Hibernation Tool for Mac OS : OSX doesn’t suspend-to-disk by default, which isn’t good if you want to reduce power consumption of an unused MacBook Pro. this AppleScript provides a nice Mac-ish UI for the commandline NVRAM pokery required to fix this
(tags: macos power suspend-to-disk sleep hibernate mbp macbook-pro nvram)spamstery.com : ‘The Last Social Game You Will Ever Play’. ‘Want in? Sorry. You can’t. We’re in beta, so we are way too cool for you. If you’d like us to throw you a frickin’ bone when we’re ready to consider your application, follow @spamstery on Twitter and we’ll see what we can do. (No promises, though. God, you’re a dork.)’
(tags: twitter elitism funny satire spam sns)
Month: May 2009
Template Based Spam : good intro to the systems used in today’s botnets, from Marshal8e6’s TRACElabs
(tags: anti-spam templates templating marshal8e6 research pushdo asprox spam)How SQLite Is Tested : wow, extensive. I’m impressed! good example of how to solidly test a C/C++ library
(tags: sqlite testing c c++ coding coverage quality database sql)True things my assistant has said : guy writing down all the stupid things his assistant says. “I forced myself to have a concussion last night in the furnace room.”
(tags: funny omgwtfbbq assistant)
MMO logging to AWS : an interesting AWS use-case; S3, EC2, Elastic Hadoop, and browser-based POST to S3 to offload work of MMO-level logging
(tags: logging distributed mmogs games coding internet)Everything you always wanted to know about female ejaculation (but were afraid to ask) – New Scientist: scientific fact!
(tags: sex biology sexuality orgasm women female)
Issue 7254: Initial Greasemonkey support : Is this why Greasemonkey is moribund in Firefox — the dev is employed by Google and working on Chromium?
(tags: greasemonkey chrome google open-source chromium web browsers)Google: Expect 18 Android Phones by Year’s End : ‘Mr. Rubin said that, in general, carriers will be slower in the United States to introduce Android phones than in Europe.’ so seeing as you still can’t buy a G1 in Ireland, that would mean never?
(tags: google android g1 phones tech)Woods gives preview of the conservative fightback : ‘The infamous deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse […] was at its most septic over the weekend. Michael Woods […] gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.’
(tags: religion ireland politics catholicism scandal abuse child-abuse ryan-report michael-woods)
If you were listening to the Marian Finucane show on RTE Radio 1 last Saturday afternoon, you might have heard the mind-boggling stuff coming out of Michael Woods, the Fianna Fail former Education Minister with a “strong Catholic faith” who brokered the controversial backroom deal back in 2003 which allowed the Catholic Church and its institutions to evade prosecution on child abuse.
Here’s a great thread on Politics.ie where quite a few folks boggle at the incredible things he said.
Thanks to Podcasting Ireland, I was able to track down and cut out this segment, so here is a recording of Michael Woods coming up with the pathetic excuse of how the British forced the Christian Brothers to abuse children:
Michael Woods – the brits made us do it.mp3 (951KB)
The last refuge of a cornered FFer — blame the British. Absolutely incredible. It has to be heard to be believed. What century is this again?
Update: according to Mary Raftery in the Irish Times, this is a preview of the religious right’s tactics:
‘It Is easy to discount former government minister and senior Fianna Fáil member Michael Woods. A former minister, he is no longer a prominent figure. He has, however, left a festering sore behind him which continues to weep poison every now and then. The infamous church-State deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse, under which the religious orders pay a mere 10 per cent of the compensation bill, was at its most septic over the weekend.
Woods, the main architect of the deal, defended it on the television news and gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.’
We marched in the streets about this stuff. It’s like the 90’s never happened.
See The Failure of Fianna Fail : a handy Firefox extension to FF-proof your web browsing experience, “They Live”-style
(tags: firefox fianna-fail biffo ireland politics lecraic via:jkeyes extensions)Doctor Jesus : heh. I have a similar cheesy thrift-shop painting at home
(tags: doctor-jesus funny cheesy tat thrift-shop moba art bad-art kitsch religion)
Google Map Parameters : reverse-engineered list of query parameters accepted in Google Maps URLs. great reference!
(tags: maps google hacks reverse-engineering api gmaps reference parameters cgi url)_Paxos Made Live – An Engineering Perspective_ : Google paper on the construction and operation of Chubby, their distributed fault-tolerant database built using the Paxos consensus algorithm
(tags: google algorithms research databases chubby distcomp cs paxos fault-tolerance scalability papers toread)OpenDHT mothballed, halting Adeona : PhDware strikes again: ‘OpenDHT was Sean Rhea’s Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos.’
(tags: opendht adeona phdware software coding open-source dht security)redbot : ‘RED checks HTTP resources to see how they use HTTP, makes suggestions, and finds common protocol mistakes.’ source available
(tags: http testing protocol conformance compression encoding web validators)Irish Craft Brewer – Brewing: How do I Start? : something to bookmark for my copious free time (yeah right)
(tags: brewing toread toget beer hobbies)bashreduce : interesting hack — apply Map-Reduce idioms to UNIX command lines across multiple machines or cores (via jzawodny, who’s obviously looking at a lot of command line stuff recently ;)
(tags: via:jzawodny algorithms hack last.fm shell cli bash commandline bashreduce distcomp mapreduce networking unix)GNU ‘xargs’ as a parallel process-pool driver : I had no idea it could do this, using its “-P” switch. cool (via jzawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny xargs parallel forking worker-pool process-pool parallelism multicore unix gnu)
Catholic Church in Ireland : a Mulley-driven link campaign I can totally support; anyone researching the church’s status here needs the context of the abuse committed by its members over the past 100 years. see http://www.mulley.net/2009/05/23/catholic-church-in-ireland/ for more background
(tags: catholicism church religion ireland abuse atrocities google googlebombing horror)mirandaupnptool : ‘Python-based Universal Plug-N-Play client application designed to discover, query and interact with UPNP devices, particularly Internet Gateway Devices (aka, routers). It can be used to audit UPNP-enabled devices on a network for possible vulnerabilities.’ looks also useful for non-security-related UPNP twiddling, too
(tags: upnp firewalls firewal-traversal routers home security auditing)
Your morning commute identifies you uniquely : ‘analyzing data from the U.S. Census [shows] that for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations — to a block level — identifies them uniquely.’ are location-based services fundamentally incompatible with privacy
(tags: privacy location security fireeagle via:schneier commute where census)over 500k ops/sec from memcached with an UltraSPARC T2 : test load used 90% gets and 10% sets. sub-millisecond response times
(tags: sun solaris via:adriancockroft memcached scalability benchmarks performance)Sriracha comes from the US : I had no idea my favourite condiment wasn’t Thai or Vietnamese in origin. there you go
(tags: sriracha food condiments yum thailand vietnam hot-sauce)AWS Import/Export : send a USB/eSATA storage device to Amazon and they’ll bulk load data to S3 (or, in future, vice versa), for $80 + $2.49 per hour of transfer time. ‘If loading your data over the Internet would take a week or more, you should consider using AWS Import/Export.’ aka, sneakernet now a supported interface
(tags: amazon aws import export data-portability s3)
Amazon.com: Canon CanoScan 8800F Color Film/Negative/Photo Scanner : recommended, apparently. I have a stack of negs at home I’ve been meaning to scan
(tags: negatives photos scanning hardware canon images toget wishlist)Gearman now does persistent queues : yay
(tags: gearman persistent disk queueing perl drizzle mysql libmemcached)Magnet now have a customer forum on Boards.ie : best Irish ISP, by far (via Mulley)
(tags: via:mulley magnet ireland isps customer-service boards.ie)
Bug #375272 in Ubunet: “Server software is closed source” : ‘The Ubuntu One server software is closed source. This is 2009. I thought we learnt this lesson with Launchpad.’ oh dear….
(tags: ubuntu canonical proprietary open-source ubuntu-one web2.0)Tweeting Too Hard : ‘Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.’ bash.org for Twitter (via @colmbrophy)
(tags: funny twitter microblogging ego tweeting via:colmbrophy wankers)Hudson EC2 plugin : ‘This plugin enables Hudson to automatically provision new instances on EC2, based on the system demand. That is, if Hudson notices that your system is overloaded, it will provision new slaves on EC2, and when those instances go unused for a certain time period, it will shut them down. You can run all your slaves on EC2 if you want, or you can maintain your local build cluster and use EC2 as a reserve capacity.’ awesome
(tags: hudson ec2 ci continuous-integration build aws elastic)Wolfram Alpha – a new kind of Fail : Ted Dziuba with teh funny: ‘For someone like me, Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness.’
(tags: wolfram-alpha funny ted-dziuba search maths fail reviews)
James Hamilton, ‘On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services’, LISA ’07 (PDF) : James Hamilton, now at Amazon, then at MSN, gives a canonical list of best practices for large-scale operations-friendly server deployments, ‘accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live.’ a lot of good advice here (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf sysadmin lisa deployment server-farms servers testing debugging monitoring logging operations configuration)spiritofireland.org technical forum : plenty of spirited (ho ho) discussion of the proposed massive wind-power project and its viability
(tags: power wind-power spirit-of-ireland forum discussion ireland green)resty : short bash wrappers for curl to ease debugging REST APIs. looks nice, but I’m not impressed at it’s stomping on the venerable lwp GET/PUT/POST commands :(
(tags: lwp rest curl http debugging shell bash cli)Artificial Owl : “The most fascinating abandoned man-made creations, and their story & location”. my new favourite photoblog, and great name too (via JWZ)
(tags: via:jwz blogs history photography travel photos architecture decay)
This is nifty. Monitor EC2 instances and load balancers; CPU, data transfer rates, disk usage, disk activity, HTTP/TCP request counts/latency, “healthy/unhealthy” instances (see below). This data is both exposed via web service APIs, but also usable as input for their new “Auto Scaling” elastic scaling feature. Ideal for someone to write a Nagios plugin for. Also, I’m looking forward to some kick-ass sysadmin dataviz for this.
Elastically scale out (or in) your grid of EC2 instances, based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. An officially-supported form of a myriad of third-party apps. I expect to hear of people accidentally spending a fortune due to accidental misuse of this ;)
Load balance across multiple EC2 instances, report metrics to Cloudwatch such as requests/second and request latency, and — most usefully of all in my opinion — shift traffic away from EC2 instances that fail to respond to a “health-check” HTTP GET with a 200, or fail to accept a TCP connection.
In other words, this provides a way to do decent HA on EC2, which is something that’s been much needed for a long time, and is quite tricky to set up using Linux-HA. I’ve done the latter, and found it full of potential reliability pitfalls; I found that Elastic IP addresses were not useful for quickly failing over to backup servers; in some cases, I found it taking about 5 minutes to fail over :( The only (relatively) snappy way to implement it was to set up a dynamic DNS record with a short TTL, point to it using a CNAME, and use “ddclient” to switch it when failing over. And even that could leave sites down for as long as it takes the DNS client to time out the existing cached CNAME.
Elastic Load Balancing supports HTTP or generic TCP connections. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support “real” termination of HTTPS connections, which is unfortunate. (You can terminate them as generic TCP connections, though.)
More details on the RightScale blog, at the AWS dev blog, and Werner Vogel’s blog.
Ross Anderson elected as Royal Society Fellow : and about time too! (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf science royal-society frs ross-anderson security)Software AG’s Chief Strategerizer on “Enterprise” : ‘In the context of software, the word “Enterprise” has now officially come to mean software that sucks.’ uh, yep. and this is new? (via wmf)
(tags: via:wmf funny enterprise enterprisey software-ag sap software sales)Fianna Fail’s talking points memo for election canvassers : ‘A lot of [FF] canvassers are finding it tough on the doorstep.’ ‘be seen to highlight their points in a notebook’, ‘ask to record their name and email address so you can get back to them’, ‘when you show interest, they will be inclined to soften their [anti-FF] views’. also: show interest in kids, local sports team — what a cliche! possibly fake, though
(tags: fianna-fail politics ireland canvassing elections talking-points scans)
In the current run-up to the local elections here in Ireland, it’s pretty obvious that Fianna Fail, the ruling party who’ve screwed the economy with mismanagement and rampant cronyism, are in line for a massive drubbing. So much so, in fact, that their own candidates are attempting to hide their party affiliations.
Check out this poster for candidate Kenneth O’Flynn (son of FF TD Noel O’Flynn):
what logo, you ask? Look closer:
Compare that to what FF posters used to look like, 2 years ago:
Meath FF councillor Nick Killian has removed the logo from his leaflet’s front page entirely, too.
Thanks to martinoc for the Bertie’s Team poster, and Ivor in the comments of this post at On The Record for the photos of Kenny’s posters. There’s gold in those comments…
‘eco-bling’ : ‘some expensive technologies such as photo-voltaic cells, which take energy from sunshine, can take up to 50 years to pay for themselves in saved energy costs. However, photo-voltaic cells often have a useful life of just 20 years, making them effectively “eco-bling”.’
(tags: eco-bling bling green technology solar-panels wind-turbines housing)
‘Scaling Apache 2.x > 20000 Concurrent Downloads’ : An Apachecon presentation from ColmMacC — still has a good bit of useful advice!
(tags: colmmacc apache presentations c10k scalability httpd linux)Software Problems with a Breath Alcohol Detector : oh dear. crappy proprietary code ahoy — in a breathalyzer
(tags: breathalyzers breath alcohol law source-code code-reviews security)Dmitry Orlov speaking in Dublin : uber-pessimist author of ‘Reinventing Collapse’, speaking on June 9th
(tags: talks dublin orlov collapse society economics russia ussr us-politics)
NYTimes Map/Reduce Toolkit : a super-simple MR wrapper in Ruby, wrapping Hadoop, inspired by Sawzall
(tags: hadoop ruby mapreduce nytimes distcomp sawzall dsls)Cision PR spam problems : I’ve been having the same problem myself, and it seems they’ve scraped my address and added it to their db in contravention of EU law. just sent an opt-out, it had better work
(tags: pr cision spam uk privacy)John Graham-Cumming: Why I wrote The Geek Atlas : sounds great! Mind you I prefer the original title, “128 Geeky Places To See Before You Die”
(tags: geek science jgc books reading tourism toget)Flare : ‘distributed, and persistent key-value storage compatible with memcached’, GPL’d, also featuring persistent storage, data replication, dynamic partitioning, failover, etc.
(tags: flare storage k-v-stores scalability memcached distributed tokyocabinet cache database)Hadoop Sorts a Petabyte in 16.25 Hours and a Terabyte in 62 Seconds : now that’s scale
(tags: hadoop benchmarks yahoo mapreduce sorting hdfs)
hahaha. a lovely Google AI “doh” moment:
Needless to say, “Angry GAA Fans” is not a recurring section on the Irish Examiner’s site…
Ubuntu One : “store, sync and share”. looks an awful lot like Canonical have just reinvented a linux-only version of Dropbox for some reason :( here’s hoping it’s open source at least, right?
(tags: dropbox canonical ubuntu linux sync online-backup filesharing)Merkle trees : hashes utilitizing a tree structure, as used for efficient delta reconciliation in Amazon’s Dynamo, in next-gen hash algorithm MD6, and Sun’s ZFS filesystem. see also Tiger tree hashing, used in Gnutella and DC p2p algos
(tags: gnutella merkle-trees hash-trees hashing hashes algorithms data-structures crypto security zfs)MD6 : next-gen hash function, allowing immense parallel computation of hashes using a Merkle-tree-like structure. funnily enough, in use right now by the Conficker worm! (via Richi)
(tags: via:richi merkle-trees hashing hash-trees md6 algorithms coding hash crypto security conficker)blasphemy.ie : A blog from Atheist Ireland as part of their campaign against the proposed new anti-blasphemy law, to replace the unenforceable old law
(tags: blasphemy free-speech ireland atheism humanism laws legal constitution absurd wtf)Attack vectors deja vu : get memory to contain malicious code, then make process dump core; naive directory search then reads your core file, attempts to interpret it, and runs malicious commands. This is one reason why SpamAssassin looks for specific file extensions when dir-searching for configs
(tags: configuration filenames exploits security core logrotate cron)
Spirit of Ireland looks very nifty.
It’s extremely simple — a group of Irish ‘entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, architects and legal and financial experts’ are calling for Ireland to achieve energy independence and become a net exporter of green energy within five years, by building a number of wind farms on our western seaboard, buffering the generated energy in water reservoirs using pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
This kind of massive-scale public-works engineering project has a strong historical precedent in Ireland — Ardnacrusha, opened in 1929, was the largest hydroelectric station in the world for a time. Given that Turlough Hill is a pumped-storage facility, it can even be beautiful ;)
We can certainly do it, given sufficient government vision. I’d love to see it happen. Great stuff!
- the Spirit of Ireland site
- John of Dublin’s blog post
- comment by Prof. Ray Kinsella in the Irish Times
- Irish Independent
- Eddie Hobbs
(image credit: CC-licensed image from Ganders on Flickr. thanks!)
mod_memcache_block : ‘a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code’, ie. rate limiting across a server farm built on memcached
(tags: memcached rate-limiting antispam security apache server-farms horizontal-scaling)
Automatic Continuous Integration for Grails projects on Google Code : crawling all Google-Code-hosted projects tagged with Grails and automatically hosting C-I instances for them using Hudson. wow
(tags: grails google-code continuous-integration testing web hosting open-source hudson)
HOWTO prep for migration off of SHA-1 in OpenPGP : now that both MD5 and SHA-1 are heading towards obsolescence, Debian are readying the long-term actions needed to take care of this. we’ll need to do this in the ASF too. Is this like Y2K and C10K? SHA1K?
(tags: sha1k md5 sha1 signatures signing crypto debian open-source releases processes long-term gpg web-of-trust)‘Churnalism’ : neologism for recycled PR and wire copy masquerading as journalism; new study claims that it makes up the majority of UK newspaper home news coverage
(tags: uk via:fanf neologisms churnalism journalism news newspapers old-media)
TechWire: Ode to Declan Ganley : ‘I am the very model of a modern major Europhobe’ a la Gilbert and Sullivan. excellent stuff!
(tags: libertas declan-ganley europe eu europhobes politics ireland dodgy gilbert-and-sullivan funny)Using ZooKeeper to tame system test for large-scale services : good demo of ZooKeeper
(tags: apache zookeeper yahoo hadoop networking distributed-locking locking configuration distcomp testing)How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street : ‘Catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses — the fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.’
(tags: coding capitalism work politics history programming banking money economics recession crash 2009 finance subprime mortgages complexity wallstreet securities cmo cdo)http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/FLORA/MooseX-MultiMethods-0.02/t/game.t : Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard implemented using MooseX::MultiMethods (Moose multi-method dispatch). class! (via Marcus Ramberg)
(tags: moose perl modern-perl rps rock-paper-scissors-spock-lizard funny geeky tests dispatch coding)
How to Store/Load Wii Games via USB Hard Drive : nifty! uses the Wii Homebrew Channel (ie the Twilight Hack savefile hack). apparently quite doable
(tags: wii hacks homebrew twilight-hack games backup)
review of the MySQL Tokutek storage engine : ‘fractal tree indexes’ instead of B-trees. new to me
(tags: fractal-tree-indexes b-trees fractals algorithms data-structures mysql performance tokutek tokudb databases)
Haystack design notes : pretty exhaustive walkthrough of Facebook’s new photo storage backend, running on XFS. nice setup for a very specific use-case
(tags: storage scaling netapp facebook scalability images nfs haystack)Party Cat : “I just feel lately your PARTIES have not been up to PAR.” “…ty”
(tags: party-cat parties comics funny via:fp cats)
REST worst practices : good advice on things to avoid in providing a REST API from a Django app
(tags: rest django web http webdev web-services antipatterns best-practices)Consistent hashing vs order-preserving partitioning in distributed databases : ‘An order-preserving partitioner, where keys are distributed to nodes in their natural order, has huge advantages over consistent hashing, particularly the ability to do range queries across the keys in the system’
(tags: consistent-hashing order-preserving-partitioning partitioning sharding distcomp networking distributed databases k-v-stores cassandra)How to use JetS3t with Eucalyptus : wow, impressive i14y; also Eucalyptus now includes an S3-like service
(tags: ec2 eucalyptus jets3t s3 storage open-source java)Psych Ward episode 2 : vote for my mate Luke’s latest TV programme. it’s great
(tags: rte psychward voting tv luke)
Here’s a great example of numerical illiteracy spotted by my mate Tom:
some classic reporting in the Irish Examiner today…
“Department staff clocked up 20,000 sick days in the three years” is the headline. Closer examination of the article reveals there are 5,000 people in the department. Do the maths (which the paper doesn’t – I wonder why) and that’s a SHOCKING 1.3 sick days a year.
Even better is this quote: “Department of Agriculture staff clocked up 3,095 uncertified sick days last year – 653 of these on a Monday”
So that would be about a fifth of the sick days being taken on one of the five working days in the week. DISGRACE!
Let’s hear it for old media’s commitment to quality journalism!