Create a snowflake

Create a snowflake

The Brick Apple – New York City in LEGO®

The Brick Apple – New York City in LEGO®

Visit http://www.mocpages.com/ for all sorts of LEGO® created goodies!

Create your own snowman

Create your own snowman at http://www.naked-i.com/flash/winter/index.html

Note: Link doesn’t work anymore. The person had too many visitors and had to pull it

iHateSpam to use Bayesian filtering

I just received an email from the iHateSpam people saying that there was a new version coming out and it will contain Bayesian filtering. Yay!

Chris and I will be reviewing it when it comes out.

Testing antispam products

As many of you know, I have a business where I do computer work (installations, upgrades, troubleshooting) for local people and build web pages for anyone. Visit the PC Improvements web site for more information. I’ve had this domain since 1998 and I literally get 100+ junk emails a day through its email accounts. A few weeks ago I did a review of iHateSpam by Sunbelt Software. At the time I was very impressed by its features and it seems to do a remarkable job at alleviating my problem.

Since then, I have also tried POPFile and SpamBayes. Both of these are free (open source) projects. Overall I’ve been far more impressed with these two than iHateSpam. PopFile using standard Bayesian filtering and using all of the features of the software, after 10,000 messages it had classified 99% of them correctly! SpamBayes uses a modified version of Bayesian filtering which is supposed to be better, but I find that it only classifies about 60% of my junk email as positively junk, and about 30% as suspected junk. The remaining 10% requires me to classify them manually.

Until I try some other products, I highly recommend POPFile!

PCIN.net search finished

I’ve finished the new search page for the PCIN.net site. I’m using phpDig and it seems to be doing an excellent job.

Strange Outlook Express errors (identity login could not be started)

I’ve been helping a neighbour with his computer, and it seems like every time I fix something, something else goes wrong. On Saturday night was was doing some updates and everything seemed to be running better, then he tried to install some software, and now Outlook Express is giving all sorts of errors. I’m hoping the following articles will help:

The identity login could not be started. Some components are either missing or incorrectly configured.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310893
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=249893

Outlook Express could not be started. It may not be installed correctly. Make sure that your disk is not full or that you are not out of memory. Contact Microsoft support for further assistance (0×80040154)
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=249893
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=238656

Error starting program. The COMCTL32.DLL file cannot start. Check the file to determine the problem
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=137273