Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, November 22, 2002

The [SpamAssassian] arms race has officially begun -- Comment()
iRights writes that the arms race cycle applies to the methods for blocking spam:

A new technique is developed.
Early adopters use it, and acheive amazing fantastic spam reduction rates.
It starts to increase in popularity.
The critical turning point is when a major ISP uses it as part of its spam filters, keeping the spam away from the few people who would actually respond to it.
The spammers counter-attack and get around the filter, and rapidly spread how to do this amongst themselves.
The resulting endless arms race, where taken over time only a fraction of the spam is blocked, finally ends when the spam fighters give up on the technique and go to a new one.
Every technique up to this point has followed this Arms Race pattern. Looks like SpamAssassian is now moving from four to five.
In light of this further analysis, I'll refine my challenge. Three months after a major ISP affecting hundreds of thousands (or more) of mailboxes starts using Bayesian filtering server-side, I predict that the filters will be largely useless. Takers?

What about more specialized segments of users? For example, the Mac users constitute only about 3-5 percent of all computer users (according to market statistics). Even if all Mac users had 100% effective spam filtering, I think there would be little incentive for the spammers to refine their methods for this segment. Is there any point in trying developing a spamming method which would target a small minority of computer users? Thus there is hope, at least for those who are not using the most common software platforms.

-- Comment()
Macworld Review: Battle of the Browsers: "But what may turn out to be the biggest surprise is how Mozilla.org and the promising Gecko rendering engine have risen from the ashes of Netscape Communications to mount a credible challenge to IE's dominance. Although Mozilla is still too similar to its Netscape cousin in performance, Navigator's speed and rendering fidelity make it the OS X browser to watch." [MacCentral]

Replacing a desktop computer with a portable -- Comment()
At home I have replaced a desktop machine with a portable. A year ago I decided to try the iBook instead of a desktop system, although I had a lot of reservations. Would the screen be big enough, and what about speed, or ergonomics?

I bought the 600 MHz model with 384 MB of memory and a 30 GB hard disk. This machine has been a fine match for my home needs. I can store it up on the bookshelf, so that our small childen don't reach it. It doesn't need room on the desk, so we can have flowers there. And writing ergonomics is good. In fact, I started to bring the iBook to work and used it instead of my desktop machine.

For a couple of months I even played games on the iBook. I had an overdose of computer games some years ago, and couldn't touch them for years. But the iBook made me addicted to gaming for a while.

The suprising thing is that the iBook has been getting faster during the one year of use. This is mainly due to the optimizations in new Mac OS X versions, but also improved applications (and new applications, for example new web browsers like Chimera). And I have been getting more and more skillful in using Mac OS X.

However, the iBook lacks the capacity to run dual displays, and it is not good with video projectors. Based on my five-day test experiences, the new PowerBook G4 is what I'm looking for in a portable which can replace a desktop machine.

The PowerBook G4 can work with the lid closed attached to an external display. First you have to attach an external keyboard and mouse to the USB ports. Then you close the lid to make the system go to sleep. After this, you attach the external monitor to the PowerBook. (The system has to be connected to the power adapter.) Then just press a key on the external keyboard, and the system wakes up. The LCD screen of the portable will be switched off, so you can keep the lid closed. All the video memory is available for running the external display, up to 2048x1536 resolution with millions of colors.

Keeping Radio UserLand reponding on Mac OS X 10.2.2 -- Comment()
I installed the KWSU tool for Radio on Mac OS X 10.2.2. Now the Radio desktop web server keeps on responding, and I don't need to restart it every few minutes.

How I did this? I replaced the previous version of the KWSU tool in the Tools folder of Radio. I restarted Radio, and now KWSU works fine. I changed the interval to 15 seconds, but perhaps the default 30 seconds would be enough.

Thanks to Andy Frangen for making the KWSU tool and for helping me out. Now using Radio is not so painful.

-- Comment()
Matt Croydon::postneo writes about Web Services: "Scott Hanselman gave a talk entitled Web Services, Behind the Music last night in Oregon. He points to several things that were mentioned at the DevCon, and he also put together a great list of tools that he used in the presentation. All of the web services heads in the audience should check it out."

Digital Typography Using LaTeX -- Comment()
Yesterday I received a review copy of Digital Typography Using LaTeX from Springer (written by Syropoulos, Tsolomitis and Sofroniou, 510 pages, publishing year 2003). This is a nice new book on LaTeX. It will not replace the classic manuals by Lamport or for example Math into LaTeX (by Grätzer). However, Digital Typography Using LaTeX has a really good description of multi-lingual typesetting. And the book also describes the future directions of TeX and LaTeX. It shows examples of using pdfTeX and pdfLaTeX, and other new tools, plus the upcoming XML-transformation tools developed in the Omega and Lambda projects. The future of TeX and LaTeX looks bright indeed.

A new channel for thoughts -- Comment()
I have been posting here at Universal Rule a lot of pointers to topics elsewhere, so I decided to make a new channel (or category) for more personal postings. I came up with the title Universally Personal, not terribly original perhaps.