Unbound: The Crowdfunding Cargo Cult – Telegraph Blogs : ‘why was Unbound set up in the first place? It’s because they constructed a cargo cult, believing that if they mimicked the superficial elements of successful crowdfunding, they could enjoy the same success as others – but perhaps even more, thanks to their relationships with publishers, agents, authors, and the media.’ They’re not the only Kickstarter-cargo-culting company, too. via waxy
(tags: via:waxy unbound kickstarter cargo-cult funding crowdfunding books uk)
Month: July 2011
Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies : bored on maternity leave, this is what happens (via Niamh)
(tags: movies babies funny via:niamh)IT expenditure and failure – submission to public expenditure consultation : Antoin lays into the disfunctional Irish IT procurement system. “The status quo isn’t just making things expensive and slow, it’s asphyxiating the government’s ability to serve.”
(tags: antoin it procurement ireland government civil-service letters)
Why we should expel the Vatican’s Ambassador, the Papal Nuncio : ‘In 2011, we have a new Government, who have stopped making excuses for the Vatican State. The Facebook campaign now has over 5,000 members, who continue to send emails and letters to their TDs and to the Minister for Foreign Affairs expressing the clear message that we want action. Enda Kenny said yesterday that the Vatican downplayed the rape and torture of Irish children to to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. We should expel the Vatican’s Papal Nuncio and send the message that they have destroyed the very things they prized the most.’
(tags: vatican papal-nuncio religion catholicism politics diplomacy ireland child-abuse cloyne-report)
Paintings by Daniel Castan : really striking oil paintings of Manhattan; looks like small-format canvases can be bought at http://en.carredartistes.com/acheter-un-tableau-peintre-et-vente-peinture-artiste/petit-format/daniel-castan
(tags: daniel-castan art via:mlkshk paintings toget cities new-york nyc manhattan)
Facebook group: Expel the Irish Papal Nuncio : “The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse in the Dublin ArchDiocese clearly states that the Papal Nuncio, the Diplomatic representative of the Vatican, refused to reply to investigators. Now the Cloynes Report has found that the Vatican’s Ambassador intervened to undermine the efforts to protect children as recently as 1996. This is not acceptable. The Irish Government has the power to expel diplomats. If we are to take the reports’ findings seriously, we must expel the Papal Nuncio.”
(tags: vatican politics ireland abuse facebook lobbying cloyne-report)zen.org Communal Weblog » Bigger Than His Body : ‘My beautiful, smart, funny, geeky, blue-eyed, bearded, amazing husband died last night with me and two of his aunts holding him.’ So sorry for Elana and their boys — Brendan was a nice guy and a great hacker :(
(tags: brendan-kehoe awful leukemia life death rip)Death Notice Of Brendan KEHOE, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland : ‘Removal on Saturday from Quinn’s of Glasthule to Mount Jerome Crematorium for service at 2pm. No flowers, please. Donations, if desired, to Educate Together.’
(tags: rip brendan-kehoe)
Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief | Stanford Center for Internet and Society : jaysus. the Epic Marketplace online ad network performs a history stealing attack to determine if the viewer has recently visited ‘pages about getting pregnant and fertility, including at the Mayo Clinic’. very very scummy — massive privacy violation (via Adam Shostack)
(tags: privacy history browsers history-stealing css attacks security via:adamshostack epic-marketplace nai ads)How we use Redis at Bump : via Simon Willison. some nice ideas here, particularly using a replication slave to handle the potentially latency-impacting disk writes in AOF mode
(tags: queueing redis nosql databases storage via:simonw replication bump)
SSL perf tip : don’t use Diffie-Hellman ciphers, they’re slow
(tags: ssl tls nginx performance web diffie-hellman ciphers)stud : ‘a network proxy that terminates TLS/SSL connections and forwards the unencrypted traffic to some backend. It’s designed to handle 10s of thousands of connections efficiently on multicore machines.’
(tags: stud tls ssl security networking web proxies performance)