I think I’ve discovered the reason that SpamAssassin has been letting a lot of spam through – the bayesian filter is effectively neutered if you have the net checks on.  Now I’m sure the SpamAssassin team has a bunch of statistics why this is good in the most common case, it’s not working out so well for me.

I live with my spam filters set to throw anything scoring 3 or higher into the spam bucket (I think SpamAssassin’s default is 10) so I’m ruthless with spam and it tends to classify forwarded jokes as spam which isn’t such a loss (it also classifies emails containing flight details from QANTAS as spam which isn’t so good but QANTAS emails look more like spam than the real thing so what can you do?).  Anyway, from what I can tell, SpamAssassin will be a lot more effective for me if I add the following to my user_prefs file:

A while back this article came through the Reuters RSS feed about someone bringing an antitrust case against Apple because he was “forced” to buy an iPod.  Now while my non-laywer opinion is that he has no chance of actually winning (hint: there’s a thriving competitive environment for online music with a wide range of viable alternatives that he could have gone to instead of the iTunes store), it does concern me that people think the courts should be used to enforce open standards.  Doing so would be hugely detrimental to the software world and harm consumers more than it helps them.

Currently stuck in my head:

It’s a world of laughter a world of tears,
It’s a world of hope and a world of fears….

And thus Ken Coar must be made to pay:

It’s just the song that has currently commandeered too many of my little grey cells. It’s a different one each morning. So far I’ve been spared it being, “It’s a Small World,” at least.

Thanks Ken…

There was another fire in the building on Christmas apparently.  Power is now back on in the office but there’s no air conditioning.  Since my house mate was kind enough to install an air conditioner at our place, the engineers are coming to my place for the week.  On the downside, sourcing enough desks for everyone will be a bit of fun.

It’s interesting to see the predictions that mobile phone content will take off really starting to come true in a big way.  The television is inundated with ads for all sorts of stupid gimmicks that can be sent to your mobile phone.  Want to know how to be a good kisser?  SMS this word to that number and the nice robot on the other end will give all the tips you need.  The ringtone craze has been going on for a while of course and there seems to be a subscription service being promoted for ringtones these days.  I haven’t seen an ad for mobile phone games yet so Mr Schwartz’s predictions still seem to be waiting in the wings a little (though mobile phone games are definitely pretty big business so I’d expect them to start showing up in TV ads here soon).

David Jericho revisits his complaints about the airport express and ends with the comment:

To that end, try as I might, from borrowing and using my sisters 1.2GHz iBook for a month, to using Kirsten’s G4 machines at home exclusively I remain unconvinced. I fail to see a use for the hardware (and the price tag – although the laptops have come down), and I just can’t see what benefits the software offers anyone in an enterprise.

pk commented on my last entry:

Wait a minute… where did you back up that it *could* have been written on another platform? Maybe yes, maybe no but let’s keep the playing field level.

Well firstly I based it on the fact that I’ve written a similar application on OS X myself which seems like pretty convincing evidence.  Secondly you could create a mathematical proof based around the fact that it would be possible to develop such an application on a Turing machine, however I’m on holidays and that’s a lot of work.  Finally it’s pretty easy to provide commercial examples of this being done on both Linux and Mac OS X as pb did in the comments on Scoble’s blog:

Scoble claimed Microsoft was cool because someone else developed an app that ran on it, I pointed out it could have been developed on any OS and then Scoble says:

Ahh, at a higher cost. Which is the whole point of why Windows is used so many places.

Got some figures to back that up?  For someone who doesn’t even know who wrote the software I find it rather surprising that you’ve done a cost benefit analysis of developing that application on different platforms.  Anyone can pull claims out of thin air but you’d have to be crazy to just believe it without figures to back it up.  So Scoble, care to back up that rhetoric?

Scoble thinks that Microsoft is cool because someone wrote a cool application that runs on Windows.  Sigh.  Talk about taking credit for other people’s work.  I’m certain the same application could be created on Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X.  Windows is the boring underlay that just happened to be there, not what makes the application cool.  Maybe Jonathan Schwartz will blog about how the store could have avoided being locked into Windows by writing the application in Java, or RMS might write an open letter about how the application should be opensourced so that the community could improve it and reduce development costs for the store.  None of that will matter in the end though because the RIAA will sue it into obvilion because people are just listening to the music on the in-store computers instead of buying the CDs.

David Jericho complains that he had a hard time setting up a new Airport Express.  I’m not what caused his experience to go so badly but my parents managed to set up an Airport Express without any problems – I know because I’m using it right now.  You can troop out the old stalwart anti-Apple crap all you like but it doesn’t make it true.  Apple *does* play well with others, they go to great lengths to make their software compatible – it’s certainly not perfect but there’s a lot of good stuff in there to make compatibility easy – I know because I use Macs in cross-platform, cross-hardware situations on a daily basis.  Just because it didn’t do precisely the job you wanted it to on one particular occasion doesn’t mean that the company is crap.  Fortunately, Google had some good suggestions for David.

I wound up travelling north for Christmas to surprise my Mum and received a suitable excited response.  It was nice to see the whole family up here as well though the heat is a little much.  I’m up here for the next week so I’ll have to try and track down some old friends and catch up.  I know a few people have discovered this blog so feel free to give me a yell at my parents place.

It’s way behind schedule but my christmas shopping is finally done.  With a little luck the delivery boy will run really fast and cover the 1600km or so to get them to the right people before christmas.  It would be so much easier if I could just email physical goods….