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From 8/24 through today I have received 71 emails. 23 of those were NOT spam. (And thanks to the barrage of Austria planning from the Wheel that's actually a very high ratio of real messages!)

The junk mail filters in the new (10.2) mail application flagged 46 out of 48 of those unwanted emails as junk. With NO false positives. Hallelujah. Thank you Apple.

They ship it in "training" mode. If mail thinks a real message is junk you can press the "not junk" button to correct it. If mail thinks a spam is a real message you can press the "junk" button to correct it the other way. The more you correct the more accurate it will become.

But it's already plenty accurate for me. Spam be gone! I'm taking it out of training mode. Now I won't be notified about spam, it will just silently go into a junk folder where I can check from time to time for false positives. But I don't think I'll have to double check too often.

That's worth the price of Jaguar right there.
- jim 8-27-2002 10:28 pm [link] [1 comment]

Mozilla 1.1 is out. Supports Quartz rendering in OS X, so it should look (even) better.
- jim 8-27-2002 8:16 pm [link] [1 comment]

Saw this in a HTP discussion. Could it be right?

Estimated amount the United States spends each year safeguarding oil supplies in the Persian Gulf: $50,000,000,000

Source: Council on Foreign Relations (N.Y.C.)

Estimated value of U.S. crude-oil imports from the region last year : $19,000,000,000

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration/ Harper's research

- jim 8-27-2002 7:22 pm [link] [34 comments]

Minimalist external hard drive firewire bridge. (via boingboing)
- jim 8-27-2002 1:51 am [link] [add a comment]

God I had fun last night.
- jim 8-25-2002 8:13 pm [link] [3 comments]

Colin Wilson on Robert Graves (via robotwisdom.)
- jim 8-25-2002 7:45 pm [link] [7 comments]

I passed the test. It's official. I'm not a complete dork. If I was, and the possibility was certainly there, I'd have left the lovely evening I was having with MB and Sarah to be at the Apple store by 10:20 last night when Jagwire (OS X 10.2) was released. Yes, they had a party. People in costumes. Probably posting to their blogs from the display machines. Supreme dork stuff like that.

Instead I resisted the mind control rays emanating from the mothership, and stayed up on the roof enjoying the perfect summer evening. Clam pasta, cuvee Buster, Texier hermitage (wine dork status might still be possible.)

Drinking coffee right now, and then I will make my way, calmly, like a normal person not caught in the RDF, over to SOHO and purchase my copy. No hurry. It's just an operating system. Not like it's going to be a big deal or anythi....


- jim 8-24-2002 7:00 pm [link] [1 comment]

The Casio EX-S1 looks great. I like my Canon G1, but it is too big. If I was buying again I'd think seriously about this camera. It doesn't have the resolution, but it is supremely small. Here's the Steve's digicams review (here's the conclusion) and here's the dcresource review. Very cool. Still, my guess is that cameras will become a feature of cellphones (like the p800) soon enough, and that will be even cooler (always with you, plus you can upload pictures wirelessly right from the same device.)
- jim 8-24-2002 12:16 am [link] [5 comments]

As if having one of the best weblogs around isn't enough, boing boing has an interesting secondary "guest blog" written by rotating third parties that runs down the right hand margin of the page. Right now it is being written by Xeni Jardin. She splits her time between LA and NYC, but is presently in the big Apple dishing lots of interesting art world links.
- jim 8-22-2002 5:52 pm [link] [add a comment]

The wheel is turning and he can't slow down. Austria trip is on. November 23 - December 1. Let's knoll!
- jim 8-21-2002 10:19 pm [link] [2 comments]

Earthlink has a new service to block pop up (or under) ads. That's cool, but you can already do this with mozilla (on any platform, through any ISP.)

In mozilla open preferences (in the 'edit' menu except on OS X where it's in the mozilla menu) and click on 'scripts & windows' under the 'advanced' category. Then uncheck 'open unrequested windows'. While you're at it, you probably want to uncheck 'open a link in a new window', 'move or resize windows', 'raise or lower windows', and 'change status bar text'.

Done and done.
- jim 8-20-2002 10:33 pm [link] [add a comment]

Went to see MB's friend Sonia in The Vagina Monologues last night (is that going to get me some weird hits from google?) Three women sitting on stage reading several short monologues culled from years of interviews with women about their bodies. Interesting. I imagine it varies a lot depending on the performers. Probably a good show for young women to see if for no other reason than to hear all of those words in a fun positive context. And I mean every euphemism you can think of - and plenty you never heard before: coochie snorcher?

After one particularly loud cathartic round of screaming (and moaning, and singing, and spelling...) the 'c' word (I'll pass on those google hits, thanks) Sonia (a.k.a. Maria from Sesame Street) made the joke: "Cookie Monster always told me 'C is for cookie.' Maybe he was eating the wrong thing all those years." The crowd had a great time being a little bit embarrassed.

Afterwards we went way up town to a jazz club called Smoke (B'way and 107) to hear the Steve Turre Quintet. I am now convinced that the trombone is the coolest jazz instrument. Fun stuff.
- jim 8-18-2002 6:31 pm [link] [3 comments]

I ditched limewire in favor of aquisition as my gnutella client. Big improvement, although I still suspect this is an area where the wintel world has better choices.

If you're running OS X, give it a shot. Download and it should unstuff automatically into a folder called Aquisition 0.6.2. Just open that up and double click on the application ('aquisition') to start the program.
- jim 8-17-2002 8:07 pm [link] [add a comment]

Interesting technical analysis of word frequencies in spam (linked everywhere.)
- jim 8-17-2002 7:32 pm [link] [add a comment]

We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs is a book, available next week, written by veteran bloggers Meg(nut) Hourihan, Matt Haughey, and Paul Bausch. Blogroots.com is the web site companion to the book. A couple of chapters are on line, including Chapter 8, Using Blogs in Business.

It makes me very happy to see people making this argument (or is just an explanation?) about using blogs in the business world. That this is a good idea for businesses is obvious to me, yet I've had almost no luck in convincing anyone. I just want to build the software, I don't want to convince people they should use it. Hopefully this will help. Of course, the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto would be another book I'd recommend to help make the case for business blogs. I hope more follow.
- jim 8-16-2002 9:37 pm [link] [add a comment]

September Wired magazine has an article about Alexander Shulgin (pg. 114.) Interesting guy. Not on line (yet.)
- jim 8-15-2002 9:12 pm [link] [1 comment]

First Danger Hiptop review I've seen - from ZDNet:

I've been playing with the Sidekick, the first Danger-powered hiptop device (yes, that's a play on laptop), which will be available from T-Mobile Wireless (formerly VoiceStream) in late September. Believe it or not, it's actually going to cost $199 with new activation. Monthly service will run $39.95 for unlimited data--yes, you read that right, unlimited data--plus 200 minutes of peak and 1,000 minutes of night and weekend nationwide talk time.
That pricing seems very good to me. MB's been asking me to get a new cell phone so she can have mine (she already used to how it works, which is a big plus for her.) I can't wait to get this thing. More from the review:
As a former BlackBerry user, there's simply no way I would choose a BlackBerry over a Sidekick...

- jim 8-14-2002 11:49 pm [link] [11 comments]

I've been letting a lot of stuff slide. Partly it's the heat. But also it's a cycle. I'm trying to think of the next thing. Either that or I'm just making excuses.

I'm trying to move into the fall with enough to keep me at my machine coding through the winter. I've been sucessful the past two years. The trick is, it has to be a good idea. It can't be just what I've done before. That's why I need this time of letting go and forgetting and wandering. But it also can't be too different or there won't be enough focus, enough momentum, to drive the heads down repetition required to actually do it. Delicate situation. Stray, but not too far.

Talking about it here is one trick to make myself come through. It's easy to decide a secret isn't worth the effort when you get to the hard part. Much harder to abandon even semi public plans.

So I'll try to say something. Part of what has been taking shape is a game. Or, some aspects of it are game like. I don't have much experience in this area. I never played computer games. I never played D & D either. Or magic. But I think I understand something.

Everquest has been in the news a lot lately, and although it has little to do with what I am vaguely starting to imagine, the articles have been really resonating for me. Hard to say more than that. I'll keep trying though. For my own sake at least.
- jim 8-14-2002 11:02 pm [link] [add a comment]

Amazing 8 megabyte flash (mostly audio) presentation of Lawrence Lessig's speech at OS Con. He's the man. It takes about 30 minutes to listen to, but you learn everything about what's important at the intersection of law and technology. Make the time. Can we run him for president?
- jim 8-14-2002 7:53 pm [link] [add a comment]

New Powermacs from Apple. Incremental imporvement. All dual processors. Finally two internal optical drive bays. The low end is most noteworthy: $1699 (no monitor) gets you a pretty smoking machine. Have to wait and see how much of a difference 166 mhz system bus makes. I can't imagine the IBM chip will surface (if at all) until next summer.
- jim 8-13-2002 6:23 pm [link] [add a comment]

Just renewed this domain. It will be three years old on Wednesday. Thanks to everyone who has taken part.
- jim 8-12-2002 10:20 pm [link] [9 comments]

I'm really getting mad at all the "terrorist profiling" stories in the news. It's like no one can think clearly any more. Not only does profiling not work, it actually opens up a huge security hole. The only arguments I hear in the news media against profiling are all based on some lame political correctness angle. That's not the point! The fact is profiling is worse than completely random searches at catching the bad guy. Why can't the media grasp this?

Here's an MIT student paper explaining why this is so. The paper is padded quite a bit (reminded me of some things I wrote back in school) with a lot of unnecessary math to make it seem more complex than it is. But the main idea is right on. If you use a profiling algorithm (like: stop all arab men) then it is trivial for your enemy to defeat this (don't send arab looking men.) D'uh.
- jim 8-12-2002 9:33 pm [link] [add a comment]

Is blogs.salon.com making any impact? Anybody read any of them?

In related news, it looks like blogger is going to do something that may be like that as well (userland powers the salon blogs.)

Sometime later this month, the first public, large-scale, non-Pyra-run installation of Blogger will go live.

- jim 8-12-2002 6:02 pm [link] [1 comment]

Linux Journal has the complete coverage of the RealNetworks goes open source story from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Well, community source, at least. All these different licenses are tricky.

I'm still not sure what to think of this. I'm used to not trusting Real. (I will say that the OS X RealPlayer beta has been solid so far in limited use. Not sure if that's a testament to Real or OS X though.) You'd better get a handle on this story if you're interested in digital streaming media.
- jim 8-11-2002 11:34 pm [link] [1 comment]

Here's the project sound from a distance inside someone's head invention in case you missed it. Still not sure there are any positive uses for such technology.
- jim 8-11-2002 9:51 pm [link] [add a comment]

An unverifiable bit from Debkafile:

Tuesday August 6, at 0800 hours Middle East time, US and British air bombers went into action and destroyed the Iraqi air command and control center at al-Nukhaib in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.... For the first time, the US air force used new precision-guided bombs capable of locating and destroying fiber optic systems. The existence of such weaponry was hitherto unknown.
Interesting weapon. Quite useful no doubt, if it exists.
- jim 8-11-2002 8:45 pm [link] [add a comment]

The memory hole. Full text of news stories that are pulled from circulation. Are these guys credible? Looks good to me, but I'll believe almost anything. Interesting in any case.
- jim 8-11-2002 8:29 pm [link] [add a comment]

Ars Technica has a roundup of the 10,000 pound stampeding elephant of a rumor that is currently trampling through Mac world. Short coded summary: The long awaited G5 might be an IBM produced son-of-Power4.

If this is true. And if the chip is as mighty as it might be. And if it could be ready to ship before next year. And if pigs fly. This will be a really really good thing for Apple.

The rumor boards are buzzing.
- jim 8-10-2002 8:01 pm [link] [add a comment]

One day a government worker knocks on the door of a rancher in eastern Montana. He introduces himself and goes on to explain that a recent survey of the area has shown that it is not in Montana after all. The rancher's house is actually in South Dakota. On hearing this the rancher replies "Thank god! I don't think I could have taken another one of those Montana winters."

Yeah, I know. Anyway, I am shocked, shocked to learn that our friend's house on Long Island is NOT IN SAYVILLE. Can you believe it? Apparently it's in Bayport. I'm not sure what to do about this. It's not that I care where the house is. It's just that we've always called it Sayville. Can we really switch to Bayport?

"What did you do this weekend?"

"Oh, we were out in Sayvi... er, Bayport."

"Bayport? Who lives there?"

"Oh forget it."

Maybe we can resurvey the area or something.
- jim 8-10-2002 7:47 pm [link] [add a comment]

Made the late night getaway after Tony got off work last night. MB came and plucked me from Tonic, and after we got past the construction on the Kosciusko bridge it was clear sailing out to Sayville. About an hour and ten minutes. I wouldn't have made it so far through the summer without this house. Nice to have well appointed friends. Beautiful day out here. Waiting on the fish sandwiches. You all have my permission not to work too hard today. Tell your boss to call me if there's a problem with that.
- jim 8-09-2002 7:42 pm [link] [add a comment]

"Telecom researchers have successfully tested a solar-powered, remotely operated aircraft capable of relaying high-quality television, cell phone, and Internet signals and transmissions to the ground." Cool. That's the sort of technology I'm thinking of for the fibre optically tethered high altitutde balloon rising from the WTC site.

Another argument for this plan: NYC doesn't need millions more square feet of office space. But I do understand the feeling that whatever we build should be good for the economy (as well as providing space for a memorial.) This gives you both. An economic boost by clearly making NYC the most wired place in the world. Plus we can keep a lot of open space at the site. Just a glowing (plusing with traffic load) thread rising into the stratosphere.
- jim 8-08-2002 7:01 pm [link] [2 comments]

Professional comics threaten to strike over unfair competition from the U.S. government. An unidentified SPC (Society of Professional Comedians) spokesman summed up the outrage at a press conference on Tuesday:

When you have Ashcroft redirecting the TIPS hotline to America's Most Wanted there just isn't much room left for the more traditional "made up" type of comedy. How the hell are we supposed to compete?

- jim 8-07-2002 10:44 pm [link] [1 comment]

I've been coveting the Danger Hiptop (cellphone/two-way/pda/email/websurfing gizmo) for months. Looks like it is finally creeping toward availability. Danger isn't manufacturing the units, they are just selling the design to other companies who can make it and rebrand it as they wish. Danger makes money selling back end ASP services (for instance, your address book isn't stored on the device, it's stored on the servers at Danger.) The newly rebranded T-mobile (was Voicestream) now has it listed as coming soon. Yum.
- jim 8-07-2002 6:28 pm [link] [add a comment]

Two atoms are at a bar having a drink. Suddenly one blurts out "I lost an electron!" The other replies "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm postive."
- jim 8-05-2002 8:17 pm [link] [5 comments]

"A Contrarian View of Open Source". Bruce Sterling stirring the pot at the O'Reilly Open Source convention. Long, but really worth it if you can make it through to the end.

Free Love as a policy is sort of okay. I mean, people will kinda overlook it when you're young... Because they expect you to die, of VD or AIDS or something! But the Linux Girl just laughs at viruses. "HA HA HA! Only debutantes from Redmond get viruses!"

And then she starts having children. Any guy's children. She'll have your child, as long as you're not particular about giving it your name. She's got a whole brood of kids, like Sendmail, and Postfix, and Apache, and Perl. And some of 'em die young, and some are mentally retarded. But the hippie earth mother is just hitting her stride here. She's a one-woman demographic boom! She's having litters of kids, kids by the dozens.

Cops are coming around, and stuff... "Is this your trailer park, ma'am?"

"Not really, officer!"

"Could we see some ID, please?"

"I never bother much with any official papers!"

"Are you from around here, ma'am? You don't look very American."

"Actually, I'm Finnish, officer! Look at this old birth certificate!"

- jim 8-05-2002 2:44 am [link] [add a comment]

OK, I admit it, I can't hear a thing. Well, not quite, but my ears are not working well. They seem to be a bit clogged. Especially my left. This started after swimming in the Ocean out at Fire Island.

It is very strange to not be able to hear well. My social skills have been severly impacted - and they weren't that good to start with. There is an extra layer between me and the world. Plus, I say "huh?" a lot.

I guess I might have to see a doctor about this. I honestly can't remember the last time I went to a doctor. I think it might have been to get a physical before my freshman year in college! That would have been 1988. But I must have been since then. I can't remember though. I should probably go.

So if you thought I was ignoring you: I probably just didn't hear.

Huh?
- jim 8-04-2002 1:44 am [link] [13 comments]

The CIA venture capital firm In-Q-tel is backing a company which sells an enterprise weblogging tool.
- jim 8-04-2002 1:08 am [link] [add a comment]

According to Infoworld, Mitsubishi is moving into the mesh network space.

In a nutshell, MOTERAN will allow any client PC or handheld with an IEEE 802.11x card or Bluetooth capabilities to behave as a relay point to communicate with the next terminal down the line and to use this terminal to move packets along to their ultimate destination.

Side note: what's the deal with all the inforworld.com pop up definition links? Seems like a possibly good idea gone awry. At the very least it should be smart enough to not keep offering the same definition for the same word that is repeated in the same article.
- jim 8-04-2002 12:59 am [link] [add a comment]

There is a RealPlayer for OS X now. I'm not saying you want to install it, but it's there.

Here's the beginners guide to installing things on OS X (executive summary: just keep double clicking):

Download the file. Double click the file. Double click whatever new file results from double clicking the first file. Repeat this until you get to a screen saying you need administrative access (if you get a folder or drive icon along the way - and you will - just double click that to open it, and then double click again on whatever is inside that - probably a graphic that looks like an open box.) On the you need administrative access screen click the lock icon on the lower left, enter your password to the computer (the one you log on with.) Agree to whatever it asks you. Reboot if it insists, but you shouldn't need to.

Update: you don't have to do anything to install RealPlayer. Just download it, and everything should happen automatically (it did for me.) You'll end up with the application on your desktop. Double click to launch it. Nice.
- jim 8-04-2002 12:46 am [link] [add a comment]

Interesting (well, if you find artificial intelligence interesting) slashdot interview with Dr. Richard Wallace, creator of Alicebot. You can talk to Alice yourself here. And here is the A.L.I.C.E. (Aritificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) website. Don't miss the cool visualizations of Alice's brain.
- jim 8-04-2002 12:21 am [link] [add a comment]

Early non functional Apple Newton prototypes on eBay. Like a keyboardless emate in a duo 210 body. No, I don't know why you'd be interested either.
- jim 8-03-2002 11:55 pm [link] [add a comment]

Weird. Someone from the Building and Fire Research Laboratory just emailed me about my World Trade Center photos.

...We are conducting an investigation to see if we can learn some lessons from the World Trade Center fire and collapse. I came across the photographs on your site during a WEB search. These images are very interesting with regard to the fire. I have a few questions. Would you be willing to make your images available to our investigation? Are the images at their full resolution, or did you compress them? We are interested in as much detail as possible. If compressed, would it be possible to obtain full resolution versions? Do you have accurate time stamps for the images? Are all of your images posted?...
Looking at them again I can't really see what help they could be. On the other hand, what do I know about building and fire research? Guess I'll have to find that DV footage.
- jim 8-03-2002 11:44 pm [link] [add a comment]

Here's two things I've been trying to write more about:

Aside from the fact that it won't happen, why wouldn't Apple open source all the iApps? Is there even a single disadvantage?

And unrelated, in regards to the WTC site reconstruction planning, I propose a fibre optic cable stretching from the top of whatever tower gets built up to a high altitude balloon (or geo synchronous satellite, but I'm not sure they could do that strentgth to weight ratio wise). The whole contraption is a WLAN antenna for a public wireless network. A virtual city commons. They could make it so the fibre thread would light up in different colors depending upon the bandwidth being used. I imagine it looking something like the input/output towers from the movie Tron.
- jim 8-01-2002 5:43 pm [link] [1 comment]

Paul Ford has an interesting magazine article from the future (2009) about Google. Good overview of RDF and how meta data might actually work in the future. Plus Paul Ford wrote it, so it's bizarre in a friendly amusing way. I still laugh when I think about that older piece where he finds the googlebot in his shower. "I am the googlebot! I'm indexing your apartment."
- jim 8-01-2002 5:32 pm [link] [add a comment]

40 Gigabyte Seagate Barracuda ATA/100 hard drive: $74.95!
- jim 8-01-2002 5:26 pm [link] [add a comment]

Looks like Apple will be able get the superdrive into the Powerbook soon. I wonder if I'd ever burn DVD's if I could. Seems like a nice way to archive I guess. Regardless, it's cool for sure, and I want one.

This is my tech lust strategy. I want all the stuff, but of course can't afford it. So I just admit to wanting it, but instead of also admitting that I can't afford it, I just say I'm waiting for some new feature X to appear. When that feature finally does appear, there will be some new X on the horizon to postpone my collision with fiscal reality.

So I'm going to buy a Powerbook. I'm just waiting for the superdrive. Or I'm waiting for airport reception to be improved. Or I'm waiting for a higher pixel density on the screen. This way I'm not poor, I just have very high demands.
- jim 8-01-2002 5:21 pm [link] [add a comment]

Went to see The Fast Runner last night at the Sunshine theatre on Houston. The theatre is a winner for sure, as others have noted. I liked the film too. The long running scene is beautiful.
- jim 8-01-2002 4:57 pm [link] [3 comments]

This one takes the cake.

A SPAMMERS LETTER OF RESIGNATION:

Dear Spam hater:

We are quitting, but before we do we are going to expose detailed information about the largest spam operators in the USA that ripped us off so bad we had to get a bank loan to get out of credit card debt.

Do you want to know how to send the crap back to them?

OF course you do!

Forget about clicking REPLY...you know by now that doesn't work. We know what DOES work.

For more information please email us at: Cleanbox@fastermail.com...
And it goes on for like three more pages telling you how terrible spammers are, how you can never get off their lists by replying, while at the same time repeatedly asking you to send them your email address. I'm surprised these people don't explode in a puff of logical contradiction.
- jim 7-31-2002 6:50 pm [link] [add a comment]

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