taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook : lots of gory details on FB’s innards via Dare Obasanjo
  (tags: facebook scaling scalability erlang caching architecture multifeed)

• Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap : sweet. HDMI out, MythTV streaming, and silent for $300
  (tags: mythtv hdmi tv diy linux media-center nettop htpc xbmc hardware)

• MullingarHeifer.com : ‘Become a virtual beef farmer. Control your personal food chain.’ also deliver prime beef. mmmm
  (tags: meat beef mullingar heifers cows food eating shopping ireland)

• Ubuntu 9.10 Technical Overview : lots of new features, and a switch of default IM client
  (tags: ubuntu 9.10 linux release-notes releases)

• The Best Way to Cook a Thick Steak : 30 minutes over medium heat, cooked in its own fat. whoa, I want to try this
  (tags: food delicious cooking eating meat recipe steak beef howto recipes)

• MAAWG notes drop in spam levels : ‘MAAWG [..] says that spam and malicious emails dropped to 89 percent in the second quarter from 90.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.’
  (tags: spam anti-spam maawg press-releases isps internet abuse)

• Common Errors Causing DKIM Verification Failures : informative, from Cisco (via BoxOfMeat)
  (tags: dkim errors typos cisco domainkeys via:boxofmeat)

• IAMA person who sends “spam” email for a living : Reddit mass-interview of a spammer. apparently he’s working on IPv6 support
  (tags: reddit spam anti-spam interviews ipv6 iama spammers)

• Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks : massive fail. ‘By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to [...] dump the router’s configuration file [...which] included the administrative login and password in cleartext.’
  (tags: smc8014 doh privacy internet security fail time-warner via:reddit pathetic javascript)

• Cybercrime Organizations Turn to ‘Mafia-Style’ Structure : good research coming out of McAfee — lots of Eastern European, Russian, and ex-USSR-country cybercrime businesses nowadays, apparently
  (tags: spam scams scareware russia eastern-europe ukraine romania credit-cards antivirus mcafee security phishing)

• XZ Utils : 15% smaller than bzip, 30% smaller than gzip, and now shipped with Fedora and Ubuntu. uses LZMA2
  (tags: xz xzdec gzip bzip compression lzma via:wmf unix compress)

• Why I like Redis : Simon Willison plugs Redis as a good datastore for quick-hack scripts with requirements for lots of fast, local data storage — the kind of thing I’d often use a DB_File for
  (tags: python storage databases schemaless nosql redis simon-willison data-store)

• Unicorn at GitHub : new Ruby HTTP server, using a preforked process pool based on select(). Github like it because of failure-recovery problems with Ruby threading bugs in Mongrel. The preforking algo used is extremely rudimentary — the kind of thing we used in SpamAssassin before I implemented Apache-style preforking in 3.0
  (tags: web ruby rails github nginx httpd server mongrel unicorn rubyonrails preforking unix fork select process-pool)

• Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC : another serialization format, binary, no IDL, no code generation, from GitHub
  (tags: github bert erlang ruby rpc protocol thrift serialization networking)

• Jailbreaking the 3GS iPhone with PwnageTool and OS 3.1.2 : a good guide
  (tags: iphone howto jailbreaking pwnagetool 3gs)

• Red Faction Guerilla Tales: Fully Destructible Integrity : Tom Francis gives “Red Faction: Guerilla” a truly massive plug based on its pervasive freeform environment destructability. I’m sold!
  (tags: gaming games xbox360 red-faction red-faction-guerilla to-get want tom-francis)

• pigz : ‘A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines’, by Mark Adler, no less
  (tags: adler pigz gzip compression performance concurrency shell parallel multicore zip software)

• Charlie Brooker interview re Gameswipe : to read, yoz gives it the thumbs up
  (tags: uk games gaming via:yoz interviews charlie-brooker tv gameswipe)

• Track down your stolen laptop – Prey : hmm, a nifty app that takes pics of the desktop, activates the webcam etc. and uploads to a central server if you activate a ‘my laptop has been stolen’ bit
  (tags: prey theft laptop osx linux windows tracking recovery crime lojack)

• DDOS mystery involving Linux and mod_ssl : connections to brutus.apache.org, “GET / HTTP/1.1″, massive HTTPS DDOS. no idea what’s going on
  (tags: apache asf ddos https httpd mod_ssl)

• O2 Ireland blocking sites listed in the UK IWF list : supposedly should only list child porn sites, but sounds like it’s got frequent false positives on file upload/download services nowadays
  (tags: fps o2 blocking ireland contract false-positives iwf uk law)

• YouTube – “charlie brooker’s gameswipe” ibbstersthecrapgamer : all 6 parts of the first episode, via Waxy. will watch this at some future point when I have free time again!
  (tags: towatch youtube bbc gameswipe charlie-brooker comedy)

Regarding Google Wave’s similarity to Lotus Notes, which is a meme I’ve heard from several angles — David Jones hits the nail on the head:

Well, I used Notes from 1994 to 1999. It did have a database backend for e-mail and a rich collaborative editing model. But it didn’t have realtime shared editing, or instant annotation.

And it was shit. No-one in their right minds would have wanted the future of the web to have been Notes. Even though, and I completely agree, it did things that the web is now only just getting round to.

+1 to that!

Tags: collaboration, google, history, lotus, notes, wave, web