Last night was the September meeting for the SFOBUG and the speaker was none other than
Vipul Ved Prakash of
Vipul’s Razor
fame and now the Chief Scientist at
title=”Cloudmark, Inc.”>Cloudmark.

Vipul came in and gave us an excellent overview of Razor and
href=”http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/” title=”SpamNet”>SpamNet
and how they work with the Cloudmark servers. The overall structure of the
process is fascinating (hopefully Vipul’s sketch will be available online
soon and I’ll link to it then). He also went into a little bit of the way the
spam email is analyzed and what is stored and what is thrown away.

Since the Razor/SpamNet system is based on trust and community there are
definitely benefits to blocking spam in this way. For instance, Vipul related
the fact that when the Sobig virus started up they got a few reports from
Denmark at first, then, with the trust in place the users of Razor and SpamNet
had those emails blocked before Sobig got really going. Simply amazing.

If online notes become available I’ll post a link to them or the notes
themselves.

So, I have worked with alpha-based computers for several years and I even
had a few for a while, but in preparing to move I decided I didn’t want
those any longer, but I did want an alpha. Well, this last week I put a
posting on craigslist.org saying I wanted an alpha. This weekend I
was able to pick one up really cheap. Man I love the Bay Area. I can
probably find any hardware I’d want out here.

The alpha is a Personal Workstation 600a:

• 21164A EV56 600MHz Alpha cpu
• 128MB RAM (with 2 open slots so I can expand it later)
• 2x 4GB SCSI hdd
• SCSI CD-ROM
• SCSI 4mm Tape Drive (DDS-3 DDS-2)

This machine will be named Bob, after Silent Bob in the Jersey Trilogy.

Last week I went down to San Jose and picked up an UltraSparc 5. The specs
are:

• 333 MHz UltraSparc IIi with 2MB cache
• 512MB Ram (50ns stuff I think)
• 8.4GB IDE HDD (I’ll add another one later, this is fine for now)
• ATI video on-board (runs X-Windows at 1280×1024 16-bit with no problems)

That’s pretty much it. I’ve got OpenBSD-current running on it (3.4-beta
as of this writing). Ports work fine except I already found a problem
with my audio/p5-CDDB_get port, it fails the ioctl on big endian machines.

In keeping with my naming convention of characters from Kevin Smith movies (with one exception, but I just loved the name smudge too much not to use it) I’ve named this one Steve-Dave after the owner of Comic Toast in Mall Rats (mostly because it starts with an “s” just like sparc64).

Just a follow up to the previously mentioned possibility of BitTorrent notes. Such things are now available online thanks to the wonderful Chris Palmer.

Last night was the August meeting for the SFOBUG. We were fortunate enough to have Bram Cohen come and give a little talk about his groovy application, BitTorrent (if you don’t know about BitTorrent just know that it’s one hell of cool bandwidth sharing utility for downloads).

Bram didn’t have a formal talk, but instead just gave a little background on BitTorrent (BT) and how it’s being used. He then went into a Q&A session about it. It’s 100% written in python (which is hella cool), has very groovy logic for TCP pipelining, and also is amazingly architected to provide the bandwidth sharing on massive downloads.

There were notes taken and I’ll provide a link to them (or the notes themselves) once those are available.