Chernobyl: now open to tourists : wow, sign me up ;)
(tags: chernobyl pripyat tourism nuclear-power gawking)Facebook | Visualizing Friendships : nifty data-mined map of cross-border friendships on Facebook
Author: dailylinks
Accentuate.us : ‘We are proud to announce the free and open-source Accentuate.us, a new method of input for over 100 languages that uses statistical reasoning so that users can type effortlessly in plain ASCII while ultimately producing accurate text. This allows Vietnamese users, for example, to simply type “Moi nguoi deu co quyen tu do ngon luan va bay to quan diem,” which will be automatically corrected to “M?i ng??i ??u có quy?n t? do ngôn lu?n và b?y t? quan ?i?m” after Accentuation. To date, we support four clients: Mozilla Firefox, Perl, Python, and Vim, with more to be added shortly.’ cool
(tags: accents language web-services typing text-entry ascii unicode characters)The Day MAME Saved My Ass : ‘Publishers would have people believe that MAME and the emulation scene is the root of all evil, that it promotes piracy and ultimately hurts the poor, starving developers slaving away on the game. Not only is this claim patently false, it ignores the fact that many developers use things like MAME, mod chips, and homebrew development utilities to help us overcome the day-to-day frustrations caused by the people behind the real problems in our industry.’
(tags: mame games coding legal spy-hunter emulation rips takedowns)Digital Socket Awards : ‘We’d like you to nominate the longlist of best music of 2010 on www.digitalsocketawards.com. From this, 26 blogger judges from towns and cities all over Ireland will each score their top choices to reach a shortlist of three finalists in each category. The winners will be announced on 3 February 2011 at a live event in Dublin’s Grand Social.’
(tags: blogs blogging irishblogs music mp3 mp3blogs ireland awards)
Flattr – Social micropayments : click a “Flattr” button on content-creator websites, pay a monthly $5 fee, and the content creators get a share of your $5. Very interesting, and seems well thought out — think I may sign up when I see some content I like
(tags: flattr payment content business social pay music)
Some figures about Eircom’s “3 strikes” system : 1000 notifications a month, and ‘Eircom is guaranteeing that it will never hand subscribers’ personal details to the music industry and will never monitor their online activities. They will, however, take the word of the music industry and their monitors on face value and presume it is accurate as a matter of course.’
(tags: eircom filesharing three-strikes piracy music mp3)
Eric Cantona’s call for a bank run : a French campaign to “bring down the banks” by engineering a massive consumer bank run, tomorrow, Dec 7th. I can see this happening in Ireland if we don’t get an election soon
(tags: ireland france banking bank-runs economy bailout eric-cantona)
Bailout will sink Ireland before we can even swim | David McWilliams : ‘This is not capitalism, it is not European diplomacy; it is a stitch-up.’ Adding another voice in favour of default — starting to look like the only sane option given the crappy ECB deal :(
(tags: david-mcwilliams economy ireland bailout eu)Daft: Gallery Quay, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin 2, South Dublin City – Studio apartment to let : ‘€57 Weekly. Deceptively spacious open plan unfurnished studio in one of Dublin’s top locations. Carbon neutral, hand crafted inuit design. beautiful ambient light leading to rooftop garden. The studio comfortably sleeps five. Pets allowed, no parking. Short term lease for the month of December. Owner is interested in selling if market warms up.’ It’s an igloo. With a snowman head on top.
(tags: funny igloos daft property dublin apartments snow sneachta)
The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (TDD) : huh. Test-driven development is slower than traditional write-first-test-at-the-end development, but it results in less bugs. Grokcode theorise that its big win is amortising the cost of testing throughout the product iteration, hence reducing the temptation to skip testing when the crunch phase happens
(tags: tdd programming testing qa coding)What now for Irish Politics? : Leo on the current political situation in Ireland. I’m mostly in agreement
(tags: ireland politics labour ff bailout)
Barry Eichengreen on the Irish bailout : ‘The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year. This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable.’
(tags: ireland economy bailout eu euro)Video: Robots Explain The Irish Economic Crisis : Pretty good explanation, actually
(tags: news ireland robots youtube debt eu politics economy)
WikiLeaks Archive: A CAUCASUS WEDDING : Dagestan knows how to party. ‘The main activity of the day was eating and drinking — starting from 4 p.m., about eight hours worth, all told — punctuated, when all were laden with food and sodden with drink, with a bout of jet skiing in the Caspian’
(tags: russia government politics leaks wikileaks weddings funny dagestan caucasus)
Eric Cantona’s call for bank protest sparks online campaign : bank runs appear to be a hot topic at the moment
(tags: banking crisis economics finance protest france eric-cantona)Copyright and defamation law is repelling investors – The Irish Times : ‘UNLESS CHANGES are made to Ireland’s legal and regulatory framework in areas like copyright and defamation, digital businesses will be discouraged from locating operations here, say legal experts and businesses.’
(tags: law legal copyright defamation ireland irish-times)
Copyright and defamation law is repelling investors – The Irish Times : ‘UNLESS CHANGES are made to Ireland’s legal and regulatory framework in areas like copyright and defamation, digital businesses will be discouraged from locating operations here, say legal experts and businesses.’
(tags: law legal copyright defamation ireland irish-times)
Anti-piracy lawyers ‘knowingly targeted the innocent’, says law body : ‘Following complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), Davenport Lyons now stands accused of deliberately ignoring concerns over the standard of its evidence. It matched IP addresses captured from movie and videogame BitTorrent swarms with customer records obtained from ISPs by court order. David Gore and Brian Miller, two Davenport Lyons partners, will face disciplinary proceedings in March.’
(tags: piracy three-strikes uk law solicitors bittorrent filesharing shakedown)
GitHub outage post-mortem : continuous-integration system was accidentally run against the production db. result: the entire production database got wiped. ouuuuch
(tags: ouch github outages post-mortem databases testing c-i production firewalls)logstash : open-source app to manage events and logs; collect logs, parse them, store, search, with web UI
(tags: logs logging logstash metrics)Loggly : ‘Logging as a Service’ – a cloud-based logging service
(tags: logging loggly cloud logs data metrics)Fingal Open Data : quite a bit of open datasets from Fingal County Council. wow (via John Handelaar)
(tags: via:handelaar open-data open fingal ireland)Boxee Box issues feedback and response : ‘Using Boxee to play local files? having issues? Here’s what were going to do about it.’ It’s amazing to see this level of responsiveness from an appliance vendor!
(tags: appliances boxee set-top-box tv video home customer-service)
Tony Finch – Some notes on Bloom filters : more good Bloom Filter tips. he says: ‘I take a slightly different tack, starting with a target population in mind which determines the size of the filter. Also there’s a minor error regarding performance in the corte.si post. You only need to calculate two hash functions, and use a linear combination of them to index the Bloom filter. This simplifies the coding a lot, and if hash calculation dominates filter indexing, it’s also a lot faster.’
(tags: bloom-filters tips coding via:fanf false-positives)
GoCar : pay as you go car-sharing and short-term car rental in Dublin
(tags: cars travel dublin ireland)The National Wax Museum Plus – Join in the celebration of Irish scientific inventors, designers and scientists : wait a sec, I know someone whose likeness appears in the National Wax Museum?!
(tags: aoife-mclysaght wax-museum small-world science cool)
Free iPhone satnav app for UK and Ireland : hmm, must try this out
(tags: satnav ireland uk navigation iphone apps)
iPhone users not waking up on time due to DST bug : lots of people complaining about this on Twitter — seems the clock changes, but the alarms do not! Internationali[sz]ation Is Hard
(tags: apple iphone alarms dst daylight-savings i18n)
That mysterious J : “in e-mail from Microsoft employees, you may find a stray J […] The J started out its life as a smiley-face. The WingDings font puts a smiley face where the letter J goes. […] As the message travels from machine to machine, the font formatting may get lost or mangled, resulting in the letter J appearing when a smiley face was intended.” aha! mystery solved. Amazon is full of mysterious “J”s in emails, and now I know why
(tags: amazon j letters wingdings microsoft spoor fonts noise)Using genetic algorithms to find Starcraft 2 build orders : discovered a previously-unknown optimal build strategy for the Zerg race — how cool is that
(tags: zerg-rush starcraft ga genetic-algorithms evolution gaming coding)
Minecraft Subreddit : this is not going to help my addiction
(tags: minecraft community games reddit)
simon listens : open-source speech recognition for Linux and Windows. must give this a go! (Via Alexander Seewald)
(tags: speech-recognition floss free-software kde speech recognition linux audio accessibility)
Project Middleman : another concurrency shell command; interesting approach to dashboarding the results, with the “mdm.screen” utility provided
(tags: mdm unix concurrency shell linux forking background xargs parallelism)GNU Parallel – build and execute command lines from standard input in parallel : by Ole Tange. pretty extensive, if inscrutable (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf unix concurrency gnu linux job parallel scripting shell)
Alebrije : ‘Alebrijes are brightly colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical creatures’. ah, I was wondering what they were — I thought there was one, extremely prolific, artist
(tags: alebrijes art folk-art mexico pedro-linares oaxaca sculpture)Amazon.com: ASUS RT-N16 Wireless-N Gigabit Router: Electronics: Reviews, Prices & more : tipped as the next generation of hackable router; 128MB RAM, 533MHz CPU, supports 802.11N and 1000Base-T, and runs Tomato firmware. pity I just bought another WRT54GL a couple of months back
(tags: hackable devices hardware asus rt-n16 tomato firmware open 802.11n wifi)UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing : ‘Client software, such as browsers and emailers, faces a difficult transition from the version of international domain names approved in 2003 (IDNA2003), to the revision approved in 2010 (IDNA2008). The specification in this document provides a mechanism that minimizes the impact of this transition for client software, allowing client software to access domains that are valid under either system.’ wow, this is hairy stuff
(tags: idn unicode domains interop)http://isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/ : does exactly what it says on the tin
(tags: dead thatcher uk politics morbid single-use-sites)
Curious Wines : finalist for a RealEx Web Award, free next-day delivery and returns throughout Ireland, and some excellent prices here. hmm
(tags: wine ireland shopping online-shopping)
ioprofile : wraps strace(1) to summarise and aggregate I/O ops performed by a Linux process. looks pretty nifty (via Jeremy Zawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny io strace linux monitoring debugging performance profiling sysadmin ioprofile unix tools)
Conall’s Blog » DIY Multimedia Centre : good data on a reasonably-priced 1080p setup. I’m struggling through this right now, particularly on attempting to reuse an old laptop which can’t play 720p output reliably, let alone 1080p. But EUR799 for a new Mac Mini seems steep
(tags: 1080p 720p hdmi display tv hardware home)
Flash Crash – Norwegians Convicted for Outwitting ‘Trading Robots’ – CNBC : ‘The two men worked out how the computerized system would react to certain trading patterns – allowing them to influence the price of low-volume stocks.’ Yet another risk of automated traders
(tags: trading stocks automated-trading flash-crash high-frequency-trading)Irish ISP was lucky – [email protected] : Kiwi lawyer on the EMI v UPC case, lots of good commentary (via Eoin O’Dell)
(tags: emi upc law ireland nz via:cearta copyfight)Cisco SCE 8000 Series Service Control Engine – Products & Services – Cisco Systems : used by UPC for deep packet inspection, according to the EMI v UPC judgement
(tags: dpi upc ireland isps cisco networking internet)
Unicode 6.0 released : including PILE OF POO, at codepoint 1F4A9:
(tags: pile-of-poo poo unicode funny emoji characters)Strike One? « A Clatter of the Law : Rossa McMahon rounds up some highlights from Mr. Justice Charleton’s judgement on the UPC case; good post
(tags: law ireland upc irma emi ip)Senator Paschal Mooney parrots the EMI “Aslan filesharing” story : ‘There is a perception that the big five record companies, all international companies, have been ripping off the consumer for many years. I do not want to be seen as an apologist for the music industry [jm: oh really], but at the lower level I can give a specific example to highlight the impact of illegal downloading on Aslan, an Irish band. [… blah blah…] Why must we wait for a High Court judgment to be made before we introduce relevant legislation? This is not the first time it has happened in the copyright sector.’ — wait, the what? It’s a SECTOR now?!! wtf (via Charles Julienne)
(tags: copyright-sector copyfight omgwtf paschal-mooney seanad ireland aslan emi irma filesharing)
Blosc : A high-performance compressor optimized for binary data — ‘designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than a traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch via memcpy()’ (via Bill de hOra)
(tags: via:dehora compression memcpy caching l1 software memory optimization performance python pytables)
Is The UPC Decision A Victory? – Michele Neylon : Michele quotes Mr Justice Charleton’s judgement: ‘It is not surprising that the legislative response laid down in our country in the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, at a time when this problem was not perceived to be as threatening to the creative and retail economy as it has become in 2010, has made no proper provision for the blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications intent on breaching copyright. In failing to provide legislative provisions for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft, Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law.’ Blocking, diverting and interrupting IP traffic? _wonderful_
(tags: wtf ireland law upc irma filtering)Record labels lose file sharing case against UPC – The Irish Times – Mon, Oct 11, 2010 : IRMA’s comment: “we reserve the right to seek compensation for the past and continuing losses from the State.” You have GOT to be joking. As TJ McIntyre put it: IRMA wants taxpayers to pay for Bono’s losses
(tags: irma upc filesharing bono u2 omgwtfbbq entitlement taxes ireland nfw)Music Industry Fails In High Court Bid To Force 3 Strikes on ISP | TorrentFreak : UPC Ireland: “Our whole premise and defence focused on the ‘mere conduit’ principle, which provides that an internet service provider cannot be held liable for content transmitted across its network, and today’s decision supports the principle that ISPs are not liable for the actions of internet subscribers.” woot! Now to the High Court, I guess
(tags: upc ireland filesharing irma law three-strikes)
All About Skimmers — Krebs on Security : photos of the current state-of-the-art in ATM skimmers via Brian Krebs
(tags: brian-krebs atm skimmers security photos banking fraud)EMAIL AND BACON : This car has everything (via Box Of Meat)
(tags: via:boxofmeat email bacon car funny lol demotivational posters)
NAMAland : ‘At NAMAland we like to look on the bright side. OK, the downside of NAMA is that it’s costing you €54 billion — the upside is that you now own some of the best (and worst) properties in Dublin. So grab your phone, put on your tophat and enjoy your new role as a property tycoon with our augmented reality tour of NAMAland. Remember, we-are-where-we-are, there’s no point playing the blame game, we were all living beyond our means and it was like that when we got here…’ Excellent! a Layar Augmented Reality layer for Layar which lets you see properties in Dublin owned by NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency
(tags: nama funny ouch augmented-reality layar dublin ireland)
Web service – current time zone for a city? – Stack Overflow : ‘a web service of some sort (or any other way) to pull a current time zone settings for a (US) city. For the parts of the country that don’t follow the Daylight Saving Time and basically jump timezones when everyone else is switching summer/winter time… I don’t fancy creating own database of the places that don’t follow DST. Is there a way to pull this data on demand?’ earthtools.org seems the closest thing
(tags: dst daylight-savings local timezones iso8601 dates times web-services http)Facebook now does export : ‘we’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download.’ excellent
(tags: facebook export data control privacy personal-data)
Government gets no ‘serious offers’ for e-voting machines : 2 *other* govt departments (nice try) wondered about buying them, for utterly random purposes for which they’re totally unfit. Total cost of the e-voting fiasco is now EUR54.6 million. Another fine Fianna Fail mess
(tags: fianna-fail fail e-voting ireland fiasco)XKCD’s updated map of online communities : Urban Dead is still around?
(tags: xkcd maps humor infographic community online)
Lone Sale of $4.1 Billion in Contracts Led to ‘Flash Crash’ in May : ‘as the computers of the high-frequency traders traded contracts back and forth, a “hot potato” effect was created, the report said, as contracts changed hands 27,000 times in 14 seconds, but with eventually only 200 actually being bought or sold.’ upshot: horrifically complex distributed feedback loops now directly impact our economies — great :(
(tags: distributed-systems distcomp flash-crash stock-market trading automation via:nelson sec nyse high-frequency-trading)Changes at dnswl.org : DNSWL will charge for subscriptions to “heavy” users and anti-spam vendors
(tags: dnswl dns whitelists dnsbls filtering anti-spam)
‘Ireland’ Reddit : quite a busy news aggregator, it turns out — 1,960 registered readers and a lot of traffic at this stage. worth bookmarking
(tags: ireland reddit local news aggregation)
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)