A while back I posted a small rant about stock quote spams using images to bypass the spam filter I have on my mail server here at home.

I've been using spamassassin locally since the start of 2004, and keeping a tally of the number of spams I've received each month. At its worst it was over 7,000 a month (a peril of having had an online presence since 1991). Since I started using Internet blacklists and handling the mail completely locally (rather than fed through my ISP's mail server) late last year, that was cut down to around 750 in May this year, but has crept up again since.

Well, now someone has written a plugin for spamassassin which attacks the image spam problem. It looks for any images in incoming emails, does OCR and then does some fuzzy text matching to find anything that l00k5 l!ke 5p#m.

So, fingers crossed, FuzzyOcr should prevent a lot of those mails from being able to bypass the filtering. Now we'll just have to wait and see what delightful innovation in spam technology comes next...

This spam is extremely overvalued

Is it just me, or am I getting a silly number of these mails? So far this month, I've had 106 spam mails promoting an American stock that I'm never going to buy. That's 13% of all the spam delivered to me in July (819 mails so far)...

Annoyingly, a good percentage of them have got through my spam filter, since the spam content is included as an image, rather than as text which can be properly analysed and binned.

It's quite strange being a new parent. At which wise words I guess all parents will nod sagely and agree. You see, it's like there's something that comes with the gas and air in hospital which makes time work differently. Only a few days ago, it kind of mattered what clocks said, whereas now they just happen to show the passing of the hours. 'Planning the day' is a quaint historical concept. When it comes to going out for the first time with Jessica, I'm sure we'll resort to military-style organisation, but until then, we'll just pootle along between feeds.

Anyway, at 6am today, we were actually rather pleased to see our first real poo. Yes, this is what it's come to. For the non-parents out there, this is actually quite a good thing, cos it means that her insides are processing food properly. I suspect that the pleasure will wear off though, probably by around 9am...

Thought for the day

Why is 'monosyllabic' such a long word?

Ros and I were discussing baby names last night (like you do). The two which tickled me most were:

• Basildon
• Ming

I think that Basildon Kaijaks has a nice ring, don't you?