Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail : first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws — for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
(tags: dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet)
Author: dailylinks
xboxdrv : ‘a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.’
(tags: drivers xbox360 controllers remote linux ubuntu xboxdrv joystick input)
moreutils : ‘a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.’ these are really, really nifty (via popey)
(tags: via:popey unix cli command-line linux moreutils sponge pee ts vipe zrun perl for:pixelbeat)
Ubuntu One Time Passwords/Single Use Passwords HOWTO : I should do this on my hosts
(tags: ssh server security opie otp skey one-time-passwords ubuntu linux sshd)FlexGet : torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
(tags: bittorrent automation boxee linux python rss torrents tv flexget)
Interpolation search : neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
(tags: algorithms programming search via:jzawodny)Overclocking SSL : techie details from Adam Langley on how Google’s been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
(tags: certificates encryption google https latency speed ssl tcp tls web performance)Cory Doctorow’s working environment : hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
(tags: cory-doctorow geek howto lifehacks ubuntu productivity tips tools)
O2.ie blocking popular image-hosting sites imgur.com, imageshack.com : apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
(tags: iwf fail blocking filtering o2 ireland imgur imageshack censorship fps)
Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right : ‘every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.’
(tags: broadband finland legal rights law human-rights three-strikes)new gastropub opening in Stoneybatter : there goes the neighbourhood! ‘L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.’ Sign me up
(tags: gastropubs stoneybattery dublin d7 food drink)
Date::Manip Error in Ubuntu 10.04 : “XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly” — caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
(tags: date-manip xmltv breakage mythtv ubuntu lucid 10.04)Misco.ie : another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
(tags: shopping components hardware ireland)
Signature-based AV is failing : on average across the AV industry, 40% block rates just after 0-hour of a new malware sample, rising to 60% after 5 days. sounds like the AV industry is losing, if this chart is valid. (via Terry Zink)
(tags: via:tzink malware av fail accuracy detection false-negatives scanners viruses)Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs [PDF] : sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
(tags: sort merge hash join databases performance cpu simd multicore)
Network Advertising Initiative: Opt-Out of Behavioural Advertising : ‘developed for the express purpose of allowing consumers to “opt out” of the behavioral advertising delivered by our member companies’ — opt out of the top 50 or so ad programs with a couple of clicks, via Jordan Sissel. great stuff
(tags: ads advertising browser cookies via:jordansissel google marketing opt-out privacy tracking web behavioral)
Monitor anything and get free notifications on your iPhone – amix.dk : using notifo.com, which has an app in the App Store allowing anyone to send push notifications via their web site. I can see lots of uses for this, not least to evade SMS fees ;)
(tags: notification push sms iphone notifo)
Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market “flash crash?” : wonderful; our world’s economies are now more networked than ever, and vulnerable to the attacks which that enables. Have we learned nothing from the last few years?
(tags: networking internet ddos stock-markets security)
John Graham-Cumming: What’s wrong with Flash Cookies? : Macromedia created a “parallel” cookie infrastructure, which is not cleared/controlled by browser cookie controls. Heinous! I had no idea. Checking mine, it was full of ad-tracking crap
(tags: cookies flash privacy crapware ads)
All slides/notes from the first 2 days of Velocity 2010 : PDFs, docs, links
(tags: slides scalability velocity conferences scaling pdf)Introduction to Unity Launcher « Canonical Design : The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too
(tags: canonical ui unity linux gnome desktop design)
The Deus Ex 3 demonstration, blow-by-blow : PC Gamer : big thumbs-up for ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution’. I’m looking forward to it
(tags: deus-x games xbox previews)We’re Back… so long MongoDB! · Blue74 : MongoDB war story — records going missing, eek
(tags: mongodb mysql nosql rant stability beta)Hadoop and the fight against shape-shifting spam : Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale
(tags: hadoop yahoo anti-spam filtering)Petit: Log Analysis : log analyzer; removes common strings and patterns from log files, identifying outliers and hapaxen as “interesting”. also does charting of frequencies etc.
(tags: logs logging analysis loganalysis syslog tools)self-replicating configuration in Conway’s Game Of Life created : The “spaceship” configuration replicates in 33699586 generations, using 2 construction arms and a volley of gliders circulating between them
(tags: via:newscientist game-of-life life cellular-automata gliders self-replicating)
UPC file-sharing court action begins – The Irish Times : it’s with Mr Justice Peter Charleton again — the Colmcille-misquoting judge from the Eircom case. here’s hoping the Data Protection Commissioner gets off their arse and does their job this time around
(tags: upc ireland law filesharing irma copyright)
SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder : good idea — generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)
(tags: via:omgubuntu avi mplayer conversion divx encoding howto rip xvid video mencoder)build a Yagi-Uda wifi booster from styrofoam and copper wire : nifty link from Heise; works for 802.11b and 11g. Unfortunately I think my own wifi issues are to do with dying AP hardware
(tags: wifi 802.11g 802.11b wireless yagi antennas diy hacking hardware)MapReduce as a way to cope with high-latency memory : interesting thoughts from Kragen
(tags: kragen thoughts random mapreduce memory speed latency)
O2 iPhone Customers – Get out of contract! – boards.ie : wow, O2 Ireland seem to have dropped the ball something rotten here. customers taking advantage of this in droves to escape the heinous 18-month lock-in
(tags: o2 ireland loophole contract law)Designing an Integrated Map for a Visionary Public Transport System for Dublin : excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)
(tags: via:antoin bus travel dublin ireland rapid-transit public-transport design usability maps mapping)
Chatroulette Working On Genital Recognition Algorithm : just *male* genitalia, mind. I dread to think of what the training corpus looks like
(tags: chatroulette algorithms machine-learning genitalia nsfw slashdot)
Balsamiq Mockups : create wireframe mock-ups quickly, via Confluence/JIRA/desktop/fogbugz plugins (via Joe)
(tags: via:jdrumgoole wireframes mockups ui web usability balsamiq layout prototype)
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1900 Hybrid TV (1179) – dabs.com : Back looking at these again, as Padraig noted the SundTek drivers are closed source; at least pvrusb2 is OSS
(tags: hauppauge drivers hardware linux tv tuners os)SEO Is Mostly Quack Science : ‘There is no hypothesis being tested here. It’s just graphs, and misleading graphs at that. The sad part is, SEOMoz is as close as the SEO industry comes to real science. They may be presenting specious results in hopes of looking like they know what they’re talking about, but at least they are collecting some sort of data. Everything else in the field is either anecdotal hocus-pocus or a decree from Matt Cutts. When you hire an SEO consultant, what you are really paying for is domain experience in the not-failing-at-web-design field.’
(tags: seo ted-dziuba rants science seomoz quality correlation statistics google)
gitPAN : CPAN and BackPAN, as a set of git repositories; essentially a read-only view of all CPAN releases, ever. good plan; I like the way git is useful as a kind of general-purpose distributed archive system
(tags: git gitpan cpan backpan perl releases archives history version-control)SundTek MythTV analog setup : ‘Analog TV is working again with MythTV which comes with the final Ubuntu 10.04 release’ — MythTV support is officially tested by SundTek support staff! I think we have a clear winner
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)Sundtek MediaTV Pro (TV Cards) – Ubuntu Linux Hardware Compatibility List : ‘I can recommend that USB device, I never had a device which has such an easy installation under linux.’
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)SundTek Media TV Pro Linux install docs : official, and pretty voluminous. looks good
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)
Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1900 Hybrid Analogue and Digital USB TV Tuner : seems to be a safe option for MythTV analog TV and DVB-T support on this side of the pond
(tags: tv hauppauge linux mythtv ireland tuner)pvrusb2 Linux drivers for the Hauppauge product line : Jesus Christ Hauppauge. get a clue already, why are you making it so hard for Linux users to buy your bloody hardware?!
(tags: htpc linux pvr mythtv usb hauppauge pvrusb2 drivers hardware)Today’s Guardian : Phil Gyford reworks the Grauniad’s website using their open content API. I really like the navigation and just-the-text nature, but I still feel a need to know what other articles are “nearby”, which this doesn’t quite provide. Still, excellent work
(tags: phil-gyford news newspapers gu guardian design usability reading readability webdesign)
Emoji Symbols in Unicode: PILE OF POO : “unchi” / “unchimaaku”, a little Emoji icon of a dog turd. unfortunately still in “proposed” status, not yet a Unicode point, boo
(tags: poo funny emoji unicode unchi shit)practical Linux commands quick-ref sheet : from Padraig Brady. lots of nice one-liners I wasn’t familiar with
(tags: padraig-brady bash cli linux reference sysadmin tips commands)Point Village Market : a new outdoor weekend market for Dublin, at the O2 on the north quays. good farmer’s market selection, and plans to do free-for-all stalls for random members of the public to sell “yard sale” type stuff, a la the Dublin Flea Market
(tags: the-point o2 ireland dublin markets farmers-markets shopping via:sboyle)
Petrodvorets Watch Factory’s black list : vendors of fake Raketas — pretty much all of the current eBay auctions are on this list :(
(tags: fakes raketa watches ebay)Russian watch RAKETA 24 hour white dial. Polar design. on eBay : 24-hour analog CCCP-era Raketa watches. want. almost definitely fake going by the price, but still very nifty (via adampsyche)
(tags: russia raketa watches analog want 24-hour via:adampsyche)
Amazon.com: Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player : $99, 10-watt, fanless device to stream HD1080p video, in pretty much any format, from a network server to your TV. crazy. quite competitive with the Acer Aspire Revo; downside: less open
(tags: tv wd wd-tv-live hdtv hd video set-top-box home)WebM : open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I’d guess
(tags: codec foss google open-source patents audio video vp8 webm standards mozilla open web)How Etsy deploy their site : pretty basic
(tags: etsy infrastructure ops sysadmin continuousintegration deployinator deployment)
GitHub scheduled maintainance due to Redis upgrade : good comments on the processes useful for large-scale Redis upgrades
(tags: upgrades redis spof nosql databases github deployment)Mea Culpa : ‘Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.’ Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt
(tags: via:janl coding programming software philosophy languages lisp elitism)Ca’n Quiros, Soller, Spain : many atrocious TripAdvisor reviews of this kip which ripped us off heavily last week. looking forward to adding my $.02. roll on data roaming limits so I can check TA via 3G before we sit down ;)
(tags: restaurants food soller spain rip-offs scams dodgy tripadvisor)
iPhone 3GS GPS suddenly stops working? here’s the fix : via a forum on MacRumors — blow away the locationd cache. Worked perfectly for me after my GPS crapped out halfway through my holidays :( Requires that the phone be jailbroken first
(tags: iphone gps software 3gs reliability bugs macrumors jailbreaking locationd)
SoundCloud Developers Manifesto : ‘We recognize that only through your apps and hacks, can SoundCloud fully realize its potential as the audio platform.’
(tags: apps hacks soundcloud mp3 music hosting files json rest oauth apis http)Good volcanic-ash links : European air traffic control Twitter feed and NOC site, via Boards.ie. The thread itself is a good reference, too
(tags: volcano ash vaac twitter boards.ie threads travel air holidays)2-day volcanic ash forecasts over Europe : using SNAP, the Norwegian Meterological Institute’s nuclear-fallout modelling system. Very useful, much niftier than the UK version, and much more *publicly available* than the Irish version
(tags: europe volcano norway yr.no met.no weather ash snap modelling forecasts)
The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City « Viceland Games : interview with the guy behind the “Magnasanti” video. [Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi] ‘presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar – depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society – with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.’ WHOA
(tags: whoa mental architecture culture gaming society video simcity urban vice)
New programming jargon you coined? – Stack Overflow : some nice coding neologisms here. aside from “Refuctoring” (see other link), I like “The Duck” (a sacrificial feature, used to distract cut-crazy bosses from useful features) and “Stringly Typed” (an implementation that needlessly relies on strings when programmer and refactor friendly options are available)
(tags: coding funny slang neologisms jargon stack-overflow the-duck stringly-typed)Refuctoring : ‘the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself’ (via Mozai)
(tags: funny refuctoring via:Mozai coding tests tdd programming software)
UK Met Office: Volcanic Ash Cloud Maps : updated 4 times daily, maps of Europe indicating coverage of the ash cloud. I’m going to be F5’ing this constantly over the next week as I’m supposed to be flying on Sunday :(
(tags: airports hazards iceland travel maps weather volcanic-ash ash forecast europe met-office holidays ash-cloud)
The result of the IMRO & music blogger meeting | Nialler9 Music Blog : upshot: IMRO will think about it and get back to Nialler et al; in the meantime, everyone operates as before. one to keep an eye on, even if you’re not Irish; this will play out overseas soon too. Good call getting Simon McGarr along
(tags: music mp3 shakedown imro nialler9 ip)EU must break down national copyright barriers, says EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes : “There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material. The problem is that it’s illegal […] We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed.” “While the internet is borderless, Europe’s online markets are not. It is often easier to buy something from a US website than online from the country next-door in Europe. Often you cannot buy it at all within Europe.”
(tags: copyright piracy neelie-kroes quotes eu ec music ip)Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites : ‘Falling victim to a [phish] isn’t just a matter of not being wise to the ways of the world: it’s a matter of being caught out in a moment of distraction and of unlikely circumstance.’ +1, that matches with the personal phishing stories I’ve heard from others
(tags: phishing cory-doctorow security anti-phishing scams distraction twitter)
Dutch forum thread on splitting analog signals from a UPC Thomson DCI-6221 DVR : I’m trying to figure out how I can rebuild a MythTV box with new UPC equipment. this claims that you can split the cable before it enters the Cisco cablemodem, and get analog TV off the basic cable that way. hmm
(tags: analog tv upc mythtv dci6221 mediabox cable-tv)the world’s largest DVR : SnapStream’s 100TB rack which records 50 analog TV channels simultaneously
(tags: snapstream video tv storage hardware analog television)Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks — PNAS : ‘we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (E. coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. … both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. … These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.’ (via adulau)
(tags: via:adulau papers toread genetics genome call-graph linux kernel e-coli operating-systems transcriptional-regulatory-network)
A fast, fuzzy, full-text index using Redis : quite easy, using a Metaphone sound-like indexing scheme to provide the fuzz
(tags: metaphone sounds-like indexing python redis search full-text fuzzy)Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit : yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less
(tags: ip law legal novell linux open-source patents redhat swpats uspto acacia-technologies)article on the IMRO-vs-blogs LOEL spat : by an ex-Hot-Press staffer. interesting: Hot Press ‘also publish MQ, the IMRO members’ periodical.’ well, that would explain a lot
(tags: hot-press ireland music mp3 loel imro shakedown)Indie music mogul: The net’s great for us : Martin Mills of Beggar’s Banquet. thought-provoking interview, and he nails it on this: “People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You’ve got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You’ll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links.” That EXACTLY described my situation a few years back
(tags: martin-mills beggars-banquet music record-labels xl mp3 filesharing)
Facebook | Save Irish Music Blogs From IMRO! : join this group to add your voice
(tags: facebook imro shakedown blogs ireland music mp3)the torture garden: On Hot Press and My Place In The Real Economy : it seems Hot Press have come up with some Paul-McGuinness-esque pro-IMRO one-sided turdery masquerading as journalism. shock me
(tags: imro shakedown hot-press tat journalism ireland dublin)Two bands pull out of IMRO show in blog protest : fair play to The Cast Of Cheers and Mia Sparrow, cancelling their show in response to IMRO’s actions
(tags: imro shakedown bands music ireland the-cast-of-cheers the-richter-collective)Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA : incredible. Almost every single modern camera capable of recording video now requires that you obtain a license from MPEG-LA to use recorded footage for commercial purposes. These clauses are currently not enforced, but could be. Horrifying (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf patents mpeg2 codec compression consumer-rights copyright legal law mpeg h264 mpegla codecs)
Make your own sourdough | Life and style | The Guardian : more recipes. This one looks like a good guide to creating a starter culture, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while
(tags: sourdough bread recipes food guardian)Thomasina Miers’ simple Mexican recipes | Life and style | The Observer : some pretty good “ports” of Mexican recipes to ingredients available over here, must try these
(tags: mexican food guardian recipes tortas tlayudas ceviche tacos burritos)Stephen Walter’s The Island : truly amazing artwork, as featured in the BBC4 documentary ‘Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art’ last week. ‘The Island satirises the London-centric view of the English capital and its commuter towns as independent from the rest of the country. The artist, a Londoner with a love of his native city, offers up a huge range of local and personal information in words and symbols. Walter speaks in the dialect of today, focusing on what he deems interesting or mundane.’
(tags: maps stephen-walter cool detail the-island london)
ScamNailer – Anti-Phishing Filter : a generated set of SpamAssassin rules containing known-phisher addresses
(tags: scams phishing spear-phishing spamassassin rules anti-phishing)Endangered sites in Britain and Ireland to see before they die : including Roundstone Bog, burned to a crisp last week :(
(tags: roundstone bogs ireland connemara tourism endangered)Irish music blogs under attack over royalties | Music | guardian.co.uk : ‘If IMRO goes ahead with its plan, targeting music blogs around the world, there will soon be legions of frustrated bloggers. And it will be much worse if other regional publishers follow suit.’
(tags: imro ireland guardian news blogs music mp3 shakedown)Vending Spree : ‘I am going to consume and review every item in my office vending machine and there is nothing you can do to stop me.’
(tags: vending-machines funny blogs food daily)Why We’re Siding With The Bloggers and Why IMRO’s LOEL Blog License Won’t Work : good post from online music marketing site Amp.ie
(tags: music mp3 blogging blogs ireland imro shakedown loel)On The Record » “This music blogger IMRO licence thing” : Jim Carroll’s blog post on the IMRO mp3blog shakedown. Comment thread has some good stuff from Irish music heads
(tags: imro mp3 blogs music ireland jim-carroll shakedown)IMRO propose massive increase in indie cinema fees : what are they up to? ‘1 per cent levy on the gross box-office takings of every cinema in the country … Smaller cinema operators who attended a meeting … said the proposal amounted in some cases to a five to sevenfold increase on their existing royalties payments.’
(tags: imro wtf cinema movies ireland shakedown)Nialler9’s getting the IMRO shakedown : Irish music blogs apparently need to pay a minimum of EUR150/year to the collection agency for “making copyrighted music available online” — and they intend to ask _all_ sites who offer music, Irish or not, to pay this fee (!)
(tags: imro shakedown nialler9 ireland music mp3 blogs blogging)
Mix Tape Amnesty : ha! ‘The amnesty was created in an effort to finally rid the country of illegally taped music. Although technology has evolved, the law on this issue has remained unchanged and these mix-tapes still constitute a threat to artist royalties.’ Remember: home taping is killing music
(tags: mixtapes funny history ireland virals music mp3 filesharing)
“Child pornography is great”, according to one EU music-business lobbyist : it’s the perfect ‘gateway’ to allow anti-filesharing filtering of the internet. ‘Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.’ Via TJ McIntyre
(tags: via:tjmcintyre ifpi filesharing child-porn filtering internet johan-schluter anti-piracy-group sweden denmark eu)