MythTV support in Boxee : native support built-in — awesome! must try this out
(tags: mythtv boxee linux pvr mythfrontend)Introducing The Computer of 2010 : hilariously off-base predictions from Forbes ASAP back in 2000. pretty much everything is wrong, except for the available disk capacity of 1TB (via Tony)
(tags: history computing prediction funny 2010 forbes frogdesign fail pc future via:fanf)Bids for the SORBS blocklist over AU$1.2m : ‘Ms Sullivan said the highest “legitimate” offer was about $1.2million. Others were for much more but from unscrupulous quarters.’
(tags: sorbs blocklists filtering anti-spam auctions bids)
Month: June 2009
Evan Weaver’s qcon presentation on Twitter’s backend : even more techie details, good tips on JVM profiling/monitoring tools and background on their switch from Ruby to Scala
(tags: scaling twitter java rails distributed memcached queueing evan-weaver scala ruby performance profiling jvm gc)
Twitter, an Evolving Architecture : good info on Twitter’s current architecture. lots of memcached
(tags: memcached twitter ruby java scalability queue architecture caching performance web)The Toaster Project : Artist attempting to build a toaster from scratch — ‘beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.’ fascinating
(tags: art hardware technology economics build diy consumption capitalism crafts toaster manufacturing mass-production)Agilo : web-based tool to aid Scrum development processes, Apache-licensed, in Python
(tags: python scrum agile management development via:joshua agilo project-management)
John Graham-Cumming: The Scacco/Beber analysis of the Iranian election is bogus : ‘the article in the Washington Post that supposedly gives statistical evidence for vote fraud just won’t die in the blogosphere and just got a boost [..] by Tim O’Reilly. The trouble is the analysis is bogus.’
(tags: jgc statistics lies-damn-lies washington-post scacco-beber iran politics elections chi-square blogs errors)
Steven Wells Says Goodbye : legendary music journo, dead of cancer :(
(tags: steven-wells via:rosco music journalism death philadelphia cancer)Fauvist paintings of scenes from video games : Megaton and Republic of Dave from Fallout 3, NYC from GTA4, the canal barn from Half-Life 2 ep 2 (iirc) featuring the G-Man, and more. I love these so much — genius work by spingo
(tags: games art culture painting fallout-3 gta4)
For the upcoming release of Apache SpamAssassin, we’re considering dropping support for perl 5.6.x interpreters. Perl 5.6.0 is 9 years old, and the most recent maintainance release, 5.6.2, dates back to November 2003. The current 5.x release branch is 5.10, so we’re still sticking with a “support the release branch before the current one” policy this way.
If you’re still using one of the 5.6.x versions, or know of a (relatively recent) distro that does, please reply to highlight this….
Brian Krebs on the Ralsky guilty verdict : good quote from Richard Cox of Spamhaus: “This has been a long time coming. Ralsky has been identified as one of the key drivers of [..] development in the spam world […] among the first to commission mass-mailing Trojans to help develop spam botnets.”‘
(tags: alan-ralsky stock-spam busts prosecutions guilty spam law spamhaus botnets)Facebook stolen-account scam : a mate had his FB credentials stolen and the account used to attempt to scam his social group. Sample chat: ‘so where should I send the money?’ ‘you can have it sent to my name and my present location […] Do you know any western union outlet nearest to you?’
(tags: western-union scams facebook security phishing 419 social-networking)
Patch-oriented development made sane with git-svn : a great HOWTO
(tags: git-svn patches patch diff collaboration jira asf bug-tracking bugzilla)Federal Bureau of Investigation – The Detroit Division: Department of Justice Press Release : Alan Ralsky pleads guilty in a stock-spam case, facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under CAN-SPAM, wire fraud, and money laundering laws
(tags: alan-ralsky spam cases law stock-spam can-spam fbi)
Imminent closure of SORBS. – news.admin.net-abuse.email : ‘SORBS is officially “For Sale” should anyone wish to purchase it as a going concern, but failing that and failing to find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia SORBS will be shutting down permanently in 28 days, on 20th July 2009 at 12 noon. ‘
(tags: sorbs filtering dnsbls anti-spam)paper taco trucks from Goopymart : print out and fold!
(tags: taco-trucks cute goopy tacos food)how to get Gwibber to load more of your Twitter feed : an undocumented registry^Wgconf tweak. hopefully this’ll be fixed more cleanly soon. Gwibber’s a great twitter/FB updates client!
(tags: gwibber apps linux twitter facebook updates bugs hacks undocumented)
The same friend who was victim to the BoI user-data leak last year has also fallen victim to the Bord Gais leak! how’s that for luck. Here’s the letter he received:
At least they make much more convincing worried noises.
Dublinbikes map : the 40 rent-a-bike depots around Dublin, from the Mater to the Grand Canal. coverage outside the city centre is pretty weak :(
(tags: bikes dublin rental dublinbikes jc-decaux awaycity)
Watching television last night, I couldn’t fail to take notice of this new IBM ad:
‘For the first time in history, more people live in cities than anywhere else, which means cities have to get smarter.’ […] ‘Paris has smart healthcare; smart traffic systems in Brisbane keep traffic moving; Galway has smart water’.
Jaw-dropping. That would be this Galway?
- April 2007: Irish city crippled by water emergency:
A major water crisis has left scores of people ill and tens of thousands at risk from contamination in a west of Ireland city. Galway’s water supply has been hit by an outbreak of the parasite cryptosporidium, with up to 170 people now confirmed to have been affected by a serious stomach bug as a result. Tests found that the city’s water supply contained nearly 60 times the safe limit of cryptosporidium pollution. Residents have already been unable to drink or use water for food preparation for weeks.
- Apr 2008: new cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway:
Residents in parts of Co. Galway have been hit by a new outbreak of the cryptosporidium parasite.Tests on the Roundstone Public Water Scheme showed trace elements of the parasite, as did water schemes for Inishnee and Errisbeg.
- Sep 2008: Residents told not to drink tap water:
Council engineers in Galway have begun work on providing safe drinking water for up to 1,000 householders […] where supplies have been contaminated by lead. The residents have been advised not to drink tap water until further notice.
Apparently the IBM ad is referring to something to do with tides and aquaculture in Galway Bay, rather than the worst sequence of water-quality disasters in Ireland for several decades. But really — someone at IBM’s marketing department should have done a little more research first before using that line…
Grantlee : ‘a string template engine based on the Django template system and written in Qt’
(tags: templates qt django c++ coding libraries)‘Chippers’ nationwide mourn loss of spice burger company : NOOOOOO! also, wtf Enterprise Ireland: ‘the firm closed after an appeal to Enterprise Ireland for emergency funding was rejected. “They didn’t want to know,” said an internal company source.’
(tags: enterprise-ireland ireland spice-burgers food epicurean yum nooooo chips)
PageRank sculpting : interesting details in the implementation of PageRank and how it “flows”
(tags: page-rank google seo nofollow pagerank web search)Hacker cracks TinyURL rival, redirects millions of Twitter users : oh dear. Cligs – ever heard of it?
(tags: tinyurl cligs url-shortening via:joshua web security risks twitter urls)
Buggy ‘smart meters’ open door to power-grid botnet : brilliant. ‘The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.’ Even worse: IOActive’s demo worm ‘exploits an automatic update feature in the meter that runs on peer-to-peer technology that doesn’t use code signing or other measures to make sure the update is authorized.’ omgwtfbbq
(tags: security smart-meters home technology stupid code-signing updates upgrades p2p power ioactive)
Google I/O – The Myth of the Genius Programmer : ‘A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We’ll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.’
(tags: talks google video collaboration culture genius presentation googleio coding slides ego)
Delicious Search Results on Google : a Greasemonkey userscript that enhances Google searches with del.icio.us hits for the same search. works quite well
(tags: greasemonkey delicious scripts extension firefox google)Matthew Garrett on the Palm Pre : sounds like a lovely Linux system under the hood; glibc, upstart, ipkg, dbus. if only it did GSM/3G…
(tags: phones mobile palm palm-pre linux)Boxing above your weight : Chris Horn with advice for Irish tech startups from his experience with IONA. lots of IONA history here
(tags: iona irish technology business history startups advice chris-horn)Real-world cloud computing : experiences of startups who’ve worked with “cloud” hosting platforms. all these comments match my experience. also notable: ‘No one mentioned Google App Engine’ doh!
(tags: startups ec2 aws amazon scaling cloud-computing rightscale gae horizontal-scaling)
Saving iPhone applications inside data URLs : a truly grody hack to work around iPhone brokenness. wtf is wrong with saving HTML pages to local flash for offline use? does it not “just work” or something?
(tags: data-uri hacks iphone web html javascript apple workarounds gross)
the Pearson correlation coefficient : a statistical measure to calculate “nearness” of items for collaborative filtering, a la “people who bought this also bought this”. wonder if this would make a good Bayes p-value combiner in SpamAssassin
(tags: algorithms statistics via:fergal ruby recommendations correlation nearness collaborative-filtering)Home taping didn’t kill music – Bad Science : ‘SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful. [..] Like I said: as far as I’m concerned, every [dodgy figure] from the [music] industry is false, until proven otherwise.’
(tags: science journalism p2p mp3 music copyright piracy pr statistics figures spin bullshit)Backing Up Flickr : using “flickrtouchr”, a handy script by colmmacc
(tags: flickr backup tips howto python small-world)
Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong! : very funny, and a fantastic illustration of common applied-crypto pitfalls
(tags: authentication crypto 2009 encryption humour cookies security coding aes cbc sso)SHA-1 collision attacks now 2^52 complexity : ‘Authored by researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, their work reveals a collision attack on SHA-1 with a complexity of 2^52 operations (the previous fastest known SHA-1 collision attack had required 2^63 operations). This is a significant improvement in finding SHA-1 collisions.’ ‘the attacks affect collision resistance, not pre-image or second pre-image resistance. […] the researchers are able to generate two unique messages that hash to the same digest value.’
(tags: sha-1 security collisions collision-resistance hashing complexity attacks danger)How I Hacked Hacker News : crappy pRNG seeding; used the same source “random” stream for both security-sensitive purposes (login cookies) and non-sensitive user-visible data (in HTML page source); and no HMAC usage at all. oh dear. good example of how not to do it
(tags: prng random cookies lisp arc ycombinator hackernews dfranke security exploits)NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream : log-structured fs; instant “free” checkpoint snapshots, fast crash recovery, superfast benchmarks, in upcoming Linux kernels. sounds awesome (via JZawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny linux storage ssd filesystems backups snapshots crash-recovery fsck checkpointing nilfs)more on Google Wave and spam : ‘Lars Rasmussen responded that [the spam problem] hasn’t been given much thought yet [jm: !!!], since it is a closed developer’s preview for now, but also mentioned that most likely Wave would use a whitelist option, where you’d have to add a friend/coworker before they could send/invite you to Waves.’ ie, the IM style
(tags: im email messaging google wave anti-spam spam chat)Google Wave spam discussion : looks like the plan is for third parties to provide anti-spam services/bots to despam your Wave inbox, plus a little economic handwaving
(tags: google wave messaging wikis anti-spam spam email)
Well, that was a really scary few days.
On Monday, the lovely C was nearly 2 weeks overdue, and was scheduled to come into the Rotunda for induction the next morning; then contractions started on Monday afternoon. We were happy, as avoiding induction was good news for a natural birth, allowing the process to be run through the excellent Domino scheme, etc.
So we went in, arriving at the Rotunda ER for 3.45 or so. They put on the CTG to monitor the baby’s heartbeats, and the first 3 contractions were strong, but everything seemed OK. The next one, however, the baby’s heart rate dropped dramatically — to a very low 40bpm; I called the ER nurses, they ran in, put C on oxygen, and that seemed to help, returning the rate to normal — but on the next contraction the baby’s heart rate dropped even further. Once that happened, the shit hit the fan. In seconds C was on a trolley heading for surgery. It was clear this was serious trouble.
I was left standing outside the theatre while she was operated on — as an emergency Caesarean section there was no time for luxuries like hapless husbands stumbling around the background. Probably just as well. The midwives and surgical staff kept me as well informed as was possible, though.
After a terrifying 10 minutes, the prognosis improved a little. Initially they were worried that the baby had put pressure on the cord, but this was discounted — in fact the baby had emptied its bowels of meconium in the womb, which irritated it enough to cause enough distress and cause its heart rate to crash. After 10 minutes, the baby was out (and was a girl!), and C was going to be OK at least. however the baby was at quite a lot of risk from aspiration of meconium and possible brain damage due to reduced oxygen in the womb. holy shit. :(
The baby had indeed aspirated some meconium, causing a collapsed lung. Over the next couple of days in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, the little mite had surgery to introduce a chest tube into her pleura to re-inflate the lung, and was treated with a variety of treatments to deal with meconium in her stomach.
The best bit was this afternoon when we got news that the results of her cranial ultrasound were in — all clear, no brain damage. Then C got to feed her and hold her — and she latched on like some kind of milk-seeking missile. what a little trooper.
Anyway, with any luck, 2 or 3 days from now they’ll both be able to come home in one piece.
We were lucky btw — if we hadn’t been in the ER at the time, it was very unlikely that the prognosis would have been anywhere near as good. And I have to give credit to the Rotunda staff, they did a great job.
Update, 7 June: C was released from hospital yesterday, and Mae got the all-clear this morning. We’re now all back home, healthy and in one piece. Now we can just get on with the usual second-child excitement-slash-drama! phew!