Month: August 2009

Playhouse running on Liberty Hall last night : wow, looks absolutely excellent! nice work (via Mulley)
(tags: playhouse cool art installations blinkenlights liberty-hall dublin)

Pinboard can now mirror a delicious account : yay! Let’s see if this shows up at http://pinboard.in/u:jm ;)
(tags: pinboard delicious bookmarks del.icio.us web)

SD, a distributed bug tracker : now available. sadly, no support for Bugzilla, which is what we use in SpamAssassin (srsly), so I won’t be trying it out just yet, but still — cool
(tags: bugs bug-tracking trac prophet distributed coding tools web sd)

Simpleton’s guide to git : it really is. Yet another one-page intro to git, but a good one
(tags: git tips via:joshua scm tools vc)

Pirate Bay latest: big music labels to issue injunction against Chorus NTL : UPC: “bring it on”, essentially
(tags: ntl chorus isps ireland pirate-bay piracy filesharing upc)

In Which She’s Every Woman : what it’s like to have your photo used for stock images
(tags: stock-photos yvonne-georgina-puig photos pictures licensing ads)

Hacking a Google Interview : course notes from a 4-day MIT course on tech interviewing (via Hacker News)
(tags: interviews google hiring puzzles mit questions coding computer-science algorithms)

Hijack: Get A Live IRB Prompt For Any Existing Ruby Process : injects via gdb. pretty cool, if it works; one comment notes that they couldn’t use it on a Rails app
(tags: gdb hijack ruby debugging irb live coding rubygems debugger)

8-bit trip : flipping amazing stop-motion LEGO animation paying homage to classic C=64 and NES gaming, featuring International Karate, Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, and Pac-Man from swedish duo Rymdreglage (via Conor)
(tags: wow 8-bit animation stop-motion video youtube rymdreglage c=64 nes international-karate pac-man pong tetris mario-rosenstock)

10 best Irish Camping Sites : including one place that includes an open farm. result
(tags: via:THRILLHO camping ireland holidays vacation farms)

codepad.org : ‘an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool. It’s a pastebin that executes code for you. You paste your code, and codepad runs it and gives you a short URL you can use to share it.’ supports C, C++, D, Haskell, Lua, OCaml, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and Tcl code; isolated by a geordi-based supervisor, in turn running inside a firewalled virt, in turn running inside a firewalled dom0. nice work!
(tags: codepad vm jails infrastructure security via:waxy c languages programming sandbox pastebin)

Hourly forecast for Dublin (Ireland) – yr.no : another weather forecasting service which may be more reliable than Met Eireann, this time from yr.no, the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. if only Met Eireann spent our taxes on something of this quality (via Stephen Mulcahy)
(tags: via:smulcahy norway met-eireann ireland weather rain dublin yr.no taxes)

Thunderbird “open in external editor” add-on : Seems to work nicely. Not quite as cleanly integrated as It’s All Text! for Firefox, but getting there
(tags: thunderbird editing vim emacs gvim its-all-text mail text extensions add-ons plugins)

Socializing the Weather : so Met Eireann’s crappy weather forecasts are actually just what they give out “for free”; if you pay extra, they have more accurate forecasts. what a scam for a govt department! Handily though, they are mandated by law to give out decent forecasts to pilots — which are available online
(tags: eidw taf terminal-area-forecasts aviation flying pilots met-eireann weather forecasts government)

bank-trojan fraudsters use Twitter to control botnet : next in a long line of one-to-many communication systems used by bad guys
(tags: twitter botnet security upd4t3 banking fraud)

Dublin Bikes : the new rental-bike system for Dublin from JC Decaux and Dublin City Council. woeful coverage, and eye-wateringly expensive; don’t keep a bike out overnight or it’ll cost you EUR30!!
(tags: dublin bikes dbs rental cycling ireland jc-decaux rip-off)

iPhone Sudoku Grab: How does it all work? : lovely run-through of the computer-vision algorithms this iPhone app uses (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy ai image programming algorithms graphics iphone ocr computervision opencv sudoku)

The Irish Economy blog : features mainly posts from NAMA-sceptic economist Karl Whelan
(tags: economy karl-whelan ireland nama politics property banking)

UCD Economist Karl Whelan pours cold water on the Irish Government’s NAMA plans : ‘What we now know is that the banks have been actively working to keep development properties off the market, so that their true values are kept out of the public domain. However, to work through our current problems, these property assets are going to have to be dealt with – either sold at a reasonable price or else demolished or returned to agricultural usage.’ oh dear
(tags: nama ireland economy banking property liam-carroll zoe accbank karl-whelan)

Irish College of General Practitioners’ advice on H1N1 : promises to be frequently updated if/when anything might happen. certainly better advice for Irish sufferers than the useless PR spooge put out by the HSE — as usual
(tags: ireland hse icgp medical h1n1 flu disease pandemic)

Stephen Hawking Has Not Yet Been Murdered by the NHS : hilarious response to mind-boggling US healthcare talking-point derpitude: ‘People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.’ fantastic
(tags: politics humour healthcare via:bwalsh stephen-hawking us-politics derp morons funny nhs uk)

Next Generation Java Programming Style : a Reddit-friendly 8-point list of new idioms for Java code in a more functional style. not sure about a couple of these, but another couple get my +1
(tags: erlang via:janl coding java oop style fluent-interfaces final encapsulation)

Gadget-supported Gmail (ad-less & wide) : nice GMail userscript to remove the ads
(tags: gmail userscripts greasemonkey chrome script ads)

BBC News on Colin Powell dancing to Yahoozee : The Beeb definitely takes it too far with this one; the song isn’t clearly about 419 at all
(tags: yahoozee yahoo bbc hip-hop spam colin-powell 419 nigeria)

Some Say Hip-Hop Song ‘Yahoozee’ Is About Nigeria’s Cyberscam Industry : the Washington Post on the Yahoozee thing
(tags: yahoo yahoozee nigeria spam fraud 419 scams)

background on Yahoozee : bit of controversy about Colin Powell dancing (!) to a song that promotes the “Yahoo boys”, 419 scammers — but it doesn’t sound like that’s the case, going by this post
(tags: 419 scams fraud spam nigeria colin-powell yahoo yahoozee)

Anti Spear-phishing SpamAssassin ruleset : from Julian “MailScanner” Field (via the SA users list)
(tags: spamassassin anti-spam rulesets sa-update phishing blocklists)

Internet access is Britons’ top priority : ‘Britons will choose to cut back on almost anything other than food before economising on electronic communications services. Crucially, we will even cut spending on their mobile phone and TV package before foregoing Internet access’
(tags: internet broadband uk ofcom research recession cutbacks spending consumer mobile tv linx)

Blinkenlights comes to Liberty Hall : ‘We will turn Dublin’s tallest building into a giant public canvas—and we want you to play with it. Our simple tools allow you to animate your thoughts and broadcast them on the city skyline.’ open from Aug 24 until Sep 24
(tags: dublin ireland playhouse blinkenlights art via:pbenson architecture)

Premature Flexibilization Is The Root of Whatever Evil Is Left : great blog post on the YAGNI principle. +1
(tags: yagni coding software development premature-flexibilization)

Boards.ie thread about iPhone 3GS shortages : YA set of “I got mine after queueing from 7.30am” posts. wtf Apple, this is a shambles
(tags: apple stock-control shipping ireland o2 boards just-in-time delivery retail not-very-good-at-this)

A short history of btrfs [LWN.net] : wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status
(tags: btrfs history zfs linux open-source licensing storage sysadmin b-trees b+trees algorithms fs filesystems)

Security Fix – Clampi Trojan: The Rise of Matryoshka Malware : ‘[Joe] Stewart said the sophistication and stealth of this malware strain has become so bad that it’s time for Windows users to start thinking of doing their banking and other sensitive transactions on a dedicated system that is not used for everyday Web surfing.’ it’s that bad
(tags: joe-stewart secureworks malware reverse-engineering clampi trojans banking security danger risks windows microsoft fraud)