Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• The leading names for our new puppy so far are Comet and Captain Nemo. Both names are pertinent: A comet, after all, is a dirty snowball, which the little guy resembles after rolling in the dirt. Also, we could then say, "Comet and QBit" to precede "Donner and Blitzen." Alas, the most natural diminutive to "Comet" is "Commie." (Some people have already called QBit QBie. Commie and QBie. Maybe not.) We considered Elf, given that he's a Christmas puppy, with the bonus after-the-fact acronym of "Extremely Lovable Furball." Captain Nemo works well because anytime he sees an available lap, it's Dive! Dive! Dive! He also has a desire to wander, rather like Pixar's defiant little fish of the same name. QBit always stayed right beside us, but the little guy clearly wants to explore. I can see it now: 20,000 Leagues Off-Leash.
• Pete Albrecht sent me some links on the Curta Calculator, which I had heard of but never seen or read about in detail. It's a thing about the size and shape of a pepper mill, with a crank on the top. You enter numbers on little sliders on the device's side, and then turn the crank to generate a sum or a difference. (Other arithmetic operators can be accomplished with a little more work.) There's even an online Curta Simulator, which will give you a much clearer picture of how things work. Now I know why people say, "crunch the numbers." Also, it was made in Liechtenstein, of all places.
• I received the "big" (non-free) edition of Turbo Delphi a little while back, and have installed it and begun to test it. It works beautifully, and (amazingly) may make me give up Delphi 6, or at least consign it to a VM. Whatever problems I've had with Turbo Delphi so far have to do with the installation of all the .NET folderol that it requires as prerequisite installs. Partway through the .NET installation on my new XP machine (the SX270) it asked to reboot, and when I did, the Administrator account (from which I had begun the install) was no longer listed on the Welcome screen, but only the Jeff Duntemann and the Jeff (Limited) accounts. I could still log in as Administrator, but I had to turn off the Welcome screen and log in via the command-line dialog. WTF?
• One thing I didn't know until yesterday is that Turbo Delphi requires activation. It's not like XP or Adobe activation in that I don't think it looks are your hardware and hunkers down when you change a hard drive or network card, but that is an experiment I do intend to make.
• Sectorlink, my hosting service, has apparently turned off their spam filtering mechanism because it was being overwhelmed by recent floods of spam. That we're being carpet bombed with the stuff is clear: I got 306 spams yesterday, after over a year of getting maybe 75 or 80 per day. As I write this, it's 10:15 AM and I've already gotten 133 since shutting down last night at 10. Most of the delta is pump-and-dump scams using only images and some obfuscation text. Thunderbird's trainable spam filter is basically worthless, and gets only about 40% of what comes in. I nab ten or twelve spams per day with a conventional keyword filter, but what we really need (as Michael Covington has suggested) is a more general filtering language that would allow us to compare strings in From and Subject, and count attached images and measure their size, etc. I really don't think that most people care about spam, because things as obvious as that are just not being done.