Invert Your Mind

It’s 2008 and I’m hoping to start blogging more regularly again. To start, I figured I’d tell my readers my plans for 2008. Here’s the quick run down:

1. Continue building Inversoft’s Profanity products and increase sales

I did a lot of work last year getting the profanity database and filter working well. These products are slowly selling and Inversoft is getting more customers each week. I’m hoping to add some more advanced logic this year to reduce false positives even further.

2. Rebrand Inversoft and finish the website redesign

We have been working with the excellent designers from We Are Super Ordinary to rebrand Inversoft with a new logo and a new website presence. This should help us leverage our website as a good marketing tool for the business

3. Launch JCatapult and promote the heck out of it

JCatapult is starting to get to a 1.0 stage. I’m hoping to finish up the last few things in the next couple of weeks, including migrating SmartURLs into the Struts source repositories and make it one of the default plugins shipped with Struts. JCatapult will be based primarily on Struts2 and the SmartURLs port (called the Struts2 Convention Plugin). Once that migration is complete, JCatapult should be ready for a solid beta release.

4. Build a web application as a JCatapult example

I’ve had a few ideas and domains registered for nearly 7 years now and I’m going to try and build out one of these ideas using JCatapult. Hopefully I can find 3-4 developers that are interested in helping build this application in their spare time. Anyone who is interested, send me an email.

That’s the run down for 2008. I’ll try and post a few times each month on my progress, in addition to the standard technical ramblings I put up, which usually get more traffic than the rest of my posts. Time to get coding! Happy New Year!

I’ve finished launching my latest Inversoft product - The Inversoft Bad Word Database. The website is written entirely in Ruby on Rails and uses PayPal for purchases. All and all the coding was extremely straight forward and simple. Here’s the address:

http://badwords.inversoft.com

The product idea essentially sprouted from my work on https://www.naymz.com where I need to add some filtering logic to the site so that folks could not enter any restricted words (cuss, slang, swear, superlatives, derogatory, etc.) when constructing their ad for the search engines. Google, Yahoo and the others reject advertisements whose content is not valid or contains restricted words. As I built out the functionality for Naymz, I wanted to test it with some data. Unfortunately there was no data to be found.

I did quite a bit of searching and found that there were services out there who offered a web service you would sent the content to and they would validate it. This just didn’t make sense to me since I wanted to have as few external dependencies as possible and most of these sites could not guarentee reliability, up-time or accuracy of the content filtering. I also found a few other sites that had lists of words, but they were not in a database friendly form. These websites also suffered from the fact that some words I would not consider “restricted” at all and yet again the data would need major scrubbing. Another site I found offered hundreds of thousands of words entered completely by its users. This was probably the worst considering that I had no way of making a determination of which words I wanted to load and which I didn’t because as we all know users will add anything when there aren’t any checks and balances.

What I really wanted was a list of words, with definitions, ratings and categories. So, in my spare time I started building this out. I surfed the web and found all the words I could. I started adding definitions to them as well as a ranking system that would allow applications to adjust the level of leniency they wanted to allow. I also found that many times a list of alternate spellings was need because folks are smart and can beat filters by typing something like sh7t.

After quite a bit of data scrubbing, tweaking and coding, I finished the website and did an initial data load. The initial load contained approximately 500 words and another 500+ misspellings (or something close). The website is live and I’ll be adding words to the database each day and also be building out an multi-language version that contains bad words from as many languages as possible. Check it out and feedback is much appreciated.

The person who left the last comment has not yet revealed themself but they did state that they did not sign up for the GMail account. This is a bummer, but doesn’t mean that the hunt is off. Perhaps the secret GMail person will find my blog and post a few clues. In the meantime, I think it better to switch my efforts to the commenter. I do have their IP address: 24.15.139.119 This should help me narrow it down. Another clue is that their IP address hasn’t changed since the previous comment. I should be able to do a little network snooping and narrow down a location. The problem after that is determining who out there knows my blog and/or knows me. Probably some guess work will ensue. I can just hope that the commenter keeps checking back so my guesses don’t go un-answered.

The person who signed up for the GMail account left me a comment last night around 10:00 PM. The message is here:

http://brian.pontarelli.com/2006/06/22/inversoftgmailcom/#comments?

I’ve done a bit of investigation today and found very little, but a bit more than I knew before.

• The person lives in Chicago area (looks to be Plainfield)
• The person uses Comcast for their broadband provider.
• The IP address, unless Comcast’s DHCP is renewing things fast, is pingable meaning they either have it hooked directly into the computer or they have a router and decided for whatever reason to respond to pings. My guess is that it is the former, but I could be wrong. If it is the former, than the person is probably less tech savvy because they probably only have a single computer where most geeks I know have a minimum of 3 and usually have a wireless router of some kind.
• The IP address doesn’t appear to be Linux or Unix based because it doesn’t have SSH open. Thiis is a lame assumption, because they might have router and just decided not to open SSH and still be a Linux or Unix user.

So, very little is know thus far, but more than yesterday. We’ll have to wait and see if they drop another clue….

Something very strange happened today. Someone signed up for a GMail account using the address inversoft@gmail.com and they used my email address as the secondary email. So, naturally I received a verification email and wondered whether I was sleep coding last night and happened to sign up for a random GMail account or if James had signed up or something totally crazy was happening.

Well, I have no clue what this is all about, but since I was the secondary email address, I changed the password and hopefully whoever created this account (still could have been me last night) will turn out to be a friend playing a joke or something. Any-which-way they can’t use the account anymore, which is probably a good thing….

Strangeness.