I can't believe I let it go 16 months since I last released a version of MailStripper - 29th May 2006 to be precise.

That's really bad form of me. And that's coming from someone who posts here once in a blue moon.

Something had to be done about it, and that's exactly what I did last night, the big push for it being fixing a snowballing issue that was never apparent on lightly-loaded machines but caused an effective uncontrollable meltdown under heavy load.

I'll try not to leave it quite so long before 1.4.2 is out...

If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Time for a quick update on geek stuff.

I made two major updates to FlashCan adding support for both a missed words list in quiz mode to aid revision of the difficult questions, and a reverse quiz mode! (I also updated the dictionary, it now has 253 entries.)

MailStripper continues to be worked on, and in the next day or two I should have a new preview build on the server, with several rather important bugs stamped on in recent weeks.

Music-wise, I have nothing to report...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-2049791,00.html. Effectively abolishing the Houses of Parliament, this looks kinda scary if this ever gets off the ground.

In binary language, 00 is none
Which cannot be said to be new.
Nor is it novel that 01 is one,
But in binary 10 is two.

If you ponder and strive, perhaps you'll contrive
A matrix from which you will see
That 101 stands for the numeral five
While the simple 11 equals three.

Computers, of course, speak binary, perforce,
Though we mortals the language abhor
We'd sooner endorse a numerical Morse
But we're not who the language is 100.

Two changes... the significant one is Mail Me Anywhere has finally launched.

The other is, FlashCan 0.4.0 has been uploaded, with a new quiz mode.

In my last post on this subject, I was getting irritated about a stuck process.

(marble: don't laugh :P ) There's a bug in the version of Tcl I'm using, where it can for some reason forget the non-blocking flag on a channel. Therefore the polling used to allow a process to time out doesn't run. And... of course, when I try to read the channel settings it thinks it's still in nonblocking mode.

The fix was surprisingly simple, though not exactly elegant. Immediately before setting channel flags (which include non-blocking mode), explicity set the channel to blocking mode. This then has the desired effect of ensuring non-blocking mode is actually set.

As a result, and hot on the heels of 1.3.1, I've just released MailStripper 1.3.2.

I need to see if this bug exists in versions later than the latest tcl8.3.x. version, and then see if my linking layer can be upgraded to match 8.4 / 8.5 .... I also am led to believe that the underlying string handling stuff in 8.4 and later has been radically changed, so the impact of this will also need to be investigated. This won't happen any time soon.

Just when you think you've almost reached the top, as you climb the last bit another peak emerges.

And so it is with MailStripper 1.3.1. As I'm on the verge of unleashing it upon the world, I discovered a stuck process that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.

I don't think it's an infinite loop, as it's consuming no CPU time, so it's probably waiting on something on a socket. The next question is, why didn't it time out?

I wrote something to help me with my attempts to learn Cantonese.

Since the last update on October 17th...

MailStripper's stability has improved, debug options are more helpful and a remaining bug that upset some MS Exchange boxes sending to MailStripper has now apparently been sorted.

The SURBL blocklist is now supported, with the help of another new plugin. This does mean the download size has gone back up again...

At version 1.3.0a25 I think I have reached a bit of a milestone. If no new major bugs are found in it, I'll re-issue it as 1.3.0rc1, 1.3.0's first release candidate.

I've done quite a bit of work this weekend, the culmination of a side project I've had going for the past several months. This has been porting several CPU-intensive functions from Tcl into C.

The net result is, my latest alpha build of MailStripper 1.3.0 is a touch smaller, and about 3 times as fast as any previous version. Although I call it an alpha build, it's running so far without any crashes on my server.

The Local Blocklist plug-in is now entirely written in C (no tcl at all!) and is 1/12 the size it used to be.

This development has been aided in part by Philip Hazel's libpcre being relicensed to BSD with version 5.0. A side effect of this is regexp support in the blocklist file is now considerably enhanced, as there were features that Tcl's regexp mechanism didn't support.

Now that most of the hard work is done in C and not Tcl, I've rebuilt my static Tcl libs optimised for size rather than speed, as this will now make virtually no impact on performance, but keep memory usage (and download time) down.

I've spent a lot of time working on

both the software package and its website.

For those wondering who in their right mind would call a software package "MailStripper", it is in fact an SMTP-layer spam filter (i.e. it strips the spam from your mail...), written to be as independent as possible from any specific mail package.

(I nearly posted my banner ad but figured it would drive you all nuts.)

I've been working on MailStripper a lot lately, it's current version is now 0.92. It now supports free evaluation licences, a much better crap-filter, and significant GUI usability improvements. And FreeBSD support.

And, to cap it all, although it's payware, I'm running an offer where you can win back your licence fee in full - with odds of just 1 in 5. It's really easy, all you have to do is look at a picture and tell me what is wrong with that. How more easy can you get?!

This evening Elvina and I decided to try our hands at making a curry. What better way to end a fun and enjoyable day?

So, we made a good start by getting the wrong stuff at Tesco. We weren't going to stop at that point so got some more of the wrong stuff at the same time. Content with getting curry paste that could render the entire population of Hampshire prone to overloading the capacity of Southern Water, we cooked it up with the chicken. At which point the recommended recipe suggested adding 10g yogurt. This really was not very helpful of it, as Tesco had already closed by this point. So doing our usual of making it up as we go along, we added about half a pint of milk to it, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. About 20 minutes, trying hard not to lose time while spodding.

After serving out the rice (which didn't really need draining, it had done this on its own accord for us) we added this... erm... chicken curry(?) to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me proudly introduce to you this evening, the Chicken Tikka Massacred.

In the spirit of science, we encourage others to try to repeat the procedure with the aim of achieving the same results.

The wine went down an absolute treat, though. Nice to know that between the two of us we can choose a good wine at least, if not curry sauce.