bidwatcher vs eBay
Over the weekend I spent a bit of time trying to get sendmail working, and only managed to get it working when I changed the hostname on sparky to that horrible name whilch includes the IP address from MediaOne. What it did show me was that with the proper DNS, it would work fine.
One of the reasons for getting sendmail working was to be able to email folks from within bidwatcher via pine. When I tried to configure pine to use SMTP, I kept getting errors that I couldn't see completly. This time, I decided to give it a little more effort, and ended up getting a configuration that works - pretty much. The address that I'm sending from still has my login name as opposed to the MediaOne email address, but with a Reply-To: header, I'm able to make it so that people can reply to that email address. Not perfect, but it should work nicely.
While I was on it I looked into the idea that bidwatcher could pull up Netscape's mail feature, as that would be the best for me. If that could work, then I'd be able to keep all my sent mail in one place. Also, there's no problem with the sent address when you use Netscape. So I dug into the code for bidwatcher.
I was surprised to see that the code for launching a new web page and pulling up the email composer was so similar. I simply cleaned up the browser code, and used a lot of it to clean up the emailing code. It worked - well... almost. The problem is that now eBay is not providing the email addresses to people - instead, you have to compose your message on their web page, and they send it for you. I'm sure this is because of the off-market deals that eBay is trying to crack down on. I wish I could get my exchange idea running... Anyway, with the fix in, it looks like there's no need as eBay has changed the rules. Too bad...
Today also saw several phone calls regarding headhunters, and other folks looking to see if I was right for their firm. Lots of nibbles but nothing serious yet. To keep my mind occupied I have been doing some more CIA work - this time adding the ability to get the background histogram based on the filter used to locate features. The idea is that after filtering, the Her2 slide is basically shades of light blue. What we're trying to do is differentiate the non-cancerous cells in the fat from the fat - eventhough they are colored very similarly. My hope is that by removing the stained portion from the image we'll have two distinct peaks - one for fat, the other for cell nuclei. Then getting the cell nuclei would be a multi-step process: filter out the stained matter, histogram the rest, pick a filter based on the histogram, and then extract features from the result. It's possible, but I'm not holding my breath in case it doesn't work.
The runs of CIA are getting long as well... certain runs are well past 30 mins. on sparky, which means there's almost no chance that this will be a real-time system to the user. Even with 1.5GHz P4 machines, the run time would be minutes, and that's just not acceptable for a hold time. I've told the guys about this, and Joel assures me that a good UI can be fashioned. I agree, but it's a submit/request one and not real-time, which is what we were going for in the beginning. Oh well... the best laid plans of mice and men...