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Mac nuts go fast,
spam gets stopped

Island Princess is going nuts with new flavored macadamia snacks and new packaging equipment.

The high-speed, vertical form, fill and seal machine can package nuts in amounts from a quarter of an ounce up to five pounds, said President Michael Purdy.

It works "faster than you can blink," creating 120 of the half-ounce bags a minute.

The half-ounce bags coming out of the machine are the size one might find on an airline, which is a line of business the company is pursuing.

The flavors, including Maui onion, sweet chili, nori, honey-roasted, curry and lightly salted, are also sold in grouped together in a clear, zipper-bag.

The wee bags and bigger bags and jars and chocolates and boxes, oh my, are part of the company's "aggressive agenda for the next five years," Purdy said. The company is on track to meet or exceed the 10 percent to 15 percent sales growth it had experienced in the days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he said.

Tracking online germs

Real-time tracking of computer viruses and e-mail plagues known as spam and phishing is being offered as a new service by Honolulu-based hoalagreevy LLC.

The company, named for its founder, tracked the Sober virus as it attempted to infect customers of its Pau Spam service last week, and Greevy found that the numbers "lined up almost exactly with what the national guys were reporting," he said.

Technophiles may appreciate that Greevy uses RSS, which stands for both Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary, to publish the real-time tracking data.

"It is a protocol to distribute content," popular with online newspapers and bloggers, he said.

"It's different from an e-mail update; it's an xml format publishing system."

Um, OK.

Special software is required to view the updates and some free versions for Macintosh and Windows operating systems are available online.