Whomwah.com

Now spam is just a fact of email, and up until now my Mail’s apps junk mail filter used to be pretty good, so much so that I never really thought about it. The problem started a few months ago when spam started slipping though the junk mail filter and into my inbox. I guess the cretins that manage these spam-gun machines that send out this crap found a new avenue to exploit.

So I hunted around and found a possible app that could improve things called SpamSieve. I’ve had this running for a few weeks now (there is a free 30 day trial period), and I have to say it has been fantastic! The amount of spam in my inbox is more or less nothing now, amazing.

SpamSieve adds bayesian filtering and runs instead of Mail’s junk mail filter. You start by giving it a bunch of emails that are junk and then a bunch of emails that are good and it monitors them, then it continues by monitoring everything that comes in and starts to build up a knowledge of what’s right and wrong. This means that even though it is behaving well now, it will hopefully get better. Here’s a little example of the stats since I started using the app:

Filtered Mail
153 Good Messages
336 Spam Messages (69%)
32 Spam Messages Per Day
 
SpamSieve Accuracy
5 False Positives
14 False Negatives (74%)
96.1% Correct
 
Corpus
258 Good Messages
402 Spam Messages (61%)
30,121 Total Words
 
Rules
263 Blocklist Rules
610 Whitelist Rules
 
Showing Statistics Since
12/11/2006 11:27

So you can see that it’s 96.1% accurate at the moment which I have to say it good enough for me for the time being. The app also comes with great documentation and is able to run with all the popular email client. I’d be interested to here about other people’s success with this app or others.

Nullriver have updated their connect360 software (See related post). This is after the latest Xbox360 software upgrade that allowed you to watch streaming movies from your media center (and now Mac, if using the connect360 software). The only caveat seems to be that only WMA or WMA movies are supported so you will need to have the Flip4Mac plugin installed in order for connect360 to find them.

This is a fast turnaround by the Nullriver team and is what I have been waiting for for. That DVD player is becoming more redundant by the day.

UPDATE Someone called NoKarma and perraultd have posted even nicer versions on the Code Snippets site, thanks!:

class Array
  def shuffle
    sort_by { rand }
  end
 
  def shuffle!
    self.replace shuffle
  end
end

I had a situation when I need to shuffle the contents of an array to randomize the stuff inside. After hunting and hacking the final solution appeared to be:

class Array
  def shuffle!
    size.downto(1) { |n| push delete_at(rand(n)) }
    self
  end
end

So you just enhance the Array Class and give it a new funky method shuffle! so you can do stuff like:

a = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
a.shuffle!
=> [5, 2, 8, 7, 3, 1, 6, 4, 9]

Just how cool is Ruby.

I was getting a little concerned with my overuse of the same password when signing up to new and exciting websites. I’m sure I’m not the only person who used the same one? Anyway, not any more.

I initially did some research and the favorite looked to be Wallet. That was until they decided to take my money and not send me a license key, that and not reply to any of my emails. Shame on you!

The product that won for me was 1passwd. Features include:

• Multiple Identities
• OS X Keychain integration
• Generate and enter strong passwords with one click

It just does everything I need, and it is being actively developed (They just released a new version). That and it’s only £15. If you’d like to start using strong passwords for all your web accounts without having to remember them all, this is the app.