Anti-spam, resumes, classes (was: can anyone offer Lisp job?)

> The stuff you have about anti-spam projects you are working on shows
> no real grasp of the issues, is something which is already available
> in various forms out there for free and despite the amo9unt of time
> you appear to have spent working on it, does not appear to ever have
> been completed.

Everything you've written there is mistaken. I have full grasp of the
issue of incoming e-mail which on some systems can be blocked at the
SMTP level so that the SMTP client suffers an error response and has to
deal with it, and the SMTP server never has to do anything except issue
the error response. Unfortunately many people, including myself, aren't
so priviledged to run their own SMTP server whereby they can establish
policy for that server and install blacklisting or whatever policy they
choose. So my ISP's server accepts *all* spam that is direct at my
address, and I have to deal with it after it's already been accepted.
Bouncing spam back to the From: address is not an acceptable option
because most of the time spam forges that information as they forge
nearly everything else in the header to make it difficult for people to
find out where it really came from and file appropriate cease and desist
orders against the spammer.

Just deleting all spam is not a valid option either, because it takes
hours per day to manually scan the hundreds of spam I get each day to
decide if it's really spam or not, and even if I wanted to spend the
time doing that, I'd make mistakes from time to time, deleting a
legitimate message because I was fatigued and pressed the wrong key.
The only solution is to automate the determination of what is likely to
be spam, and then what to do with it? Not delete it, because of the
false positives, legitimate messages that the spam filter mistakenly
believes are spam. So what is the solution you propose for what the
spam filter presumes to be spam but might be legitimate??

What I did was to build a database of actually-working spam-complaint
addresses, not per domain but per IP address range, and actually check
each complaint address to make sure it really accepted SMTP connection
and accepted e-mail from me, before I added that record to the
database. As far as I know, I'm the only person on the whole InterNet
who has done that, either the mapping from IP numbers, or the checking
to see if addresses really work. It's not something that is readily
available for free.

I also wrote code to note the entry point, not just for messages that
come to my ISP's mail server, or messages that sneak past it by being
addressed directly to the shell machine instead, but also messages that
are addressed to my Yahoo! Groups address and then forwarded
automatically to me, and messages that are posted to regular Yahoo!
Groups that I subscribe to by e-mail with all messages being sent to my
ISP shell address instead of my Yahoo! Mail address. It's a bit of a
complicated module to track the Received: lines backwards from my shell
machine through various intermediary Yahoo machines to the point where
they first enter Yahoo from outside, and list *that* IP number as the
injection point, and consequently send my automated spam complaint to
the appropriate complaint address for *that* IP number. As far as I
know, nobody else provides free software that runs on FreeBSD Unix and
can be easily configured to know all those various Yahoo intermediary
routes to decide the correct injection point.

There is no way to ever complete the database, because new sources of
spam appear every day, and those new sources must be added to the
database. Also spam-complaint addresses come and go, and even though
I've been complaining to a particular address for months or years,
suddenly that address stops accepting e-mail, and my software has to
switch to a backup address. To make instant-complaints easier, I
maintained a traceroute database for every e-mail I received. So if I
got spam from a new IP block where I didn't already have a CTW
(Complain To Whom) record, my software would send the complaint to the
next upstream host where such a CTW record already existed. It takes
many minutes to connect to various WHOIS sources and collect
spam-complaint addresses and verifying them, tying up my dialup
connection the whole time they are running, but it takes only a
fraction of a second to look up the already-collected traceroute data
to find where to complain, thereby tying up my dialup connection for
only a few seconds each time a new spam comes in.

But my program itself was essentially finished by the end of
2003.April, with only eight messages after that time that the
instant-complaint system couldn't handle and had to fall back to an
older part of the program. Except for those eight difficult messages,
in every case my program since then automatically checked for new
e-mail once per minute, and then sent a spam complaint within a few
seconds each time that check revealed that new spam had come in, again
and again and again fully reliably with those eight exceptions where it
simply left the e-mail uncomplained and notified me of the need to use
the older system which took up to a few minutes per new source of spam
to contact the WHOIS servers to collect the spam complaint data and
then verify which addresses worked and which didn't and update my
database accordingly.

> You list courses you have done in the last 5 years on C, C++,
> Java and Data Structures. The big question is, if you have been
> a programmer for 22 years, why are you doing these introductory
> courses? Most descent [sic] programmers I know don't do introductory
> courses on programming languages. When a new language comes
> along, they just learn it.

That's what I always did when I found a new language for which I had
obvious use for it, but nowadays I can do everything I want or need in
Lisp, so I have hardly any incentive to program using a new language
rather than just do it all in Lisp. I have been asking for many years
for somebody (such as an employer) to assign me simple tasks in a new
langauge, whereby I study it myself to learn enough to accomplish the
tasks, even though if I weren't prodded I'd just use Lisp for it all.
But I haven't been employed for years, and nobody has suggested any
useful tasks for me to try, so I haven't had any external
suggestions/requests what applications to program, hence haven't had
any opportunity to program in a new language toward a specified target
(until my HelloPlus project). So when the Department of Rehabilitation
said they wouldn't help me get a job until I took classes in these new
languages, and they'd pay all expenses (tuition/fees, books/equipment,
transportation), I could only accept their offer if I wanted to
continue to get their services. And in the case of Visual Basic and
Visual C/C++, I have no access to those systems on FreeBSD Unix, so
there's no way whatsoever I could have learned them on my own. As for
C, I already knew most of it, but it was a prerequisite for the C++ and
Java classes which I needed to qualify for advertised jobs.

This Summer I could have continued by taking a Perl class, but the only
time offered was late in evening, and Perl is readily available on
Unix, so I stopped taking classes and started learning it on my own. In
the case of PHP, there's no class at all available, so I started
learning it on my own also. In the case of J2EE, even though my last
Java class covered that, the campus computer system at De Anza didn't
have it installed, so I couldn't do some of the class assignments that
required it. In the case of JavaScript, I have no facilities to teach
it to myself (except on my Linux Laptop where I have only a very old
version of NetScape and no way to download anything newer nor to upload
my finished work to the net now that the modem stopped working). So I
signed up for a class last Fall (before I had the laptop, when I had no
way whatsoever to learn it on my own), but the class was cancelled, so
after I got the laptop I taught myself some of it on my own, only to be
stumped by things that work fine on my Laptop but don't work at all on
newer browsers, and vice versa.

If you can think of some interesting PHP or CGI/C++ or CGI/Java or
CGI/Perl appliation you'd like to assign me to perform, as practice in
any of those languages, please proceed with such suggestion. (Actually
best would be not to tell me what language to use, just tell me the
application to implement, and then have me do the same application in
*all* those lanaguages I'm teaching myself or took classes recently.)

> Employers are less interested in your knowledge of language
> syntax than in your ability to analyse a problem, identify the
> right data structures and algorithms and implement it.

Then why do job ads list ten programming languages, every one of them
absolutely required for applicants to do a single job, and give no
consideration whatsoever for my 22+ years experience analyzing new
problems and solving them by writing new software??

And how can you possibly judge, by what a person writes on a resume,
whether they really do identify the right data structures and
algorithms? If I put in my "skill" section a statement:
- Able to analyze new problems, choose appropriate data structures,
design appropriate algorithms, and implement them in software.
do you think any of those keywords are going to get the resume past the
automated resume scanning that virtually all agencies use nowadays to
discard 99% of incoming resumes before any human takes even a glance at
the actual wording of the resumes? (That's a real question. If you
honestly believe spending two lines to include that in my resume, that
means I need to delete an extra two lines elsewhere, but I'll do that
if you believe it'll help me get a job.)
.

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