Might later want to come back to this article about Bayesian filtering with some open source Linux tools.

The email client used in the article, sylpheed-claws, seems to have a pretty good attitude for an email client project. It claims to value "Quick response; Graceful, and sophisticated interface; Easy configuration, intuitive operation; [and] Abundant features", which, in theory, is a good thing. The author of the first article also describes the performance of Sylpheed as pretty good, even on his, "Pentium II-300 with 160MB RAM, running Slackware 8". Now that's a good set of specs for a developer. If you're happy developing on that, you've done your homework getting a good software suite together.

This also hopefully means that Sylpheed is following along the same tack as Apple's Safari browser. The number one priority is speed. I've been more and more impressed with OS X the last few days with the perceived speed-up I've been getting simply by using Safari. Every help page, every link from another app opens up Safari, combined with faster page rendering when surfing and *bam* -- everything seems to running more quickly.

The new updates for iPhoto and iMovie (according to some schmoes on Slashdot) also give much better performance on relatively slow Macs (the post in question saying they're using a G3/350!). If that's true (and I'm cleaning up enough space on the hard drive to update now), my iBook will have gotten quite a bit faster this last month. And it's a good thing. Short of the DP Powermacs I tried out at the Apple store when I had a chance to drop by, not a single piece of hardware could even run iPhoto at an acceptable clip.

If compile times for Java classes weren't as bad as ever (ok, and if I had a Superdrive), I'd stop thinking about getting a new Mac today.