05-05-2004: Rejoice, patient and adoring fans (all three of you)! I am not dead - I've just been ignoring you.

I've been putting dozens of hours a week into my spam research project. I suffered several setbacks. First, I had a hardware crash that took the database (yes, the entire database) out. Well, that sucked, but I had backups of the schema and none of the data was live, so it was just a minor inconvenience.

But, it happened a week and a half before OpenBSD 3.5 was due to be released, so I got snagged again - do I install 3.4 and almost instantly become 6 months outdated? Or do I sit on my hands and wait for 3.5, so I can at least be up-to-date? Well, I waited. And I'm glad I did.

3.5 was released last Friday night, so in the time since I've installed the O/S, updated the OS to -STABLE CVS branch, installed about ninety-three million perl modules, configured Apache and PHP, configured qmail, and begun the task of getting all of my parsing and analysis software going.

Along the way, I've blown away my CVS repository and reconfigured it a dozen different ways, and I finally have it set up just how I like. This makes the ongoing development so much easier.

So, I'm currently neck-deep in development for the actual parsing of the spam emails. I have the basics down - the headers are being parsed correctly (except for an exception thrown here and there by non-compliant spams that spammers send out), and the spams are going into the database. I've done a lot of work on the efficiency, and I've gotten it from parsing 1 email a second to 13.5 emails a second. So now, I'm just in the polishing phase of the parser, and I'm starting to work on the analysis. Egads, how I hate statistics.

And now for something completely different. Sorry to go into nerd overload there - it happens, especially when I'm as deep into a project as I am with this spam thing.

So, in short, that's why Stinkweasel hasn't been updated worth a crap lately. I can't say it's going to improve in the near future, either - gotta roll with the momentum, ya know?

I did find one very cool site tonight - www.boring3d.com. Check it out, and especially check out the archives. Neat renders, warped mind, I love it.