Keyboard shortcuts for positioning windows in Mac OS X : from Tony Finch. great stuff, I used to use shortcuts like this all the time on my Linux desktops to avoid rodentage
(tags: mouse keyboard navigation windows shortcuts scripting ui automator)Draft Functional Spec of Hadopi “securisation” software : Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking “workarounds” (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?
(tags: hadopi piracy filtering snooping big-brother 1984 via:adulau vpn tor blocklists)
Month: July 2010
XOR patent killed Commodore-Amiga : ‘Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn’t allow any CD-32’s into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32’s that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end’
(tags: cd32 commodore computers history ip patents software swpats xor amiga)Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O [PDF] : classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
(tags: java async io jvm linux performance scalability threading threads server nio paul-tyma mailinator)autojump : interesting idea; extend “cd” to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to “jump” to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
(tags: autojump cli bash command-line navigation terminal shell directory cd)Mac OS X command-line tricks : not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I’m stuck using the missus’ laptop ;)
(tags: apple bash cli osx mac sysadmin shell tricks command-line)
Schneier on Security: Internet Worm Targets SCADA : ‘Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.’
(tags: wow malware worms passwords security schneier policies defaults)Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution : from last week’s CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
(tags: spam anti-spam ceas conference papers research spamassassin adversarial-classification evolution arms-race via:jd)JotNot for iPhone : another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
(tags: apps document evernote iphone jotnot scanner scan photos dropbox google-docs)DocScanner : document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it’ll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
(tags: android apps evernote iphone mobile ocr pdf document scanner scan)
Computer History Museum: MacPaint and QuickDraw source code : wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
(tags: via:jgc apple code history mac source bill-atkinson macpaint pascal quickdraw graphics)
Technology to track trad : TunePal — “Shazam for trad”. play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it’ll link to the tune’s name, history, discography, and where it’s been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
(tags: trad irish via:klillington music recognition machine-learning)
Brick, A Literary Journal: Issue 85: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock : ‘The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society’: among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
(tags: france paris underground toread ux catacombs marquis writing)NeoRouter : establish an overlay, encrypted private “virtual LAN” for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
(tags: firewall hamachi network openwrt remote router security vpn desktop-sharing neorouter tomato)
How do I do silicone sealant neatly? : so that’s how it’s done. now to retry my DIY botch job
(tags: silicone sealant diy home howto)GNU coreutils sort(1) now uses all available CPUs : using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
(tags: via:pixelbeat sort coreutils gnu multicore parallelism)REPLs suck, I want something block oriented : good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn’t a usable approach for block-oriented languages
(tags: languages repl programming ruby hacking coding block-oriented)
Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail : first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws — for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
(tags: dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet)
xboxdrv : ‘a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.’
(tags: drivers xbox360 controllers remote linux ubuntu xboxdrv joystick input)
Ubuntu One Time Passwords/Single Use Passwords HOWTO : I should do this on my hosts
(tags: ssh server security opie otp skey one-time-passwords ubuntu linux sshd)FlexGet : torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
(tags: bittorrent automation boxee linux python rss torrents tv flexget)
Interpolation search : neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
(tags: algorithms programming search via:jzawodny)Overclocking SSL : techie details from Adam Langley on how Google’s been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
(tags: certificates encryption google https latency speed ssl tcp tls web performance)Cory Doctorow’s working environment : hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
(tags: cory-doctorow geek howto lifehacks ubuntu productivity tips tools)
O2.ie blocking popular image-hosting sites imgur.com, imageshack.com : apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
(tags: iwf fail blocking filtering o2 ireland imgur imageshack censorship fps)
Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right : ‘every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.’
(tags: broadband finland legal rights law human-rights three-strikes)new gastropub opening in Stoneybatter : there goes the neighbourhood! ‘L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.’ Sign me up
(tags: gastropubs stoneybattery dublin d7 food drink)