When good interfaces go crufty

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I forgot to post this before but Slashdot is driving much attention to it so I figured why not now. When good interfaces go crufty. Matthew makes many great points about interface components that we have come to accept and find comfortable but which are unecessary. It's hard not to think of an application having a Save command or a File Dialog but they're really unecessary, and confusing for the novice user.

POPFile

in

I've been using POPFile as my new Spam filter. It uses Bayes Theorem techniques to build buckets for classifying email types. I basically set up two buckets, mail and spam and used 2000 legitimate and 2000 spam messages to train POPFile.

POPFile is a Perl script that works as a POP3 proxy. It uses statistical probability based on the training set to determine whether new mail is classified as mail or spam and tags messages with an altered subject or with the header X-Text-Classification. I use the latter method since Mozilla (my mail client) can filter based on mail headers.

So far, out of about 250 email I've had four false positives and one false negative. I'd rather have it the other way around but each false classification is collected by myself and re-inserted back into the proper training set.

Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo!

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Via Slashdot - Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo!

This article, like many on Slashdot sparked quite a religious debate over programming languages. Personally I like Java/J2EE with Cocoon up front or JSP if more people need to be familiar with the language. PHP appears to work just as well but the case can be made for almost any language available. Nothing is perfect for every situation kid. There's always classic computer science tradeoffs.

It's too bad Java has threading problems on FreeBSD according to Radwin's presentation. It's seems as if that was their only reason to not use Java.

Police confirm sniper's 11th victim

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Globe and Mail: Police confirm sniper's 11th victim

George Bush is quoted as saying "The idea of moms taking their kids to school and sheltering them from a potential sniper attack is not the America that I know"

I did some quick statistical research after I read this.

In the U.S., there were 28,874 deaths related to firearms in 1999 (crude rate of 10.59) and 30,708 deaths in 1998. The population was 272,690,813 and 270,248,003 respectively. That also means in 1999 there were on average 79 related firearms deaths per day. Source - CDC Website

In Canada we had 1037 firearms related deaths in 1997 with a population of 29,987,200 (crude rate of 3.5). An average of 3 firearms related deaths a day. Source - Canadian Firearms Centre

Magnetic Personality

in

I know that consumer technology isn't always built to be durable but I've lost another device due to failure and I'm getting rather suspicious of myself now. Is there a way to measure one's magnetic field in relation to the average?

My latest to go is a Palm III. I had a Palm IIIx that went just over a year ago and got a Palm III that was available but hardly used. Now when I turn it on the screen is dead. If I hit reset the backlight comes on with a barley audible whining noise. Scratch another.

So far over the past three years the damage is,

1 Palm IIIx

1 Palm III

1 Gateway Laptop

3 Brand name hard drives (Maxtor and Fujitsu)

1 Logitech Joystick

3 Vtech cordless phones (going on four)

1 3Comm Ethernet hub (sill works but damaged capacitor whine hurts my ears, or so I'm told that's what that sound is)

Now perhaps I'm rather adept at picking brands the die easily, but these are not cheap no-name brands. I buy them for the name. I don't know why I bother though, it doesn't seem to matter. I'm now sold on extended warrenties.