A very unhappy birthday

Birthdays are generally times for celebration but spam e-mail, which turned 30 in May, definitely doesn’t fall into that category.

Spam, for both readers who don’t already know, is unsolicited advertising sent out as bulk e-mail messages. It is just the sort hell-born child that should have been strangled at birth and this year we can take time out to regret that it wasn’t.

It all began in 1978 when an employee of DEC sent out an e-mail to around 400 users of Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet, inviting to attend a public viewing of a new computer that the company had produced.

There was a storm of protest at the time but the fact that sending out e-mail advertising is so cheap and easy, meant that unscrupulous advertisers were always going to use it, just as soon as enough people started using e-mail.

Spam got its name from a Monty Python sketch which took place in a restaurant where SPAM luncheon meat formed the basis of all the dishes on offer. In the sketch, a group of Vikings sang about the joys of SPAM, drowning out all other conversation.

The real SPAM is a pink luncheon meat made out of pork and ham by Hormel Foods, which is surely not amused by the fact that its product’s name has also become the name for such a undesirable Internet phenomenon. The company has asked that the name of its product be written in capital letters in an attempt to differentiate it from unwanted e-mail.

I had a bit of a scout around the spam.com website and found it to be wonderfully over the top, but with a good bit of info about the popular meat product. It was apparently first produced in 1937 and the company provided the military with 15 million cans of the stuff a week during WWII.

I have never tasted SPAM, to my knowledge, but it must surely leave a better aftertaste than its e-mail namesake. In an aside, have you ever noticed that you can’t buy decent canned meat products in this country? I know they exist but here it’s all mechanically-deboned poultry, and not even a decent can of bully beef available.

Anyway, back to e-mail spam, which is proving to be a real scourge when it comes to clogging up the Internet. E-mail has traditionally made up the bulk of all Internet traffic and, of the total number of messages, 80% are estimated to be spam which equates to about 100 billion unnecessary messages every day.

The volume of spam arriving in my Inbox was so high a few years ago that I made the switch to Gmail, which filters out 99% of the spam I receive, and puts it in a separate folder so that I’m not bothered by it. At the time of writing, I had 7519 spam messages in the folder which I had received in the last 30 days.

Spam filters do improve things for users but I think that there will have to be an alteration to the Internet e-mail system, preventing e-mail from being sent quite so quickly.

The addition of a slight delay between the sending of each message is not going to really affect people sending out small newsletters, for example, but it will curtail the activities of people sending out millions of spams every day.

Another idea could be to route all e-mail through control centres which could automatically detect when lots of messages are similar, as they are with adverts, and allow operators to inspect and delete them, if necessary.

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Wake up little Susie

Every so often I think I’d like to have the radio on but then I remember how little there is that’s worth listening to in South Africa.

Thank goodness for Internet radio because at least I can get an occasional fix and listen to some music that I enjoy. I went over to BBC Radio’s (bbc.co.uk/radio) website the other day and was pleased to see that another season of Suzi Quattro’s excellent radio show has begun.

Suzi is “the” rock goddess, as far as I’m concerned, and she spins a great selection of American music from the 1950s and 1960s. What makes the show so compelling for me is that she has seen, played with, or interviewed many of the performers whose songs appear on the show.

My musical education is coming on in leaps and bounds, thanks to Suzi, and I’ve heard stuff, such as Elvis’ King Creole, which I’d never heard before, Dorsey Burnett’s It’s Late, and Debbie Reynold’s hauntingly lovely Tammy, which might otherwise, never have come my way. I have now even heard of Ricky Nelson, motown and Doo-wop; amazing, but true!

The show is broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on Saturday nights at 9pm, but you can visit the show’s website at any time during the next week and listen in. You’ll need to have the RealPlayer software but they have a free version of it which you can download.

I kept an eye on my bandwidth graph during one of her hour-long shows and it only used up about 50 or 60Mb. Given the high price of our bandwidth, you probably couldn’t listen to the radio all the time over the Internet, but at least you can get a few decent programmes.

From the front page of the BBC site, you can listen to what’s playing on any of the company’s radio stations or you can listen to a huge selection of programmes which have been broadcast but which remain available for a time.

You can search for a programme by name or by genre, and I specially recommend the humour section as a rich source of entertainment. It’s off at the moment, due to the death of the presenter Humphrey Lyttleton, but the long-running show I’m sorry I haven’t a clue is really great comedy and is repeated regularly.

Many of you reading this are not going approve of my taste but there is no reason why you shouldn’t plunge into the world of Internet radio and find something great to listen to yourself. It is surely going to be better than dying by inches listening to those interminable chat shows on SAFM, where morons tell you what they’re thinking; and that's a misnomer if there ever was one.

Local terrestrial radio station East Coast Radio isn't too bad except that their musical content isn't aimed at my age group. I enjoy the occasional song and the traffic reports are valuable. They have an online presence but, even though their advert played OK on my PC, I was going to have to download another plug-in to listen to the show. Then I thought, why bother?

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If you’ve got it, flauntR it!

Over the months I’ve written about a number of online image storage and manipulation sites.

Just the other day, I came across an interesting new site which offers you the opportunity to perform a huge variety of manipulations to your images and then to do something with them.

The free flauntR site can be found, surprise, surprise, at flauntr.com, and it is easy and quick to register. The site allows you to store pictures, and display them to visitors, but its primary goal is to manipulate images for display elsewhere.

The first step is to import your pictures into the site from your local computer or an online picture gallery site, such as Picasa or flickR. I easily managed to get pictures from my PC and from my Picasa gallery, and these were placed in an album where I could view them and select the ones I wanted to manipulate.

You can then choose the appropriate flauntR tool to do whatever it is that you want to do. The stylR tool is used to create cards and invitations, using the picture you’ve chosen, or you can place any one of a huge selection of frames around it.

The editR tool is used for rotating, cropping, fixing redeye or adjusting the colour, hue or exposure of the picture. It also give you access to lots of special effects including black and white, sepia, and many others, including an interesting one which makes it look as if you took the picture on a Lomo camera.

The textR tool allows you to place text or a variety of shapes on your pictures and there are a number of other tools which will allow you to recolour your picture using tones from famous paintings, create a profile picture for your blog, or a wallpaper for your mobile phone.

Once you have changed a picture to your satisfaction, you can save it on the site and then e-mail it to someone, download it to your computer, post it in your online picture gallery, put it on your blog or add it to a social networking site such as Facebook or My Space.

All those options fall under the heading of sharing and I found it very easy to do. I saved a picture to my computer, uploaded it to my Picasa gallery and created an entry on Blogger.

The quality of the image is good when displayed on-screen, but the version I downloaded to my computer was a bit small to print really well. A picture of over 1Mb in size, became a 300Kb file after making the round trip to flauntR, and becoming the cover for Top Gear magazine.

There is no doubt that flauntR offers some very cool features and would be valuable for people wanting to manipulate their pictures and e-mail or post them online. One snag I struck was that the site gave an occasional error message but, after I learnt to hit the Dismiss All button, it carried on working.

Another problem, which isn’t due to flauntR, is that the site can be quite slow when loading pictures or a new set of tools. The fault lies, of course, with that mean-swine organisation, starting with a ‘T’, with the skinny and very expensive undersea pipe, through which all our Internet traffic must travel.

I see that Neotel is about to start rolling out its Internet service and there has been speculation that the price will be pretty reasonable. I suppose competition may begin to improve things for us Internet-wise but, as I’ve noted before, competition in South Africa is often anything but competitive.

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flauntR sample

I converted this sample picture of mine into a magazine cover using flauntR. I also posted the picture to the blog with flauntR. Click here for my write-up on flauntR.

Happy birthday, dear worldwide web

April 30, 2008, saw the fifteenth anniversary of an act which was to lead to the explosion in the popularity of the worldwide web.

The history of the web goes back before that but it was on that day that the idea and the underlying technology was put into the public domain by its originators, so that it could be used free by anyone who felt so inclined.

The internet had been around for quite a while when, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, came up with a proposal to use hypertext linking to transfer information over the Internet.

The idea was to allow CERN researchers to share information between themselves by accessing it on each other’s computers. The worldwide web was developed on two Next computers and, as one commentator put it, to see the worldwide web in those days, you’d have to have gone to Berners-Lee’s office.

The first website was info.cern.ch and it is still running today. It provides an overview of the web’s history and, although the first actual web page has been lost to history, the site does provide a link to an early web page from 1992.

The web is a brilliant but very simple concept and is made up of computers, known as servers, which store web pages. All anyone wanting to view one of those pages has to do is type the address of the page into their web browser. The browser obtains the page from the server and displays it on the user’s screen.

Of course there is some complexity involved in the process, including how the browser finds the server it wants among the many out there, but its comparatively simple nature has ensured its success. That and the fact that it was free while the main competing technology, known as Gopher, was not.

Web servers were established in other institutions in Europe in 1991 and, by the end of the year, the first one had appeared in the USA. There were 200 web servers in existence by 1993 and, although I don’t know how many there are currently, according to a recent Netcraft survey, there are now over 165 million actual web sites.

I have said before that I was shown the worldwide web sometime in 1993 or 1994 and am embarrassed to report that I didn’t see the potential at all. It wasn’t long afterwards that the whole thing took off, however, and I was making web pages with aid of a simple tutorial I found in a computer magazine.

Seeing that web pages are simple text files with formatting and other instructions written between right-angled brackets, I was using Windows Notepad and having a whale of a time. The browser followed the instructions but did not display the brackets and whatever lay between so, for example, when it encountered the code Title, it would display the word Title in bold.

As the web has evolved and been able to do more, coding for it has become more complex. As a result, we have seen the rise of programs which can used to lay out web pages without the user ever having to encounter any of that nasty code.

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