The published Goal: To deliver on-line and community services that provide social networking and media distribution capabilities targeted at the non-professional ex-athlete and their teams.

• Showcase your athletic accomplishments...
• Preserve and share memories, photos, and videos...
• Reconnect with former teammates, coaches and fans...
• Discuss and debate all things sports..

Please check it out, and send us all your feedback either using the Contact Us link on the bottom of every page, or at this e-mail address: feedback@hgiw.com

In general, I'm very happy with a combination of spamassassin running on the server, and OS X Mail.app's SPAM filtering on the client. In order to avoid losing false positives I have a Junk folder (I use IMAP). Spamassassin re-writes the subject lines of the e-mails to be prefixed with "[SPAM]". Mail.app sorts those messages into the Junk folder and marks them as read. Just like it does with the messages it determines are SPAM.

The problem with this, is that until Mail.app checks my inbox, all that SPAM is sitting there, in my inbox. This shows up on my iPhone, and webmail. Lately, I've been working from coffeeshops, outside, the kitchen, etc... with the net result being that my laptop is spending more and more time sleeping (hence: not running Mail.app). So my iPhone alerts me that I have 20 new e-mail, but they're all SPAM.

So I decided to see if I could get spamassassin to not just mark SPAM, but also file it away in the Junk folder. While spamassassin can't do this, procmail can.

I added this to my user's .~/procmailrc file:

# Mark spam as read
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
{
	:0 fhw
	| formail -I"Status: RO"

	:0:
	mail/Junk
}

after my existing spamassassin invocation:

# Run everything through spamassassin
:0fw
| /usr/bin/spamassassin

What that is, is a conditional rule, based on the Spam-Status header being set to Yes (which is set by spamassassin). It then executes two actions. The first uses formail to mark the e-mail as read. The second moves the mail into the Junk folder (I use mbox - if you use maildir you need to change this action to a slightly more complex one which you can Google for).

This works nicely. Now the SPAM found by spamassassin is marked as read, and moved into my Junk folder on the server, instead of waiting for Mail.app to do that.

However, once I got this working, the number of e-mails which slip by spamassassin to be caught by Mail.app, began to bother me. With the old system, it really didn't matter who caught the SPAM, as long as it was caught. With the new system, any SPAM not caught by spamassassin, ended up polluting my inbox.

I discovered a couple of things. First, I installed razor and pyzor to help with scoring. I also increased the spamassassin scores of some ED drug rules in my spamassassin user_prefs:

score DRUG_ED_CAPS 15.00
score DRUGS_ERECTILE 10.00
score DRUG_ED_COMBO 10.00
score VIA_GAP_GRA 10.00
score NO_PRESCRIPTION 10.00

This helped, but by testing on individual items of spam which were being missed by spamassassin (culled from my Junk box, without the [SPAM} subject addition i.e. those caught by Mail.app), using the following test command:

spamassassin -t -D < /tmp/spam

Where /tmp/spam is a file containing the raw message text from a single spam e-mail.

I discovered that the auto-whitelist (a misnomer, it's actually an automatic scoring system designed to allow past history to average out any score spikes from the same sender), was pushing the SPAM score DOWN on many of these e-mails. Often past the spamassassin threshold, so they were mistakenly considered HAM instead of SPAM.

While the AWL can do some odd things, at least on my box it's clearly broken. Testing with a new SPAM mail, where the first run had zero input from the AWL rules, and the SPAM ended up with a SPAM score of 20 (which is definitely SPAM), I found that immediate subsequent runs against the SAME mail, had the AWL contributing a -6.9 score, against the positive 20 SPAM score. Clearly, that's wrong. Why it was doing that, I dont''know, so I just turned it off.

Again, in my spamassassin, user_prefs:

use_auto_whitelist 0

All is well. So far 100% of SPAM has been caught by spamassassin, on the server, tagged, marked as read, and moved into the Junk folder. With no false positives or false negatives.

So I'm happy.

Googling showed that other people were having this issue across many OSes and browsers. Unfortunately, most of the advice was "reboot" or "change your network buffer" or "YouTube sucks!". None of which helped me.

What did help, is downgrading from Flash Player 9.0.124.0 to 9.0.47.0 using the Adobe archive of Flash Players. I uninstalled the 9.0.124.0, and installed 9.0.47.0, and poof, no more problems with YouTube videos.

I hope this helps someone.

I have also rolled the code into my ATG Open Source Module Pack, so that I can maintain everything in one location.

Also: please note that you cannot reformat the JSP code, or introduce any spaces as it will break the feed. I've made note of that in the module's Readme as well.

Enjoy!

Tech Startups, by and large, don't carry significant debt. As such they will have little direct impact from the credit/debt crisis which is a driving factor in this economic decline. Any many of them won't even be effected secondarily by the reduction in luxury spending, as many of them don't actually charge users at this point.

So will Tech Startups be the last businesses hit by layoffs and budget crunch? Will they provide a solid anchor of invested money? What do you think?

I sat down and pulled out my laptop. Sometime between when I packed it up that morning after checking my e-mail and looking at Google Maps, the screen had decided to die. I strongly suspect it is a bad logic board, as Russell had the same issue. Worst. Possible. Timing. There I was, at this big tech conference, with a useless laptop. Of course I hadn't brought any paper to take notes on, so I was out of luck.

The talks themselves were great! Really amazing. People covered many facets of the tech startup world from law, to investment/VCs, to raw tech, to business plans, etc...

You can watch the talks here:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08

And I strongly recommend spending the time. There are great chunks of information in there, and they're all pretty good speakers.

My personal favorite talks were Paul Graham, Jack Sheridan, and DHH. While I don't use Rails, and am pretty far from a DHH worshipper, I have to say that I LOVED his talk. It stood in stark contrast to the rest of the talks which were often focused on the increasing common approach of building a company/site with the sole goal of being acquired. Sure, an M&A event is great, but it's also really unlikely. The road there, if you take outside investment, can be stressful and partially out of your control (for better or worse). And if you miss, you have nothing. Personally I really prefer the approach of having a viable business plan and revenue model for your business. If you do get acquired down the road, great, but if not, you're still making money. Maybe it stays your passion, or maybe it becomes a solid revenue stream freeing you to explore what you really want (as Tim Ferriss discusses), or maybe it dies, but regardless, you'll come out in the black and having learned a lot.

There's lots more I could say about the talks, but it's probably best if you just watch them for yourself. I'll probably bring up my thoughts and reactions to them in later postings here.

After the talks were over, Tom Music, Alex Barbara, and I walked back to the Westin. I rested for about 30 minutes, and then the three of us walked to the Super Happy Dev House event that night. I really mourned my useless laptop at this point. It was rough not being able to use it for notes and the like during the talks, but to be in a building filled with people hacking away on their projects and having no computer was rough.

I did talk with some new folks, which was great, and I saw the OLPC XO laptop in person for the first time which was pretty cool. Eventually nine of us walked up the street and got some great Thai food. Afterward some headed to a RoR meetup, others went back to the SHDH, and I headed back to the hotel. I crashed around 11 PM.

--- Sunday ----

I woke up at 6 AM, again, packed, checked out, and was driven back up to SFO. Virgin America was great again on the way home. I was driven home, unpacked, drove over to Russell's to borrow his extra laptop to use for work, and spent the rest of the day doing post-trip stuff (laundry, moving stuff over to the loaner laptop, etc...).

All in all it was great trip, and even with the laptop issues it was really valuable and I learned a ton. I also met a lot of new people who are all smart, motivated, tech focused, and good people.

On Friday afternoon, my wife drove me to the airport, where I barely caught my Virgin America flight to San Francisco. This was my first flight on Virgin America, although I had flown Virgin to London a couple of times before. I had booked first class seats for the trip, as they were barely more expensive than coach. The Virgin America First Class is AMAZING. It's the nicest First Class I've been in, with the possible exception of when I flew to Australia on Quantas. The seats were huge, comfortable, and I could stick my legs out straight in front of me, and there was still 8-12 inches between my pointed toes and the seat in front of me. The chair itself is power adjusted, like my car, which is nice, and has a built-in massager. There is an overhead reading light, and a bendable LED snake-light that comes from behind the seat for more focused light.

The Virgin RED entertainment system is very impressive. There are large touch screens which fold out of the arm rest and allow you to browse an extensive list of live TV channels, on demand TV shows, on demand Movies, a large MP3 library (including some great electronic music I wasn't expecting to find there), games, and more. On the way down I listened to some of the music, and on the way back I watched an anime movie.

The food was excellent. They offer a collection of tapas-like appetizers which were very good. For my dinner I choose a grilled vegetable ravioli with pesto sauce which was absolutely restaurant quality. Service overall was great.

I arrived into SFO on-time and was met in the terminal by my driver, who whisked me down to Palo Alto to the Westin I was staying at. The hotel was nice, and my room was great. However, they didn't offer shirt pressing or emergency laundry services. Also, no ATM in the hotel, and if you want a cab you have to walk over to the next hotel, their sister hotel the Sheraton, and try to snag one there instead. I unpacked, and then grabbed a cab to head to the pre-StartupSchool meet-and-greet at Y Combinator that evening. I arrived around 8:30, and the place was PACKED. There were hundreds of people there, all talking to each other, which filled the main room with a surreal buzz.

I grabbed a bottle of water, and made myself a name-tag. I didn't know a soul there, and I'm naturally somewhat introverted at large noisy gatherings like this, so I was a little worried. However, the great thing about this event was that virtually everyone else there A) was in tech, and B) didn't know many if any other people there. When everyone has a common ground (tech), it's easy to meet new people and join conversations. "Oh these people are talking about relative strengths and weaknesses of common databases? I can totally contribute to that conversation!"

I talked with a ton of people and must have given out about 40 business cards. I eventually ran into Paul Tyma, the owner of Mailinator, another temporary e-mail service, similar to 10MinuteMail. Mailinator was around first, so I'm the knock-off:) I actually never even looked to see if any sites like that existed before I built 10MinuteMail. We considered having a knife fight to settle which site was better, but opted instead to hang out and chat for a while.

Some other people/sites I met that night include David Parkinson and his EmptySpaceAds, Tim Robertson, Travis Cross and his OfficeTone, and many many more. Everyone I met was great.

As the last CalTrain left, and the crowd had thinned out considerably, I ended up heading over to Google with Paul, who took me on a late-night tour of the Google HQ.

Google is amazing. Very cool visualization tools, great digs, kitchens and food everywhere, laundry, mailing, etc... Every aspect of the building just screamed "We take care of our employees". I know there's lots of cynicism about many of those perks being there to "keep people working longer", but frankly the whole feel is about making the employee's life easier and less stressful, not trying to grind them up. All the free stuff is great, and of course every company needs a ball pit. This tour was definitely a highlight of my trip.

I finally made it back to my hotel, and fell asleep around 1 AM.

10 Minute Mail video

I'm pleased that people find it useful enough to bother creating a how-to video about it. Happy users are the best thing you can have.

And if you haven't seen it, I have a video tour of 10MinuteMail that I made myself:

10 Minute Mail video tour

In /atg/devtools/ create a local version of admins.xml:

 
<repository-admins>
  <default-admin id="YourRepository">
    <display-name>Your Content</display-name>
    <repository-name>YourRepository</repository-name>
    <create-bean-displays>
      <bean-display type="media" class="atg.ui.repository.MediaInternalBinaryEditor">
<property name="internalBinaryExcludedTableProperties" value="path, version, mimeType,data, length,url"/>
      </bean-display>
    </create-bean-displays>
    <standard-bean-displays>
      <bean-display type="media" class="atg.ui.repository.MediaInternalBinaryEditor">
<property name="internalBinaryExcludedTableProperties" value="version, mimeType, data, length, url"/>
<property name="internalBinaryTableReadOnlyProperties" value="path"/>
      </bean-display>
    </standard-bean-displays>
  </default-admin>
</repository-admins>
 

Thanks Russell!