It's time to do a roundup on the status and activities of various ofmy perennial spammers and spam sources. (Unfortunately I can'tliterally round them up, nor use something like Roundup( tm ) to make them disappear. Spammers aremore persistent than weeds.)

Hotmail's spam problem continues unabated,despite any attempts to get Microsoft's attention. This week alone werejected 330 attempts by Hotmail to get us to accept non'@hotmail.com' addresses from them.

I like awk , and often use it for quick little log aggregation things(often on the command line, if what I am interested in is a one-off).But awk has a small problem: it likes printing large numbers inexponential notation.

The minor problem with this is that I find exponential notation fornumbers harder to read than straight decimal notation. '3.18254e+10'is just harder to understand casually than 318254405

As a result of the MSN search spider going crazy , Iam actually paying some attention to our web server logs for achange. This led to me looking up which URLs are responsible for thelargest amounts of bandwidth used.

To my surprise, the six largest bandwidth sources were some CD-ROMimages in ISO format that we happen to have lying around, the oldestone dating back to 2002. In the last week alone , there were eightrequests totaling 3.5 gigabytes of transfers. Who