Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

Professor Dijkstra passes on

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra 1930 - 2002

A couple stories from last week

Here are a couple things I wanted to link to last week...

Eric Margolis: George Bush's new imperialism -- a history lesson on how Iraq came to be and how history could unfortunately repeat itself.

Also, there was this story about a man attacked by a Cougar on Northern Vancouver Island. He killed the cougar with his pocket knife by slashing the cougar's throat during the fight. They sent him to Victoria (where I live) for surgery, which at least 500 km away!

SpamAssassin rocks

August 6th, 2002

Over the last week I have installed SpamAssassin on RedHat and Mac OS X. This morning I wrote an email to Tyrell's internal list explaining how it works and how people can enable it on their account.

It was a highly-tuned habit of mine to select-and-delete SPAM messages in my Inbox. What I didn't realize was how many times I must have been doing this a day! My "Tagged SPAM" mailbox (which I have Mail.app filtering identified spam into) already has over 60 messages in it after only a day of use. Amazing.

The only false positive was a message that was sent to a mailing list, routed from a known open-relay server from an excite.com address.

I highly recommend you install SpamAssassin on your machine or your mailserver. It takes some time, but it's worth it. If you need help, let me know.

Linux users, check out these instructions from Peregrine HW. Mac OS X users, check out these ones from Ben Trott (yes, the MovableType guy).