A couple older pages here that you may find entertaining (or horrifying) if you are a PowerBook user: my titanium and aluminum PowerBook adventures. I sanded the paint off the former; my body chemistry ate the surface of the latter.

I’ve been called a destroyer of PowerBooks, but my PB 100 from 1992 still boots, so I can’t be that bad. I promise I’ll be nicer to my new 15".

One technical interest I haven’t written much about here is spam. I have a fairly aggressive anti-spam setup, and I have a simple spam statistics page that gives hourly breakdowns. But what I’ve wanted for a long while is some way to aggregate spam stats from other servers into a sort of spam weather report. There are all sorts of reasons why this is impossible to do perfectly – people have different criteria for what constitutes spam, for one – but I still think a useful model for sharing data could be worked out. People who are already generating spam stats could publish their data in a microformat, for example. Alternatively, they could submit periodic automatic reports to a central server, which would then make the stats available in machine-readable form. The key would be to make it easy for people to make their data available.

A lot of people who want to switch from Safari choose Firefox. There are some great reasons to do that, like the web developer toolbar. But ironically, I think a lot of Firefox’s Mac mindshare is a side effect of the gains it’s making (for good reasons) on Windows IE. Clearly it’s the best choice for most Windows users and most Linux/Unix desktops as well. But on the Mac there are other good ones.

Now that OSCON is over I’m going to be taking off for a bit of vacation, so there won’t be much action here for the next ten days or so. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you when I return.

It’s possible that there’s still some guy doing laps around the Oregon Convention Center on a Segway with security chasing after him, but as of 1:30PM today OSCON 2005 was officially over.

This was my first time attending the conference, and I had a great time. I learned a lot, had some excellent discussions and unexpected laughs, and got myself fired up again about being part of the open source anti-massacree movement.