taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• The Walton Bridge petition : ‘IOP Ireland is campaigning to have the new bridge across the Liffey in Dublin at Marlborough Street named for ETS Walton – Ireland’s only physics Nobel prizewinner.’
  (tags: nobel physics science ireland ernest-walton scientists history naming dublin tcd)

• zen.org Communal Weblog » Digital Legacy : Elana Kehoe on dealing with Brendan’s digital legacy: “What to do when you are next of kin to a geek?” A lot of good advice here, and plenty of things I need to think about…
  (tags: brendan-kehoe digital-legacy wills legacy passwords accounts tips)

• Pickstarter : ‘A curated blog of notable Kickstarter projects’ (via potentato)
  (tags: via:potentato blogs kickstarter funding links projects)

• Digital Rights Forum – Online Privacy : ‘The Digital Rights Forum is a public debate on the important issues surrounding digital rights, with each event designed around the general over-arching topic of digital rights, puls a more narrowly focused subject. On Friday, the 18th of May, the forum will tackle the issue of Online Privacy. With our lives ever more integrated with the web and social media, staying safe online is becoming an increasing concern to everyone. From mobile apps to websites and email, protecting our personal information and online privacy has never been more complicated and more important. Faced with software vulnerabilities such as contacts being leaked onto the Internet by mobile application providers, the increasing push toward revealing more private and personal information on social networks, and attempts by some to protect their businesses through litigation or processes which require the disclosure of personal information, the modern digital landscape has made protecting one’s privacy more difficult than ever before. With this in mind, this Digital Rights Forum will discuss the current state of data protection and online privacy in the current context of social networks and mobile applications.’ Featuring Billy Hawkes (the DPC, no less!), and Devore from Boards.
  (tags: dpc digital-rights ireland politics online security privacy data-protection)

• Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers – YouTube : ’some portions of the experience, such as the sky, may be replaced by personalised advertising.’ Uploading your consciousness in the age of copyright maximalism, as Nelson Minar put it (via Nelson)
  (tags: via:nelson grim-meathook-future future singularity funny copyright advertising)

• An IDE is not enough : Very thought-provoking response to that ‘Light Table’ demo which went round the aggregators a couple of weeks back. ‘The fundamental reason IDEs have dead-ended is that they are constrained by the syntax and semantics of our programming languages. Our programming languages were all designed to be used with a text editor. It is therefore not surprising that our IDEs amount to tarted-up text editors. Likewise our programming languages were all designed with an imperative semantics that efficiently matches the hardware but defies static visualization. Indeed it would be a miracle if we could slap a new IDE on top of an old language and magically alter its syntactic and semantic assumptions. I don’t believe in miracles. Languages and IDEs have co-evolved and neither can change without the other also changing. That is why three years ago I put aside my IDE work to focus on language design. Getting rid of imperative semantics is one of the goals. Another is getting rid of source text files (as well as ASTs, which carry all the baggage of a textual encoding minus the readability). This has turned out to be really really hard. And lonely – no one wants to even talk about these crazy ideas. Nevertheless I firmly believe that so long as we are programming in decendants of assembly language we will continue to program in descendants of text editors.’ (via Chris Horn)
  (tags: via:cjhorn ide programming coding programming-languages semantics syntax source-code text)

• Open Data Structures : A free-as-in-speech as well as -beer textbook of data structures, covering a great range, including some I hadn’t heard of before. Here’s the full list: ArrayStack, FastArrayStack, ArrayQueue, ArrayDeque, DualArrayDeque, RootishArrayStack, SLList, DLList, SEList, SkiplistSSet, SkiplistList, ChainedHashTable, LinearHashTable, BinaryTree, BinarySearchTree, Treap, ScapegoatTree, RedBlackTree, BinaryHeap, MeldableHeap, AdjacencyMatrix, AdjacencyLists, BinaryTrie, XFastTrie, and YFastTrie
  (tags: algorithms books data-structures computer-science coding tries skiplists arrays queues heap trees graphs hashtables)

• Chronon DVR for Java : “record entire execution of your Java app; play it back on any machine”. Other features: time-travelling debugger — step backwards, jump to any point in execution, designed for long running programs; post-execution logging — add log statements after the program has run, and see what it would have logged. Looks extremely nifty, but I wonder how big those recording files get…
  (tags: debugging via:peakscale eclipse chronon dvr java coding logging jvm)

Reminder to Dublin-based readers — next week, Amazon (my employers) will be putting on Under the Hood at Amazon, billed as ‘A night of Beer, Pizza and Cloud Computing for Software Developers’. I’ll be speaking at it.

It’s partially a recruiting event, but even if you’re not looking for a new job, please come along. It’s also useful for us to talk about some details of what we’ve been doing in Dublin, since we’ve been operating to date with a pretty low profile, and in reality there’s some very interesting stuff going on here… particularly the product I’ll be talking about, naturally.

Also, there’ll be free beer and some Kindles to be won ;)

It’s next Thursday night, in our offices in Kilmainham. More info on this Facebook page.

• FF Chartwell : OpenType font to display charts/graphs using ligatures. ‘Designed by Travis Kochel, FF Chartwell is a typeface for creating simple graphs. Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process. Using OpenType ligatures, strings of numbers are automatically transformed into charts. The data remains in a text box, allowing for easy updates and styling. It’s really easy to use; you just type a simple series of numbers like: ‘10+13+37+40’, turn on Stylistic Alternates or Stylistic Set 1 and a graph is automatically created.’ (via Simon)
  (tags: ligatures via:sboyle fonts hacks charts dataviz ui)

• McGarr Solicitors’ sternly-worded letter to Newspaper Licencing Ireland Ltd : In response to a letter received by a charity, warning of dire penalties for ‘reproducing copyright content without permission’, since doing so ‘is theft’. It gets better, since in correspondence they were then informed that “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website”. Looking forward to seeing how this one plays out…
  (tags: law ireland scams shakedown copyright nli licensing linking hyperlinks)

• Goodbye, CouchDB : ‘From most model-using code, using [Percona] MySQL looks exactly the same as using CouchDB did. Except it’s faster, and the DB basically never fails.’
  (tags: couchdb mysql nosql databases storage percona via:peakscale)

• Diageo Screw BrewDog : Giant booze multinational screws tiny Scottish microbrewery. “Diageo (the main sponsor) approached us at the start of the meal and said under no circumstances could the award be given to BrewDog. They said if this happened they would pull their sponsorship from all future BII events and their representatives would not present any of the awards on the evening. We were as gobsmacked as you by Diageo’s behaviour. We made the wrong decision under extreme pressure. We were blackmailed and bullied by Diageo. We should have stuck to our guns and gave the award to BrewDog.”
  (tags: brewdog diageo bii awards beer brewing dirty-tricks)

• My Mexican Shop.ie : the Irish rendition of Mexican food has long been legendarily terrible, but this new web shop offers a fantastic range of authentic Mexican food ingredients, especially all those chilies you just can’t get here
  (tags: chili food mexican spices cooking shop)

• UK Channel 4 News Demo – Contactless Payment Cards – viaForensics : ‘During an interview with the Channel 4 correspondent we were able to touch his wallet with an Android phone while he was distracted and capture his credit card details.’ … ‘viaForensics found that there are many cards in circulation, including recently issued cards, which are giving up the full card number, expiry, surname and initials.’ Barclays security fail hits the headlines (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: channel-4 news barclays-bank uk banking nfc wireless android via-forensics contactless-cards via:fanf)

• The lessons I learnt from my iPhone mugging | Benjamin Cohen on Technology : some good tips on iPhone security settings, in particular disabling the ability to turn off location services via Restrictions. I should do this
  (tags: crime iphone location london mugging phones security theft)

• Spam-erican Apparel : ‘LifeSphere currently offers more than 90,000 unique products and is more than likely run by one person in a suburban bungalow in Phoenix. As far as I can gather their process consists of ALPHABETICALLY(!) applying every single image in the Public Domain photography archive to every object Zazzle offers. Amazingly almost everything they make is amazing. From doggy clothes featuring macrophotography of Chex Mix, to “Thanksgiving Shrimp” skateboard decks, LifeSphere proves 90,000 times over that rigorous process-based design yields infallibly fresh results.’ (via Nelson)
  (tags: bots clothing design manufacturing zazzle on-demand spam new-aesthetic future)

• Probabilistic Data Structures for Web Analytics and Data Mining « Highly Scalable Blog : Stream summary, count-min sketches, loglog counting, linear counters. Some nifty algorithms for probabilistic estimation of element frequencies and data-set cardinality (via proggit)
  (tags: via:proggit algorithms probability probabilistic count-min stream-summary loglog-counting linear-counting estimation big-data)

• On The Record: Forging a future for the music industry : The original article is now paywalled, but the comments thread contains a fantastic discussion between some very smart young, and old, musicians, discussing music in a digital age where copying is trivial, the future of the music business, copyright, etc.
  (tags: music-business bill-whelan music mp3 copyright on-the-record irish-times)

• InfoQ: Lock-free Algorithms : Michael Barker and Martin Thompson’s talk at the last QCon on the LMAX Disruptor, and other nifty lock-free techniques and patterns. ‘Martin Thompson and Michael Barker explain how Intel x86_64 processors and their memory model work, along with low-level techniques that help creating lock-free software.’
  (tags: lock-free locking mutexes algorithms lmax disruptor infoq slides presentations qcon java)

• Don’t discount the value of price comparison sites – The Irish Times : Conor Pope recommends home-saver.ie and bonkers.ie for insurance and utilities price comparison. I’ve used the latter, with great results
  (tags: price-comparison ireland shopping utilities competition phone irish-times consumer)

• Cubism.js : ‘a D3 plugin for visualizing time series. Use Cubism to construct better realtime dashboards.’ Apache-licensed; nice realtime update style; overlays multiple data sources well. I think I now have a good use-case for this
  (tags: javascript library visualization dataviz tsd data apache open-source)

• First Music Contact – Music3.0 : ‘We talk a lot about what the world of music and artists will look like five or ten years from now. But for changes to happen then, the conversations need to happen now. We believe that the next big thing in music is not going to ever appear on a stage. After the record industry (music 1.0) and the live music industry (music 2.0), it’s time to pay more attention to innovation (music 3.0) and what can come from constructively disrupting how the music industry operates. It’s time to open up the shop. It’s time for unvested interests to see if they can use existing data and ecosystems to make a better music business. For far too long, music has been a conservative sector which views the influence of outside forces with abject suspicion and rank horror. Chalk this down to some bad experiences over the last 15 years due to misunderstandings with and ignorance of the tech and telecoms worlds. Chalk this down to rampant music industry egos which lead folks to believe no-one else can sell music bar music players. Chalk it down to fear of disruption. So, it’s time for change. You can’t keep doing the same things in the same way and hope you won’t make the same mistakes again. It’s time to listen to and learn from smart people in other areas. It’s time for people who have innovative ideas or even just the stirrings of innovative ideas to take stock from people who operate in other areas and who deal with ideas, technology and the valuable currency of innovation every single working day. It’s time for some different talking which is going to lead to some very different make-and-do experiences.’ Looks excellent. (via Jim Carroll)
  (tags: music future technology internet disruption music-industry ireland via:jimcarroll)

• A Kiva success story : Pretty cool testimonial to Kiva’s effects on the ground. ‘Thanks to Mariano’s entrepreneurship and skills, and partially to the [microfinance] loans offered to him, as he said: now, his children are attending to school, something his generation couldn’t afford to, and he is able to save some money for his retirement as he won’t have any pension when that moment comes.’ plus, I liked this detail: ‘Meeting Mariano was funny, because at the beginning he was not convinced we were not there from the lending organization to check on him.’ (via Eoin)
  (tags: kiva microfinance loans developing-world peru small-world)

• Scale Something: How Draw Something rode its rocket ship of growth : Membase, surprise answer. In general it sounds like they had a pretty crazy time — rebuilding the plane in flight even more than usual. “This had us on our toes and working 24 hours a day. I think at one point we were up for around 60-plus hours straight, never leaving the computer. We had to scale out web servers using DNS load balancing, we had to get multiple HAProxies, break tables off MySQL to their own databases, transparently shard tables, and more. This was all being done on demand, live, and usually in the middle of the night. We were very lucky that most of our layers were scalable with little or no major modifications needed. Helping us along the way was our very detailed custom server monitoring tools which allowed us to keep a very close eye on load, memory, and even provided real time usage stats on the game which helped with capacity planning. We eventually ended up with easy to launch “clusters” of our app that included NGINX, HAProxy, and Goliath servers all of which independent of everything else and when launched, increased our capacity by a constant. At this point our drawings per second were in the thousands, and traffic that looked huge a week ago was just a small bump on the current graphs.”
  (tags: scale scalability draw-something games haproxy mysql membase couchbase)

• Scaling: It’s Not What It Used To Be : skamille’s top 5 scaling apps. “1. Redis. I was at a NoSQL meetup last night when someone asked “if you could put a million dollars behind one of the solutions presented here tonight, which one would you choose?” And the answer that one of the participants gave was “None of the above. I would choose Redis. Everyone uses one of these products and Redis.” 2. Nginx. Your ops team probably already loves it. It’s simple, it scales fabulously, and you don’t have to be a programmer to understand how to run it. 3. HAProxy. Because if you’re going to have hundreds or thousands of servers, you’d better have good load balancing. 4. Memcached. Redis can act as a cache but using a real caching product for such a purpose is probably a better call. And finally: 5. Cloud hardware. Imagine trying to grow out to millions of users if you had to buy, install, and admin every piece of hardware you would need to do such a thing.”
  (tags: scaling nginx memcached haproxy redis)

• Clay Shirky Q&A: online creativity and intellectual property | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk : Good discussion and some great points, particularly this one for pro-copyright comments from “creative class” types: “there are few absolutes in copyright. To the question of motivation, if no copyright equaled no work, the fashion business would collapse, as their products are not covered by copyright. Money is one form of reward, but there are others (many non-fiction authors make more money doing things ancillary to their writing than they do from the writing, and then there is the explosion in labors of love), and copyright is one way to arrange the flow of money, but it’s a less good one than it used to be, because we are in an environment that makes that model of control less salient, and the other forms of reward moreso. So the logic of “It’s copyright or chaos” isn’t holding up well.”
  (tags: copyright clay-shirky the-guardian creative-commons fashion)

• Sci-Fi Short Story: ‘Press Enter to Execute’ : a short story about a spam assassin. (via Lee Maguire)
  (tags: scifi spamassassin anti-spam spam via:lee-maguire whoa fiction short-stories)

• HN on “What it takes to build great machine learning products” : TBH, I think this discussion thread is more useful than the article itself. It’s still remarkably difficult to successfully apply ML techniques to real-world problems :(
  (tags: machine-learning hacker-news discussion commentary ai algorithms)

• The Cybercrime Wave That Wasn’t – NYTimes.com : MSFT researchers discover fundamental scientific failures in almost all data on cybercrime/spam/malware damages. ‘In numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors — or outright lies — cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population. [...] The cybercrime surveys we have examined exhibit exactly this pattern of enormous, unverified outliers dominating the data. In some, 90 percent of the estimate appears to come from the answers of one or two individuals. In a 2006 survey of identity theft by the FTC, two respondents gave answers that would have added $37 billion to the estimate, dwarfing that of all other respondents combined.’ my opinion: this is what happens when PR drives the surveys — numbers tend to inflate to make headlines
  (tags: fail science pr press cybercrime ms via:mark-russinovitch data surveys spam malware viruses phishing)

• Censoring The Pirate Bay is Useless, Research Shows : ‘The assumption of BREIN and the court was that a blockade of The Pirate Bay would lower the number of infringers at [Dutch ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL], but new research from the University of Amsterdam shows that this is not the case. [...] The claim that The Pirate Bay blockade by Ziggo and XS4ALL leads to a decrease of copyright infringement by their subscribers via BitTorrent transfers must be rejected. There is no significant effect of this measure. [...] ‘Ziggo and XS4ALL subscribers who use BitTorrent apparently found different routes other than ‘The Pirate Bay’ to share files, and remain active as seeders to upload files to others.’ Unfortunately the paper is in Dutch, however
  (tags: holland brein ziggo xs4all bittorrent piratebay piracy research data)

• French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales : Hadopi report says piracy dropped in France by between 17% and 66% during 2011, while Hadopi was in force; however the SEVN report on 2011 notes that legitimate sales of video dropped by 2.7%, ironically blaming ‘the continually high level of piracy despite counter measures adopted under the HADOPI law’ (http://www.dvd-intelligence.com/display-article.php?article=1676), and the SNEP report on 2011 sales of audio indicates that the market dropped by 3.9% (http://www.telecompaper.com/news/french-online-music-worth-eur-110-mln-in-2011-study). Hard not to come to a conclusion that actions against piracy do not improve sales
  (tags: france hadopi legal music piracy sales revenues sevn snep video)

• Why the New Aesthetic isn’t about 8bit retro, the Robot Readable World, computer vision and pirates | : ‘The New Aesthetics, or at least the aspect I’m looking at, is inspired by computer vision. And computer vision is at the point now that computer graphics was at 30 years ago. The New Aesthetics isn’t concerned with retro 8bit graphics of the past, but the 8bit graphics designed for machines of the now.’ — ie, The Robot Readable World, etc. Great essay, and exciting stuff
  (tags: art design new-aesthetic retro robotics graphics computer-vision)

• HotelClub : a decent hotel search/booking site, recommended by On The Record’s Jim Carroll ?(@jimcarrollOTR on Twitter): ‘@sineadgleeson use HotelClub – good range of hotels & prices. Or use Hotel Tonight app for real last minute stuff’
  (tags: hotels travel recommended booking)

• Metricfire – Powerful Application Metrics Made Easy : Irish “metrics as a service” company, Python-native; they’ve just gone GA and announced their pricing plans
  (tags: python metrics service-metrics)

• Ask For Forgiveness Programming – Or How We’ll Program 1000 Cores : Nifty concept from IBM Research’s David Ungar — “race-and-repair”. Simply put, allow lock-free lossy/inconsistent calculation, and backfill later, using concepts like “freshener” threads, to reconcile inconsistencies. This is a familiar concept in distributed computing nowadays thanks to CAP, but I hadn’t heard it being applied to single-host multicore parallel programming before — I can already think of an application in our codebase…
  (tags: race-and-repair concurrency coding ibm parallelism parallel david-ungar cap multicore)

• Operations, machine learning and premature babies – O’Reilly Radar : good post about applying ML techniques to ops data. ‘At a recent meetup about finance, Abhi Mehta encouraged people to capture and save “everything.” He was talking about financial data, but the same applies here. We’d need to build Hadoop clusters to monitor our server farms; we’d need Hadoop clusters to monitor our Hadoop clusters. It’s a big investment of time and resources. If we could make that investment, what would we find out? I bet that we’d be surprised.’ Let’s just say that if you like the sound of that, our SDE team in Amazon’s Dublin office is hiring ;)
  (tags: ops big-data machine-learning hadoop ibm)

• Graft punk: Breaking the law to help urban trees bear fruit : This is brilliant. I find it pretty offensive that “ornamental” fruit trees are chosen by urban councils, so that fruit doesn’t fall on the path and become slippery or whatever — come on, that’s just what trees do! ‘They’re covertly grafting — a practice of connecting two branches in a way that will allow their vascular tissues to join together — fruit tree limbs onto the trunks of ornamental cherry, plum, and pear trees.’
  (tags: public roads trees nature city urban fruit guerrilla grafting)

• The Cake Cafe map of Ireland : ‘Now that Dublin is in our bag, on our Tea Towel and across our Aprons, The Cake Café is going to create a new map of Ireland. We want to fill this map with all of your favorite places in land. Please send us locations that turn you on, fire your imaginations, or just fulfill your dreams; what ever you think should be included. Please pass the request on to friends in far flung parts of the land so they too can send their suggestions; natural or unnatural, animal or man made, a view, a corner of a field, an island or even a journey or hidden places to enjoy a picnic. — thecakecafe /at/ gmail.com’. Their map of Dublin is a work of genius — I love that they include a decent chunk of the Northside, which was a notable failure of the Alljoy Design version. I can’t wait to see what they come up with for Ireland.
  (tags: cake-cafe ireland maps mapping crowdsourcing dublin design tea-towels)

• Videogames, the Shirt : great Berserk/Space Invaders mashup tee from drtofu. HUMANOID MUST NOT ESCAPE
  (tags: berzerk games history videogames via:fp tees t-shirts)

• A behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering | Hacker News : Good HN discussion
  (tags: deployment engineering facebook releases)

• Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering : ‘Facebook gave me an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the process it uses to deploy new functionality. I watched first-hand as the company’s release engineers rolled out the new “timeline” feature for brand pages’. Hiphop, BitTorrent, 1.5GB binaries, and IRC!
  (tags: facebook deployment engineering releases via:bos)

• Secret HotSpot option improving GC pauses on large heaps : via Toby DiPasquale. nice tip
  (tags: java jvm gc performance hotspot undocumented)

• A one-line software patent – and a fix : Just another sad story of how software patenting made a standard useless. “I had once hoped that JBIG-KIT would help with the exchange of scanned documents on the Internet, facilitate online inter-library loans, and make paper archives more accessible to users all over the world. However, the impact was minimal: no web browser dared to directly support a standardized file format covered by 23 patents, the last of which expired today. About 25 years ago, large IT research organizations discovered standards as a gold mine, a vehicle to force users to buy patent licenses, not because the technology is any good, but because it is required for compatibility. This is achieved by writing the standards very carefully such that there is no way to come up with a compatible implementation that does not require a patent license, an art that has been greatly perfected since.”
  (tags: via:fanf patents jbig1 swpats scanning standards rand frand licensing)

• Displaying a webpage as a screensaver on Ubuntu : using xscreensaver. sounds simple enough. UPDATE: easier: “apt-get install xtrlock”, a transparent lock screen
  (tags: screensavers lock ubuntu dashboards linux xscreensaver)

• Girls and coding: female peer pressure scares them off | Education | The Observer : ‘Coding and digital prowess is still niche at a young age, self-taught by the studious. It is often considered a bit nerdy in senior school, where it is not currently taught as a part of the curriculum, although this is changing in senior schools from September 2012. Therefore, generally speaking, those who code have taught themselves. Teaching yourself something that should really be covered as a part of lessons is a bit like doing extra homework – why, ask many teens, would anyone do that? There is no way the majority of hormonally challenged, desperate-to-find-their-place-in-the-world teenage girls would risk ridicule or isolation by doing such a thing – let alone be open and proud about it. (Boys of the same age have different social challenges and do not measure their societal worth so much by peer review.)’
  (tags: girls coding education peer-pressure software teaching kids)

• Can we make Irish promissory notes a bit more bonkers? Yes we can : you know Noonan’s “deal” with the ECB is insane when the FT compares it to the South Park underpants gnomes. oh dear
  (tags: ecb ireland politics anglo eu euro south-park profit)

• Karl Whelan: Promissory Note “Deal”: Not What Had Been, Em, Promised : ‘I can only assume that the “assuming this arrangement works out” element of Honohan’s reply to Michael McGrath didn’t actually work out. And the likely reason for this failure was that the ECB insisted, as it appears they had all along, that a €3.1 billion ELA repayment be made, something which required a cash payment.  That this cash has been temporarily sourced from NAMA and then Bank of Ireland doesn’t at all change the fact that this deal is not what had been flagged and does not have nearly the benefits of that deal.’ oh ffs
  (tags: ireland economy bailout ecb eu euro anglo)

• Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon S3 Performance Tips & Tricks : Doug Grismore provides a very useful S3 performance tip; monotonically increasing keys will hurt performance, and describes a clean-enough way to avoid the problem
  (tags: s3 performance aws)

• [tahoe-dev] erasure coding makes files more fragile, not less : Zooko says: “This monitoring and operations engineering is a lot of work!” amen to that
  (tags: erasure-coding replicas fs tahoe-lafs zooko monitoring devops ops)

• Rob Ricketts’ “Program Your 808″ Posters : Beautiful posters ‘detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine’. Planet Rock, Cybotron’s Clear, and Voodoo Ray feature… very nice (via stx)
  (tags: via:stx 808 drum-machine voodoo-ray electro music acid-house posters prints)

• Stats from an Irish guy’s EV driving : EUR 529.07 over ~4000 miles in his Nissan Leaf; that works out as a yearly savings of EUR 1587.21. not to be sniffed at — although what’s the premium for a Leaf over a standard diesel?
  (tags: ev cars driving nissan economy ireland fuel prices)

• Google Guava BloomFIlter : neat, Guava now has a builtin Bloom filter implementation using the murmur hash. that’ll potentially save a little hassle in the future
  (tags: guava coding java bloom-filters data-structures sets)

• The Free Universal Construction Kit | F.A.T. : ‘a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.’ this is like a patent-infringement lawsuit magnet, surely. Will make an interesting test case…
  (tags: 3d design open-source freedom free toys lego 3d-printing patents)

• The day I tried teaching primary school kids to code (and succeeded) : via Niamh — ‘I learned a bit about teaching at primary level and I learned that it is pretty fun although REALLY hard work! I learned that if you make a complex subject engaging kids will learn it and are probably capable of a great deal more than they are often given credit for. The youngest kids on the day were year four which is aged 8-9 and although they were definitely more able than some of their peers, you can expect that by year 5-6 (aged 9-11) probably a lot of the kids could follow it and indeed learn to code.’
  (tags: coding education kids programming teaching school)

• Chromium builders vs Chrome builders – Chromium-dev | Google Groups : Chromium bug report mail contains mis-pasted porn site link instead of genuine debug output. best follow-up: ‘I think that link had a few backdoors’, ho ho ho (via Filippo)
  (tags: via:filippo funny porn chromium bug-reports oops cut-and-paste)

• Colm McCarthy: This burden of bank debt is simply not sustainable : Powerful burn-the-bondholders editorial from Colm McCarthy in the Indo. ‘No other eurozone member has incurred bank-related debt under ECB duress. There are no provisions in the Maastricht Treaty, in the Stability and Growth Pact or in any other pact or international treaty which grant this power to the ECB, nor was any eurozone member state ever asked to accede to such an arrangement. Commissioner Rehn’s Latin phrase (”pacta sunt servanda”) has no pact to refer to, insofar as these imposed debts are concerned. Ireland never signed a pact or treaty which empowered the ECB to behave in this fashion. One can only speculate as to the ECB’s motives, since it does not deign to explain. European banks have come to rely heavily on unsecured bond financing and the ECB may have felt that no bank bondholder should suffer losses, in order to encourage the survival of this market in bank debt. If this was the motive, the policy is being paid for, not by the ECB, but by Irish taxpayers and sovereign bondholders and financed by European taxpayers and the IMF. There is no pact which confers powers of taxation on the ECB.’
  (tags: bondholders ireland finance colm-mccarthy bailout)

• JS1k, 1k demo submission : a speech synthesizer in 1 KB of javascript. truly awesome, nice work by @p01
  (tags: js1k javascript demos speech hacks coding)

• Cloud Architecture Tutorial – Platform Component Architecture (2of3) : Amazing stuff from Adrian Cockroft at last week’s QCon. Faceted object model, lots of Cassandra automation
  (tags: cassandra api design oo object-model java adrian-cockroft slides qcon scaling aws netflix)

• “A Rough Justice” : The poem, written by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, inventor of radar, on being pulled over for speeding by a radar-gun-wielding policeman. “Watson-Watt received a speeding ticket in Canada when he was 64 years old. In his autobiography, _The Pulse of Radar_, he describes the experience. His wife is in the car, and she tries to pull the “don’t you know who you’re giving a ticket to?” trick on the policeman. Of course he doesn’t know Watson-Watt, nor, it turns out, does he even know what radar is (he only knows what his “electronic speedometer” reads out), and Watson-Watt receives a $12.50 (Canadian) dollar fine.” (via Rob Manuel)
  (tags: via:robmanuel radar technology irony robert-watson-watt poetry history)

• Fake Unicode Consortium : featuring such codepoints as “I USED TO BE A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K LIKE YOU THEN I TOOK AN ARROW IN THE KNEE”, “BACK TO THE FUTURE”, “ENTERING HYPERSPACE”, “LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q TAKING A NAP”, and “LOVE HOTEL”. no wait, that one’s real (via Tony Finch, with comments by Michael Everson!)
  (tags: unicode humor codepoints i18n fonts skyrim hyperspace funny via:fanf)

• Senator Mark McSharry call Boards.ie and Politics.ie “subversive” : ‘we have Boards.ie and Politics.ie, for me frankly that doesn’t amount to free speech what it amounts to is legalised subversion of the state. I think it’s fundamentally wrong.’ Incredible quote
  (tags: boards politics.ie ireland internet seanad regulation subversion mark-mcsharry free-speech)

• A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work : ‘After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org.’
  (tags: patents swpat upcoming yahoo ip idiocy warchest)

• The Irish Times demands meme takedown : satire of whiny rich-girl complaining is not permitted
  (tags: satire irish-times ip broadsheet memes)

• Advanced PostMortem Fu and Human Error 101 (Velocity 2011) : John Allspaw’s previous slides on Etsy’s operations culture — this’ll be old hat to Amazon staff of course ;)
  (tags: etsy devops engineering operations reliability mttd mttr postmortems)

• I left my shutter open for 30 seconds in the wilderness at 10.30pm, under a full moon : Amazing shot. With a sufficiently long exposure, it looks like midday — no colour correction applied. (via fp)
  (tags: via:fp pictures photos night colour landscapes long-exposure photography)

• Occursions : ‘Our goal is to create the world’s fastest extendable, non-transactional time series database for big data (you know, for kids)! Log file indexing is our initial focus. For example append only ASCII files produced by libraries like Log4J, or containing FIX messages or JSON objects. Occursions was built by a small team sick of creating hacks to remotely copy and/or grep through tons of large log files. We use it to index around a terabyte of new log data per day. Occursions asynchronously tails log files and indexes the individual lines in each log file as each line is written to disk so you don’t even have to wait for a second after an event happens to search for it. Occursions uses custom disk backed data structures to create and search its indexes so it is very efficient at using CPU, memory and disk.’
  (tags: logs search tsd big-data log4j via:proggit)

• Microsoft’s Azure Feb 29th, 2012 outage postmortem : ‘The leap day bug is that the GA calculated the valid-to date by simply taking the current date and adding one to its year. That meant that any GA that tried to create a transfer certificate on leap day set a valid-to date of February 29, 2013, an invalid date that caused the certificate creation to fail.’ This caused cascading failures throughout the fleet. Ouch — should have been spotted during code review
  (tags: azure dev dates leap-years via:fanf microsoft outages post-mortem analysis failure)

• Olafur Eliasson: Your rainbow panorama : Fantastic installation on the roof of a Danish art gallery. ‘it’s literally the roof of the art museum, so it’s open to anyone who pays the admission fee’, says krautwald at http://mlkshk.com/p/DIGT
  (tags: colour rainbow spectrum denmark art installations architecture via:mlkshk)

• Welcome, Apple! : ‘The desktop version of iPhoto, and indeed all of Apple’s iOS apps until now, use Google Maps. The new iPhoto for iOS, however, uses Apple’s own map tiles – made from OpenStreetMap data (outside the US).’
  (tags: apple ios maps openstreetmap osm free iphoto)

• Apple Map Tiles : I actually really quite like these, particularly how they render parks. Good for leisure use, maybe not so hot for navigation. cute
  (tags: apple gis mapping maps)

• Why I’m Voting “No” to the Fiscal Compact : Cormac Lucey’s reasons to vote against the proposed Fiscal Compact in the upcoming referendum
  (tags: fiscal-compact ireland europe eu cormac-lucey economics bailout)

• Is it any wonder the country is the way it is? : Auto-generated complaints about the dreadful state of Ireland, for the pessimistic begrudger on the go. ‘We might as well face it – the cast of Fade Street, without any legal grounds, never gave a shit about people in the midlands.’
  (tags: lol funny begrudgery ireland satire via:broadsheet was-is-for-this 1916)

• Why upgrading your Linux Kernel will make your customers much happier : enabling TCP Slow Start on the HTTP server-side decreased internet round-trip page load time by 21% in this case; comments suggest an “ip route” command can also work
  (tags: tcp performance linux network web http rtt slow-start via:jacob)