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The Next Big Thing

Just read an inspirational editorial on Tim Oren’s Due Diligence weblog, which ends with a great quotation.

Just read an inspirational editorial on Tim Oren’s Due Diligence weblog, which ends with this great quotation:

Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda. That’s what a Next Big Thing is like. Footprints from your ass to the top of your head. Keep it in mind the next time the Valley Grail Quest gets trotted out by the punditocracy. There will eventually be a Valley 4.0, but the odds of any of the [experts] calling it in advance aren’t very wonderful. Most likely, it will hit rudely from behind, when least expected. So find something that solves problems for real people, gets you up in the morning, and lets you work with good folks, and dig in. That’s the way the Valley actually rejuvenates itself.

Food for thought, given that I don’t really know what I want to do next. These are three important things to look for, not necessarily to find the Next Big Thing, but to find a comfortable seat from which to watch for it.

BTW, I strongly recommend Due Diligence, an insightful, technology-focused blog written by a venture capitalist.

Eudora 6 with SpamWatch

QUALCOMM’s Eudora has been my e-mail client of choice for nearly 10 years, and last week a major new version shipped, Eudora 6. My primary concern before upgrading was whether and how my other anti-spam tool, Spamnix, would work with the new version, especially with the new SpamWatch feature. I’m thrilled to report that Spamnix works fine with Eudora 6 (for Mac OS X), and that Spamnix + SpamWatch is more effective than either tool alone.

Note: Although still terrific tools, and in the case of SpamWatch free and built-in, I no longer use either Spamnix or Eudora’s SpamWatch, having found more effective tools. See my Personal Survey of Anti-Spam Tools for more details and recommendations.

QUALCOMM’s Eudora has been my e-mail client of choice for nearly 10 years, and last week a major new version shipped, Eudora 6. I’m usually of the “fools rush in” school of thought with regards to software updates, so I waited to see what people were saying about the upgrade (MacInTouch is a great resource for these “reader reports”).

But it’s been a week, and nary a peep. And with the amount of spam I receive continuing to grow, I really wanted to try the new SpamWatch feature. So, after doing multiple backups, I upgraded myself over the weekend.

My primary concern was whether and how my other anti-spam tool, Spamnix, would work with the new version, especially with the new SpamWatch feature. Unlike a lot of other third-party anti-spam tools, Spamnix is a Eudora plug-in, and so runs “in-process” (i.e., inside) with Eudora. [Update: SpamSieve 2 just shipped, and now also includes a Eudora plug-in. Very cool!] This makes it more efficient, but also (in theory) more susceptible to compatibility issues.

I’m happy, nay, thrilled to report that Spamnix works fine with Eudora 6 (for Mac OS X), and that Spamnix + SpamWatch is more effective than either tool alone.

I love the way that SpamWatch and Spamnix tag-team to combat spam. SpamWatch gets first crack, before other filters or plug-ins look at the message, and if the message’s score is over the spam threshold, it will be filtered into the Junk mailbox, with no further processing. (Qualcomm designed SpamWatch to run first, and you can’t change that.)

If a message doesn’t get caught by SpamWatch, then Spamnix takes a look at it, and if Spamnix decides it’s spam, it’ll go into Spamnix’s own spam folder (on my system named “_Spamnix”; note the initial space to influence sort order). These messages, nicely separated and usually all spam, are prime candidates for further training for SpamWatch.

I receive hundreds of spam messages a day, but after two tiers of spam filtering very little spam gets to my Inbox — so far only a couple a day, with very little training of SpamWatch yet. The few that have made it through have gone straight back to SpamWatch for training. :-)

What is fascinating about this process is the progress that SpamWatch has made, in less than 4 days of processing my mail. The first time I downloaded a sizeable batch of e-mail (more than 50 messages), most of the spam got through SpamWatch, and caught by Spamnix. After training SpamWatch with those messages, and then downloading another big batch a few hours later, the ratio went the other way: SpamWatch was now catching most spam before Spamnix got a chance to look at it.

I’m still glad to have both layers. Spamnix was extremely effective at catching my spam, prior to SpamWatch being added to the mix, and it’s still catching spam that SpamWatch is missing. So overall, I am doing better in my personal war against spam (though it’s important to remember that this is defensive action only).

About the only downside of introducing SpamWatch as a new layer of anti-spam defense is that right now it’s relatively untrained, and generating a larger number of false positives (non-spams filed in the Junk folder) than I’m used to. SpamWatch ships “pre-trained”, meaning it already has a database of spam words to run against, but this list is generic, not customized to my own e-mail traffic. So it’s not that surprising that some of Rochelle’s e-mails are getting tagged as spam. My previous experience with Bayesian filtering is that it rapidly adjusts as you correct its mistakes, so I’m confident the false positives will go down in a week or so.

At any rate, I’m quite happy with the new version, especially since I was still in my 12 month support period from my last upgrade, so version 6 was free. Recommended, even if you have to pay for it.

OK, Enough Goofing Off

Ok, it’s been two weeks of sleeping in and doing nothing (much) more than web surfing in my underwear. I should start doing some real work. So today I’m putting together a weekly schedule for myself.

Ok, it’s been two weeks of sleeping in and doing nothing (much) more than web surfing in my underwear. I suppose I should start doing some real work.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been unemployed. Rochelle and I both left our jobs about two and a half years ago. It was a coincidence, Rochelle taking a planned leave of absence to find her dream job (which she’s now doing), and my dot.bomb suddenly going under. That time we spent our days together, doing cheap stuff around San Francisco, and taking cat-sponsored naps every afternoon. For three months we basically spent all of our time together, and had terrific fun.

This time Rochelle is still employed, thank god. It’s not possible to stay afloat in SF on unemployment insurance payments, which are $370 a week, before taxes. (Yes, you pay taxes on unemployment. Tax cuts on stock dividends, paid for by the unemployed. That’s an economic plan that makes sense!) With Rochelle in a good job, we can tread water almost indefinitely.

Getting laid off is “winning the time lottery.” All of a sudden, I have time to work on the literally dozens of projects that have been building up around me. But in two weeks, I’ve accomplished nothing on any of them. Everything I’ve read or heard about being unemployed in today’s economy says that you have to come up with a routine, something to keep you on track, driving forward to the next job, or at least keeping busy and not frittering the time away. Certainly, when I took the job at Persistence after three months with Rochelle, I looked back and decided I hadn’t accomplished much with that time beyond improving my relationship with my wife. No small thing, that, but still…

I need this time to be different, in no small measure because I don’t want to do marketing in my next job. I’m planning to go back to hands-on technical work, probably software development, and that means rebuilding a number of skills that have gone fallow, as well as acquiring skills for the technologies that matter today. I have a lot of work to do!

So today I’m starting to put together a weekly schedule for myself. I need dedicated, scheduled slots for networking, job hunting, exercise, e-mail, socializing outside my house, technical development, home clean-up, blogging, bathing, naps, reading for both pleasure and research, web surfing, cat petting, going to the movies (matinees only), etc.

Some of these need to be done every day, but it’s impossible to do all of them in a single day. So I need a weekly, or even a bi-weekly schedule of activities. I’m sure I won’t get it right the first time, but with the economy the way it is in SF, I’m sure I’ll have time to perfect things. In any case, look for my first schedule draft on Monday.

Uh…Is This Microphone On?

I subscribe to a mailing list for Linux news, called LinuxGram. The writer, Maureen O’Gara, has a writing style that could be described as “feisty.” It comes out once a week, and manages to entertain as well as inform. This week I was quoted in it, under a “Bite Me” headline!

Last week Maureen broke the story that SCO planned to expand their frivolous claims, and use their copyright on a particular branch of Unix source code to levy a tax on Linux users. It’s SCO’s latest move in their campaign of deception to extort money from IBM and other Linux supporters, by pouring as much FUD around Linux as news editors will publish, until somebody cries “uncle” and sends SCO a big check.

I called it McCarthyism here a while back, and when this particular story hit my Inbox, I posted those same thoughts onto the discussion board for the story. I did it without much thought, and — no thought requiring less time than thinking — ended up being the first post to the discussion. Ah, fame!

Little did I know! This week it would seem I was writing the news, instead of reading it: my posting was the lead in a special “reader feedback” issue. The e-mail graphic to the right is pretty much exactly what I saw early this afternoon (click for a larger, readable version), with zero warning that my name would be in bold print underneath the story heading “Mr. McBride, Bite Me!”. Yikes!

For the record, it’s the next guy down who actually wrote “bite me”. I don’t know if my posting was more rational, but at least I won’t get teeth marks on my butt because of it.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Rochelle’s a big fan of the makeover show “What Not To Wear”, down to playing the same game with Hilda, our upstairs neighbor. They’ve been spending a couple hours on multiple weekends, going through each other’s closets, trying things on, nixing some, swapping some, and putting the rejects in the Goodwill pile. Now comes a great new show, for men, called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Rochelle’s a big fan of the makeover show “What Not To Wear”, down to playing the same game with Hilda, our upstairs neighbor. They’ve been spending a couple hours on multiple weekends, going through each other’s closets, trying things on, nixing some, swapping some, and putting the rejects in the Goodwill pile. Overall, about 5 bags of clothing and shoes have left the house.

Now comes a great new show, for men, called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. You may have read about it recently, but the simple concept is, five makeover gurus show up, run a helpless slob through the gauntlet, and in the end, he’s prince charming. The hook is, the five gurus are gay, the slob is straight.

It’s a lot of fun. If you get Bravo on your cable or satellite service, you should give it a whirl. Unlike most makeover shows, this one is 60 minutes, instead of just 30, which gives a lot more time to the different aspects of the makeover.

I doubt if any of this will rub off on my personal sense of style — or lack thereof. But the show’s funny enough, I’ll keep watching anyway.

Reloaded three times

I just went to see The Matrix Reloaded for the third time last night, which will seem like a lot of times, especially to those folks who didn’t like it, or the previous movie. But this is entirely defensible.

I just went to see The Matrix Reloaded for the third time last night, which will seem like a lot of times, especially to those folks who didn’t like it, or the previous movie. But this is entirely defensible.

The first time was the first time. Needed to see it in the theater, had a great time.

The second time was actually free, Rochelle and I just walked into it on a Sunday afternoon, because it started 2 minutes after The Italian Job finished, and we decided to get our money’s worth out of our tickets.

The third time was different. It was amazing. It was in IMAX.

If you haven’t seen The Matrix Reloaded yet, and if it’s playing on an IMAX screen near you, I recommend kicking in the extra $5. Even if you’ve seen the movie already, it’s worth going again. It’s a whole new experience, totally worth the extra money. There’s just way more detail up on the screen, and it makes the movie that much more “real.”

I may need to Reload again.

A Backup a Day Is All I Ask

I was once again reminded of the value of a good backup strategy last night, when Eudora crashed, and corrupted my e-mail Inbox. Almost 700 messages, most not yet responded to or handled, wiped out. No matter what Eudora tries to tell you, rebuilding the table of contents for a mailbox is not always what you want. But recovery was easy. I fired up Retrospect, located my Inbox in the list of files backed up, and recovered it. Fired up Eudora again, and I was good to go.

But recovery was easy. I fired up Retrospect (backup software I have used for nearly 10 years), located my Inbox in the list of files backed up, and recovered it. Fired up Eudora again, and I was good to go.

I lost a few messages, but only a few. I do a full-system backup once a day, in the middle of the night. Most of the messages that came in after the backup were spam, and I was able to recover the 6 messages that mattered by pulling them out of the corrupted mailbox.

I started doing daily backups about 7 years ago, when my hard disk died, and took everything with it. I had a backup that was a year old, which kept me from crying like a little baby, but I was still really pissed. In the end, that disk crash killed my use of Quicken, because I never managed to get caught up on the data entry.

Anyway, if you depend on a computer, you should make a daily backup. Buy a big tape drive, and use it every day. A good one that can back up an entire 80 gigabyte hard disk runs around $1000 these days, but that is peanuts compared to the cost of losing everything that’s stored on the disk. I know this from painful personal experience. My tape drives have saved me serious grief — problems that would be otherwise unrecoverable — at least a dozen times, making the cost-per-incident under $100. Peanuts.

Get yourself a good backup strategy, today.

Phoenix Rising Into Firebird

Mozilla Firebird, the latest milestone release of the browser-only version of Mozilla, shipped last weekend. I’ve been using it for almost a week now, on my Windows machine at work, and overall it’s fabulous, really a great piece of work. The prior release, Phoenix 0.5, was better in virtually every way than Internet Explorer, and the latest release, Firebird 0.6, is better in every way than Phoenix. Well, almost…

Mozilla Firebird, the latest milestone release of the browser-only version of Mozilla, shipped last weekend. I’d been using the last milestone for ages, and was really excited to finally be able to update to a more recent release.

I’ve been using it for almost a week now, on my Windows machine at work, and overall it’s fabulous, really a great piece of work. The prior release, Phoenix 0.5, was better in virtually every way than Internet Explorer, and the latest release, Firebird 0.6, is better in every way than Phoenix.

Well, almost.

The new default theme is wonderful, except in the places where it isn’t. A number of things seem unfinished, e.g., the default icon for bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar is a generic document icon, and it ought to look like some kind of link. Another example is the beveled edges that appear around these same bookmarks in the Toolbar, to indicate you’re in a hover state. They’re too close to the edges, top and bottom, and that makes them look off.

Many of the icons in the toolbars are too cute and different from each other. There’s just a gratuitous use of extra colors that keeps them from looking completely unified. For example, the Forward and Back arrows are green, and the Reload arrow is blue. The Stop “X” is red, which makes sense, but why are the arrows different colors? I don’t see a user interface benefit, and an aesthetic problem.

The Home icon is a lot less abstract than the other buttons, and it’s at a different isometric perspective from all the others. Why? No idea, but it detracts from the unity of the theme elements.

Last problem with the theme I’ll mention — the activity indicator is stupid. What does it mean? It looks like a Quake symbol off-kilter. It’s pretty, but meaningless, and more importantly, it’s more difficult to notice that it’s in motion, it’s thinner and so less visible. Why not use the standard Mozilla activity animation, which is truly wonderful, has a symbol that means something related to it’s function, and is easily visible when activity is in progress.

Maybe I should say that the new theme sucks, except for where it doesn’t. It doesn’t suck in the Preferences dialog, where it’s beautiful. Of course, I try to stay out of the Preferences dialog, on a day-to-day basis.

Now, I’m sure that these are far from the most important usability issues in Mozilla Firebird, but I do have to wonder if anyone is thinking about them…

SpamBayes for Outlook

A while back I recommended an Outlook plug-in called SpamNet, from Cloudmark. At the time, it was a free tool for Outlook users to block spam, that worked quite reliably. Sadly, it’s no longer free. I get so little spam at work (where my e-mail address is relatively unpublished) that I can’t justify buying a subscription. Fortunately, I have found another solution at least as good.

I do still get some spam, though. Fortunately, Jon Udell’s recent weblog entries and review at InfoWorld turned me onto a replacement that is free, and will remain so (it’s Open Source): SpamBayes.

Like SpamNet, it can be installed as an Outlook plug-in, and easily used via buttons on Outlook’s toolbar. But the technology behind it is very different, as it uses Bayesian filtering rather than distributed recognition. It’s also different in that the core project and recognition engine is command line-oriented. The Outlook-only plug-in is terrific, but only a side project. It’s not required, and there are plenty of ways for those who use something other than Outlook for e-mail to use SpamBayes.

You can read the review for a thorough look, but my experience was that it was just as easy to install as SpamNet, is extremely effective at blocking spam, and is also having fewer false positives. I think the reason for that is SpamNet uses other people’s spam reports to decide what to block in my Inbox, and there’s a lot of people who just block e-mails they signed up for (newsletters, promos, etc.), rather than unsubscribe from them. Those false reports pollute the knowledge base, and affect my results. Bayesian filtering is exactly the opposite — it only cares what I think is spam.

I Need a Calendar

I was recently trying to give someone a date for an upcoming event, and I didn’t have a good way to put a calendar in front of my face while sitting at my computer here at home. I don’t use iCal, because it doesn’t synchronize events with my Outlook schedule on Windows at work, making it essentially useless; for just a monthly calendar, it takes too long to launch. I want something very small, with a clean, simple interface. I don’t need a scheduler, I just want a small, navigable monthly calendar.

I was recently trying to give someone a date for an upcoming event, and I didn’t have a good way to put a calendar in front of my face while sitting at my computer here at home. While this blog has a reasonable calendar in the sidebar navigation, it’s not terribly useful in that it can’t look to the future. I don’t use iCal, because it doesn’t synchronize events with my Outlook schedule on Windows at work, making it essentially useless (more on this in a future post). For just a monthly calendar, it takes too long to launch.

I want something very small, with a clean, simple interface. I don’t need a scheduler, I just want a small, navigable monthly calendar. It needs to be omnipresent, which ideally means it’s available from the menu bar. On Mac OS 9, I had a perfect little application called SimpleCalendar, which brought up a calendar window less than two inches square, that could be easily maneuvered into the future or past. But this app doesn’t exist on Mac OS X, and isn’t a menu bar app, which I’ve decided I want (since menu bar items can be very stable under Mac OS X, unlike Mac OS 9).

A quick trip to VersionTracker.com and a search for “calendar” yielded about eight suspects, which I downloaded and tried. Some were simply unsuitable, being application-only calendars. A few were too obtrusive, taking too much room in the menu bar, or shifting menu items around when toggling the display. And some tried to do too much.

I finally settled on MenuCalendar. It puts a very small icon in the menu bar, at the far right, shifting everything else over to the left. It uses a NSStatusItem to put up the icon, which means it’s relatively supported and stable. And clicking it drops down a monthly calendar pane that is tremendously similar to the old SimpleCalendar window, which I loved.

There are a few things I’d like to see improved. For example, today should be highlighted with the system preference highlight color, or at least be user-changeable; it’s hard-coded right now. I’d also like to be able Command-drag the menu bar icon to be next to the clock. And most annoyingly, clicking to drop down the calendar seems to only register the mouse down event; when I move the mouse off of the icon, the other menu items will drop down as though I was holding down the mouse button, when I’m not.

Ultimately, I’d like for the calendar to drop down from the menu bar clock. There were a couple utilities that almost did this right (e.g., PTHClock), that I could have replaced the Apple clock with, but they had one or two minor things wrong. MenuCalendar seems like my best option right now, but I’ll keep looking.

Things to Argue About

This site had me laughing so loudly Rochelle had to come down the hall and see what the problem was. Only a few of these are familiar…

This site had me laughing so loudly Rochelle had to come down the hall and see what the problem was. Literally tears rolling down my face laughing. Don’t read this at work, your co-workers will think you’ve gone insane.

Only a few of these are familiar…

Channel-Specific RSS Feeds

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds.

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds:

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