Ohloh is fun — a social networking site for free software and open source developers! Well, I guess Advogato was there first, but this is quite a bit more web2.0-compliant. ;) There are some cool features, like neat Sparkline graphs of commits per person over time. nifty.
Here I am, and here’s the Apache SpamAssassin project page.
Tags: coding, contributions, fun, ohloh, open-source, social-networking, software
Hey Danny! I’ve already filled out my “5 Things” list. Surprisingly (or thankfully) nobody has commented on #5 ;)
Great Things, btw. I might adopt #4, and see if it works.
It’s great fun following the web of “5 Things” links as they percolate through the interwebs. now if only the people I nominated would get on with their lists…
Well, the second half of the wedding — the fun part, with dinner, dancing, friends, and family — went off without a hitch. Our hippy-crap-laden humanist ceremony, celebrated with the aid of our friend Gerry, was a great success; the pianist and various DJs provided fantastic aural accompaniment; and the venue, Markree Castle in County Sligo, was fantastic, taking care of the entire party in every way we hadn’t foreseen and putting up with us far into the early hours of the next day.
That was the most fun I’ve had in yonks, and thanks to everyone who came. (And those who didn’t, due to the whims of US visa conditions — you were much missed.)
Photos will follow once we’re back from the honeymoon, which starts tomorrow morning. later ;)
Quick note — I’m off on vacation next week — so I probably won’t read any email while I’m there ;) Talk to you after the 17th.
I don’t do silly blog antics much, but I got tagged by Mat for the Four Things meme. Looking around, it is indeed a bit more interesting than things like the usual LJ quiz, so why not!
I wrote this on the plane from LA to Dublin, which may have affected some of the selections in 4 places I would rather be right now at least ;)
4 jobs I’ve had:
I was Iona Technologies’ first employee, and stayed there for no less than 7 years. I got to see the company grow from a handful of people, most of whom weren’t getting paid (hence how I wound up as the first employee ;), all the way up to a 300-strong multinational, while the company itself formed a core of Ireland’s mini dot-com boom. That was fantastic fun, and educational to boot.
my Dad’s gun/fishing/sporting-goods shop. Was it really a good idea to have a teenager working near firearms? At least I wasn’t the one who unplugged the fridge where the maggots were kept, so that they all hatched over the course of one weekend…
A horrible teenage job — picking tomatoes. I can still feel the orange dust under my fingernails every time I smell fresh tomatoes :( I didn’t last very long at that at all.
writing an Amiga-based kiosk system for virtually no pay whatsoever, at the age of 18 or 19. Ah, exploitation.
4 movies I can watch over and over:
Koyaanisqatsi — it’s dating a little now, since every ad agency through the 90s ripped it off. But still, the invention of a new format. I remember looking at the 405 freeway in LA, and thinking “looks like something out of Koyaanisqatsi” — of course, it was.
Princess Mononoke — either that, or Nausicaa. I just love the way the characters are coloured in shades of grey, rather than black and white.
the Lord of the Rings trilogy — oh dear I’m a hopeless Tolkien fanboy.
Spinal Tap — pure genius.
4 places I’ve lived:
Melbourne, Australia; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The Secret Lives Of Us;
Newport Beach, CA; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The O.C.;
Dublin, Ireland; no annoying TV drama — so far
University of California Irvine, CA; while Irvine itself is the most soulless suburban hellhole I’ve ever visited, living on the UCI campus is quite fun by comparison. Take about 1000 grad students, post-docs and lecturers from around the world; put them all in the same square mile or so; remove all fun (and bars!) from the surrounding areas; watch them make their own entertainment, or go mad.
4 tv shows I love:
4 places I’ve vacationed:
Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal; we trekked our way up to there, then trekked back down again. Unforgettable. I really want to do another Nepal trek as a result
car-camping around the Australian state of Victoria; they have some fantastic national park campsites, which most tourists overlook
learning how to dive in Ko Tao, Thailand; great setting, great dive sites, pretty cheap too!
Yosemite; amazing, world-class natural beauty. Californians don’t realise just how lucky they’ve got it ;)
4 of my favourite dishes:
A good Thai green curry
Laos-style green papaya salad with sticky rice
a good meaty cassoulet, from Fandango in San Luis Obispo. At least, that was the tastiest meal I’ve had in recent months ;)
Mangosteen — the queen of fruit, according to the Thais. I could, and probably have, eaten hundreds of these
4 places I would rather be right now:
spending New Year’s Day with a bunch of friends in rural West Cork or County Galway; until I moved to the US, this was one of my favourite annual traditions.
the Stag’s Head Bar, Dublin, in the snug, again with a bunch of friends
sitting on the grass outside the Pavilion bar in TCD, on a sunny summer’s day (hmm, that’s a lot of bars!)
Chiang Mai, Thailand
4 sites I visit daily:
4 people I’m tagging:
Well, I’m back… it appears that Google Maps link I posted wasn’t too much use in deciphering where I was going; sorry about that. Myself and C spent a fun week and a bit, driving up to Kings Canyon and Yosemite, backpacking around for a few days, then driving back down via the 395 via Bishop, Mammoth Lakes, Lone Pine and so on.
Kings Canyon: Unfortunately, not so much fun; we had the bad luck of encountering what must be the tail end of the mosquito season, and spent most of our 2 days there running up and down the Woods Creek trail without a break, entirely surrounded by clouds of mozzies. Possibly this headlong dashing explains how we ran into so much other wildlife — including a (harmless) California Mountain King Snake and, less enjoyably — and despite wearing bear bells on our packs to avoid this – a black bear…
We rounded a corner on the trail, and there it was, munching on elderberries. Once we all spotted each other, there were some audible sounds of surprise from both bear and humans, and the bear ran off in the opposite direction; the humans, however, did not. We were about 500 feet from our camp for the night, so we needed to get past where the bear had been, or face a long walk back.
Despite some fear (hey, this was our first bear encounter!), we stuck around, shouted, waved things, and took the various actions you take. It all went smoothly, the bear had probably long since departed, but we took it slow regardless, and had a very jittery night in our tent afterwards. After that, and the unceasing mozzie onslaught, we were in little hurry to carry on around the planned loop, so we cut short our Kings Canyon trip by a day and just returned down the trail to its base.
Yosemite: a much more successful trip. There were many reasons, primarily that the mosquito population was much, much lower, and discovering that the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge – comfortable tent cabins, excellent food, and fantastic company — provided a truly excellent base camp.
But I’d have to say that the incredible beauty of Tuolumne Meadows and the Vogelsang Pass really blew me away. I don’t think I’ve seen any landscape quite like that, since trekking to Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal. I’m with John Muir — Yosemite and its surrounds are a wonder of the world.
Lee Vining: had to pick up a sarnie at the world-famous Whoa Nellie Deli. Yum! After all the camping, we stayed in a hotel with TV, got some washing done, and watched scenes from a J.G. Ballard novel play out on NBC and CNN. Mind-boggling.
Mammoth Lakes: A quick kvetch. Mammoth is possibly the most pedestrian-hostile town I’ve ever visited. They have a hilarious section of 100 feet of sidewalk, where I encountered a fellow pedestrian using those ski-pole-style hiking walking sticks, and entirely in seriousness. Was the concept of walking so foreign in that town that long-distance walking accessories were required? I don’t know, but it didn’t make up for the other 90% of the streets where peds were shoved off onto the shoulder, in full-on ’sidewalk users aren’t welcome here’ Orange County style.
On top of that, the single pedestrian crossing in the main street spans five lanes of traffic, with no lighting, warning signs, or indeed any effective way for drivers to know whether peds were crossing or not. Unsurprisingly we nearly got run over when we tried using the damn thing. Best avoided.
I’m amazed — it’s like they designed the town to be ped-hostile. Surely allowing peds to get around your town is a bonus when you’re a ski resort for half of the year? Meh.
Anyway, back again, a little refreshed. Once more into the fray…
Tags: backpacking, bears, california, camping, fun, hiking, kings-canyon, lee-vining, mammoth-lakes, national-parks, tuolomne-meadows, vacation, wildlife, yosemite
Patents: I’m just back from a fantastic holiday weekend, totally offline, hiking through Catalina Island. I’m a little bit sunburnt, my nose is peeling, but it was great fun. I got a fantastic picture of the sun setting over hundreds of boats bobbing at their moorings in Two Harbors, which I must upload at some stage.
Anyway, it seems that over the weekend, the EU software-patents debate has swung back heavily towards the anti-swpat side. Fingers crossed — the vote is this week.
Also, today, EUpolitix.com has an interview with Charlie McCreevy, quoting him as saying:
‘The theme, or the background music, to both of these particular directives (the CII and Services Directives) you could see as part of, anti-globalisation, anti-Americanism, anti-big business protests – in lots of senses, anti-the opening up of markets’
This is standard practice for the Irish government — they did exactly the same thing with the e-voting issue, painting the ICTE as ‘linked to the anti-globalisation movement’. (I have a feeling they think that any group organised online must be ‘anti-globalisation’, at this stage.)
Of course, with these accusations of being anti-free-market, it’s important to remember that a patent is a government-issued monopoly on an invention (or in the software field, on an idea), in a particular local jurisdiction. If anything, being against software patenting is a pro-free-market position, one shared by prominent US libertarians; and nothing gets more pro-free-market than those guys. ;)
Tags: bit, fun, hiking, holiday, nose, offline, patents, software, stage, sunburnt, weekend
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
Trips: So I’m just back from ApacheCon 2004, which took place in the lovely Alexis Park building site ;)
Good fun was had — very interesting to meet all the faces behind the names from various mailing lists and blogs, and get the inside track on how the ASF really works… there’s quite a lot you don’t get to understand from the outside, or even from being a committer. So, a useful trip.
Most of the talks were, naturally, very web-oriented — we’ll have to see what we can do about that, next time around! One useful tidbit: I didn’t realise, but found out at the conference, that the ASF ConCom are very generous with paying speakers’ expenses. So maybe next time I’ll join the speaker line-up, too.
A major goal, one we achieved, was an impromptu SpamAssassin developer summit, 5 days sitting down together hammering on bugs and plans, with 4 of the main developers present (myself, Daniel, Theo and Michael). Pretty much achieved, although there were some thorny bugs to deal with… one interesting factor is that we may now be moving towards emulating the Apache httpd’s preforking model to deal with a memory/performance issue we’re seeing in 3.0.x.
Finally — this sequence of photos has been cropping up all over the internets. When I saw it, I immediately thought it looked a lot like Ireland — and Roundstone, Co. Galway, in particular. Sure enough, it appears it is! I guess the Connemara landscape of Roundstone’s bay is pretty memorable, after all…
Tags: apachecon, asf, building, fun, lot, mailing, place, roundstone, site, time, trips
Travel: Toorcon was great fun! Lots of interesting conversations.
Unfortunately they had a cruddy internet connection, so I’m majorly backlogged, and can’t write about any of it just yet ;)
Spam: So, CEAS was great fun, and very educational:
My highlight papers:
IBM’s Chung-Kwei pattern-discovery system — the one which Mark dug up. Very interesting stuff; it turns out that bioinformatics is full of large corpora of data (genomes) which you then need to find patterns in. Funnily enough, so is SpamAssassin: s/genomes/spam/, s/patterns/regular expressions/. The more advanced pattern-discovery algorithms even allow complex patterns to contain alternative blocks, ‘don’t-cares’ and similar regular-expression-like features.
The really good bit of Chung-Kwei is the Teiresias algorithm (more pages, online demo). Of course, being IBM research, it’s probably patented to the hilt, and may be tricky to license; but it’s certainly pointed us in a whole new interesting direction — anyone know any bioinformaticians?
IBM is really gearing up on anti-spam research. 4 of the 6 papers listed on their website were presented this year, at CEAS.
Another good paper was On Attacking Statistical Spam Filters, by Gregory L. Wittel and S. Felix Wu, which (similarly to Henry Stern’s submission, which I helped a little with) dealt with an attack on Bayesian filters.
This is interesting stuff; we’re pretty sure it’s not as serious as it could possibly be, in SpamAssassin’s implementation, but it’s still a serious attack.
I took copious notes on the SpamAssassin wiki, if anyone’s curious.
Tags: attack, ceas, dev, fun, got, ibm, research, spam, spamassassin, stuff
Travel: I’m just back from a great road trip around Nevada and Arizona – lots of fun was had, and I even came out $100 up on the blackjack!
In other travels, my mate Eoin recently visited Muff, Co. Donegal, and made sure to get a picture of the event.
Muff is well-reknowned as one of those towns with a silly name; the story goes that they even have a SCUBA diving club, called — guess what – “Muff Diving Club”. Sadly, the reports are apparently greatly exagerrated. Eoin writes:
I have been hearing the story of the ‘muff diving club’ for the last 10 years, and now i can categorically state that its an urban legend. No such thing. There was a ‘top muff’ petrol station though where we picked up a few keyrings. The girl behind the counter was trying to give us all 200 keyrings left in the bag as she was so sick of muppets like us coming in for a laugh.
Tags: blackjack, club, event, fun, mate, muff, picture, road, story, travel, trip
Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’
I’d guess that was our fault, moving SpamAssassin CVS to subversion at apache.org ;) Happy to oblige, Rod!
If I wasn’t so jet-lagged (still!), suffering from a cold, and busy with the day job, I’d be having that fun myself; SVN is very, very, very nice from what little I can tell so far. Only time will tell if it can beat the lovely Perforce, though, the virtues of which I have extolled on many occasions (earning myself a freebie T-shirt in the process, payola!).
But yeah, SVN looks really cool.
Tags: bunch, code, cvs, fault, fun, life, package, spamassassin, subversion, svn, today
Fun: 
C just got her xmas present; a digital camera,
the Sony DSC P10 to be exact. Results to right ;)
Good: Sony’s easy-to-use use of USB mass-storage and open formats (GIF, JPEG, and MPEG). pnmstitch.
Bad: having to upgrade my kernel to 2.4.23 to get the bloody thing mounted! (Of course, iPhoto recognised it right away.)
Tags: camera, dsc, fun, gif, jpeg, mpeg, pnmstitch, right, sony, usb, use
Funny: Mick @ P45 has a good entry today on plagiarism. He notes that an academic pal once wrote a program to test for plagiarism by his students:
It uses a fairly rough and ready ‘brute force’ approach. Nonetheless, it can identify significant strings that have been regurgitated from Text A in Text B.
Anyway, he decided just for fun to fire the program at the website’s astrology predictions for the previous 18 months or so. The program churned away, and duly spat out the results. And - well heavens above - hadn’t the astrologer been copying and pasting very large chunks of his own predictions, apparently at random and nothing to do with ‘Uranus being in the ascendent’ or other such drivel that horoscopes concern themselves with.
Tags: approach, entry, force, fun, funny, pal, plagiarism, program, text, today, website
Life: so myself and C took a one-night-only trip up to Idyllwild this weekend, hiking up to that rock formation and camping overnight. Great fun.
The rock is called ‘Suicide Rock’. It’s good to see morbid naming is international, but I should note that the prize for best placenames has to go to Victoria, Australia’s Mount Buggery, though.
(I drove past Mt. Buggery last year, and, disappointingly, it seems they’ve renamed it on the official maps. But the other ‘I can’t believe we’re still crossing this bloody mountain range and haven’t made it to Melbourne yet’ placenames still exist.)
Language: Riverbend blog notes interesting trivia in passing: Winnie the Pooh, in Arabic, is ‘Winnie Dabdoob’.
Open Source: GROKLAW on the WSIS fiasco earlier this summer. Briefly, the WSIS — the World Summit on the Information Society — came out with a position pro-open-source, and quite a few large companies seemed to say ‘eek!’ and promptly lobbied as hard as they could to give that line a vasectomy.
Interestingly, they did the same to the spam-related positions, cutting ‘a number of proposals, including prosecution of spammers’ down to a watery ‘take appropriate action on spam at national and international levels’. Snore. Fantastic work, guys.
Weblogs: When did Boing Boing stop taking comments? (looks) seems to be around about this entry of Sep 10. As far as I can see, this is the last comments page.
Shame — I’m with Jeremy on this one.
Dublin: is this entry, by London’s 3W the real winner of the competition to design the new U2 studio in Dublin’s Sir John Rogerson’s Quay?
Tags: boing, entry, formation, fun, hiking, idyllwild, life, rock, trip, weekend, wsis
Back from a great week-and-a-half in Ireland. Lots of fun (and Guinness) was had, Luke and Lean were successfully married, Ireland is officially the most beautiful country in the world, weather was amazing, got to meet up with virtually everyone, and I’m now back at the computer catching up.
Of course, some git has joe-jobbed both myself and a mailing list I’m on, so there’s thousands of bounce messages as a result and the server is slow as a wet week. Argh. But at least the SoBig onslaught has died down a bit.
Interestingly, I reported some spam to SpamCop a week or two before the joe-job. I wonder if the two really are connected — ie. report spam, and the spammers will decode the listwashing tokens from their mails, figure out your email address, and add you to their ‘enemies list’?
This is the first time I’ve reported spam to SpamCop in a long time, and the first joe-job I’ve been victim of. It seems like more than a coincidence, IMO.
Tags: country, everyone, fun, guinness, spam, spamcop, time, weather, week, world
Incredible. The text ‘My wife, Jody’ has appeared, reliably, in spam for the last 5 years — I just got one today. (I haven’t actually seen one in my inbox for a while, though, since the chain letters that copy it generally get pretty high scores — this one hit a respectable 48.2 SpamAssassin points, no less.)
Here’s the text it appears in:
MORE TESTIMONIALS
‘My name is Mitchell. My wife, Jody and I live in Chicago. I am an accountant with a major U.S.Corporation and I make pretty good money. When I received this program I grumbled to Jody about receiving ‘junk mail’. I made fun of the whole thing, spouting my knowledge of the population and percentages involved. I ‘knew’ it wouldn’t work. Jody totally ignored my supposed intelligence and few days later she jumped in with both feet. I made merciless fun of her, and was ready to lay the old ‘I told you so’ on her when the thing didn’t work. Well, the laugh was on me! Within 3 weeks she had received 50 responses. Within the next 45 days she had received total $147,200.00 …….. all cash! I was shocked. I have joined Jody in her ‘hobby’.’
Mitchell Wolf M.D., Chicago, Illinois
It’s amazing that the chain letter is never changed, given that for the last few years they are all sent using spamware applications, so the senders must have some techie know-how.
I wonder if there’s a real Mitchell Wolf M.D. in Chicago, and what he’d think of 5 years of faked testimonials using his name?
Tags: chain, fun, incredible, jody, name, spam, text, thing, today, wife
On a lighter note, I’ve written down my adventures through Thailand on the way over to Australia — with pics! Check it out.
Much fun was had. Hopefully I’ll be able to add some more travels to the site soon enough — although it’s doubtful I’ll be doing any overland trips from Asia to Ireland, given the likely feelings towards westerners in the Middle East, soon enough…
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
