About a week ago I started seeing much higher levels of spam on my main mail account. Someone connects and sends emails to multiple "$name@dalkescientific" email addresses, where $name is "lbeman", "lburley249", "lara403", "srd". I own the domain and am the only user; all emails to it get sent to me. That means I'm getting just under 50 spams an hour.

Looking at the emails, the "to" fields seem to repeat. Some of the names listed above occur three times. A cursory scan of the Received lines suggests it's coming from a large number of dial-up or DSL lines so I suspect these emails are sent from hijacked machines.

It's only a bit of a nusiance. Last fall I wrote a program called "sb_culler" which uses the SpamBayes library to detect spam vs. ham. It connects to my email accounts, gets all the emails, and discards the obvious spam (using a high threshold of 90%.)

What would I do if I wasn't a programmer? I wonder if my hosting provider has a way to /dev/null emails except those on a certain whitelist.

crhodes: Lisp is not big in bioinformatics. There's a whole bunch of C and Perl code, and some Java and Python code, and a bit of Ruby, but very little Lisp.

nymia: Yourdon's "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" came out in 1993. In 1997, after the events he predicted didn't happen, he came out with "Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer." Copying from the Amazon.com review:

In 1992, Yourdon wrote The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, warning of impending loss of leadership by American software engineers. But a great deal has changed in three years, and Yourdon now sees a complete reversal of many of the trends he previously documented, as well as new trends such as the WWW, Java, "Good Enough" Software, and the enormous impact of Microsoft on the world of software and computing, that together signify the Resurrection of American software engineering.

You mention how the first book predates the internet, with the implication that that is more likely to cause a decline, but your argument goes contrary to his second book.

I've read a few of his books ("Decline", "Rise", "Death March"), and haven't been that impressed. Remember, this is a guy who moved from NY to New Mexico because of Y2K. He said something like "NM public infrastructure is the least dependent on high technology so the least likely to fail." (Oh, wait. I live in NM.)

So I now discount his ideas.

But that yes wasn't really a yes, and now it's no more.

After nine months of dating, and during a trip to Paris (after EuroPython), I proposed, and she said yes.

*grin*