POPFile worked well for a while but it doesn't seem to be able to stay much above 99% accuracy. Worst of all, however, is that it often chokes on messages containing attachments or non-ascii text such as Chinese, and I have to go into my account settings to make it bypass POPFile, then switch it back once I retrieve the offending message.
So I decided to try something else out. My first choice would be SpamBayes, but there's no installer, so I took the path of least resistance and I'm trying out Robin Keir's K9, which did have an excellent installer and seems to be well written. I'll probably report back on how well it works. 
Via Martin, this looks like a pretty hefty article on Flash detection techniques. Every once in a while I have to do something like detect Flash when I never expected to have to do it again. I hope this'll come in handy the next time that happens.
Josh Claybourn has some amazing stats about the high growth of Christianity.
Hey, sometimes when I copy text from other places on the web and paste them into a weblog post, I wind up with characters in my RSS feed that Microsoft's XML parser chokes on. I always thought Microsoft's XML parser was stupid (Mozilla's would usually work fine, for example). However, as I recently copied text that contained non-ASCII characters and was manually changing them to their ASCII equivalents like I usually do, my recent foray into learning everything about character encodings paid off because I finally realized what was happening.
It turns out I declare my RSS feed to be UTF-8, but those special characters I always paste are probably all Latin-1, and while Unicode shares code points with ASCII, it doesn't share them with Latin-1. I also discovered that PHP has a handy UTF8_encode function that I was able to stick in where I generate my RSS file, and now everything is happy. I should also check out PHP's multi-byte string functions.
Friday, August 22, 2003
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The Elegant Universe
Well I have finally found the crazyguy that preaches useless nonsencein A...
Joseph Baxter: Jan 7, 11:07pm