Recently, several individuals (Bill Gates included) have been advocating buying “stamps” to send emails in an effort to stop spam. The two mechanisms for this would be an actual payment (a fraction of a penny), or giving up processor time (perhaps ten seconds) to solve puzzles. The cost would, they hope, put off potential spammers since sending out a million emails would either take too long or take thousands of pounds.

This idea is fundamentally flawed.

There are legitimate reasons for sending large volumes of emails: universities, organisations, corporations, mailing lists. They all utilise email to a great extend and would be hit in exactly the same place as the spammers. That would simply be unacceptable.

Additionally, processor time is cheap. The spammers buy a few more boxes and let them deal with the backlog of processor time. The cost of this is not prohibitively high.

Nice try though, but it just won’t work.

You have to wonder how much has been lost in translation in films like Infernal Affairs. The direction is stylish but functional, the plot good, but the dialogue seems very basic; like the mangled simplification of a poor translation.

The film does not suffer too much for this: the story is still comprehensible, even if it does have a few bizarre subplots (was the psychiatrist really necessary?).

Worth seeing.

Using a very simple technique, it is possible to compress your CSS files with PHP.

Following the instructions on that site, and you can cut your CSS files by a large percentage. Good for bandwidth, good for visitors.

However, I would suggest one modification to the code given: do some user-agent sniffing for Netscape 4. Now, normally I’m not a fan of UA specific techniques, but if you don’t make an exception in this case, the GZip process will crash Netscape 4.

The problem is that it is difficult to target that particular browser. After some careful observation of various similar UA string, I think it is sufficient to not run the compression routine if you find the string Mozilla/4 but not the string compatible.

In addition, I’ve set up an htacess rule to parse .css files, rather than rename them to .php.

This weeks random links:

• Throw Rocks At Boys – A charming little flash game where you throw rocks… at boys.
• IE HTTP Headers – Like Live Headers, but for a crap browser.
• Plucene – A perl port of Lucene, the java indexing project.
• Regex For URLs – A mammoth regex that will parse almost any kind of url. Complex stuff.
• Anime Cartoon – An odd little gif animation.
• Link Bar – Another workaround for Internet Explorer’s lackings, a link bar. Comes as standard on other browsers.
• Sharp Edges – Funny image.
• Yahoo Vs Google – Visualisation of search engine overlap and differences.
• Bright Fish – Who knew that MP3s are allowed to be tagged with “a bright coloured fish”? It’s in the spec.
• LinkFader – A link fader script that seems to be markup friendly. Nice.
• Things My Maths Teacher Did – Some absolutely bizarre behaviour from a teacher.
• Ninja Golf – A great idea, whether it is a spoof or not.
• Pikasso – Imagine the rocking you could do on this bad boy.
• The Viagra Prank – Taking a viagra and then going to church. Bad idea, but funny.

That’s it for today.

Although I’m loathe to include any personal entries on this site, I feel compelled to write about something odd I saw today. I was (and to an extent still am) having a terrible day, and on the way home I spotted something odd: 24 magpies.

One for sorrow, two for joy… and all the rest. Now, as I recall, the things you get for seeing more of them get better and better as you go. Six is for gold, seven for a secret never told. Twenty-four must be one hell of a great thing; and I know what I want.

1. 1. More soon.