Programmer Competency Matrix : actually quite a good breakdown of software eng skill progression
(tags: software coding programming management hiring engineering matrix skills)filemap : ‘File-based, rather than tuple-based processing’; based around UNIX command-line toolset; good UNIXish UI; lots of caching of intermediate results; low setup overhead — although it does require a shared POSIX filesystem, e.g. NFS, for synchronization
(tags: networking python opensource grid map-reduce filemap files unix command-line parallel distcomp)Negatendo: Let’s Buy Delicious Back from Yahoo! : wow. can we (and by “we” I mean “the people in my del network”) not just move en masse to Pinboard? ;)
(tags: pinboard delicious community social sns bookmarks links linkblogs yahoo del.icio.us)nifty spam-related Threadless tee : “Life would be easier if you could mark people as spam”
(tags: spam twitter clothing threadless tee-shirts apparel slogans)
Month: July 2009
GUI Icon Sets for Web Designers : lots of commercial and open-source-friendly-licensed icon sets, including the old reliable FamFamFam and Pinvoke icons
(tags: gui icons ui web graphics creative-commons via:nelson)Upgrade Xbox 360 hard drive : how to upgrade from 20GB to 120GB. this looks frankly terrifying (via Rod)
(tags: via:rod upgrades xbox360 gaming hardware xbox mod hacks voids-warranty)
o2.ie’s iPhone stock levels : massive shortages of iPhones in Ireland; this forum thread is apparently the most reliable way to determine if you’ll be able to get your hands on one (via Keith)
(tags: via:keith-brady phones iphone apple o2 ireland shortages drought forums)
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real : good wrap-up from Anil Dash on “the new push”
(tags: http-push http feeds atom ping standards messaging pubsubhubbub pubsub async comet realtime web)Consumer Issues forum on boards.ie : lots of stuff about one of Boards’ best topics, handily arranged by company (via Eoin)
(tags: boards.ie consumer-rights consumer buying shopping an-post delivery law ireland)
Irish law regarding unsolicited SMS messages : what is the law, and how to make a complaint against an Irish company, via Donncha
(tags: via:donncha law ireland sms texting spam unsolicited bulk texts)Logitech Formula Force EX Driving Wheel And Pedals : good and cheap; good reviews; supported by Linux HID force-feedback joystick library; EUR58 at Play.com
(tags: linux hardware ui games racing controllers steering-wheel pc pedals)Joysticks, force feedback and racing games working under Linux : an alternative way to get pedal controls working; use a racing-game steering-wheel controller, instead, since they’re cheaper
(tags: linux hardware ui games racing controllers steering-wheel pc pedals)Gmail now intercepting “mark as spam” and interpreting it using the List-Unsubscribe header : good call. but as one commenter notes: why isn’t there an “unsubscribe from this list” button in the normal UI? now if I want to use this as a quick-unsub mechanism for mail I know is ham, I’m _forced_ to use “mark as spam” to get this shortcut, which doesn’t make much sense
(tags: via:aliverson gmail google spam filtering ui mail mailing-lists unsubscribe)Spinvox in trouble after BBC investigation : ‘A UK firm that turns mobile messages into text faces questions over its privacy standards, technology and finances following a BBC investigation’ .. ‘claims to the BBC suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines.’ ‘The fact that messages appear to have been read by workers outside of the European Union raises questions about the firm’s data protection policy.’
(tags: data-protection privacy facebook bbc technology mobile transcription spinvox security south-africa offshoring)
Public SSL Server Database : ‘an online service that enables you to look up the configuration of any public SSL web server. The configuration of known public SSL web servers will be periodically inspected and the results recorded. This service relies on the SSL Server Rating guide for the assessment’
(tags: ssl grades security tls https servers sysadmin ssl-labs)‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, but two bugs do’ : a story of how a bug in Apollo 11’s Lunar Module control software, intended to work around a deficiency of the engine hardware, barely avoided mission-endangering results
(tags: apollo-program bugs software coding engines hardware don-eyles allan-klumpp interfaces specifications)X-keys Foot Pedal : recommended by JB. 3 switches, USB, $120. Linux support seems tricky; requires running Windows apps to reprogram the pedal’s firmware. ugh
(tags: x-keys hardware shopping wishlist usb keyboard foot pedals ergonomic)Sony FS-85USB foot pedal : comes with dictation transcription software and headphones, USB, UKP93.15. there’s a blog post indicating that it’s Linux-compatible, emulating a generic USB keyboard
(tags: hardware shopping wishlist usb keyboard foot pedals ergonomic)Foot pedal: Savant Elite dual action : from Kinesis Ergo, claims to do mouse or keyboard actions, $129, USB. Linux support unclear
(tags: hardware shopping wishlist usb keyboard foot pedals ergonomic)Thinkism : great Singularity contemplation from Kevin Kelly: ‘to be useful, artificial intelligences have to be embodied in the world, and that world will often set their pace of innovations. Thinkism is not enough. Without conducting experiments, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results. It cannot think its way to solving the world’s problems. There won’t be instant discoveries the minute, hour, day or year a smarter-than-human AI appears. The rate of discovery will hopefully be significantly accelerated. Even better, a super AI will ask questions no human would ask. But, to take one example, it will require many generations of experiments on living organisms, not even to mention humans, before such a difficult achievement as immortality is gained.’
(tags: ai singularity ray-kurzweil kevin-kelly science progress technology future philosophy intelligence knowledge thinkism)UK company selling “have you been phished” check using stolen data : according to this, a retired cop has set up a company called Lucid Intelligence with ‘the records of four million Britons, and 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans’, and plans to ‘charge members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached.’ How is this legal under Data Protection law? wtf
(tags: privacy uk law hacking phishing fraud crime police database identity-theft lucid-intelligence data-protection security colin-holder)
Yelp.ie now open : hooray, a decent review site for Dublin at last
(tags: yelp ireland i18n dublin reviews restaurants food pubs)Infrastructures.Org: Best Practices in Automated Systems Administration and Infrastructure Architecture: Gold Server : well-written, and it’s good to see version control listed right at the top of the list. But quite dead; interesting for historical reasons only at this stage
(tags: via:fanf deployment sysadmin unix rsync ssh cvs infrastructure cfengine)glTail.rb – realtime logfile visualization : ‘View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way’, supporting postfix/spamd/clamd logs among loads of others. very cool if a little silly
(tags: dataviz visualization tail gltail opengl linux apache spamd spamassassin logs statistics sysadmin analytics animation analysis server ruby monitoring logging logfiles)Launchpad is now open source : Canonical _finally_ open source (under the AGPL) their bug tracker/project hosting platform. yay! here’s hoping it’s reasonably easy to deploy. maybe it would be viable for the ASF… hmm
(tags: canonical launchpad open-source apache hosting projects ubuntu agpl)
Alex Payne writing about “Fever”, a new link-blog aggregator app:
Fever’s proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs.
Fever is commercial software, costing $30. Alternatively, I’ve been doing something very similar for the past few years using SpicyLinks, which is free (if a great deal less pretty on the UI end).
It’s nice to see the idea getting some polish, though. ;)
Alex does raise an interesting point towards the end:
Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I’d love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs — and, indeed, linking outside one’s own site — just aren’t as prevalent in those communities.
True.
How much did shutting down McColo help? : turns out most of the McColo-based spammers were sending easy-to-block output
(tags: mccolo spam anti-spam filtering mail smtp richard-clayton ceas)OghamBrew : ‘founded in late 2007 by a small group of individuals with a common interest in brewing, but, whose experience extended to tasting only. Word of the idea spread rapidly, and such was the interest that by December of that year eight brewing teams had been formed.’ next meetup is 15th Aug 2009
(tags: oghambrew homebrew beer hobbies festivals via:alan)OrbixWeb V3.1 release notes : wow, software archaeology. looks like the 3.1 release (which I worked on) still has its HTML release docs online
(tags: orbix orbixweb history java 1998)
Spam tool developer faces six years in chokey • The Register : ‘Between January 2004 until September 2005, [Ralsky accomplice David S] Patton developed and marketing his illegal bulk mailing tools via a firm called Lightspeed Marketing. Nexus was designed to falsify the headers of spam messages while Proxy Scanner was designed to channel junk mail through compromised zombie proxies, typically PCs in either homes or businesses infected with [trojans].’
(tags: spam alan-ralsky david-s-patton david-patton ratware nexus proxy-scanner fbi prosecutions lightspeed-marketing botnets proxies pump-and-dump stock-spam)Vague Scientist : “The Magazine For People Who Try To Have Conversations About Science News”. oh god, this is my life
(tags: vague science funny parody new-scientist comics via:bruce-sterling cartoon journalism)CompuServe “Logans Run”-Inspired Ad : “Someday, in the comfort of your home, you’ll be able to shop and bank electronically, read instantly updated newswires, analyze the performance of a stock that interests you, send electronic mail across the country, then play Bridge with three strangers in LA, Chicago and Dallas.” just not with CI$. oops
(tags: compuserve cis history antiques future jumpsuits logans-run scifi)
Last few remaining C=64 DTV PAL units available : ‘The last few C64DTV PAL units are available for sale at £100 GBP Plus shipping. There are no more units available anywhere in the world as production ceased in 2005 and due to complicated licensing issues, it’s unlikey that the unit will ever re-enter production.’
(tags: c64 commodore-64 dtv games history jeri-ellsworth c-one hardware retrogaming)Aslan claim of 25,000 illegal downloads is false : apparently the bassist went online, googled their new covers album, and totted up all the counts of search results — including the fake ones from scam/ad sites
(tags: aslan fail figures irma music-industry mp3 music google scams funny inept)
I woke up this morning to hear speculation on RTE Radio as to how Eircom’s DDOS woes were possibly being caused by the Russian mob, of all things. This absurd speculation is not helped by lines in statements like this:
‘The company blamed the problems on “an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic” directed at its website, which affected the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for its customers.’
I’m speculating, too, but it seems a lot more likely to me that this isn’t just a DDOS, and someone — possibly just a lone Irish teenager — is running an attempted DNS cache-poisoning attack. Here’s why.
Last week, there were two features of the attack in reports: DDOS levels of traffic and incorrect pages coming up for some popular websites. To operate a Kaminsky DNS cache-poisoning attack requires buckets of packets — easily perceivable as DDOS levels. This level of traffic would be the first noticeable symptom on Eircom’s network management consoles, so it’d be easy to jump to the conclusion that a simple DDOS attack was the root cause.
This week, there’s just the DDOS levels of traffic. No cache poisoning effects have been reported. This would be consistent with Eircom’s engineers getting the finger out over the weekend, and upgrading the NSes to a non-vulnerable version. ;)
Once the attacker(s) realise this, they’ll probably stop the attack.
It’s not even a good attack for a bad guy to make, by the way. Given the timing, right after major press about a North Korean DDOS on US servers. it’s extremely high-profile, and made the news in several national newspapers (albeit in rather inept fashion). If someone wanted to make money from an attack, a massive-scale packet flood indistinguishable from a DDOS against the nation’s largest ISP is not exactly a subtle way to do it.
In the meantime, apparently OpenDNS have really seen the effects, with mass switchover of Eircom’s customers to the OpenDNS resolvers. Probably just as well…
German electronic health card test fails due to over-paranoid root CA hardware : ‘Matthias Merx, the firm’s managing director, told heise online that following a voltage drop, something happened in D-Trust’s “Trustcenter” that does occasionally occur. “The [hardware security module] independently deleted the data [including the root CA private key] because it suspected an attack.”‘
(tags: security oops health smartcards pki certificates ca heise germany tests d-trust gematik coprocessors)Why I (A/L)GPL : Zed Shaw on OSS licensing and today’s software industry: ‘I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Good. Because I have a solution to that too.’
(tags: software copyright licensing opensource bsd gpl gnu zed-shaw)
Cache-Oblivious Algorithms : whoa, nifty. ‘Retrieving items from various levels of memory and cache make up a dominant factor of running time, so for speed it is crucial to minimize these costs. The main idea of cache-oblivious algorithms is to achieve optimal use of caches on all levels of a memory hierarchy without knowledge of their size.’
(tags: cache-oblivious algorithms coding mit cache caching l2 memory lectures towatch)
Draw things from reCAPTCHA text! – The Something Awful Forums : brilliant (via Waxy)
(tags: funny recaptcha captchas art sketches somethingawful)The Associated Press: Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears : as predicted: ‘Zipping past Fisherman’s Wharf, Chris Paget’s scanner downloaded to his laptop the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians’ electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he’d “skimmed” four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.’
(tags: chris-paget rfid privacy scanning travel)
Found here:
On Wednesday 20 May 2009, speaking at a parliamentary Justice Committee debating his new blasphemy law, Dermot Ahern joked that people were making blasphemous comments about him, and he compared his own purity to that of the baby Jesus.
So we have a Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary Justice Committee discussing his own blasphemy law, that could make his own jokes illegal.
In honour of this Ministerial revelation, we have founded the Church of Dermotology. We believe God sent Dermot Ahern to save Ireland from rational thinking. Our sacred symbol is the Star of Dermot.
Our sacred beliefs are quite similar to those of other religions.
- We believe ice cream wafers are literally the body of Dermot Ahern.
- We believe Dermot Ahern created the universe on Wed 20 may 2009.
- We’re sometimes not sure whether Dermot Ahern really exists.
- We believe it is blasphemous to publish an image of Dermot Ahern.
- We refuse to gather sticks on the Sabbath, which is Wednesday.
- We wear magic underpants that protect us from fire and bullets.
- We are outraged whenever anybody insults our sacred beliefs.
- We fervently support Dermot Ahern’s proposed blasphemy law.
- If it is passed, we will be regularly outraged, and will take test cases.
Like Scientologists, Dermotologists offer a free personality test. Question one: are you vulnerable? Question two: have you money? If you answer yes to either of these questions, you’re in.
After you join, check out the campaign against the Irish blasphemy law at blasphemy.ie.
A while back a friend of mine mailed us all with this classic of overweening health-and-safety bureaucrats gone wild:
The company are now installing wallpaper on our PCs with their 5 golden safety rules:
Always hold the handrail
Always reverse park
Assess Risks
Accept Challenges
Wear PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] gear
We also have to drink from metal cups with plastic lids on them.
The thing that really got me was #2 — ‘always reverse park’. Apparently, someone decided that reversing into the parking space was safer than going in head-first, and to such a significant degree that it was worth mandating it across a medium-sized company. On the other hand, another friend noted:
The college i went to [in the US] would ticket you if you backed into a parking space — they said it was a “fire hazard”.
so we’ve got “fire hazard” in one direction and “unsafe” in the other. Parse that.
Another friend was told that she couldn’t bring her folding bike in the lift because “what would happen if the president was in the lift going to the board room?”. She says “I could not work out the health and safety implications.”
What health and safety insanity have you encountered recently?
Will the Greens pay YOUR €25,000 Blasphemy fine? : good point from Jason O’Mahoney. ‘let’s pass this law anyway, but instead of a €25,000 fine, make it a €25 fine. The constitution is satisfied, and the fine is so nominal as to be useless, which is what the Greens say is the effective outcome of the law anyway.’ +1
(tags: greens ireland politics blasphemy law constitution absurd omgwtf)Information regarding 2 July 2009 outage – Google App Engine : extremely detailed postmortem of the recent GFS outage — a poorly-written MapReduce client issued repeated “query of death” messages, causing server-side stack overflows
(tags: postmortem gfs appengine mapreduce google gae downtime operations communication failure bugs)Count Me Out : ‘Count Me Out is a campaign seeking to lessen the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland. Our primary focus is to reduce the number of “members” of the church by encouraging people to formally defect.”
(tags: countmeout religion ireland catholicism ryan-report politics schools)
Eircom blames DNS outage on ‘irregular’ traffic volumes : a better quote than the IT article. “This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers.” Hmm. an irregular volume caused by a DNS cache poisoning attack, maybe? (via Chris)
(tags: via:chris security dns eircom hacks)Dublin’s long-awaited wheel deal on track for September roll-out – The Irish Times : ‘There is an undisguised and frank expression of relief in Michael Sands’s voice when asked what Dublin City Council will do in the event of theft or damage to the city’s 450 bikes. “JC Decaux is responsible for that. Our deal with them is that the city must have 450 bikes fit for use at all times.” We’ll see over time who got the better half of the deal.’
(tags: jc-decaux dublin bikes cycling commute dublinbikes rental)Suspected hacker attack on Eircom internet service – The Irish Times : the _only_ press coverage so far of Eircom’s DNS subversion. ‘The company blamed the problems on “an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic” directed at its website, which affected the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for its customers.’ uh, how does that wind up redirecting popular sites to porn ads exactly?
(tags: eircom ads exploits hacking dns isps press rte irish-times)
Hey Gravatar. When you auto-generate an avatar image, like you did with the one to right, could you do me a favour and omit the bits that look like swastikas? kthxbai!
Groovy creator on Scala : so that’s James Gosling, JRuby’s Charles Nutter and Groovy’s James Strachan all giving Scala big thumbs up. really have to learn this language
(tags: scala jvm languages coding groovy programming)
User Scripts ?(Chromium Developer Documentation)? : must try this out and see if it’s usable in Chromium on Linux yet
(tags: greasemonkey userscripts chromium todo google javascript chrome)Possible DNS Hack at Ireland’s Largest ISP – Legit links redirected to ads : ‘Rik Ferguson, solutions architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, also reported about the issues. “So far there are very few details on the nature of the problem over at Eircom, but it is certainly clear that many Eircom subscribers are being redirected to bogus websites and rumours abound that Eircom’s DNS has been compromised,” the researcher wrote on his blog. He suggests that affected users switch to using OpenDNS.’
(tags: eircom security dns redirections hacking isps)
Last year, I blogged about Full-Text RSS, a utility to convert those useless “partial-text” RSS/Atom feeds into the real, full-story-inline deal.
The only downside is that the author felt it necessary to withhold the source, saying:
Still, I wouldn’t want to offer a feature that middlemen can resell at the expense of bloggers. So while I do want to open this up, I don’t want to make things easy for the unscrupulous.
However, recently Keyvan Minoukadeh from the Five Filters project got in touch to say:
I recently created a similar service (along with a bookmarklet for it). […] It’s a free software (open source) project so code is also available.
Here it is:
fivefilters.org: Create Full-Text Feeds
I’ve tried it out and it works great, and the source is indeed downloadable under the AGPL.
Five Filters — its overarching project — looks interesting, too:
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky describe the media as businesses which sell a product (readers) to other businesses (advertisers). In their propaganda model of the media they point to five ‘filters’ which determine what we read in the newspapers and see on the television. These filters produce a very narrow view of the world that is in line with government policy and business interests.
In this project we try to encourage readers to explore the world of non-corporate online news, websites which avoid the five filters of the propaganda model. We also try to make these sources of news more accessible by allowing users to print the stories found on these alternative news sites in the format of a newspaper.
Inside Postini’s anti-spam systems : lots of detail
(tags: spam google postini anti-spam)Get Your API Right : 8 key gotchas when implementing RESTful web APIs. great advice
(tags: apis http web rest patterns architecture webdev web-services)
LZO compression : ‘focussed on decompression speed’ … ‘On modern architectures, decompression is very fast; in non-trivial cases able to exceed the speed of a straight memory-to-memory copy due to the reduced memory-reads.’
(tags: lzo compression speed memory lossless)Analyzing Apache logs with Pig : great demo and walkthrough from Cloudera
(tags: hadoop howto pig analytics cloudera apache hdfs mapreduce)
The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later : interesting CACM article updating Gray and Putzolu’s “Five-Minute Rule” for RAM and disks (which postulated that a 1KB record accessed more frequently than once every 5 mins should be stored in RAM, rather than on disk). modern price/performance indicates that this still holds, once 256KB records are used. The article also suggests that a new tier of persistent flash storage should be considered, adding a new set of 5-minute-rule transitions for 2KB records migrating from RAM to flash
(tags: performance disk caching ram flash storage 5-minute-rule jim-gray memory acm)Spice burgers back on the menu due to popular demand – The Irish Times : ‘The humble spice burger, one of Ireland’s few original contributions to world cuisine, has been saved.’ YAY
(tags: spice-burgers ireland cuisine food yum saved chippers phew)
Filtering Companies Can’t Be Sued By Blacklisted Firms, Court Rules : ‘The [Communications Decency Act] treats security software makers the same as internet service providers when they block material they find objectionable, granting them so-called “good Samaritan” immunity from civil lawsuits. Like an ISP, such companies provide an “interactive computer service” because they pull updates from a central server, the San Francisco-based appeals court said.’
(tags: us-law legal blacklists blocklists cda filtering spam zango kaspersky)
UPC’s response to IRMA’s legal summons demanding a “three strikes” system : ‘UPC has made its position clear from the outset — it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided under existing legislation. There is no basis under Irish law requiring ISPs to control, access or block the internet content its users download. In addition, the rights holders’ proposal gives rise to serious concerns for data privacy and consumer contract law.’ go UPC!
(tags: upc isps ireland law legal irma music mp3 downloading piracy three-strikes privacy)Gmail Access Methods and Login URLs : you can access an Atom feed of your inbox via https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ – I had no idea!
(tags: gmail urls api google atom feeds mail mobile url login)
For years now, I’ve been collecting bookmarks at delicious.com/jm — nearly 7000 of them by now. I’ve been scrupulous about tagging and describing each one, so they’re eminently searchable, too. I’ve frequently found this to be a very useful personal reference resource.
I was quite pleased to come across the Delicious Search Results on Google Greasemonkey userscript, accordingly. It intercepts Google searches, adding Delicious tag-search results at the top of the search page, and works pretty well. Unfortunately though, that searches all of delicious, not specifically my own bookmarks.
So here’s a quick hack fix to do just that:
my_delicious_search_results.user.js – My Delicious Search Results on Google
Shows tag-search results from my Delicious account on Google search pages, with links to more extensive Delicious searches. Use ‘User Script Commands‘ -> ‘Set Delicious Username‘ to specify your username.
Screenshot:
Enjoy!