Category: Techie

A dirty fan is a noisy fan. As dirt builds up around the blades of the fan, and between the plates of any heat sinks the fan might be attached to, the smooth air flow gets disrupted, which leads to turbulence, which leads to noise. Compressed air is your friend.

Heinous:

“Heinous means bad. Really bad. Horrible sky-is-falling bad. Grossly wicked. Jack the Ripper bad. Are you getting this? Good.

“Heinous is the word to describe the type of bug you will not ship with. As a responsible parent for your product, you think you will ship with no bad bugs and that’s where you’re loopy. You’re going to ship with tons of bad bugs. More than you’ll be comfortable with. You’re, however, not going to ship with Heinous bugs because these are the bugs which, if found AFTER YOU SHIP, the presses would stop. People would run around screaming about the building. Money will be lost and heads will roll.

“I’m not talking crashes… I’m talk massive data loss… horrible operating system hangs… exploding computers. I’m talking Heinous.”

There are some people I need to show this article to….

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my main email client for the last couple of weeks, but the experiment is coming to an end, and I’m moving back to Outlook again. Two main reasons: spam, and unstable message filters.

I have been using SpamBayes for Outlook to filter spam for almost a year now, and it rocks. After spending a couple of months double-checking its assessments of what is spam and what isn’t, I found that it was never issuing false positives, that is, categorizing good messages (“ham”) as junk. If it encounters a message that it is unsure about, it puts it in a “Possible Spam” folder, which I check manually every couple of days. Some messages that end up here are real, and some are junk. As soon as I sort them appropriately, though, SpamBayes analyses their characteristics, and improves its odds of filing similar messages correctly in the future. Very rarely, maybe once or twice a week, an actual piece of spam will make it past SpamBayes and get into my inbox. A similar re-training process follows.

Thunderbird stacks up poorly against SpamBayes in three ways:

• It doesn’t have a “Possible Spam” middle ground. You’ve got spam and you’ve got ham, but nothing inbetween to indicate uncertainty.
• It lacks a decent interface for you to properly “train” the filter about what is spam and what isn’t.
• It doesn’t indicate what the “spam rating” was for a given message. SpamBayes allows you to see the spamminess score it has assigned to a given message, and it allows you to fine-tune the levels at which something is definitely ham or definitely spam(15% and 85% respectively, in my case).

Next up is the message filtering. It works great most of the time, but every now and then I found that a message that had been processed by a filter (either one of my custom filters, or the built-in junk filter) would be marked as unread, and bounced into the Trash. Huh? What’s up with that?

Bearing in mind that Thunderbird is still early beta software (0.5), these issues may well go away in a later release. My overall impression of the program was very favourable, though: it’s small, fast, nicely tweakable, and cross-platform. I’ll be keeping my eye on it as it develops. (That is, if I don’t get seduced by GMail in the meantime….)

Oh, how we love it when the pound is so strong against the dollar! Suddenly all those cool electronic gadgets seem terribly affordable. It’s a shame that many US retailers won’t ship electronics to the UK any more (hi, Amazon!), but that’s where usefully placed family on the other side of the pond comes in.

In a week and a bit, our personal courier (hi, Susan!) will be bringing us some cool new toys. Abi has bought herself a new Garmin eTrex GPS receiver, and I’m going to be getting the Alphasmart Dana I have long been lusting after. The wireless one. Oh yes. It will be mine.

I have also been musing over the vexed iPod question. I would love an iPod. They’re gorgeous, and they are designed to go with iTunes, which is what I use to play music on my desktop. On the other hand, they don’t have an FM radio. And based on my past experience, portable music devices that don’t have a radio built in find themselves languishing under a pile of papers at the back of my desk. All aesthetic considerations aside (that high pitched sound you hear is my aesthetic sense whining in shame), FM radio is a deal breaker for me.

Out of the alternatives, the iRiver iHP 120 (or 140) looks rather spiffy. It acts as a simple external USB hard drive, it can record direct to MP3 from optical line in, and it has a Lithium-Polymer battery (the iPod uses Lithium-Ion) that by most accounts provides well over ten hours of playback. And it has radio. And it’s cheaper than an iPod. The downside is that it doesn’t have the groovy iTunes integration, so I’d have to do lots of manual file and playlist shuffling.

On the other hand, I’ve just managed to secure a car parking space near where I’ll be working for the next two months, so I’ll be driving my commute instead of taking the bus. That means I won’t need a portable music player for a while, so I think I’ll hold off for the moment. (Besides, economic forecasts suggest that the pound is going to stay strong against the dollar for a while yet.)

But still…new toys! Woo!

The health visitor weighed Fiona again today, and she came in at 5kg, or just a shade over 11lb. That’s 300g more than she weighed just three days ago, and a full 25% more her birth weight less than three weeks ago. Yowza.

According to the graphs, she is now tracking the 98th percentile for weight. So out of every 100 babies, there are only two that are heavier than her. No wonder Abi’s feeling drained. Fiona’s a milk vampire.

I regularly find myself thinking, “I know I read a web page about [XYZ] last month, but where the hell was it?” I may be able to remember certain key phrases, and these sometimes help me find it again by using Google or some other search engine. Sometimes I can also find the page by doing a full-text search on my browser cache. (I use the “Find in Files” functionality of TextPad, because Windows’ own search is too slow.) But that doesn’t help if I was looking at the page more than a week or so ago, because it will have dropped out of the cache. (I have my cache set to 1GB.)

What I would really like is “Personal Search.” This would take the form of an extra option on a search engine that would alow me to restrict my searches to only the pages I have visited.

I don’t think it would be too difficult, technically. First of all, you would have to have some mechanism of reporting to the Search Engine Company (SEC) whenever you visit a page on the web. I think the Google Toolbar might already do this. Likewise, it shouldn’t be too hard to build something for Mozilla that would perform this task.

The Search Engine Company would then have to record this page view in a database, and associate it with your personal browsing history. It wouldn’t have to store the whole page itself, because chances are good that the page has already been spidered and is present in its main index already. If the page is new to the index, it will have to be added. (No big deal, and this even adds value to the main index as a whole.) Because the SEC only needs to store a list of URLs (and probably timestamps, too) against a user ID, this wouldn’t even take up impossible amounts of disk space.

Next, the SEC has to implement the search filter: whenever I do a search with the “only show results for pages I’ve visited” checkbox ticked, this should limit the search results appropriately, based on my browsing history. And voilà! My own Personal Search results.

There are a couple of down sides to this idea, though. For one, it requires the SEC to keep a complete track of my browsing activity. Depending on legal jurisdictions, this history could be used in ways I’m not entirely happy with. The scheme would have to have some way of turning off indexing completely, or for the duration of a browser session.

Secondly, not all web pages can be indexed by the SEC, and not all pages should be indexed by them, either. (For example, newspaper or magazine archives that require subscriptions.) There isn’t just the preference of the end user (me) to take into account, but also the preference of the web site owner. As a result, I may find that there are still gaps in my Personal Search. However, I think these gaps would still be less annoying than not being able to get back to web page XYZ that I remember from last month.

Finally, there’s a question of cost. To a certain extent, search engines fulfil a public service to the population of the Internet. “Personal Search” would be a service that I imagine people might be willing to pay for. After all, it means you don’t have to manage an enormous search index on your own computer. I could keep all the pages I’ve ever visited in a cache somewhere, but I really don’t want to spend a couple of hundred pounds on disk space every year.

It all sounds too easy. Can someone tell me now why this wouldn’t work? Or alternatively, can you tell me if there are any search engines out there that do this already?