Ask Jonathan Zdziarski

You may recognize the name Jonathan Zdziarski from a recent Slashdot book review of his book Ending Spam. Aside from his DSPAM spam filter Jonathan has also contributed several other projects to the open source community under the GNU General Public License. These projects include Verizon-Compatible SMIL Multimedia Gateway, The Reactive Automated Blackhole List Server, Apache DoS Evasive Maneuvers Module, and several others. Want to know how to effectively contribute projects to the open source community? Curious to ask another programmer about his history? Now is the time to ask. Moderators will select the top few questions that we will forward on to Jonathan sometime tomorrow. The answers to the questions will be displayed next Tuesday when we will encourage Jonathan to participate in the discussion as time permits.

Comments

Re:Nomenclature

[Ann Elk]

Polish 'z' sounds like English 'z' as in "zoom".
Polish 'dzi' trigraph sounds more-or-less like English 'j' as in "jam".
Polish 'a' sounds like English 'a' as in "call".
Polish 'r' sounds something like an English 'r' as in "read", but it's rolled (more like a Spanish 'r').
Polish 's' sound like English 's' as in "say".
Polish 'k' sounds like English 'k' as in "kit".
Polish 'i' sounds like English 'y' as in "fully".

"Z-dzi-a-r-s-k-i" is prounounced (very roughly) "Ze-jarrsky". At least, in theory. I'm not Polish, so he may have a different opinion.

Re:Bogofilter And Standardized Bayesian Testing

[dozer]

From his paper:

http://www.nuclearelephant.com/papers/justifying.h tml

"This family of filters includes the now-popular Bayesian filters (pronounced "bay zee in") as well as other filters using statistical analysis to filter spam (such as Markovian classifier CRM114 and Chi-Square Bogofilter)."

That's why Bogofilter is not Bayesian.

I definitely like the second question.

history of DSPAM

[passion]

I recall hearing a story that you created DSPAM as a response to the trashy emails that your religious leader was receiving. I also see that your religion plays a large role in your life. I'm curious, how a thinking, logical, Christian such as yourself feels about the "intelligent design" movement?

Is this a misinterpretation of scripture? A reaction filled with fear against science? An attempt to distance ourselves from animals so that the atrocities occuring in modern industrial-meat production can be justified? Or is it a revival of much-needed spiritual values in our country?

In addition, I'm curious what your take is on the Intelligent Falling theory?