As I was stepping off the bus, I looked at a particularily attractive girl. I had been checking her out while riding, but this time I caught her looking at me. I almost smiled at her, and I could see her almost smiling at me. It could have been a wonderful moment.

I saw a person on the bus smiling shamelessly. I thought the person was weird, but aren’t I weird for thinking it’s wrong to be smiling?

A highly unscientific signal-to-noise experiment in spam analysis.

I’ve heard stories of people getting innumberable amounts of spam mail. I’ve heard the horror stories of Hotmail accounts filling up faster than a person can refresh the page. I’ve never quite understood the validity of these statements though. I wanted to explore how bad it really was from my perspective, as I had never done before. The results were not pretty.

To truely understand how bad spam is, I decided to stop doing what most normal people do – deleting it. I saved all of my spam email for an entire week. I wanted to see just how bad it really was.

But first, a little background on the popularity of my email address.

My email, “jeff @ creatimation.net”, has been around for well over 2 years now. Back in the day, I didn’t know better (ah, youth) so I just posted it all over the place. Needless to say, this account is now spammed to death. (That’s why I have no issue posting it here.) I get every kind of email you can imagine. The best so far was one selling me a bigger penis, bigger breasts, better self-confidence, help to quit smoking, and the secrets to better sex all in a single MP3! Sweet!

However, I have used other various addresses over time for this that and the other thing. And one of the nice features of owning a domain is that you can setup a “catch-all” email system. With a catch-all, any email that is sent to the domain is forwarded to a (or several) account(s). This way I can just say, “Yes, Mr. President, my email is ‘Mr.Jeff.Sir @ creatimation.net’…” and the message will still get to me. Very handy.

But this means that all those spammers looking for “contacts@” or “info@” or “jack-asses-who-love-to-spam-me@” will still get their emails to me. What a bummer!

My other address, which I won’t post, has not been harvested yet. I’ve kept better tabs on it so far, and it’s doing all right.

Down to the results.

Email Account	Real Emails	Spam Emails	Ratio of Real Email
jeff at cre/atimation.nt	22	819	2%
jefzorsemail at the/code[]pro.cm	20	158	13%
Totals	42	977	4%

96% of the email I recieve is spam

Astounding. I never thought it was that bad really – I just deleted it when I checked my mail. But that spam really does build up – and it’s not just annoying either. It’s a real serious problem. When I recieve spam, it’s using my bandwidth. If a text message takes up, oh say, 3k, that’s not so bad. That’s about 126k for real email transmission – totally fine.

At 3k a message, spam would be 2.8Mb of transmission. That’s not such a bad figure, except that spam is filled with viruses, html, images, and a plethora of other assorted crap. So let’s change the message size estimate to, 70k (and that’s conservative).

70k * 977 = 66.7Mb of crap, uh, I mean “Unsolicited Email”

Not only is that wasting my server bandwidth, but if anyone had to sort through all of this email over a dialup connection they would simply give up email. Which brings me to my next point.

Why do I even bother to continue using email?

Seriously, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 4%, why should I even continue using it?

Quite simple, as far as I know, no better system exists yet. Email is the defacto standard of internet communication. “What’s your email” is almost as popular a phrase as “Let’s trade numbers.” The only medium that is nearly as popular is IM systems, lead at the fore by AOL Instand Messenger – or simply: AIM. However, since there is no “offline” feature in AIM (despite it being in ICQ which is now owned by AOL), it couldn’t be used in the same way – nor would attachments work as well.

Finally, the 4% of email I recieve is actually very important and useful.

Here’s what I’m doing about it

I am not sitting still on this matter either. People have lots of complicated methods for filtering spam. Address filters, word catches, fake sender detection, etc etc. All of these things work on the server’s side preventing you from ever seeing the spam at all.

Those types of solutions are all well and good – but I don’t like them. Paranoid as I am, I worry that those filters are going to catch something that was a real email. Dang it.

Instead, I download all my email – right into my trash can. That’s right, all my email goes straight into the trash, then I have a filter in my email client that automatically brings the email into my inbox, if – and only if – you are in my address book. Of course, if I get email from someone new I run the risk of lossing it, however it’s much easier to find this missed email in my trash can then in the abyss of the server side filtered email.

Oh yeah, these results are skewed…

…in favor of spam.

Yeah, I said that right. See, I explained earlier how I can have mail sent to any made up account on my server and I still get it. Well for “accounts” that get a lot of spam, I just filter all the email from that account out at the server side. I know, I said I was against server side filtering – but for the email address “junk aht creatimation.net” I can live without getting the email. Anywho, these results are skewed in the favor of spam because the numbers would be much, much higher on the spam side if it weren’t for this practice. So I’m going to give this a real try and see what happens to the numbers once I take these filters out of place. We’ll be able to get a real feel for the damage spam is doing.

Check back in a week for the horrifying conclusion to “When Spam Attacks!”

There was this woman walking down the street with a dog straped into a chest carrier. Since when does taking your dog for a walk not involve the dog actually walking? More odd, why did she have a leash?

Jessie Greene and I broke up yesterday (April 16th, 2004). We had been dating since Fedurary 27th 2002 – just about 2 years and 2 months together.

Can’t say it hadn’t been coming, because it certainly had been. We had a fantastically loving and connected relationship. We laughed together and cried together. Place this relationship 10 years in the future and I could, scary I know, see us getting married.

But that would be then. Now is different.

Now we are distant. Separated by 40 short physical miles, but annoying long emotional miles. We would see each other one, maybe two, days a week and it would always be completely unproductive for either us. Basically a day or two where the rest of our lives would be put on hold. With both of us becoming more and more responsible and involved, taking days off became not just a hassle, but impossible most of the time.

Now we are young. There used to be a time when you met a girl, dated, and married and that was that. “Till death do you part.” Instead we have options these days: we can travel, we have careers goals, life is no longer a straight and fairly even path. Our lives are going to change drastically over the next 3 years and forcing those changes into the moldings of a relationship would stunt their growth and in the end hurt us. Both of us have school to finish and a career to pursue – and they aren’t exactly going in the same direction.

Now we are inexperienced. Both of us, being young, have had limited relationship experience. For me, Jessie was only my second long term relationship – I was her first. Both of us knew that we could not go through life with only that experience once or twice. We needed more expereience dating.

In all honesty, our relationship was doomed the day I decieded to attend the Art Institute in S.F. However, if it hadn’t been me going away to college, it would have been her – so who went first really doesn’t matter.

We are in love. It sucks so much because it won’t work – and both of us knew this. We let our selves fall so far into love. Embraced, connected, shared. It’s the most fantastic experience you’ll ever know if you are so lucky. But it had to end for all the reasons I hate conceeding too.

I have been “out of it” since she left. Dazed is the correct word. I feel like it isn’t really happening. I’ve thought about it happening on several occasions, but feeling it is drastically different. Some break ups are hard. They hurt really bad: your stomach churns, you get lumps in your thoat, you cry until you can’t stand to wring your pillow out any more. This isn’t like that. I feel a pang of sorrow. A dull ache in the pit of my stomach that something is simply just off. The impact of not being with her the way we used to be only hits me in small portions for moments at a time. And I think I know why it’s not the gut wrenching, eye balling break up…

Because it’s not over.

I’m not pining for her. I’m not going to stalk, or immortalize her and never think of another girl again until I have her again. I may never be with her like I have been – and I think I can live with that.

Instead I don’t feel the intense emotions of a break up because I refuse to simply burn the bridge we built. She has become an integral part of my life over the last 2+ years. I know her family and their stuggles, her friends and their lives. I’m not willing to simply destory these important connections because we can’t be together the way we want to be. She feels the same way.

We’ll still talk once in a while. Maybe on the phone, maybe on IM – slim chance I might see her once in a while for an oddly uncomfortable lunch…but that’s a long time off.

I know that, given some time, I will begin to be comfortable being single again. Flirting, friends, and free time will return. Yet, despite grieving the relationship we shared and lost, I will treasure the realationship we will build from it’s ashes.

Thank you.

The iPod Mini has been doing extremely well since it’s launch earlier this year. So well in fact, that apple can’t keep up to demand for them.

The $250 iPod Mini sports a 4Gb hard drive (roughly holds 1,000 songs), dimensions of 3.6 by 2.0 by 0.5 inches, and weighs in at an impressive 3.6 ounces. The regular iPod, in comparison, starts at $300, has a 15GB capacity (roughly 3,700 songs), measures 4.1 by 2.4 by 0.62 inches, and weighs 5.6 ounces.

What puzzles me is why the iPod Mini has been selling so well. The iPod Mini has 1/3 the amount of storage (song space), is only slightly smaller/lighter, and costs very little less. Then it hit me:

People – are – stupid.

What other explanation could there be? Many people will make several arguements for buying the Mini, and of all the ones I have heard so far, none stand up.

Some people say that the coloring is worth it. I, and several people here, own iPods, and I can tell you the precise location of where these spend 95% of their lives. Two places:

1. A jacket pocket while walking or riding the bus.
2. The dock/firewire cable.

In your pocket, I don’t think anyone cares what color your iPod it. It could be neon-green with pink dots, and it wouldn’t matter. And when it’s in the dock, the only person who really sees it is you – and does having a pink one, as opposed to white, really make your day better?

Some people will argue that the size difference is important. I don’t know what kind of pockets there are on your pants, but if they aren’t big enough to hold an iPod, even first generation, then you may wish to consider updating your war drobe since childrens clothing is never attactive on someone with enoug money to purchase an iPod.

Others will state that the iPod Mini is simply cooler than the bland white iPod. This is complete rubbish, and I can attest to it first hand. I have a first generation, scatched up, battery dying iPod, and people still think it’s cool. This thing is a beast, but no matter who sees it, if they aren’t one of the eleet with an iPod already, they will always comment, “Oh, hey and iPod – how cool!”

Finally, those last stragglers that say “well, it’s cheaper, and I don’t need that much space.” If you are going to blow $250 (plus tax) on a music player, why not just continue scrounging through your couch for an extra $50 and get a real player. Also, the iPod is useful for things other than playing music. I regularily use the iPod to move files from school, home, and work and when I do, the extra capacity can come in extremely handy.

What it boils down to is this: I feel sorry for anyone who has been suckered into buying an iPod Mini. You have wasted your money on an inferior product because it was “cool”.

Now, despite my harsh criticisms of the iPod Mini, I do think that it has some things going for it.

• I genuinly appreciate the new dial control.
  Integrating the four buttons into the four cardinal positions makes a good deal of sense both by simplifying the controls and by centralizing them to save space.
• I also do need to give them credit for shoving that much functionality into such a small package.
• The size and weight reduction is much appreciated.
• The colors are a neat idea. Worked for iMacs, should work for other things in the furture as well.

So, while I have a large disagreement with Apple about the pricing of the iPod Mini, I think that they have taken steps in the right direction and charged to much for it – seems like that’s just the Apple way. :-D

Version2 is a redesign contest run monthly right over here.

I really like the idea of this. Sites get a good make over, and people get a great portfolio piecec. I think that works out pretty well – plus the prizes help :D

I’ve considered entering, but lack both time and design skill to compete.

However, I can still review the proposed solutions. These are my picks for this month so far:

• Jeremy Johnson
• Lucian Slatineanu
• Ben Scofield

And the most unusal (but oddly innovative to me) design goes to this fellow.

The full list of designed can be found by clicking on this pretty text.

For those not familiar, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. A scheme created and placed upon content that controls how that content can be used. For audio this means that the music can only be played under a set of restrictions, such as only being played 20 times on one computer.

This technology was developed to help protect content for copyright holders, but all it has done to date is fail miserably. Most notable of these failures is CSS (Content Scrambling System) - an encryption scheme used on DVDs. The CSS caused fair-use issues for a number of reasons. You could no longer take your movie from one country to another because of Region Codes. In addition, some DVD players (mainly computer drives) could not decrypt these movies. Regular consumers were finding themselves having paid for DVDs that would not play.

These few people with "broken" DVDs would probably have been an acceptable loss - if the system had worked. However, shortly after the release of DVDs using CSS, a program called DeCSS was released which allowed anyone to decrypt the data on a DVD. Thus the content protection scheme was broken and high quality copies of DVDs began circulating, not only around the Internet for download, but also at street corners where cheap copies could be bought.

Any audio DRM is going to fail just as well. Only faster.

You see, DeCSS took some time to reverse engineer and takes a lot of processing power to run, and, over all, is a pain in the ass to get working. Copying a DVD is no simple task. However, copying an audio file is simple. All you need is a sound card (which you probably already have) and a mini-to-mini cable.

This is the basic setup. Take the mini, plug it into the Mic port (commonly red) and the line out (black) or headphones (blue) if you don't have line out. Now, when you play your audio file though whatever convoluted DRM scheme that has been forced on you - simply hit record in a sound application. The sound being played will then be recorded (at near perfect quality) into any format you want.

This trick has been around forever and defeats any DRM in existence. What it comes down to is this. No DRM will ever safeguard content. If you can hear or see it, it can be copied. I mean, microphone, video camera, whatever - it can be done. The only things that DRM does is hurt regular consumers by forcing them to abide by someone else's interpretation of "fair-use" - and this is why audio DRM will eventually die.

Yay!

And with that I bring another quarter to an end at the AI@SF. I am very happy with the way classes went for me this semester. I was able to complete several very good projects that I can't wait to build into my next portfolio.

My class called "Programming for the Artist" was centered around object-oriented Flash ActionScripting. I was able to move ahead and was allowed to pursue my own project. So I ended the semester with a project showcasing five simple, but really fun games.

Flash Games by Jeff Minard

For "Net Broadcasting", a class focused on preparing video/audio for internet delivery, I rebuilt my brother's old skate site and put his video's up. Now with a better (XHTML/CSS) design and streaming Flash video:

Concrete Hooligans

In addition, I spent some more time with my computer-in-the-cabinet project. I added on another hard drive ( an endeavor under linux when I can only SSH to the computer. :D ) bringing it to a whoping 10gb total. I also got apache/php/perl working so that I could run stats on the server. I took the keyboard out the drawer and added a HDrack with a fan. Much cleaner and cooler. So now that it's open for business:

tF-WebServer (currently hosting stats for True Combat games found at hq.servequake.com)

All sites designed with xhtml/css as best I can. I am sure there are little rendering bugs about, but the web is always a work-in-progress. (p.s. -- The tables on the stats page aren't my fault - a script gerenates those!)

q: Who runs this thing?

a: At the reins is Tim Murtaugh. He's a professional web developer in NYC and has been building sites since 1996. His web standards fanatacism can be traced back to the first time he opened a FrontPage document in Notepad.

Oh man - that's the funniest thing I've read all morning!

Tim, I feel your pain.

It's finals week once again and I am just as busy. More so you could even say because I tutor now as well.

So I get to do my homework, and then I get to help/teach/explain other people their homework (which is, btw, signifigantly harder than just doing it myself.) I, however, really do enjoy the tutoring - and I better cause I'm in for a full day of it tomorrow, along with a load of work I need to get together for yo.

I have done a bit more work to this site - since I am turning it in as a final - and I'll post more about what I've done in a while.

While waiting for the bus to pick me up last weekend, I noticed this ad attached to the bus stop.

I saw it more recently on another bus stop as well.

While I appreciate the fact that the ad is doing some good, I wish the designer had thought about it's application. I imagine this poster was designed using a computer, and the background image was put in place from some stock photography.

What they didn't manage to check was that when the image was blown up to poster size, the background image pixelated!

I guess I finf myself trying to make some kinf of connection between this poster and webdesign. Like "make sure to test" or something lame like that. But ya'll get the idea.

After scrounging for several months I have managed to gather all the nessecary pieces to build and run my own linux server. First priority: dedicated quake machine!

So far the dsl connection hasn't been complaining too much. >;-)

I have had this filling cabinet here since I moved in, but I don't really have a lot of files - I only use one drawer. I needed a place to put this new piece of linux hotness, but didn't feel like having a whole 'nother computer case sitting around. 1+1 = solution! Thus the filing cabinets top drawer was to become the permanent housing for the machine.

The filing cabinet with computer setup inside. Note that right now the network cable is stuck in through the drawer. I have the power cable routed under the cabinet, but the network cable didn't quite reach - it'll get in there eventually and then you won't be able to tell it's a computer.

On the ourside of the drawer are some tape mounted controls. Power, reset, power led, and HDD led. Not that I turn it off that much. If I can find a drill I will probably move these things to the inside and just leave little holes for the LED's.

And overview of the inside of the case. Here you can see keyboard, HD, MotherBoard, power supply, and everything else. The pink mat at the bottom is the lining from a motherboard box. I figured having all of this sit on metal wouldn't be such a good idea.

A closeup of the mother board showing off it's massive power. Some specs

• Pentium 3 - 866Mhz.
• 128 Mb ram
• 10/100 Lan
• 16mb AGP2x Video Card
• Keyboard input only (lol)
• 3GB harddrive (as pictured below!)

And finally, the powersupply - 250watt! Yeah!

This machine, with only one restart since it's set up due to user error, has performed flawlessly. It hosts quake (truecombat, yeah!) games wonderfully. It's always fun to frag your friends on your of server. If you feel like playing, the server should be up 24/7 at hq.serverquake.com.

Update!

Woah, I guess I got on this one fast. I already took the dremel to the cabinet and had my way with it.

As you can see, it's much nicer now. No cords hanging out, no wires taped to the side. Oh it's beautiful.

The site has been going through some growing pains - as a few people noticed. :D

Well, as stated previously, I've been doing a keen amount of work on the backend of my website. Mostly upgrades that move my system towards a system more like a CMS. The big updates came today when I added a summary feature to all the posts, as well as a multi-category setup for posts.

The summary is pretty easy - just allows me to post a quick summary for the homepage (or whatever page) and then a full post on the ...uh, post page. Yeah.

The multi-category means that I can file a post under several categories. The advantage here is that I can then have categories like "Home Page" so that I can define home page posts while still having it show up as a post about "CSS" or something else.

Nifty!

The U.S. Patent Office has officially invalidated the Eolas patent on the popular web browser technique of using plugins to load and process extrenal data.

For those who are not up to speed on this subject, here's a little background.

Many moon ago, Eolas (a one man company run by Mike Doyle) registered a patent on embedding extrernal data in an application. The patent office, in all it's wisdom, granted this patent, despite the fact that this technique already saw widespread use. This, however, seems to be a constant problem when technology patents are made.

After several years of legal battles, Eolas won a hug $521,000,000 settelment from Microsoft because Internet Explorer uses this "technology" for its plugin architecture. While a few people who are always happy to see MS take one in the gut, the majority realized that this was unexceptable as the web has come to expect, and in many cases, rely on the existence of a way to extend a browser through the use of plugins.

Macromedia Flash is one of the most popular plugins on the internet with a saturation of nearly 98% over a span of 3 versions of it's plugin. During the prolonged battle Macromedia stocks took a hit falling from the upper 20's to the mid teens - people feared this suit could be the end of a company's flagship product.

Recently though several examples of previous art have been established and there has been a very vocal outcry from the internet community. All of this lead to the Patent Office allowing a reexamination of the patent, and on Wednesday, March 3rd, the invalidation of the patent.

Eolas will have 60 days to appeal the patent, which he'll probably do, but I don't think it matters now. Doyle (and his lawyer) has enough money to live several lifetimes a very happy man, and his original reason for doing this was to get back at Microsoft since he held a grudge against them. Because MS was in violation of the patent at the time of the courts $521 million decision, he will keep the settlement. He got his vendetta money, we get our internet - I think we all win.

Let's do a little link dance!

• Eolas' web patent nullified - The Register
• Patent office rules for Microsoft in Eolas case
• Eolas browser plug-in patent invalidated by US Patent Office
• Slashdot article I suggest reading through comments on this one.
• Stock Prices for Macromedia around the original verdict date (December 2003)
• Flash player version pentration