www.ekr-home.de

New mail address

Since 1995, I used to have a domain to myself (pluto.camelot.de) and received all mails targetet at (anything)@pluto.camelot.de. Back in those days, spam was not a problem, and I used the address freely in public places. This was all nice and well, until the spammers popped up.

The statistics of my spam filter POPFile look like this, counting since 2003:


  • Messages classified: 345,768
  • Spam: 333,997 (96.59%)
  • Non spam: 11,717 (3.38%)
  • Unclassified: 54 (0.01%)
  • Classification errors: 292 (103 false spams which were really ham)


So, that's roughly 110.000 spam mails per year, 10.000 per month, 300 per day. The spam filter does a beautiful job with it, so I don't notice the amount of mail at all.

But enough is enough. I'm switching to new mail addresses (some more private, some rather public, other ones for forums etc.). If you don't kow any more private address from me, then use web@ekr-home.de. This address will work until it is overly spammed again, and then I'll switch again more regularly. This is also a little experiment to see how long it takes from this address being publicated here until the spam comes in.

I also found the following services helpful to avoid spam or the need to hand out your mail addresses:


  • Spamgourmet - the best of them, unfortunately under DDoS by spammers since months, and now unusable.
  • Mailinator - random mail addresses without any accounts.
  • Spammotel - similar to Spamgourmet, but requires to log in and click somewhere before you get a new address... didn't really use it much.


I'll try to work without them for the time being, and hope that Spamgourmet gets onto its feet again.

About time

>> Over a month... time to update!

Well, what's time (and again) anyway? Time is relative, especially dinner time.

But closely related, what's space? Lots of things are going on there behind the scenes.

There's one book which explains the string theory approach to space and time: The Elegant Universe (Brian Greene). It's well worth the trouble, in my opinion. If you liked good old Einstein with his thoughts experiment, then Greene is more cutting edge (and includes the most important points about Einsteins relativity theories as well, for the same price).

I don't pretend to mathematically understand everything Greene writes, but I don't think that's necessary at all, as his book is intended for the general public, not for mathematicians. There are no formulas in there, but he does a good job explaining the concepts. A big point of his book is a meta-explanation of the state of the science that works on string theory - being that the mathematicians out there don't really understand the theory either, yet. But it's still very fascinating.

Go get it, and broaden your view of the universe. And then explain to your friends what a 11-dimensional Calabi-Yau space looks like. :)

Kaltenberg 2006

Here are my images from the Kaltenberger Ritterturnier 2006 (site is in german; the english version is here, but it seems to be broken).

Kaltenberg is a small village west of Munich; they have the "Kaltenberg Knights Tournament" each year. It is - to my knowledge - the largest commercial medieval knight tournament in Germany. It is always very noisy and colourful, with all kinds of things to see and do (and buy). It's not authentic, but who cares.

It is also known for being the event where the band Corvus Corax plays on each day (Wikipedia on Corvus Corax). Corvus Corax happens to be the most famous - to my knowledge - medieval band in Germany. :)

Optics

Specifically for Mr. Calderone, a link to a beautiful site:

http://www.atoptics.co.uk/

It explains a lot of athmospheric and optic phenomena, including nice pictures. Including Rays&Shadows, Water Droplets, Rainbows, Ice Halos, and the High Athmosphere.



Also, for more like these, check out http://www.polarimage.fi/.

Last but not least, I used to visit http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ daily. It has a single new astronomical picture for each day, with a short description and loads of links to in-depth information.

A different kind of Chaos / Mailinator

This blog is more and more turning out to be my personal bookmark site...

A different kind of Chaos is a nice blog from the guy who made the Mailinator, a service that lets you use fake anti-spam mail addresses without signing up (and even without creating the address before you use it).

He has some relatively long - for a blog, anyway - articles about software development in a business context, and brings up interesting topics with a little bit of humour.

Edit: www.spamgourmet.com is similar in that it offers on-the-spot generation of accounts, but it also has a login, so you are sure to get the mails yourself; and it forwards incoming mail. Altogether a better solution for most things, then.

Socar Myles



Finally, something worthwhile to post again... found the artist Socar Myles by accident - she likes rats and zombies, so check her out.



Some videos...

The good, the (not so) bad, and the quite ugly... oh, and the downright absurd. Take your pick: 1 2 3 4

Sudokus

Recently started to do Sudokus while driving to work... see www.websudoku.com or any other site for more information.

Great fun!

Powered by Blogger