It’s incredibly sad when people let their egos get in the way of developing something useful. I haven’t run into this in Apache yet but I’m seeing a really bad case of it in the on-going quest to create an opensource replacement for HyperCard, Apple’s now abandoned rapid application development system. There are now four or five different projects each struggling to get something up and running, none succeeding because the developer resources are stretched so thin.

Recently there has been a very interesting and at times heated discussion about optimization on the HUMBUG mailing list. It’s worth reading the archives (look for the “Which is better?” thread) to get the whole picture. There were two main topics being discussed: Whether you should look for optimizations as you code and implement them if they don’t affect readability and Whether or not memory allocation in Java is slow and thus efforts should be taken to avoid it.

So I made the mistake of checking out VISA Preferred Seating, promptly followed by QTIX, promptly followed by spending money and wanting to spend more. I’ve booked tickets to go see The Carer staring the delightful Charles “Bud” Tingwell. I very nearly managed to go see it in Lismore on my recent road trip but the uncultured locals didn’t even realize they had a theatre let alone be able to give me directions to get to it.

Every so often you come across a system that is just ridiculously stupid. Telstra’s</a billing system is one of these. It means well, but just gets in the way. The particularly problematic feature is the fact that if checks to see if you’ve already paid the particular bill you’re trying to pay and warns you if you already have. That would be great, except for two major flaws: 1. It warns you even if you haven’t paid the bill already.

It seems that the proprietary hooks in .Net are becoming more and more clear. This Netcraft interview with Miguel de Icaza ends with the comment: Longhorn has kind of a scary technology called Avalon, which when compounded with another technology called XAML, it’s fairly dangerous. And the reason is that they’ve made it so it’s basically an HTML replacement. The advantage is it’s probably as easy as writing HTML, so that means that anybody can produce this content with a text editor.

Feeling sick is no fun…. and daytime TV is really bad.

Continuing my spam theme of late. Today I received a message from “* Rochelle *” that wound up in my inbox. Since I have so many carefully crafted filters to dump mail in the appropriate mailbox anything that winds up in my inbox is immediately suspected as spam that spamassassin missed. This message hit massive alarm bells in my head and I just couldn’t work out why spamassassin had missed it.

Richard Giles comments on SpamSaver, one of the worst ideas I’ve heard of in a long time. Essentially SpamSaver aims to feed a massive number of useless email addresses into the spammer’s database making it all but useless and swamping them with bounced mail. Sadly, the flaw lies in the last part – the spammers don’t see the bounced mail – the poor sap who’s email address they forged does. PLEASE don’t contribute to more of this “bounce-spam”, it’s already reached the point where I receive more bounce messages than I do actual spam.

It’s a long weekend here in Australia for ANZAC day so I’m considering going on a road trip. Not sure where I’m going yet, but my last road trip took me down into northern New South Wales and I’m thinking of heading down that way again – I figure my random selection of which way to turn should take me somewhere else this time (I don’t actually own a map of anything outside of the Brisbane region).

With all the crisis and the shooting and the killing in Iraq, it’s good to see that the American military has found a solution: an upgrade to Active Directory. I mean, once the Iraqis see how much better their life is with Active Directory instead of Windows NT 4 based networking, they won’t care if their home has been blown to smithereens, if their children have been shot and if they’re starving to death.

Ian Holsman comments on a vacation responder that deletes all incoming email to avoid their mailbox overflowing while they’re away and asks if email is dead. The answer is a clear no. Email is now a critical system, it just can’t be killed, perhaps morphed into a different set of protocols but the concept of sending mail electronically just can’t die, unless you count being replaced with sending video messages electronically as killing email.

It’s crap. Total and utter crap. When I last depended on Mail.app’s filtering I got practically no spam. Now I get about 3 spam messages a minute and Mail.app hasn’t picked up a single one, despite having been trained on a weeks worth of spam. SpamBayes was handling it perfectly even back when it first started. I’m really not sure how much longer I can put up with this before I’m motivated enough to divert my work email through my home server and filter it with spamassassin.