Wired: Finding Bad Spam Delights Geeks:
When freelance Web developer Joe Stump first installed the e-mail filtering program SpamAssassin, he and a friend started a competition. Each day, the two would look through their junk e-mail and try to find the missive that SpamAssassin had assigned the highest score.
‘It was always a little contest between the two of us,’ says Stump. ‘We were always trying to tweak and modify the settings to get it just right. I finally won the contest when I got a spam with a score of 43.’
The points system has really been popular — as Joe Stump says — ‘geeks love numbers’. Screengrabs of the SpamAssassin website on Sky News, ABC, and now this! (thanks to Tim Schutte for the pointer.)
Linux: Wonder what the Ximian guys are blogging about? Ha ha, very funny.
Mark Pilgrim: How to install Windows in 5 hours or less.
Tim O’Reilly on parallels between OSS and the mainframe days. ‘We so often trace our antecedents back simply to the Unix heritage, or the Lisp hacker heritage. But when I’ve talked to IBM old-timers, they make clear just how many of the social dynamics and collaborative software development paradigms of the early mainframe era resemble the open source tradition.’ Interesting…
Humour: Chris recently set us up the blog — and kicks it off with this SCO 419 parody: ‘I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP, FORMERLY KNOWN AS CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, IN LINDON, UTAH, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOUR BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.’ On the roll!