Posted by Eric
Sun, 22 Sep 2002 04:00:00 GMT
Ever since Paul Graham published A Plan for Spam,
"trainable" spam filters have become the latest fashion. These filters
train themselves to know the characteristics of your personal e-mail.
Supposedly, this extra knowledge allows them to make fewer mistakes,
and makes them harder to fool. But do these filters actually work? In
this article, I try out Eric Raymond's bogofilter, a trainable Bayesian spam filter,
and describe the steps required to evaluate such a filter
accurately.
Read more...
Tags Hacks, Recommended, Spam
Posted by Eric
Fri, 20 Sep 2002 04:00:00 GMT
Metrowerks CodeWarrior is a
fairly nice compiler suite and IDE for the Macintosh. Unfortunately,
it suffers from several severe flaws. Most of these flaws involve
CodeWarrior's binary project files.
A short list of problems with this design:
- The project files are completely opaque. As Unix users
like to complain, binary files are just an opaque blob of bytes.
This breaks such vital utilities as diff and merge.
- The project files change every time you compile your
program. For some unknown reason, CodeWarrior stores object code
in the project files. This means the files get changed every time
you compile. This makes CVS grumpy.
- The project file format is always changing. I've never
upgraded CodeWarrior without having to re-import all my project
files.
- CodeWarrior can't read very old project files at all.
Just today, CodeWarrior told me it couldn't open an old project file
at all. I wonder what was in there.
Now, don't get me wrong, CodeWarrior was a really sweet product back
in early 1995. But by modern standards, it's pretty painful.
Tags Mac | 1 comment
