SpamSieve
Posted on September 26, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | Comments Off
Erik posted his SpamSieve 2.0 stats, and I’m equally impressed. Still getting more false positives than I like, but I’m sure that will improve as I’m diligent about telling SpamSieve what it’s doing wrong through the scripts. What I *love* about SpamSieve is that it really learns from its mistakes. Once you tell it that something is spam, it is. And more important, when you tell it that it has a false positive it doesn’t make the same mistake again.
My stats since September 10, 2003 (SpamSieve 2.0):
Good messages: 2333 Spam messages: 1458 False positives: 134 False negatives: 31 Correct: 95.6%
Michael Tsai, the author of SpamSieve commented on Erik’s blog that the reason for the false positives is that he has more spam than good in his corpus. I’m looking at mine and I see that I have 190 good messages and 1458 spam. Ah ha! I went through every folder of saved mail I have and told SpamSieve that it’s all good (over 2000 messages worth) and we’ll see if the false positive rate goes down. I’m checking my spam folder often and it would be nice to going back to doing it every once in a while (if at all). Part of the problem is that I had to start a fresh corpus when I set up the G5.
VersionTracker/MacFixIt Pro
Posted on September 26, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | Comments Off
I subscribed. What the heck. .Mac is giving away a VersionTracker Plus subscription to members, but today I read that MacFixIt has added Dan Frakes as an editor. I like his style, so I went for the discounted combo membership (normally $60, on sale for .Mac members for $35). I don’t really need it, but I’ve read the site for years and with good websites falling left and right (or in serious danger of doing so) I thought it a good idea to give back to one I get some use out of. I suppose it will be handy to be able to search MacFixIt’s archives when I want to track a problem down. First thing VT Pro did was point out to me that I forgot to upgrade my newly installed copy of Microsoft Office to the latest version (10.1.5) so I guess that was a sorta good thing.
They’re also giving away blog software (ha!) and $30 off some firewire drives.
Dreamweaver MX 2004 slowness, part 2
Posted on September 24, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | Comments Off
Last week I posted that Macromedia is collecting information from Mac OS X users who have experienced performance issues with Dreamweaver MX 2004. Today, I received the following email:
Dear Dreamweaver User,
Thanks for responding to our survey regarding Dreamweaver MX 2004. Here on the Dreamweaver team, we are collecting as much information as we can about specific issues that our users may experience. We would like to learn from you exactly what problems you have noticed. Please take a moment to complete this follow-up survey:
http://surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=5358277649
With this information (especially sample files and steps to reproduce), I can file a bug that will help our engineers diagnose the problem that you see. At this point, the potential exists for an update to the product, but it is unclear when this might occur and what it might look like.You can increase the likelihood of an update by sending this email and the survey link to anyone else whom you know is using the new product.
Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you,
David Zuckerman
Dreamweaver QA Engineer
Macromedia
Good for Macromedia for trying to get to the bottom of this. I didn’t bother with the second survey as I’m no longer having performance issues in Dreamweaver.
Saving time
Posted on September 24, 2003
Filed Under Design | Comments Off
I think I may have to raise my billing rate, or this G5 is going to cost me.
I use the phenomenal Studiometry to keep track of my billable hours. I did a brochure this morning. What normally would have taken me three to four hours was done in a little over two. And it looks pretty good if I say so myself. We’ll see what the client thinks later. 
That’s what you get for being an early adopter
Posted on September 23, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | 1 Comment
This entry is for the Macheads…
I ran into my first problem with the G5. Yes, I’ll be reporting this through the proper channels to see if it was just me.
Feeling confident today, I installed the latest Wacom tablet driver and the Kensington MouseWorks driver so I could use my Studio Mouse again. There’s something there that the G5 doesn’t like. It was fine for a few hours, and then suddenly I was in Safari and the mouse was jumping all over the place. I would be on one side of the screen, and then the cursor would be on the other side. Impossible to control. I reboot and the problem was still there. I first removed the MouseWorks driver, when that didn’t help I removed the Wacom driver (and unplugged it). To be safe, I reboot into open firmware and reset nvram to reset the mouse drivers (as recommended on the Apple discussion forums). I’m back here now with the yucky Apple keyboard and mouse and it seems to be okay. I want to make sure things are stable before trying alternate input sources again.
Anyone have a clue about this?
