Electric Car

This is why electric cars don't sell very well.

(Actual picture, no photo editing tricks. Seen in Sacramento CA in front of the State of California EPA building, 3/27/08)

Scripts and Spam and Web Site Income

Been working on a vbscript program that checks the update and anti-virus status of a group of computers, storing that info in a nice html file. Almost finished; testing takes about 10 minutes, since it talks to a whole 'Class C' IP address range.

And monitoring the anti-spam mail system. There's a bit more spam that has slipped through our defenses, and it's difficult to stop those. We've been pretty successful in spam filtering in the past.

Our users might be a bit spoiled, though. I get complaints if just a few (under 10) spams slip through each day.We're blocking 94% of all messages (about 600K a day) as spam. That's up a bit from the 90% a month ago. Still pretty impressive, though.

And still working on my latest secret money-making web site. Using some free (GPL) software, but there seems to be minimal support of one of the modules I need to use. I may have to delve deeper in the PHP code to fix things.

Slow Friday - But Fun Fart Facts Abound!

It's a slow Friday.

But I found a great article on an important issue - flatulence !

http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/19/786305.aspx

As I get older, I find that some of the things I used to enjoy eating can cause intestinal distress, along with the accompanying uncomfortable discharges. So I found the article fascinating, along with the comments at the end.

Especially the one that proves that global warming is caused by flatulence.

So I recommend that you read the article.

And I'll go take my medication now.

Spam-a-Lot Attack

Did you get a bit more spam email this weekend than normal? I did at the office...and users complained a bit.

It was what I call a 'zero-day spam attack'. It's explained over in my "Security Dawg" blog here: http://www.securitydawg.com/2008/03/zero-day-spam-attack.html .

In the meantime, a bit of hand-holding for the users, who are probably spoiled by the overall effectiveness of the spam blocking at the office. We block about 500K (out of 550K) messages a day as spam. A few do get through, but overall we are quite effective at blocking spam.

Not as effective as Gmail, though. I hardly ever see spam in the "In" folder in my Gmail account. The above link explains my theory about that.