I had my first day of class at the Montreal Goethe-Institut today. It was a great walk down through Parc LaFontaine and rue Cherrier out to St. Denis. There were footprints in the snow over the pond in the parc, so I assume the ice is frozen. It'd be great if the lake were open for skating sometime this winter; it was liquid last week. The class itself was great. The building itself is like the office of a dot-com with good VC backing -- indirect lighting and modern furniture and quiet carpeting. My lehrerin is a nice woman from Freiburg. We had about 8 people in the class, a good mix of men and women, young and old, Quebecois and eux autres. We spent most of the class time practicing how to introduce ourselves, say hello and where we were from and where we lived and such and so. I haven't taken a class in so long, it was a little hard to get back in the swing of things. I didn't even have a notebook with me -- just my Moleskine notebook, which it seems a waste to fill up with irregular verbs. But we'll see. I got home and sang the song we learned to Maj and Amita June, just so they knew how Deutsch I am now. Here's the song (to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"):

 "Guten Abend! Ich hei e Knabe!"
 "Freut mich! Jonny Watanabe."
 "Kommen Sie aus Tokio?"
 "Nein! Ich komm' aus Buffalo!"

I also updated my Wikitravel German user page with my newly-learned personal information. We'll see how that progresses over the next few weeks. tags: deutsch goethe-institut class buffalo

In his post “Ok, now we are getting somewhere! (Re: XML-based configurations)”, Gunnar Wolf writes that he doesn’t regard XML as a suitable standard for configuration files which need some sort of nesting (like, e.g. the apache configuration needs nesting while a config for a simple /usr/bin/sendmail replacement like nullmailer or msmtp won’t need nesting). He seems to like YAML, as you can see in his first post on the subject: Configuration files for humans and for computers. I looked into YAML a bit and to me, it doesn’t seem like a good replacement for XML in config files. Sure, the files look simpler, but I would have a heck of a problem to memorize the syntax. Sure, a colon (:) is intuitive for a direct mapping, but remembering that a pipe (” ”) marks a literal which preserves newline while the default is a scalar which maps newlines to spaces is harder. Folded style (”>”) is even harder to remember. It folds multiple lines with the same indentation into a single line unless there is a differently indented or empty line in between. More important is that I honestly hate syntaxes which rely on indentation. Indentation is dead useful when a nested config or source is read by a human, but it often causes problems when edited by a human, especially when tabs are used. A program could (and most often would) see a difference between “test” and “<8*space>test”, while a human would most probably not see a difference with default tabs. To sum it up: I see the problems with XML, most notably bad program outputs which don’t use indentation (some even put everything on a single line) and the sometimes overwhelming amount of whatever constructs, but YAML doesn’t seem to be the right solution to me neither, especially due to the indentation-used-as-syntax-element problem. What I really would like to see is a syntax that doesn’t use indentation as a syntax element and doesn’t need the name of the opening tag when closing it, but still allows to use it. In other words both of the following constructs (or an equivalent which looks less like XML) should be legal:

<x>
        whatever
</>

<x>
        whatever
</x>

While the following should raise an error:

<x>
        whatever
</y>

I will take part in a round table on Women and Technology at the Free Software World Conference 3.0, on the 9th of February, at Badajoz. If you intend to attend, register now!


I will then attend FOSDEM at the end of February and will then take a week off in the biggest port in northern Germany, I think that s Hamburg, to get away from the stress of Madrid and to hopefully get a taste of a decent winter Schei wetter.

In April, I will attend DudesConf (formerly known as Debconf-es) in A Coru a.



And in June... Debconf7 in Edinburgh! That s the most important event in the whole year for me. I will get there on the 8th of June and leave on the 24th.

I expect some resistance at work, yes, this job I am both so paranoid about loosing and at the same time not worried about anymore, but it would not be the first time I am fired because of attending a Free Software event that meant a lot to me, Debconf4 in Porto Alegre, to be more specific, and I am not scared. I will survive. I have lost jobs before, and I have had much better and much worse jobs. A job is a job is a job is a job.

At this moment of my life, mentally troubled and physically ill, I am still painfully aware of my priorities, specially (the small amount of) stuff that I am doing to at least try to change a world that disgusts me in so many ways. Happily trying to change this world, for the ones to come, including the kids of the people that have fired me (or will ever fire me) because of it.

And, for a change, I feel my family backing me up, fully supporting me in my quijotada, which makes me the strongest and most determined person you have ever met.
Be very, very afraid ;)

Debootstrap was very inspiring.There initially was knowledge about using debootstrap and creating chroots; but that was a bit crude.pbuilder was one effort which wouldn't have started without debootstrap.Debootstrap has been used in many different ways, but by centralizing debootstrap debugging and bug tracking on pbuilder, and running daily regression tests on debootstrapas pbuilder testsuite, quality is assured.I think in that sense, debootstrapchanged a significant portion of Debian and the way Debian project handles quality.6 years. Touches me. Sniff.

Once upon a time I wrote a collection of shell scripts for managing virtual hosting. Combined these allow me to “easily”:

• Add/Remove/List Apache2 virtual hosts.
• Add/Remove/List virtual domains for use by Exim4.

These work well, but every now and again I think “I want a web-based control panel”. After mulling this over for a while and remembering how many of the existing control panels are tricky I’m actually going to do it. There are two hard parts:

• The user-interface is key.
• The format I’m using for domains isn’t appropriate.

The last point is the part I’m worrying about right now. So far I have a list of mail domains, and a list of web domains - and the two are unrelated. This becomes obvious when they are listed:

Domain	Facilities
steve.org.uk	MAIL
bar.steve.org.uk	WEB
foo.steve.org.uk	WEB

See? No link - I’d expect to see the domains listed as just “steve.org.uk” with links to “Mail” showing the mail setup, and “web” showing the subdomains. Or maybe they really should be listed seperately - I can’t decide. (For reference here is my live listing of domains - where the problem becomes obvious. Note that you’ll not have permissions to see my server stats…) So I need to decide how to handle this - I also need to be "inspired" by OSWD. I think the plan right now is to store all data in a database, then regenerate the plain text configuration files on demand. That should give me the best approach - if I restrict myself to running HTTPS on a custom port and avoid the ability to modify the files by hand… Feel free to tell me this is misguided, or inspired. Although I remember the last time I talked about control panels and I’m still not seeing a good solution. I want to be able to:

• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable apache2 virtual hosting setups.
• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable exim4 virtual domains - with optional mailing lists (ecartis)
• Have only “server admin” vs. “nobody” - no resellors etc.
• Avoid PHP like the plague.
• Have it be utterly secure. (Ha!)

by Alberto Yazquez-Figueroa: Just finished it; couldn't stop reading it! Really worth to be read. Tuareg is the story of a tuareg, a nomad in Africa. He's living a happy live in the Sahara dessert, respecting the traditions handed down from his fathers fathers. His live is changed, when two strangers crossing the dessert stumble half death in his camp. His honour is called into question, when soon after those two strangers, who are in search of a border, soldiers arrive and break the most holy law handed to him from his fathers fathers: His hospitality. This book is quite exciting. As said: I could hardly lay it away (and that happens not very often). The only negative thing I can say about this book: I dislike the ending. Really. My tip would be to read everything, but the last two chapters. I saw on amazon, that there is a movie about this book, too. Anyone knows something about it? DVD cover doesn't looks promising, so I'm quite curious if the film is even half as good as the book.

A brief update concerning the conferences with which I am involved.XTech 2007, of which I'm chair, is progressing well. We've had a large number of submissions and the review process is proceeding apace. Speakers will be notified on February 2nd, and we hope to publish the schedule very soon after. Now's the time to think about joining us in Paris, May 15-18th.
The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, aka ETech 2007, for which I'm a member of the program committee, is now open for registration. Be in San Diego this March to connect with the brightest cultivators of tomorrow's tech.Also from O'Reilly, the 2007 Open Source Convention is now open for proposals. OSCON needs no introduction from me, I'm sure. I've been on the program committee for some years now, brooding over Linux, XML and other topics. Deadline for proposal submission is February 5th.

Sometime this month, debootstrap turns six years old. I was thinking about this last night as I tweaked a new xen instance that the hosting provider had installed Debian on using debootstrap, while in the other window using a debootstraped system to investigate a weird apt premissions problem. All very standard, and between this kind of thing, installing Debian with d-i, and building packages with pbuilder, a lot of us would be lost without debootstrap now. The story of exactly how it came about is interesting, though it's blurred by time in my memory. Maybe AJ will correct me, but I think it went something like this:

• Aeons ago, every Debian system was bootstrapped using a root filesystem tarball, which was built using the basedisks.sh script in the boot-floppies source. That ugly thing hardcoded a bootstrap sequence that managed to work most of the time, and had a lot of code to work around issues in various packages in bae. IIRC it needed a local mirror, and lots of babysitting to keep it working.
• When I suggested that boot-floppies be rewritten, and modularised, I'm fairly sure that I pointed to basedisks.sh as one thing that would make a useful standlone module, but I can't find proof of that.
• In late 2000, AJ posted to a thread about one of the first d-i demo systems with something he was calling "base-deb", that is a recognisable prototype of debootstrap. It downloaded debs from a mirror and built a chroot on the fly.
• After some back and forth over the next couple weeks regarding how it would work with d-i, AJ released the first version of debootstrap on January 30th.
• It's sorta hard to believe now, but there was a lot of push-back on the idea of bootstrapping Debian on the fly, rather than using the old tarball. Much of it was inertia; some of it was legitimate concerns about whether it would work robustly. IIRC these concerns kept coming up right through the release of woody in 2002, the first version of Debian to install using debootstrap. In fact, woody still included a basedebs.tar, although it was built using debootstrap.
• While various rough edges were filed off over the years, there were no really big changes after that to debootstrap until 2005 then debootstrap finally got smart enough to resolve dependencies, rather than using the hardcoded lists of what packages to install in what order, that it had inherited from the boot-floppies.

Debootstrap is one of my favorite examples of a tool that ends up being much more general purpose than was first envisioned (at least by me; AJ may have known all along). The collection of stuff that has grown up around it and the way it's changed how both Debian developers and users work is pretty impressive.

... for the problems delivering your mail, Jordi. The failure you got came from my (old) backup mx. Don't know what the problem was, or why someone should phone him to deliver mails. My old ISP was some kind strange regarding spam... However: I removed the backup mx. Sorry, that shouldn't have happened.

Excellent little annotation on the Trademark Blog regarding the iPhone trademark dust-up. Schwimmer concludes:

DISCLOSURE: I HAVE NEVER REPRESENTED EITHER PARTY. I HAVE CLIENTS WHO ARE EITHER ADVERSE TO OR HAVE DEALINGS WITH APPLE (SOMETIMES BOTH). I AM TYPING THIS ON A POWERBOOK. I DOWNLOAD MUSIC FROM iTUNES. MY PHOTOS ARE STORED ON iPHOTO. I WANT TO BUY AN iPHONE.

Here it’s a top-10 list of really important things, created by M dicos Sin Fronteras in Spanish. directhex, from #debian-offtopic (thanks!), provided a grammar/spelling check on my original English translation.

1. Central African Republic: Resurgence of the conflict. In 2006, its civilian population was a victim of violence again. During these months, confrontations have taken place between government troops and rebel groups. Civilians, suspected of supporting one or the other, have stuck in the biddle. Around 100,000 civilians have been forced to leave their homes. Several children, under 5 years old, have become ill of malaria, worms and serious respiratory infections.
2. Chechnya: Physical and psychologic scars. The consequences of a conflict that has lasted over 12 years so far are still present. Large numbers of Chechens that were displaced during the most serious phases of the crisis have already returned. However, the majority still lack housing and has to live in temporary shelters. Violence, kidnappings and abuses are still rampant. In the rural zones, medical infrastructure is almost nonexistent.
3. Sri Lanka: Civilians caught in the middle. Combat between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have intensified since the summer, causing displacements of tens of thousands of people. Other are still imprisoned and cannot flee.
4. Democratic Republic of Congo: Violence and permanent deficiencies. Deprivation and violence suffered by millons of Congolese is still happening unnoticed by the rest of the planet. Eastern Congo is a battleground for fights between several armed groups, included government forces that use force against civilian populace, leading to brutal living conditions.
5. Somalia: War and natural catastrophes. Even though its current situation has temporarily attraced media attention, the terrible living conditions of the Somali population are still largely forgotten. The country has one of the worst levels of sanitation in the world, and a quarter of the infant population dies before reaching 5 years old.
6. Colombia: Living with fear. Massacres, executions and fear are a daily life of thousands of Colombians. So far, almost three million have fled their homes because of a conflict marked by the drug trafficking that involves government forces, paramilitary groups and armed guerrillas.
7. Haiti: Extreme urban violence. The violence and insecurity is a daily breakfast in its capital city, Port-au-Prince, with confrontations between armed groups, the Haitian police and the UN Stabilization Mission on Haiti. Since December 2004, more than 3,000 people have been registered with bullet wounds, including more than a thousand women and children.
8. India: 25 years of conflict. Confrontations between Maoist insurgents, government forces and anti-Maoist military services have caused the displacement of 50,000 civilans in several areas of the country. The population still lives with fear and violence, with little or no access to sanitary conditions.
9. Tuberculosis: Obsolete and insufficient treatments. Against popular opinion in the West, tuberculosis is not an “obsolete problem”. Each year, it causes the deaths of two million people, around nine million people contract the disease, and new multiresistants variants are appearing.
10. Undernourishment: Thousands of avoidable deaths. Whilst in Spain the Ministry of Health tries to fight one of the major problems of the decade, obesity, millions of children die of hunger around the world and more than 60 million people show signs of acute undernourishment.

I guess not everything around is a top ten contest on popularity of who’s the hottest, who’s the prettiest, who has the longest penis or the biggest breasts, or whose farts smell better, geek, eh?

For a reminder of the situation, see also:

• Playing evil with VMWare ESX Server, and
• Playing evil with VMWare ESX Server, part 2

I finally had time at work to implement a solution for the problem. The result is a bit less than 400 lines of code, which I hope to be able to make free-as-speech. I’ll probably have tons of paperwork to do with my employer before that can happen… The program implements a fuse filesystem that you feed with a raw device image file (but I’m willing to implement more image file formats), and that shows the individual partitions as separate files, named “partn.fstype“. These files can then be mounted via loopback devices the standard way (which was not possible on vmfs for the reason you can find in my first post on the subject), with the benefit of not requiring offset adjustments (as when you want to mount partitions from a disk image), or some loopback device hack. Additionally, it has an internal Copy-On-Write mechanism so that it is possible to mount “dirty” ext3 filesystems (e.g. a snapshot of a mounted filesystem) without modifying the original disk image. Note that there is no way, yet, to keep these writes after unmounting the fuse filesystem. It uses libparted to handle the partition table reading, which means it will read any disk label types parted supports, such as BSD labels, sun partition tables, and so on. It doesn’t support LVM, though. Unfortunately, VMWare ESX server 3.0 being based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, only an ancient version of libparted is available. By the way, this version (1.6.3) had a pretty bad bug that made it impossible to use it for regular files instead of devices: it was trying to do a BLKGETSIZE (or was it HDIO_GETGEO ?) ioctl on it. To workaround this, I implemented my own PedArchitecture. It was somehow a revelation, because with similar mechanism, I can implement support for different disk image types :). Anyways, there have been quite some API changes in-between, so some updates will have to be done to the code… In other news, I started working on ext3rminator again. There may be a new release in a few weeks. Update: Thinking again about the ioctl issue, I’m wondering if vmfs couldn’t be responsible (again) for the failure, actually… I’ll check that on monday.

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone! We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice. On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful! Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!. Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ... Resolutions Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:

1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
   • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
   • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
   • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
     So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...

So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.

I wonder if we should do some RDF representation of packages - especially including dependency data. That way we can maybe use some RDF reasoners to query our data, and maybe extract some interesting information. On the other hand, people with interest in RDF to use our real-world data for their experiments, and maybe we get something back from them. There is a couple of package metadata we currently are not tracking inside the actual archive, but in different places. Including licensing information (debian/copyright), homepage location (on packages.qa.debian.org), download location (debian/watch) - it would be nice to aggregate these into some RDF store, and export them somehow. For most of the package information (especially dependency information), we'll have to write our own ontology (I wonder if we can map version numbers to some standard rule language, or if applications will need an external reasoner to process them?); for some things we can reuse the FOAF (Friend-of-a-friend) or DOAP (Description of a project) ontologies. The first is rather common for describing people, people-people and people-thing relationships; the latter was designed for describing opensource projects (but won't be directly applicable to packages of a project). I've blogged about my RDF export of Debtags data before; the canonical first step would actually have been to export the package data, and enrich it with the Debtags collected data... Note that RDF is designed in a way that you can have one site provide metadata for another site. For example, the Debtags RDF export contains "category" information for Debian packages, but does not contain e.g. the description of the packages it talks about via an URI. So there is nothing wrong from a RDF point of view of keeping e.g. the licensing, watch or homepage data separate. For the Google Summer of Code, there was a proposal including "collaborative repository of meta-informations about source packages (CRMI)"; but the first part of the proposal, the "distribution wide tracker tool (DWTT)" showed to be a bigger task than expected. But maybe we'll still see CRMI at some point, and maybe we can have it provide an RDF export of data (using a semantic wiki might be a good starting point for CRMI maybe?). [P.S. this blog posting maybe belongs more into the en/linux/debian category. But only the xml category is also syndicated on planet.XMLhack, and I want this post to go there to reach more RDF users. I really need to switch my blog to some software which supports tagging...]

Just a quick reminder: if you were planning on going to the X.Org Developers' Conference in the Bay Area, from the 7th-9th of February, then please make sure you've registered on the page. If you weren't planning to come and you work on X or related fields of endeavour (toolkits, desktops, maybe you're an IHV), then you should consider coming along as well. There'll be a mix of scheduled talks, random freestyle hacking, corridor schmoozing, dinners, after-dinner fun, and a whole world more.

If you'd like to come but your pockets don't go quite that deep, please consider applying for sponsorship. The Foundation is willing to pay for travel and accommodation to developers who couldn't otherwise attend.

Hope to see you in sunny(ish) California!

Or, Cleanliness is next to godliness The last time when I blogged about Spam fighting Mail Filtering With CRM114 Part 1, I left y'all with visions of non-converging learning, various ingenious ways of working around a unclean corpus, and perhaps a sinking feeling that this whole thing was more fragile than it ought to be. During this eriod of flailing around, trying to get mailtrainer to learn the full corpus correctly, I upgraded to an unpackaged version of crm114. Thanks to the excellent packaging effort by the maintianers, this was dead easy: get the debian sources using apt-get source crm114, download tghe new tarball from crm114 upstream, cp the debian dir over, and just edit the changelog file to reflect the new version. I am currently running my own, statically linked 20061103-Blame Dalkey.src-1. Cleaning the corpus made a major difference to the quality of discrimination. As mentioned earlier, I examined every mail that was initially incorrectly classified during learning. Now, there are two ways this can happen: That the piece of mail was correctly placed in the corpus, but had a feature that was different from those learned before; or that it was wrongly classified by me. When I started the chances were almost equally likely; I have now hopefully eliminated most of the misclassifications. When mailtrainer goes into cycles, retraining on a couple of emails round after round, you almost certainly are trying to train in conflicting ways. Cyclic retraining is almost always a human's error in classification. Some of the errors discovered were not just misclassifications: some where things that were inappropriate mail, but not Spam; for instance there was the whole conversation where someone one subscribed debian-devel to another mailing list, there was the challenge, the subscription notice, the un-subscription, challenge, and notice -- all of which were inappropriate, and interrupted the flow, and contributed to the noise -- but were not really Spam. I had, in a fit of pique, labelled them as Spam; but they were really like any other mailing list subscription conversations, which I certainly want to see for my subscriptions. crm114 did register the conversations as Spam and non-Spam, as requested, but that increased the similarity between Spam and non-Spam features -- and probably decreased the accuracy. I've since decided to train only on Spam, not on inappropriate mails; and let Gnus keep inappropriate mails from my eyes. I've also waffled over time about whether or not to treat newsletters from Dr. Dobbs Journal or USENIX as Spam or not -- now my rule of thumb is that since I signed up for them at some point, they are not Spam -- though I don't feel guilty about letting mailagent squirrel them away mostly out of sight. A few tips about using mailtrainer:

• Make sure you have a clean corpus
• Try and make it so that your have roughly equal numbers of Ham and Spam
• Don't let mailtrainer quit after a set number of rounds. I use a ridiculous repeat count of about 100 -- never expecting to reach anywhere close to that. Instead, I set the streak to a number = number of Spam + number of Ham + 10. This means that mailtrainer does not quit until it has processed every email in the corpus correctly without needing to retrain. Letting mailtrainer quit after it repeated the corpus twice, but before it got a streak of correct classifications left me with a filter with horrible accuracy.
• Make sure you have a clean corpus (yes, really)
• While the ratio of similarities between .css files to the differences between .css files is a fun metric, and I use it as an informal, rough benchmark while training, it is not really correlated to accuracy, so don't get hung up on it, like I was. Usually, the value I get when training from scratch on my corpus is somewhere around 7.5; but over time the ratio degrades (falling to about 5), while the filter accuracy keeps increasing.
• Train only on errors. The good news is that both mailtrainer and mailreaver already do so, so this is easy rule to follow. The reason is that you should only be doing minimal training, in case you have to modify/change the underlying rule in the future. So your filter should be trained to correctly classify the mails you get, but don't shoot for overwhelming scores.
• Use mailreaver. It has the nice behaviour of asking for retraining when it is unsure of some mail, and it caches mail for some time which really helps in training and rebuilding .css files. The reason mailreaver learns faster than mailtrainer is just this feature, I think.
• Stash mails you train on in your corpus, and don't hesitate to re-run mailtrainer over your corpus again after you have been training the unsure emails. When you train single emails, the changed filter may no longer correctly classify some email in the corpus you train with. Running mailtrainer over the corpus adjusts the filter to correctly classify every mail again. I generally retrain about once a week, though I no longer retrain from scratch, unless I change the classification algorithm.

So, the Apple iPhone has been launched, it was brought to my attention as actually being announced by the MD at work, who appears to have become a complete apple freak (poor bastard... or is that rich bastard to be able to afford apple's mediocre offerings and be happy about it?). Anyways - from reading the story from BBC News and the official website, here's my conclusions. First off, when marketing a phone, how about you actually mention it's phone capabilities as the number one priority? I'd like to know about the sound capabilities, the battery life, the overall user feel for it as a phone... maybe I'm odd, but a phone has a purpose, it should make and receive calls, and it should do that job *well*, with good quality voice, a decent (filtering) microphone (it's a mobile, you'll be walking whilst speaking on it, reducing the background noise is a selling point), but apple appear to have mostly avoided talking about this. Instead, the first thing that you're told about from the news story is the unique user interface - great, so we have a touchscreen "whoop, de, do!". Worse still, from the official site, the first thing that springs out is that it's a "Wide Screen iPod" - it's a phone, if I wanted an iPod I'd buy a damned iPod - as it stands, for my music needs I have an iAudio M3 which suits my portable music experience really rather well. I choose that on the basis that it provided ogg support out of the box, didn't require any magical software (I run linux on my machines, it presenting itself as nothing more than a USB hard disk was fantastic, and means that I can use it for other things when needs arise). For a phone I want something that actually behaves like a phone, looking at the iPhone it's primary purpose appears to actually be a media player - that's not good. With the iPhone only having a touch screen interface, and from everything that I've read there's no stylus and the "finger is the ultimate pointing device", I'm just expecting that within the first 2 weeks you're going to have a scratched or smudged screen from usage alone, add in the fact that it's a mobile phone, and therefore generally treated with contempt (neccessity rather than luxery), and that most people carry mobiles in their pockets without any form of protection (easy and fast access) and you've got a recipe for disaster! The touch screen is going to be hit (wether you like it or not) whilst the phone is in your pocket, it will wear - there's no question in my mind about it. Touchscreens aren't designed to be smacked around 24/7, they're touchscreens - they respond to touch! So, assuming that you're shiny new iPhone is sitting in your pocket a lot of the time that's a lot of usage of the touchscreen - they're not designed for constant pressure (think about what happens to pockets in trousers when you sit down...), so I don't think that, overall, the sensitivity of the screen is going to last very long. It's only got a fairly narrow screen too, so what about those of us with not entirely slender fingers? When composing SMS messages on it with the on screen qwerty keyboard, do you really think that you're going to get the right keys every time? Small, on screen, buttons and pubs do not mix - and I'd hasten a bet there's a fair number of SMS messages sent from, or on the way back from, the pub, with a predictive text system at least you can almost work out what the heck the person was trying to say - this is a whole new ball game. The iPhone also makes the phone functionality only available after you've hit the part of the screen that says "Phone", now, I don't know about other people, but if I'm being given a number, I tend to just start hitting the right buttons on the phone, I can store the number later (via the call register or whatever) and hit call, now there's an extra step to getting in touch with people. From the official site we have the words """ iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. """" - now, err, just when did a phone require you to use anything other than your fingers? Please tell me, I'm dying to know - I've never yet needed to use my feet to operate my phone, have you? This is marketing gone insane - and what worries me is that people actually believe this bullshit. Apple may have "revolutionised" the computer industry with "Mac OS X" (this is actually not something that I believe, and OS X actually makes me more frustrated than being sat infront of a windows desktop - and believe me, that's difficult), but this is a phone, how about they try making it about the phone first, and the next generation tart audio player second? I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I definately won't be going out of my way to aquire an iPhone just because the marketing spiel looks good.

The biggest party in Bavaria and part of the current german government, CSU, has announced that they want to make the "production and distribution of killer-games" illegal in germany. They claim it's because of a recent highschool shooting (no fatalities except the shooter; there was one other highschool shooting in germany a few years ago with 16 fatalities. Yes, that is 17 fatalities in over 40 years, the 42 years old amok runner back then didn't play killer games, I guess, although he used a flame thrower...). This would make the production and distribution in Germany unlawful, since we include games such as overkill, tremulous and openarena. Other distributions such as SuSE probably include some games that classify as "killer games" as well. Also note that "distribution" is a rather wide term. Does it apply to web sites? ISPs? If there is an online killer game, is the ISP "distributing" it? Polticians (especially those from CSU/CDU/SPD) are such a bunch of idiots. Please do NOT ever again vote for CSU. Software patents, killer games, "Problemfrauen & Schadbären", surveillance cameras and other surveillance, military inside germany (note that in desaster cases such as the flooding some years ago we could already deploy soldats without extra laws), shooting down of civilian airplanes, transrapid, reducing math and natural sciences in highschools, "google earth threatens worldcup security", police installing trojans on home PCs (because criminals don't install virus scanners?), kicking "irritating" students out of school, study fees, ... Often they make George W. Bush look like a genius, don't they? They don't do any important stuff, but just say whatever a majority people might want to hear. They waste our money (Transrapid). They destroy our biggest resource (changes in school system and university system, which will reduce average knowledge in germany a lot). They do lots of stupid things, which heavily invade privacy or public safety (military, surveillance) with no benefits in safety and many of which even where only stopped because they violated our constitution. Do not vote for them! [Updates: Daniel, sorry for posting a non-english post to planet. I again put it into the wrong category; I intended to do a longer post (this one) in english later on. For clarification: CSU is the sister party of CDU, these parties have an arrangement not to compete by region and are closely affiliated. On the nation-wide level they have a joint list, which often is called CDUCSU. So they're not just an "affiliate", but a strong part of the ruling party. Holger Levsen pointed out we are likely going to violate some laws much earlier by distributing ("hacker-") tools such as nmap, ettercap or whireshark.]