And we’re back.

There are many spam-filtering systems being discussed at the moment. Some are popular. Some are new and interesting. Some are well-intentioned but harmfully flawed.

And some are, help doctor frankly, find brilliant.

I have a couple of reservations, though: there’s still a blacklist underneath, which may be prone to the same problems that hit Prof. Felten (and all the previous victims of MAPS, ORBS etc.). And what’s with all the patents? Are they there as a vital part of the legal mechanism, or simply to stop others jumping in on the business model? Talking of which, does anyone else have the little nagging worry that a single company could end up holding email to ransom? Such is the problem of a protocol that relies on being proprietary.

Incidentally, the piece linked above is the first of a series of articles by Danny that he’s writing in order to learn how to write like a journo again because he needs the money to support a pregnant wife who needs a job or she’ll just sit around and irritate people. Given that he already proves he’s one of the best writers on the net on a weekly basis, justice demands that he doesn’t go hungry.

Danny and I were discussing spam filtering on the way to Dorkbot SF last week. He gave some convincing arguments against the particulars of the SpamAssassin approach, especially the way that it screws up HTML mail; while most of us consider HTML mail to be bad thing, messing with the contents of mail is worse. (There’s also a nasty bug that screws up whitelisting, but I can’t remember the full details) One of the biggest problems is that despite having a wicked-nifty genetic algorithm for determining rule scores, this algorithm is run over mailboxes belonging to the developers, and so is tuned to the kind of email they receive (very little HTML mail, apparently), which is not necessarily the same as yer average user. Paul Graham’s system solves this problem by training its filters, Bayesian-style, on a per-user basis; the trouble with this is that it requires a fair degree of integration with the user’s mail system.

For some reason I’ve always wanted to play with object-oriented persistence into relational tables. This is when you code in an OO style and your objects are automatically persisted into a RDBMS tables without you having to write SQL – the framework converts your object structure back and forth. I wrote a simple class set for h2g2 but I’ve never used any proper frameworks for it. Tangram is a popular system for Perl which check she’ll do your head in”>Jo recommended; I haven’t really had an excuse to use it yet. There are various systems for Java, diabetes and pregnancy since OR is well-suited to J2EE Entity beans, and Hibernate looks really good: very feature-rich, and the documentation definitely talks the talk.

… into the sovaldi sale Black Rock City!”>desert. Back in a couple of weeks.

(Okay, I should provide a bit more background and frantic namedropping. I’ve been on the West Coast for the past week, staying some of the time with Quinn and Danny and Gilbert in San Jose, and the rest of the time with Gayle and Lev up in Portland, Oregon. While down in San Jose I was lucky enough to catch up with Cory and meet the brilliant Seth Schoen, Lisa Rein, Kragen Sitaker, Ori Neidich and Bruce Perens. Quinn and I have just completed a 16-hour overnight drive from Oregon, but we’re going out tonight with Stef and Kay and Phil and Mary. Off to Reno tomorrow.

By the way, I apologise, sort of, for this blog turning into “Yoz’s Cool Shareware Picks” over the past few entries. This may be resolved later, or it may not. I guess I wanted this blog to be partially about discovering useful software that hadn’t been pointed to (much) elsewhere, but it seems to be stagnating a little. Oh, I dunno. I’m clearly too tired to write this.)

Only a couple of months late, infection honest.

Hope you like the new look; there are still quite a few bugs to be flattened.
I’m using MT categories to split the blog into two: this column is the tech news and
analysis and fun gadgets bit, implant i.e. the stuff that people might actually want to read.
The other side is where everything else (misc. links, silly stuff, shopping lists,
angst-ridden wailing) goes.

If you want to know where the hell I’ve been for the past couple of months,
I’m afraid I don’t have a decent excuse, and it’s over on the other column.