On Monday we presented a talk about Siafoo to the Linux User Group of Davis. It went quite well, nobody fell asleep or walked out, and we received some really good feedback. The talk had two parts: What Siafoo does and How it works. Most of the information about Siafoo's purpose and features is contained within the about page but if you are interested in knowing a bit about the technologies Siafoo uses check out the PDF slides. Also if you happen to live in the Davis area we encourage you to check out LUGOD and attend some of their monthly talks. Of course if you run a User Group or club and want us to swing by and feed you some Siafoo propaganda contact us =)

On another note, the nodebox community brought to our attention that line endings for downloaded snippets were CR-LF (Windows style). The issue was caused by the fact that the internets use CR-LF as the standard line terminator. To remedy this all snippets are now stored with LF (Unix style) line endings. You should not see a difference when copy/pasting from the page but all downloaded snippets will have Unix style line endings. Let us know if this is causing a problem. Next release we will start sending the correct MIME type for most languages which should allow your browser to correctly change the line endings to your native format. For more about the history of line endings check out Wikipedia

Also Siafoo now supports COBOL, thanks to Theo

Defcon is upon us, and I am there [allegedly] to learn some things that would prevent Siafoo from getting 0wnx0red.

Anyway if you have made the trek here, be safe (make sure you turn off your windows file sharing), and enjoy.

Also because of the usual pre-Defcon paranoia we realized that the Create Account links on the site were not SSL! We remedied the problem and suggest you go change your password... just in case.

Oh and if you noticed a weird FF2 glitch today, it's now been fixed =)

A few weeks ago, during the last release, we upgraded Siafoo to Genshi 0.5, a version that promised to deliver more speed using static include caching and a C-based text processing module. It was fairly obvious that the site had gotten a lot faster but we didn't know how fast until we looked at the Google Webmaster tools crawl statistics. Among the statistics provided is the Time spent downloading a page:

Average time (in ms) Googlebot spent downloading a page

The sharp drop off at the end of August coincides with the Siafoo R8 release and upgrade to Genshi 0.5. Note that the drop off can not be account for by a difference in bandwidth or traffic to the server as our burst-transfer rate has been the same and the traffic to the site has been steadily increasing. As far as the two peaks, the first (May) peak was probably because David's Python Tips, Tricks, and Hacks article hit the front pages of reddit, ycombinator, and delicious, the second (June) peak was probably because the tubes were clogged... or possibly because of solar flare radiation.

In other news, next week is dedicated to BogoSort implementations. I thought I'd get the ball rolling with a simple Python implementation.

We've racked our brains, developed algorithms, ran complex simulations, and consulted world class scientists [1] all in an attempt to solve the great Siafoo Mystery of 2008. The mystery is that although Siafoo has acquired dozens of new user accounts over the past couple of weeks, none of the new users have shared any source code... or even rated any of the existing code.

This is confusing for various reasons, among them is the fact that people actually took the time to fill out the create account form, solve the captcha, verify their e-mail address and login to the site... but did not take advantage of all the cool features it has to offer.

Although neither of us is superstitious we are going to attempt to break the dry spell by offering $1, that's right one US dollar [2], to the owner of the first legitimate snippet that shows up in the recent activity stream after this news item [3].

This could be the actual dollar you receive