Eager to get a better comparison, Nick Lothian the author of Classifier4J has put up a web app so that people can test the quality of Classifier4J's summaries.

For a long time I've wanted a text summarizer that I could use as a system service. It looks like there's some healthy incentive for the authors of these three systems to keep improving them. Information distillation, here we come.

• Today is a Mozilla.org day with both Thunderbird 0.1 and Firebird 0.6.1 being released. I installed Thunderbird and got it working against my existing Mail directories from my Mozilla profile. This was actually somewhat urgent because Mozilla 1.4 has a bad GDI leak on Windows, so after some time, the browser and mail reader go belly up. Plus when you open too many tabs in the browser then you can't read mail because the whole suite is locked up. I spent too much time playing with Thunderbird, so Firebird will have to wait, probably till 0.7, because I don't want to hassle with all the extensions and whatever.
• A Mozilla and Thunderbird related tool is Enigmail which is a nice extension for both Mozilla and Thunderbird that lets you use GNU PG. On Windows you can couple this with the Windows binaries for GNU PG at nullify, and you have an entirely open source OpenPGP mail system. I even brought my PGP 8.0 keyrings and everything over. ASF people take note.
• I like thinking tools like outliners. It seems that FreeMind, a Java mindmapping tool has taken some big steps since I looked at it last, especially since they are trying to compare themselves to MindManager, which I've been thinking about buying.
• BEA has a new extensible compiler framework called Javelin. It looks cool but it also looks like a binary license. Fortunately, I know a very extensible Java compiler framework. It's called Eclipse.
• Which brings us to our last tool quickie of the day, which is also related to BEA, but on a happier note. Since it looks like XMLBeans is going to incubated at the ASF, I'm paying more attention to XML databinding than I have in a while. So the Avaya workshop on XML and Data Binding caught my eye.