If you are looking for a good popular introduction to what spam is and how it works, the BBC World Service Documentary Podcast has a very good documentary up right now. I cannot find a direct link, but go to the overview page and then download “Doc: Assignment – On the trail of spammers 17 Jan 2007″. Enjoy!
Monthly Archives: January 2008
BBC Documentary: On the Trail of Spammers
Brilliant Virtualization Comic
I’ve never seen the comics at xkcd.com before, but they are really quite brilliant nerdy comics. Liking virtualization and simulation, I found number 350 at http://xkcd.com/350/ especially fun. And note that that is what some serious researchers are doing, using virtual machines as active honey pots (“honey monkeys“) to go out and contract infections by actively searching the web with machines in various stages of patching.
Multithreading Game AI
Over at an online publication called AI Game Dev, there is an elucidating post on how to do multithreading of game AI code (posted in June 2007). Basically, the conclusion is that most of the CPU time in an AI system is spent doing collision detection, path finding, and animation. This focus of time in a few domain-given hot spots turns the problem of parallelizing the AI into one of parallelizing some core supporting algorithms, rather than trying to parallelize the actual decision making itself. The key to achieving this is to make the decision-making part able to work asynchronously with the other algorithms, which is not trivial but still much easier than threading the decision making itself. The threading of the most time-consuming parts turns into classic algorithm parallelization, which is more familiar and easier to do than threading general-purpose large code bases. A good read, basically, that taught me some more about parallelization in the games world.
Blog tip: The Wonderful World of Early Computing
There is a nice blog post over at Neatorama with many pictures of early computers. The material is nothing new to someone familiar with computing history, but the pictures collected are very nice indeed.