Research

Whenever I get spare time – (yeah, right!) – I have several projects currently on my agenda:

  • Spam Filters

    When I first joined the internet community in 1992, like many other people I quickly found that email was an incredibly useful communications tool. Then along came the spammers – (current estimates have around 95% of all email traffic on the internet as being spam) – and suddenly it took more time to weed out the rubbish than it actually took to read the legitimate email. Not very useful.

    One day, after spending nearly an hour on a dialup connection downloading a truck load of messages to discover they were all spam, I decided I could do something about it. Over the last few years I have been steadily developing a filtering solution – in it’s current form, it has enabled me to receive NOT ONE SINGLE PIECE OF SPAM in over five years.

    In the past, a few have slipped through when spammers have come up with new attack vectors, but I’ve never taken more than a day to code in functionality to get around them, but after two years with none at all, I believe I’ve hit the sweet spot.

    The code is actually fairly lightweight, but is not very scalable in it’s current form. That’s the next step along the road – making it scalable to many thousands of users. Check the “Project Odyssey” page for more information over time.
  • MAWstatus

    The programmer in me always keeps my mind active, and being actively involved with the internet and various internet technologies, I am currently working on a combined Facebook API/Twitter API project, called “MAWstatus“. It is in the very early stages, but I have been working with these APIs for some time – even if there is not a lot to report in regards to this particular project as yet.