Nothing to Say and Saying It Loudly

This was the scene at Sophie’s party:

Sophie turns three today. Let’s all wish her a happy birthday.

Here’s the party last year.

I could give my long-winded and cynical opinion on the nature of presidential “debates,” the multifarious failings of the commission on presidential debates, and my dislike of Jim Lehrer, but no one really wants to read that. Instead see what other people have to say here and here.

This is an embarrassment.

After a week of Spamsieve, here are the stats. That’s over 550 messages, 3/5 of which are spam. Spamsieve is up to 90% correct now, certainly close to 100% correct in the last few days. I don’t know what kind of percentage Apple Mail got, but I am guessing it was a little lower. At least qualitatively, it seems like I am not having to manually filter as much spam as before. Just think if I had to manually sort all that mail. What a nightmare.

Filtered Mail
238 Good Messages
326 Spam Messages (58%)
48 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
1 False Positives
47 False Negatives (98%)
91.5% Correct

Corpus
262 Good Messages
329 Spam Messages (56%)
39827 Total Words

Rules
102 Blocklist Rules
497 Whitelist Rules

Showing Statistics Since
9/22/04 1:00 AM

I have looked around thoroughly (i.e., used more than one google search), but I can’t find any radio or tv station with the call letters WWJD. How has this slipped by for so long? I’m thinking I should get on it and start my own radio station, if just to claim those letters. I could play all death metal or something. Maybe just play Reverence 24 hours a day.

There is, however, and extensive What Would Jesus Drive site. And the always informative What Would Judas Do.

One of the benefits (maybe the only one) of going back through all of the old posts in order to get them into the new format, is that I can assess my bold predictions. Take for instance:

Wouldn’t it be funny if, instead of showing Trading Spaces, TLC had a show called Trading Spouses? (10 December 2003)

And there you go: Trading Spouses.

I learned a lot from reading other people’s lists of OS X software that they use. So here’s my list:

Applications - this is what’s in my dock (in order, left to right), plus a little something about why I don’t use something else.

• VPN - Brown supplies a Cisco VPN client to connect to the network. I use it so I can get to the library’s online journals. Nothing special - it works most of the time.
• iTerm - Until yesterday, Terminal was there. Since I switched over to ssh for logging into the anax website, I think iTerm will serve me better. Tabbed sessions are handy and transparency is nice.
• Mail.app - I have tried both Entourage (utter garbage, needs no further comment) and Eudora. I actually did switch to Eudora for a few hours. I didn’t like its poor spam filtering and lack of collapsable threads. Also, dealing with multiple email accounts (I have about 5 to check) was a pain, and I couldn’t use multiple outgoing SMTP servers. Today, I have been trying out SpamSieve for my spam filtering in the place of Mail’s built-in version. So far I am favorably impressed. It does statistics. I like statistics.
• Safari - I go back and forth between Safari and Firefox. Safari is rock solid, but slow sometimes. My main (and this is really significant) complaint about Safari is that it has no facility for choosing what cookies to allow. You can block referred cookies, but not on a site by site basis. I want a dialog box to open and let me choose what cookies to set. Also, it doesn’t handle jsp and asp pages correctly all the time. Note that this is not Apple’s fault. It is Microsoft’s for not conforming to web standards. And it is also the fault of the offending websites, my tolerance of whom is rapidly dwindling.
• Firefox - If it didn’t crash so often, I would use it all the time. Sometimes it just stops working.
• PulpFiction - My RSS newsreader of choice. I used NetNewsWire for a long time, but I prefer the way that PF handles feeds. My only complaint is not being able to open links in my browser in the background, which NNW did quite well.
• ecto - I wrote this using ecto. Best $18 I have spent in a long time.
• Dreamweaver - Slow and bloated. I don’t use 99% of its features. SFTP never worked right, and the help files were predictably helpless. So it was always using ftp to send and receive files, which is inherently unsafe. I’ll probably switch to BBEdit now. It can open remote files via SFTP and has its own previewer. Furthermore, since I don’t have to spend much time actually looking at html, it will not be a big issue to use BBEdit. The only thing I have to change with any regularity is the sidebar, and that doesn’t happen too often. This is more than you wanted to know.
• iCal - It does calendars well. I don’t use the subscription features.
• Quicken - I should update my finances more often than I do. Quicken sits in my dock to remind me.
• Sherlock - Actually Sherlock was there when I started writing this, but I removed it this morning to make room for other things. I don’t like it if the dock icons are too small (but also not if they are too big). The net effect is that I can only have so many on my dock at a time. I guess I need a larger screen.
• Address Book - It comes and goes. I delete it for space, but inevitably I end up going to find it in the Applications folder. Then it returns.
• iTunes - Still the best. I wish it were not so much of a memory hog though. I guess I need a faster computer.
• Illustrator - The best vector based drawing program I have used. NB: I haven’t used any CAD programs.
• Photoshop - I’d like to run GIMP, but I just can’t. I did all of the jpeg –> ps image conversion for my thesis in GIMP (under Linux). The GIMP interface is so non-intuitive. It drives me crazy.
• iPhoto - Yeah, it does it’s thing.
• TextEdit - I generally like editing RTF documents. Apple’s TextEdit is fast and easy. I’ve tried the BBEdit demo, and I really like that program. I used to use it back when I had a Centris. It’s pretty expensive now for the amount of editing that I do. Were I a real programmer or designer, it would probably be worth it. But see the Dreamweaver note above. Apparently, I contradict myself within the span of one post. Lately, I’ve been using SubEthaEdit (neé Hydra), which has syntax highlighting. It seems relatively fast.
• EndNote - I have 3,212 references all entered by hand. It’s better than any filing cabinet. If only I could find some way to attach a pdf file to an entry, with some sort of database filing system. So I could call up a reference and get the pdf for it from my local database. Someone should work on that. Eventually everything will go pdf.
• LyX - That I could run LyX in OS X was one of the main reasons that I got a Mac again after so many years fiddling with Windows and Linux. The LyXMac project has come a long way even since I got my iBook two years ago. Basically, I could in OS X, run all of the software that I used to write my thesis (LyX, Word, Illustrator, Photoshop).
• Word - I have the new version, which seems less prone to crash. I can print now from within Word, which I could not do for about the last 8 months, for no apparent reason. I’d like to be a purist and switch to OpenOffice or AbiWord. I have used both pretty extensively and like them both quite a bit. AbiWord is faster. But people send me files in Word format. I could do the conversion, do my editing, and convert back before sending them on, but that takes too long. Everyone would complain if I started sending them AbiWord files. I don’t use 95% of Word’s features. I wish there were a light version (perhaps that’s what Mellel is).
• Excel - I have largely the same feeling about Excel as Word. I’d like to use something else, but this is the de facto standard.

Other applications I use:

• Now Playing - Sends my current iTunes tune to anax, complete with cool little graphic.
• Preview - The can opener of OS X. I love it.
• Acrobat - Soooooo sllllllloooooooowwwwwww. I hate this program.

Other things that are really useful:

• Synergy - A good iTunes controller.
• Salling Clicker - Lets me control iTunes and pretty much any other application from my phone via bluetooth. Most geeky use: running a PowerPoint presentation for 3rd graders.
• ProximitySync - Works with Salling Clicker for transferring my address book and calendars to my phone.
• MenuMeters - Network throughout and cpu load meters in my menubar.
• AutoPairs - Automatically adds the corresponding >, ), ], }, or ” when I type the first. I am always forgetting the closing.
• uControl - Finally a way to disable the caps lock key. You can remap keys as well, but I don’t.
• BluePhoneMenu - Caller ID on my menu bar via bluetooth. Really, this is pointless, but I have a bluetooth phone, so I feel compelled to do something with it. It has a good SMS browser and writer that is useful.
• WeatherPop - Weather. It’s been kind of buggy lately.
• Little Snitch - Monitors outgoing network connections.
• Fugu
• MacGPG
• iStache
• iStumbler
• MacStumbler

So I ran out of gas there at the end. Most of you won’t care about SFTP, GPG, or wardriving. iStache, however, deserves a look.