I have moved over to spamprobe for all my spam filtering needs. It’s an implementation of Paul Graham’s Bayesian spam detection algorithm, which detects spam based on word frequency analysis. It requires some training before it works well; you have to feed it a collection of a couple of hundred good messages and a couple of hundred spam messages so that it can build a table of spam words. Or, alternatively, you can train it over time and put up with false negatives and positives for a little while. But once you get those few hundred messages classified, you’re golden. ...

It looks like is getting made into a movie (original). (If I were on the ball I’d hit the extras casting session tomorrow, but time prevents.) The book is excellent and highly recommended; Dennis Lehane has a knack for writing the dark side of Boston while still caring about the city deeply. And I adore his characters. Mystic River departs from his earlier series work, probably (from his interviews) because he didn’t want to get typecast. I think it was a good choice. Kenzie and Genarro are compelling characters, but at some point they’ll get overused. Their relationship is core to the series; how many changes can he ring before it grows stale? ...

Copplestone Casting (original) has several very cool lines of miniatures — the historicals would be great for pulp action. I particularly dig the Back of Beyond (original) line, which covers Central Asia in the 1920s. Read the Web pages at the link back there; the historical information rocks.

Major geeking out, here. This is a test of my hacked up Movable Type to LiveJournal bridge. I’m using blagg (a good RSS aggregator) with an LJ plugin to do the dirty work; the hacked up part is a) a modification of the default MT RSS .91 template so that the description field includes the entire entry, and b) a modification of the LJ plugin so that it sends the entry to LJ as pre-formatted text. ...

Dave Barry, of all people, made me tear up this morning.

Landed in Boston successfully, and currently tapping away at the keys of my iBook in my brand-new apartment. Well. New to me, anyhow. Earthlink came to my aid in time of need, thus the connection. Later I expect pizza. Could be worse! Pictures of the new place may come at some later date. Updates will continue to be sporadic until I get the real network in here, mmm mmm good.

I caught Blood Work last night at the Somerville Theatre. Much to my relief, the central theater is still there; I’d been worried because the listings showed five movies playing there at once, and in my previous Bostonian life, there was only a single large auditorium. But it seems they’ve simply added small screening rooms on the sides, and the main theater (with balcony) remains intact. Good. Alas, the movie didn’t benefit from my resulting good mood. I hadn’t truthfully been expecting all so much, since I wasn’t overly fond of . The bones of the plot worked better on the screen than on the page for me, perhaps because Michael Conneley’s prose isn’t very fluid, but the acting in general wasn’t terribly strong. Jeff Daniels as the guy next door was good, and Eastwood himself was passable, but everyone else — even Angelica Huston — was strident and strained. Big drama with big declarations and horrendously arrhythmic patterns of speech. Not so good. ...

Almost all packed, which is a darned good thing considering that the movers are showing up in about 12 hours. It’ll be down to the wire, yep. Posts will be very sparse for the next little while.

Adventure Strips looks just amazingly cool; it’s a subscription-based webcomics site focusing on — well. Adventure Strips. Gotta love the straightforward branding. I wouldn’t be quite so excited except that the art samples look wonderful. Mike Barr is doing one of the titles, too.

The Hugo vote breakdown (original) is now online. Bujold fans like Gaiman, no surprise. You can always get so much out of poring over Australian Rules voting results. Perhaps a better use of time would be reading the Hugo nominated stories. You won’t find the novels there, but almost all of the other fiction is online. Nice. I remember when Clarinet did a CD containing all the stories (and some of the novels), and that was a big deal.