One of the spam comments on this blog had this as the url: http://csx.calvin.edu/dw/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=http://------.com/-.html The URL 404s, I have no idea how they got it. The media parameter is a real spam site. The funny thing is that csx.calvin.edu is the student organization I led for two years at Calvin.

For the non-nerdy: spammers automatically add spam comments to weblogs, to increase the number of links to their site. This gives them higher search result rankings. I regularly filter and delete these. Above, I ---ed out the real spam website they were targetting. "404" is the error code for "page not found". The reason the spam site is in the same website address as csx.calvin.edu is because spammers often exploit bugs in websites to sort of "hide" their site by using somebody else's site. In this case, csx.calvin.edu had no such bugs and so I don't know what the spammer was thinking.

Earlier this week I found out that the paper Andy & I wrote for our senior project, Konfidi, at Calvin College got accepted at the Models of Trust for the Web workshop. That workshop is on May 22, and is part of the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.

This is pretty exciting! I will be attending to present the paper, but Andy will not be able to, unfortunately. I'm a little nervous about it all, too, of course.

My friend Andrey has a friend in London, so we're working on coordinating flying out there together. I'll probably then take a train from London to Edinburgh which could be pretty nice.

There are some great Open (or Community) Source projects for higher education that are under-linked. I only found out about these by word-of-mouth or the digital equivalent.

• JA-SIG currently sponsors 3 projects
  • uPortal is designed particularly for use in education. Supports "channels" and JSR-168 portlets
  • CAS Central Authentication Service lets you have one single sign-on service for all your enterprise applications; CAS can be connected to many many types of authenticators (ldap, sql, jaas, etc)
  • HyperContent does website content authoring & publishing
• Kuali is a Financial Information System
• Bedework does institutional calendaring
• Sakai is a Learning Management System
• University of British Columbia has started talking about a community-source Student Information System
• University of Indiana has a "OneStart Workflow" that soon will make its first release. It lets developers route documents (e.g. for approvals) around an organization based on business processes. It'll be used as part of Kuali

h2g2 last night at calvin for free

Sufjan Stevens tomorrow night (not free). He's become quite a bit more popular since last year, even getting reviews by Rolling Stones and the like. Last year's concert was great and I'm sure tomorrow's will be awesome too.

-DRANKIE

So I took my last exam tonight. I'm done with school forever. And I made it out with writing comparatively little :-) Good thing because I don't like writing essays, especially not verbosely. If anyone has something worthwhile to say, they should be able to say it in two paragraphs. Anywho, for the record, I last night I tried to figure out the longest papers I've written and this is what I found:

1. 22pp (originally 8pp at 9pt single spaced) - CS Senior Project paper (but Andy Schamp wrote over half of it)
2. 10pp - Cultural Anthropology interview write-up (easy, just had to write about interviewee's answers to given questions)
3. 8pp - CS Perspectives term paper
4. 7pp - Doctrine of Revelation paper
5. ... a few 5-pagers ...
6. 4.5pp (spanish) - Lit of Spain II paper
7. 4.5pp (spanish) - Survey of Spanish Lit paper
8. ... lessers