Posted by Peter Morris
Mon, 18 Dec 2006 12:28:00 GMT
Now, I don’t know about you, but I like SPAM.
Yes, yes, I do. specially pressed American meats.. Salty unidentifiable slabs of animal protein and…
Pork, Salt, Starch, Water, Ham, Sugar, Trisodium Diphosphate and of course, those yummy YUMMY flavourings, antioxidants and preservatives (Sodium Nitrite), De-lish.
Hey, I am a geek, so I had to go get the real ingredients. I am a fatgeek so I happened to have a can (or three) handy.
Now, Nigerian 419 spam? not so much.
In fact, I just received one.
What makes these things possible is that NOBODY responds to them. Well, almost nobody. And the people that do, are the ones they WANT to have respond to them.
But…
What if.
What if, everyone who received a 419 spam, instead of binning it and getting on with their lives, ANSWERED it.
It would take less than a minute a day. Just respond to one a day (if you get one).
What would happen at the other end?
Suddenly the spammer is getting back 100s (thousands, tens of thousands?) of responses instead of one or two.
And to do his business, he would have to READ them.
This makes the work on their end that much harder.
How much would they put up with before the job gets too expensive?
I dunno, but I am willing to find out.
Are you?
Posted in Projects | 2 comments
Posted by Peter Morris
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 09:52:00 GMT
Well, I have finished the coding for the radio capture system.
I can now click on a radio .RAM link of the BBC website, and a request will be queued for download. A cron job will pick up the request and download the raw radio as a WAV. Another cron will take this wav, and encode it as an MP3 with the appropriate ID3 tags. Finally, another task will pick up the MP3, and use the tags to move it over to my MP3 archive directory and insert records into the MusicBox database so that it can be picked up by the Shoutcast server.
The only bit left is to increase the power of the requester script to allow scheduling of periodic tasks so that I will never miss an episode of “The Archers” again!
Posted in Projects, Coding | 1 comment
Posted by Peter Morris
Thu, 24 Nov 2005 19:08:00 GMT
I have been informed by my current client that the project I have been working on has been shelved indefinitely.
Scrapped.
This is the first time in my career in IT that a project I have worked on has not succeeded in its objectives.
Previously I have always taken pride in the fact that when I finish on a project, my product as part of that project will continue (probably) long after I have left.
To not have that feeling, to have the exact opposite.
To know that all the creative work put in, was deemed to not be satisfactory for purpose. To know that as I leave the project, nothing of my effort will go forward.
Its a profoundly depressing experience.
Posted in Projects, Coding | no comments
Posted by Peter Morris
Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:18:00 GMT
I am a bit of a music buff.
My CD collection runs to some 400odd CDs.
As you can imagine, 400 CDs take up some significant amount of space.
I really need to be able to play my CDs from any room in the house.
I’m a coder.
So, combining these, I came up with the idea of using a Rails app to generate an index to my CD collection (ripped into MP3 files) that can be served via shoutcast.
Heres the project page.
Posted in Projects | 2 comments
