Spam update

Stuff has started coming through again, however it's only ever going to me, which is what should happen. I seem to have effectively blocked spammers being able to send via my server. Oddly they still seem to be able to change things like the subject and message body. I'll have to work out what's going on there and squish it. At least this crap isn't going to anyone else anymore. It's also no longer bringing my server to its knees. Hundreds of emails at once, most of which aren't deliverable and therefore get queued for redelivery several times over, was really starting to cause problems. It's a virtual machine, it's not geared up for that sort of craziness.

Anyway, I'm sort of chuffed with that. I'll come up with a more thorough solution in time, but that will do me for now.

On another note entirely...

Hands up those of you who are interested in genealogy? Family trees? Looking up what grandma's grandma did for a living? I'm in the middle of a project I'm actually doing pretty well with. It's a family tree app, like commercial apps like Family Tree Maker etc. So far it's got a reasonable looking gui and can handle importing GEDCOM files and exporting them out again. I think I've decided to improve the parser. It currently just reads in the data I actually need. It's probably better to allow it to read in the full gamut of GEDCOM data, and write it out again, but just use what I need internally. Anyway, it's also got a built in chat app. The premiss being that you build your own tree locally and the app mirrors it to a server, whereupon it can be compared with other people's trees. If these people are connected at the same time as you, you can chat to them, and possibly discuss great uncle freddy, or whatever.

It will automatically let you know if you have matches and allow you to download individuals you don't already have into your tree. Once you get back past certain dates, you'd be surprised how likely you are to just want someone to give you information on your great-great-great-great-great grandfather's brothers and sisters.

Anyway, that's my pitch, anyone interested? I need to finish the basic code base, but once that's done I'll be releasing an alpha version for initial comments. I'm hoping I can get some of it done this week while I'm in Wales.