News and views from a software developer's perspective
Friday, May 03, 2002It's nice to know that the Hewlett name will not be struck from the new HP. :-)
How to collect addresses for sending spam. It's not hard. You don't need the harvesting tools from ElcomSoft. No, you don't have to spider the web or grep through newsgroups. All you have to do is farm out an email address to spammers, then grep the emails they send, since they often include multiple addresses in the To or CC line. Alternatively, set up your own computer to act as an open relay for the first N messages -- to fool a spammer into thinking he has an open relay -- then collect the SMTP recipients.
Okay, I really don't like spam. And I'm not trying to offer advice would-be spammers. I'm just commenting on how, once you get on a spammer's list, you might soon end up on every spammers list.
XML documents on the run, part 3 (JavaWorld.com) [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News]
This article contains a performance comparison between various XML SAX parsers and the new XML pull parsers. The Piccolo SAX parser wins in every case. Xerces and Crimson SAX parsers are very slow (relative to the others) for small documents, but actually beat some of the other parsers for large documents.
Sun's OpenOffice open for business. A competitor to Microsoft's ubiquitous Office desktop software, Sun's OpenOffice is the open-source version of the company's StarOffice software suite. [CNET News.com]
I used StarOffice 5.2 and hated the MDI interface. I started using OpenOffice 641c (the Beta version of OpenOffice 1.0), and it's buggy in some ways. I was glad that 641c did away with the MDI interface.
I have a legitimate version of Microsoft Office 97 that I could install have not. OpenOffice 641 works okay for opening most Word documents.
I think it's good that Sun plans to charge for StarOffice. I hope the cost is very low. Nevertheless, they have to pay the salaries of those developers who are working on StarOffice. Charging for StarOffice may also be important for it to be accepted by real world corporations, many of which have a bias against free software.