taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• XOR patent killed Commodore-Amiga : ‘Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn’t allow any CD-32’s into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32’s that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end’
  (tags: cd32 commodore computers history ip patents software swpats xor amiga)

• Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O [PDF] : classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
  (tags: java async io jvm linux performance scalability threading threads server nio paul-tyma mailinator)

• autojump : interesting idea; extend “cd” to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to “jump” to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
  (tags: autojump cli bash command-line navigation terminal shell directory cd)

• Mac OS X command-line tricks : not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I’m stuck using the missus’ laptop ;)
  (tags: apple bash cli osx mac sysadmin shell tricks command-line)

• Schneier on Security: Internet Worm Targets SCADA : ‘Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.’
  (tags: wow malware worms passwords security schneier policies defaults)

• Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution : from last week’s CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
  (tags: spam anti-spam ceas conference papers research spamassassin adversarial-classification evolution arms-race via:jd)

• JotNot for iPhone : another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
  (tags: apps document evernote iphone jotnot scanner scan photos dropbox google-docs)

• DocScanner : document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it’ll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
  (tags: android apps evernote iphone mobile ocr pdf document scanner scan)

• What are the lesser known but cool data structures ? – Stack Overflow : some gems here
  (tags: data-structures algorithms cs data geek programming)

• Computer History Museum: MacPaint and QuickDraw source code : wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
  (tags: via:jgc apple code history mac source bill-atkinson macpaint pascal quickdraw graphics)

• Technology to track trad : TunePal — “Shazam for trad”. play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it’ll link to the tune’s name, history, discography, and where it’s been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
  (tags: trad irish via:klillington music recognition machine-learning)

• Brick, A Literary Journal: Issue 85: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock : ‘The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society’: among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
  (tags: france paris underground toread ux catacombs marquis writing)

• NeoRouter : establish an overlay, encrypted private “virtual LAN” for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
  (tags: firewall hamachi network openwrt remote router security vpn desktop-sharing neorouter tomato)

• How do I do silicone sealant neatly? : so that’s how it’s done. now to retry my DIY botch job
  (tags: silicone sealant diy home howto)

• GNU coreutils sort(1) now uses all available CPUs : using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
  (tags: via:pixelbeat sort coreutils gnu multicore parallelism)

• REPLs suck, I want something block oriented : good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn’t a usable approach for block-oriented languages
  (tags: languages repl programming ruby hacking coding block-oriented)

• Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail : first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws — for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
  (tags: dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet)

• xboxdrv : ‘a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.’
  (tags: drivers xbox360 controllers remote linux ubuntu xboxdrv joystick input)

• moreutils : ‘a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.’ these are really, really nifty (via popey)
  (tags: via:popey unix cli command-line linux moreutils sponge pee ts vipe zrun perl for:pixelbeat)

• Ubuntu One Time Passwords/Single Use Passwords HOWTO : I should do this on my hosts
  (tags: ssh server security opie otp skey one-time-passwords ubuntu linux sshd)

• FlexGet : torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
  (tags: bittorrent automation boxee linux python rss torrents tv flexget)

• Interpolation search : neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
  (tags: algorithms programming search via:jzawodny)

• Overclocking SSL : techie details from Adam Langley on how Google’s been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
  (tags: certificates encryption google https latency speed ssl tcp tls web performance)

• Cory Doctorow’s working environment : hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
  (tags: cory-doctorow geek howto lifehacks ubuntu productivity tips tools)

• O2.ie blocking popular image-hosting sites imgur.com, imageshack.com : apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
  (tags: iwf fail blocking filtering o2 ireland imgur imageshack censorship fps)

• Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right : ‘every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.’
  (tags: broadband finland legal rights law human-rights three-strikes)

• new gastropub opening in Stoneybatter : there goes the neighbourhood! ‘L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.’ Sign me up
  (tags: gastropubs stoneybattery dublin d7 food drink)

• Date::Manip Error in Ubuntu 10.04 : “XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly” — caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
  (tags: date-manip xmltv breakage mythtv ubuntu lucid 10.04)

• Misco.ie : another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
  (tags: shopping components hardware ireland)

• Signature-based AV is failing : on average across the AV industry, 40% block rates just after 0-hour of a new malware sample, rising to 60% after 5 days. sounds like the AV industry is losing, if this chart is valid. (via Terry Zink)
  (tags: via:tzink malware av fail accuracy detection false-negatives scanners viruses)

• Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs [PDF] : sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
  (tags: sort merge hash join databases performance cpu simd multicore)

• Network Advertising Initiative: Opt-Out of Behavioural Advertising : ‘developed for the express purpose of allowing consumers to “opt out” of the behavioral advertising delivered by our member companies’ — opt out of the top 50 or so ad programs with a couple of clicks, via Jordan Sissel. great stuff
  (tags: ads advertising browser cookies via:jordansissel google marketing opt-out privacy tracking web behavioral)

• Monitor anything and get free notifications on your iPhone – amix.dk : using notifo.com, which has an app in the App Store allowing anyone to send push notifications via their web site. I can see lots of uses for this, not least to evade SMS fees ;)
  (tags: notification push sms iphone notifo)

• Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market “flash crash?” : wonderful; our world’s economies are now more networked than ever, and vulnerable to the attacks which that enables. Have we learned nothing from the last few years?
  (tags: networking internet ddos stock-markets security)

• John Graham-Cumming: What’s wrong with Flash Cookies? : Macromedia created a “parallel” cookie infrastructure, which is not cleared/controlled by browser cookie controls. Heinous! I had no idea. Checking mine, it was full of ad-tracking crap
  (tags: cookies flash privacy crapware ads)

• All slides/notes from the first 2 days of Velocity 2010 : PDFs, docs, links
  (tags: slides scalability velocity conferences scaling pdf)

• Introduction to Unity Launcher « Canonical Design : The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too
  (tags: canonical ui unity linux gnome desktop design)

• The Deus Ex 3 demonstration, blow-by-blow : PC Gamer : big thumbs-up for ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution’. I’m looking forward to it
  (tags: deus-x games xbox previews)

• We’re Back… so long MongoDB! · Blue74 : MongoDB war story — records going missing, eek
  (tags: mongodb mysql nosql rant stability beta)

• Hadoop and the fight against shape-shifting spam : Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale
  (tags: hadoop yahoo anti-spam filtering)

• Petit: Log Analysis : log analyzer; removes common strings and patterns from log files, identifying outliers and hapaxen as “interesting”. also does charting of frequencies etc.
  (tags: logs logging analysis loganalysis syslog tools)

• self-replicating configuration in Conway’s Game Of Life created : The “spaceship” configuration replicates in 33699586 generations, using 2 construction arms and a volley of gliders circulating between them
  (tags: via:newscientist game-of-life life cellular-automata gliders self-replicating)

• UPC file-sharing court action begins – The Irish Times : it’s with Mr Justice Peter Charleton again — the Colmcille-misquoting judge from the Eircom case. here’s hoping the Data Protection Commissioner gets off their arse and does their job this time around
  (tags: upc ireland law filesharing irma copyright)

• SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder : good idea — generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)
  (tags: via:omgubuntu avi mplayer conversion divx encoding howto rip xvid video mencoder)

• build a Yagi-Uda wifi booster from styrofoam and copper wire : nifty link from Heise; works for 802.11b and 11g. Unfortunately I think my own wifi issues are to do with dying AP hardware
  (tags: wifi 802.11g 802.11b wireless yagi antennas diy hacking hardware)

• MapReduce as a way to cope with high-latency memory : interesting thoughts from Kragen
  (tags: kragen thoughts random mapreduce memory speed latency)

• O2 iPhone Customers – Get out of contract! – boards.ie : wow, O2 Ireland seem to have dropped the ball something rotten here. customers taking advantage of this in droves to escape the heinous 18-month lock-in
  (tags: o2 ireland loophole contract law)

• Designing an Integrated Map for a Visionary Public Transport System for Dublin : excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)
  (tags: via:antoin bus travel dublin ireland rapid-transit public-transport design usability maps mapping)

• Chatroulette Working On Genital Recognition Algorithm : just *male* genitalia, mind. I dread to think of what the training corpus looks like
  (tags: chatroulette algorithms machine-learning genitalia nsfw slashdot)

• Balsamiq Mockups : create wireframe mock-ups quickly, via Confluence/JIRA/desktop/fogbugz plugins (via Joe)
  (tags: via:jdrumgoole wireframes mockups ui web usability balsamiq layout prototype)

• Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1900 Hybrid TV (1179) – dabs.com : Back looking at these again, as Padraig noted the SundTek drivers are closed source; at least pvrusb2 is OSS
  (tags: hauppauge drivers hardware linux tv tuners os)

• SEO Is Mostly Quack Science : ‘There is no hypothesis being tested here. It’s just graphs, and misleading graphs at that. The sad part is, SEOMoz is as close as the SEO industry comes to real science. They may be presenting specious results in hopes of looking like they know what they’re talking about, but at least they are collecting some sort of data. Everything else in the field is either anecdotal hocus-pocus or a decree from Matt Cutts. When you hire an SEO consultant, what you are really paying for is domain experience in the not-failing-at-web-design field.’
  (tags: seo ted-dziuba rants science seomoz quality correlation statistics google)

• gitPAN : CPAN and BackPAN, as a set of git repositories; essentially a read-only view of all CPAN releases, ever. good plan; I like the way git is useful as a kind of general-purpose distributed archive system
  (tags: git gitpan cpan backpan perl releases archives history version-control)

• SundTek MythTV analog setup : ‘Analog TV is working again with MythTV which comes with the final Ubuntu 10.04 release’ — MythTV support is officially tested by SundTek support staff! I think we have a clear winner
  (tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)

• Sundtek MediaTV Pro (TV Cards) – Ubuntu Linux Hardware Compatibility List : ‘I can recommend that USB device, I never had a device which has such an easy installation under linux.’
  (tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)

• SundTek Media TV Pro Linux install docs : official, and pretty voluminous. looks good
  (tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)

• Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1900 Hybrid Analogue and Digital USB TV Tuner : seems to be a safe option for MythTV analog TV and DVB-T support on this side of the pond
  (tags: tv hauppauge linux mythtv ireland tuner)

• pvrusb2 Linux drivers for the Hauppauge product line : Jesus Christ Hauppauge. get a clue already, why are you making it so hard for Linux users to buy your bloody hardware?!
  (tags: htpc linux pvr mythtv usb hauppauge pvrusb2 drivers hardware)

• Today’s Guardian : Phil Gyford reworks the Grauniad’s website using their open content API. I really like the navigation and just-the-text nature, but I still feel a need to know what other articles are “nearby”, which this doesn’t quite provide. Still, excellent work
  (tags: phil-gyford news newspapers gu guardian design usability reading readability webdesign)

• Emoji Symbols in Unicode: PILE OF POO : “unchi” / “unchimaaku”, a little Emoji icon of a dog turd. unfortunately still in “proposed” status, not yet a Unicode point, boo
  (tags: poo funny emoji unicode unchi shit)

• practical Linux commands quick-ref sheet : from Padraig Brady. lots of nice one-liners I wasn’t familiar with
  (tags: padraig-brady bash cli linux reference sysadmin tips commands)

• Point Village Market : a new outdoor weekend market for Dublin, at the O2 on the north quays. good farmer’s market selection, and plans to do free-for-all stalls for random members of the public to sell “yard sale” type stuff, a la the Dublin Flea Market
  (tags: the-point o2 ireland dublin markets farmers-markets shopping via:sboyle)

• Petrodvorets Watch Factory’s black list : vendors of fake Raketas — pretty much all of the current eBay auctions are on this list :(
  (tags: fakes raketa watches ebay)

• Russian watch RAKETA 24 hour white dial. Polar design. on eBay : 24-hour analog CCCP-era Raketa watches. want. almost definitely fake going by the price, but still very nifty (via adampsyche)
  (tags: russia raketa watches analog want 24-hour via:adampsyche)

This page has been floating around in links over the past couple of weeks, as a collection of test cases to compare e-mail address validating regular expressions. However, watch out: it’s wrong.

RFC822/2822 defines an email address with a bare IP address domain part as using:

  domain-literal  =       [CFWS] "[" *([FWS] dcontent) [FWS] "]" [CFWS]

In other words, this test case is not valid at all:

  IPInsteadOfDomain@127.0.0.1

Instead, it should be:

  IPInsteadOfDomain@[127.0.0.1]

ditto for the other addrs using IP addresses in the domain part. They’re rare, but the non-bracketed form is definitely not legal and should not be considered so in the test cases.

I sent a mail to the author a few days ago without response, hence this post.

Tags: code, email, mail, regexps, regular-expressions, validation

• Amazon.com: Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player : $99, 10-watt, fanless device to stream HD1080p video, in pretty much any format, from a network server to your TV. crazy. quite competitive with the Acer Aspire Revo; downside: less open
  (tags: tv wd wd-tv-live hdtv hd video set-top-box home)

• WebM : open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I’d guess
  (tags: codec foss google open-source patents audio video vp8 webm standards mozilla open web)

• How Etsy deploy their site : pretty basic
  (tags: etsy infrastructure ops sysadmin continuousintegration deployinator deployment)

• GitHub scheduled maintainance due to Redis upgrade : good comments on the processes useful for large-scale Redis upgrades
  (tags: upgrades redis spof nosql databases github deployment)

• Mea Culpa : ‘Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.’ Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt
  (tags: via:janl coding programming software philosophy languages lisp elitism)

• Ca’n Quiros, Soller, Spain : many atrocious TripAdvisor reviews of this kip which ripped us off heavily last week. looking forward to adding my $.02. roll on data roaming limits so I can check TA via 3G before we sit down ;)
  (tags: restaurants food soller spain rip-offs scams dodgy tripadvisor)

• iPhone 3GS GPS suddenly stops working? here’s the fix : via a forum on MacRumors — blow away the locationd cache. Worked perfectly for me after my GPS crapped out halfway through my holidays :( Requires that the phone be jailbroken first
  (tags: iphone gps software 3gs reliability bugs macrumors jailbreaking locationd)

• SoundCloud Developers Manifesto : ‘We recognize that only through your apps and hacks, can SoundCloud fully realize its potential as the audio platform.’
  (tags: apps hacks soundcloud mp3 music hosting files json rest oauth apis http)

• Good volcanic-ash links : European air traffic control Twitter feed and NOC site, via Boards.ie. The thread itself is a good reference, too
  (tags: volcano ash vaac twitter boards.ie threads travel air holidays)

• 2-day volcanic ash forecasts over Europe : using SNAP, the Norwegian Meterological Institute’s nuclear-fallout modelling system. Very useful, much niftier than the UK version, and much more *publicly available* than the Irish version
  (tags: europe volcano norway yr.no met.no weather ash snap modelling forecasts)

• The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City « Viceland Games : interview with the guy behind the “Magnasanti” video. [Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi] ‘presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar – depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society – with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.’ WHOA
  (tags: whoa mental architecture culture gaming society video simcity urban vice)

• New programming jargon you coined? – Stack Overflow : some nice coding neologisms here. aside from “Refuctoring” (see other link), I like “The Duck” (a sacrificial feature, used to distract cut-crazy bosses from useful features) and “Stringly Typed” (an implementation that needlessly relies on strings when programmer and refactor friendly options are available)
  (tags: coding funny slang neologisms jargon stack-overflow the-duck stringly-typed)

• Refuctoring : ‘the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself’ (via Mozai)
  (tags: funny refuctoring via:Mozai coding tests tdd programming software)

• UK Met Office: Volcanic Ash Cloud Maps : updated 4 times daily, maps of Europe indicating coverage of the ash cloud. I’m going to be F5′ing this constantly over the next week as I’m supposed to be flying on Sunday :(
  (tags: airports hazards iceland travel maps weather volcanic-ash ash forecast europe met-office holidays ash-cloud)