I have created a new weblog for my upcoming Nobilis game, Delphinium and Larkspur. (Actually, this is a sort-of a revival of the game. I intended to run it as an email game last year, but it never got off the ground.)

As you may have noticed, I did a bit of rearranging on the site so that this news weblog is also the main index for niflheim.net. That might help me not forget to update the silly thing, ensures people don't miss the updates, and also provides a bit more organization to the site.

My home internet access has been down since early Friday Morning due to upgrades being made by my provider across much of the city (judging by their recording).

It seems likely to stay offline all weekend, but who knows. I'm presently posting from Mom's, where my brother has DSL. Oh, how I loathe Cable Modems.

Anyway, that's why I haven't been able to do any more work on the site.

When I left for work today, our internet access was still out.

That's 3 days and counting. What kind of moron decides that the weekend will make a brilliant time in which to perform upgrades?

Today is my sister's birthday. Happy Birthday, Stacey.

Internet still down at home. Blah. Four days and counting.

Apparently, the reason that our internet access is out is because Insight "detected a signal leak or ingress in violation of FCC regulations" at the house during their recent maintenance, so in order to prevent interference from aircraft and other such, they installed a filter on the line.

So we've been offline for nearly a week, not because of the upgrades, but because they decided to simply cut our access. Which is fine and all (assuming that this isn't "excuse #19"), but they told us about this by mail, so it took us DAYS to find out about it. And they apparently can't schedule someone to fix the problem until Friday.

Personally, I think they should have put the filter on, walked over to the house, told someone what they had done and why, then immediately asked when it would be convenient for us to have them fix the problem (right then being a valid choice). If nobody was there (unlikely) then they should have left a note.

I would like to reiterate how much I hate and despise cable internet access. Never had anywhere near this many outages, nor this level of customer non-service with DSL. And it was pretty much the same speed to boot, and had less issues with security. If Pete hadn't insisted on keeping his present cable modem account when we moved in, and if we had an actual need for a land phone line (or DSL didn't require a land account), then I'd be on DSL right now.

In other news, I saw Matrix Reloaded last night. Didn't have the problems with it that some people did. Also didn't really think it was Gods Gift to Hollywood. It was entertaining and had some interesting points to make. The anime influence on the plot (and action) was more apparent here than in the first movie.

Yep, we are finally back online, as of a half hour ago.

And there was much rejoicing ("yaaaay.")

Update: Although it seems to be a bit flaky...

Just pointing out that the Obsidian Requiem and Delphinium lists are recieiving most of the updates at the moment.

And that I'm up way too late, considering that I have to work tomorr- err, this afternoon. Well, that's what happens when most of my day gets sucked up by fixing the problems caused by making a Movable Type upgrade. Or more accurately, by WS_FTPle's b0rked ASCII/binary transfer modes.

I downloaded the extremely cool Matrix Reloaded 3d screensaver. I'll post a link later; too tired right now to bother to look it up.

Added a new page for our upcoming B5 game, Lurking in Shadows

At least, it's upcoming if the game ever comes out…

Like the two games mentioned in the previous entry, you'll probably see most of my updates happening there.

The niflheim.net domain used to belong to somebody else. You can tell, because of the volume of spam mail that is sent to addresses that no longer exist. Spam is also sent to addresses that never existed in the first place, or to no address at all.

All of this is considered “unrouted mail” by my host. I dump it all into a special account that I set up for this purpose, with a 5 meg disk quota, and never check. (I had cleaned it out once, a month or so after I set it up, but ignored it ever since.) The idea was that it would eventually fill up and start bouncing.

It turns out that the mail software ignores the disk quota, so the mailbox just continues to grow. One day last week, I decided to check the account. It has been accumulating mail ever since.

10953 messages.

50 megs of my host's disk space.

All of it, every last piece, spam. I do not like Green Eggs and Spam. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.

Then it hit me. Recent versions of Mozilla contain Bayesian junk mail filters. (Mail filters that can be trained on the specific mail that you get to recognize what most frequently distinguishes good from bad mail.) 10953 spam messages is a lot of training.

Now, I know that the Bayesian filter in Mozilla isn't the best in the world yet. And I don't actually get a lot of spam at my real email addresses anymore (I've been canny about posting my addresses, and I can change them on a whim.) But on a lark, I decided to download and clear out all of that mail, and punch it through the filters. Several hours later (even on a cable modem … mail servers are slow) my junk mail training file was 11000 messages richer (I also marked all of my email list and ordinary email as Not Junk). The training file is 2.6 megs. Does it help?

Well, before I trained it, it let through all 11000 messages. Afterwards, it lets through 1 or 2 pieces out of each batch of 50-70 spam mails. <=2% false negative rate. Since I went through and classified all of my known good mail, it hasn't yet incorrectly marked one of those. 0% false positive rate (so far).

Since mozilla's bayesian filter doesn't work as well as it most, these numbers are likely to improve as the software gets improved.