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House hunting

At the end of last week, the possibility arose for me to go and work in Belgium for a short while. We discussed and investigated this opportunity over the weekend. With Abi still on maternity leave, it would have been (just) possible for all of us to move there for six months, and come back in time for Abi to return to work in November. However, we came to the conclusion that it would be too much stress in too short a time, for not enough tangible benefit.

But because we are still interested in moving to a different country so that Alex and Fiona can be exposed to another language at an early age, we came up with a different plan: move to a bigger house here in Edinburgh this summer, spend the next three years getting Fiona up and running, getting Alex launched into school, getting myself more experience as a technical contractor, and getting Abi cross-trained on something other than mainframes, and then move to the Netherlands in the summer of 2007.

Note that this is still a provisional plan, and is subject to change.

What it does mean is that we’ve started the search for a new house. It’s a daunting prospect because the Edinburgh property market is insane, and finding the space we want at a price we can afford is not going to be easy. We have identified a couple of target properties already, though, and we plan to take a look at the first one tomorrow evening. More details when we have them ourselves…

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The evolution of nicknames

Before Fiona was born, we already knew that we wanted her middle name to be Chenoweth. It’s an old family surname from Abi’s side of the family, and because it’s so unusual, we could use it equally well for a boy or a girl. (We didn’t know Fiona was going to be a girl.)

“Chenoweth” also gave us a useful placeholder name to use for her in utero. It was the name we used when we talked to Alex about the baby in mama’s tummy, and by January he was quite thoroughly drilled on the idea. Then we changed the rules on him, and told him that Chenoweth would be getting a new name when she was born. Alex seemed to grasp this concept, too, but when Fiona actually arrived and got her new name, Alex thought she was getting her new name in addition to her old one. He started calling her “Chenoweth Fiona”.

Well, so did we. If you’re a parent, you’ll be familiar with the way that families develop their own idioms and figures of speech. You’ll say something to the child, and the child will misinterpret it, turning the phrase into something almost unrecognizable, but terribly cute. Then you start using the altered form of the phrase, reinforcing the mutation, and a new “family phrase” is born.

“Chenoweth Fiona” turned out to be quite a mouthful for Alex, though, and he quickly started abbreviating it to “Che-o-Fiona”, or “Chuffiona”. And recently I’ve started calling her “Chuffy” just for short.

It’s strange how these things go.

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The dark side of blogging

If there was any doubt about the desirability of Movable Type’s forthcoming TypeKey authentication service for blog comments, what’s been happening to Kathryn Cramer over the last few days should provide ample justification:

“There’s been a lot of sanctimonious criticism, to which I will not link, about the inadequacy of Kos’s apology. Does anyone really think that if he had apologized and withdrawn his statement, all would be forgiven? Ask Kathryn Cramer. She went too far in her coverage of the Fallujah killings, and posted some unwarranted speculation. In response, she got vile pornography and death threats posted to her comments section. She took the errant post down and apologized profusely, and the hostile comments increased – because, apparently, taking the post down meant that she was trying to hide. She’s continuing to receive violent threats, some of them directed at her children.”

(from Respectful Of Otters, via Electrolite)

Parallels between TypeKey and the US-Visit programme are duly noted.

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Backing off of Thunderbird

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….)