The Duct Tape Programmer – Joel on Software : ‘He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.’
(tags: duct-tape jwz funny joel-spolsky hacking coding overengineering architecture-astronauts)
Month: September 2009
Ag Tweet: Paying Customers : pay EUR3 per month to receive Twitter @replies to your SMS mobile in Ireland — a good niche
(tags: twitter agtweet ireland mobiles sms text revenue)Dubs On Wheels : ‘Where can I find an available DublinBike?’ — another DublinBikes mashup. hopefully JC Decaux won’t C&D this one
(tags: mashups useful web dublin dublinbikes jc-decaux bikes cycling commute)details of the Markdown Javascript-escaping hole : as used to exploit Reddit and create a comment worm
(tags: hacks security reddit javascript md5 escaping html)
Excellent animated treemap dataviz : “How the Giants of Finance Shrank, Then Grew, Under The Financial Crisis”. but the data is less interesting than the excellent dataviz technique used to display it
(tags: data dataviz visualization economy animation nyt infographic infographics treemap design flash banking nytimes bailout)
Nelson Minar plugs a new way to write web apps : Every HTML page is static — the dynamic parts are entirely DOM-injected from server-delivered JSON by client-side Javascript. No dynamic data is delivered in HTML. I’m thinking about this, and it does seem to bring a lot of positives. hmm
(tags: dom javascript json web-apps web nelson-minar ajax)
Please don’t hesitate to contact me – a rant about Powwow Water : brilliant encounter between an inept UK water-cooler supplier, the cluetrain, and the Streisand effect
(tags: funny law streisand-effect legal-threats prfail pr powwow water uk water-coolers blogging ethics fail)
The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s web server : more on the new async HTTP server from FriendFeed/Facebook, in Python. looks lovely
(tags: async http epoll python comet long-poll facebook scaling scalability web friendfeed tornado opensource)Tornado Web Server : ‘an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google’s webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking (epoll) infrastructure.’
(tags: epoll open-source python http scalability facebook scaling web)Embeddable Google Document Viewer : ‘Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don’t have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.’ sweet!
(tags: google google-docs javascript iframe content pdf adobe html web documentation embedding powerpoint ppt viewer embed embedded)Chris de Burgh sees red – The Irish Times – Fri, Sep 11, 2009 : awesome vitriol from the big-in-the-80’s Irish balladeer
(tags: music journalism humour irishtimes funny chris-de-bergh)Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” – UK Prime Minister : woot, nice work jgc!
(tags: jgc apologies uk england justice government computing history wwii codebreaking science turing gay rights apology alan-turing)TechCrunch falls for Facebook fakie : FB add a (working!) “Fax This Photo” feature, only visible to TechCrunch IP ranges — and TC fall for it, pushing an unverified story to live, after waiting only 24 minutes for a verification. nice one FB
(tags: facebook fax dead-media funny pranks punkd techcrunch pr humor)
why “anonymized” data really isn’t : ‘Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: “data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”‘
(tags: security internet politics privacy medicine anonymity datamining anonymous data)
Creative Ireland take on Coir’s “No To Lisbon” posters : photoshop phun galore. “Foreign Toilets: VOTE NO” (via Shane Hegarty)
(tags: via:shanehegarty photoshop lisbon coir funny ireland)Irish alternative to poor FedEx : Brendan plugs Wells Cargo, good international couriers if you’re sending from .ie
(tags: wells-cargo plugs couriers transport shipping ireland)
100 Examples of Japanese Municipal Flags : a lot more awesome than the title would suggest (via TTT)
(tags: via:ttt design japan logos flags graphic-design graphics)Postfix – (almost) a satellite system : how to keep a small number of user accounts (ie. root) delivering locally while the rest are delivered to a smarthost
(tags: postfix sysadmin unix mail mta smtp)
Colm’s “n+1” post reminded me that I’d forgotten to write about this.
On July 27th, I started at Amazon, in a new Dublin-based software dev team working on infrastructure automation. It’s now (just over) a month later, and I’m enjoying it immensely.
Needless to say, this company does some very interesting web-scale technology, and getting to look inside the AWS sausage factory is really enjoyable, believe it or not ;)
(I should also post a pic of my glorious screen real-estate. The hardware is a massive improvement over the previous gig, thankfully.)
Unfortunately, however, this has coincided with a lack of free time to blog and keep up with interweb-based leisure pursuits, including SpamAssassin. Really though, this is more due to looking after two wonderful little girls under 2 years of age, rather than the job — but still, I need to remedy my neglect of this site…
In SpamAssassin news: we’ve been putting out some alpha releases of 3.3.0, and are planning to do a mass-check for score-generation in the next couple of days. Hopefully we can drive 3.3.0 to a GA release in a few weeks.
Also — we’re still looking for more people in the Amazon team, and hiring aggressively. If you’re looking for an interesting software dev role in Dublin, get in touch!
PS: it was Bea’s second birthday last weekend. Check out the awesome Very Hungry Caterpillar cupcake cake made by the missus for the occasion:
Ben Collins-Sussman: The True Path : Ben C-S rejigs the legendary “ed, man! !man ed” net.humor for a new age of DVCSes
(tags: dvcs ed git funny humour zealotry unix)TCD researchers first to find genes unique to humans : go Aoife! “This is the first ever discovery of novel human-specific protein coding genes,” said Dr McLysaght. “They are found in humans and nowhere else.”
(tags: science genetics research biology evolution tcd sfi genome junk-dna)
Hudson Nabaztag Plugin : get a glowing rabbit to semaphore latest C-I build status
(tags: nabaztag hudson gadgets silly hardware c-i builds)CloudSplit – Real Time Cloud Analytics : interesting idea from Joe — track your cloud-hosting spend in real-time
(tags: cloudsplit hosting amazon ec2 azure joe-drumgoole analytics real-time)Why WeakHashMap Sucks : ‘SoftReferences are the cheap, crappy caching mechanism […] perfect for when you’d like your cache to be cleared at random times and in random order.’
(tags: softreferences weakreferences weak references gc java jvm caching hash memory collections vm weakhashmap via:spyced)Cóir Launches No To Lisbon Campaign : Satire site The Emergency on pro-life paramilitary nutter group Coir’s new scaremongering campaign: “A German Will Be In Charge Of The SKY Remote IN YOUR LIVING ROOM!!!! Unless you vote NO!” — a pretty accurate rendition of their posters
(tags: coir politics ireland satire funny the-emergency youth-defence)