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There’s a map for that

‘Not long ago, we began rendering 3D models on GitHub. Today we’re excited to announce the latest addition to the visualization family – geographic data. Any .geojson file in a GitHub repository will now be automatically rendered as an interactive, browsable map, annotated with your geodata.’ As this HN comment notes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5875693 — ‘I’d much rather Github cleaned up the UI for existing features than added these little flourishes that I can’t imagine even 1% of users use.’ Something is seriously wrong in how GitHub decides product direction if this kind of wankology (and that Judy-array crap) is what gets prioritised. :( (via Marc O’Morain)

(tags: via:marc github mapping maps geojson hacking product-management ui pull-requests)

Lawsuit Filed To Prove Happy Birthday Is In The Public Domain; Demands Warner Pay Back Millions Of License Fees | Techdirt

The issue […] is that it’s just not cost effective for anyone to actually stand up and challenge Warner Music, who has strong financial incentive to pretend the copyright is still valid. Well, apparently, someone is pissed off enough to try. The creatively named Good Morning to You Productions, a documentary film company planning a film about the song Happy Birthday, has now filed a lawsuit concerning the copyright of Happy Birthday and are seeking to force Warner/Chappell to return the millions of dollars it has collected over the years. That’s going to make this an interesting case.

(tags: music copyright law via:bwalsh public-domain happy-birthday songs warner-music lawsuits)

graphite-metrics

metric collectors for various stuff not (or poorly) handled by other monitoring daemons Core of the project is a simple daemon (harvestd), which collects metric values and sends them to graphite carbon daemon (and/or other configured destinations) once per interval. Includes separate data collection components (“collectors”) for processing of: /proc/slabinfo for useful-to-watch values, not everything (configurable). /proc/vmstat and /proc/meminfo in a consistent way. /proc/stat for irq, softirq, forks. /proc/buddyinfo and /proc/pagetypeinfo (memory fragmentation). /proc/interrupts and /proc/softirqs. Cron log to produce start/finish events and duration for each job into a separate metrics, adapts jobs to metric names with regexes. Per-system-service accounting using systemd and it’s cgroups. sysstat data from sadc logs (use something like sadc -F -L -S DISK -S XDISK -S POWER 60 to have more stuff logged there) via sadf binary and it’s json export (sadf -j, supported since sysstat-10.0.something, iirc). iptables rule “hits” packet and byte counters, taken from ip{,6}tables-save, mapped via separate “table chain_name rule_no metric_name” file, which should be generated along with firewall rules (I use this script to do that).

(tags: graphite monitoring metrics unix linux ops vm iptables sysadmin)

Former NSA Boss: We Don’t Data Mine Our Giant Data Collection, We Just Ask It Questions

‘Well, that’s – no, we’re going to use it. But we’re not going to use it in the way that some people fear. You put these records, you store them, you have them. It’s kind of like, I’ve got the haystack now. And now let’s try to find the needle. And you find the needle by asking that data a question. I’m sorry to put it that way, but that’s fundamentally what happens. All right. You don’t troll through the data looking for patterns or anything like that. The data is set aside. And now I go into that data with a question that – a question that is based on articulable(ph), arguable, predicate to a terrorist nexus.’

(tags: data-mining questions haystack needle nsa usa politics privacy data-protection michael-hayden)

fastutil

fastutil extends the Java™ Collections Framework by providing type-specific maps, sets, lists and queues with a small memory footprint and fast access and insertion; provides also big (64-bit) arrays, sets and lists, and fast, practical I/O classes for binary and text files. It is free software distributed under the Apache License 2.0. It requires Java 6 or newer.

(tags: via:highscalability facebook giraph optimization java speed fastutil collections data-structures)

Big Memory, Part 4

good microbenchmarking of a bunch of Java collections; Trove, fastutil, PCJ, mahout-collections, hppc

(tags: java collections benchmarks performance speed coding data-structures optimization)