Just got a call from Noah Glass at audblog – a service that lets you post to your blog from any phone. He wants us to consider it for use at the J-School… some interesting possibilities. Noah set me up with an account to test with — click link below to hear me narrate this entry live and unedited. And the first person to respond that it sounds like I just “phoned in my performance” gets a noogie.
SpamAssassin / Vipul’s Razor
Realtime Blacklists were working very well — I had seen no false positives in weeks and 90% of spam rejected at the gate — but a customer complained that mail they actually wanted was being rejected as spam (this is what happens when some of your customers are marketing types). No false positives allowed. Disabled RBLs a week ago, then set up SpamAssassin via CGPSA (SpamAssassin as a CommuniGate Pro module). Tonight added Vipul’s Razor to the mix, which works by keeping track of what humans around the world consider to be spam. So the SA/VP combination is essentially a machine detection plus human detection method. Will need to let it run and tweak the tolerances a bit, but if all goes well, this should both stem the spam spigot in my own inbox and give customers the ability to do same.
Another difference between this methodology and the RBL technique is that I am no longer globally rejecting spam at the server level no matter how high its score — now that we have proper tagging, customers can configure the server to delete their own spam at the server level, or let it pass through tagged and delete it at the client level. Elegant.
Music: Cecil Taylor / The Art Ensemble of Chicago :: Nutty
Winged Migration
Saw Winged Migration with Mike tonight. 90 minutes of footage of birds migrating (some up to 12,000 miles, North pole to South), shot from radio-controlled planes, balloons, gliders — they get right in there alongside the birds and come up with stunning footage nobody has ever seen before. I mean, we’ve seen birds migrating, but not from their perspective, not from within the flock. To get a camera up there and to have it accepted as if it were another bird, to experience the pace of flight, the view of land mass from that particular height… breathtaking. No special effects, it is claimed at the outset. Four years in the making — an experience. See this in a theatre, not as a rental. And forgive it the often Enya-like soundtrack.
Update: Discovered later that Matthew and Lila were in the audience with us that night. It was Lila’s first trip to the movies, and it would have been our last chance to see Matthew alive. 12 hours later he would be dead.
Music: Ennio Morricone :: Of Sacco and Vanzenetti
Broadswords
After the recent mugging in front of our house, I was talking to our Renaissance Faire (“renfaire” ?) geek neighbor about what we could do as a neighborhood. His response:
“We have ways of dealing with this. We’ll just get nine guys in full leathers and broadswords to do some rehearsing in broad daylight. That’ll scare ’em off.”
This was a grown man talking. I kid you not.
Music: DJ Shadow :: Stem-Long Stem
A Second Opinion
birdhouse hosting welcomes asecondopinionfilm.com, a site promoting a documentary film by J-School student Hadas Ragolsky.
A Second Opinion is a 25-minute documentary film that takes the viewer on a journey to the occupied Territories with Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, a group of Israeli doctors, nurses and human rights activists who provide medical care for Palestinians.
Music: The Yardbirds :: Over, Under, Sideways, Down
Ask a Blogger
Ever notice how your local paper seems perfectly credible until you read an article on something you actually know a lot about? All of a sudden it seems like journalists know nothing, and you wonder: If this piece is so ill-informed, then what stories can I count on to be well informed?
Bloggers tend to write about what they know (myself excluded). If bloggers present an actual threat to traditional journalism (as is often suggested at jschool seminars), it’s not because the public isn’t discriminating enough to care, it’s because no journalist can know (or research) everything about everything. Bloggers sidestep this problem by virtue of sheer numbers.
In fact, when it comes to many topics in which I have a professional interest, I would sooner pay attention to particular blogs than to anything published in Big Media – including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it’s just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them – which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.
Music: Bright Eyes :: False Advertising
France, Spain Control Baby Names
Fascinated by comments in Peter, Paul, and Mary from people who have lived in or who currently live in France and Spain, saying that those countries’ governments maintain active lists of allowable names for babies. Naturally, these lists are Biblically derived. The thought of a similar tradition continuing on in the U.S. is almost impossible to imagine, and it amazes me that Europeans are sufficiently complicit with the tradition to not be rioting in the streets over such a fascistic and unfree practice. How can such a personal choice be considered government business in 2003?
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Paso Robles
Weekend in Paso Robles, visiting family at brother’s new house. Hot and dry, surrounded by pastures and orchards. People have real acreage and elbow room, in exchange for lots of dust, foxtails in the socks, and eight miles to nearest store. Sushi feast with family at golden hour. None of them had seen Miles since he was three months old. Now he sits on dad’s motorcycle (not running) and smiles wide. Hooked up chintzy FM transmitter to iPod and listened to David Sedaris stories much of the trip. Coast highway home, it’s been a long time. Over the past 20 years I’ve negotiated this, the most beautiful highway in the nation, in a ’66 VW bus, ’82 Honda kook car, ’78 convertible bug, family station wagon, various motorcycles, our capable Camry. Stopped at Nepenthe for hummus and endless Pacific view in warm air of early summer. The last weekend out before big push of packing, moving in to new place, the start of the DIY projects cycle.
Music: Godley & Creme :: Don’t Sqeeze Me Like Toothpaste
Apple As Innovator
Tim O’Reilly has some interesting comments on the common notion that Apple is an innovator, Microsoft a copier. His position is that Apple doesn’t really innovate that much more than other companies — what they do is to package and market difficult technologies in such a way that people realize they need them the minute they see them in action — AirPort, Rendezvous… all technologies that were sort of inchoate in the industry — Apple polishes things like this to a high gloss and makes them into fetish objects. By the time MS gets around to similar, it’s clip art.
Example: Tim is especially enamored of Rendezvous, which is impressing me more all the time. The zeroconf spec has been floating out there for a while, but Apple implemented it at the OS level and started building it into apps. Now my browser has automatic, real-time bookmarks to every user’s homepage on every Apache-running Mac on my subnet, iTunes can see the collections of every iTunes user on the home network, and so on.
Aside: Customer Reports on customer satisfaction with Macs.
Update: In the comments, Allistair McMillan points out that Rendezvous actually is an Apple technology – I stand corrected (this takes a bit of the wind out of Tim’s sails as well). FireWire removed from the above list – not sure why that was there to begin with, der.
Music: The Pretenders :: Jealous Dogs
Stream Sharing Pulled
All my curiosity about whether iTunes 4’s streaming capabilities amounted to webcasting or not turns out to have been on target — version 4.01 is out, and Apple has yanked the feature. Turns out that merely marking the feature “for personal use only” was insufficient — people found ways to list streams for public consumption within weeks. Apple says they’re “disappointed” that a few bad eggs ruined it for everyone else, which strikes me as funny — as if Mac users were a bunch of kids that Apple thought had all grown up, only to discover that, nope, we’re not ready to own a Daisy B-B Gun after all since we still leave our bicycle in the driveway*.
One has to wonder whether Apple’s new relationship with the big labels forced their hand here — I had assumed that the five-listener limit was one of the “reasonable compromises” Apple had reached with the labels, and that they fully knew what they were getting into with this limited form of webcasting. In retrospect, it looks as if either Apple or the labels got cold feet after releasing the feature, and backpedaled. Anyway you slice it, this is disappointing step backwards. I was getting a lot of perfectly legal mileage out of it, too.
Great discussion at MacSlash.
*Sorry for the obscure reference — when I was a kid there was often an ad on the back of comics that showed a kid leaving his bike in the driveway in the path of dad’s car, thus demonstrating he wasn’t yet mature enough to own his first gun.
Music: Afro Cult Foundation :: The Quest