Entries from October 2003

(Warning: Highly location-specific post ahead.)

Liberals win big in Ontario: My god, it's about time. It's just too bad that fascist Mike Harris wasn't the one bounced out on his ass when the Liberals cleaned house.

Now, of course, the question is whether or not Dalton McGuinty actually has what it takes to govern Ontario with both fiscal and social responsiblity. I'm pretty sure about the latter, but I do wonder about the former.

Strange how I still give a shit about Ontario politics, considering it's been two years since I lived there, but there always was something about the PC government that got my back up.

Now Toronto just has to replace that ferret of a mayor, Mel Lastman. Don't get me started on Mel.

I'm just getting over a totally brutal flu - no delirious hallucinations, drooling mania, or weeping mother dabbing a damp cloth at my feverish brow, but sick all the same. Of course, this happens just as Winnipeg goes through a rather unseasonal heat wave (+28 degrees for the past three days). Suh-eye.

Fall in Winnipeg comes abruptly, and like a gust of cool wind through an open window the chill is delicious, prickly, revitalizing. Fall is undoubtedly my favourite season, if only for the fact that everyone starts wearing all of the cool fashions that they've hiddem away during the sweltering summer.

It's no surprise that most of my life's major decisions (quitting bands / jobs / bad relationships, moving away from Winnipeg, moving in with my girlfriend, getting a real life) were made in the fall. The coolness of the season seems to give the brain some breathing room and space to allow decisions to expand, exhale, and spread into the deepest crannies.

The leaves seemed to change so quickly this year. One moment the whole world is green and alive, and in the next the streets are littered with a thousand corpses, puddles running red with the blood of summer's best intentions.

1. A tip for folks upgrading to the shiny new 15" Powerbook (aka "the albook"), a word of warning: This machine will not boot up any OS lower than 10.2.7. You read that right: someone at Apple is smoking some seriously mind-numbing weed, and has locked out booting any OS released before August 2003.

This means that all of the troubleshooting utilities that have to be run from bootup (DiskWarrior is a biggie) will not work. I shake my head in disbelief.

1. That said, the new powerbooks are more rugged, and slightly faster than the 667mhz machine I used to be running. I'm not sold on having all of the ports on the sides, however - my powerbook now looks like its caught in the throes of some twisted cable nightmare when everything is plugged in.
2. After playing around with the just-released Dreamweaver MX 2004, I can now say that it eats pants big time. So incredibly slow, even on my Quicksilver 1.2ghz tower, to be almost unusable. Does Macromedia beta test their software, or what?
3. iTunes for Windows - now my dad can finally buy that iPod he's been lusting over... and I can finally try to sell my parents on the benefits of Macs. I hope it doesn't suck.
4. New versions of the Mozilla web browser, the Thunderbird email client, and the Mozilla Firebird web browser were released, along with a redesigned Mozilla.org web site. Open source sweet and tasty for everyone!
5. DEVONAgent released - this application kicks some serious search-app ass. If you do lots of research and searching online (and run Mac OS X), check it out.

elliott smith 1969-2003. I don't want to believe that it could be true.

Spam sucks the whole day long.

I've used many different programs to filter spam out of my inbox, and what I've found works the best is a combination of Spam Assassin running on the server, and the open source POPFile running locally. I'm running at around a 99.5% accuracy rate, with zero false positives.

The other great benefit of POPFile is that it doesn't just filter spam. You can set it up to use Bayesian filtering for all kinds of email. POPFile filters email into "buckets", and learns what kind of email belongs in what bucket as you train it. I have buckets for personal email, email subscriptions, email from clients, and of course, for spam. POPFile can add a header to the email with the bucket it thinks the email belongs in, or can also add a prefix to the subject line.

You then set up your email client to fetch email through POPFile, and filter on the header, or the subject line. It kicks butt, and is way easier to set up than my rambling explanation would belie.

The new version of POPFile has been greatly changed to now use the BerkeleyDB software to store its information and data in. This means that POPFile is much, much faster than before. This also means that the install process is that much more difficult.

Here, I've documented what I did to get POPFile 0.2.0a running on Mac OS X. I'm definitely no Unix or Perl guru, so these instructions should definitely be taken with a big ol' your mileage may vary. But, after fussing with it for a while, I think I've got it figured out.

Drop me a line if these instructions help you get POPFile and the BerkeleyDB installed successfully. I'll try to help if you have problems, but like I said, I'm no expert.

» Installing POPFile on Mac OS X continues...

Where love is concerned, too much is not even enough.

-- Pierre De Beaumarchais

Happy Birthday, sweetie.

(If you feel so inclined, stop by for a visit, and send along your birthday wishes.)