Author: Martin

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Julius Caesar blog

Here’s something cool and interesting: Bloggus Caesari. It’s a blog supposedly written by Julius Caesar, giving a day-by-day run-down of his exploits and campaigns. It has been running since 2001:

“I’m heading up to Geneva. One of the Gaul tribes is planning on cutting through Roman territory, in an attempt to go and fight some other tribe. I’m the governor of Gaul now, so I have to stop them… I’m caught a little off guard ? there’s only one legion up there, so I’m trying to raise some more at the same time.

“Well, it looks like I might be away more than I’d like, so I decided to set up this blog. My friends in Rome can keep track of what I’m up to amongst the barbarians..”

(13 May 2001)

Caesar talks in a familiar, modern voice, while describing actual historical events from 2000 years ago:

“Suddenly new enemy troop movements are visible. A force about 60,000 strong has concentrated at the most awkward point in our siegeworks: a hill too large to include in our defences, so that the camp there is built at a slight incline. Simultaneously Commius’ cavalry has lined itself up facing the outer wall, while his infantry has left camp in battle order. And now troops once again pour out of Alesia. I’m looking for a position from which I can view all of these developments. This could be the big one.”

(29 May 2003)

I’ll have to get Abi to give me some idea of the “real” time frame of the blog. It looks like the author has gone to some amazing lengths to provide vivid descriptions and thorough details of how Caesar’s campaigns unfolded. What a fantastic idea, and what a wonderful way to learn more about Roman history! (via Brad DeLong)

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Constant Craving

You know how most shops play in-store music? Well, in Britain at least, they have to pay a licence fee to the Performing Rights Society to do so. The PRS takes this money and distributes it to the songwriters, performers, and music publishers.

(Mini trivia update: If you remember the Beautiful South’s hit “Song for whoever” from 1989, you may remember the lyric: “I love you because you put me in my rightful place / And I love the PRS cheques that you bring”.)

I don’t know the exact ins and outs of the system, because the PRS doesn’t include a full price list on their web site. You have to contact them personally to get a quote for your specific situation. I can therefore only assume that you can get a much cheaper license if you play music that is performed by unknown artists. What else could explain Scotmid supermarkets playing a non-stop soul-destroying loop of “The Worst Cover Versions In The World–Ever! (Vol 28)”?

I love pop music. Generally, I don’t even mind when someone, usually a manufactured boy band, covers a song whose original I particularly liked. But these…things, these abomominations that Scotmid uses to assault its customers with are truly unforgiveable.

The instruments are all synthesised. Badly.

There is only one female vocalist, and one male vocalist, although it’s sometimes hard to tell their fractured, screeching falsetto voices apart.

The song tempos are subtly wrong. Some are a little too fast, some are a little too slow, but none are just right. Yet the speeds are sufficiently close to the original to make you wonder if it’s your brain running at the wrong speed, and not the song.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the artists are still trying to make their songs sound like the originals. This is the most painfully embarrassing part of it all. In most (commercial) cover versions, the artists attempts to add something “new” to the song, to give it their own unique twist. But these musicians seem to think they sound just like David Bowie or Celine Dion. No-one has told them that actually, no, they’re crap.

In some cruel joke of fate, every time I have been in a Scotmid this month, I have been clubbed over the head by the tattered and bleeding zombie remnants of kd lang’s “Constant Craving”. I used to love that song. It used to remind me of sitting out in the grass of the Cathedral at St. Andrews in springtime, studying for my exams, and listening to Radio 1 on my walkman. It spoke to me of wistful love and beautiful harmonies.

Now it just crashes my brain with images of minced beef and frozen peas.

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Busy, busy

It’s been a mad couple of weeks. First, on Tuesday 13th, my back gave out on me. Then Alex got ill–very ill. It started with a fever on Thursday 15th, which just didn’t get any better. We eventually had to take him to Hospital on Sunday 18th. (Sunday was notable for another reason, too, but more of that some other time.)

For a while we thought we were going to have to cancel our holiday to Rome, but by last Wednesday (21st) my back was doing okay, and Alex had recovered just enough that we were willing to take the risk of flying with him. He recovered a lot in Rome, and acquired quite a taste for pizza.

Oh, and on top of all that it’s crunch time on my project at work. Whee!

I wish I could write more, but it’s just going to have to wait for a while…

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SpamBayes

Shortly after giving up on the SAProxy anti-spam tool the other week, I found an alternative tool that is doing the job very nicely: SpamBayes. It’s an add-in for MS Outlook that acts as a Bayesian filter for your email. (Big, big thanks to Anders Jacobsen for pointing it out.)

Whereas SpamAssassin (and hence SAProxy) uses a fixed set of rules to weed out spam, SpamBayes uses statistical methods to analyse your incoming mail. (See the article “A Plan For Spam” by Paul Graham for an explanation of the technique.) When you first set it up, you show it a bunch of mail that is good (“ham”) and a bunch of mail that is known to be bad (“spam”). It uses this to construct a profiling database. Each new piece of mail is checked against this database to figure out how likely it is to be spam. If it fits the profile, SpamBayes will automatically toss it into a “Spam” folder for you.

The neatest thing, though, is that the system is constantly adapting to new spam as it comes in. If a piece of email comes in that is spam, but doesn’t trigger the filter, then you click a button marked “Delete as Spam.” The offending message is added to the profiling database, so reducing the likelihood of similar junk mails getting through in future. Likewise, if an email is falsely tagged as spam, or as “possible spam” if the system is unsure, you click on the button marked “Recover from Spam.” This tells the profiling system that it made a mistake, and that it should adjust its probability weightings again. The system learns. SpamAssassin doesn’t, and so you have to keep updating it as time goes by, and as spammers learn to circumvent its fixed rules.

So far, it has been pretty good at catching incoming spam, but not quite as successful as SpamAssassin was. That’s probably because I didn’t have many examples of spam lying around in my mail to help it build up its initial profiling database. If you plan to use SpamBayes, I suggest you hang on to some of your recent spam so you can use it for teaching purposes.

An interesting side-effect of using a spam filter on my inbox is that I find incoming spam much more interesting now. Both SpamAssassin and SpamBayes allow you to see what it was that caused them to flag a particular piece of email as spam. SpamAssassin shows you what spam rules were triggered by a junk message, and SpamBayes shows you what words in the email contributed most to its overall Spam probability rating.

Ironically, this geeky fun factor means that I read (some of) my spam a lot more closely than I ever would have before. But in a forensic kind of way. Don’t be thinking that I actually spend time considering whether I really need some more Viagra this month. I keep careful track of my own supply, thanks.

Erm…

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