What's with this? The .dmg disc image file for the new iChat beta generates a .pkg installer for the new version, but when I open it the thing just flickers in the dock before going away without having done anything. If I tail the logs in Console.app, I see

2003-06-23 23:04:11.366 Installer[7012] Unable to load nib file: PagedInstaller.nib, exiting

I've just received a copy of the June 2003 edition of ;login:, Usenix & Sage's journal.

My writeup of the MIT Spam Conference is on page 65 :-)

Anna one --

OOO weee ooh I hack Perl like Buddy Hobbit...
Oh oh and you're Galadriel
I don't care what they say about this stupid ring
I don't care 'bout that

Anna two --

Okay, this keyboard navigation thing is driving me batty. In every other graphical web browser I've used, you could always depend on certain reliable responses from the keyboard: the up & down arrows scrolled the screen by a line or two, and the pageup & pagedown keys scrolled the page by a screen at a time. Reliable, predictable, unsurprising, good.

Some things are worth forwarding as widely as possible. This is one of them.

To: SCO

I am a Linux user. I feel that SCO's tactics toward an operating system of my choice are unjust, ill founded and bizarre. I am willing to be sued because I am confident that SCO's tactics toward Linux will fail. If I have published my email address as part of this petition it is so SCO representatives can email me and begin the process of serving me a court order.

Sincerely,

Okay, so now that every browser except the 800 pound gorilla officially supports tabs, when are we going to be able to access browser tabs from Javascript? I've got pages where I'm dying to replace every window.open(url) Javascript call with a call equivalent to window.newtab(url). As far as I can tell, Javascript can't do this because support for it hasn't found its way into the DOM. Maybe this is a good thing -- no acc

Andrew: Apple has an OS X Security mailing list, sign up at http://www.apple.com.phrak.com/signup/.

61 INT. DR. SCO'S VOLCANO LAIR - MAIN ROOM Dr. SCO at his table with Frau, Scott, and Number Two.

DR. SCO Get me the President of the IBM.

The PRESIDENT appears on Dr. SCO's video screen with his BOARD MEMBERS behind him.

62 INT. IBM BOARD ROOM (SPLIT SCREEN)

PRESIDENT Dr. SCO, what do you want?

Does anyone have any suggestions for converting old analog audio into a digital format like MP3 or Ogg? Yes, I've poked around Google, but I'm not finding any clear answers like I think might turn up here on Slashdot.

I've got a couple of boxes full of old tapes, including things like bootlegs & demos, that I'd like to convert to MP3s. On the same tack, my parents have some pretty good albums that I'd also like to convert.

Seeing as this will probably get lost in the noise of the Google patent discussion, I'll promote it to a journal entry where (arguably) it'll be a little more visible.

For those that hate the Dell ads, rejoice: Steven the Dell Dude has been arrested for pot possession. How many people that saw these ads didn't see this coming?

I just realized that, although uce@ftc.org is a pretty well known "official" spam sink, I can't actually find any official sounding site that supports the notion that forwarding spam there actually does any good. After poking around on Google for a few minutes, I can't find anything more substantial than anecdotes about people sending spam there.

The general concensus seems to be that statistical spam filters don't work as well for groups of users (ISPs, networks) as they do for individuals. Most of the statistical filters seem to work nicely for individuals, but that accuracy comes from being able to model the usage profile of single users. When applied to a group the accuracy seems to generally slope off, and 98% true-positive / 0.1 % false-positive rates fall to say 80% / 5%.

I was waiting for the review to show up on Slashdot, as the conference was really good. The audio proceedings have been put online, but I'm not sure if they can take a Slashdotting, so please be gentle :) If you have 8 hours to spare, the whole day was pretty good & worth listening to, but the schedule as planned isn't exactly the sequence people spoke in, so you may have to jump around the RealAudio stream a little bit.