Category: Reviews: Computer stuff

POPFile 0.21.1 got released a little while ago, and I noticed it supports storing it’s word corpus in an SQL database. So I decided to try it out and upgraded a few days ago. A relatively painless procedure documented here.

Just had to install Perl on my Win2K box (ActivePerl from ActiveState) and install a couple of modules.

POPFile with the MySQL backend runs a slower than it did using the flatfile BerkeleyDB. My machine running MySQL isn’t the fastest in the world, so I blame it. I imagine it would be significantly faster with the DB server running locally.

Having the corpus and word matrix stored in an SQL database makes it easy to see what’s going on. You can see what words have been classified, what buckets they belong to and how many times they occur. Makes it easier to dig out some statistics (if you want to do such things) about POPFiles word classification.

There are a few other changes to POPFile that make the 0.21.1 upgrade worthwhile. Switching to a MySQL backend from the default involves a little more work, and if you don’t care about it, stick with the default.

If spam is a problem for you, and you want something simple to help manage it, I definitely recommend POPFile. Since the upgrade, POPFile’s gone through 3000+ messages with only 24 misclassifications so far.

Now if only I could get my Groupwise mail to go through POPFile also…

I’ve been playing with my T3 for a few days now, and I absolutely love it. Screen is nice and bright, sharp, colourful, and I absolutely love the extra screen space when you slide it open. Really makes using spreadsheets a lot easier (which is something I do a lot of). The screen is easy to read in the daylight and battery life is pretty good. Used it quite a bit to test a couple of x-ray rooms the other day. 5 hours of hard use along with lots of syncing and the battery indicator was down to about 40%. And it’s fast. Being able to switch between portrait and landscape mode is pretty cool to. The thing can handle pictures and music (comes with a Palm version of RealOne) too. Also comes with a webbrowser, but haven’t had the opportunity or need to use it yet.

The virtual grafitti area is pretty cool. Collapsing it gives you a bunch of extra screen real estate. One thing I would like to see is the ability to customize the buttons in the virtual grafitti area, like the hardware buttons can be customized. Since it is virtual, I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t be customizable.

Syncing is really fast too. Way faster than my Visor with USB. Already have it loaded up with about 10 MB of stuff, and a complete sync including backing up all the contents of the T3 only takes 2-3 minutes.

It has Bluetooth, which at the moment isn’t too useful for me yet. Maybe I’ll find something to use it for.

Migrating from my Visor was easy too. Sync my Visor, and rename the backup directory. Install the updated Palm Desktop, attach the cradle and sync my T3. All the contacts, datebook, todo and memos were transferred over seamlessly. I use Datebk5 and had to recategorize some of my datebook entries though. Some of the events got mixed up into different categories. Minor inconvenience. Then it was just a matter of dragging the apps I wanted to transfer out of the old backup folder to Palm’s QuickInstall tool and doing another sync.

Still carry my Visor Platinum around, just in case there’s something I need that I forgot to transfer over, but soon it will be relegated to sitting in my desk drawer. Anybody want to buy a used Visor Platinum? Good condition, just needs a new screen (digitizer is flaking out). Comes with USB and serial cradles, Stowaway keyboard (starting to suffer a little bit of wear and tear), Memplug and Vaja case. I think I’ve even got a few extra styli lying around I can throw in. Make me an offer if you’re interested.

The keyboard is a little thinner than my Stowaway keyboard, but bigger in the other two dimensions. Unlike the Stowaway’s clever foldout design, this one just folds out in half. Pop the latch (which also serves to support the backrest for your Palm) and fold out the right half of the keyboard. In fact it looks remarkably similar to ThinkOutside’s wireless keyboard.

You are greeted with a 3 row keyboard layout (with a split spacebar and other function buttons on a 4th row). A blue Fn key gives you access to the numbers and PDA related functions, while a green Fn key gives you access to symbols.

I like the wireless part. The keyboard’s IR port swivels into position above my T3. No connector to snap on to, which is good. I’ve already worn out one button board on my Visor because of the constant snapping into and out of the keyboard.

I don’t like the keyboard at all though. In fact, I suspect anybody who touch types more than 20 wpm probably won’t like this keyboard. The hinge just happens to sit where I normally rest my thumb to hit the space bar which keeps me from hitting the space bar properly. I have to hold my thumb in an awkward position to hit the space bar. Maybe I’ll just have to train myself to put my thumb a little farther out to clear the hinge.

Having the numbers and symbols compressed into the top row of letters is also inconvenient if you’re typing a lot of numbers mixed in with text. Really slows typing down having to reach for those extra modifier keys. It also means the right hand number keys are all in the wrong position (compare with a full-sized keyboard to see just how out of position they are).

Key spacing is all right, somewhat narrower than the original Stowaway keyboard design. 19mm vs 18mm may not sound like much, but it sure feels like a lot.

I think hoever came up with the 3 row keyboard design was never much of a touch typist who entered a lot of numbers. I suppose eventually I’ll get used to it, but man, it sure makes typing slow.

I’ll have to hunt around and see if I can find an original Stowaway keyboard that I can use with my T3.

I discovered a spam fighting utility called POPFile through a post over at TechReport today. It’s a tool that runs on your local computer and acts as a POP proxy between your mail client and your ISP’s POP server. You reconfigure your mail client to connect to your local machine, and when you check mail, it queries POPFile, which goes out to your ISP’s POP server and grabs the mail. Then it does some kind of analysis (probably Bayesian) and forwards the results to your mail client. POPFile also runs a local web server that’s used for accessing retrieved mail for training the filters, and configuring POPFile.

Mail is sorted into what it calls buckets, which in Eudora-speak would be analogous to mailboxes. You can set up magnets, which are filters that file message directly into a particular bucket based on an email address or domain for example.

The training process looks pretty simple. Just a matter of connecting to the local webserver, selecting the messages that need to be reclassified and reassigning them to the appropriate buckets. POPFile adds a couple of headers to the message, which should make it pretty simple for your email client to do any secondary filtering afterwards.

Since most of my spam seems to come overnight while I’m not at work, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see how effective it is out of the box. Earthlink’s Spaminator supposedly catches a good portion of the spam I get, but lately it’s been sucking. The amount of spam getting through Spaminator has pretty much doubled over the last couple of weeks, and seems to be slowly increasing. Hopefully POPFile will help with this after a little training.