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some good data (and graphs) on baby names (via Ruth)
(tags: via:ruth babies naming graphs dataviz data usa names)
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Crowdsourcing transcription of some WWI artifacts: ‘The story of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War is waiting to be discovered in 1.5 million pages of unit war diaries. We need your help to reveal the stories of those who fought in the global conflict that shaped the world we live in today.’ (via Luke)
Map of Steamship Routes of the World, 1914
massive image. very cool (via burritojustice)
(tags: maps desktop images steamships shipping history 1914 travel world)
Google Fonts recently switched to using Zopfli
Google Fonts recently switched to using new Zopfli compression algorithm: the fonts are ~6% smaller on average, and in some cases up to 15% smaller! […] What’s Zopfli? It’s an algorithm that was developed by the compression team at Google that delivers ~3~8% bytesize improvement when compared to gzip with maximum compression. This byte savings comes at a cost of much higher encoding cost, but the good news is, fonts are static files and decompression speed is exactly the same. Google Fonts pays the compression cost once and every clients gets the benefit of smaller download. If you’re curious to learn more about Zopfli: http://bit.ly/Y8DEL4
(tags: zopfli compression gzip fonts google speed optimization)
“Understanding the Robustness of SSDs under Power Fault”, FAST ’13 [paper]
Horrific. SSDs (including “enterprise-class storage”) storing sync’d writes in volatile RAM while claiming they were synced; one device losing 72.6GB, 30% of its data, after 8 injected power faults; and all SSDs tested displayed serious errors including random bit errors, metadata corruption, serialization errors and shorn writes. Don’t trust lone unreplicated, unbacked-up SSDs!
(tags: pdf papers ssd storage reliability safety hardware ops usenix serialization shorn-writes bit-errors corruption fsync)
Irish politician calls for ban on “open source browsers”
‘Fine Gael TD for Limerick, Patrick O’Donovan has called for tougher controls on the use of open source internet browsers and payment systems which allow users to remain anonymous in the illegal trade of drugs, weapons and pornography.’ Amazing. Yes, this is real.
(tags: open-source clueless omgwtfbbq fine-gael ireland fail funny tor inept)
