Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Last Tuesday, Microsoft Outlook started behaving strangely, exiting silently a few minutes after starting. after a number of fruitless attempts to revive it, I finally realized my Cloudmark SpamNet beta was causing Outlook to exit, probably when checking for updates. I went to their website and discovered the program was out of beta, with a version 1.0.1 out. A less pleasant surprise was that using it now requires a $5/month subscription. This change has already raised quite a ruckus among beta-testers.

Cloudmark’s original material did imply the basic SpamNet product would remain free, but I don’t mind a subscription plan so much (although I would have preferred a yearly plan to the monthly one they are proposing). The program is extremely effective – when coming back to work on a Monday, I often have over a hundred spam emails waiting for me, and SpamNet will more often than not catch all but a couple or so. This 99% effectiveness is well worth $60 per year in my book.

I will probably not subscribe to their plan, however. What Cloudmark failed to realize is the effectiveness of the program is directly related to the number of users who participate in its distributed peer-to-peer data collection. If most of the beta testers decide to leave SpamNet, its effectiveness will be compromised and thus the value of the program dwindle.

I am experimenting right now with SpamAssassin and the bayesian filtering programs bogofilter (in spite of lead author Eric S. Raymond’s racist and bigoted remarks), Annoyance-filter by John Walker (a co-founder of AutoDesk and author of the excellent Hacker’s Diet, a.k.a. “How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”) and the Python-based SpamBayes which is available as an Outlook plug-in.

In an earlier article, I described my first experiences with Bluetooth. I had managed to get both my Palm Tungsten T and my Sony Ericsson T68i to sync with Outlook. I had since managed to get my laptop on the Internet via Cingular Wireless’ GPRS service.

Yesterday, I finally stopped procrastinating and configured my Tungsten T to browse the web and send/receive email via Bluetooth and GPRS. Cingular, like all other US carriers, very poorly documents its GPRS service but some Google footwork (and using Mergic Ping to find out their documented DNS servers do not work) got the job done.

Cingular doesn’t operate an outgoing SMTP server to allow its customers to send email, and any public SMTP server without authentication is likely to be blacklisted by spam filters as an open relay. Fortunately my company’s Postfix SMTP server supports SMTP AUTH, as does the Palm VersaMail 2.0 client bundled with the Tungsten T (no SSL/TLS, though, you have to use VersaMail 2.5 which requires a PalmOS 5.2 device like the new Zire 71 or Tungsten C).

All in all, this confirms my earlier assessment of Bluetooth as a technology not quite ready for prime-time yet. This whole set-up procedure is certainly nowhere near user-friendly, thanks in great part to voice-dominated wireless telcos’ general cluelessness about data.

Interestingly, Bluetooth works better between devices such as my TT or my T68i than between devices and my PC (where associations keep resetting), in spite of the limited software upgradability of these devices compared to a PC. Obviously, it helps that the TT-T68i combination is explicitly tested as part of an agreement between Palm and Sony Ericsson, but still, it’s rather worrisome for the likes of Microsoft that the PC’s software entropy defeats its higher capabilities. Admittedly iMac works better with Bluetooth than my PC, so this probably tells more about the immaturity of Bluetooth middleware stacks on Windows than the whole PC as digital hub approach in itself.

Browsing the web from my PDA is very neat, but I doubt I will use it very often, because of the incredibly high prices US carriers charge for wireless data. Cingular charges $6.99 per month for 1MB, with 3 cents per extra kilobyte. Compare this to Orange France, who charge € 6 per month for 5MB and 3 euro-cents for 10KB, i.e. US carriers charge almost ten times as much. Just checking out a handful of test pages ate up 15% of my monthly quota… (email is more efficient, however). Compare this also with how much Cingular charges for voice ($39.99 per month for 600+5000 minutes at 13kbps, $0.49 per minute afterwards, which works out to 7.5 cents per megabyte of voice).

Wireless carriers still consider wireless data a business-oriented service (i.e. license to gouge). This attitude explains in large part why in a recent Metrinomics survey, only 1 in 8 respondents thought 3G wireless would be their wireless data technology of choice over IEEE 802.11 “WiFi”. To paraphrase an old saying about IBM, telcos seem to think when they piss on something, it improves the flavor… (for a contrarian perspective, read this The Register article). Unfortunately, WiFi hot spots do not have universal coverage today, and you still need GPRS as a fall-back, but the new WiFi-equipped Tungsten C does not include a Bluetooth port (otherwise I would have bought one).

If you need help with such a setup using Cingular, don’t hesitate to drop me an email via the “Contact Me” icon for some tips.

Update (2003-09-04):

I tried to use GPRS while in the Chicago area over Labor day weekend. Unfortunately, when you roam, the GPRS settings of the other network do not match, in this case DNS lookups were failing. Since I had no way to determine what the correct settings for AT&T Wireless were, I had to fall back to dialup. Just more evidence of just how clueless mobile phone companies (and the standardization committees they support) are about data.

Update (2004-01-14):

Here is a cute real-life story of a wireless Internet via Bluetooth saving the day

Karen Armstrong

Anchor Books (Random House), ISBN: 0385721404  Publisher, Buy online

British theologian Karen Armstrong entered a convent at seventeen to become a Catholic nun. She defrocked in 1969 (this caused a great scandal among British Catholics, many have not forgiven her to this day). She has since become a student of the three great monotheistic religions, writing one bestseller on the subject, A History of God

In this book, she recounts the history of the Crusades and how it still shapes the modern-day Middle East. Interestingly, she tries to take a tripartite Christian/Jewish/Muslim view (more accurately, a quadripartite Catholic/Greek Orthodox/Jewish/Muslim view, but she herself writes about a “triple vision”). Most other accounts give short shrift to the Jewish point of view.

Even now, the subject is still fraught with passion and having an entirely unbiased view is difficult, but she does a good job of it in my opinion. Certainly, her assessment is quite critical of the Crusaders, but the only actors to which she is wholly sympathetic are the humanistic Byzantines, who were poorly repaid for their forbearance towards the Crusaders by the sack of Constantinople.

Her central thesis is that the Crusades were the crucible where the modern European identity was forged, and that unfortunately in the process it was alloyed with anti-semitism and a visceral hostility towards Islam. Her second thesis, somewhat less convincing, is that in the current Israeli-Arab conflict, both parties are consciously replaying the Crusades.

The convoluted politics of the Middle East, over seven millennia in the making, have a habit of tripping up overly simplistic analyses. The Lebanese master story-teller Amin Maalouf, in his excellent (but clearly not unbiased) The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, notes that shortly after the first crusade, an army of Christian and Muslim allies fought another such army in Syria.

The Crusades were clearly seen at first as a colonial or purely military venture by Arabs of all faiths, it is only later with the sultans Nasr-ud-din and Salah-ud-din (Saladin) that the war took on a religious significance. While Karen Armstrong does a good job of showing how the conflict progressively acquired the traits of a holy war, she is not as good at identifying the purely secular realpolitik that was pursued then as it is today.

All in all, for all its flaws, specially in the political analysis of the current situation, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

A San Francisco judge has thrown out a ballot initiative, “Care not Cash”, voted by a 60% margin last November, saying only county representatives (i.e. the San Francisco Board of Supervisors) have authority to define welfare standards.

While I have my own doubts about that welfare reform package, I find curious to say the least the idea that elected representatives have higher sovereignty than the people they derive their legitimacy from.

Update (2003-09-18):

The San Francisco board of supervisors has killed the measure. Contempt for voters is not the exclusive province of right-wingers, it seems.

Update (2004-04-30):

A state appeal court has reversed the decision, citing saying it was upholding the right of voters and exercising the court’s “duty to jealously guard the prerogative of initiative”. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine, but also exceedingly slowly

In the film world, the technical quality of the pictures you take is conditioned mostly by the lens and film you use. A $79 Olympus Stylus Epic with a fixed 35mm lens will take as good or better pictures than a fancy SLR (single-lens reflex) by Canon or Nikon, and you can load it up with Fuji Neopan 1600 or Ilford Delta 3200 film for taking pictures in very low light conditions.

For digital cameras, this does not hold – the more expensive digital SLRs (DSLRs) have much larger sensors that collect more light and thus have a higher signal to noise ratio, which makes for smoother, cleaner pictures and higher sensitivity. Compact digicams peak at ISO 400, which means flash is required at night, with the accompanying “red-eyed rabbit caught in headlights” look…

Unfortunately, until recently DSLRs have been out of most peoples’ reach, with prices above $2000. Canon breached this by introducing its flagship amateur DSLR, the 10D, for under $1500 street price. Many believe that prices will still need to fall below the psychological threshold of $1000 for DSLRs to gain wide acceptance. It’s interesting to look at the Japanese camera manufacturers’ trade association CIPA’s statistics, from which it appears the manufacturers’ average wholesale price for interchangeable-lens digital SLRs was about $910 in February 2003. Some pundits think the $1000 retail price threshold will be crossed around the end of the year.

Update (2003-08-20):

The other shoe drops – Canon just announced its $900 EOS 300D, which packs most of the features (and more importantly, the sensor and image quality) of the EOS 10D for less than 2/3 the price. Canon can do this, as they are a vertically integrated company, making everything from the optics to the sensor.