Trillian Pro 1.0

It is not very often that I 'fall in love' with any computer application, but Trillian has always been close to my heart! The idea of combining the four major instant messenger clients - ICQ, MSN, AIM and Y! (an IRC client is also included), must be an old idea,... [Read article]

SpamAssassin Score Record

Some week ago I installed SpamAssassin 2.41, and made sure that all the necessary Perl modules were properly installed, to get the most out of SA. Instantly after installing the amount of spam leaking through SA was reduced (which was not really that surprising). Just now I looked through the... [Read article]

Statistical Analysis of Spam - Part IV

My series on spam and the statistical aspects behind it continues. Last time (part III) I discovered that the probability distribution of spam seemingly was Weibull. An interesting discovery. Add to this some knowledge about the Weibull distribution, and some results from Minitab and one suddenly can actually calculate the... [Read article]

American 'Free' Speech

As a follow-up on Anders' posting Mixed reactions on my "niggardly"-posting I wanted to look more into the concept of free speech. How can a person be fired on grounds of teaching kids a perfectly sound work, listed in any dictionary? Wouldn't this infringe on that teacher's rights? Congress shall... [Read article]

Airfares, classes, tickets and such

It is a well known fact that the world's airlines, and especially the good(??) old big ones, are not doing to well these days. It is said that they have too much overhead, too many people doing too much stuff that really is just... overhead. As in any capitalistic society... [Read article]

Emptying the Dictionary

Our dictionarys are about to become empty! Every day a new word is tagged as being politically incorrect, rendering them useless and effectively putting a ban on them. Main Entry: political correctness Function: noun Date: 1990 : conformity to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities... [Read article]

Statistical Analysis of Spam - Part III

Once more it is time to study the statistical aspects of spam. In part II I commented on the differences in two independent sets of spam. Today I will try to be slightly more scientific. Just by looking at the histograms in the previous posting it is easy to see... [Read article]

Yahoo! Messenger Spam

These days it ain't only by e-mail one recieves spam. Lately my Yahoo! Messenger account seems to recieve a more than normal amount of 'spam' messages. Todays last message (and what made me write this post) came in as: pamela_21_px: hello, here's my pic, http://64.38.228.85/pamela/ wanna chat? or call me?... [Read article]

Statistical Analysis of Spam - Part II

Just after finishing my last piece on this topic (Statistical Analysis of Spam - Part I) I recieved a list of some 1900 X-Spam-Status lines from Anders. Inserting this into Minitab I expected to get two graphs looking more or less similar to eachother. No such luck. The graph below... [Read article]