Understanding Nothing

Today I trained Bogofilter on 85,000 spams (and an equally large number of normal messages).

A little playing with the resulting database reveals that my largest spam giveaway words are (not counting ‘header’ words, such as spamtrap addresses, and words added by previous Spam-Assassin rewriting):

1. devnull
2. dotted-decimal
3. Impotence
4. Enlargement
5. zhtclxqx
6. Medications
7. Phentermine
8. remove.html
9. remove.php
10. Soma
11. eGroups
12. Guaranteed!
13. out.html
14. windows-1251
15. optout.html
16. Citrate
17. Sildenafil
18. Ultram
19. erections
20. Adipex

To get into the Top 10 list of the Television Sets per Population, your country needs to have over 635 televisions per 1000 people.

To make it to the top of the list, you need to have over 1.2 televisions per person, so that you can displace Christmas Island!

Communications operator: “Police Can I help you?”

Caller: “Yeah this is… I’ve been tired, stopped policeman, rung you up… I beat-up one of your coppers last year and I can’t get health insurance because of it. Now I know it’s over a year and I’ve been very polite and I’ve tried to ring the court …I’ve… waved down a policeman today…”

Communications operator: “Right, Madam is this an emergency 999 call?”

Caller: “Yes! I would like to talk to the sergeant at Bath Prison – Nick”

Communications operator: “Yes, Madam this is not an emergency call”

Caller: “Yes it is!”

Communications operator: “Well I’m afraid you’ll have to ring on the normal number which is…”

Caller: “What 999? I’ve just done that…”

Communications operator: “That is the emergency number for life and death and emergencies…”

Caller: “How do you know I… !!!!! they been !!!!! all day”

Communications operator: “Right, let me just warn you now that if you swear at me again…”

Caller: “You’ll put the phone down on me and I can die…”

Communications operator: “What is the problem right now?”

Caller: “I’m in agony and I’ve took all the painkillers I can… and nobody cares…”

Communications operator: “Well, have you rang your doctor?”

Caller: “(Sigh!) You ring your doctor they put you through to the NHS and then you get…”

Communications operator: “Right, so tell me something if you’ve got a medical problem why are you calling the police?”

Caller: “Because I would like to go to sleep and I don’t want to take Zopiclone because they give you a bloody hangover…”

Communications operator: “Yeah, but…”

Caller: “I don’t want to drink. I’ve been dry over a year. I’m celebrating but I actually ripped my back yesterday and I might have ME…”

Communications operator: “Right, Madam it’s five minutes to four in the morning…”

Caller: “I know what time it is…”

Communications operator: “Right, so why?…”

Caller: “I’m just trying to get some help!”

Communications operator: “Alright, I’m sorry…”

Caller: “My doctor’s told me I’m anaemic I’ve got to take more valium…”

Communications operator: “Alright, I’m cutting you off.”

— Avon and Somerset Constabulary

Joel’s Book of the Month this month is Robert Glass’s Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. This has been on my To Buy list for a while, as I keep stumbling across articles by Robert Glass that I like.

The book lists 55 Facts, all seemingly backed up by references. I really wish Amazon had “search inside” enabled for this book though, as I want to see what the references given are for Fact #2, “The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers”. As I’ve written before, I believe the oft-cited Sackman experiment to be a fundamentally flawed source for this claim.

The chances of finding this book in Belfast are slim, so if anyone has a copy and can let me know what the sources listed against this fact are I’d be grateful.

My homepage has been essentially the same since I registered TMtm in 1996. Every 6 months or so I’d check to ensure all the links still worked, remove those that had vanished, fix those that had moved, and add a few new ones. Then I’d forget all about it again for another 6 months.

Although it moved to a CSS-based ‘design’ in June 1997, the HTML gradually grew old, and crufty, and nasty. The Perl code that produced the page became cringeworthy. The overlib JavaScript library I’d been using to make the links slightly more obvious stopped working on modern browsers, but I never got around to upgrading it.

Today, I finally cleaned the whole thing up. I threw the entire thing away and started again from scratch. Hopefully in 7 years time I’ll look back and think this version was horrible too.

I arrived back from Glasgow last night to discover that the Information Commissioner’s Office had finally gotten around to processing the two Request for Assessments that I had made.

The scariest part of the responses were the reference numbers given. Assuming these go up in simple increments of 1, then there were almost 700 RFAs made in the 11 days between my two requests. No wonder it took them two months to deal with the requests…

Jim Weirich enthuses about deleting code.

I also love deleting code. In the past month I’ve managed to remove almost 33% of the code from a major work project. It’s been slowly growing in size for over a year, and I’ve managed to get it back to the level it was at in February; although it obviously has much more functionality now.

Much of this was by removing non-obvious duplications (although there were some obvious ones too), removing workarounds for bugs in library code that has since been fixed, and just plain ripping out functionality that’s never actually used. (As much as we like to believe in YAGNI all sorts of things always creep in that seem like they’ll be useful but never actually are, and just turn out to be a complication when you need to extend or modify the code.)

But a large part of it was also finding code that we’d written that we didn’t ever need to, as someone else had already written it. CPAN continues to amaze me more and more every day. Unless you’re working on something really esoteric, 90% of the code you need is probably already available there for you. It’s just a matter of spotting what isn’t really business logic (you usually have much, much more scaffolding than you think), knowing how to find the modules that already provide the functionality, and then gluing it all together.

We were also able to find 3 or 4 things in the code that really weren’t that connected to the actual project, where we would have used a CPAN module if there had been one, rip them out and contribute them back to CPAN. I guess this isn’t really deleting code, but I like to think that it is :)