Gerph - Diary (February 2007)

Diary (February 2007)

I had 5 job interviews this month, resulting in 2 job offers. I decided to take a job in Reading, and found a place that I liked, with Simon. A little bit of playing around with the diary to offset nerves meant I added new links for albums and artists. There were some random comments about music and stuff. Finally, I've been lazily packing things ready for moving.

28 Feb 2007 (Wednesday)

Music genres.
Writing stories.

Chris was trying (again) to work out how to apply genres to his music. We have this constant thing about not being able to categorise things usefully. The problem is one of personal interpretation and also that you have to be consistent otherwise you put things in the wrong place.

Me: I'm wondering if I should have a decision tree for this sort of thing... Like, "Is the group more folky than 'Simon and Grafunkel' ?"
Chris: You're trying to build a bridge over troubled water there.

[ Decision trees; Chris and Justin ]

I've seen the most impressive spam to date today. No sarcasm. Really. Firstly, it got past my filters - which I'm really not happy about as it's a HTML email and they should be pretty much binned - but if it hadn't I'd have never seen it. The reason it interested me most was that in pine it appeared as a jumble of letters separated by '|' characters. That's because it's HTML and it's used the simple HTML to text conversion to format it. It's using a lot of table cells to make up the words, and if you just read the text acrossward like this you can't see anything that makes it out to be spam.

The clever thing is that its uses the row-span cell feature to hide the text. So every other letter (-ish, it has to include spaces within the cells because otherwise they'll be lost) is on a separate row of the table, but the top row uses a 'rowspan=2' together with 'valign=bottom' to force the text to be in the same place as the lower line. I'm going to try a little diagram.

   +-+-+-+---+------+-+-+-+-+-+------+-+---+-+-+-+-+
   | | | |   |      | | | | | |      | |   | | | | |
   +-+ +-+   +------+ +-+ +-+ +------+ +---+ +-+ +-+
   |T|h|i|s i|s an e|x|a|m|p|l|e of t|h|e t|a|b|l|e|
   +-+-+-+---+------+-+-+-+-+-+------+-+---+-+-+-+-+

Heh. That's probably not the best diagram in the world but it works. Anyhow, this means that the text (in the above example) is (cell ends delimited by '|') :

  |h| |s i|      |x| |m| |l|      |h|   |a| |l
 T|  i|    s an e|  a|  p|  e of t|  e t|  b| e

I've added spaces to make it easier to see - it's still not easy, but that's the point. It's hiding the text from the spam checkers.

The other thing that was impressive about the spam was the quality font specifier (now we're back to sarcasm). '<FONT color=#33 a 6>'. Yes, those are spaces in the middle of the colour specifier, and no delimiting quotes. Someone forgot to use the 0 in %02x I think.

The URL it references isn't valid - there isn't a DNS entry for it, and there's no whois entry for it either. Which is kinda pointless really. I guess it's a little sad that the anti-anti-spam measures they've taken have been successful, but they're not gaining because the destination doesn't exist.

There we go, half an hour being impressed by a spam. That's a lovely use of my time.

I was a little amused, today, to find someone had stumbled upon my stories by searching for 'how to write a good gcse short story'. My GCSE stories weren't all that wonderful - not that any of the more recent ones have been better. I'm not sure whether they found what they wanted, but I hope they found that the stories were interesting.

Oh no! It's March. Damn. Oh well.