For the last eight months or so, my life has been more or less trouble free. I’ve had an insecure job, yes - and I still do in a way - I’ve been thrown out of an apartment - and I wake up every morning happy for just that - but these things haven’t really bothered me. I’ve still been living the good life.

Now I feel I’m heading back towards square one. Important decisions have to be made. Is the good life slipping yet again?

Now for something completely different.

At work I’m developing a stripped down HTTP server to be used as a billing gateway between our marvelous product and the telcos. I could of course have used an existing server or maybe a servlet container, but I wanted to keep it as small as possible and to gain full control of everything that’s happening. It’s one of the most interesting tasks I’ve been working on since I started in June, and so far I’m quite pleased with the design of the application. It should be real easy to use it as a billing gateway for any kind of billing from IVR to credit cards - simply implement an interface, create an HTML wrapper and update an XML file and you’re good to go.

What’s interesting is that while I’m working on the server, I’ve opened our firewall to make it available on the Internet. It’s listening on the standard HTTP port, which has made the server an involuntary honey pot for port scanners. The server is scanned several times a day, mostly by automated scripts sending the OPTION command to the server to check its capabilities and type and version. But I have yet to be 0wn3d.

It’s still interesting, in a very nerdy kind of way.