Welcome to Simon Philp's Blog

It's come to that time of the year where we have to chat about where our snowboarding adventures will take us next year.  There was a glimmer of heading back to Bulgaria or even going to Canada.  After thinking what a disaster this years Balkan holiday was we're not going back to Bulgaria nor using Balkan holidays. Decisions, decisions....

What are we looking for? Well. 

• The resort has to have some long runs which are suitable for snow boarders.
• A park to have some fun in.
• Some good off-piste areas.
• Good Aprés Ski.
• Beer prices aren't through the roof.

So where will we go?  Well Les Deux Alpes is on the cards but the second destination has still to be decided.  We've thought about Tignes or a resort in Austria, somewhere different.  If anyone has any recommendations then please get in touch as word of mouth is always a good thing.

It's always a good day when one step further is taken to combat spam. This is when browsing the BBC's website I came across the following article  - Backing for tool to battle spam

Lets hope that ISPs and Companies can offer a common element like this so that we can prevent these unwelcomed emails.

In many cases it's due to insecure mail servers that have "relay email" enabled, virus/trojan infection, spammers using applications that has it's own email engine or even abusing there own ISP's email server.

Not a day goes by without my old freeserve account being spammed. 60ish emails caught in the spam filter offering me anything from Viagra to $100 casino deposit.  This is where I thought will simple variations of my email address be safe on my website, and the answer is NO.

If you search the web for tools that crawl sites looking for "mailto:" tags and harvesting the contents you would be quite surprised how many tools there are.  They range from simple grab and store to wildcards that can be set up to remove or manipulate any "email address" found.  For example some people use the following PersonsEmail@nospamdomain.com or PersonsEmail [at] domain.com to deter these nasty crawlers but unfortunately the programs get more and more advanced at every release. 

I downloaded one of the basic programs I came across and ran it over a mock up site and the results were astounding:

As you can see this program has picked 23 email addresses on a single sweep lasting 9 minutes.  Looking further into the advanced settings it's possible to setup the depth of the crawl and even add login credentials. Most forum software hides users "signatures"/profile details to annonymous users so the fact that you could login before commencing this crawl could open up a big can of worms. 

So we know that software exists out there to hunt our email addresses down so what can we do to protect ourselves?  There have been numerous good articles outlining different techniques to protect our email addresses being harvested that can be found below:

JunkBusters guide to staying off Junk email lists

http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/harvesting.html

Hivelogic: Enkoder Web Form(Protects email addresses by converting them into encrypted javascript code)

http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/form

Preventing Spam: Bulletproof Solutions

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/12/14/preventing-spam-bulletproof-solution/

Most ISP's, free email providers have filters in place and while the majority capture 8/10 it's still possible for a new message variation to get through the filters.

There are many ways to protect your email address from being "crawled". This however won't stop spam totally.   Spam is an on going problem and well hopefully one day the government will get its finger out and do something about it.

Other Resources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/askbruce/articles/email/spam_1.shtml

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/stop-comment-spam

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/toughen-forms-security-image

I didn't realise just how many trails there are over at braefoot. We took a quick trip round there since it was a nice evening.  The picture below was taken from braefoot looking out to Inchcolm Island.

Inchcolm Island - River Forth

There are numerous jumps ranging in size and ability. People have obviously put alot of work into creating and maintaing the area.  If your one of these people then please get in touch as respect where respect is due. Just down from where I took the above picture we came across:

There are alot more jumps but unfortunately we didn't have time to go around the whole area.  We plan on going along for the day to uncover all the jumps and trails so what this space. 

For people who haven't heard of braefoot it's situated in between Dalgety Bay and Aberdour

Google Maps - Braefoot
More Information on Inchcolm Island

It's been a busy month so hence no posts lately.  We went camping on my birthday weekend to Thurston Manor which resulted in coming home early sunday morning due to strong winds. I also needed to rebuild my laptop due to it running to a hault with the amount of cr@p that was on it.  For £40 from Asda this tent took a serious battering but it was fine. Money well spent.  Think next time we go camping we check the weather before going. Overall was very impressed with the asda tent.

Thurston Manor, well what can I say.  The people we met were friendly and very helpful.  The onsite shop was reasonably priced and had a lot of things to offer.  The other onsite facilities included a clean toilet/shower block, a football pitch, play park and "the Glen".  The site was quite busy with a range of tents and caravans.  We're planning another weekend down there soon when the weather is better.  I would recommend this camp site.

You would think that rebuilding a laptop wouldn't take much time, however when you can't find the drivers disk then it can put a hold on things.  After doing a windows update and installing all my development tools I saw light at the end of the tunnel.  Then I realised that there is a service pack for Visual Studio 2005.  I started the install around 1pm and it didn't complete till 2.30 which I personally think is quite long.

My contact form will be back online soon enough along with style updates that will cater for I.E. 7 and will change the way the top navigation looks.

Till next time stay safe