brentashley

It’s been about 18 months in the making. An idea, then a prototype, then some hard work, then more hard work, and a whole bunch of testing, tweaking, and refinement.

Tim Aiello and I just launched our new spam-identification service this evening. It’s called SimpleFilter.

SimpleFilter is a service for anyone who uses POP3 email. Go have a look for yourself at http://www.simplefilter.com. It’s free to try out. It’s highly accurate, doesn’t require any software installation or messing with settings.

The biggest lesson to be had in making Simplefilter is that it takes A LOT of work to make something simple. Big thanks to all the beta testers – you know who you are.

Now go tell all your friends. Both of them. 🙂

Did I mention it’s Simple?

Aaron Boodman of youngpup.net fame, who like me has been fairly sparse on the blogging of late, writes a fantastic case study on well-behaved DHTML.

Ooh – while he’s at it, he’s finally added an RSS feed. Yippeee!

Here’s an interesting little hotspot appliance. Interesting too how they seem to be centrally managed and all that.

Looks like Dave Sifry is a partner in Sputnik. Dave is best known in the blogging world as the man behind Technorati, something that I didn’t quite fully grok until Doc Searls explained it to me when he was in town earlier in the year.

Dave also covers the wifi sphere in Sifry’s Alerts.

I love it when programs remember passwords for me. I don’t have to remember them and the program remembers for me.

I hate it when programs remember passwords for me. I fry the program or its data somehow and I don’t have the password anymore.

Using UltraEdit today I managed to overwrite the FTP account settings for one client while fixing something for another client. I couldn’t for the life of me find the password to set it up again.

Luckily (or not?) it was FTP and not SSH, because all I had to do was use UltraEdit on my other machine (which also had used the ftp account for that client) to connect to it while using tcpdump to watch the the traffic. The ftp password came through in the clear, so I picked it out and voila.

thatbrentguy: I finally figured out why I would ever want to load up Cygwin with Xfree86 on Windows.
fuzzygroup: ok
thatbrentguy: Then I can run the perl TK debugger using X forwarding in an ssh session
fuzzygroup: ok you’re a bigger geek than i am
thatbrentguy: Or any sort of X forwarding for that matter. Nice to putty into somewhere, run something from the cmdline and have an x-window come up locally!
thatbrentguy: just figured you’d appreciate the combination nerdly-studliness of it all.
fuzzygroup: oh yeah
fuzzygroup: that’s very studly.
thatbrentguy: heh heh
thatbrentguy: don;t go getting a nerd-on
fuzzygroup: roflol
thatbrentguy: you can have that one. freshly coined.
fuzzygroup: blog it. I dare you.’
fuzzygroup: Heck I double nerd dare you.
thatbrentguy: with your permission to cut/paste
fuzzygroup: yep

I’ve been working pretty hard over the past couple of months and not blogging a lot. On one of my projects, I wasn’t really able to say what I was working on and for whom, but it’s all in the open now.

Today all that hard work paid off with the news that McDonald’s Canada announced the kickoff of their wireless hotspots, as a part of the company’s North American wireless hot spot initiative.

There’s been a lot of teamwork among the KnowledgeWorx crew that came together to make this happen and we all deserve a break today. Just a short one though – there’s much more to do!

When I recently moved my ashleyit.com site to imhosted, I decided to upgrade Movable Type and move from Berkeley DB to MySQL. I thought it would be easiest to simply export all my entries from the old system and import them into the new.

This worked for a while until I realized that all my old posts were not where they were expected to be by external links and search engines. It seems that export/import doesn’t preserve post IDs – they just all get resequenced.

Since I still have the old site at PHPWebhosting, I was able to grab the old db files, bring them across, and get everything back to where it was, import the few entries I’ve done since the move, and I’m off to the races again. I think I’ll just keep it on Berkeley DB at this point – MySQL just required an extra sql dump in my nightly backups anyhow.

You’ll notice that indeed, I’m holding onto two hosting services. I’m using mail from PHPWebhosting and web services from imhosted. I can swap from one to the other at a moment’s notice because I keep my DNS at ZoneEdit, an ass-saver of great renown.

At 2 X US$9.95 per month, I have a total of a half a gig of storage, with redundant web and mail, two separate shell accounts, cron jobs, raw logs, you name it.

And many corporations pay hundreds of dollars a month to have people host their low traffic brochure sites.

From my referrers, I find joatBlog, and although there’s no explanation just who or what joat is, the many tech nuggets to be found there are full of chewy goodness.