Talbott Crowell's Development Blog

At the heart of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is something called MinWin.  No, it is not a new operating system.  It is just a layer of dependencies for the tens of millions of lines of code we call Windows (think the network layer stack like OSI).

 

Here is a great article describes it in more detail: The Truth About MinWin

 

This is the story of how I manage to eliminate almost all of my spam.

 

I signed up for the eMusic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMusic to receive 3 free song downloads as part of a promotion.  To protect myself against spam, I have used a technique that I started a few years ago that consists of setting up a unique email address for every web site that I don't trust.  This includes facebook, shutterfly, zillow, ny times, amazon, etc..  This means that I have accrued almost 60 email aliases for my personal email account and probably half that for my business email account.  Basically the way it works is that I'm surfing the web, stumble on something I want to check out, join, experiment with, or buy.  I go into my personal email account administration, add a new email address alias that points to my regular email account.  Now I use that new email alias to sign up to the web site I need to interact with.  All the confirmation emails, passwords, and such required to setup the new web account or buy a product, track shipping or whatever is now sent to the alias and I receive it along with all my regular email because an alias is just another name for my regular email account. 

 

So for eMusic, I used emusicx@mydomain.com (where x is a number and mydomain is my domain).  Then I download the 3 free songs.  If I am sold on their service, I subscribe for a year.  Needless to say, I wasn't sold and didn't subscribe.

 

Fast forward to today (maybe 9 months since I signed up for eMusic).  I'm getting 10 spam emails a day sent to the alias I set up to use the eMusic service. Note that these are typical spam messages selling pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, and other junk which has nothing to do with eMusic except for the fact that they were sent to an email address that only eMusic knows about because it was uniquely created for them to send me email. 

 

So, my solution to reduce spam is quite simple.  Just delete the alias.  This is easy in this instance because I don't use the eMusic service anymore.  It would be a little more complicated if it were facebook which i use more frequently.  It wouldn't be that bad since all I need to do is create a new email account and modify my account on facebook.  But it would put to the question do I want to continue using a service that leaks my email address to spammers.

 

This technique not only helps me manage and reduce my spam (I have almost none), but it also identifies those evil companies that sell my private information (and yours) for a profit to the evil spammers.

 

Feel free to use this technique for yourself and see if it works.  The only caveat is that you must do three things: 

 

1.    You must abandon your old spam riddled email address and start with a new primary email address. 

2.    You must never give your new email address out to anyone you don't trust 100%.  If you need to give it to a company or organization you don't trust, create an alias for them in the form of <company_not_trusted><x>@<yourdomain>.<tld> where <company_not_trusted> is eMusic, <x> is some number, I usually use the number 1 and if I need another alias for this company I don't trust, I'll just use a 2, etc...

3.    You must have your own domain and an email service that allows you to create unlimited aliases for our domain.  Most domain hosting companies offer this for free as part of the hosting fee.

 

For some people, like my wife, #1 is not an option.  So for her, she must go through 100 spam emails a day and delete them.  Other people, like those who use gmail for personal email, #3 will be a deal breaker. 

 

According to recent studies, 97% of email traffic today is spam.  This is a huge problem.  We must identify those responsible, prosecute, and eliminate them.  This is one, albeit convoluted, way to reduce spam.  I believe a new email system that forces senders and receivers to use some form of authentication or certificates that can be tracked will hopefully replace our archaic but simple SMTP system.  Until then, happy spammer hunting.

Michael, Rick, and I are proud to announce the first live meeting of the New England F# User Group.  Tomorrow evening at 6:30 PM we are meeting in Cambridge, MA at One Memorial Drive in the Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center.  We welcome any and all to join us explore this new language from the other Cambridge across the pond.  The F# language has its beginnings in 2002 at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, where Don Syme and crew designed it to follow OCaml (a modern dialect of the ML functional language).  MS Research has released several versions since 2006.  The latest is the F# September 2008 CTP which integrates with Visual Studio 2008.  Microsoft announced last year that it was planning to productize it, giving it much promise for the future.  We can expect to see it as a first class language in the forthcoming Visual Studio 2010.

 

Until then, join us for some pair programming exercises at our F# User Group dojo tomorrow night.  If you miss tomorrow, then we hope to see you in the future.  We also plan to upload our meetings and potentially broadcast them in the future, so check our web site at http://fsug.org.  Remember, we meet every 1st Monday night at the NERD Center!  So see you there :)

I created my Twitter account over a year ago and plugged it into Facebook so that my tweets update my Facebook status, but haven't used it in 14 months until today.  We had a speaker social over here at ThirdM headquarters in Lexington with Joel Oleson, Eric Kraus, Geoff Varosky, Michael Lotter, Mike Dwyer, and many more speakers for SharePoint Saturday Boston. Everyone was talking about Twitter, and I think they even convinced Pradeepa to start tweeting! 

 

Twitter has really taken off.  Today I went from following 0 to 62, including David Bowie, Steve Jobs, Shepard Fairey, a ton of Microsoft guys, my friends from SharePoint Saturday, Snoop Dogg, and Quest from the Roots (who are now the band on Jimmy Fallon's late night show.)  BTW: Jimmy Fallon's on Twitter too.

 

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/talbott although I can't promise that I'll have anything interesting to say... I mean tweet.

We are at 286 registered attendees for this Saturday's free conference in Waltham, MA.  Only 14 seats left.  Should be a great session with givaways at the end of the day including software and books from O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, and many others.  Joel Oleson (SharePoint Joel) as well as Michael Noel (author of SharePoint Unleashed) are speaking.  Check out the schedule at: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/boston/

I'll be presenting at the NYC Microsoft office at the SharePoint Saturday event on using Silverlight as a front end to Excel Services this Saturday, Feb 21. 

 

 

I'm helping to organize the SharePoint Satuday Boston event in the Microsoft Waltham office all day on March 14, 2008.  If you are interested in a free conference in the Code Camp style, please join us.  If you are interested in speaking the call for speakers is open and you can get a "Speaker Submission Form" here. Call for speakers is closed.

Recently I was in the speakers' room at the MSDN Dev Confernece complaining to my friends who work for Microsoft that the OS is way too bloated.  Windows 7 is an improvement over Vista, but its not enough.  I would like a total rebuild from the ground up with significantly less code.  One rebuttle is that Microsoft's promise to its customers of backward compatabilitty makes it difficult.  Apple managed to do it with OSX (mind you it took them over a decade after they brough Jobs back and used the NextStep OS base to rebuild Mac OS.)  Anyway....

 

It looks like the answer to my dreams may not be far off.  Check this article out about MinWin.  Windows with "no dependencies, bootable, application-ready, and altogether about 25MB," according to this article on CrunchGear! 

Attached are my slides from my talk today at NE Data Camp on "Automating SQL Server Database Creation for SharePoint".