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| Ignite Boston 3 @ Tommy Doyle's |
About Jonathan Zdziarski
Who Am I?
My passions are that of an author, a hacker, a musician, and a scientist...
for starters, anyway. Why one would choose so much to love is simple:
there are lifetimes worth of words and music to paint with, endless equipment
to hack, and plenty of things to legally set on fire in the name of science.
I presently live and work out of my home in New Hampshire, accompanied by my
wife of ten years and my four beautiful children. We've just recently
moved back to New England after a decade in the good ol' South, where the
Barbecue and the Mexican food was much better, and the states were much
redder.
The Hacker in Me
I've been hacking since age 8 (I am now 32) and have come to develop very strong
interests in machine learning, cellphone hacking, and any other
geek-worthy hacker projects I come across. My first PC was a
TRS-80 with a casette deck (no disk drives) and a whopping 128x48 B/W
resolution. I recall bootlegging cheezy games from other TRS-80s in
grade school, but consistently forgot about the lead track on the tape, and ended up
with mostly worthless cassettes. My sister eventually paper mached the entire
computer, rendering it completely unusable and also happened to void the warranty
(read the fine print). Today I spend much of my hacker cycles
developing on and maintaining several cool projects including
DSPAM, an extremely accurate
enterprise-grade spam filter. I've also spent my time as of recent working on many of the iPhone jailbreaks with various development teams, and have taken this hacking knowledge to build a forensics toolkit for the iPhone, available to law enforcement. You can check out the rest of my brain children
in my projects section.
The Author in Me
I took up writing when I was in grade school, but nobody really mentioned
I was
good at it, and so it faded away as I moved onto other things. I was approached
a few years ago about writing a book covering the inner-clockwork of statistical
spam filters
like my DSPAM, and decided to give the pen another try. It seemed to turn out
alright, and shortly thereafter I became inspired to write again on a more
regular basis. I've recently finished a second book about developing software
on the iPhone, and have apparently found a good niche. One of the
things I noticed was that good writers seemed to enjoy writing, whether or not
they became famous for it. Paul Graham's essays on life particularly inspired me
by reminding me that I enjoyed writing. This philosophy
seems to work for just about anything else in life too: if you enjoy it,
spend a lot of time doing it, regardless of whether it makes you famous or pays
the bills. I'll occasionally pen an essay
about some subject I feel passionate about. You can read some of these in
my papers section.
The Musician in Me
Music (noun): brief interruptions between bass solos
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| My MTD-535, Hand-Made by Michael Tobias |
I took up bass guitar when I was around 18, which came about by some cosmic
mistake when a so-called friend of mine tried to dump his gear on me for
some cash. It was a beat up Peavy Foundation, and I spent several
months with bleeding fingers figuring out how the stupid thing worked.
As it turned out, I started to enjoy it, and have been
playing bass for the past 14 years, with only a few brief vacations.
I didn't "get" music theory until I really started playing the bass. Prior to
that, I was so oblivious to music that my high school theory teacher beamed a book at my
head and nearly got himself fired.
I finally figured it out, though, and while
hackers and painters
are a more well known combination, hackers and musicians have more fun. As far as gear is
concerned, I've since sworn off Peavy and other cheap store-bought hardware.
I liked Fender up until they bought and trashed my favorite company at the
time - Guild - who made me an amazing sounding Pilot Pro-5 fretless bass,
which I regret selling every day of my life. Since moving on, I've spent the past several years
exclusively playing basses hand-crafted by
Michael Tobias, which are probably
the world's finest. My musical inspirations have included Abraham
Laboriel, John Patitucci, Anthony Sallee, Charlie Peacock, and many others.
The Scientist in Me
During my time as a hacker, I found inventing new things to be much more
interesting than the actual hackery itself. Several years went by doing my
own research and coming up with my own new ideas, some of which I've had the
pleasure of lecturing on. Up until the past few years, most of my research had been
in the form of pet projects, while I worked a series of mundane corporate
programming positions at various companies. Don't get me
wrong, it can be exciting work if you're a mundane person, but I prefer to work on projects that require stimulating thought and artful discipline.
In September 2005, I accepted a position as a
research scientist with a leading network security company. We're working on
some of the coolest technologies which you'll likely see change the face of
electronic security in the future.
Research, invention, and
experimentation seem to be my cup of tea. I gave a talk on some recent work
during my third speaking engagement at the MIT SpamConference in March '08.
The Jesus in Me
My technical and musical interests take a knee to one thing I am undeniably
certain about - my God, Lord, and Savior Jesus Christ.
When I gave my life over to God, all of my former interests became subservient to the more long-term callings on my life, and to clarify for others what I have come to find is a scientifically beautiful piece of logical harmony - the Bible. "Who I am" can't possibly be expressed adequately without sharing my Christian faith, as it's not only shaped my character but brought a new level of insight into my professional and personal life.
I first heard about
God and became a Christian at age 17, which is really when I began to think
for the first time in my life. Prior to that, I just assumed the church
was something people created to feel good about themselves. When I got my
first taste of the difference God made in the lives of some people around
me, I immediately drove myself to the nearest church to ask somebody about it
(yeah, I led myself to the Lord).
Being a Christian isn't as easy as turning on a light switch; in fact, I spent
much of my late teens and early twenties a complete self-destructive mess and hurt several
people I cared about in the process. It took another decade and a move to Georgia before I
came to understand what it meant to genuinely love people and desire to live a
life of conviction. We all are in need of forgiveness, both from
God and other people, and as you grow, you begin to understand the true depth of
that need. During my nine or so years of restoration, I was part of a dynamic,
multicultural church in middle-GA which then expanded to Alabama.
I've spent several years lately studying church government and what the real
church was originally supposed to look like. I ended up teaching myself the
Greek language so I could read many manuscripts in their native dialect and
see just how much of popular theology is full of it. I concluded
that most churches fall into one of two schools of thought:
they're either cheapened by the American culture engine and have compromised
their faith to appeal to the masses, or have gone off on some apostolic power
trip that didn't exist and have compromised their faith to appeal to their
own ego. What bothers me most is that neither class seems to care one way or
another about representing the true church, which I think is why so many
people have such a strong aversion to it. It's likely that the true
church would show its face only if persecution and genocide were to hit America.
Fortunately, the God I worship still loves us, even in our ignorance, and in
spite of ourselves, we are still forgiven.
As you may have guessed, I consider myself to be of the thinking population, and not one of the
masses asleep in their own reality. This followed me into my Christian faith,
but started much earlier. At some point in my younger life, it occurred to me
how programmed I had been by society and pseudo-science to be an atheist, before I even knew
what being an atheist meant. When I stumbled across God, it made me realize
there's much more to this life than I had been conditioned to believe.
Today, I'm sure many of my Christian
beliefs would get me burned at the stake, but
I'm not going back to my old, dead life.
0.75" @ 600y (Dime)
Rem 5R .308 BH 175gr SMK BTHP |
Other Interests
In addition to my primary interests, I enjoy good music, Greek apocrypha,
fine wine (love a good bottle of Amarone della Valpolicella or Barbara D'Asti), and reading. My time in the South helped usher me into a fascination for
firearms (and a love affair with freedom), and I enjoy the discipline of
long-range rifle marksmanship. I've also been known to barbecue on occasion.
Professional Goals
I'm already doing what I love, and think I can see myself doing this type of
work for a long time to come. My musical interests have got me interested in
becoming a more proficient bassist and possibly getting into doing some
studio work for Christian artists, or joining a ministry-focused Christian
band again some day. However it pans out, I like having the experience to
do the things I love and get paid for most of them.
Missionaries, outreaches, Bible smuggling, and seeding new churches all cost
money. After all, the Bible teaches that it's God who gives us the ability to
earn wealth, and in spite of many misconceptions
about wealth, it's still one of the ways in which the faithful bankroll
some of these ministries. I certainly wouldn't mind being one of these guys. God doesn't float C-notes down from heaven
to pay for this stuff, He likes to work through His people. Life's much too
short to care about dying with a few million in the bank having done nothing
with it. Every dollar we have is ordained for a specific purpose, and my
goal is to find out what God's plan is for them.
Personal Goals
My personal life is about developing who I am and what my callings are, and learning
what it means to be a good father and leader for my family.
I've gotten to meet some exceptional people in my short time on this rock,
and am just happy to be here at this point. However my life is supposed to
end up, I've already been given some great opportunities that have exceeded
what I would have imagined for my life.
   
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| The best four kids anyone could ask for |
Contacting Me
Although I write a lot of articles about different technologies (hacking
cellphones, linux, spam, etc.) I don't usually have time to answer many
direct technical questions. I strongly recommend trying one of the mailing
lists related to a particular project (such as dspam-users) or google before
emailing me a technical question, because it runs a strong risk of ending up
in the bit bucket. Sorry, but that's just the way it has to be.
Aside from that, if you'd like to know more about my availability, my faith,
or any other personal topics, please feel free to shoot me an email.
Jonathan
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