In Valid Logic

I ran across this YouTube video this morning and couldn't help but laugh.  Short video by the creator of the Ctrl-Alt-Delete shortcut.  Couldn't help but laugh, since Bill Gates doesn't look too amused when they cut to him.

As with most developers, I always have a couple of little ideas for programs or sites tucked away in case of a rainy day.  One idea I've been slowly working on for a while is to create my own spam filtering gateway.  Recently, I finally gave it a name (and a basic site design).

After reading Dan Hounshell, another Telligenti, and his ongoing series for his pet project WhatIWantMost.com, I thought I'd do some posts to my site about my project and little progress updates.

A common problem for most techies is that they get their coveted domain name and email address and keep it forever.  The problem?  Over time, as you give out the email address more and more (and through your less intelligent days of giving it out too freely), you start to collect some major amounts of spam.  As your volume of spam increases, you run into a few serious problems.  First, your regular anti-spam allows a lot of spam messages to slip through as not-spam, causing a build up in your inbox.  And second, you get an ever growing number of false-positives that cause you to have to lighten up on some other rules, causing the first case to grow.

There is a solution though.  There are more advanced spam filtering servers and services, specifically built to offload the processing of spam in a high performance, high assurance way.  Most of the time, these are targeted for business and have a high price tag, or they have good per mailbox rates, but require a 10 mailboxes minimum to sign up.  After shopping around a lot, the cheapest I could find was about $10-15 per month for a whole domain name, which isn't bad, however like a lot of people, it is just me on my domain.  Also, $10-15 is as much (if not more) than you usually pay for web hosting, so it seems like a lot for a fairly basic service.  I feel there is a void to be filled for quality spam filtering for single end-users.

That is where I come in with spamalicio.us.

Spamalicio.us is a high quality spam filtering service targeted towards end-users.  These are people who have their own domain names and have them hosted elsewhere, but are plagued by the issue of mediocre spam filtering.  They either use their domain for themselves, or have just a hand-ful of people on the domain.  Since it is targeted at single users, it will be priced right around $30/year for approximately 10k messages per month (a pretty good volume, I think).

Spamalicio.us works as a middle-man in the chain of email delivery.  Typically, you set up your domain, and you create a couple of mail exchange (MX) records that specify where email is to be delivered.  This is usually your webhost's mail servers.  When you sign up for spamalicio.us, you change it so that the mail is routed to spamalicio.us, it performs the spam checks, and then passes the checked emails onto your normal mail server.

Implementing spamalicio.us will require the follow components to be in place:

• A website (done, mostly)
• A page to allow users to specify a list of email addresses/domains that they will be filtering, as well as display current usage
• A series of small, light weight Windows services to move the messages around to/from the spam filter, and to move it onto its final destination after filtering (in the works)

 Overall, I think I could get the service up in about 2-3 weeks, though up as in working, not available.  Things like management, payment handling and all will take much longer.  My goal is to have something working in the next month, and maybe shoot for letting the public use it like July.  I'd like to get it to the point where it is fairly hands off to manage, and used enough on my own to ensure stability before general consumption.

Last week, we finally had a doctors appointment in which we actually got a due date.  Our doctor doesn't like to give a due date without seeing the embryo, since he measures it to calculate the due date.  Before, we weren't able to see it at all since Trish found out she was pregnant so early.  On Friday, we were finally able to see it and get our due date.

Currently, Trish is at six weeks.  At this point, the embryo is about 9mm.  It is quite interesting to see, since even though it is only the size of like a green pea, you can faintly see the heart beating.  It is a little area that changes color as it beats.

So with her being at six weeks, out due date came out to be October 15th, 2007.  Interestingly, that is the day after my mom's birthday.  So it may actually come on the 14th.  Who knows.  Now that we have the due date, I think I need to start taking bets on the actual date.

I swear, the search functionality in Outlook 2007 is just plain dumb sometimes.  Earlier I was trying to track down a message in my 2006 archives, I knew what folder the message would be in, and I knew some search terms that would definitely bring it up.  What happens?  No results… not any.  So I clear my search, and just to make sure it is working, I see a number of messages from ScottW at the top so I enter in "from:Scott".  That should return all messages from Scott, and since I was in my 2006 Community Server folder, there should be plenty.  But it shows no records.  What the hell!  There are some right there at the top!  There should be like a couple hundred in the folder overall!

LookOut, the old search plug-in for Outlook 2003, was the absolute best.  It was bought up by Microsoft a few years ago, but unfortunately, all their email search functionality sucks.

One nice thing about having a wife who is a teacher and her becoming pregnant shortly after Christmas is that all her Starbucks gift cards become your Starbucks gift card.  Seriously, as a pre-school teacher, she gets tons of gift cards at Christmas, and since she is now pregnant, she won't be using them, so handed her remaining ones over to me.  Woo!

Saw this and just had to laugh.  The system for printing on the cake allows unrecognized HTML tags to go directly onto the cake.  At first, I was thinking "wow, that is cool, I want that on my cake", but then I realized that it didn't look as though it belonged.

BTW, ThisIsBroken is an awesome site.  My favorite daily site along with Gullible.Info.

Yes, I finally applied the style update to make my site more elder-friendly (I kid, I kid).

I increased the font size of the comments (they were small), I darkened the normal text color, shrunk some of the paragraph spacing in the comments (was a little whacked out), and fixed the header from showing up clipped in IE (you should be using Firefox anyway).

I read a couple of personal finance and entrepreneur blogs, and happened to find this little post on I Will Teach You To Be Rich about one guy's venture with his product, the WingDipper.  Very interesting product and interesting read on how they got the idea and made it a reality.  Plus, their marketing was creative.

Today, we announced the official release of CS 2007 Beta1.  Definitely go check it out!  We will be posting beta builds of the add-ons soon as well.  Those will most likely go live tomorrow morning.

Also, help track issues relating to the Beta1 release, we've also create a forum specific for the CS 2007 Betas.

I am also going to work on cleaning up some of the skins I've created recently and will be posting those once they are polished a little more.

Thought I'd post a few more pictures, since I was going through some from a couple of weeks ago and saw a number of ones that I liked.

This is my sister.  This was taken a few weeks ago at my parent's house when we were celebrating my sister's 22nd birthday.  Actually, it was a group birthday between my sister, my cousin's fiancee, and my 2nd cousin (cousin's daughter).  Group birthdays are big in my family, since we have a number of birthdays at the end of January/early February, a number in April (with one in March), and a few in December (within days of Christmas).  Anyway, it is kind of funny how much like my mom my sister is.  She always talks with her hands, though so do I.  I think if you held her hands down, she couldn't talk.  Hmm, have to remember that.

This here is my grandfather.  He is 88 years old (I believe, might actually be 89).  He is the Italian in the family (hence my mom's maiden name of Galetto), so we all get the "talking with own hands" from him.  He is originally from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, known as the Keweenaw, or to him, Copper Country.  Slowly moved his way out to California working in the aerospace industry, eventually working at Lockheed Martin in the Bay Area.