Merry Christmas
December 2002 Archives
One can never blog about one's cat too often, so...
And what would a post be without the obligatory pictures. Ptolemy Pierce is a nearly four-year-old Siamese that we rescued three and a half years ago from the Austin City Shelter. She (yes, it's a she and yes, her name is Ptolemy) is very bright, very talkative and becoming more cuddly with age.
I saw this Washington Post mention of Mozilla Mail as a defender against spam last night with a google news search for "mozilla" and was reminded of it again this morning in the mozillaZine Mozilla General Forum. It's worth a read but for the lazy, here are juicy bits:
But while the volume of e-mail has kept growing -- along with the severity of such afflictions as "spam" and viruses -- the tools most people use for mail have barely evolved in the past two years....Not bad for the mainstream press. I've been using the Mozilla junk-mail controls for nearly a month and after about a week of training the filter (marking known good mail as good and known bad mail as bad) it is catching about 90% of my spam and I haven't had a false positive yet with something like 2,000 messages automatically marked as junk. This feature is going to be to Mozilla Mail what pop-up blocking was to the browser. After only about a month's use, I'm sure I couldn't go back to a client without the junk controls.The best hope for better e-mail software, then, may lie in a fourth program -- one whose authors have no plan to profit from it.
The mail component of Mozilla, the open-source cousin of Netscape, has seen a spurt of development lately, with recent versions introducing smart spam filters, handheld address synchronization and saved searches. Why? Because its developers need these features themselves -- and because anybody, not just a designated set of employees, can dig into the program's code to experiment with new features.
Open-source development, in which programmers let anybody revise their products' core workings, can seem like a strange way to write software. But in this case, it may be the only way that works.
If I was going to blog about Phoenix today I'd say something like Michael Alderete @ aldoblog.
It's also cool to see Phoenix bringing Mozilla features to the masses.
hyatt, hixie, and pavlov have each posted voting buttons to their blogs encouraging readers to vote for them at the new mozillaZine poll which asks "Which Mozilla developer would you most like to have around for Christmas dinner?". I've personally had many conversations with all of these folks and while there are many great conversationalists in the group I think that you'd get the most from dinner with Mike Shaver.
So I guess I have to go buy it to see what they really say. Thanks for mozillaZine for the news that someone at Playboy likes Mozilla
Mozilla 1.3 Alpha for your testing pleasure. If you haven't tried any of the 1.3a nightly builds you should check this out. The mail spam controls are awesome. Once you've enjoyed a spam killing mail app like MozMail you just can't go back. The Mail team really put together an amazing effort in getting all these improvements into 1.3a.
Could we possibly release _more_ software? Well, Mozilla 1.2.1 is out, Phoenix 0.5 (Naples) is out, Mozilla 1.3alpha is just around the corner, Chimera 1.0 is also close at hand. Stop the madness :-)
