Cool, a fresh batch of idiots out of the elections yesterday. Now we get to engage in our favorite national past-time - turning them into mince meat and raking them over the fire. That's how we entertain ourselves.

So I'm going over all the Mozilla code trying to figure out where to plug in those cool view filters that came out of my old Stanford research lab. In fact, Bill Yeager gets the credit. My contribution was taking them and being the first to put them into a program (ML) that didn't crash every fifteen minutes (xlview, which actually came from Scott Brock but that's another story). And, and, somebody already did it. Day before yesterday. It wasn't there when I looked the first time. Dang - it's almost all there in Mozilla and almost working.

Another thing which showed up in the source is a Bayesian spam filter. Bill also worked on something like that (before there was spam), but it never quite made it to prime time. I could explain it, but it would make your head explode. Basically, it's a vector-based probability engine. It finds things that are kinda' like something you supply as a model. Think of it like a dial. With the dial at '0', you only see the original document - your sample. If you turn it all the way up, you'll see every document. But somewhere towards the low end of the dial you'll start to register documents that contain the same words, phrases, or grammatical structure, a few more every time you move the dial up. Cool, huh?

Friggin' phone company. Once again they throw some mystery configuration into the works and I can't send any email. My home computer declares that my work computer is a forger. They screwed up the DNS again. To fix it, I have to provide my home computer with the address of the work computer and basically allow it to send spam. But the address always changes. Until they fix their servers I've got to tunnel in through the firewall and type in the address every time I want to send mail and restart the mail server. Fun. Great fun.