Technology

Alan Lee gives an overview of how we reduced our spam email count here at Elcom. Interestingly, Alan found that 95% of all our email was spam – a figure that matched with reports I mentioned earlier in the year. The numbers: In the first week of implementing the changes we blocked 206,563 emails out of a total of 217,768 emails. Alan sent me an internal email with calculations of the cost saving just on bandwidth usage alone. Amazing. We're talking $,000s over the course of a year. Technorati Tags: Spam

XML turned 10 years old on10 Feb. I remember working on a project back in the very late 90s (can't be sure when but it was using SQL 7.0) and we decided to use XML as a mechanism for storing certification results (so yes, we were using XML in SQL 7.0 – quite an achievement in itself). Towards the end of the project our boss at the time (he left the company a year or so later) pronounced to the project team that this 'XML thing' was a fad and was never gonna take off. After he left the room, Scott and I just looked at each other with puzzled expressions, wondering what […]

When will the correction finally come? We've seen no end of silly money being thrown around by Venture capital companies of late, and now it seems that Google and Facebook are chasing grad students with fistfuls of cash. $95K for a grad student with no experience is crazy talk, but the comments on the post seem to support the claim. Sadly this just perpetuates an unrealistic industry that will eventually come crashing down. Of course, in the interim the rest of us software companies have had to increase salaries just to get any talent, and the end result is our clients pay. Software gets more expensive, and the industry gets a bad name […]

Reading through Australia’s IT news roundup over the last few weeks has been illuminating. Security Take security exploits and spam for example. This reminder on SQL exploits welcomed us back to the new year, alongside this note about how 70K web pages were hacked in a single week. And a new take on the hijacking side things was scary (but inventive): the printer hijacking method. Or perhaps just using Windows Server 2008 is enough. In any case, you’ve been warned. That won’t matter for some though, given that many still fall for lottery scams. Especially ones from the FBI. Oh, and brace yourself for Valentines Day. Email And speaking of email, more interesting […]

The news earlier this month about Network Solutions automatically registering any domain you search for on their site has been universally condemned. And rightly so. Supposedly providing a service, but actually reducing service for your (potential and existing) customers is only ever going end up with reduced market share. I first read about it on TechCrunch, and then saw Joe's analysis. (It was first reported here as far as we know). Since then there's been a stack of discussion about it and we can only hope the company in question makes a hasty back-pedal. The other possibility – that other domain companies will follow – is just too sad to even contemplate. Comments […]

Three interesting things happened last week.
First up, Wikipedia turned 7 years old. Happy Birthday Wikipedia. Wikipedia was and is the world's first open source encyclopedia, and remains one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world. Big things happen slowly.
Second though, Google hit 600USD. This, after hitting a high of 747USD last November. Big things happen quickly.
Finally, China prepared to become the world's biggest internet market with over 210 million internet users. Big things happen.
Technorati Tags: Google, Wikipedia, China

Code Project has a nice little article on how to use Yahoo Web Services to return the geocoded results of an address lookup. For those who don't know, Yahoo has a full developer network with stacks of articles for a variety of development tools including .NET. Also check out their Developer Centre blog. Technorati Tags: Yahoo Developer Network, Geocoding address