taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Meta: You might have noticed things being a bit quite around here recently. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for good reasons.

A close family member in Ireland died suddenly on Good Friday. Once we found out, being in Death Valley (of all places) that weekend, we made a mad dash back home for the removal, funeral, and so on. The past two weeks have been not so much fun, all in all.

I’m torn between eulogising here, and keeping it offline. All in all, I think it’d be better to not use this weblog for that; I don’t think it’d be appropriate. But he’ll be greatly missed.

Tags: bit, dash, family, friday, fun, good, home, member, meta, removal, weekend

Spam: So, next Friday I’ll be in Cambridge, MA for the Spam Conference 2004, a one-day extravaganza of probabilistic classifiers, spam-bashing, and hopefully, some socializing too.

Anyone else planning to attend? If so, see you there!

Tags: anyone, conference, extravaganza, friday, planning, spam

Software: Great LWN weekly edition last Friday; not only is there a very nice article about SpamAssassin, debunking the ‘open spam filtering rules considered harmful’ myth, but there’s a great tool tip: Meld, a new graphical merging tool.

Basically, when you have two pieces of text, and want to merge them together into one, you need a merge tool. This is a tricky job; most people just get the tool to stick them all in one file, CVS-style, and try to figure it out visually. It’s fraught with problems.

Hence the idea of using a GUI to ease the task. There have been other graphical merge tools before; I know of the proprietary one bundled with ClearCase, and tkdiff. However, both of these just aren’t very good — it’s quite simply too hard to figure out exactly what direction which piece of text came from.

Looks like meld is a fantastic effort to fix this; take a look at the screenshots. The key is the approach they’ve taken of having a drawable area in the middle between the two differing texts; this is used for lines and graphical indications of what came from where. It really seems to work, from what I can see.

Tags: article, edition, friday, great, lwn, software, spam, spamassassin, text, the, tool

Guardian: Courage under fire. No matter what you think about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, Caoimhe, and the other international observers, require your support:

Friday was a very close call. Caoimhe was shot in the left thigh as she stood in between a firing IDF tank and three young boys in the street. I spoke to her on the phone shortly after the attack as she lay in her hospital bed. She explained that she had been trying to persuade the IDF, after they shot dead a nine-year-old boy, to stop shooting at the children. They had told her to get out of their way or they would shoot her. It was while she was clearing the children off the streets that she was shot. She is sure she was a direct target; the tank was close by, the soldier pointed his gun at her and fired, and continued to do so as she crawled to an alleyway for shelter.

I asked an IDF spokesman for his explanation. ‘We are in the middle of a war and we cannot be responsible for the safety of anyone who has not been coordinated by the IDF to be in the occupied territories right now. While we do not want innocent Palestinians to suffer, or internationals to get hurt, we are trying to ensure the safety of the Israelis and we will not tolerate internationals interfering with IDF operations. It is not the job of internationals to stand in the line of fire, unless they are the son of God, but he hasn’t come yet.’

Tags: caoimhe, courage, fire, friday, guardian, idf, matter, safety, support, tank

The Guardian: Word of the week: “basically”:

“Perhaps you are one of those strong individuals who manages to resist the use of meaningless adverbs, but others will have recognised, guiltily, one of their own favourite words appearing as a verbal tic in a widely broadcast statement this week. On Friday, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, accused of attempting to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami, introduced a slice of South London syntax into the Boston court where he is being tried. Questioned by the judge about his intentions, he declared: “Basically, I got on to the plane with a bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the plane.” …

Tags: broadcast, favourite, friday, guardian, plane, shoe, statement, use, week, word