taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Charlie’s Diary: The myth of the starship : Charlie Stross’ thoughts on the true viability of interstellar travel. This was about the most thought-provoking bit of ‘Accelerando’ for me alright
  (tags: beans ships travel interstellar space ai downloading)

• Church ‘lied without lying’ – The Irish Times – Thu, Nov 26, 2009 : you have got to be kidding. Father Ted meets the Inquisition
  (tags: church catholicism ireland pathetic child-abuse appalling)

• Meeting Notes 2009 11 24 – Noisebridge : notes curated by Danny O’Brien: ‘I have volunteered to take the meetynge notes in the style of a 17th century essayist.’
  (tags: meetings hilarity 17th-century ye-olde-wiki minutes via:3ze)

• All Android Phones : so many! Saw a Hero last night, it looked pretty swish — although not quite as pretty as the iPhone ;)
  (tags: phones android htc hero os g1 mobile tech shopping)

• explicitly running author tests from a CPAN module : we do something similar in SA
  (tags: perl tests testing)

• Node.js : I’m late to the party, but this sounds lovely
  (tags: javascript server http web comet closures node.js event)

• nginx_http_push_module – Comet For The People : looks great
  (tags: nginx ajax webdev server comet scalability)

• “Source Code Optimisation”, Felix von Leitner, Linux Kongress 2009 [PDF] : Good presentation on C compiler optimization, via Cal Henderson. ‘People often write less readable code because they think it will produce faster code. Unfortunately, in most cases, the code will not be faster.’ I particularly like ‘Fancy-Schmancy Algorithms’: ‘If you have 10-100 elements, use a list, not a red-black tree; Fancy data structures help on paper, but rarely in reality. (More space overhead in the data structure, less L2 cache left for actual data.)’
  (tags: via:iamcal compilers c c++ optimization coding assembly speed for:colmmacc)

• Me and Belle de Jour – ‘Could it be Brooke?’ : LinkMachineGo knew the true identity of Belle du Jour way back when — and set a Google trap to ensnare snooping journos. nice work
  (tags: belle-du-jour google blogging blogs via:waxy privacy googlewhack identity daily-mail journalism)

• JSON Format : ‘your online JSON Formatter’. useful. via JKeyes
  (tags: via:jkeyes json formatting tools useful format debugging)

• Summary of all the MIT Introduction to Algorithms lectures : good reviews and notes from Peteris Krumins
  (tags: algorithms mit programming coding lectures)

• MacRumors iPhone Blog: Undercover 1.5 Adds Push Notification Tool to iPhone Theft Recovery App : very clever. ‘You can make the messages as enticing as you want – say, by having them pretend to be a notification from your bank account. If the crook chooses to view the push notification, Undercover will launch, [..] loading any Website of your choosing, such as the aforementioned bank’s. While the thief is distracted, Undercover will be happy to save the device’s GPS coordinates and IP address to Orbicule’s Website.’
  (tags: iphone theft crime push-notifications undercover)

• Boingo Wireless – AVOID : argh. wish I’d seen this page before I signed up for a month’s access while travelling — they’ve now charged my credit card again, over a week after I requested the account’s cancellation :(
  (tags: boingo avoid customer-service customer-hostile scams wifi travel)

• HTC Hero is on Meteor : according to Fergal, at half of the price of O2’s iPhone “deal”
  (tags: htc hero o2 iphone android phones mobile ireland meteor)

• SSL trick certificate published : ioerror published the ‘\00′ wild-card SSL cert for any domain (for affected SSL client libs at least)
  (tags: ssl tls security nul ioerror bugs exploits)

Irish iPhone users — you may find this useful. I’ve written a web scraper which takes a couple of the more useful pages on Met Eireann’s website — the regional forecast and the rainfall radar page — and reformats them in an iPhone-optimised style. Enjoy:

• iPhone-Optimised Weather Forecast for Ulster
• iPhone-Optimised Weather Forecast for Munster
• iPhone-Optimised Weather Forecast for Leinster
• iPhone-Optimised Weather Forecast for Connacht
• iPhone-Optimised Weather Forecast for Dublin

(updated: supports all the provincial forecasts now)

Tags: iphone, ireland, scraping, weather, web

• Google employees now discouraged from using Python for new projects : ‘You have to balance Python’s strengths with its weaknesses: your engineers may be more productive using Python, but if they have to work around more platform-level performance/scaling limitations as volume increases, do you come out ahead? etc.’
  (tags: google performance scalability python unladen-swallow languages via:preddit)

• Damn Cool Algorithms: Spatial indexing : quadtrees, Hilbert curves, and geohashing, as seen in Google’s new Closure library. useful for multidimensional addressing in general
  (tags: algorithms mapping gis indexing quadtree datastructures spatial geometry)

• Mint Studio Multi-Room Wireless Speaker : $130 speakers; outputs from computer via USB, transmits to wireless receiver, which also has an iPod dock and a line-in. exactly what I’m after! (thanks Jason for the tip)
  (tags: via:jcosper music sound mp3 home wireless speakers)

• IT Law in Ireland: Irish law on hacking tools / dual-use software : specifically, a port of dessid to the iPhone, recently causing headlines
  (tags: dessid eircom hacking dual-use software distribution law ireland tools security)

• Introducing Resque – GitHub : github’s take on a good, distributed queueing system in Ruby
  (tags: ruby github queueing ipc resque)

• SBSettings : good overview of this jailbreak app
  (tags: iphone jailbreak hack software apple sbsettings unlock)

• Why would I want to jailbreak an iPhone 3GS? : Ask MeFi thread, mostly recommending tethering and SBSettings
  (tags: sbsettings jailbreaking askmefi metafilter iphone apple)

• Subversion Submitted to Become a Project at The Apache Software Foundation : woot!
  (tags: svn subversion asf apache open-source incubator)

• Spiritual search turns into a stampede as impatient lose faith in double visionaries – The Irish Times – Mon, Nov 02, 2009 : hilarious article on the BVM-witnessing hysterics in Knock. ‘if you looked hard enough, you could indeed discern a face in the play of light and shadows. When I squinted a certain way, I thought I could make out Bruce Forsyth.’
  (tags: mayo religion hysteria funny bruce-forsyth bvm fortean)

• Structural Regular Expressions : ‘The current UNIX text processing tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line. There is a simple notation that can describe the `shape’ of files when the typical array-of-lines picture is inadequate. That notation is regular expressions. Using regular expressions to describe the structure in addition to the contents of files has interesting applications, and yields elegant methods for dealing with some problems the current tools handle clumsily. When operations using these expressions are composed, the result is reminiscent of shell pipelines.’ Paper by Rob Pike, via adulau. intriguing
  (tags: sregex via:adulau regexp rob-pike regex library text structural parsing)

• sregex – Structural Regular Expressions : ‘The sregex module implements Structural Regular Expressions.’ Python, Apache-licensed
  (tags: sregex python via:adulau regexp robpike regex library text structural parsing)

• The Rise and Fall of the Hobbyist Game Programmer : great article on the 80’s one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)
  (tags: 1980s games history programming nostalgia geek gaming hobbies coding 6502 c=64)