With the recent SoBig.F worm/virus outbreak, my email started getting flooded with silly emails asking me to look at an attachment. Since I know better, I didn’t bother opening them. However, it’s still mildly frustrating to have to be deleting spam again since using SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin went to the rescue though, since by adding a high score to MICROSOFT_EXECUTABLE, I haven’t gotten any more. Too bad virus detectors don’t know that the SoBig worm doesn’t send a valid From: address. Since the outbreak I’ve gotten numerous emails telling me I’ve been sending emails out (hint: I haven’t). Since I can’t say it any better, I think just reading this blog entry explains it just as well. Virus detectors need to learn how emails work. On a related note, yahoo needs to send out the bounce warnings without malformed email headers because they are crashing a php script I wrote that checks an email box. I guess I need to submit a bug to PHP now.

I participated in a PHP coding contest a week or so ago and the results have been released. I got 6th place, so I’m happy :). In other news I’m developing code for the Spades Contest on codewalkers.com. If anyone wants to write one and test their scripts against mine, feel free to post a comment and I’ll look at it.

Me and my mom took a vacation for a few weeks at my dad’s apartment in Utah. Boy am I glad I brought my laptop since there’s not much to do there. Comcast was supposed to have cable modem service available before I got there, but it still isn’t available (and I’ve been home for 3 weeks). Good thing too because my dad bought a house there so he wouldn’t be throwing away money to the appartment complex.

While I was there I watched the first and second seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD. It’s actually pretty interesting to watch the first seasons because I’ve never watched them in their entirety before and makes the later seasons make more sense. Seeing them out of order on rerun tv doesn’t help much either since the series was almost over before I understood most of what was happening. Also while we were there, we went to a few resturaunts; one of which was The Cracker Barrel. That place has the best iced tea I’ve ever had. Seriously.

I got to do some coding too. I implemented a Genetic Algorithm to determine the best way to play Blackjack (whether to hit/stand against cards with what you have), aka the “Basic Strategy.” Since I’m turning 21 in October (buy me something on my wishlist if you want to celebrate my birthday!), I’ve been reading up a little bit on gambling in general. I saw some of the tables there and decided to implement something. I’m sure that the statistical methods are more accurate, but I wanted to see how well GA’s could do.

That about sums up my trip. It was fun, but not long enough. Nothing ever is (except work).

Well, as you might have noticed, I changed the layout of the site a little bit. It still remains mostly the same, but it’s not nearly as radical as some of the other layouts I’ve done. Hopefully I can have a better post up tomorrow since I have a bunch I can write about (it has been a while since I’ve updated mainly since it’s a pain to open up text files and edit them, then upload them. After creating dynamic sites for so long, you’d think I would’ve written one for this already. I figured it was easier to use something that was already written though, so I got bblog (see link at the bottom of the page) and plan to modify it to suit my needs. Currently the non-news stuff is hacked together pretty bad to use the older engine for the pseudo-dynamic pages, mainly the table macros so I wouldn’t have to type all that. That, and it made the pages a lot cleaner to write and look at.

Hope you like it. Now you can comment on the pages too, so I can see if you have to say anything.