Yes, Mr Spam in god-knows-what-country (cough cough America!) got smart.

Many of you may have already used Spam prevention software, either server or client side, such as Spam-Assassin or the usual Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook builtin software.
This type of prevention is usually based on looking at the subject or body and crosschecking the words against a ‘ban list’, if the work is found in the list it is either discarded so you don’t ever see it, or its tagged in some way to notify you that it is potentially spam.
I tend to have it just rewrite the subject line with **SPAM** so it still reaches my inbox and from there i am able to sift the real spam, from the emails the system thinks is spam.

Just when you thought that you were getting used to this type of system, and its all up and working and your ‘ban list’ is growing and filtering much better, you get a dreaded piece of spam that looks like it should have been spotted…
The email has all the words in your ‘ban list’ yet it didnt get pulled.

You wonder why?! Its a bloody image!
Yes, Big Wig Spam has looked at how the most common spam prevention software works, and found a genius way around it.
Because the body of the email is an image, the spam software cannot read it and so it looks like you standard email!
One way of getting around these emails is to block all the emails from the domain it has originated from.
But what happens when you block ‘hotmail.com’?
Well your friends emails will never reach because you have essentially blocked EVERY hotmail.com user, Whoops!

Currently i have not come across any software that is able to read the images within an email to determine if it should be blocked, it must be possible because some websites make use of images with a code word in them that you have to type in to authenticate yourself as an actual human being.
The text in the image is skewed and messed for a reason, so that people with automated software cannot read them easily to make sense of what it says.

That would definatly be a piece of software i can see millions of email users rejoycing about!

Flock is a newish web browser built off the Mozilla (Firefox) source. You may wonder what could be so different if they are using the same backends, but you could not be furthur from the truth.
Flock is being dubbed the ‘Social Web Browser’; it has many features that make it stand out to the usual things, Sharing of files, photos (in the form of albums), RSS reader/updates straight from the browser.

To me it looks like they are trying to make the web browser a desktop, this will couple well with a few new ‘products’ from Google, Google Docs, but that is for another posting.

Reading through the Flock Blog they tell us about a blog editor, this is a great idea, it is cutting out the need to go to the actual blog site eg: Blogger/Wordpress, or your administration area to update or add things, you can do it straight from a program built into the browser.
I will add more to this post as i see new things happening!

Yes, you heard right!
i’m doing a module this semester called ‘Agent Technology’. For those of you who have no idea what i am talking about; Agents are self sufficient autonomous pieces of software, you give them a set of goals and put them into an environment, and from there they must achieve their goals (in our case if they dont, they die).

So you would assume that in this day in age i would be using a sophisticated programming language like C# or Java… Noooo, this is Oxford Brookes, we are stuck with Borland Delphi; which although it has a nice GUI for writing and compiling the program you are writing, it is total rubbish if you are used to PHP.
I was suprised to find that Delphi is actually the 9th most popular programming language, i know thats low, but why would you be taught it, i was in the industry for a year, and they laughed when i mentioned Delphi (20 Most Popular Programming Languages)

Anyways back to the Agents.
Basically we were given the basis of a ‘world’ and were told that we had to put ‘Herbiovres’ and ‘Carnivores’ into the world where they would compete for food as they would in the real world.. pretty scary!

I will skip straight to the final, and most fun part of the program, Experiment 3 (sounds rather daunting huh?). Experiment 3 comprised all the other parts of the program: Eating, sleeping, pregnancy, escaping, searching for food. But we couild include whatever else we wanted into the program to spice it up a little.
Age and Betrayal were the 2 we added.

Age
Basically we categorised the agents into 3 age groups; young, middle aged and old (funnily enough). We allowed the young ones to jump 3 squres (this will all make sense when you run the program) but not have babies.
The middle aged agents could only jump 2 squares and could have babies.
The old aged agents could only jump 1 square, could not have babies and each move made their stomach (max_food) drop by 5, yes in our weird world old agents has taps on their stomach!

Betrayal
Basically we turned the program into a kind of self-playing game.
Each carnivore agent was given 1 ‘experience point’ for each herbivore it ate… once the carnivores experience points were greater than 1 if they could not see any herbivores in their field of view, they would look for carnivores. If the carnivore they saw had less experience points, it was eaten and gained 2 experience points (we figured that it would take more guts to kill one of your own kind).
If there were 2 carnivores evenly matched on experience points then it was a battle to the death, other wise known as ‘who has more energy’…

Mind boggled yet, we certainly were!
Definatly worth it though, and before people ask, no our agents weren’t ‘intelligent’ they had intelligence (if you could call it that) hard-coded into them.

No animals were harmed in the making of this program!

Yesterday i decided to sell my old mobile phone (Samsung D500) and my iPod Speakers (iStation 3) on eBay. I have only ever bought things never sold anything…

You would assume for the amount of people using eBay that selling something would be really easy, no so if you are a Mac user. Its crazy the amount of boxes you have to fill in, fine they are probably all necessary but the ones you are looking for: ‘Buy It Now’ and ‘Set Reserve Price’ seem to only be enabled after you have reached a particular ‘level’.

Anyways, after my phone being online for roughly 30mins, i got a message from another user saying that they will offer me £40 for it. How cheeky! Don’t worry i’m letting it ride the ‘eBay boat’ hopefully, hopefully, hopefully i will get more than i was offered! I’ll keep you posted.

Its really addictive this whole eBay thing!

Hi i’m Jamie
Welcome to my Blog, i am sure you have a couple of questions, so hopefully i will answer them and introduce myself a little better.

Who am I?
I am 22 and a 4th year student at Oxford Brookes university studying Computing (CP to anyone on my course reading this).
I did my Placement last year working for Symantec.
And before you ask/comment i DID NOT work in the Anti-Virus department, Symantec does have other products :p

Where am i from?
Ireland, well Northern Ireland to be presise. I don’t think where i live is on Google Earth yet…
Yes, its in the sticks!

Have i blogged before?
No
I was never a fan, or got into the whole ‘blogging’ thing i never know what to write, mind you this seems to be coming alot easier than i thought.

Why Now?
Ummm. I am doing a module called Professional Issues and Skills and for my coursework (next semester) i need to have a Blog, so here i am!

Why Nodstrum?
I actually have no idea, a couple fo years ago i needed a domain, well didnt actually need one just wanted another, for some projects i was working on, and the name Nodstrum sprung to mind.