Oh yes! Someone out there has been reading my mind. Now can you integrate this gadget into the right chair please? (via Engadget)

Finally there's a Graphviz port for OS X. Pixelglow Software did a really nice job. Download it here.

With AT&T Graphviz, you don’t figure out the graph, the program does. Using a simple file format called dot, just describe which nodes should connect to which other nodes. Then the sophisticated layout routines quickly render it into many different output formats.

Some time ago John Gilmore envisioned Grokmail, an automatic email classification system. Unfortunately he never released his research prototype.

John Graham-Cumming developed and released POPFile, which essentially implements the Grokmail idea as an email proxy on the client side. John will be very pleased to hear that it's released under the GNU license.

POPFile classifies email into categories you define. It can sort into spam and not spam or into any number of categories you like

The classification is done using a naïve Bayes algorithm. In other words, POPFile uses statistics to track which words are likely to appear in which messages. This means that POPFile will adapt to the kind of mail you receive and needs to be trained. Out of the box, it doesn't know anything about spam or how messages from your mother differ from those your friends send you. However, if you train it, it will soon learn how to tell these different kinds of messages apart.

This is a nice solution if you don't run your own server.

Ever since I bought my Powerbook the stupid Caps Lock key was driving me mad. When I work on my Linux workstation I use a Avant Stellar keyboard which allows me to remap and physically swap the Caps Lock and Ctrl key. Today I discovered uControl and it works like a charm! It let's me remap Caps Lock and Ctrl key on my Powerbook.

Lately I've been typing a lot on the Symbolics keyboard. Maybe I should add a feature to swap Caps Lock and Backspace keys to uControl. My left pinky is constantly searching for the Rubout key.

If you think about it, the correct mapping in the lower left corner of a Powerbook should read "Hyper, Super, Meta, Control".

William Paul Vrotney announced Agroups on comp.lang.lisp.

Action Groups are groups of action entries that an Emacs user can create, save, name and access quickly. In a general sense these actions are any automation that a user can imagine to help with his activities. The user instantiates these automations as action entries which are a specific instances of some action from the current collection of actions. Actions can be as simple as finding a commonly used file in a buffer, to more complex like executing a previously defined keyboard macro, to very complex like an unimaginable whopper defined by a user created Action Template. Action Templates are an extensibility feature of Action Groups and allows the user to easily create new actions, Agroups supplies a useful predefined collection of actions created with Action Templates.

I've been a VESTA fan for quite some time now. Ken Schalk presented VESTA at CodeCon 2004. VESTA is a configuration management system. Unlike CVS, which only gives you revision control, VESTA adds configuration and build management. It was used by the Digital Alpha microprocessor group to manage all design related files. VESTA also supports replication of source repositories. Here's a couple of citations from his presentation:

• Immutable, immortal, versioned storage of all sources and tools
• Precisely repeatable builds
• Incremental builds
• Parallel development
• Consistent builds
• Automatic dependency detection
• Automatic derived file management
• Site-wide caching of all build work

Subversion reached version 1.0 a couple of days ago. It certainly is an improvement over CVS, but I think Subversion is to little to late, unless your projects tend to be smaller than 10k lines. In a production environment repeatable builds are worth killing for. Shlomi Fish created a good comparison of SCM systems which inlcludes VESTA.

Because I'm very lazy guy, automation always appeals to me. Many times it's the little tools that make all the difference. Chew Wei Yih created websec to automate checking web pages for changes in content. It scans an URI list, downloads the pages, diffs the changes and sends you email, if the page changed since the last run of websec. I run it from crontab once a day to check for changes on my watch list of web sites.

I couldn't find version 1.4 online, when I recommended it recently, so I put it up for download here.