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AOL just added a webpage saying that you should publish SPF records if you want to be whitelisted with AOL.

The MicroSoft Caller-ID/SPF merger proposals say that SPF records will be honored, so you can publish them without fear of losing support.

So, go ahead and publish SPF records.

MicroSoft supporting SPF records is a really smart move. Last week, I posted results of a survey of 1.3 million email domain names to the IETF MARID mailing list. Now that I'm back from the MARID meeting, I just finished a survey of Caller-ID records. There appears to be about a factor of 500-1000 more domains that have published SPF exclusively than Caller-ID exclusively and only a tiny fraction of the 1.3 million domains have published Caller-ID records. In short, MicroSoft isn't changing to support SPF records because they are better (I think they are), but because it is an acknowledgement that MicroSoft's Caller-ID hasn't caught on.

Meng Weng Wong (the SPF author) and MicroSoft are still discussing how exactly this merger will work on. I personally don't see any reason to support XML right away. MicroSoft has not come out with a single concrete extention that can't be done with SPF already.

I also think that there are alternatives to the complex Caller-ID algorithm and that doesn't require every Ezmlm and other mailing lists to upgrade their software. From the research that I've done (and yes, this is something I have really researched), there appears to be far more mailing lists broken by MS's Caller-ID system than email forwarders broken by SPF.

(I'm the author of libspf-alt and the maintainer of the trusted-forwarder global whitelist. So, now you know why I have researched this stuff so much.)

The xlock -mode galaxy code is far from being an accurate simulation, it just looks interesting.

Long ago, I wrote up a more accurate n-body simulator called XStar, along with an introductory text on the n-body problem. XStar isn't that accurate either, as it is only a 2D simulation, rather than a 3D simulation, and the dynamics of a million particle system is very different than a system with only a couple dozen stars. Still, it is pretty accurate for what it does and will give you some insight on how stuff really works.

To give you some idea how old XStar is, it was designed on a 33MHz 486 on a 1024x768 display. If you run it, make sure you add more stars, as in "xstar -b 50" or even "xstar -b 200" if you have a fast computer.

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The xlock -mode galaxy code is far from being an accurate simulation, it just looks interesting.

Long ago, I wrote up a more accurate n-body simulator called XStar, along with an introductory text on the n-body problem. XStar isn't that accurate either, as it is only a 2D simulation, rather than a 3D simulation, and the dynamics of a million particle system is very different than a system with only a couple dozen stars. Still, it is pretty accurate for what it does and will give you some insight on how stuff really works.

To give you some idea how old XStar is, it was designed on a 33MHz 486 on a 1024x768 display. If you run it, make sure you add more stars, as in "xstar -b 50" or even "xstar -b 200" if you have a fast computer.

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Several years ago, I wrote up a program to play with the n-body problem and I also wrote up an introductory type paper on the subject. The link you posted to Amara's N-body page is a good one, and I used it as one of my sources in my paper. Included in my paper, however, are a bunch of pictures to make some of the concepts clearer.

I think most of the infomation is still fairly accurate. The paper is aimed at semi-techincal people, but not experts in the field of the n-body problem. That is, show some formulas that such that use basic, first year calculus, but you don't need to know how to use a "Hamiltonian Operator".

You can find a copy of XStar program and paper can be found here.

The original document was created in FrameMaker and I have been unable to fully HTML-ize it. To get a copy with pictures, you need to look at the postscript document.