Amazon.com: Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player : $99, 10-watt, fanless device to stream HD1080p video, in pretty much any format, from a network server to your TV. crazy. quite competitive with the Acer Aspire Revo; downside: less open
(tags: tv wd wd-tv-live hdtv hd video set-top-box home)WebM : open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I’d guess
(tags: codec foss google open-source patents audio video vp8 webm standards mozilla open web)How Etsy deploy their site : pretty basic
(tags: etsy infrastructure ops sysadmin continuousintegration deployinator deployment)
Month: May 2010
GitHub scheduled maintainance due to Redis upgrade : good comments on the processes useful for large-scale Redis upgrades
(tags: upgrades redis spof nosql databases github deployment)Mea Culpa : ‘Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.’ Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt
(tags: via:janl coding programming software philosophy languages lisp elitism)Ca’n Quiros, Soller, Spain : many atrocious TripAdvisor reviews of this kip which ripped us off heavily last week. looking forward to adding my $.02. roll on data roaming limits so I can check TA via 3G before we sit down ;)
(tags: restaurants food soller spain rip-offs scams dodgy tripadvisor)
iPhone 3GS GPS suddenly stops working? here’s the fix : via a forum on MacRumors — blow away the locationd cache. Worked perfectly for me after my GPS crapped out halfway through my holidays :( Requires that the phone be jailbroken first
(tags: iphone gps software 3gs reliability bugs macrumors jailbreaking locationd)
SoundCloud Developers Manifesto : ‘We recognize that only through your apps and hacks, can SoundCloud fully realize its potential as the audio platform.’
(tags: apps hacks soundcloud mp3 music hosting files json rest oauth apis http)Good volcanic-ash links : European air traffic control Twitter feed and NOC site, via Boards.ie. The thread itself is a good reference, too
(tags: volcano ash vaac twitter boards.ie threads travel air holidays)2-day volcanic ash forecasts over Europe : using SNAP, the Norwegian Meterological Institute’s nuclear-fallout modelling system. Very useful, much niftier than the UK version, and much more *publicly available* than the Irish version
(tags: europe volcano norway yr.no met.no weather ash snap modelling forecasts)
The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City « Viceland Games : interview with the guy behind the “Magnasanti” video. [Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi] ‘presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar – depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society – with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.’ WHOA
(tags: whoa mental architecture culture gaming society video simcity urban vice)
New programming jargon you coined? – Stack Overflow : some nice coding neologisms here. aside from “Refuctoring” (see other link), I like “The Duck” (a sacrificial feature, used to distract cut-crazy bosses from useful features) and “Stringly Typed” (an implementation that needlessly relies on strings when programmer and refactor friendly options are available)
(tags: coding funny slang neologisms jargon stack-overflow the-duck stringly-typed)Refuctoring : ‘the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself’ (via Mozai)
(tags: funny refuctoring via:Mozai coding tests tdd programming software)
UK Met Office: Volcanic Ash Cloud Maps : updated 4 times daily, maps of Europe indicating coverage of the ash cloud. I’m going to be F5’ing this constantly over the next week as I’m supposed to be flying on Sunday :(
(tags: airports hazards iceland travel maps weather volcanic-ash ash forecast europe met-office holidays ash-cloud)
The result of the IMRO & music blogger meeting | Nialler9 Music Blog : upshot: IMRO will think about it and get back to Nialler et al; in the meantime, everyone operates as before. one to keep an eye on, even if you’re not Irish; this will play out overseas soon too. Good call getting Simon McGarr along
(tags: music mp3 shakedown imro nialler9 ip)EU must break down national copyright barriers, says EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes : “There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material. The problem is that it’s illegal […] We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed.” “While the internet is borderless, Europe’s online markets are not. It is often easier to buy something from a US website than online from the country next-door in Europe. Often you cannot buy it at all within Europe.”
(tags: copyright piracy neelie-kroes quotes eu ec music ip)Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites : ‘Falling victim to a [phish] isn’t just a matter of not being wise to the ways of the world: it’s a matter of being caught out in a moment of distraction and of unlikely circumstance.’ +1, that matches with the personal phishing stories I’ve heard from others
(tags: phishing cory-doctorow security anti-phishing scams distraction twitter)
Dutch forum thread on splitting analog signals from a UPC Thomson DCI-6221 DVR : I’m trying to figure out how I can rebuild a MythTV box with new UPC equipment. this claims that you can split the cable before it enters the Cisco cablemodem, and get analog TV off the basic cable that way. hmm
(tags: analog tv upc mythtv dci6221 mediabox cable-tv)the world’s largest DVR : SnapStream’s 100TB rack which records 50 analog TV channels simultaneously
(tags: snapstream video tv storage hardware analog television)Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks — PNAS : ‘we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (E. coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. … both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. … These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.’ (via adulau)
(tags: via:adulau papers toread genetics genome call-graph linux kernel e-coli operating-systems transcriptional-regulatory-network)
A fast, fuzzy, full-text index using Redis : quite easy, using a Metaphone sound-like indexing scheme to provide the fuzz
(tags: metaphone sounds-like indexing python redis search full-text fuzzy)Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit : yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less
(tags: ip law legal novell linux open-source patents redhat swpats uspto acacia-technologies)article on the IMRO-vs-blogs LOEL spat : by an ex-Hot-Press staffer. interesting: Hot Press ‘also publish MQ, the IMRO members’ periodical.’ well, that would explain a lot
(tags: hot-press ireland music mp3 loel imro shakedown)Indie music mogul: The net’s great for us : Martin Mills of Beggar’s Banquet. thought-provoking interview, and he nails it on this: “People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You’ve got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You’ll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links.” That EXACTLY described my situation a few years back
(tags: martin-mills beggars-banquet music record-labels xl mp3 filesharing)
Facebook | Save Irish Music Blogs From IMRO! : join this group to add your voice
(tags: facebook imro shakedown blogs ireland music mp3)the torture garden: On Hot Press and My Place In The Real Economy : it seems Hot Press have come up with some Paul-McGuinness-esque pro-IMRO one-sided turdery masquerading as journalism. shock me
(tags: imro shakedown hot-press tat journalism ireland dublin)Two bands pull out of IMRO show in blog protest : fair play to The Cast Of Cheers and Mia Sparrow, cancelling their show in response to IMRO’s actions
(tags: imro shakedown bands music ireland the-cast-of-cheers the-richter-collective)Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA : incredible. Almost every single modern camera capable of recording video now requires that you obtain a license from MPEG-LA to use recorded footage for commercial purposes. These clauses are currently not enforced, but could be. Horrifying (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf patents mpeg2 codec compression consumer-rights copyright legal law mpeg h264 mpegla codecs)