Cal Jacobson’s Blog

A crisis on the family front involving the health of one of my children has been consuming my time as of late, but I haven’t abandoned my blog. I’ve composed quite a few posts, unfortunately they were all composed in my head, in my car, while driving to work and without means to record my brilliance. Damn this primitive 21st-century technology! Had I been able to store my wit and wisdom, why I would have shared with you my thoughts on the following:

• Seven months later, Truevision3D 6.5 is still nowhere to be seen by the non-paying public.
• Silverlight looks like it will be enough to kick Adobe in the pants and give Flash a run for its money. I could never get into ActionScript and decent online tutorials on Flash that went beyond “hey I’m gonna make a cool intro webpage” were few and far between; I look forward to doing this sort of thing in C#.
• Ah, Paris Hilton.
• Spambayes is still working marvelously; again, I recommend it for anybody who is drowning in spam.
• Google’s new Street View feature is damn impressive. I can’t say I buy into the paranoia that the privacy advocates are attempting to whip up: if you take a picture of my house from the street in front of it, you’re not exactly peering into my windows. If some cretin has the mind to break into my home, I’m willing to bet that he’ll case the place in person and that the Internet may be a tad too sophisticated for him anyway. Besides, by the time the magic Google vans get to my city, any pressing privacy issues and legislation will have likely taken place. Thanks for taking the bullet for small-town America, San Francisco!
• Dwarf Fortress is, by far, the best ASCII-based game I’ve ever played. Not that I’ve played that many — certainly not in the last 10 years or so — but it beats the crap out of most Roguelikes. I suspect what keeps me playing is not the random-generation element (and certainly not the graphics, the other Roguelike characteristic DF shares) but the fact that you can build rather complex fortresses and gently nudge the inhabitants in a particular direction. In fact, I think Tarn Adams should pitch the concept to Maxis; SimMoria sounds like a winner.

No, I’m not even talking about IronPython…just honest-to-goodness Python scripts hosted by Microsoft that tackle a fairly wide range of Windows tasks.  Who would have thunk it?

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.