I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier. My email is stored on an IMAP server and I primarily used Apple’s Mail.app client to access it there. I’ve got Mail.app set up to store mail it identifies as “Junk” on the server, but until today I wasn’t harnessing Mail.app’s junk-fighting skills to make SpamAssassin smarter.

All I needed to do to make this happen was to set up a cron job to have SpamAssassin learn that all the mail in the Junk folder was spam:

/usr/bin/sa-learn --spam /home/peter/Maildir/.Junk/cur

This simply tells the SpamAssassin “learning” application, sa-learn, to take all the mail in my Junk folder and learn that it’s spam. I run it one a day.

I did an upgrade of SpamAssassin here at HQ yesterday, and I installed sa-stats.pl, a Perl script that parses the SpamAssassin log file and produces summary reports.

I knew that we were receiving a lot of spam here, but I had no idea it was so great a percentage of incoming email. I feel a lot better now about the dozen or so spam that are still getting through the net; at least I didn’t have to see the 681 other ones that came my way in the last 24 hours. Here’s a breakdown, by user on our mail server (with actual addresses blurred) showing the last 24 hours worth of incoming email:

Username:                      Total:  Ham:    Spam:   % Spam:
---------------------------------------------------------------
me                             751     70      681     90.68%
user support                   193     37      156     80.83%
*******                        122     3       119     97.54%
*******                        321     3       318     99.07%
*******                        399     13      386     96.74%
*******                        104     2       102     98.08%

In the chart “Ham” means email that isn’t spam. The overall figure is 93.23% spam over the 24 hours.

I absolutely love the Danish language locale for Denmark, Narrative Cultural Specification page. Full of culture-parsing goodness like:

Denmark has its own cultural symbols in some cases and use of non-Danish symbols as icons can create irritation and - if they are not easily recognized - confusion. Example: The typical suburban American mailbox with the raised flag is unusual in Denmark and hence not immediately associated with mail for most users.

Every country should have a page like this. Oh, wait, they do. At least countries in Scandanavia do. Alas, it says here that “the registry has not been updated since December 2001.” Fortunately the Common Locale Data Repository seems to be taking its place.

Just stumbled across this index of Creative Computing magazine that runs from 1981 to 1985, which were the years I would have been an avid reader. They were also the last fours years of the magazine’s life.

The vicitim of socks that were too heavy for the weather, I mused this morning about whether or not I should reconsider my lifelong ban on sandals wearing. My musing inspired considerable disucssion in the Jaikusphere. I’m sticking with shoes.

Every once in a while a plesant bit of the vernacular sneaks into an advertisement. Like this one for Northumberland Ferries:

In an industry that comes up with things like “in preparation for disembarkation,” to say “or just show up as usual” in an ad is something of a miracle. They could have said “if you don’t have a reservation you can still sail, but you must wait in line with everyone else” or “reservationless parties must queue.” Thankfully, they didn’t.

My friend in California sent me a story from the Boston Globe about the excavation of a blue whale here on PEI. He wondered why he hadn’t read about it in this space, what with the “history’s largest exhumation of a single creature” and all.

Truth be told, other than following the progress of the excavation on Compass for a few weeks, this event didn’t strike me as particularly significant or newsworthy. Perhaps because it didn’t seem to strike Islanders as particularly significant or newsworthy. You certainly didn’t hear of people making pilgrimages up to Nail Pond to see the great beast.

I remember when we first arrived on PEI there was a local businessman who’d purchased a Jaguar after making it big. It was suggested to me at the time, in hushed tones, that this sort of thing was best avoided, as it would be seen by Islanders to be “putting on airs.” Success was fine, you just didn’t want to be obvious about it.

This is a strong chord running through Island society, and it’s not limited to expensive motorcars.

The Confederation Bridge, for example, is, by any measure, an engineering wonder: a billion dollar stucture that runs 13km over icy waters. And while there was something of a flurry the week it opened — much of it assoicated with runs to Fred’s in Cap Pelé for lunch — a month later the bridge faded into the background, and it’s been years since I’ve heard anyone make mention of it.

Which makes me think that the reason that Islanders weren’t captivated by the uncovering of a “beast bigger than any dinosaur,” was a feeling that, what with being so superlative and all, the whale was, in its own way, putting on airs.

It’s fine to be so big and massive an all, but it’s just not right to lord it over everyone.

If you use Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, or any other iCalendar-compatible appliction, you can now subscribe to the Casa Mia Daily Specials Calendar:

Once you’ve subscribed to the Daily Specials in your calendar, you can sync them to your phone, and thus have them in your pocket whenever you need them:

I’ve make some renovations to the Brackley Drive-in RSS Feed. It now includes one item for every weekend (early in the season) or week (once shows start playing daily), rather than an item per night.

In the spring of 1992 I was working at the Peterborough Examiner newspaper in the Composing Room, and doing freelance graphic design work on the side.

The Peterborough Festival of the Arts hired me to design and produce a season brochure for them, and after playing around with some ideas I decided to take a photo of my 1978 Ford F-100 pickup truck and use it as the signature image, running over all 5 folds of a standard accordion brochure.

I took the photo with Catherine’s SLR film camera (digital cameras didn’t come along for another few years), scanner the negative at the Examiner and used their stand-up camera to blow it up to the required size.

When I showed the mock-up to the people at the Festival they needed some, well, convincing that this was the appropriate image for their brochure. Which led me to deliver an impassioned plea about how the DIY ethic of the Festival was well-captured by the DIY ethic of the pickup truck. I was mostly full of shit, but I really liked the image, and I wanted ever-so-much to use it. In the end, they gave the go-ahead, and this is what we ended up with:

On the day the brochures — 10,000 copies! — were ready, I picked them up at the printer and delivered them to the Festival’s office on George Street. That night the building burned to the ground, and took all 10,000 brochures down with it.

With the help of a sympathetic printer, and a Festival that didn’t balk at the notion of committing to the truck image again, another 10,000 copies were produced in short order.

It was the most exciting design/print job I ever did.