Thoughts for the day - SpamArrest and "quality as a control variable"

Couple of thoughts spring to mind on this Monday, which is a “public” holiday over here in the UK (OK, it's a “bank” holiday to us Brits)...

After about eighteen months of a frankly useless e-mail system that's continually getting jammed up with spam, I think I've finally found a solution.  I don't want to come across to salesmanlike about this, but SpamArrest really is very good.  It works on the principal that it continually polls your POP3 mailbox, and any senders that aren't on your “approved” list get an e-mail whereby they're sent to the SpamArrest site and asked to type in a word rendered as a GIF image.  In the past 20 or so hours, it's stopped 100 pieces of spam, and delivered... three legitimate pieces of e-mail. 

I've tried most of the other anti-spam software and this is definitely the only one that hasn't scared the crap out of me that legit e-mails are going to be lost.

Second thought for the say is a phrase from a book called Extreme Programming Explained : Embrace Change by Kent Beck.  In Chapter 4 he talks about the four control variables of a software project.  Under “Quality“ he says that “Quality is a terrible control variable.”  Well said - when I'm feeling the need to rush something because I'm under pressure, I really remind myself of this, breathe deep and take stock of the situation.  It's never worth it - and Kent's other thoughts on the subject bears this out: “You can make very short-tem gains by deliberately sacrificing quality, but the cost - human, business and technical - is enormous.“

Continuning my brain dump, if you haven't checked out http://www.extremeprogramming.org, give it a go.  Really nice Web site that contains a wealth of information in TARDIS-like proportions.