2006-08-18

Moving Threedux

All of the paperwork at the bank has gone through! We still need to have the house inspected (either this coming Monday or Friday), get insurance for the house, and go to the closing.

I thought that the realtor had a lot of papers for us to sign at the bid; however, the banker had even more. To put this into perspective; it took about 20 minutes to sign the paperwork for the realtor and 1 hour for the banker's paperwork.

From what friends and coworkers have told me, the paperwork gets even worse at the closing. Doh!

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.

2006-08-15

Update

My first two days at my new job have gone well and my wife and I should have a house soon. We made an offer on a house and, through several renegotiations, have agreed with the seller on a price. Hopefully, if all goes well, we should be closing on the 31st. Until then, I will probably only be able to write new articles once or twice a week.

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.

2006-08-10

Moving Redux

This will be my last post for a couple of days as my wife and I are moving out of state tomorrow.

We will be in a hotel for a couple of days until we can close on a house; I do have a laptop on order (since I do not want to lug a destop computer to a hotel room) being shipped to the house of a relative who lives near where we are moving. However, there seems to be a problem with the order, so I may not have it this weekend.

Ugh.

Please check back on Wednesday 2006-08-16 for an update.

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.

2006-08-07

Search engines and spam

I have a couple of websites that I have developed that are currently running honeypots from Project Honeypot. These sites had not had any reports of harvesters until 2 days after I submitted them to several lesser used search engines.

Does anyone know if any search engines are actually fronts for harvesters that make the victims do their legwork by submitting their own sites? This wouldn't surprise me, but I could not find anything in Google about it.

Fortunately, I use contact forms which go to PHP backends on sites that I create instead of listing e-mail addresses, so not actual spam has resulted from this. But, I can see how, for many people, this would certainly be an inconvenience.

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.

New trend in Spam messages

I have noticed recently that spammers are sending numerous HTML formatted messages containing articles from popular magazines contained within HTML comment tags.

This seems to be an effort to thwart spam filters that examine messages for content. Since these messages do contain actual content with many ham words (words that are indicated not spam by filters) and low instances of spam words, some filters will probably let them pass.

I am using Spam Assassin to filter mail and it appears to be catching these; but, until I looked at the message source, I could not figure out why there were no bodies to some of the messages (only headers and a subject). This does not seem to be effective marketing since: 1) at least some commonly used filters are catching them, 2) there is not enough content in many of them to indicate what is being sold.

The other problem with these messages - from a recipient's point of view - is that they are harder to submit to SpamCop. If you use SpamCop and want to submit a message that does not appear to have a body, check its message source. If there is HTML code in the message source, submit it in its entirety.

This is how the mail servers would see the message and for mail servers and clients that use message hashes to block spam, this is the only way for them to accurately filter these messages.

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.

RSS feed update

I have been using the Performancing plugin for Firefox to write entries to this blog, but it does not seem like the RSS feed has been updating properly.

I am typing this entry in on Blogspot's site to see if this entry is added to the RSS feed.

Has anyone else experienced this issue?

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.

PHP book

I am contemplating writing a book dealing with creating dynamice web sites using PHP. Is there any interest in this? Is the market already flooded?

If I undertake this project, I plan on inlcuding many ready to use "out-of-the-box" scripts that can easily be included (via an include file) in any web site (i.e. last modified date) as well as sections on general ideas and examples for scripts that would have to be tailored for each site.

If any one has an interest in me writing this book, please respond to this post, or contact me on my website's contact form (http://carson.ballweb.org/carson.php).

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.

2006-08-06

Moving

I will be moving soon as I have recently accepted a job in Central Illinois. This means that there may not be any new messages here for a few weeks, or on my technology and humor site.

I apologize for this inconvenience to anyone who will miss The Spampyre during this short outage.  I will try posting a couple of times to both of my sites before I head out though, so stay tuned.

Rules

I moderate all comments and reserve the right to remove any post that I deem inappropriate.

Since I support free speech, I do not intend to remove any posts except for spam, which contributes nothing to a discussion.