Posts tagged: SITE

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.

Each year I spend some time doing research on inexpensive web hosting options for my students. It’s virtually impossible to find a cheap hosting company whose name doesn’t produce copious results for a Google search on “FoobarHost.net sucks”. The predominating mood for me at the end of this research is always: I’m really glad I have more than $10/month to spend on hosting.

Since fall 2003 I’ve had a FreeBSD VPS with JohnCompanies, and it’s really quite excellent. They are a high-performance, no-nonsense, technically oriented provider. When you ask a support question, you get a reply from an actual human being whose first assumption is that you know what you’re doing.

$ sudo portupgrade php5 php5-curl php5-sqlite php5-bla bla bla...
--->  Upgrading 'php5 bla bla bla...'
...
[Updating the pkgdb bla bla... done]
$ sudo apachectl graceful
$

My little pastebin site, dpaste.com, has been chugging along nicely since I announced it here about six weeks ago. Today I updated to the very latest Pygments codebase, which allowed me to add colorizers for Apache config files and bash scripts.

I’ve also started to add some Django-specific rules to the Python colorizer; it now recognizes Django model field types (model.CharField and the like). My thanks go to everyone who’s been using it, especially those who have given me feature suggestions and problem reports.

I suggested to Carl over at Codegolf that the old reverse game would make an interesting challenge. He agreed, and after making some changes to his site’s back-end (to accommodate multiple correct solutions) he unveiled the challenge today: http://codegolf.com/reverse

I can’t wait to give it a try!