stormbrew

What is Backscatter These days, one of the main ways spammers get into your mailbox is through a technique called ‘backscatter’. Backscatter happens when a mail server accepts an email and later decides that it can’t deliver it, and so informs the sender through a bounce. Unfortunately, what spammers do is they send their spam [...]

Backstory A few weeks ago I demoed a project I’d worked on called Oncloud.org. Oncloud was an offshoot project of something called CloudBridge, which was intended for use as a frontend load balancer for a hosting service I was thinking of working on. I’d worked on these projects about a year ago, and at the [...]

I doubt it’s news to anyone that Canada is about to get a new entrant to its lackluster cell phone market. WIND Mobile, partially owned by foreign interests, was temporarily blocked from using the spectrum they bought on auction last year, but managed to overcome that hurdle and are now gunning towards having phones on [...]

A few things converged to make this blog post happen, and it is a strange and mysterious convergence. First of all, the Fringe is coming up in a few weeks, and I’m super excited about it (more on that in a few paragraphs). Second, Mack Male posted a blog post to titled Discovering Live Theatre [...]

Traffic Shaping On Monday, Canadian ISPs Rogers and Shaw went up in front of the CRTC to discuss traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the practice of altering the way packets move through the network in order to (in theory) provide a higher quality of service. If you want to consider the tired analogy of the [...]

Every now and then I find someone interesting to follow on twitter because of the links they post. Finding interesting links is a big part of why I use Twitter. It makes it so the links come to me with very little action on my part (thus fitting in nicely with the my lazy side). [...]

There was a brief discussion on Twitter yesterday about whether meetings are a good thing or a bad thing. The question was raised, by a young and up-and-comer self-taught programmer and university student in what I understand to be one of his first office jobs (in the form of an internship), as to why others [...]

Last week we took in the Canada Day fireworks here in Edmonton. I’ll get right to the point and say that they were incredibly awesome. I’m pretty sure that they were, in fact, the best fireworks I have ever been personal witness to. Well choreographed, lots of variety, some really massive explosions (the kind that [...]

Spammers on Twitter appear to have discovered how to use @replies to their advantage. For the twitter uninitiated, an @reply is essentially a public message. Prefixing a message with @username makes it so the target user sees the tweet in a special reply feed even if they aren’t following them, but it also allows everyone [...]

Just read the blog post on Mashable calling the #moonfruit twitter tag “twitter promotion done right” and I couldn’t disagree more. Purely from a financial perspective, I doubt it’s worth it. They are giving away 10 MacBook Pros. Each is worth, most likely, somewhere around $2500. So they are spending $25,000 on this promotion. This [...]