Finally, Summer Holidays!
I had my last exam today — I got the grade 11 again. The exam was in DAIMI:dDistSik and I had to talk about “LAN systems and LAN technology”. I liked the question for I’ve been playing a lot with LANs in the last five years. I talked about the topologies of LANs (buslans, starshaped, ringshaped LANs) about the media used and about the MAC protocols used, that is the media access control protocols that determine how the media is shared between the hosts connected to it. It all went rather well.
When I had talked for about 15 minutes they started to ask me questions, they wanted to talk about an entirely different thing (it’s almost always a good sign when they want to change the subject radically) namely transactions. My lecturer asked me if normal two-phase locking (as opposed to strict two-phase locking) would be enough if we were given the guarantee that all transactions would be commited by the clients, that is that there could be no aborts. It was a rather specific and tricky question in my opinion — I knew about transactions, locking and was able to talk about that, but I couldn’t come up with a rigoursly argument for or against the use of two-phase locking… I guess that’s why they gave me 11 and not 13.
Anyway… this was my last exam, so I’ll be relaxing for a couple of months now. I’m really looking forward to it :-) I’ll buy a new computer sometime soon now and I also have to play with [PHP Shell][] (I’ve figured out how to implement a commandline history using JavaScript) and my new SPAM filter POPFile which is a learning filter instead of my old filter TMDA. I’ve been using POPFile for a couple of days now and it works very well, it learns incredibly fast.
Happy holidays to everybody (my apologies to those who still have a couple of weeks left… :-)
Martin Geisler:
Instead of POPFile I’m now using SpamAssassin, which is working very well using a combination of rules (some of which use online databases of spam) and, of course, everyones favorite: Naïve Bayesian filtering.
With the rules it’s very easy for me to tune SpamAssassin (something which was difficult with POPFile) to, for example, give a penalty to emails sent to my old domain of gimpster.com. With SpamAssassin I’ve yet to see a good mail being treated as a spam mail.
POPFile also worked well, and the webbased interface is very userfriendly compared to the command line based interface for SpamAssassin — but as I don’t consider myself a “normal” user, that point really doesn’t matter to me, in fact I prefer the command line!
20 May 2005, 7:44 pm