One of my neglected side projects, purportal.com, features a “Scammy spam library” where I share the text of scam emails I’ve been collecting. Today it reached the 1000-specimen milestone, so I wrote a little script to count word frequencies. The raw list reads like some of the less coherent messages itself:

account email our please ebay me paypal information bank any address through contact security am money funds us million…

I posted a bit more on the purportal.com news page.

Just got back from my second meeting with the Western Mass. Developers Group. Being the only programmer in my workplace (and having been essentially solo in almost all of my software endeavors), it’s really refreshing for me to talk with other actual working programmers. Plus, we understand each other’s jokes.

Some topics of discussion (unordered):

• FizzBuzz and code golfing
• RPG and punch-cards
• Can you name a program that Eric Raymond wrote besides fetchmail? (Answer: bogofilter)
• $4,000 DST-change patches
• Distributed version control (gratuitous mentions of darcs from me)
• The fundamental turn toward concurrency in software: threat or menace or non-event?
• Amazon EC2 (sounds very cool; evangelized by Chas)
• Things to hate about Python
• Things to hate about Ruby
• Enumeration of lots of OS X stuff that’s written in C++, not Objective-C
• Windows Vista on a MacBook ("…I was expecting more!")
• Lisp as secret weapon, a la Paul Graham (sub-question: can you name a program Paul Graham wrote besides Viaweb?)
• The TextMate book
• Fun with Reddit (“Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!”)

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Charles commented on Fri Mar 9 05:56:03 2007:

I couldn’t stop myself.

1. W3C Relaunches HTML Activity
2. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group Notices W3C Relaunching HTML Activity, Seems Pleased

An energy conservation law from 2005 makes Daylight Savings Time (quaint US custom) begin earlier this year – this coming Sunday, to be exact. It’s supposed to be saving us energy, but I’m not sure if the upgrade costs were factored in. Anyway, I have a couple FreeBSD servers that needed the update. Went like this:

sudo portinstall misc/zoneinfo
sudo tzsetup

It took three times longer to find this information (buried at the bottom of this notice) than it did to implement the fix.