Over at Maniacal Rage there is a new posting, Bush Will Do Whatever He Wants.
I couldn’t agree more with every thing Garrett Murray says about Herr Bush. From the day he was appointed to office he has operated exactly like a spoiled little rich kid. He openly admits that he doesn’t read newspapers, and it appears that the circle of advisors he listens to is increasing small.
Make sure you participate in the electoral process this year.
For the month of January 2004 I got 7,275 spam messages. Midway through the month I started using Command-C’s SpamSieve. So far I have been very pleased with SpamSieve.
I trained the corpus with my December spam, and all the good messages I had archived in my mail folders. While there were some false positives and false negatives initially, within days SpamSieve was catch 98.5 percent of my spam. The recent upgrade to release 2.1.2 has made the process even better as now the mail identified as spam moves automatically to my Spam folder. Over all SpamSieve filtered 4,932 messages for my in January. 1,250 were good and 3,682 were spam. Mostly due to my training there were 60 false positives and 14 false negatives for an accuracy of 98.5%.
My corpus has a ratio of 2,459 good messages to 6,967 spam messages, or 74%. There are a total of 231,020 words in the corpus.
The major benefit to using SpamSieve has been the elimination of some 60 inbox mail rules. Now I let all my mail stay in my inbox and archive only the ones I want to keep. Before I was using rules to sort my mail into folders as a way of separating the good from the spam. SpamSieve’s Whitelist has already identified 150 address variations that I want to receive mail from.
All in all I am very pleased with SpamSieve and I am looking forward to reaching an accuracy of 99 percent, at which point I’ll start automatically deleting mail in the spam folder after a weeks time.
For those of you who are aware of, or follow, the whole SCO/Linux mess, Cannot find Stolen SCO Code in Linux will provide a chuckle.
Over at NSLog(); the question of the day is how do you feel about open book tests. Ambivalent at best would be my first answer.
When I was in college, in the late 1970’s studying computer science, the only courses that regularly presented open book exams were the ones from my core curriculum, internal data structures, COBOL, online (CICS) programming, et-cetera. Sure, they could ask more obscure questions about the topic at hand, but if you were going to rely solely on the book or your notes to get all the answers then you weren’t going to do very well.
Without a solid basic understanding of the material at hand you’d lose too much time flipping through the book to complete the test. Most of the time I’d use the book to look up obscure tidbits, like the volume in bytes of a track on a 3350 disk drive.
The larger question for me is, “how do I feel about testing?” Throughout my high school and college careers I was constantly in trouble of failing or on academic probation. And yet I was one of the best programmers in my class and I have had a very successful working career for over 20 years now. Not only was I a poor test taker, I wasn’t motivated by the thought of getting a lessor grade.
I think that most testing fails because it is subjectively based on the teacher’s perspective of the material. If the test itself was a poor representation of the material covered in the classroom, then how could my failure on the test be an accurate measure of my knowledge of that material. Too often, in my experience as a student, the tests were wide of the mark when it came to accurately reflecting the course content.
Especially for the technical side of computer science, and any other discipline with a measurable outcome, I think a fairer evaluation would be of product produced and not just regurgitation of facts or theories.
With the recent reports of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease” in the United States, Michele and I have been looking at our diet. Michele has been and continues to be largely vegetarian in her approach to food. I have always been a meat and potatoes man. She eats meat mostly because I do, and since I prepare a majority of our evening meals, there’s meat on the table.
The recent focus on meat, and how it is produced, has brought our different lifestyles vis-a-vis food to the foreground. Not in a negative way, but in a “we need to look at what we are doing and understand it better” way.
Growing up I wasn’t allowed control over my diet. Food was placed on my plate and I was expected to eat it. There were frequent battles between my mother and I over food. The specifics aren’t important here, but the result, a stubborn resistance to new or different foods, is the crux of the matter today.
Giving up a diet that consists of chili, Salisbury steak, hamburgers, spaghetti with meat sauce, et-cetera, for one with Tofu, soy crumbles, and fish, augmented with vegetables is major for me. In the 7 years we have been living together I have broadened my eating horizons thanks largely to Michele’s patience and understanding. But it has been at a slow pace. I tend to make one or two changes and live with them for a long time before adding more food to my recurring diet.
The abruptness of the mad cow scare was mirrored by an abrupt shift in our evening meal selections. It has been difficult not to feel like I’m being punished for some wrong. This week we’ve had only one evening meal with meat, the rest were meatless, used fish, shrimp, or tofu crumbles. Each meal has been good, the shrimp fried rice was excellent, but I have missed my meat and potatoes.
This afternoon we purchased a halibut fillet for dinner. I had been looking forward to spaghetti sauce (with tofu crumbles) so I was uncomfortable with the menu shift. We found an easy bake recipe using salsa, dijon mustard, and honey. As the time approached to make the meal I was increasingly upset and scared. I broke down and cried as I explained to Michele how scared I was about all the changes in our menu thanks to the meat industry’s greed. She gave me a safe place to express the fears little Mark was having about all these different foods. Letting go of the build up of frustration and hurt at this whole situation helped me to feel more in control.
In control enough to make the fish and eat it. It wasn’t the best meal I’ve ever made or eaten, but it wasn’t bad either. Afterwards I again was overcome with emotion; this time relief at having faced my childhood fears about new food.
Knowing that I can express my childhood fears, however petty they may sound, safely allows me to grow and move past the places these fears have held me for so long. Thanks to my beautiful wife, Michele, I am able to comfort and heal the parts of me that were damaged or left uncompleted as I was growing up.
The online poll I talked about a while back has succeeded admirably. At least from my humanist stance. Voting was running 2 to 1 in favor of gay marriage or civil union when the organizers pulled the plug. Wired has the story.
Years ago, when the anti-smoking crusaders were cleaning out office buildings and restaurants, I remember saying that while I liked the idea of clean air to breathe I wasn’t sure I like the idea of laws against personal choice. My belief is that zealotry needs a target, and while today’s target may please you, you could very well end up being tomorrow’s victim.
Smoking is on the run and it appears that sexual orientation is next. All of which leads me to ask, how is the dogmatic approach to social issues and structure in this country by the Christian Fundamentalists any better or different than the dogmatic approach to society held by Islamic Fundamentalists in the Middle East?
For some time now I’ve known that I enjoy (suffer from) attention deficit disorder. I believe that it actually allows me to perform better in some areas of my life; I can work on multiple things at once for example. It does have a downside or two, but I’ve forgotten what they are right now.
This posting perfectly captures how I see ADD, or as the author perfectly describes it, nerd attention deficit disorder.
This week I am updating my wife’s site, andifyoudidknow.com with new style sheets, images and color changes.
The basic structure is there now, with color changes and minor tweaks coming. Give her a look and let me (or her) know what you think.