So my phone was up for replacement and for sometime now I've really been wanting to replace it with a smart phone but do to certain business related security circumstances could not have a phone with a camera, which limited my choices. Try walking into a cell phone store and telling them you need a phone without a camera and they stare blankly for a minute then say we have this one or this and and I think we don't have one of them in stock, greeeaat.

Thankfully those restrictions went away recently so I was able to walk into the store and literally have my choice of any phone they had, what a relief. Last November Trish replaced her phone and got a Blackberry Curve, I played with it some and thought it seemed like a good phone, so when it came time to replace my phone I went with the Curve as well. Long story short couldn't be more happy, this phone is a godsend and I'm already beginning to wonder what I ever did without it. With my previous phone I had friends that would sometimes text me and trying to reply with a standard keypad was painful, but with the Curve and it's full QUERTY keyboard and it's so easy. The hardest part was getting it my head it's just a QUERTY keyboard and forgetting the hardship of trying to type a message with only 9 keys.

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You can read the full release here [qtsoftware.com].

Until the announcement today Qt was available in GPL or a purchasable commercial license, mostly because Qt was the primary source of profit for Trolltech, the company who originally developed Qt, but since the software was acquired by Nokia with the purchase of Trolltech the need for Qt to be a revenue generator has diminished considerably. Qt is primarily used in the KDE desktop for Linux , and also happens to be the desktop I use. For those unaware starting with Qt 4.x they made it available to work directly in windows making it possible for software written with Qt to run in windows. I really like QT, KDE, and the applications developed with it, especially Amarok, which is by far the best desktop MP3 player in my opinion. I'm hoping this will help propel Qt and KDE farther into the limelight and encourage developers and companies to start using the Qt framework.

The spam came back somewhat yesterday, and although I knew it would eventually I was still disappointed when I saw my inbox yesteday.

Most people probably don't realise it, and I didn't have my site up at the time, but several weeks back an ISP in the Northwest, McColo, was taken down by it's upstream providers. This ISP was also the controller for a massive botnet that generated quite a large amount of the spam on the internet. For my business I have one email account that has about two dozen different email addresses pointed at so suffice to say, even with a spam filter that blocks 95% of the spam that those accounts get, I still receive about 75 spam messages per day. Since McColo was taken down I've received an average of 10 per day.

That was until yesterday, I open my email and wake up to find 30 spam messages in my Inbox, not anywhere near what I used to receive but it does herald the return of the botnet that was operating out of that ISP.

So it looks like the spam is starting to come back.