Thursday, 06/23/05

Why aren't I entitled to a prize when all three of my netflix movies are in various states of transit simultaneously? I really think I deserve some kind of prize, even if it's just the right to depress a lever and get a tasty food pellet. 11:45AM «

Monday, 06/06/05

Before Apple announces whatever it's going to announce, I invite you to check out "Dude, Where's My Integrity?" Dahlia Lithwick's witty, scathing coverage of oral argument at Ashcroft v. Raich, the worst federalism decision since Bush v. Gore, which was decided this morning 6-3 in favor of the gubmint. I haven't found out who voted how yet, but Stevens wrote the majority opinion and O'Connor wrote the dissent.

Update: I heard on the radio that Thomas stuck to his guns and joined the dissent, as did Rehnquist, putting Scalia (for shame!), Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter and Kennedy in the gubmint's camp with Stevens. With Rehnquist in the minority, Stevens has the seniority to assign the majority opinion, which he apparently assigned to himself. What a weird lineup. Can't wait to read the opinions. 08:30AM «

Saturday, 06/04/05

I have no real contribution to this story alleging Apple's upcoming transition to Intel processors, except to say that while I did think it was odd for Intel's CEO to be pushing Macs on computer owners who were sick of spyware, I expect these claims will prove more wrong than right on Monday morning. That Apple will use Intel chips in something seems plausible, and frankly less interesting than a local restaurant changing its beef supplier, but a wholesale transition away from PPC is a huge reach.

I respect Cnet's putting the story out there in a way that appears falsifiable, unlike the great majority of anonymously-sourced rubbish about sweeping changes to Apple's underpinnings, but their story doesn't make the prospect of an architectural switch sound any more credible than the rumors were last week, or eighteen months ago. 11:54PM «

Wednesday, 06/01/05

Spam tools in my life have gotten so good over the last couple of years that I don't consider spam to be a serious problem anymore. Yes, I get hundreds of junk messages a day, but unless I'm compelled to use dialup or go offline for a couple of days, volume isn't an obstacle either.

The core of my system is Michael Tsai's Spamsieve, which continues to be uncannily effective. I especially appreciate that it records statistics on its accuracy: going back to the first of the year I've had an average of 357 spam messages per day, or 53,949, of which a grand total of 28 got through, plus three false positives. All three were marketing messages that really were borderline spam, and which I did not care about at all. Overall accuracy is reported as 99.9%, but that's rounding down -- it's actually 99.94%. That sounds like the definition of a non-problem.

That said, my spam corpus is a year and a half old, which is pushing the limits -- the profiles of spam change over time, and an old corpus keeps fighting the last war. This was driven home to me this morning when Spamsieve flagged its first unmistakably non-spam message in memory. Fortunately, its mitigating factors left it with a very low score and it was reported by Growl, so I caught it immediately.

Looking in the Spamsieve log, I see my corpus considers "ajax" a .999 probability spam term. That's what happens when the community dreams up new jargon overnight, I suppose. The other spam-associated terms from the message were:

skyscraper (0.998)
ect (0.998) (misspelling of "etc.")
toothpicks? (0.998)
reused (0.995)
R:^dsl^speakeasy^net (0.995)
stearns (0.995) (a correspondent's name)

Time to rebuild that corpus. 12:15PM «

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