How much is spam worth? In the case of a couple who sent millions of spams to a small ISP, $236 million. That’s the judgment a federal judge in Iowa levied against the husband-and-wife spamming team of Henry Perez and Suzanne Bartok, IDG reports.
Over four months in 2003, the couple used a program appropriately called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies (a name that not only nicely describes its user base but simultaneously violates IDG Books’ trademark on the “For Dummies” books) to send millions of emails to little CIS Internet Services of Clinton, Iowa. CIS underwent an expensive server upgrade and devoted three servers to blocking the scumbags’ spam assault.
CIS owner Robert Kramer III said the company was processing about 500 million spam messages every day in 2003.

 “There were millions of e-mails being delivered to us for each spam campaign to users that didn’t exist on our servers,” Kramer said in an interview. “It was do or die: it wasn’t just a nuisance for us.”

Perez and Bartok claimed the emails they sent were legit. That argument was just a lie, the court said.

“The court simply does not believe Mr. Perez or Ms. Bartok,” Judge John Jarvey wrote in a Sept. 30 order.

 

CIS has sued and won judgments against 10 spammer so far, but good luck collecting on those, or from Perez and Bartok. Many spammers simply fold their companies or move the money overseas.

No word on this couple’s assets but one suspects it is less than $236 million. The size of the judgment – based on $10 per spam – may be more of a deterrent than one that compensates CIS for its losses.

If you have received this error from a Datasource of type "OTHER"  using the JDBC connector/j driver then this may be your solution. It may apply to other DSN type issues as well.

When you create the Datasource initially everything seems to work just fine, but after a while it will mysteriously stop working with the error

Error Executing Database Query.

Can't find configuration template named 'coldfusion'

This is most likley to occur if you are in a sandboxed environment, the reason being that when a DSN is created it uses a pooled connection, and as the CFADMIN has access to everything it works fine. But when the connection has timed out, ColdFusion is no longer able to re-establish the connection due to security restrictions of the site now trying to establish the connection. 

The template named ColdFusion the error refers to would seem to be the  file /com/mysql/jdbc/configs/coldFusion.properties from inside the connector/j jar, which the MySQL connector tries to use to do some autoconfiguration for coldfusion to optimise it.

If you add the following to your JDBC URL, then this should resolve the problem by stopping the ColdFusion optimisation and thus removing the need for the conenctor to access that file.

autoConfigureForColdFusion=false

E.G

JDBC:mysql://myserver:3306/myDatabase?autoConfigureForColdFusion=false&allowMultiQueries=true&useDynamicCharsetInfo=false 

Adobe has announced that ColdFusion is now free for educators and students.  The licensing is such that it isn't free for production use, but rather for learning. I am not sure how this differs from the free developer edition that already existed, perhaps it doesn't have any IP restrictions.

Hopefully this will lead to many students getting their hands dirty and educators empowered to teach CF even more, especially now that there 3 CFML engines to choose from, Open BlueDragon, Railo and of course ColdFusion.

"Adobe ColdFusion 8 for Education is available for free to educational customers to use for learning purposes only and not for production purposes. This includes all qualified students, faculty and staff of eligible education institutions"

As you have probably noticed by now, CFDevCon unfortunately got cancelled. This was mainly due to lack of sponsorship which meant we could not afford to run the event, and there were really no cutbacks we could make to get around this as the main cost was the venue.

As one door closes, another opens, with AWeeDram conveniently popping up and advertising itself as a "replacement for CFDevCon" and costing only £10 entry, so there is no excuse not to come.

In the style of the original CFDevCon, they just have a single track with a great lineup of 7 terrific speakers, presenting on topics that many want to know or know more about: ColdSpring, OO, clustering, Subversion, dev practices, and Railo. And the topics are bring presented consecutively so you won't need to worry about missing a single one. That also makes for an easy read of the web site: it's just a single page, with popups for each talk. Take just a minute to check it out.

Put on by the same folks who run Scotch on the Rocks, I'm sure A Wee Dram will be as fun (and relaxed) as it will be informative. 

While I am always happy to see another CF related event, I wasn't really too happy at the way they went about organising it and announcing it as a replacement for CFDevCon without even telling us. Had they taken a few moments to communicate their plans to me, I would have been more than happy to support it and put a notice on the CFDevCon site officially endorsing AWeeDram as a replacement for CFDevCon. 

On 21st August at around 3AM my dad "David", husband and father of 2,  passed away bravely and quietly in his sleep. I love you dad, and we will all miss you deeply and hope that you are in a better place.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer approximately 2 months ago and given 6 months to live, sadly he didn't last that long. He accepted his fate bravely and with dignity without fear or complaint.

David was a great dad and was a good kind hearted man who would do anything for anyone and would turn the other cheek most of the time to any grief anyone gave him, I don't think there was a nasty bone in his body. He was liked by everyone that knew him, and will be sorely missed.

I would live to give my thanks to St Catherine's Hospice who looked after him in his final weeks when my mum was no longer able to. They really are a nice caring bunch of people and the hospice is a nice place that allows residents lots of freedom and provides plenty of comforts and support for their final days. I would highly recommend St Caterine's to anyone that is unfortunate enough to be dying of cancer and gets to the stage where they cannot look after themselves, and to anyone who has a family member in this state, please check it out, it really is not like sticking them in hospital or in a home. The site above is for the one in Crawley, sussex, but they do have others around the country.

The hospice do not charge for their time or help and is run purely on donations, so I would kindly ask, if you support charities or have a few quid to spare, please make a donation.