Computer Programming

Allowing anyone to send me email has its obvious advantages, but unfortunately, this means your mail server gets attacked by spammers trying to find your email address.  Of course, there are many ways of adding spam filters that work pretty well, but still, your server's incoming traffic from these spammers can be rather large and we all pay for this traffic anyway.  So wouldn't it be great if we could block these guys at the ip level.  Seeing how our telcoms will not do this for us ( probably because of their conflict of interest in making money charging us for all this extra spam traffic ), it is up to us to do it at our server level.

Links and other annoying things

After testing out this new and otherwise wonderful blogging software, today seemed like a good day to move it from the test area to the main web site.  All that needed doing was to change the directory for this domain name to point to the blogging software.  Well, it turned out to be a bit more tricky....but it's a practical example of how to fix software problems with a hack or two.

Cookie free Web Navigation

Here is one simple way to avoid having to force cookies onto the visitors to your web site.

Internet cookies

Web sites these days typically track visitors to their sites with a session identifier, either held in little files called cookies ( the ones quickly baked by Netscape in the 1990's ) or by adding the identifier to the web site’s URL’s. Unfortunately for the individual internet citizen, there are serious problems with both these methods.