ChapterZero

Somewhere, there should be an unwritten law stating if you carry more books from the library that you can comfortably, then you won’t be able to finish reading those books. At least in my case– I went to the library for one book, and ended up getting 3, at least two of which I probably won’t do much more that glance at until it is time to turn them in. Seriously, I have a problem… a strange one, but a problem none the less. When will it end!

Rhetorical question: does anyone know of a webhosting company that would be willing to host a student organization’s website? Specifically, the University of Houston’s chapter of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars? I’m trying to involve myself in their affairs. We would like PHP or ASP, and database connectivity if possible. The message has been spread… to the unlistening wind (of the Inernet).

Latest content ideas: cryptography for beginners (because I’m interested in it right now), math (because I’m continually interested in that), nude pictures of me (because who isn’t interested in that?). I’ll stop now.

And because probably only two people but myself visit this site, which is only occasionally, despite how hard I try, anything other than a tribute to my ego and evidence of my bad English, happy belated birthday Zorowar! (I should post your email for the spam-bots, that would be unique birthday gift).

Speaking of which, I wonder at anti-spam technology sometimes. Why is it so undeveloped? Currently every ’solution’ I’ve seen is, at core, nothing but a list of reg-exps. Certainly in the wide and twisted field of AI, there has got to be some kind of research that can be applied to spam prevention. Maybe this genius, Douglas Hofstadter, has the answer; I wouldn’t be surprised at all, with his bad, Godel-toting, Bach-loving, Escheresque self :). The most original approach to dealing with spam are those spambot traps that post multitudes of fake email addresses, attempting to corrupt spam-masters’ databases, so they have to toss them out and start over. Unfortunately, while that may slow the spam-bots down, it can’t help those people who have already had their email addresses added to every single spam database in the world! (like myself). I would love to do something about spam, but what can I do? I don’t know much of anything really.

I used to smirk at the people who basically claimed that XML is the be all and end all of data storage methods; I couldn’t see why having everything based on markup would make such a big difference. But, praise the Lord, I have seen the light! Why? Nothing apocalyptic happened, I just had the first occasion to truly see how XML can help a lowly, non-enterprise, would-be web programmer like myself. The NSCS is considering moving some of their data over to XML, as they translate it from ‘old’ html to fit the design of their new site. That made me think: why not just change everything over to XML, and generate the markup dynamically using XSLT? That would solve all future compatibility problems, as well as allowing them to generate non-HTML output with ease. Go XML!

Possibly relevant posts:

• Anti spam-commenting ideas (4/23/2004)
• A Thought (1/25/2002)
• the useful address book (7/23/2002)