Daily Bytes

BlogShares: And I thought they couldn't invent anything more about blogs. From Paolo:

I have bought some shares of weblogs in my blogroll on blogshares. Interesting new experiment. It looks like Scripting News has been victim of an (hostile?) takeover by Ruzz. I hope that Dave will be able to maintain his freedom and integrity.

K: Personal thoughts on Gulf War II: Interesting and nicely written!

Slashdot | Eclipse 2.1 Released: After a lot of waiting, here it is!

Only 7 days ago I moved from Evolution to Mozilla Mail. At that time I said that I was looking forward to the day I would have zero spam mails in my Inbox. Well, that day arrived sooner than I expected. And besides having no spam I had no false negatives either. A big kudos for theMozilla Spam Filtering team.
Still there are some stuff that could be improved:

• Use bayesian filters not only to differentiate ham from spam but also has a substitute for filters
• Train those bayesian filters automatically when I move a message from my inbox to a folder

That would be ultra-cool as it would be very easy for Mozilla to separate all my mailing lists and newsletters without me creating filters by hand.

Adaptation: Great movie and Nicolas Cage surely deserved an oscar for this one.

From IMDB:

On February 11, 2003, "Donald Kaufman" was nominated for a real-life Academy Award, along with the real Charlie Kaufman, for the screenplay of Adaptation (2002). This is the first time in Oscar history that a nomination has been bestowed upon a fictional character.

I wont' even try to explain the plot of the film. I just loved the intricate/recursive story. Not to miss ...

In the beginnning there was the geek Code, now there's the Bloggercode .
For the sake of it, here is mine: B3 d t+ k s u f i o x-- e+ l c-

Finally it happened!

Text only virus: Some time ago I received a joke by e-mail about a lazy virus that asked the user to forward the e-mail to all his friends and delete it's entire hard disk afterwards.
Today I received this e-mail, claiming that the person that sent the e-mail had a virus and was checking if any of his contacts got infected too. The e-mail had some simple instructions for the receiver:

• Find a particular file (a Windows system file).
• Delete that file.
• If the file existed then forward the e-mail to all your contacts so they can check if they have the virus.

And there you have it, a text only virus!!! And the most amazing thing is that given the amount of e-mails of this type I received today it works better than real virus.

Day 2 of my GSM lessons. Whenever I think things are making sense I discover another problem GSM has to deal with. No wonder so many calls get lost. Just so you can get an idea, this diagram is a part of what happens when someone from a external network calls a mobile phone (just the call setup phase).
In the next few days I'm going to learn some GPRS and UMTS (they told me it gets even more complicated).

Spent most of my day learning the intricate workings of the GSM protocol. One thing on my mind at this point: How in the freaking hell do mobile phones work at all.

Didn't anyone explain the KISS concept to GSM engineers. Now I understand why the first mobile phones resembled backpacks.