Paul's Time Sink

28 Apr, 2004

phpGedView is a php/mysql based program that displays genealogy information on the web.  It has features like authentication, so you can only allow people that you know access private information.  Also it will show media for people, so you have pictures of your family posted with their record.

Here is the web site with our family history.


The website for the software is: http://phpgedview.sourceforge.net/

27 Apr, 2004

I found another pretty cool program for Mac OS X. Peripheral Vision displays a graphic or plays a sound when a peripheral is connected or removed from a computer. In addition to this, it will run a program or script when the peripherial is connected or removed. I am using this to run a script whenever I remove a network adapter. I am doing it to fix a problem in X11. Here is a article that discribes this fix.

22 Apr, 2004

I just found a pretty cool program that validates the links on web sites. It imports the data into a mysql database, where you can look at the results in php.

It is called ht://Check

The main home page is: http://htcheck.sourceforge.net/

21 Apr, 2004

WebSitePulse is a pretty good service where you can make sure that your web site is up and and running. In addtion to monitoring http services, it can monitor other ports. I am using it to make sure that the SMTP (Port 25) service is still running.

The website is http://www.websitepulse.com

21 Apr, 2004

This is a great spam and virus filter service. It will scan all email messages for a domain and not filter all spam and virus messages. It has stopped 100% of all spam and virus email messages for the westbrooks.org domain.

The url is http://www.mailbarricade.com

Here is the link to their current stats.  It is pretty impressive, since they are blocking 99% of spam.

13 Apr, 2004

I found this really cool project. It is called SURBL or Spam URI Realtime Blocklist.

Instead of blocking messages based upon the computer that send the spam, it actually looks at the content of the message. Since the whole purpose of spam is for someone to make money, the spam messages generally contain urls for the receipient to buy what the spammer is selling. SURBL looks at the urls listed in the messages. If a lot of other people have reported messages that have the same url as spam to SpamCop, then this message will be considered spam.

SURBL web site