Month: September 2010

The MySQL “swap insanity” problem and the effects of the NUMA architecture : very interesting; modern multicore x86 architectures use a NUMA memory architecture, which can cause a dip into swap, even when there appears to be plenty of free RAM available
(tags: linux memory mysql optimization performance swap tuning vm numa swap-insanity swapping)

law firm’s mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k : ‘Off-the-cuff bravado aimed at [4chan] has led to what must already rank as one of the worst ever data leaks, by the anti-filesharing solicitors ACS:Law’ […] ‘the law firm is faced with the threat of a fine by the [UK] Information Commissioner, who is keen to use new powers that raise the maximum penalty to £500,000.’
(tags: ouch 4chan acs-law filesharing data-leaks privacy data-protection fines uk)

http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/ : extensive. the NSFW words that Google Instant won’t search for (via Waxy)
(tags: nsfw censorship filtering google keywords search blacklist google-instant)

RecordStream : ‘A set of programs for creating, manipulating, and outputing a stream of Records, or hashes. Inspired by Monad.’ looks very powerful
(tags: monad recordstream open-source recs cli grep)

The Spamhaus Whitelist : exactly what it says on the tin
(tags: spamhaus anti-spam whitelisting spamassassin)

why James Gosling left Oracle : 1. made him take an effective pay cut; 2. removed decision authority on Java; 3. he felt Oracle was “ethically challenged”. also: ‘he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java’; “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” he doesn’t pull any punches. oh dear, this is all adding up…
(tags: java oracle opensource sun james-gosling larry-ellison gossip)

Mongrel2 Says, “Goodbye Python” : Linux distros ship ancient Python interpreters, hence it’s impossible to rely on recent language features because they won’t be there, making it useless to write code in Python. We have similar problems in perl-land, but it’s easy enough to get by without the latest-and-greatest; maybe Python is different in that regard? … or is it Zed?
(tags: zed-shaw python mongrel distros linux sysadmin packaging)

Bunnie Huang on the simulated 6502 : ‘It makes my head spin to think that the CPU from the first real computer I used, the Apple II, is now simulateable at the mask level as a browser plug-in. Nothing to install, and it’s Open-licensed. How far we have come…a little more than a decade ago, completing a project like this would have resulted in a couple PhDs being awarded, or regarded as trade secret by some big EDA vendor. This is just unreal…but very cool!’
(tags: simulation bunnie-huang 6502 cpu chips emulation hardware)

www.Visual6502.org : ‘working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip’s physical components – about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip. This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their ‘high’ or ‘low’ logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the ‘clock’) on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.’ Awesome
(tags: 6502 emulation physics simulation mos atari-2600 pet commodore c-64 cpu silicon)

JAM Software – SpamAssassin for Windows : ‘adapted for Windows by JAM Software’ — cool! Thanks Daniel
(tags: windows spamassassin anti-spam software win32 jam-software)

MineCraft: Mine The Gap, Day 1 : Rock, Paper, Shotgun review the current lo-fi sandbox indie-game hit
(tags: pixels minecraft gaming fun walkthroughs)

The Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box : this is fantastic — a (physical) puzzle, which must be brought to a specific location on the planet to be opened
(tags: geocaching cool electronics geolocation gps hardware puzzles arduino)

John Graham-Cumming: The Myth of the Boy Wizard : JGC on the Haystack mess. bad journalism by The Guardian, Newsweek and the Beeb, basically, single-sourcing articles without any corroborating backup from domain experts
(tags: journalism haystack the-grauniad newsweek bbc news cpj jgc)

Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music “free” : open-source classical music: now very well-funded. awesome!
(tags: musopen classical music copyright funding opensource free)

P2P investigations now illegal in Switzerland : ‘The country’s Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can’t go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.’
(tags: p2p privacy ip-addresses pii logistep switzerland piracy)

Forking is a Feature – Anil Dash : thought-provoking piece about GitHub-style forking applied to other disciplines; Tumblr, Dribbble, Forrst being cases where it’s happening now
(tags: community development forking github git opensource tumblr dribbble forrst wikipedia)

Ubuntu’s cron package silently ignores files : Ubuntu have hack-patched Vixie Cron to silently ignore cron files which contain a “.”. omgwtf
(tags: omgwtfbbq broken ubuntu patching quality bugs software stupid packaging)

Game On : exhibition billing itself as “the world’s biggest celebration of games”, arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. ‘Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.’ tix are EUR10
(tags: games gaming exhibitions dublin)

Your Country, Your Call, You’re Doomed : Bock on the predictably-crap biz-waffle results from the YCYC “get Ireland back on track” competition. ‘If we don’t take this seriously, we’re doomed to repeat the current economic disaster over and over again, each generation with its own Bertie Ahern, its own Seanie Fitzpatrick, its own Fingers Fingleton, and all the other assorted, integrity-free panhandlers and parasites who have soiled the reputation of this country and sold us down the Swanee for their own, ignorant, self-serving enrichment. Forget about Eamon Ryan’s smart economy. Let’s put all our effort into creating the Honest Economy.’
(tags: ycyc waffle business ireland vision-lock integrity bock-the-robber economy)

Hit The Road: Public Transport Directions for Dublin : ‘a public-transport route-planning service for Dublin city, which shows you how to get from A to B using buses, Luas or DART services. The original version was built during the first Startup Weekend Dublin in May 2010.’ Pretty good; although in my tests it wasn’t able to find the optimal route, it always came up with something that made a good starting point
(tags: routes dublin public-transport buses hit-the-road)

o2 Broadband Dongle Working on Ubuntu 10.04 : the Huawei E1752 dongle does that horrible thing where it defaults to acting as a USB storage device containing the Windows drivers, instead of acting as a 3G modem by default. usb_modeswitch should be in the Ubuntu base install to deal with this crap
(tags: usb broadband o2 hauwei e1752 ubuntu dongle)

Twitter’s misuse of OAuth : Twitter seem to be attempting to control misbehaving clients, by using the “consumer key” pair as a secret key for app developers. This is proving impossible for FOSS clients to work with, and is trivially hacked to allow third-party app impersonation. Bad idea, Twitter
(tags: twitter fail oauth standards open-source gwibber security)

Boxee Blog » How Boxee Sees the Apple TV : go Boxee! open TV is the way to go
(tags: boxee apple tv set-top)

“if slalom” : a great name for a common “code smell” of too much indentation, calling for merciless usage of Extract Method (via Aman)
(tags: via:akohli code-smells refactoring if-slalom programming funny if-else indentation)

/~colmmacc/ » Prime and Proper : algorithm to perform set membership tests on enumerated sets quickly and memory-efficiently, using multiplication by primes. Nice trick
(tags: hacks colmmacc prime-numbers set-membership bloom-filters bignums algorithms programming)

_Fast Cache for Your Text: Accelerating Exact Pattern Matching with Feed-Forward Bloom Filters_ [PDF] : intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick — or possibly re2c, as used in “sa-compile”. On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn’t perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
(tags: bloom-filters grep filtering spamassassin sa-compile text-matching caches aho-corasick)

SuperTweet.Net : free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
(tags: via:pixelbeat api oauth proxy twitter web http curl supertweet)