taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US : I came across this a while back and have been looking for it again for a while. Good document on what happened in the former USSR after its society collapsed — pretty funny too. A bit heavy-handed in its criticism of the US though (via Bruce Sterling)
  (tags: politics history usa government society russia ussr economy collapse sustainability orlov futurism america world)

• Moviestar.ie now fulfilled by Screenclick.com : Irish DVDs-by-mail market consolidation
  (tags: screenclick moviestar.ie dvd film tv ireland business mergers)

• LINX Public Affairs - Cinema ratings and web sites : Good commentary on the absurdity of the UK govt’s attempts to impose age-rating certs on websites. ‘From a regulatory point of view, at least part of the Internet is more like a pub, football crowd or playground than it is like a TV programme.’
  (tags: linx ratings censorship uk politics filtering web andy-burnham free-speech)

• shouting at a disk can increase latency : funny anecdote. bookmarked mainly because of the nice SmokePing-like chart they’re using to chart I/O latency stats… wonder if I can apply similar dataviz for spamassassin’s rule-QA…
  (tags: rule-qa spamassassin dataviz infoviz latency smokeping graphs charts storage audio shouting disks solaris funny)

• Want to rent a house in Stoneybatter? : I’m letting out our house in the ‘batter; 2 bedrooms, 15 mins from town, cosy, great neighbourhood. A little bit of heaven in Dublin 7
  (tags: stoneybatter ads housing rental dublin-7 d7 kirwan-st neighbourhood daft)

• The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3 : in-depth exploration of the C=64, right down to the I/O bus, in a 64-minute presentation
  (tags: hardware c=64 commodore-64 retrocomputing programming talks assembly 6502 6510 commodore via:vvatsa)

• Mozilla bug finds MITM attack in the wild : annoying Firefox “blah.foo.org uses an invalid security certificate” warnings cause user to open a bug at the Moz bugzilla, whereupon it is discovered that they are being haxx0red
  (tags: mitm security firefox mozilla usability pki ssl man-in-the-middle)

• major SSL/TLS cert vendor issued certificates without any verification whatsoever : ‘Five minutes later I was in the possession of a legitimate certificate issued to mozilla.com - no questions asked - no verification checks done - no control validation - no subscriber agreement presented, nothing.’ uh, massive FAIL
  (tags: fail ssl tls security encryption comodo)

• np237: The session non-manager : GNOME’s current “stable” release, appearing in FC10 and Ubuntu 8.10, contains absolutely no session management, at all. wtf
  (tags: ubuntu fedora gnome releases software wtf session-management x11)

• “Holy Fucking Shit I Was Just In A Plane Crash!” : twittering a pretty scary aviation incident, no less
  (tags: news twitter microblogging planes crash aviation web)

• Hasbro has dropped their idiotic Scrabulous lawsuit : hopefully someone in there finally figured out that the massive resurgence of Scrabble’s popularity was due entirely to the Scrabulous team’s homage. I’m still never playing it again though: worse than crack
  (tags: scrabble scrabulous cluetrain copyright hasbro games facebook law)

• More coverage of the spam fine increase : ‘Mobile-phone users must now “opt in” for a company to contact them. “If you don’t agree to be contacted, then it is an offence to contact you,” [asst DPC] Delaney said. “Opt in” agreements can now only last a year. “Within that period a company must contact you to request that you extend this “‘opt in’ phase,” he said.’
  (tags: opt-in anti-spam spam ireland dpc data-protection sms texting law)

• max fines for Irish spammers increase to EUR250k or 10% of turnover : good news. the Data Protection Commissioner: ‘Increasingly, in this period of economic downturn, my Office is receiving complaints about businesses making unsolicited contact with their past customers for marketing purposes. In many cases, such contact is unlawful and, if carried out by telephone, text message or email it may be a criminal offence. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for non-compliance and I will have no hesitation in applying the full force of the new regulations to offenders.”
  (tags: data-protection ireland law anti-spam sms texting spam dpc)

• Solid State Disks - time to give up that iron oxide habit : legendary Sun performance guy Adrian Cockcroft sez: ’spinning rust is dead, and a large number of basic assumptions [...] are now wrong. In 2009 SSD’s will be faster for read, faster for write, faster for sequential and much much faster for random access, more reliable, more durable, lower power, higher capacity, than discs. [...] SAN’s are now a complete waste of time. There is so much reliable I/O performance available in a single drive, that it makes much more sense to put SSD’s in the systems and access them directly. Accessing an SSD over a SAN adds a huge latency and cost overhead. It makes much more sense to use node-to-node replication for critical data.’
  (tags: disks storage san ssd performance io future planning)

• The story of ORCH5 : via Ian. ‘a one second pre-set sample supplied with the Fairlight synthesiser, and people from hip hoppers to Kate Bush used it all over the place. David Vorhaus (himself an electronic music pioneer in the 1960s) recorded what became ORCH5 in the late 1970s. The sound is the transitional bit of Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird, the moment when the full orchestra come in and do their stuff.’
  (tags: fairlight sounds music audio orch5 sample david-vorhaus igor-stravinsky afrika-bambaataa planet-rock hip-hop via:ian)

• Newgrange Winter Solstice live stream : actually, it was live this morning at 8:58am. Missed it :( Still, the archived stream of the sun entering the burial chamber at Newgrange on the winter solstice is viewable here — and one to bookmark for next year…
  (tags: newgrange ireland archaeology solstice history heritage events winter)

• Using ATA Over Ethernet On Debian Etch : fantastic tip (via Jeremy). see also http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149
  (tags: ata-over-ethernet ata ethernet aoe san iscsi server linux storage filesystems howto disks debian sysadmin)

• the new BBC Test Card for HD TV : fascinating in-depth analysis of how to actually _use_ the test card — and yes, Carole and her clown doll still stars (via Yoz)
  (tags: via:yoz uk tv bbc geek hdtv tutorial testcard hd television nostalgia)

• database schema migration : Alias muses on massive Oracle db migration algorithms. looking forward to seeing the full db migration system when/if it eventually hits CPAN
  (tags: perl databases migration activerecordmigration sql schemas oracle)

• AWS signature version 1 is insecure : Amazon have just rolled out version 2 to avoid this bug, which uses HMAC-SHA256 instead of HMAC-SHA1. they’re also now deprecating use of HTTP instead of HTTPS, since the attack requires that the attacker sniff a valid request to reuse its signature
  (tags: aws amazon sdb ec2 sqs security holes web-services authentication replay-attacks attacks hmac)

Apparently, I’ve just won a 3 broadband dongle. Sweet! Thanks Pat!

Now I need to recycle a mobile phone through the Jack and Jill Foundation to balance out the karma ;)

Tags: 3-ireland, competitions, mobile, mobile-broadband, mobile-phones

• Ubuntu on Amazon Web Services : Canonical are issuing official Ubuntu Server AMIs. very good idea; make Ubuntu Server the virtualization platform of choice
  (tags: ubuntu virtualization aws ec2 amis ubuntu-server)

• Archie In… A Different Class! : “Archie” does Pulp’s “Common People”. incredible
  (tags: archie pulp funny music)

• cpan2dist - The CPANPLUS distribution creator : generate RPMs, DEBs etc. from CPAN packages; apparently takes over from the deprecated (but excellent) cpan2rpm
  (tags: cpan rpm deb debian perl packaging distribution software red-hat mandriva)

Some people, when facing a problem, think “I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have HORDES OF CUTE PEOPLE WANTING TO SLEEP WITH THEM

– Yoz, on twitter

Tags: funny, quotes, twitter

Hey lazyweb! Long time, no write.

I’m wondering what setup people use to deal with the following situation. Upstairs, I have an Ubuntu 8.04 server with 71GB of MP3s. Downstairs, I have a stereo system. In between the two is a wireless network. How can I listen to the music downstairs, without simply copying the lot (or subsets thereof) onto a local disk on some appliance down there?

Currently, I’m using a VNC client on a Nokia 770 to control a JuK window on the server. This works great, believe it or not! KDE 3 can be coaxed into providing a fantastic UI for a small touchscreen. This then uses Pulseaudio to transmit the sound output using the ESD protocol over TCP to the ESD server on the N770, and the N770 plays back the sound.

Until a few months ago, this worked great. However, something (either hardware changes, network topology changes, or an upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 on the server) has resulted in effective bitrates between the server and the N770 dropping frequently — hence the audio drops out or changes pitch, rendering it unlistenable :(

I’ve tried using UPNP servers (specifically mediatomb, ushare, and Twonkymedia), with the built-in Media Streamer app on the N770. All fail. MP3s cut off near the end, M3U playlists aren’t supported, and sometimes Media Streamer just locks up. In addition it’s pretty messy trying to get the UPNP servers to notice changes to the MP3 collection.

I’ve also tried using Squeezecenter (nee Slimserver), but the MP3 stream playback support on the N770 is pretty atrocious; there are audible decoding artifacts.

So — anyone got a suggestion? Even something involving iTunes might be helpful — as long as it can at least preserve the Linux server. I’m unlikely to host the full MP3 collection on anything else…

Tags: home, lazyweb, linux, mp3, music, networking

• Scaling memcached at Facebook : bit late bookmarking this; awesome speedups though
  (tags: facebook memcached udp scalability performance memory scaling)

• Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference! : hilarious account of Loic Le Meur’s latest car-crash of a conference, LeWeb ‘08
  (tags: rant leweb loiclemeur paulcarr leweb08 web2.0 conferences paris guardian web funny)

• Rent or Own: Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation Comparison for Hadoop Clusters : Rapleaf do the computations on using EC2 vs “grow your own”. waaay cheaper to do the latter for their use-case. also interesting to see lots of Hadoop fans in the comments
  (tags: ec2 rapleaf hadoop clustering colo hosting server-farms scalability)

• Richard Clayton on the IWF/Wikipedia fiasco : ‘The bottom line is that these blocking systems are fragile, easy to evade (even unintentionally), and little more than a fig leaf to save the IWF’s blushes in being so ineffective at getting child abuse image websites removed in a timely manner.’ +1
  (tags: iwf richard-clayton filtering wikipedia isps uk blocklists)

• lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library : contains a 20-line Python script to diff two HTML pages. nice!
  (tags: python scraping web http xml css lxml beautiful-soup html)

• On Why Auto-Scaling in the Cloud Rocks : asshat on the ORA blog posted something about how he didn’t like auto-scaling server infrastructure, seemingly because he hadn’t seen an implementation he liked. Debunked by SmugMug
  (tags: ec2 scaling auto-scaling scalability cloud-computing aws automation)

• Amazon EC2 Now Available in Europe : Euro-hosted EC2 nodes. woo! wonder if they’re in the Digital Depot…
  (tags: aws ec2 amazon hosting ireland europe)

• LINX on the IWF/Wikipedia fiasco : good wrap-up. hilariously, traffic to the blocked page “increased by more than 200 times normal” [levels], after the block was imposed, due to the press their screw-up received. also the image was still available elsewhere, including Amazon. oops! nice work IWF
  (tags: iwf fiasco wikipedia filtering squid proxy blocklists http)

• Higher-Order Perl : the entire text of MJD’s functional-programming-in-perl bible! awesome. (I have no less than two copies of the dead-tree version.)
  (tags: higher-order-programming perl programming books reference manual free mjd)

• np237: RubyGem is from Mars, apt-get is from Earth : on the crapness of Ruby and Python distribution mechanisms for server deployment. ‘Developers are reinventing the wheel, engine and transmission. Which is not that bad per se, but by not looking at existing solutions for the problem of making a car move, they are inventing a square wheel, a steam-powered engine and a superconductor-powered magnetic transmission.’
  (tags: ruby python perl languages distribution install rpm deb apt unix)

• Flickr: Documenting Dublin’s cycle lanes : a group dedicated to Dublin City Council’s ineptitude where bike lanes are concerned
  (tags: flickr groups photos dublin planning dcc cycling bikes bike-lanes roads road-safety)

• surround.vim : nifty Vim plugin for working with “surrounding” text entities — quotes, XML tags, parens etc.
  (tags: vim plugins text-editing editors)

• Wikipedia:Administrators’ noticeboard/2008 IWF action : WP commentary on the repercussions of the IWF censorship
  (tags: iwf wikipedia censorship http proxies transparent-proxies cleanfeed uk)

• IWF blocked Wikipedia; Wikipedia blocks UK ISPs : ouch. IWF decided an image on WP (specifically a “Scorpions” album cover) was illegal. Due to bugs in the “Cleanfeed” implementation, this caused a block of WP’s editing infrastructure for ~95% of UK ISP users. fiasco
  (tags: wikipedia wikimedia cleanfeed iwf blocklists uk filtering proxies http censorship fiasco incompetent duh)

• Install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on a T61p - ThinkWiki : lots and lots of gotchas :( avoid Ubuntu 8.10 on a T61p! I’m finding it buggy as hell
  (tags: ubuntu 8.10 intrepid-ibex thinkpad lenovo t61p linux bugs)

• How I learnt to love Perl : a great paean to Moose, Test::Class, Devel::DProf, and other good features in modern perl programming
  (tags: perl programming via:reddit moose oop objects dprof)

• Dogs in Elk : another interwebs classic thread. “I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring.”
  (tags: dogs-in-elk dogs funny humour elk food wildlife carrion snoring carcass)

• Microsoft offers free access to CPAN developers : 6 VMs running different versions of Windows, in order to ensure CPAN modules run OK on ‘doze. this is awesome, and UNIX vendors should be doing the same
  (tags: perl microsoft windows cpan testing porting strawberry-perl xp vista)

• Python Makes Me Nervous - Ted Dziuba : both points are pretty valid, I’ve been hurt by them before
  (tags: python duck-typing exceptions coding reliability ted-dziuba software)

• KDE3.5 for Ubuntu Intrepid : the Kubuntu team went with the half-baked and broken usability nightmare that is KDE 4 for the latest Ubuntu release. here’s packages to revert back to the working KDE 3.5.1. I hope they work :(
  (tags: kubuntu ubuntu kde desktops linux packaging deb kde4 usability repositories)

• Misco.ie : new Irish computer bits shop, recommended by Damo
  (tags: ireland hardware shopping computers components)

• Unlocking iPhone 3Gs — the Vietnamese way : hardware hacking, Bunnie-style. hard. core (via Danny)
  (tags: via:malaclyps hardware hacking iphone mobile apple vietnam unlocking)

• Social Media Backlash Against Cheaters and Fleshmongers : Ian Kallen on spam-battling at Technorati, Ning, Digg, YT: ‘It seems to be an accepted truism that social media oft demonstrates, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites. Yep, I’ve talked to folks from Six Apart, Wordpress, Tumblr, Twitter and elsewhere. We’re all feeling the pains of success. Over the past month at Technorati, we’ve purged about 80% of the porn that was active in the search index. Sure, we’re not spam free yet but the index is getting a lot cleaner.’
  (tags: anti-spam web technorati ning digg youtube ian-kallen)

• Mathematica on Amazon EC2 : legendary maths app can now spawn EC2 servers to perform heavyweight calculations in parallel. Very clever move! (via Waxy)
  (tags: ec2 aws mathematica cloud-computing elastic maths via:waxy)

• Garden worms : improve garden drainage using these lob worms, available to order online. my mate Eoin recommends ‘em
  (tags: gardens toget worms drainage earthworms)

• Does the broken windows theory hold online? : There’s an interesting side effect of forum spam — it engenders more spam by ensuring that site appears in Google search results for the spam keyword, which is what _other_ spammers use to find target sites (via Waxy)
  (tags: broken-windows spam anti-spam forums mailing-lists archives web google via:waxy)

• Intel’s X25-E Extreme solid-state drive : wow, sounds amazing. as Tim Bray said, SSDs are going to be very cool very soon. this one claims 170MB/s writes, 250MB/s reads, seeks 2 orders of magnitude faster than HD, many years of write/erase cycles, and power consumption of 0.06W idle/2.4W active
  (tags: ssh hardware intel review computers disk storage performance power)

• YouTube - THE HUNGER Music Video : classic “so bad it’s brilliant” YT
  (tags: the-honger funny excruciating youtube tat egypt vampires bad-acting music-videos awful sports-bra)

• Sophos say Rustock botnet is back on the air : “Starting yesterday, the amount of spam coming to our traps has gone up 3 times (a 200% increase).” Other sources saying similar
  (tags: sophos rustock botnets spam spam-weather)

• Google decide that GMail account thefts are due to phishing : ‘Attackers sent customized e-mails encouraging web domain owners to visit [phish sites ...] Once attackers gained the user credentials, they were free to modify the affected accounts as they desired. In this case, the attacker set up mail filters specifically designed to forward messages from web domain providers.’
  (tags: google gmail accounts phishing security)

• Values of n bought out by Twitter : Small software company (run by ex-ORA Rael Dornfest) is bought out; immediately gives 2 weeks notice of shutdown of their webapp products. Cue massive trainwreck as users freak out. Release the code as open source! It can’t be worse than it is now…
  (tags: twitter m&a acquisitions rael-dornfest stikkit iwantsandy web-apps web2.0 trainwreck cluetrain)

The Digital Depot is ‘an innovative, state-of-the-art building specifically designed to meet the needs of fast growing digital media companies [...] developed as a joint initiative of Enterprise Ireland, Dublin City Council and The Digital Hub Development Agency.’ Generally, it’s a pretty nice place to work, and a great resource for startups and small tech companies.

However, recently, it looks like they’ve been embarking on some innovative, state-of-the-art cost-cutting exercises.

There’s a little canteen area, for companies to make tea and coffee, wash up their mugs, etc. Check out this snapshot from the canteen this morning, courtesy of JK’s phone cam:

Notice anything odd about that bottle of washing-up liquid?

Yum yum! Nothing nicer than washing your mug with a dash of toilet cleaner.

Tags: digital-depot, digital-hub, dublin, ireland, oh-dear, omgwtf, recession, toilet-cleaner

• Do Your Cloud Applications Need To Be Elastic? : answer: no. ;) IMO there’s useful applications of EC2-like elastic hosting services that don’t require a fully-elastic horizontal scaling app
  (tags: ec2 hosting aws scalability elastic servers scaling horizontal-scaling)

• Tim Bray on the Storage Hierarchy in 2008 : Registers > Cache > DRAM > DHT (ie memcached) > SSD > Disk > Tape
  (tags: memcached via:jzawodny memory disk storage io performance tim-bray)

• good deal on a Bodum burr coffee grinder and 2 bags of coffee : EUR72.08 for grinder and 2 bags of beans from Dublin-based Java Republic’s online shop. good xmas pressie methinks ;)
  (tags: coffee presents toget wishlist xmas gifts kitchen)

• 441-year-old bitmap font rendering : wow, so cool. A serif typeface from ‘”La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami”, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus, published in 1567.’ Plus ca change… (via waxy)
  (tags: type fonts books renaissance history embroidery typography pixels giovanni-ostaus 1567 lace via:waxy)

• The Septic’s Companion : ‘A mercifully brief guide to British culture and slang’, aimed primarily at the USAnian. Now with book, just in time for xmas!
  (tags: usa uk europe culture slang language books)

• o2sms v3.11 : oh thank god for that; scripty, scrapey access to O2.ie’s web-SMS system without having to use their now-broken website. yay for Mackers
  (tags: o2 sms texting ireland mobile-phones)

• Mozilla Foundation’s non-profit status in question : under audit by the IRS; it receives 88% of its revenues from one source, Google. ‘While the Foundation did not automatically qualify as a public charity with public support at 33% of total support, it believes that it qualifies as a public charity under the facts and circumstances test with public support over 10%.’
  (tags: google mozilla non-profits foundations revenue irs techcrunch open-source)

• CBL on the McColo outage’s effects on botnets : great article, with lots of good facts and figures. Best bit: ‘if you noticed a steep decline in spam in your inbox as a result of the McColo disconnection, this is an indication that you need better spam filters.’ heh
  (tags: mccolo spam anti-spam botnets cutwail cbl xbl ozdok mega-d asprox rustock bobax srizbi warezov)

• MS To Offer Free Anti-Virus Software : about time! This has been necessary for ages. It will, of course, eat McAfee/Symantec/et al’s lunch on a huge scale; I guess that was probably the issue
  (tags: microsoft windows malware viruses mcafee symantec av anti-virus)

• Twixenate : Walter’s Twitter profile pic editing tool; enter your username and use the Pixenate image-editing tools to hack at your profile pic, then re-upload — all from the browser. great demo of Pixenate
  (tags: pxn8 pixenate twitter avatar images editing image-macros)

• boards.ie has second-highest unique visitor count in Ireland : ahead of the Irish Times & Myhome.ie and the Irish Independent sites, just short of RTE.ie. Web forums are certainly mainstream in Ireland now
  (tags: boards.ie web stats ireland irish-times newspapers irish-independent rte forums)

New Scientist have a great article up this week entitled ‘Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask’, including:

Q: Does switching from bus to bike really have any effect? After all, cycling isn’t completely carbon neutral because I’ve got to eat to fuel my legs.

A: You are much better off cycling. A 12-kilometre round commute on a bus or subway train is reckoned to generate 164 kilograms of carbon per commuter per year. Somebody cycling that distance would burn about 50,000 calories a year - roughly the amount of energy in 22 kilograms of brown bread. A kilo of brown bread has a carbon footprint of about 1.1 kilograms, so switching from public transport to a bike saves about 140 kilograms of carbon emissions per year — although this only really works if enough people cycle to allow public transport providers to reduce the number of buses and trains they run.

Also included: ‘How clean does the pizza box/can/bottle have to be for it to be recyclable?’; ‘Are laminated juice cartons recyclable?’; ‘What’s worse, the CO2 put out by a gas-fuelled car or the environmental effects of hybrid-car batteries?’; ‘Can I put window envelopes i