Zattoo Tech Talks

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Speaker	Topic	Date	Bio	Abstract
Adam O'Donnell	Mixed-strategy Nash Equilibria in Security Attack and Defense	02/10/09	Adam O'Donnell is the director of emerging technologies at Cloudmark, an anti-messaging abuse company. He completed his PhD as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Drexel University's department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2005. As an expert in messaging security, Adam was featured as the keynote speaker at the MIT Spam Conference in 2008. He is a regular contributor to the ZDNet Zero Day blog which focuses on security trends and breaking news. Adam has worked on several books, serving as the technical editor and contributor to "Building Open Source Network Security Tools," a contributing author on "Hacker's Challenge," and co-author of "Hacker's Challenge 2". His work has been published in IEEE and he's been quoted by leading publications such as USA Today and Computerworld.	Prognosticating Macintosh malware has become a hobby of security analysts of late, with pundits debating whether or not Macs are more secure from attack or simply too small of a market to be attacked. A similar debate occurs in the security product space, where security techniques appear to be incredibly effective at small scale but fail when applied to the broader market. In this talk we present a game theory model of attacker behavior that tries to determine when Macintosh-targeted malware will become endemic. We also apply our model to other security technologies in an attempt to reason about the viability of defense mechanisms as they transition from startup to mass market.
Dave McKay	Hotmail, Google, and MSN	10/7/08	Former net/ops architect for Hotmail, Google, and MSN	Dave will cover some of his experiences managing the world's largest enterprise networks, and tens of thousands of machines in both small, high-growth startups (Google's first two years) and massive enterprises.
Andrew Myrick, Apple	Managing Kernel Extensions in Mac OS X	9/25/08	Apple Core OS Engineer	Snow Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X, includes a new system for managing kernel extensions (kexts). I will discuss the components and features of the kext management system, what motivated our redesign efforts, and what it means for Mac OS X users.
Chris Cassell, Zattoo	Zattoo Architecture Tech Talk Series: Hacking Drupal to handle Zattoo.com's traffic	9/19/08		Zattoo's public website is implemented with the open source Drupal content management system. I'll go over the basic architecture of Drupal, the custom functionality I've added, and the hoops I've had to jump through in order to make the site handle its load, while maintaining flexibility.
Eric Petit, Zattoo	Introduction to video compression	7/30/2008		Introduction to the principles behind video compression, focusing on block-based algorithms such as H.264. We will cover topics such as color spaces, intra and inter prediction, quantization, DCT and deblocking - without getting into the math or code details. We will also try to show how the Zattoo solution should takes those inner mechanisms into account.
Matt Pizzimenti, Zattoo	pytoss - simplifying automation	7/23/2008		Pytoss is a task automation and deployment tool written in Python. It is similar in purpose to Capistrano and Rake, except with a lot less magic and simpler syntax (i.e. straight Python). The talk will focus on defining simple automation and how pytoss helps to achieve it.
Marshall Weir, Zattoo	Feedback 2.0	6/5/2008		Feedback 2.0 is a new Lucene based index of all of our customer feedback. This will replace our existing system as we move into Euro '08. We will talk about how Feedback 2.0 will make your life easier and do a brief review of its design and capabilities. Topics include: searching feedbacks, archiving old data, daily emails and limitations.
Mark Ramm, TurboGears	TurboGears 2	5/13/2008	Mark Ramm is the project lead for TurboGears 2, and he is very interested in helping make sure that Python has "industrial strength" web development tools that can handle large, complex projects, while still being easy to use, easy to learn.	TurboGears 2 will have its first beta release in the next couple of weeks. For buzzword compliance reasons we've been compelled to call TurboGears 2 a "Full-Stack" "next generation" "dynamic language" web framework that enables rapid web application development. But in reality, it's a set of tools we've pulled together to make it easier to make robust, scalable, web applications more quickly. TurboGears 2 replaces many of the components we had used in TurboGears 1, but maintains a very similar API. TG2 provides more robust scalability features than competing dynamic web framework stacks, and is working to provide an easy-to-use rapid development environment that encourages scalability. This talk is focused on the features of TG2 that make it a more compelling toolkit than many of the other "next generation" frameworks
Matt Pizzimenti, Zattoo	Building With Less Pain	4/4/2008		An overview of our current build system, the pains involved, and potential solutions to both (a) build-product organization and (b) tools, using SCons.
Jonathan Duty, Zattoo	Scaling Vocabulary	3/3/2008		This will basically be a vocabulary lesson on existing technologies and practices that are widely used to scale production-level systems today. The purpose is to introduce participants to these ideals and practices before the scalability summit on Tuesday.
Zach Steindler, Zattoo	CUnit: Making software development less gangsta	2/13/2008		Not to be confused with rap group lead by 50 Cent, CUnit is a lightweight unit testing framework for C. We'll talk about what unit testing is, best coding practices to make unit testing easier, and show how we use CUnit in libzattood.
Eric Wucherer, Zattoo	MBTI	2/6/2008		Try taking one or both of the following tests online: http://www.kisa.ca/personality/http://www.personalitytest.net/cgi-bin/q.pl
Andrew Turner, Mapufacture	Neogeography and Location Awareness	1/25/2008	Andrew Turner is a neogeographer and co-founder of Mapufacture, a personalizable geospatial search and aggregation company. He has consulted with companies like MapQuest, the BBC, and the UN in developing their geospatial and community components. Andrew is actively involved in expanding the GeoWeb by advocating open standards such as GeoRSS and KML and developing open-source tools such as GeoPress to make it easy to add location to your blog or CMS. Previously, For 11 years, Andrew was an aerospace engineer building airships, spacecraft, and realtime immersive simulators. He received his B.S in Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2000 and his Masters from Virginia Tech. Andrew writes articles for Make and MacTech magazines and also wrote O'Reilly's Introduction to Neogeography.	The GeoWeb is a quickly emerging set of standards, tools, and services that are making it easier for people to create geospatial content and access complex GIS technology. Google Earth and Maps let users access advanced satellite imagery and visualize user-generated content and mashed-up services. Geolocation techniques are using mobile phones, wifi, and increasingly commodity GPS chips to provide users with locally relevant information and also to share their location with friends and employers. This talk will survey the current landscape of these technologies and also look to where they are headed. Augmented and immersive parallel worlds, free maps and remote imagery, Twitter for disaster response, and Pigeon Bloggers are just a few of the upcoming innovations that will be presented.
Jonathan Cohen, NVIDIA Research	Spider-Man 3 and Dynamic Execution Tracing of Physical Simulations	1/18/2008	Jonathan spent 7 years developing software and overseeing R&D for the Hollywood visual effects industry. His work can be seen in movies such as The Cat in the Hat, Chronicles of Narnia, and Spider-Man 3. In 2007, he was awarded a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for his role in developing an influential fluid simulation system while at the visual effects studio Rhythm and Hues, which was used most recently on The Golden Compass. In February, he will begin as a Research Scientist at NVIDIA, the world's largest manufacturer of computer graphics hardware. Jonathan received his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University in 2000.	Abstract 1: For the movie Spider-Man 3, Sony Pictures Imageworks was responsible for creating almost 200 shots of the digital Sandman character. This was an unprecendented visual effects challenge, which required everything from detailed close-up simulation of individual sand grains to large-scale simulations of billions of sand grains coming together into human form, all while obeying plausible laws of motion. In this talk, I will describe the process of how the "Sand Team" approached the problem, first developing a software framework and numerical methods to tackle the computational physics problem, them building an artist-friendly system that was used to create a wide variety of digital sand effects. Finally, I will show how this technology was used to create the challenging "Birth of Sandman" sequence in which the Sandman character first appears. Abstract 2: For sufficiently complex systems, the generic "gdb"-style breakpoint-driven methodology of debugging breaks down. I will present "sstrace", the custom debugging component of the Sandstorm system. Sandstorm is the software architecture that was used to generate all of the digital sand effects in Spider-Man 3. sstrace is modeled after the debugging paradigm of Solaris DTRACE, but applies the model of dynamic execution tracing to computational physics algorithms, rather than dynamic operating systems. In this talk I will discuss the applicability of this paradigm to computational physics, and provide implementation details for sstrace's lightweight run-time engine.
David Ward, RedHat JBoss Division	JBoss Seam and the Red Hat Developer Studio	11/27/2007	David Ward is a Solutions Architect within the JBoss division of Red Hat. He has over 12 years experience designing and developing enterprise systems across various fields such as online commerce, payroll services, pharmaceutical applications, real estate, printing, document management, inventory management and more. He has authored numerous Java related articles and whitepapers. David is a longtime JBoss evangelist and joined Red Hat in October 2006.	JBoss Seam and the Red Hat Developer Studio" - JBoss Seam is a modern enterprise Java application framework, integrating the best practices learned from past frameworks, and innovating in areas where they have been deficient. Using JBoss Seam, developers are more productive as they leverage Seam's powerful yet simple component model, state management facilities, presentation and business tier integration, and more. The Red Hat Developer Studio (RHDS) is a set of Eclipse-based tools that are pre-configured for JBoss Enterprise Middleware, offering significant time-savings and value to developers. A summary of JBoss Seam and RHDS features will be presented during this technical session, followed by a detailed demonstration of creating a Seam application using RHDS.
Dr. Jose Nazario, Arbor Networks	An overview of the Storm Worm, a p2p botnet	11/9/07	Dr. Jose Nazario is a Senior Security Engineer within Arbor Networks' Arbor Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT). In this capacity, he is responsible for analyzing burgeoning Internet security threats, reverse engineering malicious code, software development, developing security mechanisms that are then distributed to Arbor's Peakflow platforms via the Active Threat Feed (ATF) threat detection service. His research interests include large-scale Internet trends such as reachability and topology measurement, Internet-scale events such as DDoS attacks, botnets and worms, source code analysis tools, and data mining.	Botnets and malicious software are nothing new, but this year's biggest disruption came in the form of the storm worm, a large peer to peer botnet. First appearing on the Internet in january, 2007, the storm worm continues to spread and flood everyone's inboxes with spam. This presentation will give an overview of the storm worm and how it works as well as some measurements into the network.
Zach Steindler, Zattoo	Zattoo's EC2 Testbed	11/6/07		Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud: What is it, how can you use it, and how do we use it at Zattoo to test our P2P protocol?
Scott Collins, Slashdot	The Qt toolkit	11/1/07	Scott was an early member of the Netscape team, former principal engineer of the Mozilla project, and former engineer at Apple, Macromedia, Trolltech, and now Slashdot (since August).	This will be a highly technical talk, with live C++ coding and comparison to other frameworks like Mozilla's XUL.
Jeremy Linden, Cataphora	Startups and Funding	10/23/07	Jeremy is a Software Engineer at Cataphora, and was previously an intern at Arbor Networks and Microsoft, and a member of HKN.
Eric Kustarz, Sun Microsystems	ZFS: The Last Word in Filesystems	9/27/07	Eric Kustarz <[email protected]> has been a kernel engineer at Sun Microsystems since 2000. He previously worked on NFSv4 for Solaris (at Sun) and on Linux (at CITI). He now works on ZFS and on helping to bring FileBench to the storage industry. Eric holds a BSE and MSE from the University of Michigan.	He'll be speaking on ZFS, Sun's "future-proof" filesystem, and will also available to answer questions about other interesting Solaris features (dtrace, zones, etc.), some of which are finding their way into other operating systems like MacOS X and FreeBSD through OpenSolaris.
Jonathan Duty, Zattoo	Java, Java Enterprise and the Jboss Application Server	9/21/07

Zattoo Tech Talks

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