Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• In releasing free editions of the upcoming Turbo language products, Borland may be hoping to noodge people with six or seven year old copies of Delphi to upgrade. Many people stopped upgrading when Delphi 7 appeared, because the version got such bad press. I know a fair number of people still using Delphi 5 and 6, and even one guy with Delphi 4. If the new versions are really good, they may drive at least a few upgrades, and that's all to the best if we want Borland (and by that I mean the new fork of the company that we'll see this fall) to stay alive.
• Andrew Stuart sent me a pointer to BookMooch, a site that coordinates the passing around (rather than the selling) of used books. I haven't tried it yet, but it's an obvious thing to do. It's a point-driven system with an elaborate set of rules for how you earn points, and it will take some time and experience to see if this will actually work. (The idea is to give people incentives to send out books rather than only receive them.) I'm going to give it a shot when I get home (where all my stacks of used books are) and will report back in this space.
• My spam count has very abruptly soared to about 200 per day, from a previous average of 80-100. I get the impression that some spammer somewhere has passed a list of pre-resolved email addresses (that is, resolved to IPs) through DNS to "freshen" it. My spam count dropped by almost 80% when I changed hosting services a couple of years ago, probably due to spammers using preresolved lists of addresses in which my address pointed to the old hosting service.
• Another note on spam: The majority of messages I get from spam zombies (rather than spammers like GossipFlash that own their own domains) now carry their payload messages as images. The change came fairly quickly, and this suggests that most of our spam comes from a relatively small number of botnets. Teergrubing (slowing down the rate at which SMTP servers accept connections) might help us, but I don't hear much about anyone doing it.