Will a screensaver help stop spam?

Lycos-Europe is trying a different approach at stopping spam - provide a screensaver that generates traffic on the sites that spam advertises with the intent of driving up the bandwidth costs of that site. The screensaver can be found at Make LOVE not SPAM. While the site focuses on Europe, there appears to be a download for international English and Spanish countries. The screensaver is available for Windows and Macintosh.

You never know what you've got until it's gone

It's amazing how one question can make you thankful for something you have, or in this case, don't have.

I was asked at work today essentially what could be done for a document to make it more color blind friendly, as it was using red to make text stand out. This got me to wondering, as it is something I never really thought about before, yet it affects more people than we realize.

"How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to color blind people" takes a look at giving scientific presentations that are friendly to color blind people. It goes into the 3 types of color blindness and also reports that "(o)ne in twelve Caucasian (8%), one in 20 Asian (5%), and one in 25 African (4%) males are so-called "red-green" colorblind. It is commoner than AB blood group."

Searching for information on color blindness and web usability eventually led me to Vischeck, which allows you to see how an image or a page of a website looks to people for each of the color blind types. Check it out, it's definitely an eye opener. It definitely makes me thankful that I am not color blind.

Microsoft uses Firefox, so why aren't you?

This article says it all.

Another band member leaves

One of the bands I like to listen to is the Cruxshadows. They've been having a number of band member changes, mostly from wanting to focus on their personal life, which is completely understandable, considering they are usually on the road touring for 5-6 months all over the world. Chris, who has been with the band for many years, is leaving after the current tour finishes. We'll all miss you, Chris.

In other Cruxshadows news, some Wal-Marts are going to be carrying music by the Cruxshadows. I'm glad to see them get into more mainstream stores.

Review of Spambayes 1.0

As mentioned in an earlier entry, I was not satisfied with the job that Mozilla Thunderbird was doing for filtering spam. I decided to have another program do spam filtering before the mail reached Thunderbird. I was looking at two possible programs to do this: DSPAM and Spambayes. I was intrigued by DSPAM for their sophistication, successful filter rate, and graphs (probably because of the statistician in me). I didn't go with DSPAM because it would require me to install the Apache web server (which I am not ready to do at this time) and from what documentation I could find, the setup looks difficult. I've also worked with Spambayes before on a Linux install that died due to a hard drive crash; it only requires Python, which I already have installed, and is much easier to setup.

Spambayes was very easy to setup. The documentation found on Spambayes website is sufficient in guiding a user how to set up a proxy for their mail program to connect to. Setup is done through a web page located on localhost (which is the user's computer) port 8880. Spambayes classifies mail into three categories: ham, spam, and unsure. I setup Spambayes to place the category name into the subject line of the e-mail when it was spam or unsure. This served two purposes: so I could setup a rule in Thunderbird to automatically place spam in the trash and also know when I needed to train Spambayes with mail it was unsure with and to correct it on incorrect ham or spam. Training Spambayes consists of forwarding the e-mail to spambayes_ham@localhost or spambayes_spam@localhost, depending on whether the user decides the e-mail is ham or spam.

Since I started using Spambayes, I have trained Spambayes on 151 pieces of spam and 19 pieces of ham. Spambayes complains about the high difference between ham and spam training; I usually don't forward mails when it correctly classifies it, but at the same time I do notice it having a difficult time correctly classifying some e-mail, so I have started to send it ham, even when it already correctly guessed that. Spambayes is doing a better job overall than Thunderbird, though there have been a few instances where Thunderbird correctly classified e-mail as spam that Spambayes missed.

I'll continue to use Spambayes, training it on ham and spam, until the end of the year then reevaluate it's performance. If I'm not totally happy with the results, I may try out DSPAM.

Do we really need the FCC to police the media?

As reported at Wired, there's talk of the FCC regulating cable and satellite radio. I'm still questioning if it is really necessary for them to do so, even with regular TV. Maybe there is a fine line when the FCC should step in, but I don't know what it is. I don't think we have crossed it, though. Besides, there are other solutions. One, people don't have to watch the show. Parents, monitor what your kids watch on television. If you don't want them to watch something, then be a parent and enforce the rules, don't go expecting the government to do it for you. Finally, if people feel the need to do more, then boycott the show. Or the station. Or the companies that buy commercial time for the show. If enough people feel that way, there will be change. If not many people get upset about something that happens on television, then maybe those people that do need to take a close look at why it gets them so upset.

Just what you wanted for Christmas

First, it was the Boyfriend's Arm pillow. Now, another Japanese company has come up with a pillow for the guys: the Girlfriend's Lap pillow. This information was found from Gizmodo.

Lady Spring

On Friday morning I had a bit of an unusual dream. What was unusual about this dream was that it was in a story format. Usually my dreams are random things but don't follow any kind of story, though, like most dreams, this dream was a bit broken up, or my memory of it is. Does my having this dream mean anything? Perhaps. Or maybe it was just someone trying to tell me their story. And with that, I present to you Lady Spring.


Lady Spring's beauty was known all over the world; each year many men would try to court her, but none would succeed in gaining her favor. The reason for this was because Lady Spring thought that no man was good enough for her. She was not mean or cruel about it, she simply was not attracted to any of her would be lovers.
One day Lady Spring happened to come upon a man in a forest meadow outside of a cabin that she assumed to be his. He was seated on a chair, applying paint to a canvas that sat on a simple easel made of wood. She waited to catch his attention before she spoke, so as to not interrupt him in the middle of painting. It didn't take long for Lady Spring to catch his attention; few men would be able to ignore her beauty for long.
"What can I do for you, my lady?" the man asked.
"I am sorry for the interruption, sir, but am very curious as to what you are painting," Lady Spring replied.
The man shrugged.
"Nothing in particular. I'm merely getting the creative energy moving, waiting for it to guide my brush over the canvas."
Lady Spring's nose wrinkled a bit as she caught the aroma of the paint. It wasn't the uncomfortable smell that accompanies most paints, but had a sweet smell to it that she could not identify.
"Your paint doesn't smell like other paints. It has a pleasant scent to it. What is it?"
"Just a little something I mixed up. Painters tend to focus only on the visual aspect of a painting. I like to involve the viewer's sense of smell as well."
Lady Spring nodded. "Very interesting. I shall have to come by later to see what you come up with. Good day!"
The man nodded back as she skipped off and went back to his painting.
One year later, Lady Spring returned to see what the man had come up with. She found him in the same spot as a year ago, once again painting. The man heard her approaching and greeted her.
"Good day, my lady," he said.
"And a good day to you, sir. How did your painting last year turn out?" she inquired.
"This is it. I'm still working on it."
Lady Spring looked at the painting. While there definitely was more on the canvas than last year, she could not see where the painting was going.
"Forgive me for saying, sir, but I thought you would've been done with the painting by now."
"Yes, if I only wanted to focus on the viewer's senses of sight and smell, I would be done now. But I want my paintings to amaze and delight the viewer's senses of touch and hearing. I want it to reach out and touch their heart and soul. It took many years for nature to create this meadow and the forest around it as we see it; I only hope I can come close to mastering in my short life the art that nature created in more years than I will ever live."
Lady Spring nodded and replied "I understand what you are saying. But I am curious as to how you will delight the viewer's sense of hearing with a painting. Paintings don't make sound!"
The man, with a twinkle in his eye, gave Lady Spring a mysterious smile. "You'll see. It's what separates a painter from an artist!"
Lady Spring visited again the next year, but still the man was no closer to finishing his painting. Many more years passed before Lady Spring visited him again. The man was much older while she still retained her youth and beauty. As she approached from a distance, she saw him put his brush down and lean back with a smile. Despite his age, his bright eyes and warm smile were still full of youth; his skin was not touched by spots or wrinkles that affect so many others. Lady Spring quickened her steps in anticipation of seeing a hopefully completed painting.
"You're timing is perfect, my lady. The painting is finished!"
Lady Spring looked at the painting and was breathless. The painting contained rivers, hills, forests, fields, mountains, and, in the background, an ocean. It all looked so life like that she looked back and forth between the painting the the forest surrounding them to see if her eyes were playing tricks on her. She could even smell the pine trees! She looked to the man for approval, who gave a nod. She reached out to touch the leaves of the trees. And again, she was astonished. It felt like the real thing! She was about to speak a question when a sound. She cupped her ear to hear it better. Her eyes widened.
"Oh my! I can hear a river! And the distant roar of the ocean! But how is that possible? We are nowhere near a river, much less an ocean!" she exclaimed.
The man smiled. "It's the magic that only an artist can wield." He sounded short of breath, but Lady Spring was too enthralled with the painting to notice.
"And so many colors...hmm, interesting, not one touch of red in the painting anywhere!" Lady Spring liked that. She didn't care for the color red.
"I thought you might like the absence of red, my Lady Spring."
"So you do know who I am!"
"Of course! Your beauty is legendary. When I saw you, I knew it must be you."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
The man shrugged. "It really wasn't that important. Besides, I wanted you to feel like you could be yourself and not have to worry about yet another man trying to win your love."
Lady Spring raised an eyebrow and asked, "And for one minute you didn't want to try?"
The man shook his head. "I would be lying if I said I never wanted to try. Every minute I wanted to. You inspired me to create this painting. I now give you this painting freely, out of love, and expect nothing in return." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Lady Spring wasn't sure how to react. She looked back at the painting. It was then when she saw something else in the painting. The painting had not changed, but now she could see the man's face in the painting, though the casual observer would not see it. A tear came to her eye and a big smile to her face. She knew that she loved him. "I love you!" she proclaimed loudly as she turned to give him a kiss.
"No!" She gasped in shock. The man was slowly falling back, his eyes closed, but his face in a soft smile. She knew that he was dead. But as the man's body came closer to the ground, he started to fade. Lady Spring stared in shock. Finally, the body of the man disappeared completely. In his place was a single, red flower.
Lady Spring, tears now flowing from her eyes, picked up the flower. She held it against her chest, her arms shaking from holding the emptiness that should have contained the man she loved so dearly. The aroma of the flower reached out to her and slowly took away her tears. Lady Spring dried her eyes with the back of her hand as the scent of the flower brought a soft smile back to her face, as well as a memory. It smelled just like the man's paints did when she met him for the first time so many years ago. She looked at the flower and softly spoke:
"Little flower, as you have raised my spirits, so shall you be named for it. You shall be known as the rose. And forever shall your red color be symbolic of the love the man had for me, of his giving his heart to me."
Lady Spring gently lifted the painting to take with her. With a wave of her other hand, where the man's easel and chair once stood was now a patch of roses. And so Lady Spring left, creating roses wherever she traveled, so that she would always remember the man she loved.

Evolution 2.02

I've been trying various mail and calendar programs in Linux and haven't been 100% satisfied with what I have found. I settled with Mozilla's Thunderbird for mail, but I've never cared about it having to pause the whole program to play a sound file and the junk filter doesn't seem to be as good as it used to be. The calendar programs I have tried either wouldn't play an assigned sound file or wouldn't give me a reminder of an event, despite configuring the event to give me one. I was hoping that Evolution would solve both problems for me.

Mail wise, Evolution doesn't really impress me. Evolution's import option could not find the mail I have in Thunderbird, nor would it let me give it a directory to get the mail from (Correction: You only can't do this if you try to import data and settings from another program. Importing from a single file allows you to choose a directory in file, though I would have to do it multiple times for each mail account I have, and it may be messy). Also, I've gotten use to having separate inboxes for each of my mail accounts, but Evolution forces me to use one inbox, create folders in that inbox, and filter my mail into those folders. But I could deal with that if their new junk mail filtering system worked better than Thunderbird's. Alas, it wasn't to be. Despite the good amount and mixture of spam and non-spam mail I get, Evolution just didn't want to identify spam at all. Maybe I missed something that I had to do to get it working, but the options showed nothing obvious that I hadn't enabled that looked like it dealt with junk mail. Still, I would expect it to be as easy to set up as Thunderbird.

With the calendar, though, Evolution did everything I want a calendar program to do. It gave me reminders when I told it to and played the sound file I assigned for it. Because of that, I'll use Evolution for it's calendar, but completely avoid it for mail. I'll probably try doing two layers of spam filtering - one at the Thunderbird level and before that, one with some other spam filtering program like spambayes. No matter what I end up doing, I will be sure to report my results here.

Strange November weather

This evening, as I left work, I looked west towards the Sierra Mountains, seeing the clouds of an approaching storm. The clouds looked darker than normal, almost having an evil feel to them. I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye, but thought it was just the headlights of a car as it makes a turn. It wasn't until I was driving in my car that I finally saw it - there was actually lightning in the sky. I've never seen lightning this late in the year. It is very weird to be wearing a heavy jacket to keep warm and have weather you would associate with the summer happening outside.

I arrived home, got my mail, and as I got back into my garage to get my things out of my car, the rain started to fall, as if nature waited for me to take cover.

For more information on lightning, see http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast05dec_1.htm.

More information than you get from the red-blue map

Found via a link on http://www.cellar.org, this map takes a look at the Republican-Democrat percentage split in the US county by county. Find out just how Republican or Democratic your area is.

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

Interesting experiences in meditation

One of my interests is meditation. I tend to meditate about an hour a day. I tend to be less stressed than I used to be before meditation and, as a result of that, people have said that I look younger than my actual age. I've had some interesting experiences*, such as having my eyes closed yet seeing things as if my eyes were open, but last night I had a new experience. My hands started to vibrate. Not shake, as might happen if one were cold, nervous, or scared, but a much more subtle vibration. Even though it was subtle, it was enough to startle me. Of course, after that, it went away and never came back. Has anyone else had such an experience?

* - Of course I realize that those experiences are not the purpose of meditation.

That's one heck of a piece of sushi!

http://www.dynamism.com/sushidisk/index.shtml
I have to admit, it definitely is the most creative looking flash drive I've ever seen.