Dumping Grounds

Saddam Hussein has ended an 11-day hunger strike for “health reasons”, his chief lawyer has said. — From the BBC

Wait, I mean… wasn’t that the point?

About the spam I receive

Filtered Mail
611 Good Messages
691 Spam Messages (53%)
21 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
0 False Positives
32 False Negatives
97.5% Correct

Corpus
262 Good Messages
427 Spam Messages (62%)
30245 Total Words

Rules
95 Blocklist Rules
275 Whitelist Rules

Showing Statistics Since
1/14/06 10:23 PM

Given that I think it missed 10-12 messages in the first week I had it installed, the accuracy is quite good. I just loved JunkMatcher, but as far as I can tell, it’s a dead project. The bug that causes Python to grab 100% of the processor is a killer. So, SpamSieve is my solution of choice. SS gets bonus points for the line that reads: 0 False Positives.

Coolest NEW programs released on OS X

• Yojimbo
• QuickSilver (OK, it’s been out a while, but it’s still in beta, and it’s new to me)
• TextMate 1.5
• MythFrontEnd (would link to it, but it seems they are having domain issues at the moment)
• I don’t know if Lightroom Beta 2 is cool or not. I’m about to go try it out. But they did remember to add a crop tool this time.

Silly joke

A group of kindergartners were trying very hard to become accustomed to the first grade. The biggest hurdle they faced was that the teacher insisted on NO baby talk! “You need to use ‘Big People’words,” she was always reminding them.

She asked Chris what he had done over the weekend. “I went to visit my Nana.” “No, you went to visit your GRANDMOTHER. Use ‘Big People’ words!”

She then asked Mitchell what he had done. “I took a ride on a choo-choo.” She said “No, you took a ride on a TRAIN. You must remember to use ‘Big People’ words.”

She then asked little Alec what he had done. “I read a book,” he replied. “That’s WONDERFUL!” the teacher said. “What book did you read?”

Alec thought real hard about it, then puffed out his chest with great pride, and said, “Winnie the SHIT.”

courtesy of my mother

By all accounts, Sam Alito is going to be a terribly right wing justice. He’s going to side with the conservative bloc, and along with Chief Justice Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, tip the Court in a more conservative direction than Sandra Day O’Connor ever allowed it to go.

Probably.

Like any other position that one holds for life, you just never quite know what you are going to get until after someone is appointed (remember: John Paul II was expected to be a liberal Pope.)

In his very first decision, Justice Alito broke ranks with his conservative brethren and went with the majority in a 6-3 decision to stay a Missouri man’s execution. On what grounds? That the drugs used would cause undue suffering. In other words, you can’t kill him Missouri, if you are going to make it hurt while you do it.

Oh good grief.

While as I get older, I find myself getting more and more liberal, (and I find this decision a wonderful, if unconvincing, first sign of things to come with Justice Alito) this decision is ridiculous. Just because I’m getting more liberal doesn’t mean I’m not still from Texas. I support the death penalty. There is no doubt that this man committed the crime (kidnapping, raping, and murdering a 15-year old girl). He pled guilty, he admits that he did it.

And he can’t be executed because it might hurt?!?!

Oh well, I just wonder how many hard line conservatives are clinching up a bit that the man nicknamed “Scalito” didn’t vote as predicted on his very first decision out of the box.

In my last entry, I bemoaned the fact that a $189 PC I bought at Fry’s this weekend was faster than my 2 year old Powerbook (which cost considerably more than $189).

I may have been hasty.

While it is true that the PC runs my Craps program written in Ruby faster than my Mac… I wasn’t taking into consideration some other items, namely, how long it took to start Ruby in the first place. What looked like a 30% speed advantage for the PC, turns out to be closer to a 50% disadvantage.

When running the WEBrick webserver for testing Rails applications, suddenly the Powerbook is almost 10 TIMES faster. Serving the same application.

This difference is almost assuredly caused by memory (slow hardware, bad OS management, and/or lack of it). Plus the hard drive is slow, and the network interface is probably not the best.

I could fix all those things, but then it wouldn’t be a $189 PC, now would it? (As a matter of fact, I already put 512MB of RAM in it, making it a $228.99 PC) I don’t plan to add anything else to it. Continuing with my stated goal of bashing Windows at every available opportunity… I would like to point out that my 3 year old AMD machine (with LESS memory than the Windows PC) blows it out of the water while running Gentoo Linux. The difference may be a little in the hardware (the AMD was a nice machine 3 years ago, while the new one is CRAP, but current), but I think that most of it is in the operating system it’s running. I have not had a machine running Windows in almost two years… and as far as I can tell, I haven’t been missing anything.

All in all, not a bad showing for a 2 year old portable vs. a current purchase, no matter how cheap.