an ex-Skype employee dishes the dirt on their buyout and acquisition : some incredible stories — pretty mind-boggling stuff, I’m amazed people stuck around
(tags: skype startups legal share-options shares economics)PSI License [PDF] : the license under which the open data from various councils around Fingal and Dublin (see www.dublinked.ie) is being published
(tags: licensing open-data dublin fingal open public government county-councils city-council ireland)
Month: June 2011
Great Hacker News thread on Andy Baio’s “Kind Of Screwed” shakedown : full of good commentary on the rather horrific result. here’s one: “I wonder how the photographer would feel if the company that manufactured the trumpet played by Miles Davis had claimed that his photograph violated the copyright of their “sculpture” and the tailor Miles got his suit from also protested. Of all art forms, photography has some of the least claim on being an entirely original creation of the artist.”
(tags: photography miles-davis jay-maisel andy-baio waxy hn discussion copyright copyfight creativity art)
_Scaling with MongoDB_, Michael Schurter 2011 [PDF] : presentation with some rather terrifying MongoDB war stories
(tags: mongodb performance presentation scaling war-stories)
F.B.I. Seizes Web Servers, Knocking Sites Offline : law enforcement fail. “the agents took entire server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that “one enclosure is = to one server,” [DigitalOne’s CEO] said in an e-mail.”
(tags: search-and-seizure law-enforcement fbi fail datacenters racks digitalone usa hosting)
Hero orang-utan sparks copyright row – The Irish Times – Thu, Jun 16, 2011 : “They did not have the right to sell it and have infringed his copyright. It is as simple as that.” Scummy — some company called “News Team International” taking YouTube content and passing it off as their own
(tags: youtube copyright scummy news-team-international video)
Hacker News | Ooops. : brilliant thread of epic “OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE” stories
(tags: fail ouch oops via:hn via:waxy computers software rm-rf)64yourself : Damn. my 2006 hack http://taint.org/c64ize/ reinvented, although with a lot more panache :(
(tags: c64 images retro commodore-64 commodore)_Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming_ : Gunnar Kreitz’ paper on its innards! ‘Spotify is a music streaming service offering lowlatency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks. Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol. In this paper, we give an overview of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide measurements of service performance and user behavior. The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and has been available in six European countries since October 2008. Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming with good results. In particular, 8.8% of music data played comes from Spotify’s servers while the median playback latency is only 265 ms (including cached tracks). We also discuss the user access patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the access patterns as they reach the server.’
(tags: spotify via:waxy streaming p2p music architecture papers networking)
Asciiflow : ‘ASCII Flow Diagram Tool’. great web-based ASCII-art drawing app; create diagrams in your browser
(tags: ascii art ascii-art diagrams drawing html)Python Idioms and Efficiency Suggestions : will have to run this by our resident Pythonistas in work as a good set of guidelines
(tags: idioms programming python reference tips via:hn)Scala: The Static Language that Feels Dynamic : a good intro from Bruce Eckel. We need a good excuse to deploy some Scala ;)
(tags: scala actors java language programming jvm coding)
Redditor explains why Apple power cables break frequently : “As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple’s products. And when I say “the most powerful”, I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it’s pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I’m sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn’t like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.”
(tags: apple cables design industrial-design power-cables funny)France To Launch a National Patent Troll : ‘The operation, called “France Brevets” will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of […] shaking down companies for money.’ I think the word is: incroyable
(tags: france fail omgwtfbbq patent-trolls swpats patents government innovation software europe)The first Irish case on defamation via autocomplete : Google Instant has picked up people searching for ‘Ballymascanlon hotel receivership’ and is now offering this as an autocomplete option — cue defamation lawsuit. Defamation via machine learning
(tags: machine-learning defamation google google-instant search ballymascanlon hotels autocomplete law-enforcement)
Data Protection Commissioner investigating Eircom’s “three strikes” system : Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn’t been updated for DST. ‘this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management – i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime – for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.’ As TJ explains, this could have very serious results
(tags: dpc ireland eircom fail time dst daylight-savings three-strikes filesharing piracy)
Hipster Ipsum : ‘Adipisicing do Tumblr fugiat vinyl Pitchfork. Organic tempor laboris, esse Tumblr irure eu nostrud. Dolor Cosby sweater mustache qui consequat incididunt. McSweeney’s ullamco occaecat Wes Anderson. Minim aute lomo, duis ea proident enim Carles. Eiusmod culpa photo booth ex. Pariatur incididunt minim qui, dolor Pitchfork wayfarers mollit vinyl fixie.’ (via boogah)
(tags: via:boogah hipster lorem-ipsum filler text markov-chains funny humour)Apple rips off student’s rejected iPhone app : ‘Wi-Fi Sync’ was rejected from the App Store last May — and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! ‘Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers’ kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”’
(tags: apple walled-garden protectionism iphone wifi syncing apps ip rip-offs)Why Ryanair The Cookie Monster is just an urban myth : “If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
(tags: ryanair pricing airlines travel web shopping urban-myths)
Piracy: are we being conned? : The Age with a cynical take on pro-music-biz anti-piracy “reports”. “The quality of data and analysis is very weak as its political objective is so clear. It does not use actual ABS data but data taken from Europe. It’s an elemental statistical error, it’s fudging with numbers to come out with a figure which is ‘kinda sorta’ plausible.”
(tags: piracy filesharing copyright australia the-age newspapers ifpi acta)Our 256,000 (and counting) atheists, agnostics, humanists and non-religious – The Irish Times : “The ‘non-religious’ are the largest group in the State after Catholics, according to the [2006] census.” Doubtless higher in this year’s, too…
(tags: humanism atheism religion census ireland)Dr. Neal Krawetz explains perceptual hashing : ie. TinEye and other “images like this one” search engines. nice explanation
(tags: algorithm images analysis programming dct hashing perceptual-hash tineye via:hn image)
Telehack: May the command line live forever : ‘Connected to TELEHACK port 13 / It is 8:16 am on Saturday, April 30, 2011 in Mountain View, California, USA. There are 10 local users. There are 24139 hosts on the network.’ via Waxy
(tags: via:waxy simulation history telnet arpanet networking unix bbs)
irishindoleaks : ‘leaking the indo’s offline wikileaks coverage online where it belongs’ – scans of each article
(tags: irish-independent ireland politics wikileaks newspapers scans)
_Tim Robinson: Connemara_ : a new documentary, based on the work of Tim Robinson, the great Connemara map-maker. showing this Sunday at 1pm at the IFI in Dublin
(tags: ifi films ireland connemara tim-robinson mapping nature)bump2babe – The Consumer Guide to Maternity Services in Ireland : wow, they’ve done a really good job on the statistics collation here
(tags: statistics birth childbirth ireland health maternity)GTA4 Google Map : wow, very impressive — as far as I can tell, it really _is_ using GMaps infrastructure to some degree
(tags: google-maps google maps gta4 grand-theft-auto via:nelson games)