Red Hat Diaries/0033

S3 The SpamStopper Stopper!

Just when they think the battle is over, they find it's hardly been enjoined.

Elsewhere on this site, if you are completely unaware of what this company stands for, you can find a number of articles and links to even further articles dealing with the fight against bloat. Bloat is a state of mind as insidious as the software bug. It is not an error - it is laziness and cluelessness, pure and simple. It is uneducated software developers - or amateur software developers - claiming to have produced a good product, coupled with the excusable lack of knowledge on the part of the consumer public who might be interested in that product.

The consumers, through no fault of their own, and with only what is found online or in print to guide them, are led to believe something is good when it is nothing of the sort. Sometimes the vendors even go out of their way to deliberately fool the public - that's when it gets nasty.

And invariably these 'wannabes' and 'lesser crooks' get nasty as well when caught at their game.

SpamKiller from RAILhead Design is a case in point. This application claims to rid you of the ever-pervasive spam, merely by helping you obfuscate your email addresses in your web pages.

Which is a simple string format function call - and that's it. The punch line with SpamKiller is that for this single format call you need 960KB (nine hundred sixty kilobytes) on disk.

Ok, the Mac is a different platform, and GCC is a different compiler, but are things really this bad? I really wanted to find out, and so I wrote to the program author, who in the meantime, over one night, renamed his killer app and added 40KB to the download blubber.

You can find the results of that exchange here, and you can find S3 The SpamStopper Stopper here.

Enjoy.

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