4. May, 2003 - last week - spam
- Radke, Ullger suspended, fined for role in beanball battle with Tampa Bay. That’s the ballgame that I went to on Wednesday with Steph, Tim & Jim. Steph commented about it on her blog (scroll to the May 1 entry), but I missed the biggest part of the hassles, as I was in the men’s room at the time. D’Ohh! But I was pretty sure the Tampa Bay pitcher who was warned in the first inning just had no control at all, and it really didn’t seem all that weird to me. I guess I’m too used to watching minor-league ball. [strib]
- I’ve been thinking about BlogShares (link takes you to my portfolio) and aside from it being a fairly time-consuming bit of entertainment, I had a feeling of unease about it. I mean look at the quantities of virtual money floating around in the system, and where the heck did it come from?!? This morning it struck me–the biggest problem with blogshares is that it isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s possible to make money in the game without anyone else losing money, and that’s led to some behaviors that just wouldn’t work in a real stock market such as being able to buy all the shares of a blog, thereby driving up the price, and then dumping them all at once. With no other person involved in the trades, it was possible for me to parley $500 into over $25,000 during the beta-period, and to turn that into over $30k in the first day or two of “real” play, without affecting anyone else’s balance. The thing I feel worst about is that it took me this long to figure it out.
- Last monday when my server had a kernel panic, and needed to be manually rebooted, I figured out how to make it restart by itself. Automatically rebooting OpenBSD after a panic is the result.
- OpenBSD 3.3 has finally arrived. There’s some pretty cool new technology in there to make the OS even more secure.
- Spam E-Mail Problem Worse Than Imagined:
If there are not immediate improvements implemented across the board by technologists, service providers and perhaps lawmakers, e-mail is at risk of being run into the ground.
Yeah, it’s bad. But there are tools to filter out most of the crap, it’s just that so few email providers are actually running them.
- Spam Invasion: Your Cell Phone. If you get text-messaging on your cell-phone, especially if you pay per-message costs, things could get expensive real soon.
- Talking about spam, I’ve been using SpamAssassin, but here’s an article on how to Fight Spam with SpamProbe. It looks like another reasonable system. But I’m thinking pretty hard about switching to an email client that supports IMAP. Leaving the mail on the server is starting to sound like a better and better idea, especially since it makes it so much easier to train the spam-spotting tools.
- Finally, Steve Jobs: “It’s So Cool”. Steve’s talking about the iMusic thing. Thing is, I just can’t get that excited about it yet. Steve says that they’re going to be signing up independent labels soon, but they haven’t yet. But between the RIAA’s harping on DRM and piracy, and the way the labels screw most artists, I just haven’t had the urge to buy any new music for a couple years. But there’s no arguing that it’s the best music-download system out there at the moment if that’s what you want to do. In one day, Apple sold more music than all the other online music services did in the past six months (at least that’s the statistic I remember hearing that I can’t find the source for again).
Copyright 2009, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Sun, 04 May 2003 07:51:38.