Recently, I've been getting spam on a mail address I only use for uservoice.com. What's worse, the amount of spam is about 30 mails a day.

It's weird, because nowhere on the uservoice.com website is your mail address actually displayed or linked. So, either someone who participates in the tweetdeck uservoice discussions had a virus, or uservoice.com has had a privacy leak and all the mail addresses in their database are now being spammed. The latter seems likely because of the high amount of spam I'm getting, which could indicate that spammers believe this address to be recent and valid.

I would like to hear from other people who've had their spam count increase dramatically over the past few weeks and if they can determine why.

Edit: At least 1 other person is experiencing this: http://twitter.com/bjq/status/1784497230

---

Computer Futures is an IT recruitment company. At least, that's what they claim. In fact, they're nothing more than a call-center disguised as a recruitment center. There is no personal contact, no real assessment and no real matching.

In 2003, I applied for a job through Computer Futures. They have kept that information on file for over 6 years without a follow-up call. Any decent recruitment center would have either stopped using that information or place a follow-up meeting to make sure the data is up-to-date. More on the legality of keeping data that long in the last paragraph.

In the meantime, I keep getting job offers that do not concern me. I got job offers for developing in languages or environments that I never worked with and that certainly weren't ever mentioned in my resume. I got job offers stating that the candidate had to live in close vicinity to the offices - which were halfway across the country for me. I got job offers that didn't even mention a job offer, just a description of the company they were "recruiting" for.

I have asked to be removed from their systems several times over the past year. I have done so by writing to the call-center agents that mailed me, by writing to the e-mail address they mentioned in their e-mails and by writing to info@computerfutures.nl. I kept getting mails.

Today, I called them and the person answering the phone couldn't tell me why I hadn't been removed from the system, even though I had used the mail address mentioned in their mails for about four times. Upon asking to be removed, I was told that "I will make sure that you will no longer receive our e-mails". That's not what I asked. I wanted to have my information removed from the system. The call-center agent replied that "I will block everything that I can block". He could not affirm that my data would be permanently deleted. He also wouldn't confirm that they never had face-to-face interviews or that they screened persons by a real-life interview. When I pushed, he asked me if I wanted to have my e-mail removed or if I wanted a discussion. I told him that the latter would be nice since I had some questions about the way they treated me and my privacy to which I got blown off with a "I don't have time for this". Well, thank you! Just another confirmation that Computer Futures doesn't care about you as a person.

Itmight  also be useful to add that Dutch Law states that data concerning job applications should not be held longer than one year after which they have to be destroyed. It looks like Computer Futures is breaking that law. Not only that law, but they're also breaking the OPTA rules which state that everyone should have the right to know what personal data is being kept by an organisation and should have the right to ask for immediate removal of this data from any databases and archives that this organisation stored his or her data in. So, I'm filing complaints with the appropriate government institutes. It'll take time and effort, but that's how tired I am of Computer Futures.

---

This is another typical Microsoft-based development issue. Everyone is writing tutorials and omitting what references need to be set to make the tutorial code work.

Anyway, if you're looking for the MSHTML library, it's a COM reference and it's actually named "Microsoft HTML object library". You need to put using mshtml; in your project to be able to reference it.

---

Turning on autonumbering for headings in Word 2007 has puzzled a good many people. I have been looking for a way to make my headings automatically numbered for some months now.

Today, I looked further into the issue and finally found the solution.

Step 1.
Open the normal.dotm template. Enter the text as shown in the image below. Do not use the headings at this point. Instead, type it in and format it the way you would like the headings to appear.

Step 2.
This is actually the part that I overlooked first.

Select all your text. Click the multiple-level list button and choose the list that has heading in it. In the picture below, it's the option that is enlarged. It says kop because I'm using the Dutch version of Word 2007.

Now, you need to tell Word that you want multiple levels - not just 1 level.

Click the multiple-level list button. There's an option that lets you change the level of the list item. For each heading you want to create, change the level.

Step 3.

The last step. Select each heading and then right-click the corresponding style button in the ribbon and select "update style to selection". That may not be the exact wording (again, I'm on a Dutch copy of Word) but it should be the first item in your list. Check the image for further help.

Do this for all your headings. Save the template and press ctrl-n to start a new document. Your headings will be autonumbered.

---

The title is actually misleading. I'll be explaining how to ditch tables and move to a more CSS-centered approach of your website.

There is still a large number of webdesigners and webdevelopers that use tables over divs and CSS to design their website. This article is meant as a "getting started" tutorial to help you move from tables to divs.

This is in no way a complete guide to CSS-centered design, and it certainly doesn't explain about all the niceties of CSS-centered design. It's meant to help people move away from tables and start appreciating CSS-centered design.

Read on...

---