Our Story

Update 9/4/2003: Please note that these somewhat cumbersome instructions below are now deprecated. You can now install SpamBayes with the simple MS Outlook plugin, provided by the SpamBayes project. See the download page for the plugin. The instructions below should only be followed if you want to install the latest bleeding-edge release of SpamBayes.

Ever since I last wrote about SpamBayes, I couldn’t wait to try to install it on my PC. The problem was that the Outlook plugin that was created for SpamBayes wouldn’t play nice with Outlook 2002 on Windows 2000–the exact configuration I’m running. Go figure.

Since then, I’ve been dying to install this software. The spam problem at work has upgraded from mildly annoying to prolific–spam now consists of 75% of my daily email. The majority of it is mild: cable boxes, money scams, and diet pills. However, at least a handful of these emails are for products that I’d rather not mention in a public forum. For months, everytime I open my inbox I’ve been anxious that a coworker will turn the corner and see me looking at (use your imagination). I’ve tried addressing the problem by setting up keyword-based rules in Outlook. They’re at the point where they take care of most of the problem, but I still get a handful of spam that leaks through.

On June 21^st, the SpamBayes team released a third alpha version of (1.0a3) the software and, while they haven’t yet released a nice install package, I was able to download the source code and run an installation program in a Python GUI–all of which was relatively painless. If you’re beleagured by spam and feeling adventurous, give this a whirl:

# Download the the latest SpamBayes Zip file (e.g. SpamBayes-1.0a4.zip)
# Unzip the file and you’ll get a folder called “spambayes”
# Move this folder into C:\Progam Files
# Download the latest Python build (2.3)
# Run installer for Python 2.3, which will create a folder in your start menu
# Download the required Python Win32 Extensions for Python 2.3
# Run the installer for the Python Win32 Extentions–this program will install a Python GUI in your start menu (Note: you must have Python installed first!)
# Open Start → Programs → Python 2.3 → Pythonwin–that will open the Python GUI
# Click File → Open… and click to C:\Program Files\spambayes\Outlook2000\addin.py (Note, the path for version 0.4a is slightly different: C:\Program Files\spambayes-1.0a4\Outlook2000\addin.py).
# Click File → Run…, don’t change anything in the dialog box, and click OK
# The script will run and should not return any messages
# Open (or restart) Outlook–the install was successful if you have a new “SpamBayes” toolbar

After all of that is completed (whew!) you’ll want to open the SpamBayes Manager via the toolbar, and click on the About… button. That will give you some help on setting up the plugin.

Now, rather than dreading spam, I can’t wait to get more so I can train SpamBayes to kill it–bring it on.

Dave Shea: Reconciling Flash. The goal of �experience design� is flawed. When I�m on the web, I am generally looking for information. I don�t browse for the sake of browsing, and that�s unfortunately what those aiming to provide an experience expect me to do. It�s funny: I�m a visual person, and I know great illustration, photography, and animation enhances content. But when used as an end result? I just don�t get as much out of it.

I had actually wanted to write a comment on Dave’s site regarding my thoughts on the Flash vs. CSS/HTML debate. It occurred to me as I wrote that I was going well past long-winded for a comment, so I brought my thoughts here. Enjoy and discuss.

Hi Dave. I think there is a critical component to your current CSS-bent that you refered to in your recent coding vs. design article: the separation of content and design. This is not possible in Flash at all—and it’s not as simple as “Flash is a bad medium.”
Homestarrunner is a great example: you can’t separate the content of the cartoons from their presentation methodology; they’re all one integrated component. This doesn’t make cartoons any less capable medium of expressing content—animators will likely argue that they are capable of expressing ideas and emotions that would take paragraphs in plain text—just “different.” Machines are not capable of understanding cartoons, animation cannot be cataloged and queried, and, perhaps most importantly to this discussion, animation cannot have its ideas torn out and reproduced in another medium (without recreating it entirely).
This doesn’t make Flash inferior as a content medium, but it’s not how we use the Internet right now. We search and catalog things by text, we express ideas in text (though photoblogs are becoming increasingly common—note, too, Mark Pilgrim’s current experiments with RDF and his photos), business transactions, which have arguably driven the Internet’s explosion since 1995, are all text-based.
We all know these things implicitly and, I think, get a sense of comparing apples to oranges in our CSS/HTML vs. Flash debates. Markup-based technology was built with the idea in mind that anyone would be able to access its content. Flash is great, but by its very nature caters to a specific mode of expression—a mode of expression which appeals, in fact, to a subset of the target audience of markup.

So, I was finally, finally, finally getting down to blogging about the Matrix. I’ve been sitting here on the couch for the last three hours, writing in my own, brilliant, inimitable style. The ideas were flowing, my markup was precise, and I was just getting down to publishing the first draft for all the world to see. But, just before I get down to clicking that “Save” button, I decide to open a new tab and watch the Reloaded trailer just one more time to catch a quote that I wanted to include.

Now, I love my browser. Anyone who reads Our Story is quite aware of the fact that I think you all should download and install it now. But, Mozilla—as with any browser, or any software for that matter—is bound to fail every now and again. Less than 10 seconds into my trailer, an error message pops up and the Mozilla crashes, taking all those hundreds of hard-wrought words with it into digital oblivion.

After shouting the required explitives at the computer, beating the couch with my fist, and some good, old-fashioned pouting, I decided to go look for blogging client software that would—if nothing else—be able to save my posts with some degree of security greater than an HTML text-entry box. After some brief searching in this directory on Google, I rediscovered w.bloggar.

In addition to a “save” feature, w.bloggar can auto-highlight HTML code, provide me with a completely customizable preview of my entry, let me adjust my editing text size to a much more comfortable 14 point MS Trebuchet font, and even do some spell checking. It also features button-based HTML editing so I can auto-insert less-often used tags without looking them up or using trial-and-error. The software is quite stable (though with some very minor UI glitches) and, better yet, free.

I’m going to try to recall my Matrix entry and recover my sanity now. Happy blogging.

A blog entry by Ryan Lowe reminded me of an idea I’ve always had for backup software that seems so simple that I can’t believe I haven’t found it yet.

A lot of people–Ryan included–use CD burners to copy critical data like My Documents and store it away somewhere in the event of a crash. This solution gets the job done, but requires manual copying, which means time away from getting “real work” done. It also requires an accessible CD burner. I have a burner, but not on my laptop, which adds steps to this process to copy the data over to another machine. And, while CDs are cheap, they’re somewhat burdensome to juggle and keep track of.

I always wanted a solution to back up my data over our home network. Last year, I bought a 40 GB drive at Best Buy because I got a really great deal. It sits in our home PC, a modest P233, and is largely underused. My main PC, a laptop from work, has a 20 GB drive, about 10 of which is the data that I care about. To my knowledge, though, there really isn’t an easy way to do this kind of backup short of manually copying the files over, which just puts me back to where I started.

I want a TSR (do they call them that anymore?) program that I can set up once. I want to be able to point out the folders that contain my critical data and the backup “server” for which it should be looking (by IP address, DNS name, IPX/SPX, whatever). Then, every time I start my PC, I want the program to wait quietly until it can find the backup server on the current network (no ugly errors if I’m at work or school). Once it finds the machine, it uses just a preset percentage of my bandwidth to copy files to that machine–better yet, it would monitor my bandwidth usage and throttle up or down depending on my decrease or increase in demand.

Being a smart program, the backup software wouldn’t simply copy my entire MP3 collection across the network everytime I was in range of the WLAN. Instead, it would keep a database of which files have been changed when and copy only the files that have been recently updated. Not only would this be an intelligent use of resources, but it brings to light an interesting property of disk usage: I only use some of my files (perhaps even only 10%) most of the time and most of my files some of the time. Most of my files–like music or video–go unchanged indefinitely, while there are a handful of files–like email or databases–that are updated every day.

With the proliferation of home networks in the last few years, this would be a very practical and even profitable idea. Of course, the ideal package would be Open Source. Rather than be relegated to backing up only to a Microsoft machine running the latest and greatest operating system, I want to be able to put the hard drive in a Linux machine and copy my PC and future iMac data to it. So, the client might ideally be written in Java or be a Mozilla app.

And, just for kicks, I’m using the LazyWeb trackback to broaden exposure to this idea and see if there are any takers.