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May 27, 2004
Recycling Software
I was asked the other day, a question to which I didn't know the answer to. Not an uncommon occurrence, but this one began to intrigue me a lot. Back in the days before Open Source software re-created every commercial program possible, people did something called purchasing software. This entailed going to a store, buying a box that was typically oddly shaped so that competitors could not be on the same shelf, bringing it home, unwrapping it, and installing it on your computer via a series of floppy disks. Now that we have electronic distribution, cdrom/dvdrom distribution we no longer have to really deal with the box idea. But what do you do with old software? Is there some organization you can donate it to? If not, is it better to find some floppy recycling program?
Google seems to provide no answers for any of the above questions. Considering my family has a large collection of older Macintosh software (KidPix!) that no longer is used or cannot run on the current operating systems, it would be nice to reclaim the space these boxes currently occupy. More importantly though, it would be nice if someone else could put them to use, or have them put somewhere I know they won't be adding randomly to the landfill.
You can certainly find information on purchasing recycled software, most for the IBM DOS days of computing. Most of the pages talk about donating computers, and their software as a whole. Unfortunately in my case that will not work, as someone took our Quadra 700 years ago.
Posted by Dan at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2004
Dragon boats!
I was able to attend the recent Washington DC Dragon Boat Festival, and finally got my pictures online, 
where I cheered on the Schuylkill Dragon teams. All teams did rather well, given the sheer amount of heat and humidity on both days of the competition. I somehow managed to end up badly sun burned not during the day, but rather on my 14 mile cycle back to a friends apartment. Future warning: sun screen while being waterproof, the water does not necessarily mean sweat. Ugh.
Posted by Dan at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2004
Spam Virus
Via Slashdot comes an interesting article in the Register. It seems we can now pretty much blame Microsoft for spam, which is odd considering their publicly stated anti-spam stance. I wonder how difficult it would be for broadband ISPs to enable a local traffic monitoring device in their bridge. Not that I promote ISPs being responsible for what end clients do, but I can't imagine that the traffic of 10,000 emails doesn't have some repercussions on their network.
Posted by Dan at 09:06 PM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2004
Spam Stats and Ratios
Sometimes I really enjoy seeing the statistics found about internet usage. One of the quotes I hear regularly is the spam ratio of global email usage (last read at about 40%). While I love my email, I have never been one to receive massive amounts of email on a daily basis. I keep my mailing list membership low, and personal emails go through small waves topping out at most at 40 a day. This morning I awoke to 230 messages of email, 190 of which were spam. My spam ratio is now well above 50%, making email become one of the least useful means of communication for me.
I decided it's time to track this a bit. I enjoy using DCCd as my first line of anti-spam defense. Yes I know SpamAssassin will use it, but I have a fondness to running DCCd locally. Vernon has a nice series of graphs based upon the stats collected from numerous DCCd servers. They don't give much hope for validating email as a viable communication tool. I have begun to start displaying my own stats from DCCd a little while ago. You can find them here. These stats are really for about 6 domains, with only one domain actually reporting (I need to work on that).
Now to figure out if I can get SA to start giving me stats and incorporate those as well.
Posted by Dan at 11:50 AM | Comments (2)
May 09, 2004
RIP
After a lengthy battle, my grandmother has passed away tonight. At 95, she lived a long and full life, missing her life goal by only 5 years. She did get to see many of the accomplishments of man in her lifetime, from first flight to space travel to even the internet age). During the last three years, her health and mind began to decline to a point of non-responsiveness this past weekend. She quietly passed at 10:28 pm tonight. May she rest in peace.
Posted by Dan at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)