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good interview with Irish Times MD, Maeve Donovan, on their removal of the paywall: ‘it had become clear that there were not sufficient numbers of Irish Times readers prepared to pay for online content.’ seems the example of the Grauniad was influential
Month: June 2008
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make the obtuse pg_locks table more useful. ‘show any queries that are waiting on a lock, and the query that currently holds the lock on which those queries are waiting.’ haven’t tried it out yet
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The SGAE agency will collect on sales of mobile phones (EUR 1.10), blank CDs (17c each), laser printers (EUR 10), scanners (EUR 9), CD recorders (3.40). I guess Spanish consumers have a license to download freely now, since they’re already paying for it
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using a couple of mod_rewrite rules and a redirect to www.avg.com
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there goes my pocket money. I <3 the woot crew
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‘It’s a common enough misconception, but Irish national newspapers have not and are not currently showing the large-scale declines in readership as seen in the UK and US. The market is reasonably stable.’ interesting
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A film festival is putting this on? wtf, does not compute. good line up though. at Filmbase, Curved St, Temple Bar, 10am Friday 27th June
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intro to the EAM (Execute Around Method) closure-based resource-management pattern. I was wondering what this trick was called
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I missed this at the time. great news
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yay, PutPlace on Windows is now in public beta
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handy algorithm to take N randomly-selected samples from a passing stream of data; must use this on the SpamAssassin spamtraps
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‘one of my mentors told me that the chief responsibility of a CEO to his staff is to improve the CV of every staff member [..] I sincerely hope that each and every career immensely benefited as a result.’ Certainly worked for me – thanks Chris!
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A company called “TenFour Sweden” apparently sold a product called “TFS Gateway” that supported virus scans, prior to Trend’s patent filing. Note that they’re still looking for people who _used_ TFS Gateway in 1995
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it was a Hungarian sysadmin protesting a $227M investment in MS licences throughout the Hungarian state system as a massive waste of money: “I think there are much more useful free software solutions available, for no charge.”
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very good list of differences, and compelling downsides to cfengine. sounds like I need to give Puppet another chance after all
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Amazingly clear breakdown of my social groups — great infoviz. Must try something like this for SpamAssassin spamtrap data (via Leonard)
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lovely. would prefer the tee, but it’s sold out for now
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this is becoming critical for use of git as a file-synchronization mechanism for my MP3 collection, for obvious reasons. looks like it should be possible with git 1.5.6
Joey Hess suggests that current discussions about the superfluity of DVCS systems have a parallel in how the internet protocol world, circa 1993, played out:
I’m reminded of 1993. Using the internet at that time involved using a mishmash of stuff — Telnet, FTP, Gopher, strange things called Archie and Veronica. Or maybe this CERN “web” thing that Tim Berners-Lee had just invented a few years before, but that mostly was useful to particle physicists.
Then in 1994 a few more people put up web sites, then more and more, and suddenly there was an inflection point. Suddenly we were all browsing the web and all that other stuff seemed much more specialised and marginalised.
I would disagree, a little. Back in the early ’90’s, I was a sysadmin playing around with internet- and intranet-facing TCP/IP services (although in those days, the term “intranet” hadn’t been coined yet), so I gained a fair bit of experience at the coal-face in this regard. The mish-mash of protocols — telnet, gopher, Archie, WAIS, FTP, NNTP, and so on — all had their own worlds and their own views of the ‘net. What changed this in 1993 was not so much the arrival of HTTP, but TimBL’s other creation: the URL.
The URL allowed all those balkanized protocols to be supported by one WWW client, and allowed a HTML document to “link” to any other protocol —
The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols (FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and information suppliers encourage each other.
This was a great “embrace and extend” manoeuvre by TimBL, in my opinion — by embracing the existing base of TCP/IP protocols, the WWW client became the ideal user interface to all of them. Once NCSA Mosaic came along, there really was no alternative to rival the Web’s ease of use. This was the case even if you didn’t have a HTTP server of your own; you could still access HTML documents and remote URLs.
In essence, HTML and the URL were the trojan horse, paving the way for HTTP (as HTML’s native distribution protocol) to succeed. It wasn’t the web sites that helped the WWW “win”, but embrace-and-extend via the URL.
For what it’s worth, I think there is an interesting parallel in today’s DCVS world: git-svn.
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Ubuntu Ireland LoCo team now has a drop-in centre on Saturdays between 11am-4pm at the Camara offices in the Digital Hub, on Thomas St in Dublin 8
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‘Our programs have left the desktop and found their new home on the web. System administration issues loom large.’ I agree with the thesis, but Puppet as a key component to fix this? it’s just cfengine in Ruby, snore
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great sketch: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett at the pitch ‘n’ putt (NSFW)
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to hold Django’s trademarks and IP. that’s a major step forward, congrats guys. although I’m sure there’d have been room at the ASF too ;)
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the ‘Jura Internet Connection Kit’ has a few security holes, it seems. ‘Fun things you can do with a Jura coffee maker: Change the preset coffee settings; [..] Change the amount of water per cup (say 300ml for a short black) and make a puddle’
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an announcement-only Google Group for notifications about GAE downtime and outages. useful, considering they had a major datastore outage yesterday
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Boards user boasts of cheating in the Leaving Cert exams, is identified, and an epic thread unfolds. IRISH INTERNETS – SERIOUS BUSINESS
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70% of UK kids aged 18-24 download music illegally; 87% of all respondents have copied music CDs; 74% said they’d be interested in a working, DRM-free legal download service
Happy Firefox Download Day — or rather, Firefox Download Evening!
It turns out that the “day” in question has been defined as a 24-hour period starting at 10am Pacific Time; rather than compensating for the effects of timezones around the world, they’ve just picked an arbitrary 24-hour period.
That’s 6pm in Irish time, for example. At least I’m not one of the 57,000 Japanese pledgers, who’d be waiting up until 2am to kick off their download. It seems a little bizarre that there’s little leeway provided for non-US downloaders, who are right now twiddling their thumbs, waiting, while their “day” passes.
Annoyingly, the main world record page simply says ‘the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008’ — no mention of a starting time or official timezone at all!
This is the top thread on their forum right now — in addition to the omission of an entire continent ;)
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‘right now it feels like an ugly popularity contest. I can only assume that the A-listers of the Irish blogging world are lovely, lovely people because to be frank, some of them are shit-awful writers.’ be sure to read the name-calling in the comments
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ouch, he cites plenty of bad management at ORA. On the plus side, the end result, “High Performance MySQL”, 2nd Ed, sounds like it came out well — eventually! all in all though, it sounds like I dodged a bullet on that one, hard work
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sounds like this guy’s work laptop was trojaned by a virus/malware, then used to host child porn, for which he was then prosecuted. what a nightmare scenario — thankfully the forensics analyst figured it out
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The Register says “maybe”. mind you, that means absolutely feck all ;)
On programmers “going dark” — Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
Jeff Atwood argues that open source projects are in real danger of programmers “going dark,” which means they lock themselves away silently for a long time, then surface with a huge patch that implements a complex feature.
It seems to me that this is as much a technological problem as a social issue… and that we have the technological solution figured out: it’s called distributed version control. It means that that lone developer who locked himself in a room need not resurface with a single huge patch – instead, he can come back with a branch implementing the feature in individually comprehensible steps. At the same time, it allows the lone programmer to experiment in private and throw away the most embarrassing mistakes, addressing part of the social problem.
However, I don’t think he realised that the Jeff Atwood story he responded to was in fact an echo of Ben Collins-Sussman’s original article, where he specifically picked out DVCS as a source of this danger:
A friend of mine works on several projects that use git or mercurial. He gave me this story recently. Basically, he was working with two groups on a project. One group published changes frequently…
“…and as a result, I was able to review consistently throughout the semester, offering design tweaks and code reviews regularly. And as a result of that, [their work] is now in the mainline, and mostly functional. The other group […] I haven’t heard a peep out of for 5 months. Despite many emails and IRC conversations inviting them to discuss their design and publish changes regularly, there is not a single line of code anywhere that I can see it. […] Last weekend, one of them walked up to me with a bug […] and I finally got to see the code to help them debug. I failed, because there are about 5000 lines of crappy code, and just reading through a single file I pointed out two or three major design flaws and a dozen wonky implementation issues. I had admonished them many times during these 5 months to publish their changes, so that we (the others) could take a look and offer feedback… but each time met with stony silence. I don’t know if they were afraid to publish it, or just don’t care. But either way, given the code I’ve seen, the net result is 5 wasted months.”
Before you scream; yes yes, I know that the potential for cave-hiding and writing code bombs is also possible with a centralized version control system like Subversion. But my friend has an interesting point:
“I think this failure is at least partially due to the fact that [DVCS] makes it so damn easy to wall yourself into a cave. Had we been using svn, I think the barrier to caving would have been too high, and I’d have seen the code.”
In other words, yes, this was fundamentally a social problem. A team was embarrassed to share code. But because they were using distributed version control, it gave them a sense of false security. “See, we’re committing changes to our repository every day… making progress!” If they had been using Subversion, it’s much less likely they would have sat on a 5000 line patch in their working copy for 5 months; they would have had to share the work much earlier.
To be honest, I’d tend to agree with Aristotle; just because centralized VC makes it harder to maintain a “private branch” with this “high barrier to caving”, and this therefore imposes a technical pressure to fix a social problem, doesn’t mean that is a good thing. I’d prefer to fix the DVCS to apply social pressure, and have both working tools and a working social organisation.
Another commenter on Ben’s original post put it well:
I [..] disagree, strongly, that DVCS makes code hiding any more difficult than single-branch VCS. When using a single branch, it’s usually a very small group of people who are allowed to commit. Any patches from non-core contributors get lost in a tangle of IRC pastebins, mailing lists, bug trackers, and blog posts. Furthermore, even if these patches are eventually committed, they have lost all their associated version information — the destructive rebase you complain about. DVCS allows anybody to branch from trunk, record their changes, and publish their branch in a service like Launchpad or github. For an example of this, look at the mass of user-created branches for popular projects like GNOME Do or AWN.
It’s very interesting to see those Launchpad sites, in my opinion.
I’ve spent many years shepherding contributions to SpamAssassin through our Bugzilla. We’ve often lost rule contributors, who are particularly hard to attract for some reason, due to delays and human overhead involved in this method. :( So an improved interface for this would be very useful…
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‘As [a govt minister] attempted to speak, he was surrounded by Coir [ie. extreme-right-wing anti-abortion group Youth Defense] activists who screamed at him and sang “there’s no Lisbon”. When [Joan] Burton attempted to intervene, she was spat at.’ lovely
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release management failure on this scale is pretty worrying in an open-source project; here’s hoping the upcoming 1.0 actually happens
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“face value ticket reselling”. no auctions, no additional fees, no bullshit demand-generation or touts buying up the lot — just p2p buying and selling of gig tickets. looks like a good option
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classic Onion. ‘Cheney reportedly makes reference to President Bush and the Iraq War, alludes to the 9/11 attacks 27 times, and warns eerily about Americans “making the wrong choice” in November.’
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‘iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed.’ looks a good deal cleaner than OzyManDNS, packages available for many distros
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due mainly to ridiculous bureaucratic worries about “treading on other people’s toes”, according to Richard Clayton and Tyler Moore. seems like an obvious and worryingly exploitable security hole
So, Nelson is apparently contemplating a trip to Ireland, and was looking for tips. Since he’s not the first to ask, I thought I’d do some research among my friends on things to do and good places to stay and eat in our native country. Here’s the result.
First off — it’s worth noting that we’re all thirty-somethings, so backpacker stuff and heavy boozing is no longer on the menu. If you’re after that, though, head for Temple Bar in Dublin ;) This is mainly nice hotels, good food, and interesting things to look at.
To start with, I’d recommend driving as a means of getting around. Lots of the good stuff can’t be reached any other way, and the roads are generally pretty good nowadays (if a little narrow).
Prepare for rain.
Things to do: Connemara and Kerry are stunning; in my opinion, they’re unmissable, if you’re coming to Ireland in search of natural beauty. Clare and West Cork are pretty good too. Generally, the west coast is the place to go.
A friend recommends the Skelligs: ‘the best thing I’ve seen in Ireland. If its sunny. If its raining it sucks so don’t go.’ (I’ve never been — appalling, given that my great-grandfather wrote one of the definitive works on them, I need to fix that.)
Stuff to avoid: Dublin’s not too hot, unfortunately. Over-priced and hard to get around due to traffic. I mean, it’s quite nice, especially to live in, but as a tourist destination compared to other cities around the world I don’t quite get the attractiveness. Also, the south-east corner of the country, while full of nice friendly people, is exorbitantly expensive in my experience (even pricier than Dublin!), short on good stuff to see, and a bit of a washout, so I say skip it. (I have no idea why it’s so expensive, BTW. my theory is that it’s a traditional in-country holiday venue for Dubliners, and the Wexford inhabitants love to fleece us, so we got fleeced. whatever.)
In general, I’d say the larger towns aren’t too exciting; stick to the country.
The Lonely Planet guide to Ireland, while frequently backpacker-oriented, is pretty good for non-backpacker stuff as well. If you’re driving around, it’s a good source of offbeat stuff to check out. I used it a lot when driving around Connemara last year. They also do a great book of hikes which I can recommend.
Next, places to stay… that friend again: ‘if you’re doing the Ring of Kerry, I strongly recommend diverting to Valentia and staying in Glanleam House (beautiful grub, beautiful gardens, cheap) and doing a day trip from there to the Skelligs.’
Temple House in Sligo also comes recommended: ‘a classical Georgian mansion set in an estate of 1,000 acres, overlooking a 13th century lakeside castle of the Knights Templar.’
There are lots of useless hotel/B&B sites in Google, making it hard to tell crap from quality. But these sites come recommended:
Ireland’s Blue Book – ‘luxury accommodation in Irish Country House Hotels, Manor Houses and Castles. Also listed are Ireland’s finest gourmet restaurants.’ This is high-end stuff, but it’s pretty reliable, as far as I can see.
Friendly Homes of Ireland – another friend says ‘aka crazy houses of Ireland — terrible webpage, but good accommodation (its also a more attractive guide). We stayed here and loved it.’
Hidden Ireland – ‘a unique collection of historic private houses which provide the very best and most stylish country house accommodation available in Ireland – great Irish hospitality at an affordable price. Our houses are not hotels and are very much more than ordinary guesthouses. They all offer a rare opportunity to experience the lifestyle of a bygone age – a special and fascinating alternative to conventional tourist accommodation.’
Irish Landmark Trust, if you’re interested in self-catering stays at heritage houses.
Georgina Campbell guidebooks are apparently quite good.
Finally, scams and rip-offs are few and far between, so that’s not something to worry about. Crappy service and mediocre food, however, is more likely to be the source of problems. At least you can now get decent espresso pretty much everywhere!
Hope that helps someone ;) Got tips of your own? Feel free to add comments!
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‘Multiple groups of nude participants will be photographed outdoors by Tunick as part of his series of installations that have previously taken place in cities around the world including New York, Amsterdam and Mexico City.’
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kokogiak’s amazing blog of top photos hot off the newswires. his selection is fantastic (via Waxy)
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to read — a bunch of Bloom Filter tricks. doesn’t load here yet, but when bos and joshua both bookmark it you know it’s going to be worth reading ;)
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VM pool management using XMPP, used in their ‘EngineYard’ cloud computing platform. I’m sceptical of real-world usage of XMPP, however, since _every_ impl seems to have horrible i14y bugs…
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brilliant! probably best for non-desktop systems, though. my $400 Dell laptop acting as a home server now has 224MB of additional superfast swap ;)
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nice demo of sharding a counter to avoid locking overhead under heavy load
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great detailed post about SmugMug’s EC2 horizontal-scaling controller
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insanely complex, requiring hacks in about:config followed by pasting a line of raw Javascript into the address bar. wtf Firefox? (via:wwhyte)
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“xdotool”, command-line app to perform window management manipulation for X11, similar to sawfish-ui or Enlightenment’s proprietary UIs, can now activate/warp to windows. must use this to reinstate the Pidgin feature I miss
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I’m getting more hits from this Polish article about the Debian/OpenSSL security fiasco, than from many other sources