Let's make Happy New Year 2007

It's the end of year 2007. It was tough year for me specially in organization area. Some projects were finished, some were prolonged so I feel fairly ok about my productivity.

Last weekend I spend on cleaning my "space". End of year is good as every other event to remove clutter.

My goals are balanced and refreshened and I'm ready to enter into new year.

So think about your new year's resolutions. We live in interesting times. Almost everything is possible.

What to do if you have no idea what changes are needed make your future better? I would like to introduce you hackyourself.org site. It's an interesting and condensed article about living happier life.

Happy New Year 2007. Let your dreams come true.

Mutual Funds Portfolio project

I have finished first prototype of Mutual Funds Portfolio application. It supposed to be finished 3 weeks ago, but meantime I have to switch to another data source.

Application contains core skeleton and basic functionalities plus administrative functions. No bells no whistles, just tables with interesting numbers.

I will deploy it on public testing server, and send message to my project cooperators to play with it. It's good holiday gift I prepared for myself.

Now I'm thinking about usability and features users will envy like various portfolio views, graphs etc.

So on that time, Merry Christmas and let the Santa bring you all you need.
BTW "Santa" story is an interesting tale and it looks that there is more than one gift-giver. It may explain how he can manage workload :)

Is host virtualization for everyone?

Corporations often use host virtualization as a way to split one bigger and powerful server machine into set of easy manageable custom smaller servers without hardware mess. For software developers there is a way to test their software in various target environments, that are easy to set up on one testing box. Home and office users often use it boot two different systems at once to get what it gives best to improve productivity.

On the other hand virtualization separates OS from real hardware. This is tempting to have unchanged hardware environment for long time support systems. What will be problem with your customized perfectly working system in the next 5 years or later? New hardware solutions arrive at crazy pace. Your hardware platform probably will not be supported soon. And there will be differences that cause most of installed Operating Systems to be reinstalled or reconfigured again. So if you are looking for cutting the cost of future hardware adaptation, think about future machines preconfigured to use host virtualization. There are of course more usable cases for use of virtualization.

From historical point of view there is convergence of PC and server hardware platforms. Do you remember Amiga or Atari PCs? What about Apple computers- what is the difference between new Mac and other off-shelf Intel PC? Operating systems are trying to hide and abstract hardware differences. The final difference gap can be hidden under virtual machine host.

I'm looking forward for even better virtualization solutions.

Thunderbird and everyday spam fighting

How many emails do you get every day? How many of them are not spam?
I get about 200 spam emails everyday. I'm using Thunderbird mail client with built in spam filter - but it "eats" only about 15% of my spam. I think that it's not the matter of training data because of about several thousands good marked posts.

Somebody wrote about manual preselecting best representatives for the types of spam, and then feeding the spam filter with it. But come on - I need and automated method.

So I started looking for the best spam filters I can use for free. Very popular and tempting option is to forward all your emails to Google mail and use it as your mail client. Filtering capabilities are indeed very good, but what if you don't want to redirect all your email to "G empire"?

There are good open source spam filters working as proxy servers like fabulous spamassasin. It's good idea to set up such kind of spam filtering server for intranet.

I've needed something different. While searching for Thunderbird spam filtering plugins I found adn tried one interesting product - Spamato.

It can work as standalone mail proxy but I used Thunderbird plugin version spamato4thunderbird. There is also MS Outlook version too if anybody is interested.

Installation procedure is easy - like for most of hunderbird plugins. Basic configuration - show your bin/java path and give registration email (spamato can send spam statistics to central server). Oh I mentioned java. Yes it's written in java- and proces takes about 70 MB under windows, and it's not blazing fast. It's not a problem for me - I'm checking email a couple times per day and don't need to run Thunderbird all day. It's the matter of work organization.

What you get after install: a beast with pluggable architecture, a dozen filter and decision maker modules, configurable via http interface, and displaying nice charts. Oh and there is that funny (annoying) sound after every spam email marked - it's good you can easy turn it off.

Using experience- surprisingly good. Filtering results - not worse than Google mail filter. There were few false positives at the beginning (ham marked as spam), but all those filters are learning. All spam marked messages are moved into special spamato folder (check configuration). You can view spam history and correct (teach) filters via web interface. Big negative - spamato is not integrated with Thunderbird native junk mail tools. So marking something as junk under Thunderbird, doesn't count for Spamato. You have to correct filters on Spamato separately. There is partial solution for that problem - you can configure spamato to detect posts movements in/out of spamato folder on IMAP server.

So I'm going back to read my spam errrgh email inbox.

Agility - ready for change

Life is full of surprises and random events affecting every planned action.

Last week my wife and kid get some health problems. I had to change schedule to take more care of my family.

Another example is my Mutual Funds Portofolio project. I have finished first prototype and was ready for "intra" testing. Unfortunately main quote data source has been shut down. It was free service, that I used for testing purposes, so that kind of things are quite probable.

Minor or major change of plan will occur anyway. So, is planning worth anything? Yes, but we have to plan with possible changes in mind.
Most solutions tend to fall between two strategies:
- using enormous resources to analyze every probable option
- analyze core issues and then proactive adapt do changes

Good example of ready for change strategy are agile methodologies. If you are interested in the subject please read introduction at agilemanifesto.org/.