TechProsaic

From the site:

I use a lot of little programs to make my day-to-day life easier. Here are a few of them.

But even better, he’s got a great list of links at the bottom to other similar sites.

My Favorite Smallware :: MarkTAW.com

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My kinda thread: The “neat application I stumbled across on the web” thread (arstechnica)

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Haven’t blogged in a while. As usually happens, work picks up pretty quickly after the New Year in my industry. So, I’ve been busy working!

I just came across something interesting that was said by the terrorist Musab al-Zarqawi recently:

“We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology”

Sounds to me like Al-Qaida are upset we have Freedom and the rest of the Iraqis are about to. Darn that Freedom and Democracy! We should just revert to a totalitarian dictatorship with a state-enforced religion to make the terrorists happy!

References:
Don’t take the president’s word for it - take Zarqawi’s, by Jonah Goldberg

Google News

[This shall be my only Politics post for a while, I don’t like cluttering up my pretty blog with this stuff usually.]

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I went to check on the WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin post and didn’t really have anything special to say, but was surprised to see that I’ve been proactively blacklisted for being a Comcast customer!

Warning: Your IP address 24.30.32.149 has been found on a spam advisory list. You will not be able to post comments. More information is available.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand, I really do. I’ve done my research, paid attention to the spam tactics, run my own Spam Assassin server, etc, etc, etc. It’s just a bit offensive for me to be affected personally since I did nothing wrong.

This is why I dont’ like IP address blacklists, and why I don’t use [one][] of [the][] [many][] Wordpress plugins that use that technique, although I greatly respect the authors’ works.

What I do like are DNS blacklists based on the content of the comment spam (which to be fair I think some of the above do). This is one of my favorite features of Spamassassin 3.0 because it is really effective. Think about it. The point of spam of any kind, blog comment-embedded or not, is to drive traffic to a website that has a pitch for some scumbag’s product. So why not key your spam determination on that website?

The other main spam tactic I like and have liked for quite a while now is Bayesian filtering. This consists of breaking spam up into bits, most of them single words, and then by initially training a filter what good email is (say a letter from your mom), and what spam is (by looking at actual spam you have received), use this Bayesian technique which is a type of statistical math to measure if a given piece of email is spam or “ham”. With proper training, you can get 96%+ success rates no problem. (A bit of an aside, but my recommendations for client-side spam filtering are Spambayes and POPFile, both great products that work with any email program. Or run Thunderbird, which includes a Bayesian filter built-in.)

Spamassassin runs on your email provider’s server, which is the most efficient place to filter spam, and it uses both of these techniques, plus others, so harnessing it for comment spam blocking just makes sense.

[one]:http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2004/08/25/spammer-tar-pit
[the]: http://www.asymptomatic.net/wp-hacks
[many]: http://sm.farook.org/index.php?p=149

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IO ERROR - WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin

Yes, finally! Here’s an early version of a wordpress plugin to filter comments through Spam Assassin. I am watching this, but will not install it yet as I’m still evaluating CSPAM.

via dougal

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Title speaks for itself. A very good read.

Secrets of Firefox 1.0

As seen on del.icio.us‘ most popular links.

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Quick link to Last.FM. Streaming radio, tries to find people who like the music you do. I like it a lot so far.

Last.FM - Your personal music network - Personalised online radio station

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Quick link here, just found this one by accident. I haven’t checked it out yet, but looks very minimalistic, which I like.

WinXP Desktop Shell Replacement - Evil, as in Dr.

### Update ###
I’ve installed it, and it’s really pretty cool. It’s a side-docking bar that consists of your Explorer Quick Launch toolbar items, plus a tray notification area. There’s a context menu (right-click menu) that has the contents of your Start Menu. The bar is alpha blended, and also apparently has an Outlook / MAPI hook to show your number of unread messages, plus a animated bell icon to show you have new reminders. I think I’ll keep this one.

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