Log

I've heard about XMLHttpRequest before, but never really gave it much attention. Which means I didn't even know what it was supposed to do, and therefor never looked into it further.

Turns out it's pretty neat though. If you're a webdeveloper, you must know how we deal with stuff like changing the values in a dropdown box depending on a chosen value in another dropdown box? You either send all possible information with the page when you construct it and then use Javascript to fill in the information on demand. Or you submit a form when something is chosen by the user and fill in the information server-side.

XMLHttpRequests let's you retrieve information from the server using a client-side Javascript XML object without requiring a page reload. In essance, it's a mixture between the two hacky methods mentioned above.

For more information, check out this article. An example is also present. While that example is nice, I like this one better.

I only had time to quickly skim through the article, so I'm still left with some more researching to do:

• What about security? Can we XML request over a secure connection?
• Do we have to transfer server-side session ID's manually?
• Any complete frameworks available where have a XMLHttpRequest enabled front-end (client side) which queries a bunch of server-side pages which in their turn query the database (or stored XML information) and return information in XML?
• Can this be a nice platform for three-tire webapplications?

_{(Thanks to Joel On Software for posting about this)}

I hate spamfilters.

For years now I've run my own server at home without problems. Suddenly my provider, C-hell-o, decides that I need some sort of semi-dynamic IP. I don't understand why, but anyway. So guess what..

It turns out that those spamfilters have the whole UPC range blocked as 'Spam senders'. Ooh, nice. NOT. So now I won't be able to send any mail from my server and instead will have to relay everything to Chello's crappy mailservers. And those don't work half of the time.

The problem with these spamfilters is that they simply don't work.

Filtering for keywords and assigning scores doesn't work.. I've seen mails with subjects like "V 1 A G R @ – Buy it now for only $0.99 a pill", and the score was still far below spam. While on the other hand I've also sent emails to people with subjects like "Re: application" and gotten in back because it was supposedly spam.. yeah, right. Spammers will always find a way around these kinds of filters.

The other filters – the origin-based ones – also don't work. Why not, you ask? Because spammer will keep finding new places from where to send their spam, until we've blocked every goddamn IP in the whole world.

I'll even go as far as too say that it is not spam that is screwing up e-mail, it's the spamfilters!.

I give e-mail another year or two before it's either completely unused or we just accept spam as a day-to-day nuisance and move on with our lives instead of thinking up sollutions that are even worse than the problem itself.

I'd rather receive 20 spam emails and 1 normal one than recieve 2 spam emails and miss the real one I was supposed to get.

gExec v0.2 was released

Changes include:

• Duplicate history entries are now removed
• Various bug / memory leak fixes
• Tabcompletion of arguments as well as program names
• Settings
• Better command launching and error reporting

Release overview here.

After the problems of the server being dead due to a failure in hardware, it was now time for the internet connection to perish. All electricmonk.nl domains are in working order once again. The nihilist.nl domainnames aren't, and I'm not sure if I'm going to resurrect them.

Hopefully this will be the last of the problems with this server.