Saturday, 17 August 2002

Instant gratification Hello World! I'm posting via IM! [lawrence's notebook] God save us ... 6:06:14 PM

Simulating Reality In the literature: Modelling urban growth Past models of urban growth have been unable to account for observations on a small scale. A new model solves this problem and has features that can be matched up with actual human decisions and motivations. Therefore, it has the potential to aid in development of policies and regulations. Physical Review E (Print issue: August 2002) [David Harris' Science News] This could make a very interesting base for a SimCity clone. PyGame to the rescue! :) 5:09:46 PM

Telecom Inanity The Telecom Death Spiral continues .... Conventional wisdom still holds that the telecom death spiral only applies to the long distance and Internet backbone segments.  I don't think that it is as well understood that the local carriers and the wireless carriers are in almost as much as trouble.  This interview with Francis McInerney paints a picture of an industry in serious trouble. I particularily like his arguments about 3G wireless.  Too little, too late, too expensive and aimed at the wrong problem.  Couple that with a terrible balance sheet.  Not an attractive picture. [RadioXaos] The funny thing from my perspective is that here in Australia we are currently having a large debate on whether to sell the remaining 51% of Telstra - our current government owned telecom giant. People believe, for some reason, that cutting Telstra loose will lead to reduced telecom product costs. I think the real thing here is that the government needs the cash, and doesn't want to fork out for the ongoing capital maintenance costs. Not that Telstra has any intention for upgrading it's current last mile copper infrastructure. 5:04:28 PM

Juxtaposition predicts the future Look what turned up in my aggregator, side by side: Music Industry Needs Unhindered Control Over Internet To Survive. Seems Vivendi, BMG, Sony, Warner Brothers, and others have sued AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Sprint, and UUNET demanding the right to control what websites are connected to the Internet. [Blunt Force Trauma] And, Microsoft can strong arm the NSA. Linux makes a run for government - Tech News - CNET.com Sources familiar with events said that aggressive Microsoft lobbying... [Vertical Hold] Reminds me of Lessig's speach. The old will attempt to strangle the new. 3:26:16 PM

Minotaur Finally, MailNews gets the same attention as browser. With all of the work being done to improve the browser end of Mozilla, finally it appears that MailNews is getting the same attention. [Blogzilla - a blog about Mozilla] The goal of Minotaur is to produce a stand alone mail application, built from the mozilla code base. 3:19:33 PM

Tomcat 4.1.9 Beta Tomcat 4.1.9 Beta released (Jakarta Project) [IBM Developer Works - Java News] Ant integration. A management app. This could get interesting. Out of interest, anyone know what the state of ServletAPI 2.4 is? 3:16:43 PM

Open Source newbies Garbage In, Garbage Out. Is it just me, or does Larry Ellison have little grasp of the problems involved in consolidating multiple data sources? [The Peanut Gallery] I suspect Larry, like anyone new to open source, thinks that open source is just like commercial software, except no one is getting paid. So it makes economic sense to aggregate all the projects together because with n times as many programmers you will get n times as far. NOT. 2:48:50 PM

Brad's Insanity Weblog Get yer tongue out of yer cheek already. Rickard posted a nice little response to my musings on requiring development of an open source project by entry level programmers. Rickard: sarcasm much appreciated. What I am thinking is that the experience of developing an open source project would really be beneficial for someone who is new to the field of software development. Brad offered a nice alternative which would still provide insight into the complications of development of a large scale project. Brad even went so far as to define the process including ways of judging the level of success for each student. [All Things Java] I didn't know I'd had a name change ... ;) 1:56:39 PM

Signs That You Badly Need A Break From Work My dad sent this to me. I love my dad. :) You ask the waiter what the restaurant's core competencies are. You decide to re-org your family into a "team-based organisation." You refer to dating as test marketing. You can spell "paradigm." You actually know what a paradigm is. You understand your airline's fare structure. You write executive summaries on your love letters. Your Valentine's Day cards have bullet points. You think that it's actually efficient to write a ten page presentation with six other people you don't know. You celebrate your wedding anniversary by conducting a performance review. You believe you never have any problems in your life, just "issues" and "improvement opportunities." You calculate your own personal cost of capital. You explain to your bank manager you prefer to think of yourself as "highly leveraged" as opposed to "in debt." You end every argument by saying "let's talk about this offline". You can explain to somebody the difference between "re-engineering," "down-sizing," "right-sizing," and "firing people's arses." You actually believe your explanation in the previous point. You talk to the waiter about process flow when dinner arrives late. You talk to department store personnel about improving their turnaround time. You refer to your previous life as "my sunk cost." You refer to your significant other as "my co-CEO." You like both types of sandwiches: ham and turkey. You start to feel sorry for Dilbert's boss. You believe the best tables and graphs take an hour to comprehend. You account for your tuition as a capital expenditure instead of an expense. You insist that you do some more market research before you and your spouse produce another child. At your last family reunion, you wanted to have an emergency meeting about their brand equity. Your "deliverable" for Sunday evening is clean laundry and paid bills. You use the term "value-added" without falling down laughing. You ask the car salesman if the car comes with a whiteboard and Internet connection. You give constructive feedback to your dog. 1:36:37 PM

Email sorting I was reading Paul Graham's writings on spam filtering this morning where he applied statistics to word usage in emails to sort out spam. Paul reports that this actually gives amazingly good (to me anyway) results. Something like failure to recognise 5 out of a thousand spams with 0 false positives. The real change here is that he is using statistics on user sorted email. In my mind this harks back to my calls for using statistics to watch what the user does. I personally have major email sorting problems (think fourty odd email lists spread across three, soon to be two, email accounts). I am interested to see if single word statistics are enough to sort all my email. I think I have dreamed up a user interface that would work - and it involves abusing IMAP within an inch of it's spec. The advantage of abusing IMAP is that all the current imap clients can be used with my initial prototype, thus eliminating the need to re-invent that wheel. I suspect I should be able to use Apache's Java email server as my experimental base. James is what I was thinking of, but it appears to only does POP3. I wonder how much pain would be involved in making it speak IMAP. Hmmm. My real ponderance here is wondering if this is just going to be a personal hack for the fun of it, or whether this a commercially viable idea. Obviously Microsoft & Co are going to be in this area soon. If all that is required is single word statistical analysis I suspect there will not be enough oxygen in this space. However, I suspect when you start doing more than spam/not spam that a simple bayesian model will not be enough. I have a raft of ideas for extentions, eg switching to Fuzzy logic, using sentence decompisition, using word proximity pairs, etc, that could make this space more livable for the fast moving small software co. But could this be a sale-able product? Would people pay for this? Obviously in places that use IMAP currently (say linux/bsd/solaris/*) this is reasonably easy to slot in. For places that use Exchange, I can't see how to do it. I don't want to have to integrate with exchange. It's a pain tolerance thing. Of course there is the approach of writing an outlook plugin. Hmmm. Thoughts? [later...] Here's a handful of thoughts culled from the blogosphere: Paul Graham on Fighting Spam [Slashdot] A Plan for Spam.. Paul Graham: A Plan for Spam. Very clever. [Hack the Planet] Bayesian filters, the ultimate anti-spam weapon?. Do not stand in our way - we will walk around you. Spam is in our way. We will use the inhuman aspects inherent to your sales pitch to walk around you. Cluetrain on statistic-driven autopilot. :)... [0xDECAFBAD] Gordon Weakliem has a bunch of thoughts here Looks like Mark Paschal could be convinced into being a beta tester ... ;) [Even Later ...] Started hacking through the James source base, and there appears to be the start of IMAP support. That is easier to start with than nothing at all... Hey there even appears to be a reasonably active developer community. Kewl. 1:05:30 PM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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