maynardcase.co.uk linkfest

Courtesy of The Register, this is a marvellous collection of spam poetry - little bits of spam emails that seem to have a deeper meaning. My personal favourite is the lovely phrase “Translucent gibbon rucksack bonanza”.

All this is because when Bayesian filtering started becoming popular, spam mail generators starting writing code to generate nonsense that looked like English. This was done using a Markov chain nonsense generation system - you simply look through a piece of text, and analyse which words follow which other words. For example, in this article the word “this” is followed by the words “is”, “was” and “article”. Once you’ve done that, pick a word at random to start (eg. “This”), then pick one of the next options (eg “is”), and repeat until bored. A sample bit of text from this article could read:

“Done using a word at random to have a sample bit of spam mail generators starting writing code to have a sample bit of text from this is a marvellous….”

Not perfect sense, but it’s difficult to automatically distinguish from English. Despite this, the war against spam continues on new fronts, with Sender Policy Framework trying to ensure users only send mail as themselves (preventing spoofing of “From” addresses) - although this won’t prevent all spam, even when Microsoft adopts it. International agreements to do… well, something about the problem are being forged (although as this only includes the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia it’s unlikely to be terribly effective).

No doubt the fight will continue, although probably at some cost to both freedom of speech and the plain simple convenience of email.

The Animal Episode is a very interesting description of how one of the first computer viruses was written. ANIMAL was a game which would attempt to guess the animal that you were thinking of; if it couldn’t guess, it would add your animal to it’s tree so that it would do better next time. The creator, John Walker, also wrote a program called PERVADE which would try to copy ANIMAL and itself to all the available directories in the system - essentially the behaviour of a computer virus.

The especially geeky people out there may be interested in the assembler code provided, which gives a bit of an insight into what coding was like back in the good old days!

Are sequels always a bad idea?

Shrek 2 is hyped as the unicorn of the film world, a mythical entity also known as the sequel-that-is-better-than-the-original. I disagree - but only a little, as Shrek 2 is really good fun and has many laugh out loud moments. The element of surprise at the quality of the animation is gone, as is the satire and some of the sharper wit, but overall it preserves the spirit of the first and extends the plot without having to force anything.

But am I the only person to cheerfully ignore the point of the film by thinking that Princess Fiona is rather nice in her human form?

[for ratings and review of other films see the reviews page]

No, really

Well, let’s see. I could … take a photo of this poster as well! And write a rant about how annoying it is to be nagged by the bloody Open University to get my arse in gear. I mean, really - when I’m walking home every evening I get this big hulking whinge in the corner of my eye about how I should be doing something more interesting. Well, I’m walking home, dammit - you expect me to be beavering away at some poxy “degree” while walking home? How about when it’s raining? Idiots.

An interesting documentary from fat, bearded, rich white American Michael Moore which has a distinct emotional hit despite being closer to propaganda than most films of this type.

Farenheit 9/11 is a tour through George Bush’s first term, covering his vacation time, reaction to the events of 9/11, associations with myriad dubious companies, various Saudi families and motives for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. While all the facts shown are genuine there is a perpetual feel of slippiness to the documentary; Moore continually implies conclusions by asking leading questions that aren’t answered. It also potentially lacks focus; by breezing thorough so many dubious areas of the presidency it lacks a building of the facts into an unassailable case against Mr Bush. However, there is a serious punch from the final scenes, dealing with the grieving parents of a soldier killed in Iraq, which elevates the whole film and gives a sense of how someone’s corruption and naivety can blight hundreds of real people’s lives.

[for ratings and review of other films see the reviews page]

A great fun little flash game this afternoon:

Mr Malibu and the deep-fried penguin posse

Not terribly difficult but great design and a nice control system. Plus high levels of surrealism which is always good!

(thanks to Barry for the link)

This is part of what I shell out 35 clams for each month: