.Net Wrapper for Google Desktop Search

I've been reading the Google Desktop Developer Forums pretty often, partly to see what people have to say about my Spindle Search plugin, and partly to help whenever I can.

I realized that a lot of C# / .Net developers are reinventing the wheel when writing code for interoperating with the Google COM object. So I thought, why not separate that into a library (I already had the code written as part of Spindle Search.)

So there's now a new project, .Net Wrapper for Google Desktop Search, on my site.

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CD / DVD Spindle Search

I've been a huge fan of Google Desktop Search, especially seeing how fast it is over the traditional file system search in Windows. But what I noticed it lacked, was the ability to index removable drives such as CDs, DVDs and external hard-disks. Even if it did index them, there is always the problem that the file might be unavailable when trying to retrieve it, simply because the CD is in a spindle, not in the drive.

But Google had a solution: they made their API accessible, so I wrote a plugin for it. Spindle Search now lets you add CDs, DVDs and other media to your Google Index, and then comes up with a dialog when you search for them, telling you where to locate the file and disk.

Go take a look, tell me what you think.

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Jurassic Park ... what the movie left out

I utilized a day from Spring Break to catch up on some reading. Jurassic Park, the novel I'd wanted to read for a long time now, finally came up on my radar. I knew Crichton, I knew how the scenes would be described, I knew the subtle theoretical underpinnings to be expected from any Crichton creation, but his treatment of Ian Malcolm's character was absolutely fantastic.

Malcolm was the mathematician that John Hammond had recruited to analyse his Park, but wasn't happy at his skepticity since Day 1. Malcolm's character was underplayed in the movie in the interest of, I presume, keeping it simple. But his application of Chaos Theory to Jurassic Park made the best reading.

An excerpt, a pretty long one: (fair use, of course, as permitted by copyright law.)

"You know what's wrong with scientific power? It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails. [...] Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants that power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you've attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline."</p>

"Now what is interesting about this process is, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it."

"But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. There is no discipline lasting many decades. There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsify -- it doesn't matter. Not to you, or to your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards. They are all trying to do the same thing: to do something big, and do it fast."

"And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly. You don't even know exactly what you have done, but already you have reported it, patented it, and sold it. And the buyer will have even less discipline than you. The buyer simply purchases the power, like any commodity. The buyer doesn't even conceive that any discipline might be necessary."

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Data Backup for Home Users

<rant>Why isn't there a decent piece of software that lets home users backup their hard drives every once in a while? Or if there's one, why can't I find it anywhere? I can't hire an IT department, so anything more than 3 or 4 clicks is not worth it.</rant>

So I finally gave up and wrote a homegrown tool - the bit about programs scratching a developer's personal itch is so true! It's trivial enough to not call it a piece of "software" or even a "utility". I had the following objectives in mind for my backup strategy:

• The backup should reside on DVDs. When my machine goes six feet under, I cannot fiddle with peripherals nobody else has. I want a disk I can carry in my jacket pocket, walk over to school, and have my files with me.
• Restoring should only involve copying the files back: no extracting from archives (Corollary to Murphy's Law: In any archive copied to optical media, exactly one bit gets toggled by an invisible evil force, thus rendering said archive unusable.)
• Incremental backups for intermediate days: copy only those files that changed since the last backup.
• I can't afford to pay for a program for such a simple task.
• Nice-to-have: have it automatically do this for me every X days.

Unfortunately, I found none that satisfied the given criteria. It didn't help that my primary platform is still Windows. I found Mike Rubel's article on Incremental Backups with rsync nice and informative, but useless on Windows because NTFS won't support hard links.

So I ended up writing this tool that looks at the last-modified date and copies over everything modified after a given date X to a temporary backup directory. Then, I just burn that to a DVD. Who said good solutions are complicated?

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Spam Filter FAQ

Q: What is this spam filter FAQ about?

A: This page explains why I might not have replied to your email and, instead, puts the blame on my spam filter. ;-) It also tells what you can do to make sure I get your email, and what makes my spam filter think that your message was an unsolicited commercial email. It offers tips on what common message characteristics you should avoid, so that other people's spam filters will not block your legitimate messages.

Q: Why am I seeing this page?

A: Probably because you clicked on a link to this page from an email I sent you. I might have included a link to this page in my email signature.

Q: So, why do you use a spam filter in the first place?

A: Due to the huge amounts of spam I receive every day (> 500 messages a day) it has been impossible to manually read every email and decide if it is spam. Therefore, I switched to using a spam filter (SpamAssassin, a free product) sometime ago. For a long time after that, I had configured it so it would only mark each suspicious message with "[Spam]", but did not delete such emails automatically. I also use the junk mail controls built into the Mozilla Thunderbird email client program.

I used to filter these emails to another folder, and whenever I had some free time, I checked that folder on a regular basis.

Q: What do you do now, that made you write this FAQ?

Since around May 2003, it has been entirely impossible to inspect my Spam folder to weed out the good from the bad. So I began to delete all such emails without looking at every single one. There are only 24 hours in a day, and it has become humanly impossible to do this process once every day.

Also, the spam filter I use has been quite accurate in identifying spam, hence the number of legitimate messages that get flagged as spam ("false positives") has reduced drastically to around 1 in every 200, thus making the whole process not worth the time.

Q: How will I know if my email was deleted by your spam filter?

A: The short answer is, if I do not reply to you within a reasonable amount of time, you should assume that your message was inadvertently deleted. I apologize for having had to do this, but as you've seen from the questions above, there is no other alternative. :-(

Q: What should I do so that my emails are not flagged as spam?

A: I can suggest a few rules that SpamAssassin uses to identify spam, so that you may make sure your messages do not satisfy them. That should help get your email to pass through most other spam filters too, so if you have been having trouble sending email to people in certain organizations where spam filtering is enforced, you have come to the right page.

Q: Just tell me what I need to do:

A: OK, let's start. I will list here the rules, beginning with those that are most easy to implement and progressively to those that are more difficult to. Before I begin, I need to tell you about how a message is flagged. SpamAssassin performs each of these tests on each message received, and assigns a score (positive or negative) for each test. Then, it sums up the score for each message, and if it is beyond a particular threshold, it flags it as spam. So, if your message satisfies two or more rules from the list below, there is a higher likelihood of it being classified as spam.

A novel way of almost guaranteeing that your email is never flagged as spam, is to incorporate Habeas headers into your message. For more information, please check out their FAQ page. It is free for personal use, hence a good choice for the cash-strapped individual email user like me.

Disclaimer: This is not an official or exhaustive document. The SpamAssassin tests page was used as a reference, and that page should be consulted for any clarification of these rules. This FAQ is intended for the common man concerned about his/her email being flagged as spam.

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