POPFile after two months

I’ve been using POPFile on my Linux system for right at two months now.  Its statistics show that it has classified 2,724 messages in that time, with an accuracy of 96.91%.  Of the 84 classification errors, 32 of them have been false positives:  good messages that POPFile identified as spam.  Most of those errors occurred in the first few weeks that I was using POPFile while I trained it to tell the difference between ham and spam.  I still scan POPFile’s classification, but it’s been over a week since I last got a false positive.  I’m going to reset the statistics on August 1 and see how it fares over the next couple of months.

I’ve found that it’s a whole lot easier to scan POPFile’s classification results for false positives than it is to try sorting out my inbox by hand.  If you’re having spam trouble (and who isn’t these days?), I’d highly recommend giving POPFile a look.

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Converting to CityDesk

I spent a large part of the last few days setting up a CityDesk template for my Random Notes site and the main page, and adding entries for the month of July.  Now I’m slowly converting prior months’ entries, but it’s going to be a long process.  It’ll take a long time to convert almost four years of entries.

Jeff Duntemann reported in his diary that he’s creating a photo index and a topic index.  I’m planning to do much the same thing, but not on this first pass.  That might seem like the wrong way to go, having to visit every entry at least twice, but I’m not entirely sure how I want to organize things.  So I’ll get everything into CityDesk first.  Then I’ll worry about indexing it.

Another bicycling update

Three more items on the bicycling front, before I leave that topic for a while to avoid losing readers:

  • Lance Armstrong made history today by winning the Tour de France for the sixth time.  Not only did he win by a convincing margin, he completely dominated the mountain stages of the Tour.  In particular, he won Wednesday’s mountain time trial up Alp d’Huez by over a minute and beat his closest rival in yesterday’s individual time trail (55 kilometers) by over a minute.  All around, it’s an impressive achievement.
  • I did my monthly century ride yesterday, rolling out a little before 7:00.  I met another cyclist about 10 miles into my ride, and we rode together for the next 70 miles or so.  He’s a much stronger rider than I am, but was taking it easy while recovering from a knee injury.  The temperature topped 110 degrees on the road, and by the end of the ride I was suffering.  But I completed my 100 miles, keeping with my goal of at least one century ride per month for the year.
  • Debra’s training is coming along well.  We did a hard 45 mile ride this morning, introducing her to some of the hills to be found in the Austin area.  She wasn’t too happy having to climb some of them, but she made it home without any ill effects.

Microsoft MapPoint

I spent about 90 minutes on the phone this evening with a representative from Microsoft’s MapPoint technology group.  The purpose was a technology overview for an article I’m writing to be published on DevSource.  On the surface, MapPoint doesn’t look all that exciting.  It’s just another MapQuest knock-off, right?  Wrong.  MapPoint is actually several different products, including MSN MapsStreets and TripsMapPoint 2004MapPoint Web Service, and MapPoint Location Server.  They all provide some type of mapping service, but in very different ways.

MSN Maps provides maps and driving directions in much the same vein as MapQuest.  Streets and Trips is a desktop product that lets you plan trips, print maps, view points of interest, and all that other good stuff people expect from mapping software.  There’s also a Pocket PC version called Pocket Streets.  MapPoint 2004 is business mapping software that lets you put maps into documents and include demographic information on the maps.  The CD product has an astounding amount of demographic information.  You can color-code a city based on demographics:  median income, number of children, etc.

The Web Service is what I find particularly exciting, though.  If your company needs mapping information or wants to provide mapping information to customers through your Web site, you can contract with Microsoft MapPoint to provide the data.  A simple example is providing your Web site visitors the ability to find the store nearest their location.  Given the user’s ZIP code, you can query MapPoint for stores within a given radius and then show a map that pinpoints each store.  You have to put a few pieces together in order for it to work, but it’s pretty simple.

It’s worth checking out if you’re interested in playing with map data.  Go to the Web Service page, download the SDK (requires the .NET Framework), and sign up for an evaluation account.  .NET isn’t required to use MapPoint:  as an XML Web service, it’s platform agnostic.  But the SDK samples and all the documentation are .NET centric, so be prepared to do some translation if you’re doing PHP or something else non-.NETish.

Bicycling update

A few notes on the bicycling front:

  • One of my coworkers is an avid bicyclist: former mountain bike racer, manager of bicycle shops, and a real gadget freak. He brought in his Garmin eTrex Legend GPS last week and offered to let me use it on the Katy ride this past Sunday. I know, I probably should have got one of these about four years ago, but I wasn’t convinced that it was useful. After using it on two rides, I think I’ll be putting a GPS on my “must have” list of cycling equipment. Although I’d really like one that has built-in cadence counter and heart rate monitor.
  • I’ve long suspected that my cycling computer was mis-calibrated, even though I measured the tire’s circumference and programmed it into the machine. Sunday’s ride with the GPS confirmed my suspicions: the cycling computer was reading about two percent high. This assumes, of course, that the GPS is accurate–a good bet, all things considered. I re-calibrated the computer Sunday night and today it agreed exactly with the distance and average speed that the GPS reported for my ride to work.
  • As I expected, Lance Armstrong won today’s Tour de France stage and regained the lead. I’d be pretty surprised to see him lose it now.
  • It occurred to me yesterday while I was paying for Gatorade and water at the convenience store halfway through my ride that any money I save in gas by commuting on the bike is at least partially offset by the cost of fluids and Power Bars. I don’t always need to refill my bottles on the way home, but when it’s hot and I’m riding hard the two liters I carry doesn’t last much more than an hour. I guess I could wear the Camelbak that holds 100 ounces, but it’s very uncomfortable to wear in the heat.
  • I’ve scheduled my monthly century ride for this coming Saturday. I’ll be rolling out at first light, hoping to get most of the ride finished before it gets too hot. In August I’ll be riding the Hotter’N Hell Hundred. September is open because they’ve moved the Waco Wild West Century to October 2. I’ll have to skip that one this year because I’m already planning to do the Texas Time Trials on October 9, where I’ll compete against the clock to see how far I can ride in 12 hours. I considered doing the Waco ride with Debra, but that’s not the course on which to do your first century. There are too many hills and the roads are very rough.

Tour de France update

Today is the second rest day of the 2004 Tour de France. After a week on the flats and a few days of climbing in the Pyrenees, the riders get a day to rest before the final week of racing in the Alps. As is usually the case, this year’s Tour has been full of surprises:

  • Lance Armstrong, going for a record breaking sixth consecutive win, has spent only one day wearing the leader’s yellow jersey. He earned that by coming in second during the prologue time trial and then leading his U.S. Postal Service team to a smashing victory in the team time trial. He gave up the jersey the next day when a group of sprinters went off the front. This was no big deal, as the sprinters don’t fare well when the roads turn up. But even after finishing well ahead of the peloton in the mountain stages on Friday and Saturday, Armstrong is still in second place: 22 seconds behind the race leader.
  • The current race leader is Thomas Voeckler, a 25-year-old rider from France who is competing in his first Tour. He’s the French national champion, so it wasn’t surprising to see him lead the race during the first week, but to see him maintain his lead over the past few days is pretty surprising. Almost everybody thought he’d lose the lead on Saturday’s brutal stage, especially when we saw how he was struggling on the big climbs. But he managed to tough it out even without much help from his team mates. I doubt that he’ll keep the lead much longer; certainly not after the mountain time trial scheduled for Wednesday.
  • Almost all of the riders who were viewed as challengers to Lance Armstrong have either dropped out of the race or are so far down in the standings that they have little chance of catching up. Jan Ullrich, considered by most to have the best chance of beating Armstrong, struggled over the hills on Friday and Saturday, and now is seven minutes behind the race leader. Tyler Hamilton, last year’s fourth place finisher (with a broken collarbone no less) abandoned the Tour on Saturday. Haimar Zubeldia also abandoned on Saturday. Iban Mayo, a Spanish rider who beat Armstrong in a race last month, almost abandoned but was convinced by fans and his team mates to keep riding. He’s over 30 minutes behind.
  • Barring accidents or mechanical problems, the only real threats to Armstrong’s sixth victory are Ivan Basso (1:39 behind) and Andreas Kloden (3:18). And taking a minute and a half from Armstrong during the final week of the Tour is pretty unlikely.

As with previous years, there’s lots of real time coverage on the Internet. www.letour.com is the official site. From there you can get stage reports, standings, route profiles, and live updates during the stages. They also have a link to OLN TV, where you can listen live to the audio of the OLN broadcast. Other sites you might want to check are Cycling NewsVeloNews, and The Daily Peloton.

Katy Flatland Century

Debra and I drove from Round Rock to Katy, Texas (it’s near Houston) last night and got up early this morning to participate in the Katy Flatland Century. Our goal: 60 miles. I took the picture on the left while we were waiting to start. My friend Ben Trimmer, a 1990 graduate from the Marine Military Academy joined us for the ride, along with his wife and some of their friends.

Weather at the start was about 70 degrees with cloud cover and a light wind–perfect riding weather except for the high humidity. We rolled out at about 7:15 am. After the first 10 miles or so of picking our way through the crowd (there were about 2,000 riders), we were able to settle in and (mostly) enjoy the ride. Debra’s longest ride up to today was just 42 miles, so the planned 60 was a challenge.

The wind picked up as the morning wore on, and the cloud layer burned off or blew away about 10:30. We were moving along a little faster than our goal of a 12 MPH average, and taking our time to refill water bottles and enjoy the snacks at the rest stops. Ben and his friends tended to go faster between stops, meet us there, and then pass us as they headed to the next stop.

Debra did a great job conserving her energy, kept fed and hydrated, and managed to finish the ride without hurting herself. The last 7 miles or so was difficult because of the headwind and the sun beating down on us. She was a bit disappointed when the ride turned out to be only 57 miles, and wanted to make a few turns around the mall to bring the total up to at least 60. I convinced her otherwise. She’ll have the chance to make a longer ride soon.

The picture at right is us standing by the car after the ride.

We went to lunch at a nice little Mexican food place (hey, after burning all those calories, we can afford to splurge a bit) and then crawled into the car for the 3 hour trip home.

The Northwest Cycling Club did a great job organizing the ride and the volunteers at the rest stops were friendly and encouraging. The course is almost completely flat (hence the name), and an excellent place to introduce a new rider to the joys of organized rides. I hope to do the century ride next year.

Recycling the dump

Almost every city has nearby a potential gold mine of resources that nobody has yet figured out how to tap: the city dump. People have been dumping their trash in “sanitary landfills” for hundreds of years, and continue to do so at an increasing rate. It used to be that the dump would take anything: dead leaves, grass clippings, tree trimmings and other yard waste, general household garbage, old appliances and televisions, construction debris, etc. If it could be hauled off, it ended up in the city dump. This has changed over the last few decades so that stuff hazardous to the environment or useful in other ways is diverted to recycling centers, but there still is an astounding amount of trash going into landfills.

I’ve long been fascinated by the potential of extracting value from the contents of these landfills. Think of strip-mining the landfill site, separating the contents, and then selling it as scrap. Anything organic (yard waste, mostly) would be composted and sold as fertilizer or mixed with dirt to make planting soil. Old appliances could be ground up, metals separated, and sold as scrap. Tires could be. Well, tires were always problematic. The point, though, is that most of a landfill’s contents have value–just not enough value to make such an operation profitable. Until recently.

Modern recycling methods can separate and resell most of an incoming waste stream–sometimes at a profit–but they’re expensive to build and more complicated to operate than a landfill. Municipal governments with their short-term focus have a very difficult time approving the millions of dollars to construct one of these systems when given the much cheaper alternative of buying an isolated piece of property 50 miles away for the city dump. So we continue to bury or dump into the ocean millions of tons of valuable trash each, mostly because there are no visible short-term consequences, and the long-term economic consequences mean nothing to most people.

The long-term environmental consequences do concern some people, but they find themselves powerless to do anything about it. About the best they can do is stage a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protest when a new landfill is proposed, or begin a neighborhood recycling program that starts with lots of excitement and participation but soon loses steam when people realize that there is no direct economic benefit to be gained from separating the glass, plastic, aluminum, yard waste, newspapers, cardboard, and hazardous materials into separate bins to be picked up on different days or dropped off at different facilities. I know that parts of California have mandated recycling programs under which people have separate bins for different kinds of trash. I also know that many people pay no attention and throw their kitchen trash in the bottles and cans bin. A recycling program has to be as convenient as taking out the trash or it won’t be effective.

The thermal depolymerization process developed by Changing World Technologies (yes, I’ve discussed them before, see June 21, 2004 and May 30, 2003) has the potential of making recycling that convenient. Currently in the development stage, this technology could actually be used to recycle any kind of organic trash, including old tires, plastics, yard waste, paper, and even paint and other toxic materials. Current plans for the company are to build plants that are optimized to recycle focused waste streams (for example, the plant in Carthage, MO will recycle 200 tons of turkey parts each day), but it’s reasonable to envision a pre-processing step that would separate an incoming waste stream and divert the non-organics for alternate processing.

Consider, then, this scenario. A company purchases the city dump and contracts with Changing World to build a plant at the site. The company continues to accept incoming waste at a regulated cost. The company then begins to mine the landfill, dumping all of the contents into the hopper to be turned into diesel oil, natural gas, and what-all else. When the dump is empty, the company trucks in clean fill and either turns the former landfill into a big park or sells it to a developer for a new shopping mall or subdivision. Of course, they’d have to keep some land where the plant sits and have some space to store incoming trash for the short term, but much of the former landfill could be used for something else. If you’re looking for a win-win situation, I can’t think of a better example. Consider:

  • All municipal waste is recycled. Metals are ground and resold as scrap. Organics become fuel. See Changing World’s site for the details.
  • Citizens don’t have to separate their waste.
  • No more hazardous materials leaking out of the dump into the ground water.
  • A formerly smelly unpleasant piece of land, sometimes in a prime location, is put to more productive use.
  • The city no longer has the expense of maintaining a landfill.
  • The company creates jobs and makes a profit.

It’s possible that the company could waive all tipping fees (fees for dumping trash) because profits on the recycled byproducts would cover those costs. In fact, I could envision the company actually paying for trash! A remote possibility, true, but possible.

I don’t know what it would cost to get the ball rolling on something like this. It should be possible to find a city somewhere that would let a private company operate the landfill and begin a pilot program. Would it be possible for a small guy to put together the resources to make something like this happen? Or do we need to wait for a big company like Waste Management or Allied Waste Industries to make it happen?

Content management

It didn’t take me very long to discover that building my Web site manually (raw HTML) is a heck of a lot of trouble, and that building my own content management system will require much more time than I’m willing to spend. I don’t know why I thought I could take on a project of this size. Whatever the case, it’s been instructive. I can more easily appreciate the value of a good content management system.

The question then is what am I going to use? I was hoping to find a good client-based CMS for Linux, but I didn’t find anything near as feature complete or polished as CityDesk by Fog Creek Software. I downloaded and evaluated the trial version over a year ago, but at the time wasn’t prepared to pay for a CMS tool. I downloaded it again the other day, and I’ll probably purchase it. $300.00 (less with the 25% discount email coupon) is a bargain considering all of the features that this program has. I’ve started building a template for my site, but it’ll be a few days before I’m ready to post anything.

If you’re looking for an easy to use and inexpensive content management system for your Web site, be sure to give CityDesk a look.

Found Dog Day

Two years ago today, Charlie showed up in the yard while I was mowing the lawn. He was tired, dehydrated, hungry, and very sick. Debra took him to the vet and I tried to find him a home. Two weeks later we decided to keep him. He’s become a well adjusted companion, if somewhat overenthusiastic at times. He genuinely likes most people, and anybody he doesn’t like I view with some suspicion. I wonder at times if his reaction to people is based on “vibes” he picks up from Debra or me.

The dog’s a nut and an endless source of amusement. Debra and I weren’t ready for a big dog when he showed up, but now we can’t imagine life without him.