Rubenerd

That's a lot of filtered spam!

You may recall I recently gave a glowing review of TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter plugin for WordPress. Now that a few weeks have past I thought I'd give an update on how it's working out in real world usage.

After several weeks of adding keywords from incoming spam messages every other day, TanTanNoodle's Simple Spam Filter is now taking care of virtually all my spam messages. By virtually I mean it's taking care of thousands, while Akismet is taking care of a couple. This is a staggering ratio that I never dreamed a filter could reach, and a real sign that a simple, clean, no frills plugin can outperform a much bigger, collaborative commercial plugin such as Akismet.

Below is a quick table I drew up that shows the number of spam messages Akismet and the Simple Spam Filter blocked. While Akismet can be reset, the Simple Spam Filter simply shows the cumulative number of blocked messages, so I simply subtracted the previous weeks total from the one reported at the date shown.

Date	Akismet	Simple Spam Filter	Unfiltered
2009.01.20	4291	n/a	29
2009.02.01	2499	1913	12
2009.02.06	44	2070 (=3983-1913)	1
2009.02.10	12	1767 (=5750-3983)	0
2009.02.24	2	6014 (=11764-5750)	0

Now of course there are several caveats to this table: I didn't bother doing checks at predetermined intervals, and given spam is an unpredictable, living beast the fact one filter did a better job than the over when compared just on one day doesn't give an accurate picture. Still, the overall trend is clear: with some adaptation over a period of weeks to the kinds of messages I receive, Simple Spam Filter is now more effective than Akismet, while using a fraction of it's resources.

To appreciate these numbers, you also have to keep in mind how Akismet and the Simple Spam Filters differ in function. Akismet allows all comments into your blog's database then filters what it thinks is spam into a spam folder. The Simple Spam Filter rejects blatant spam messages outright: these messages NEVER alter your database. What this means in practise is the Simple Spam Filter puts much less load on your systems and keeps your database much cleaner.

Spam instead of baked beans?! So you want spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

Of course we must also remember that no spam filtering system is perfect and that there are bound to be false positives. Again Simple Spam Filter works great for this because it only filters spam messages with obvious strings of keywords; as you can see in the table this takes care of the bulk of the spam. This means the more intelligent but heavier Akismet is left to deal with the rest of the comments that are harder to discern, and any messages it does flag as spam I can more easily skim through for false positive because there are only a few messages a day instead of a few thousand!

If you are using WordPress on your website, you absolutely want to download and install this, right now! I mean it!

Another day, yet another problem with Microsoft Windows. It’s not that I dislike Microsoft Windows, as much as I wish it had never existed in the first place. Well okay that was a bit harsh, in a healthy operating system ecosystem there is room for everyone, it’s just a problem when a system such as Windows is the overwhelmingly dominant one on the desktop. I feel for people who don’t have a choice.

Another adventure in the never-ending saga that is my dad’s Tablet PC? Actually no, this time it involves our media computer downstairs running Windows XP Professional. After a bit of an internal hard drive data scare recently we decided to invest in an external drive to backup our ripped music, videos and downloaded software images, plus it means when we finally upgrade it to a shiny new iMac or Mac Mini (eventually!) we’ll be able to simply attach the drive to the new machine. Easy!

I can confidently say that while I’ve encountered my fair share of vague, cryptic and ridiculous Windows errors in the past, I wasn’t expecting to be told that the destination directory for a series of copied files was "too deep". I was especially surprised given that the directory was only one step away from the drive letter! It was hardly nested down anywhere in thousands of directories!

C:\> CD WINDOWS
C:\WINDOWS> PLEASE_GET_A_CLUE.EXE
UNKNOWN INPUT… TERMINATING

Formatting the external drive and trying again resulted in the same error message for dozens of files. Only by formatting the external drive as FAT32 instead of NTFS did the darned files transfer properly; if you’re a Windows person you can appreciate the subtle irony that an older, less efficient and more limiting file system did its job better!

I’m going to pretend Windows threw those error messages at me because those particular files were for outdated versions of software, and that it intentionally forced me to format as FAT32 so that a future Mac computer would be able to write to it. Yeah, that works.

Photo taken with my iPhone this afternoon in the deli section of the supermarket in Tanglin Mall here in Singapore. The sign reads: "Cheeses: the perfect addition to any cheeseboard".

No, really!? Cheeses are the perfect addition to a… cheeseboard? ^_^

I wonder if Bill Kurtis is aware that cheeses are the perfect addition to any cheeseboard? As of this afternoon at least I can say with confidence that I am now aware of this. How… cheesy. Oh come on, you could see that coming.

Sam Harris, photo by Sara Allan from Skeptic.com. One of the people on my life list of people I’d love to meet. And he has a sense of humour!

It seems one of my more philosophical posts from March last year is still stirring up controversy. I commented on a BBC report that stated religious people are happier than the non-religious, then proceeded to pontificate on the reasons why our brains crave faith without evidence, and how wishing something to be true isn’t evidence in it’s favour.

A comment posted this afternoon to my moderation queue from Mari Thomas got the grey matter pumping again:

I commend you for realizing that holding to a belief simply because of comfort or pleasant results is not necessarily worthwhile. For our beliefs about life to be worthwhile, those beliefs must be based upon truth– evidence. Faith without a knowledge of the evidence behind it is, indeed, lacking in value.

Various religions and beliefs about God abound around the world. Beware of the weighty assumption that there is no God. This assumption permeates the mind similar to the blind acceptance of religion.

If you desire to be open-minded, I challenge you to research the records of history to see if the evidence reveals that there is or is not a God.

I am a Christian, but not simply because of what I have been taught. I believe that the historical evidence of Christ points to the truth of His claim “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

I recommend the book Evidence for Christianity by Josh McDowell. It portrays some of the evidence found by the man who set out to disprove Christianity and was against religion in general. Interesting and worthwhile material.

Rather than specifically defending my position and launching into a debate as to the authenticity of the Bible which would unravel any subsequent arguments, I thought I’d try a fresh approach:

I appreciate your comment Mari, but I would say that if you are to challenge me to look into the evidence for your particular God and faith, I would challenge you to do the same. As the author of "The End of Faith" Sam Harris said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence provided in defence of any religion so far is either insufficient or (for want of a better word)… terrible!

I admire that you have the conviction to not believe something unless it’s true. As I do, you clearly don’t believe in any other religions because there’s insufficient or terrible evidence for them, so I know it’s possible for you to visualise how others view yours.

I don’t try to convert people, but for many of those who’ve tried to call me out on my atheism before have at least conceded this point. By all means be a Christian, but I’d advise against using the reason that there’s evidence for it to justify it.

I do approve of hearty philosophical discussions, but I’m starting to think I may need another blog or avenue to do it… at some point on a software blog I should talk about software ^_^. I’m not Bill Kurtis.

Wait whoa whoa, hold on folks… the grace period for entering commands on your FTP server is 10 seconds? You time out after… 10 seconds? You expect me to process your output, make the appropriate decision and enter the next command in… 10 seconds? What if I need to consult something else first?

Who do they think I am, Bill Kurtis?

Unfortunately I’m not, which means for the next hour I’m going to have to login and type in the appropriate directories with every second command entered it seems. This is going to be a very long and gruelling evening.

To all you other computer users who have to connect to FTP servers to upload your work, what’s the silliest grace period time you’ve ever had to deal with? Any other similar tales you’d like to share or get off your chest? Believe me, I could use a laugh right now myself!

One of the things that dismays me about most computer software is how incrementally newer versions are heavier and larger than the number of new features and useful functions they contain could explain. "Feature creep" is a term that describes the inevitable phenomena of increased sizes as a result of new features, but we start referring to software as "bloatware" when the increased sizes really can’t be justified anymore!

Case in point, this afternoon my dad’s corporate computer died and as a result he needed to use his backup home laptop which I hastily installed his work software onto (that’s an adventure for another post!). One of the design applications he uses requires a PDF reader so it can show documents internally. I thought "easy!" and proceeded to download the Sumatra PDF Viewer, an extremely lightweight (less than 1.3MiB) and lightening fast free and open source application that I’ve been recommending over Adobe [Acrobat] Reader and FoxIt Reader for my friends on Windows for a few months now.

ASIDE: I placed the Acrobat brand in square braces because Adobe pulled a Microsoft, only instead of changing a brand by adding superfluous information (such as Windows Internet Explorer) they dropped the Acrobat name from the reader, but kept it in their professional paid products. I wish I understood why people decide to do such things.

No such luck, this particular application requires Adobe Reader, despite Sumatra PDF’s ability to read and search PDF documents. I figured the application used some APIs in the Adobe Reader which the Sumatra PDF reader doesn’t provide, so I figured I’d bite the bullet and download Adobe Reader after all.

You know you’re in for a big download when the vendor provides you with a… download manager!

Now you must understand that given I’m a Mac OS X and FreeBSD desktop guy I’ve long since been used to having PDF reading functionality in my OS and desktop software so I haven’t needed to grab the Adobe Reader in a while. I had forgotten what a pain it really was! The condensed saga in three points:

1. I visited the download page on the Adobe website in Mozilla Firefox on my dad’s laptop, but the page refused to load. I turned off NoScript and part of the page loaded, but then got stuck in an infinite loop and refused to finish. No amount of page reloads or waiting solved the problem. Giving up, I launched Internet Explorer (sorry, Windows Internet Explorer) and the page loaded fine. Crappy JavaScript, crappy page or both? Not sure.

2. Once I clicked the download it became apparent this reader I was replacing Sumatra PDF with was almost 30 times the file size! I know it can do more, but 30MiB versus 1.3MiB?

3. It seemed though that Adobe recognised the large size of this file, so they implemented their own download manager which downloads and decompresses the file as it goes on. It’s also designed in such a way that if you close the browser window containing the page where you started the download, the download manager closes too. Brilliant!

I’ve never really liked Adobe or their software, in fact I’d probably use Windows Vista or Windows 7 loaded up with Microsoft Office and Windows Internet Explorer before I touched a breathtakingly overpriced and bloated Adobe application. And believe me I have plenty more stories!

As for my dad’s laptop, he now has a functional replacement system which is slower than his work laptop was when it worked, but let’s just say it runs rings around it now that it’s not functional at all. Oh come on, you try and be funny when you’ve been traumatised by software! Reckon Bill Kurtis could still pull it off.

Delicious (aka del.icio.us) is a simple online bookmark service which I’ve been using for years and have promoted here many times. By having your bookmarks online and taggable they’re much easier to find later, and because they’re hosted remotely you don’t need to worry about which machine you bookmarked a particular page on.

I’ve found though having mostly moved back to Mozilla Firefox from Camino and Safari that the official Delicious bookmark add-on is really bloated and unnecessary. Instead, the easiest way to use Delicious I figure is the same as with every other browser: using the "bookmarklets".

1. Go to Delicious and log into your account
2. Click the "Help" link in the top right corner
3. Click "Bookmarklet buttons for any browser"
4. Drag and drop the "Add to Delicious" and "My Delicious" links to your linkbar.
   

Many sites also include "Add to Delicious" links on their pages as well which makes it even easier. People who do this may not be Bill Kurtis, but they’re really intelligent, attractive people I’ve heard. Uh, yeah ^_^.

I don’t know what I would do without Delicious.

There has been somewhat of a brew-ha-ha over Facebook’s controversial changes to their terms of service where they claimed ownership and rights of content you upload even when you delete your account. Yay.

Now normally I’d be right in the thick of such a controversy like this, getting agitated and espousing my own views in detail here on why I thought they were in the wrong and what they would need to do to regain the public trust, but in this case I can’t help but pose one small, timeless question:

What did you expect?

Did people really think a closed, gated community such as Facebook where external search engines weren’t allowed access and where your uploaded media was only available to people who created accounts would breed ethical behaviour? Did people really think Facebook would behave ethically at all in the first place? I have a really, really hard time believing this; it sound too much like people who were upset at MySpace, and AOL, and presumably stone tablets if you go back far enough.

I have a Facebook account, I have a few photos on there too. I never assumed though that such media would be safe from licence nonsense; quite the opposite. It’s their business model… well, if they had one at all that is. On sites like Flickr I pay for their service and explicitly licence my media under Creative Commons, on Facebook there never was such a provision. As a result I don’t upload anything of value onto Facebook; heck I don’t even upload full resolution photos onto Flickr as is! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

The simple fact Facebook covertly exploits its users is NOT NEWS people. Move on!

One of my close internet friends Todd Tyrtle has an extremely well written post on this very subject over on his blog which you may want to check out.

For what it’s worth, I did say I’d all but given up on Facebook back in November last year, though back then it was more for social reasons than anything else.

Are you a conspiracy theorist who believes your intellect is greater than the rest of us duped "sheeple"?

The following video is from the always entertaining Angry Aussie who is great other than he uses Georgia on his blog… hey, we can’t all be perfect. I guess I should throw in a strong language and Not Safe For Work warning too. And I really do mean this!

You’ll need to temporarily allow RubenerdShow.com (UPDATE: now Rubenerd.com) in NoScript if you use it to view the video.

Taken on my iPhone in December at the Starbucks outside Pacific Plaza on Scotts Rd (OpenStreetMap), just a block away from Orchard. Beautiful weather.

Come to think of it’s beautiful weather right now too. Might go for a walk.