Cal Jacobson’s Blog

I’ve finished writing my first Ruby script for ConnectedText…it’s a simple RSS feed reader similar to an earlier one I wrote in Python. It may not be pretty, but it works and it was an interesting exercise to work with another scripting language. I’m not planning on abandoning Python, but I anticipate writing more Ruby scripts for CT in the near future.

It’s official: Internet Explorer 7 has been officially released. I hope that this marks the beginning of a series of reasonably frequent and substantial improvements…to not just CSS support but more evolutionary additions such as SVG support. I can’t help but think that an aggressive IE will spur other browser developers on so we see the kind of competition and innovation we saw in the mid-90s.

I am really digging SpamBayes. If you’re not familiar with it, SpamBayes is a Python-based antispam tool that learns to identify good email (”ham”) from junk email (”spam”). If SpamBayes isn’t sure which category the message falls into, it saves it into an “unsure” folder for later review.

I’ve found SpamBayes to be incredibly effective so far. I tend to get a lot of spam, and SB is filtering out about 95% of it at this point. The “unsure” messages are usually spam as well. I highly suggest this application for anybody who is getting flooded with Viagra, Rolex and hot stock tip emails.

I’ve posted a new item to the ConnectedText Scripts repository: a Python script that makes use of Microsoft’s Speech API (SAPI) and Peter Parente’s PyTTS module which enables your ConnectedText topic pages to be read aloud. Check it out.

I’ve dusted off my GooglePages site and added a section devoted to extending ConnectedText’s functionality via scripting.  Right now all I’ve got are some rather simple Python scripts, but hey…it’s a start.