Maize Maze (by )

There's a Pick Your Own place near us, just by the Shurdington A46/A417 roundabout, which I sometimes drive past on the way to or from Cheltenham. And for ages, I've been intrigued by their "Maize Maze Open" sign.

I'm rather fond of mazes, so this morning, after dropping Jean off at her nursery, we stopped off at the maze on the way back.

Life being rather busy at the moment, I rarely have time to do something fun except from making empassioned blog postings about technology when I should be going to bed (or when I should be working, so I end up working when I should be going to bed), so I was rather excited about this outing.

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I can now stand carpets (by )

Once I lamented that I don't like carpets because I'm always trying to clean liquids out of them, while knowing that I'll never truly succeed.

Well, with a lingering smell of kitten urine in the lounge becoming a bit too much to bear, and Jean tired of being stuck in her playpen rather than being allowed to crawl free, we went out Thursday morning and splashed out on:

The Mighty Machine

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Integrated Publishing (by )

Integrated Publishing, as far as I can tell, are an outfit who get the US military to release their training manuals under Freedom of Information Act requests, then (due to US laws that government works are in the public domain) sell them as books.

They have a load of cool information about all sorts of topics, from the nuclear interlock system in the missile handling systems of a naval ship to electronics, maths, and the disturbing M18A1 claymore mine.

It's worth a browse.

Whitelists and Blacklists (by )

In my previous post, I spoke of technologies that prevent [email spoofing](E-mail spoofing) by reliably tying the mail server sending a message to a domain, or checking that the message is from who it claims to be from.

These measures alone can reduce spam - in the short term - because, right now, lots of spam is spoofed. But as these technologies spread, spammers will set up lots and lots of domains, put valid SPF and CSV records in them, and start spamming.

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CSV vs SPF vs DomainKeys (by )

There are a number of technologies vying to protect us from spam, by providing channels for legitimate senders of email to prove that any given message comes from them, thus allowing them to build a reputation (and get whitelisted) while spammers' domains and/or mailserver IPs get bad reputations, and they can't spoof messages to steal the good reputations of others.

This is entirely separate to tools like SpamAssassin, which try to analyse emails once they've arrived, and allow a recipient to judge their spaminess regardless of who they've come from.

It's also entirely separate from things like HashCash, which work by letting senders attach a mathematical proof to their message that shows they've invested a second or so of computer time, thus distinguishing them from people who send thousands of messages per second.

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