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Author: Justin

Justin Mason, the author of this weblog.

I’m a Dermotologist!

Found here:

On Wednesday 20 May 2009, speaking at a parliamentary Justice Committee debating his new blasphemy law, Dermot Ahern joked that people were making blasphemous comments about him, and he compared his own purity to that of the baby Jesus.

So we have a Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary Justice Committee discussing his own blasphemy law, that could make his own jokes illegal.

In honour of this Ministerial revelation, we have founded the Church of Dermotology. We believe God sent Dermot Ahern to save Ireland from rational thinking. Our sacred symbol is the Star of Dermot.

Our sacred beliefs are quite similar to those of other religions.

  • We believe ice cream wafers are literally the body of Dermot Ahern.
  • We believe Dermot Ahern created the universe on Wed 20 may 2009.
  • We’re sometimes not sure whether Dermot Ahern really exists.
  • We believe it is blasphemous to publish an image of Dermot Ahern.
  • We refuse to gather sticks on the Sabbath, which is Wednesday.
  • We wear magic underpants that protect us from fire and bullets.
  • We are outraged whenever anybody insults our sacred beliefs.
  • We fervently support Dermot Ahern’s proposed blasphemy law.
  • If it is passed, we will be regularly outraged, and will take test cases.

Like Scientologists, Dermotologists offer a free personality test. Question one: are you vulnerable? Question two: have you money? If you answer yes to either of these questions, you’re in.

After you join, check out the campaign against the Irish blasphemy law at blasphemy.ie.

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Health and Safety

A while back a friend of mine mailed us all with this classic of overweening health-and-safety bureaucrats gone wild:

The company are now installing wallpaper on our PCs with their 5 golden safety rules:

  1. Always hold the handrail

  2. Always reverse park

  3. Assess Risks

  4. Accept Challenges

  5. Wear PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] gear

We also have to drink from metal cups with plastic lids on them.

The thing that really got me was #2 — ‘always reverse park’. Apparently, someone decided that reversing into the parking space was safer than going in head-first, and to such a significant degree that it was worth mandating it across a medium-sized company. On the other hand, another friend noted:

The college i went to [in the US] would ticket you if you backed into a parking space — they said it was a “fire hazard”.

so we’ve got “fire hazard” in one direction and “unsafe” in the other. Parse that.

Another friend was told that she couldn’t bring her folding bike in the lift because “what would happen if the president was in the lift going to the board room?”. She says “I could not work out the health and safety implications.”

What health and safety insanity have you encountered recently?

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Gravatar Fail

Hey Gravatar. When you auto-generate an avatar image, like you did with the one to right, could you do me a favour and omit the bits that look like swastikas? kthxbai!

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Open source ‘full text’ bookmarklet and feed filter

Last year, I blogged about Full-Text RSS, a utility to convert those useless “partial-text” RSS/Atom feeds into the real, full-story-inline deal.

The only downside is that the author felt it necessary to withhold the source, saying:

Still, I wouldn’t want to offer a feature that middlemen can resell at the expense of bloggers. So while I do want to open this up, I don’t want to make things easy for the unscrupulous.

However, recently Keyvan Minoukadeh from the Five Filters project got in touch to say:

I recently created a similar service (along with a bookmarklet for it). […] It’s a free software (open source) project so code is also available.

Here it is:

fivefilters.org: Create Full-Text Feeds

I’ve tried it out and it works great, and the source is indeed downloadable under the AGPL.

Five Filters — its overarching project — looks interesting, too:

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky describe the media as businesses which sell a product (readers) to other businesses (advertisers). In their propaganda model of the media they point to five ‘filters’ which determine what we read in the newspapers and see on the television. These filters produce a very narrow view of the world that is in line with government policy and business interests.

In this project we try to encourage readers to explore the world of non-corporate online news, websites which avoid the five filters of the propaganda model. We also try to make these sources of news more accessible by allowing users to print the stories found on these alternative news sites in the format of a newspaper.

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User script: add my delicious search results to Google

For years now, I’ve been collecting bookmarks at delicious.com/jm — nearly 7000 of them by now. I’ve been scrupulous about tagging and describing each one, so they’re eminently searchable, too. I’ve frequently found this to be a very useful personal reference resource.

I was quite pleased to come across the Delicious Search Results on Google Greasemonkey userscript, accordingly. It intercepts Google searches, adding Delicious tag-search results at the top of the search page, and works pretty well. Unfortunately though, that searches all of delicious, not specifically my own bookmarks.

So here’s a quick hack fix to do just that:

my_delicious_search_results.user.js – My Delicious Search Results on Google

Shows tag-search results from my Delicious account on Google search pages, with links to more extensive Delicious searches. Use ‘User Script Commands‘ -> ‘Set Delicious Username‘ to specify your username.

Screenshot:

Enjoy!

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Still using perl 5.6.x?

For the upcoming release of Apache SpamAssassin, we’re considering dropping support for perl 5.6.x interpreters. Perl 5.6.0 is 9 years old, and the most recent maintainance release, 5.6.2, dates back to November 2003. The current 5.x release branch is 5.10, so we’re still sticking with a “support the release branch before the current one” policy this way.

If you’re still using one of the 5.6.x versions, or know of a (relatively recent) distro that does, please reply to highlight this….

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IBM Ad Execs Who Should Be Fired

Watching television last night, I couldn’t fail to take notice of this new IBM ad:

‘For the first time in history, more people live in cities than anywhere else, which means cities have to get smarter.’ […] ‘Paris has smart healthcare; smart traffic systems in Brisbane keep traffic moving; Galway has smart water’.

Jaw-dropping. That would be this Galway?

A major water crisis has left scores of people ill and tens of thousands at risk from contamination in a west of Ireland city. Galway’s water supply has been hit by an outbreak of the parasite cryptosporidium, with up to 170 people now confirmed to have been affected by a serious stomach bug as a result. Tests found that the city’s water supply contained nearly 60 times the safe limit of cryptosporidium pollution. Residents have already been unable to drink or use water for food preparation for weeks.

Residents in parts of Co. Galway have been hit by a new outbreak of the cryptosporidium parasite.Tests on the Roundstone Public Water Scheme showed trace elements of the parasite, as did water schemes for Inishnee and Errisbeg.

Council engineers in Galway have begun work on providing safe drinking water for up to 1,000 householders […] where supplies have been contaminated by lead. The residents have been advised not to drink tap water until further notice.

Apparently the IBM ad is referring to something to do with tides and aquaculture in Galway Bay, rather than the worst sequence of water-quality disasters in Ireland for several decades. But really — someone at IBM’s marketing department should have done a little more research first before using that line…

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Mae’s OK!

Well, that was a really scary few days.

On Monday, the lovely C was nearly 2 weeks overdue, and was scheduled to come into the Rotunda for induction the next morning; then contractions started on Monday afternoon. We were happy, as avoiding induction was good news for a natural birth, allowing the process to be run through the excellent Domino scheme, etc.

So we went in, arriving at the Rotunda ER for 3.45 or so. They put on the CTG to monitor the baby’s heartbeats, and the first 3 contractions were strong, but everything seemed OK. The next one, however, the baby’s heart rate dropped dramatically — to a very low 40bpm; I called the ER nurses, they ran in, put C on oxygen, and that seemed to help, returning the rate to normal — but on the next contraction the baby’s heart rate dropped even further. Once that happened, the shit hit the fan. In seconds C was on a trolley heading for surgery. It was clear this was serious trouble.

I was left standing outside the theatre while she was operated on — as an emergency Caesarean section there was no time for luxuries like hapless husbands stumbling around the background. Probably just as well. The midwives and surgical staff kept me as well informed as was possible, though.

After a terrifying 10 minutes, the prognosis improved a little. Initially they were worried that the baby had put pressure on the cord, but this was discounted — in fact the baby had emptied its bowels of meconium in the womb, which irritated it enough to cause enough distress and cause its heart rate to crash. After 10 minutes, the baby was out (and was a girl!), and C was going to be OK at least. however the baby was at quite a lot of risk from aspiration of meconium and possible brain damage due to reduced oxygen in the womb. holy shit. :(

The baby had indeed aspirated some meconium, causing a collapsed lung. Over the next couple of days in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, the little mite had surgery to introduce a chest tube into her pleura to re-inflate the lung, and was treated with a variety of treatments to deal with meconium in her stomach.

The best bit was this afternoon when we got news that the results of her cranial ultrasound were in — all clear, no brain damage. Then C got to feed her and hold her — and she latched on like some kind of milk-seeking missile. what a little trooper.

Anyway, with any luck, 2 or 3 days from now they’ll both be able to come home in one piece.

We were lucky btw — if we hadn’t been in the ER at the time, it was very unlikely that the prognosis would have been anywhere near as good. And I have to give credit to the Rotunda staff, they did a great job.

pics on Flickr!

Update, 7 June: C was released from hospital yesterday, and Mae got the all-clear this morning. We’re now all back home, healthy and in one piece. Now we can just get on with the usual second-child excitement-slash-drama! phew!

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Michael Woods saying “the Brits made us do it”

If you were listening to the Marian Finucane show on RTE Radio 1 last Saturday afternoon, you might have heard the mind-boggling stuff coming out of Michael Woods, the Fianna Fail former Education Minister with a “strong Catholic faith” who brokered the controversial backroom deal back in 2003 which allowed the Catholic Church and its institutions to evade prosecution on child abuse.

Here’s a great thread on Politics.ie where quite a few folks boggle at the incredible things he said.

Thanks to Podcasting Ireland, I was able to track down and cut out this segment, so here is a recording of Michael Woods coming up with the pathetic excuse of how the British forced the Christian Brothers to abuse children:

Michael Woods – the brits made us do it.mp3 (951KB)

The last refuge of a cornered FFer — blame the British. Absolutely incredible. It has to be heard to be believed. What century is this again?

Update: according to Mary Raftery in the Irish Times, this is a preview of the religious right’s tactics:

‘It Is easy to discount former government minister and senior Fianna Fáil member Michael Woods. A former minister, he is no longer a prominent figure. He has, however, left a festering sore behind him which continues to weep poison every now and then. The infamous church-State deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse, under which the religious orders pay a mere 10 per cent of the compensation bill, was at its most septic over the weekend.

Woods, the main architect of the deal, defended it on the television news and gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.’

We marched in the streets about this stuff. It’s like the 90’s never happened.

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New EC2 Features

Amazon Cloudwatch:

This is nifty. Monitor EC2 instances and load balancers; CPU, data transfer rates, disk usage, disk activity, HTTP/TCP request counts/latency, “healthy/unhealthy” instances (see below). This data is both exposed via web service APIs, but also usable as input for their new “Auto Scaling” elastic scaling feature. Ideal for someone to write a Nagios plugin for. Also, I’m looking forward to some kick-ass sysadmin dataviz for this.

Auto-Scaling:

Elastically scale out (or in) your grid of EC2 instances, based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. An officially-supported form of a myriad of third-party apps. I expect to hear of people accidentally spending a fortune due to accidental misuse of this ;)

Elastic Load Balancing:

Load balance across multiple EC2 instances, report metrics to Cloudwatch such as requests/second and request latency, and — most usefully of all in my opinion — shift traffic away from EC2 instances that fail to respond to a “health-check” HTTP GET with a 200, or fail to accept a TCP connection.

In other words, this provides a way to do decent HA on EC2, which is something that’s been much needed for a long time, and is quite tricky to set up using Linux-HA. I’ve done the latter, and found it full of potential reliability pitfalls; I found that Elastic IP addresses were not useful for quickly failing over to backup servers; in some cases, I found it taking about 5 minutes to fail over :( The only (relatively) snappy way to implement it was to set up a dynamic DNS record with a short TTL, point to it using a CNAME, and use “ddclient” to switch it when failing over. And even that could leave sites down for as long as it takes the DNS client to time out the existing cached CNAME.

Elastic Load Balancing supports HTTP or generic TCP connections. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support “real” termination of HTTPS connections, which is unfortunate. (You can terminate them as generic TCP connections, though.)

More details on the RightScale blog, at the AWS dev blog, and Werner Vogel’s blog.

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The Pay-No-Attention-To-Our-Tiny-Logo Party

In the current run-up to the local elections here in Ireland, it’s pretty obvious that Fianna Fail, the ruling party who’ve screwed the economy with mismanagement and rampant cronyism, are in line for a massive drubbing. So much so, in fact, that their own candidates are attempting to hide their party affiliations.

Check out this poster for candidate Kenneth O’Flynn (son of FF TD Noel O’Flynn):

what logo, you ask? Look closer:

Compare that to what FF posters used to look like, 2 years ago:

Meath FF councillor Nick Killian has removed the logo from his leaflet’s front page entirely, too.

Thanks to martinoc for the Bertie’s Team poster, and Ivor in the comments of this post at On The Record for the photos of Kenny’s posters. There’s gold in those comments…

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Spoon’s Rhubodka Recipe

Today on Twitter, the perennial rhubarb topic — ie. what to do with all this rhubarb — came up. Here’s a recipe I picked up from a man called spoon which may help:

I’ve mentioned this before, but just in case…. Rhumember kids:

  • 1 empty 2 litre bottle
  • 4 or 5 sticks of pink rhubarb
  • 110g caster sugar
  • 1 litre of vodka

Cut the rhubarb into inch chunks and put them into the empty bottle until it is not empty any more and you have run out of rhubarb.

Add the sugar

Add the Vodka

Shake vigorously

Leave to stand in a dark corner for maybe 4 weeks or until you can’t wait any longer. You should certainly wait until all the sugar has gone. The longer you leave it the more Rhubarby goodness will be pulled out by the sugar.

Strain all the rhubarb out.

CONGRATULATION. YOU HAVE UNLOCKED RHUBODKA.

DRINK THE RHUBODKA

It sounds awful, but instead of being that, it is fucking awesome.

I have a bottle of this stewing away on top of my kitchen cabinet. It should be ready just in time to toast the arrival of child #2 ;)

PS: “rhubodka” is a googlewhack!

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Spirit of Ireland

Spirit of Ireland looks very nifty.

It’s extremely simple — a group of Irish ‘entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, architects and legal and financial experts’ are calling for Ireland to achieve energy independence and become a net exporter of green energy within five years, by building a number of wind farms on our western seaboard, buffering the generated energy in water reservoirs using pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

This kind of massive-scale public-works engineering project has a strong historical precedent in Ireland — Ardnacrusha, opened in 1929, was the largest hydroelectric station in the world for a time. Given that Turlough Hill is a pumped-storage facility, it can even be beautiful ;)

We can certainly do it, given sufficient government vision. I’d love to see it happen. Great stuff!

(image credit: CC-licensed image from Ganders on Flickr. thanks!)

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Irish Examiner innumeracy

Here’s a great example of numerical illiteracy spotted by my mate Tom:

some classic reporting in the Irish Examiner today

“Department staff clocked up 20,000 sick days in the three years” is the headline. Closer examination of the article reveals there are 5,000 people in the department. Do the maths (which the paper doesn’t – I wonder why) and that’s a SHOCKING 1.3 sick days a year.

Even better is this quote: “Department of Agriculture staff clocked up 3,095 uncertified sick days last year – 653 of these on a Monday”

So that would be about a fifth of the sick days being taken on one of the five working days in the week. DISGRACE!

Let’s hear it for old media’s commitment to quality journalism!

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Reminder: Irish computing history talk next Monday

Don’t forget — next Monday, the Heritage Society of Engineers Ireland, in association with The Irish Computer Society, and the ICT and Electronic and Electrical Divisions of Engineers Ireland, will be hosting an evening lecture entitled “Reminiscences of Early days of Computing in Ireland”, by Gordon Clarke (M.A., CEng., F.B.C.S., C.I.T.P., F.I.C.S). Sounds like it’ll be great. More details.

Update: it starts at 8pm; useful info! Also, the event’s flyer can be found on this page, which notes:

For those new to using our webcast facility, please see www.engineersireland.ie/webcast for information on how to set-up and access our webcasts. To view the event, please log onto the url below: https://engineersireland.webex.com/engineersireland/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=841959965 The password: computer
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Linux per-process I/O performance: measuring the wrong thing

A while back, I linkblogged about “iotop”, a very useful top-like UNIX utility to show which processes are initiating the most I/O bandwidth.

Teodor Milkov left a comment which is well worth noting, though:

Definitely iotop is a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately it’s still hard to tell who’s wasting most disk IO in too many situations.

Suppose you have two processes – dd and mysqld.

dd is doing massive linear IO and its throughput is 10MB/s. Let’s say dd reads from a slow USB drive and it’s limited to 10MB/s because of the slow reads from the USB.

At the same time MySQL is doing a lot of very small but random IO. A modern SATA 7200 rpm disk drive is only capable of about 90 IO operations per second (IOPS).

So ultimately most of the disk time would be occupied by the mysqld. Still iotop would show dd as the bigger IO user.

He goes into more detail on his blog. Fundamentally, iotop works based on what the Linux kernel offers for per-process I/O accounting, which is I/O bandwidth per second, not I/O operations per second. Most contemporary storage in desktops and low-end server equipment is IOPS-bound (‘A modern 7200 rpm SATA drive is only capable of about 90 IOPS’). Good point! Here’s hoping a future change to the Linux per-process I/O API allows measurement of IOPS as well…

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Big table desking

We have an extremely open-plan layout in work — no partitions, just long benches of keyboards and monitors. It looks a bit like this, but with less designer furniture and more Office Depot:

Aman pointed out that this is a new trend in workplace design, which Workalicious calls “Big Table Desking”:

I’m still not sure what to make of the frequent instances of Big Table Desking. While this kind of workstation arrangement is no doubt a new trend, the no-privacy work place is a throwback to the 1950s office pool, a line up of identical desks classroom style. Is it the peer to peer seating position that overcomes this? How would it? By building community? As opposed the pilot and passenger 747, catholic church model of everybody facing “forward”. Does the Big Table Desk break down this heirarchy by facing people towards one another, sharing a big desk instead of staking out territory? Is the big table desk a microcosm, a representation of a healthy organizational structure?

No comment ;)

It seems to be popular with designers, presumably due to their collaborative working needs.

Mind you, it also looks a bit like a Taylorist workplace layout from 1904, of which Wired says:

American engineer Frederick Taylor was obsessed with efficiency and oversight and is credited as one of the first people to actually design an office space. Taylor crowded workers together in a completely open environment while bosses looked on from private offices, much like on a factory floor.

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YouBloom plug

Last week I got a very nice mail looking to plug a new music site:

‘I’m not sure if this would interest you at all but wanted to pass on the link to a new website called YouBloom.

It’s a new social networking and e-commerce website set up with independent artists in mind – to help them to make make real money (unlike MySpace etc which just make money from the artists)! It was set up by Irish Musician Phil Harrington and is backed by Sir Bob Geldof.

Admittedly I am involved with the website. I have been helping bring artists on site for the last few months, since I was introduced to the concept by a friend, but would love for you to take a look at the site anyway – even if it turns out to be of no interest to you.’

I normally wouldn’t post these, but I’m a sucker for flattery ;) and the poster had taken the time to read my blog a little. It also looks like the site allows bands to offer free MP3 downloads of their tunes, which IMO is a key factor for bands trying to get promotion.

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UPC.ie’s new Channel 4 frequency for MythTV

So, after spending an hour or two attempting to figure out where the hell UPC had moved Channel 4 to, I eventually found out that it was now being broadcast on 543 Mhz. I also found out that this wasn’t part of the standard list of A1 to A30 channels in the “pal-ireland” range. :(

Thankfully, I then found this Frequency to MythTV channel converter page; here’s the correct values to use on the MythWeb channels page:

  • Freqid = 30
  • Finetune = -4
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“you are, in fact, in the message queue business”

Oh man, this Twitter Ruby-vs-Scala language spat is hilarious; talk about handbags at dawn. I loved this exchange in the comments to this post in particular:

BJ Clark:

I’m mostly surprised that a guy who wrote the book on Scala comes out and says that Scala is better than everything else and someone actually listened and took him seriously. He has a vested interest in saying that Scala is the next big thing and I’ve yet to see any evidence that Kestrel is better (at anything) than RabbitMQ.

And frankly, I still get fail whales at Twitter on a daily basis, so, what exactly are they so proud about over there?

Steve Jenson:

Kestrel pages queues to disk: if you get more messages than you have memory, it’s fine. If RabbitMQ gets more messages than memory, it crashes. We talked to them extensively about this problem and they’re going to address it. We were hoping we’d be able to use RabbitMQ or another message queue. We didn’t want to be in the message queue business. At this point, given that we know the code and it’s performance inside and out, it makes sense to continue using and developing it.

BJ Clark:

I don’t feel like arguing with you but your logic isn’t clear to me. It would make sense that if you don’t want to be in the message queue business, you’d submit patches against an established message queue to make it work in your situation instead of writing your own message queue, twice. This is overlooking the fact that twitter is basically a massive message queue and you are, in fact, in the message queue business.

Zing!

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URL shortening services: my experience

A good post from Joshua Schachter about URL shortening services.

For what it’s worth, I ran into the unwanted-interstitial risk. At one stage, before I’d bothered registering jmason.org, sitescooper.taint.org or my other domains, I used a URL-shortening service to provide a memorable, short URL for an open-source application I wrote — http://zap.to/snarfnews/.

At some point a few years down the line, the forwarding process started accreting ads; eventually they became soft-porn in content, and I was forced to apologise to users for the forwarding I could no longer control!

By now, 10 years down the line, it seems to hijack the page entirely, returning a page in Cyrillic I can’t even read :( (apparently it’s a page of Flash games; thanks, Alexandr Ciornii, for the interpretation!)

Anyway, lesson learned.

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“Report Says Deal”

Twitter has this “Trending Topics” sidebar now, which lists the following topics:

Trending Topics

  • TGIF
  • National Cleavage
  • G20
  • Easter
  • #grammarsongs
  • France
  • #rp09
  • French
  • Grand National
  • Report Says Deal

Now, I’m not going to go into the topic of National Cleavage right now. ‘Report Says Deal’ is intriguing because it makes no sense, until you click through to see:

Real-time results for “Report Says Deal”

  1. Too_cool_normal dlloydsecret Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb half a minute ago from twitterfeed    
  2. Orig_8102_003_normal dlloydthemlmpro Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb 1 minute ago from twitterfeed    
  3. Ad-tech-paul2_normal techupdates [PCWrld] Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://tinyurl.com/c63ont 3 minutes ago from twitterfeed    
  4. Orkut_normal icidade Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works. http://is.gd/quu9 4 minutes ago from TweetDeck    
  5. Img00315_normal chrisgraves Retweeting @CinWomenBlogger: Retweeting @ays: Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works – PC World http://bitly.com/LhT4 6 minutes ago from twhirl

So I’d say that Twitter’s “Trending Topics” uses N-grams of between 1 and 3 “words” for topic identification. In this case, rather than “Report Says Deal“, a better topic string would be something like:

Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works – PC World

or even:

Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works – PC World http://bitly.com/LhT4

Funnily enough this is exactly the issue I ran into while developing this algorithm. The trick at this point is to apply a variant of the BLAST pattern-discovery algorithm, expanding the patterns sideways while they still match the same subsets of the corpus until they’re maximal.

Twitter folks, if you can read Perl, “assemble_regexps()” in seek-phrases-in-log in SpamAssassin SVN does this pretty nicely, and reasonably efficiently, and is licensed under the ASL 2.0. ;)

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OSSBarCamp this weekend

It’s two days until OSSBarCamp, a free open-source-focussed Bar Camp unconference at Kevin Street DIT, this Saturday. I’m looking forward to it — although unfortunately I missed the boat on giving a talk. (Unlike the traditional Bar Camp model, this is using a pre-booked talk system.)

Particularly if you’re working with open source in Ireland, you should come along!

I have high hopes for John Looney’s discussion of cloud computing and how it interacts with open source. Let’s hope he’s not too Google-biased in his definition of “cloud computing”. ;)

Also of interest — Fintan Boyle’s “An Introduction To Developing With Flex”. To be honest, I hadn’t even realised that Adobe Flex was now open source. cool.

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Talk: Early days of Computing in Ireland

On Monday April 20th, the Heritage Society of Engineers Ireland, in association with The Irish Computer Society, and the ICT and Electronic and Electrical Divisions of Engineers Ireland, will be hosting an evening lecture: ‘Reminiscences of Early days of Computing in Ireland’:

In 1957 the Irish Sugar Company installed the first stored program computer in Ireland. Other large organisations slowly followed suit.

Gordon Clarke will discuss how the early computers enhanced the electro-mechanical systems that had developed over the previous 60 years. He will talk about their specifications, a few of the first applications and tell the story of the very early years of designing and developing computer based systems.

All Welcome. Admission Free. No booking required. This event will be web-cast

For Details: www.engineersireland.ie, or Con Kehely: (01) 6860113 (con.kehely /at/ dublincity.ie)

Location: Engineers Ireland, 22 Clyde Road D4

Sounds great! Thanks to Frank Duignan on the ILUG list for forwarding the notice.

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4chan Memes, circa 1889

In the comments to this unremarkable story about 4chan’s Boxxy fad, I came across this gem from CSClark:

I don’t know why I didn’t think to see if this sort of phenomenon was covered in Extraordinary Popular Delusions… Of course, it is.

Walk where we will, we cannot help hearing from every side a phrase repeated with delight, and received with laughter, by men with hard hands and dirty faces, by saucy butcher lads and errand-boys, by loose women, by hackney coachmen, cabriolet-drivers, and idle fellows who loiter at the corners of streets. Not one utters this phrase without producing a laugh from all within hearing. It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question; in short, it is the favourite slang phrase of the day, a phrase that, while its brief season of popularity lasts, throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour, and gives them reason to laugh as well as their more fortunate fellows in a higher stage of society.

Wherein we also learn that the FAIL of the day was Quoz:

When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip, and an impatient shrug of his shoulders. The universal monosyllable conveyed all his meaning, and not only told his opponent that he lied, but that he erred egregiously if he thought that any one was such a nincompoop as to believe him.

I’m also sure I’ve read of a fad – Greek, Roman, 18th century, something like that – where a group of young (aristocratic?) men who would suddenly grab a common woman and proclaim her Helen and make her their queen and swear to die for her and so on. And the tearing down of such idols could be seen, if you were wont to be pretentious like me, as part of Frazer’s Golden Bough’s Sacrificial King idea, although I’m not sure script kiddies care if the crops grow. (One other problem with that is that Frazer was romancing; but so are the more literal memecists, so yah!)

Since then however, it appears that “quoz” has entirely flipped meaning, according to UrbanDictionary:

slang for quality, a cockney term for something good. usually accompanied with a hand action of slaping ur index finger against the stationary thumb and middle finger. ‘thats quoz man! propa quoz.’ finger slappy hand thingy

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“Fundamentally flawed”

Killer presentation — “RPC And Its Offspring: Convenient, Yet Fundamentally Flawed” from Steve Vinoski, who presented it at QCon London last week. It’s full of reminders of the mid-90’s, hacking away on CORBA technology — Steve was one of the key players at Iona while I was there.

But never mind where we’ve been; let me hit you with the summary slide to show where Steve’s going:

  • RPC is a convenient but flawed accident of history

    • 1980s research focused on monoliths of programming languages, distributed applications, and operating systems
    • each computer vendor of the time owned their own full stack, from language to hardware and network, and you used what they gave you
    • imperative languages won back then simply because of their superior performance at that time
  • It’s almost 2010, folks — we can do WAY better

    • pull your head from the imperative language sand and learn functional programming
    • the world is many-core and highly distributed, and the old ways aren’t going to keep working much longer

Awesome ;)

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A plug for Kiva.org

I just made a loan using Kiva.org to a weaver in Nepal and a group of Vietnamese broom makers.

You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent — and you get updates letting you know how the entrepreneur is going.

The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back – and Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

Kiva’s microfinancing seems like a nice way of helping the developing world, and I’ve heard good things about it. Here’s hoping it works out well for my two recipients!

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Google Reader productivity hack: change your Home

So, if you use Google Reader, read your news with the “All items” page, and are subscribed to hundreds of feeds, it can be pretty overwhelming. I’ve found a better way to deal with this.

Select a ‘most important’ subset of feeds. For each of those, click through to the feed details page, hit the “Feed Settings…” menu, and select “Change folders…“. Put the feed into a new “top” folder (creating it if necessary).

Now go to “Settings” -> “Preferences” and check out the “Start page” preference. By default, it’s set to “Home“; change it to “Folders and Tags: top“.

Hey presto — now, when you load Google Reader, it’ll come up with your “top” items. You can get through those quickly enough, and get on to other more important tasks. When you’re bored and need something to read, though, just hit “Navigation” -> “All items” (or even just type ‘ga’), and every other feed is now there for your delectation. Sweet!

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Ready for the blackout?

Reminder — Ireland’s Blackout Week starts tomorrow:

Take part in Blackout Week

  1. To demonstrate your feelings about [IRMA’s censorship demands], you can make your avatar black on any websites you have a presence on.
  2. This is inspired by Creative Freedom New Zealand’s blackout campaign.
  3. From Black Thursday on the 5th of March, for one week, set your picture on sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, MSN, etc black to raise awareness for Blackout Ireland.
  4. On that Thursday we encourage you to express yourself publicly about this issue, whether by blog posts, letters to newspapers or any form of communication you can think of.
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Using VC to track system config changes by mail

Here’s a great idea from a thread on the SpamAssassin users list, from Roger Marquis:

Karsten Bräckelmann [questioning the utility of a mechanism to dump the entire contents of the SpamAssassin configuration database]:

‘postconf’ without the handy -n switch dumps about 500 lines. The equivalent dump for SA including the rules is about 6000 lines. And that’s a plain dump, without following and unfolding meta rules or anything.

Whether 6K or 60K would not necessarily make a difference to how I would like to use an SA ‘postconf -n’ equivalent. That use is change management. The intent is not in the full report itself but in its deltas.

As full time mail/systems admins we get invaluable data from tripwire/integrit, ‘postconf -n’, dconf, ‘rpm -qa’, ‘dpkg -l *’, ‘pkg_info -a’, … whose output is checked in to RCS daily. This provides a nice configuration snapshot and historical record but its real usefulness comes from rcsdiff piped into a daily report. These are (usually) relatively concise, and IMO, absolutely essential for monitoring production Unix/Linux systems.

I like it! I think I’d check it into a git repo, though. The concept of applying VC smarts to traditional sysadmin tasks is definitely a meme on the way up — see also etckeeper.

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Blackout Ireland – a response to IRMA’s censorship demands

As Adrian noted last week, IRMA are demanding that Eircom block the Pirate Bay — first on a list of websites they don’t like — on pain of being sued. On top of that, they intend for the other Irish ISPs to follow suit — here’s a key line from the letter they sent to Blacknight MD Michele Neylon:

in the event of a positive response to this letter it is proposed to make practical arrangements with Blacknight of a like nature to those made with eircom.

If that comes to pass, this will be an appalling situation for Irish internet users, and we need to act to ensure it doesn’t happen. Digital Rights Ireland:

The net effect of this scheme, if it is allowed to go into effect, will be to impose an internet death penalty on two groups. On users, who will be cut off on the allegation of a private body, with no court involvement, and on websites, which could be blocked to Irish users based on a court hearing where only one side is heard.

Pace Mulley:

So first they’ll start with the Pirate Bay. Then comes Mininova, IsoHunt, then comes YouTube (they have dodgy stuff, right?), how long before we have Boards.ie because someone quoted a newspaper article or a section of a book?

Digital Rights Ireland have posted an excellent document detailing the following plan of action for Irish internet users concerned about this:

  • Contact your ISP and let them know that this is a key issue for you, as their customer.

  • Join up with your fellow netizens. Subscribe to the Blackout Ireland blog. Follow the #blackoutirl hashtag on Twitter. Join the Blackout Ireland Facebook group. It looks likely that there’ll be a week-long blackout campaign starting next Thursday, March 5th.

  • Contact politicians. This is likely to cause irreparable damage to the Irish internet, so our pols should be very worried. See the DRI post for details on getting in touch with Minister for Communications Eamonn Ryan.

New Zealand is running their own blackout campaign right now, so that may help our planning.

International readers — make no mistake, you’re next. IRMA in this case is acting as the local delegate of IFPI, which stated in 2007 that this was one of the 3 technical options for ISPs to control piracy:

Here’s some other interesting coverage:

Fantastic interview with BitBuzz CEO Alex French:

If ISPs, including Eircom, agree not to oppose blocking access to The Pirate Bay and other similar websites, is this not an agreement to web censorship? “I don’t think there is any other way to interpret it,” said French.

“They are essentially agreeing to censor certain websites at the behest of the recording industry, without these websites ever having necessarily shown to be illegal in the Republic of Ireland. I would have a huge concern over what other websites may be blocked and what other industries will pile in now that the precedent has been set.”

Some sample letters:

And further discussion — here’s a massive boards.ie discussion thread, now closed in favour of this newer thread.

Update: here’s the letter I sent to the Minister, if you’re curious or need inspiration.

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Ubuntu to bundle Eucalyptus

Introducing Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10:

What if you want to build an EC2-style cloud of your own? Of all the trees in the wood, a Koala’s favourite leaf is Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware. It’s no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty – during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs.

A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat, and waking up when there’s work to be done. No need to drink at the energy fountain when there’s nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will help take the edge off the bear market.

AWESOME — exactly where the Linux server needs to go. Eucalyptus is the future of server farms. Really looking forward to this…

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Blimey, I won

Somehow or other, I seem to have won the 2009 Irish Blog Award for Best Technology Blog/Blogger! To be honest, for the last year I haven’t been spending as much time on the blog as before, due mainly to a rather compelling distraction, so I’m doubly grateful for winning.

Unfortunately, I was out of the country, at Nishad and Janet’s wedding, so missed my chance to get up on stage and thank my fellow bloggers in person — but I asked John to do so instead. Seems he in turn got stage fright and delegated to his missus, who picked up the trophy. Thanks Fiona! That’s probably just as well, since I’m pretty incoherent in that kind of situation myself.

Cheers to my fellow nominees, Eoghan, Robin, Michele and Pat. One of you guys should totally have won ;)

And last of all — cheers to BitBuzz for sponsoring the category, and Mulley for the whole bash. I definitely have to turn up next year!

Now I need to put more time in this year to really earn that award…

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Plenty of money for Dublin’s bikes

So it seems that JC Decaux have been complaining about the costs of running the Velib scheme in Paris:

Since the scheme’s launch, nearly all the original bicycles have been replaced at a cost of 400 euros each.

Of course, this won’t be a problem in Dublin. Going by Newstalk’s estimates of how much the advertising space provided to JC Decaux for free, in exchange for the (as yet nonexistent) 450 bikes would have cost, each bike comes at a public cost of 111,000 Euros. That should cover a lot of “velib extreme”.

(OK, that may be overestimating it. The Irish Times puts a more sober figure of EUR 1m per year; that works out as EUR 2,000 per bike per year. Still should cover a few broken bikes.)

A quick reminder:

ParisDublin
20,000 bikes450 promised
~1,600 billboards~120 installed
~12.5 bikes per billboard~3.8 bikes per billboard
10km range (from 15e to 19e arondissement)4km range (from the Mater Hospital to the Grand Canal)

And, of course, there’s no sign of the bikes here yet… assuming they ever arrive. Heck of a job, Dublin City Council.

BTW, here’s the rate card for advertising on the “Metropole” ad platforms, if you’re curious, via the charmingly-titled Go Ask Me Bollix.

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Fixing the Gmail Tasks window bug

Hey Gmail users! If you’re using Tasks, there’s a slightly annoying bug in Gmail right now — you may see the “Use this link to open Tasks” tip window appear every time you access the inbox page.

Several other people have reported it, and apparently the Google guys are ‘working to resolve it’ at the moment. In the meantime, though, here’s a way to work around the issue without losing Tasks (you will, unfortunately, lose the offline-gmail functionality, though). Simply disable Offline Gmail (Settings -> Offline -> “Disable Offline Gmail for this computer”), and the bug no longer manifests itself.

You can allow Gmail to keep the stored mail on your computer if you like, which will be handy for when the bug is fixed and Offline can be re-enabled — hopefully sooner rather than later.

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