Yaser Sulaiman’s Blog

In addition to being a nuisance, spam (junk) emails waste user time, disk space and network bandwidth. On my way back to KFUPM after the summer vacation, a simple idea regarding spam filtering hit me.

It all began with a simple question: “Why don’t you want to see spam emails?“. The answer was straightforward: “Because I’m not interested in whatever subjects the email is talking about“. Then, I started thinking:

We can’t use the subject header of the email because it can be totally unrelated to the body. So, we have to look at the content itself. How about if we extracted keywords that represent the main subject(s) of the email, and then compared them with keywords that represent the subjects that the user is interested in? After that, we should come up with a predicted “level of interest“. If it is too low, then the user will (most probably) not be interested in seeing this email (i.e. it’s spam).

This idea is now the core of my senior project. It will be a research-oriented, AI-related project. Regarding the first phase (keyword extraction), my teammate and I will most probably use some of the available services. We will focus our efforts on the second phase (keyword comparison). We have to figure out exactly how to do it and how to incorporate machine learning in it. We also might improve it by using Bayesian Belief Networks and/or Functional Network classifiers.

Spam filtering is one of the hot topics in the application of data mining and AI techniques. By working in this project, we hope that we can contribute to the ongoing research and develop an approach that will hopefully be taken as a basis for a new filtering technique or as an addition to existing ones.

Firefox is my default web browser and I use it a lot. One thing that I don’t like about it though is its memory usage. It is true that I’m using around 20 extensions (some of them can cause memory leaks and crashes), but consuming about 100 MB of memory while only 8 tabs are open is quite irritating.

By default, Firefox doesn’t reduce its memory usage when it is minimized (unlike Internet Explorer). Nevertheless, there is a trick to make it do so. Just do the following:

1. In the Firefox address bar, type “about:config” and then press Enter.
2. Right click anywhere in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. Type “config.trim_on_minimize” in the box that pops up and then press Enter.
4. Select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

Now when you minimize Firefox, its memory usage should drop to about 10 MB.

Although the memory usage will gradually increase even when Firefox is kept minimized, this is a good way to “manually” free some memory out of Firefox’s grip. Hopefully, this issue will be resolved in Firefox 3.

(via FeelFirefox)

Note: For some reason, this didn’t work under Windows Vista! (Currently, I don’t have other operating systems installed to test this trick under them)

Phew!! I was so close to forget that I have a blog that needed to be maintained regularly! I didn’t intend to leave my blog for more than two weeks without updating it, but things got out of my hands… sort of!

I had two weeks to spend relaxing in Syria before coming back for my last semester as an undergraduate. For my surprise, my PC there (an old one) wasn’t working properly. I tried to fix it myself but I didn’t have the necessary equipment. I didn’t take to be repaired because I was… too relaxed! I said to myself: “I can survive two weeks without a PC, I only need to go to an Internet café from time to time“.

My first (and only) visit to the café was terrible! The DSL connection was literally slower than a dial-up! I started to panic: “I HAVE TO check my e-mail, publish a post on my blog and update my status on Facebook. I just HAVE TO!“. Then, it hit me: “What if I left everything and tried to enjoy my vacation without worrying about anything related to technology for once?“.

And that was exactly what I did. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I felt this relaxed before. I admit that catching up will be hard (1000+ unread items in my Google Reader!!), but it was worth it.

Now that I’m back online, I’ll continue blogging regularly. I won’t be publishing posts at the same rate as I did in the summer though, because I have a lot to deal with right now