History: This year’s archives are open, revealing lots of goodies from WWII. Here’s a good one via the BBC: 1940 ‘peas bomb plot’ on palace:
Category: Uncategorized
Software: I’m a huge fan of Perforce, the best SCM system I’ve ever used; it thoroughly kicks the ass of ClearCase, CVS, RCS et al.
Irish
Independent: Now ads can’t say it but you always knew it — Guinness IS
good for you:
One pint of Guinness a day can reduce the risk of blood clots that cause heart attacks, according to new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.
… Scientists investigating the health benefits of drinking beer found that stouts like Guinness worked much better than lager. They said dark beers were packed with anti-oxidant compounds called flavonoids which help reduce damage to the lining of the arteries. … For maximum benefit a person would need to drink just over one pint of Guinness a day.
My grandfather was ‘prescribed’ a bottle of Guinness per day by his GP, to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Mind you, that was in ’70s Ireland ;)
Hardware: This weblog is jinxed!!
Tech: Old-timers may remember the Commodore PET’s halt-and-catch-fire POKE instruction.
Old-timers may remember the Commodore PET’s halt-and-catch-fire POKE instruction.
Turns out modern LCDs may have a similar problem that can cause permanent damage from software activity, according to this posting to Red Hat’s fedora-list.
Update: Yoz mails, noting another case: the perils of reviewing games. Ouch.
Spam: Great NYT article; well worth a read.
Weblogs: Great — now I can figure out who my political neighbours are in blog-space. No wonder I like reading Crooked Timber — they’re fellow ( -8–6.01 , -8–6.01 )-ers! (Catchy.)
Spam: So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.
So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.
Of course, I’m sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.
BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue — it seems the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:
For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.
Which is all well and good, but I’m not going to hang around for 10 minutes of ‘what long-distance company do you use?’ in order to differentiate ‘good’ surveys from ‘bad’ ones; I’ll just hang up straight away.
Sport: Ben forwards this story — the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn’t know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.
Software: Shirky on the Semantic Web. Great snippet:
Spam: The Reg reports that a Belkin Router software upgrade hijacks HTTP connections to spam the browser with ads. Here’s a screenshot of the ad page. Here’s a USENET post bemoaning the situation, and the followup from a Belkin PM.
Spam: DNS blocklists are the oldest means of spam-blocking, and are still exceedingly useful; nowadays, many of these are fully automated systems, using proxy-detection algorithms and sensing patterns in mailer behaviour indicative of spam.
(DNS blocklist accuracy figures continued…)
Note, however, that it’s still incomplete:
- some DNSBLs were not measured; these are just the default DNSBL list in SpamAssassin 2.60, excluding RCVD_IN_NJABL_DIALUP (which I had to remove because I can’t parse out accurate data).
- it’s only 1 person’s hand-classified mail.
- SpamAssassin tests more than just the ‘delivering’ SMTP relay; it’ll also look backwards through the headers, at earlier relays, to catch spam sent via mailing lists. This is different from what’s used with most traditional DNSBL-supporting systems.
But the results should still be quite useful.
The time period covered:
- Thu, 21 Aug 2003 17:11:30 -0700 (PDT)
- Sat, 25 Oct 2003 23:11:52 -0700 (PDT)
Recap of the fields:
- SPAM% = percentage of messages hit that were spam
- HAM% = percentage of messages hit that were spam
- S/O = Spam/Overall = Bayesian probability of spam
- RANK = artificial ranking figure, ignore this!
- SCORE = default SpamAssassin 2.60 score
- NAME = name of test. Figuring out the exactly DNSBL should be pretty obvious ;)
Blogs: Mimi Smartypants, very funny woman that she is, has become a very funny doting mother:
Open Source: The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet: Howard Strauss, Princeton’s manager of technology strategy and outreach (no less!) takes aim at free software in their ‘Syllabus’ magazine. He launches a few ad hominems while he’s at it:
Net: So it seems Kerry Packer has announced a Netflix-like service in Australia, Homescreen.
Spam: I just got another Jody spam; 40 points
this time, and featuring the very latest in spam fashion, a .biz URL.
Ireland: The best programme on Irish TV, by far, is Sampler. It’s a great magazine series covering Ireland’s underground scenes, with several nice scoops, including being the only set of film cameras around for the police brutality that made the May 6th 2001 Dublin ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protest infamous. Great soundtrack, too.
Timeliness: w00t! I blog about Jason Salavon, and 4 days later Boing Boing and plasticbag.org both pick up on it. (and rightly so.)
Ireland: I’ve just come across Dervala’s take on the I am Canadian Molson ad. Total genius!
Bizarre: Given some historical context, it’s funny how absolutely
insane this sounds:
Guardian: At Home with the Fuhrer.
The best programme on Irish TV, by far, is Sampler. It’s a great magazine series covering Ireland’s underground scenes, with several nice scoops, including being the only set of film cameras around for the police brutality that made the May 6th 2001 Dublin ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protest infamous. Great soundtrack, too.
Naturally, it’s also had a long and illustrious history of no support from RTE, who just seem to hate the whole idea and would prefer they just had a nice, non-controversial chat show instead.
Well, Sampler just won ‘Best Special Interest Programme’ at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Nice one! (Not that you’d know it from the IFTA website, which hasn’t updated the awards pages in 2 years. — update: Simon points out I’m looking at the wrong site: the real one is here.)
Disclaimer: Luke, the producer, is a good mate of mine. But it’s still
a great programme. ;)
Go take a look! Episodes 2 to 5 are online in full, in RealVideo format — and encoded at a pretty decent bitrate.
Spam: I just received a spam containing this (HTML tags made readable by translating angles to round brackets):
Spam: The volume of spam continues to rise inexorably. Brightmail are now estimating that 54% of all mail messages are spam.
The volume of spam continues to rise inexorably. Brightmail are now estimating that 54% of all mail messages are spam.
Nowadays, my personal mail account is getting about 70 a day, rising to
over 200 a day at the weekends. It’s getting tiresome; pretty much
all of it gets marked as spam and diverted, but I still have to wade
through it ‘just in case’, and to build the corpus. I guess I need
to extend my .procmailrc to divert high-scoring spams somewhere
I can check even less frequently ;)
That’s not the really annoying thing, though. I use tagged addressing when I publish my email address, most of the time. It works very well to identify spam sources overall, and divert ‘dead’ addresses that are getting spam, into the spamtraps. That’s the plus.
But the curse of writing spam filters is that you need a good archive of spam; and one of our SpamAssassin corpus guidelines is to attempt to trim out duplicate spams where possible. Many spammers will wind up sending more-or-less identical spam messages, modulo random subject lines, hash-busters, etc., and with (let’s say) 8 tagged addresses in their lists, I’ll get 8 copies of that spam, and have to pay a little bit of attention to trim it down to 1 copy for the corpus.
Damn spam-filter development! All this corpus building is hard work ;)
BTW, note how spam load rises at the weekends; (Tim Hunter, Paul Terry and Alan Judge of eircom.net also noted this in their paper presented at LISA ’03 yesterday ;). There’s a good reason — spammers attempt to deliver their spam while abuse staff are not at their desk. Same thing applies in the network security world; many of those attacks have taken place over a US holiday weekend.
Hallowe’en: best too-late idea for a hallowe’en costume: ‘Top Gun GWB’ in his flight suit. In the end, I played half of the ‘Dr. Frankenstein and Monster’ pair (I was the monster, as C really is a scientist, and computer ‘science’ doesn’t count). Best costume seen: a very impressive onnagata kabuki player.
Patents: New Scientist reports that IBM have applied for a patent on “an electronic password ‘wallet’ that securely stores all your passwords, with overall access via a single password. The wallet pops up on screen whenever you are asked for a password. You enter the master password and the wallet then answers the online request by pasting in the appropriate password for that site.”
Patents: Slashdot gets a lot of stick for cluelessness. Now and again, though, you find well-presented arguments you won’t read elsewhere. Try these:
Patents: World Wide Web Consortium Presents US Patent Office with Evidence Invalidating Eolas Patent: ‘W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee urges USPTO Director to review prior art, take action’.
World Wide Web Consortium Presents US Patent Office with Evidence Invalidating Eolas Patent: ‘W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee urges USPTO Director to review prior art, take action’.
The specific prior art
exhibits cover several 1993 postings by Dave Raggett to the
www-talk mailing list.
Let’s hope the USPTO admits that their patent examiners never bothered to do a Google search ;)
Games: Commodore 64 old-timers may remember Andrew Braybrook’s classic Paradroid, easily one of the best games for that platform, and a classic by any standards. Here’s a copy of the Zzap! 64 review from 1986. Many thumbs up, and the bottom line was that Paradroid ranked as ‘THE classic shoot-em-up’.
Voting: Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)
Spam: Lee Maguire on pay-per-mail schemes. A great read — recommended to anyone who has given thought to this system.
Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)
First off, this Debian-news posting notes some snippets from an Age article by Nathan; Here’s some longer excerpts. It features some great quotes: ‘the only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).’
And this one:
‘Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds,’ Jones said. ‘We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates.’
He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not.
This letter to LWN notes: ‘You might be interested to know that some of the work on this project is being done by ‘big name’ open source people, including Andrew Tridgell (aka Mr Samba), Dave Gibson (orionoco wireless LAN driver), Martin Pool (apache), and Rusty Russell (netfilter and other gross kernel hacks)’, and links to the code’s CVS repository!
It seems those guys performed the work on behalf of a Canberra open-source consultancy group, Software Improvements; Here’s the product brochure.
This posting to iRights gives a few more details.
It all looks like an excellent job all ’round, as far as I can see.