This is interesting. These headers are from an email I got. It passed through someone else's Barracuda Networks anti-spam appliance (starting at $700, plus annual fees).

Identicons are those odd graphics you see next to peoples' names in comments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

[Turns out there's a PECL extension for tainting: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.taint.php
So this article is already kind of obsolete.]

It's hard to concentrate when you're tired and cranky, so I wasted some time writing a simple calculator in several different languages.

The telephone number that will tell you the number you're calling from is called an Automatic Number Announcement Circuit, or ANAC.

The IRS has a general sales tax deduction calculator. It helps you take the deduction even if you didn't keep receipts!

Here's a VBA script that I'm using to train Spamassassin from Outlook. It saves out email messages to a file server where messages are used to train the filter. The problem here is that Outlook doesn't save EML (MIME format) files. You can save messages as text, but lately, spammers have been loading messages with a lot of chaff text that looks like regular email. You can't train with that, because it might cause the filter to start mis-identifying legit email as spam.

I bought this several months back, and finally installed it on the Linux box. It works, sort of. ATSC (HDTV terrestrial broadcast) works fine. FM Radio does not. More info:

This post isn't for any specific reason, but it's been bouncing around in my mind for a long time. That higher levels of abstration is a "good thing" is given among experience hackers, people into functional programming, and people who write SQL. At least up to a few years ago, there was some hostility toward increasing abstraction, particularly from the anti-SQL set. I railed about this against and entry in a Symfony book. This is another review of the issue.

You aren't supposed to develop Office solutions using VB Express Edition.

This is an outline I'm going to use to fix up a mass email script for Outlook that I'm working on.

There's this Japanese word "mottainai" which was used on an almost daily basis when I was growing up. It means "don't be wasteful", particularly with regard to "stuff" and energy.

InfoPath Rocks
InfoPath Sucks

"Rocks" is beating out "sucks" 189 to 119, but the fact that it seems like nobody cares about InfoPath is the really interesting fact(oid).

Often, when you have MS Access in a small office, and have done the right thing and split the database into a backend of tables and frontend of queries, reports, and forms, you end up with changes to the objects in multiple files. The trickiest is comparing queries, because the query object is modified if even a column width is changed. You need to dig deeper and compare queries.

Operating Sytem Interface Design Between 1981 - 2009 has a lot of great screenshots.

There's on omission of history. The Start Menu, wasn't the first "start menu". Apple's System 7 allowed you to put folders into the Apple Menu, and people would put folders full of aliases (shortcuts) to their apps. Next also had a unified menu that listed apps.