OK, I now have SpamAssassin up and running. If you have an account on the Unix server where your mail is delivered (and especially if you’ve used procmail before), getting SpamAssassin to work is ridiculously simple. I also tested it with a copy of a spam message that I had, and its scoring system worked perfectly. So, now I’m eager to get some real spam messages so I can see how well it works. I’m utterly giddy about the possibility of getting rid of most, if not all, of the spam that I receive on a daily basis.

Today I’m trying to get SpamAssassin up and running. I have finally decided that I can’t take deleting spam by hand any more.

There’s nothing quite like a good RMS rant. While I don’t agree with RMS on everything, I appreciate the extreme position that he (and the FSF stake out). Through their intransigence, they push the open source/free software community in what I consider to be a direction that’s positive overall.

Stephen Jay Gould, RIP.

Josh Marshall’s comments on the gamesmanship undertaken by the White House over the past week are so are worth reading.

Schools are finally wising up and banning the sale of junk food to students.

The Economist: Intervention that worked. Intervention by British forces seems to have put Sierra Leone on the path toward peace and a government that can actually hold up.

Newsweek’s article, What Went Wrong, which discusses what we knew prior to the 9/11 attacks and how the Bush adminisitration dropped the ball on counterterrorism, illustrates why newsweeklies are still useful. The article does a great job of synthesizing (and adding details to) the various news stories that have been cropping up over the past week or so.

The big news today is Dick Cheney’s tour of the Sunday talking head shows, at which he warned us all about the inevitability of future attacks by al-Qaeda. Everybody with the least bit of common sense knows that al-Qaeda is still operating, and that they’re still working on the same stuff they’ve always been working on. The question is why is the administration making a big deal about it again? Could it be that they are trying to distract us from their failures last summer by focusing our attention on attacks yet to come?

How benighted is Pakistan? Check out Akbar S. Ahmed’s article on Pakistan’s incredible blasphemy laws. He begins with the story of Mohammad Younas Sheikh, who is currently rotting in a prison, awaiting execution:

Sheikh’s problems began in October 2000 when he made some innocuous remarks about the origins of Islam. Muslims believe that the Koran came to the prophet Muhammad as a revelation when he was 40. In response to a student’s question, Sheikh said that before he was 40, Muhammad was neither a prophet nor a Muslim, as there was no Islam. For those Muslims who believe his prophethood was divinely preordained, this was blasphemous. The students took the matter to some local mullahs, who in their role as religious leaders registered a case with the police. Matters then moved rapidly and, as in such cases, with a certain inexorability.