I just found an error in an Apache config file for taint.org, resulting in some of the legacy RSS feed URLs producing invalid data — this meant that anyone subscribed to the Feedburner feed, for example, had been missing out on my witterings. Fixed now — apologies!
Month: August 2006
Update: This is now fixed. See here for details…
Here’s the 2lmc boys getting rightly annoyed about Flickr’s new mapping feature, which displays geotagged photos overlaid on a mapping UI — as they note, it’s basically a steaming pile of crap outside the US:
However, because Flickr are owned by Yahoo, they’re using their maps. And, like all Yahoo! products, if you’re not American, it sucks.
Compare this lovely data-rich map of SF:
With this featureless grey blob:
That’s just pathetic — there isn’t a single place name visible, and even the Phoenix Park, the biggest urban park in Europe, is simply displayed just as a light-coloured splat with a road going through it.
It appears the Yahoo! mapping data for the UK and Ireland just isn’t really there. What someone needs to do, is take the geotagging data from Flickr, and overlay it on the far more informative Google map data instead ;):
It’s a real shame — I used to rely on Y! Maps to get directions everywhere while in the US. They’re missing out on so many customers here…
Update: good news — the Flickr maps are now things of beauty to match Google’s:
Yesterday was spent in the beautiful surrounds of Naas Leisure Centre, attending the Kildare Registry Office for a brief ceremony and some putting of pen to paper — and hey presto, myself and the lovely C are now husband and wife ;) About time, really — we’ve been going out for 13 years, after all.
This is just the legal preliminaries — the big party is two weeks from now, in a castle in Sligo, and it’s shaping up to be a great party. But still, legally, she’s my wife now…
By the way, one bonus of getting the legal stuff out of the way in advance is that we now don’t have to have all the fun marred by legal requirements on the big day. As a result, our mate Gerry, who a few taint.org readers will know, will be presiding over the real wedding ceremony. ;)
The European Health Insurance Card is dead handy, providing access to healthcare for EU residents while travelling in Europe — it’s definitely worth having one.
There were a few reports in the Irish newspapers last week of an announcement by the Health Service Executive, warning of “a bogus website” which charges a fee of EUR22 to process applications for this:
The HSE also warned that the site is asking applicants to submit detailed financial information. “It has come to the attention of the Health Service Executive that Irish residents are being targeted by a website which is unnecessarily charging people to apply for EHIC cards. The bogus site concerned — http://www.ehic-card.eu/ — is not connected to the HSE,” said the HSE in a statement.
I’d link to the HSE’s press release on the topic, but it’s down, apparently — and that’s pretty indicative of the problem. You see, I’ve been trying to apply for one of these recently.
The HSE has been announcing that there’s no need to use this “bogus site”, since we can just use the “real” site at http://www.ehic.ie/ to apply for one. Here’s what they neglect to mention:
- (a) that unless you’re a pensioner you can’t apply for one online — you have to print out a form, fill it in, and post it to your local health office.
- (b) there’s no indication on the site as to what exactly your “Local Health Office” may be, just a long list of mysterious locations.
- (c) in order to apply, the form demands that you supply all that ‘detailed financial information’ — namely your name, address, date of birth, proof of residency, and PPS number — anyway.
- (d) the “bogus site” isn’t really all that bogus after all.
If they had a simple and usable online application process, perhaps they wouldn’t be plagued by other sites attempting to offer that service for what is really a quite reasonable EUR22 fee?
This is a pretty frequent phenomenon on Irish governmental websites; a half-assed attempt to bring governmental services online, resulting in shiny informational sites, full of clip-art of smiling people talking on the phone, which all come down to a bottom line of “print this out and post it in” or “call this number” — business as usual. Having said that, at least I can generally still get a human on the phone, which still beats dealing with US government agencies, I guess!
BTW, I notice the HSE claim that it only takes 10 working days for an EHIC to arrive using their system. I applied for mine 3 weeks ago, and there’s been no word yet…
Here’s a Firefox Smart Keyword to search your GMail:
https://mail.google.com/mail/?search=query&view=tl&q=%s
Usage example, assuming you use ‘mail’ as the keyword: (CTRL-L) mail whatever
Update: as of Oct 2007, this advice is obsolete. The Spamcop algorithms have been greatly improved, as far as I and others can tell.
I’ve been hearing increasing reports of false positives using bl.spamcop.net.
One today spurred me to check out exactly how many times it I’m seeing it misfiring on nonspam in my own mail collection. The results have been pretty astonishing.
In my nonspam collection, it fired on 1043 messages out of 8415 in July; 12.4% of the mail. It gets worse for August, though — 884 messages out of 3729 since the start of August. That’s a staggering 23% of my nonspam mail this month. ;)
Most of that is due to the listings of GMail and Yahoo! Groups, both of which seem to have been listed for large swathes of the past month and a half.
Now, an important point — it can work pretty well as a single input to a scoring system, like Spamcop itself or SpamAssassin. In fact, I didn’t lose any mail as a result of those listings; SpamAssassin assigns only 1.5 points to the RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET rule, so it’s easily corrected by other rules.
However, people using it to block or reject spam outright, or who’ve changed the score of the RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET rule, need to turn that off ASAP — as they are losing mail.
Last week, Matt Sergeant released a great little perl script, re2xs, which takes a set of simplified regexps, converts them to the subset of regular expression language supported by re2c, then uses that to build an XS module.
In other words, it offers the chance for SpamAssassin rules to be compiled into a trie structure in C code to match multiple patterns in parallel. Given that this is then compiled down to native machine code, it has the potential to be the fastest method possible, apart from using dedicated hardware co-processors.
Sure enough, Matt’s results were pretty good — he says, ‘I managed to match 10k regexps against 10k strings in 0.3s with it, which I think is fairly good.’ ;)
Unfortunately, turning this into something that works with SpamAssassin hasn’t been quite so easy. SpamAssassin rules are free to use the full perl regular expression language — and this language supports many features that re2c’s subset does not. So we need to extract/translate the rule regexps to simplified subsets. This has generally been the case with all parallel matching systems, anyway, so that’s not a massive problem.
More problematically, re2c itself does not support nested patterns — if one token is contained within another, e.g. “FOO” within “FOOD”, then the subsumed token will not be listed as a match. SpamAssassin rules, of course, are free to overlap or subsume each other, so an automated way to detect this is required.
For simple text patterns, this is easy enough to do using substring matching — e.g. “FOOD” =~ /\QFOO\E/ . Unfortunately, once any kind of sophisticated regexp functionality is available, this is no longer the case: consider /FOO*OD/ vs /FOO/ , /F[A-Z]OD/ vs /FO[M-P]/ , /F(?:OO|U)D/ vs /F(?:O|UU)?O/ .
The only way to do this is to either (a) fully parse the regexp, build the trie, and basically reimplement most of re2c to do this in advance; or (b) change the trie-generation code in re2c to support states returning multiple patterns, as Aho-Corasick does.
I requested support for this in re2c, but got a brush-off, unfortunately. So work continues…
In other news, that food poisoning thing I had back at the end of June has lingered on. It’s now pretty clear that it isn’t food poisoning or a stomach bug… but I still have no idea what it actually is. No fun :(
Here’s another quick-hack Greasemonkey user script I wrote recently.
Stretch-to-fit Textareas is a user script which improves the usability of editable textareas; it causes them to “stretch” vertically to fit their contents, as you type. This behaviour was inspired by that of textareas in FogBugz.
It can be inhibited by turning off the small checkbox to the right of each textarea.
Update: it’s worth noting that this is different from the Resizeable Textareas Firefox extension. Whereas the latter allows the user to resize the textareas by hand, this user script does that action automatically, based on the contents of the field; no manual resize-handle-searching and dragging is required. On the other hand, this user script will only stretch textareas vertically, whereas the extension allows them to be dragged in both dimensions. In fact, the two are complementary — I’m running both, and I suggest you do too ;)
Update 2: here’s a Firefox extension version — Greasemonkey not required!
LKML: Alexey Zaytsev: Time to forbid non-subscribers from posting to the list? — the linux-kernel mailing list discusses list moderation as an anti-spam strategy.
Spam really sucks; anything that deals with email now has to include some set of anti-spam features because of it. The LKML has important features that mitigate against simply closing the list partially, such as being a point where bug reports are submitted — so this is a thorny issue for them.
For what it’s worth, I have written a system to further automate moderation beyond the basic features provided by Mailman and ezmlm. http://taint.org/wk/ModerateList describes this in detail; in essence, it’s a specialised mail user agent designed to moderate lists quickly and efficiently, with an outboard spam filter built in (SpamAssassin, of course, via its perl API).
I moderate about a thousand messages per week using this (last time I checked), and it takes about 30 seconds per day to do so, so it’s pretty efficient.
In other news: wow, talking to a good accountant can really mitigate complicated tax issues… phew.
OK — looks like I’ve found the perfect poem for our wedding ceremony; allow me to present “Gravity of Love”:
One day, one day I asked myself
What is the right number or symbol?
What is the perfect equation?
What truly is LOGIC?
And who decides right reasoning?
In cause of no answer to my quest,
I traveled through the physical and metaphysical,
I traveled through the delusional and mystical
And at last back to the physical.
I made most important invention of my life career
That it’s only in the mysterious equation; logic of love
Any logical; mystical and psychological reasoning can be found.
It’s you in me I only believe that’s true and real
All I can say is — Wow.
For the past few years, I’ve been a very happy user of Netflix, the innovative web site which let you receive DVDs via the post for a flat fee per month, for US residents. When I got back to Dublin, I was very happy to see that there was a local equivalent, in the form of ScreenClick — so I signed up.
However, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with their service, for the same reasons as Adrian Weckler writes about here…
Turnaround time: this varies wildly, and can take nearly a week to turn around a DVD from dropping it in the postbox to receiving the next one. Netflix was reliably two days for me, out in suburban Orange County, California; Even this Kansas blogger noted that the longest they’d waited was 4 days.
This may seem to be an externality for Screenclick — but really, it shouldn’t be. Their business is built on the postal service, and they have to have decent results for it to work.
The ‘wishlist’ model: Netflix uses a queue, operating on a first-in, first-out model, while Screenclick uses something they call a ‘wishlist’, where the DVDs are delivered based both on position in the list and availability — in other words, you can find you’ve been delivered the DVD at number 10 in your list, instead of whatever’s at the top.
Again, superficially a minor point. However, one important factor is that these services are bought by households, not by individuals. Chez jm, that means that we operated a pretty strict alternating system in our Netflix queue — one movie for me, one movie for the lovely C, repeat. This is now thoroughly scuppered with a random ‘lucky dip’ system. On top of that, forget about watching a serial in order. The end result is a mess.
The website: it’s atrocious, a hodge-podge of ads for third-party sites, press coverage of Screenclick, more ads for Screenclick (hey, I’m already a customer!), and news clippings I couldn’t care less about — with finally a few tiny sidebar boxes containing the things I want (login, search box and wishlist). My impression: it’s designed to sell the company to investors and advertisers, not for customer use.
On top of that, it’s all squished into a tiny window — Irish web designers need to buy bigger screens! That late-’90’s Jakob Nielsen thing about users not knowing how to scroll? They’ve learned by now.
That’s not even talking about the awful Javascript that’s used to edit the wishlist ordering, where little buttons need to be clicked repetitively, one by one, to reorder the list. Surely someone took a look around at other sites first — Amazon perhaps — to see how other sites do it?
Anyway, on this count, I sent in a mail containing a batch of bug reports and unsolicited opinions, and got no reply. ;)
Less bang-for-buck: pretty simple. Netflix: 3 movies at a time, more movies in the collection, $17.99 per month; Screenclick, 2 movies at a time, EUR 19.99 ($25.56, $10 more expensive than the equivalent Netflix service) per month. Surprisingly, this is actually a minor issue compared to the others, though, since it’s made plain from the outset.
These may seem to be minor points, but when selling a disposable-income service to consumers, the difference between an essential leisure-time service and a waste of pocket money is a very fine line. Looks like Adrian eventually cancelled. I’m not at that point yet, but it’s heading that way…
Here’s a new Greasemonkey user script which fixes a minor annoyance in the Bugzilla user interface. When viewing the ‘Create a New Attachment’ page, this will transclude the previous comments onto the bottom of that page, for reference while editing: bz_see_earlier_comments.user.js
Thanks to Jesse Ruderman for the nifty AJAXish iframe-transclusion trick it uses.