taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Why I’m Voting “No” to the Fiscal Compact : Cormac Lucey’s reasons to vote against the proposed Fiscal Compact in the upcoming referendum
  (tags: fiscal-compact ireland europe eu cormac-lucey economics bailout)

• Is it any wonder the country is the way it is? : Auto-generated complaints about the dreadful state of Ireland, for the pessimistic begrudger on the go. ‘We might as well face it – the cast of Fade Street, without any legal grounds, never gave a shit about people in the midlands.’
  (tags: lol funny begrudgery ireland satire via:broadsheet was-is-for-this 1916)

• Why upgrading your Linux Kernel will make your customers much happier : enabling TCP Slow Start on the HTTP server-side decreased internet round-trip page load time by 21% in this case; comments suggest an “ip route” command can also work
  (tags: tcp performance linux network web http rtt slow-start via:jacob)

• FOI docs regarding lobbying of Sean Sherlock on the copyright SI : Truly amazing outcome from Mark Tighe’s FOI request regarding lobbying on the copyright SI. It turns out that (a) IRMA want all Irish ISPs to enact “3 strikes”, and view the SI as a way to force this; but (b) Eircom are of the opinion that “3 strikes” is now illegal and unenforceable under EU and Irish law. Despite knowing this, Sherlock then went ahead and signed the SI into law *anyway*, just to avoid the hassle of IRMA’s members bringing the government to court. Which they did anyway, regardless. What an utter shambles
  (tags: sopaireland sean-sherlock irma emi copyright ireland law eircom lobbying foi)

Thanks to IfTTT, I am now posting the Pinboard link feed to Twitter, as well as on this blog. If you’d prefer to read them there, here’s the link. Enjoy!

Tags: admin, Links, pinboard, twitter

• Copyright Review Committee #CRC12 Survey : 95 questions for the public, corresponding to the Copyright Review Committee’s Consultation Paper at http://www.djei.ie/science/ipr/crc_index.htm . I need to sit down and get through these at some stage…
  (tags: questionnaire copyright law ireland crc12)

• Artist and Hacktivists Sabotage Spanish Anti-Piracy Law | TorrentFreak : ‘In an attempt to sabotage a new anti-piracy law that went into effect today, hundreds of websites in Spain are participating in a unique protest organized by a local hacktivist group. The websites all link to an “infringing” song by an artist loyal to the protest, who reported the sites to the authorities to overload them with requests.’
  (tags: hacktivism spain art music mp3 piracy p2p sinde soap hacktavistas eme-navarro sgae)

• Photo Tampering throughout History : dating back to 1860: ‘This nearly iconic portrait (in the form of a lithograph) of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body.’ I had no idea of many of these
  (tags: tampering photos pictures images photoshop doctoring history)

• Key Techdirt SOPA/PIPA Post Censored By Bogus DMCA Takedown Notice | Techdirt : ‘our page clearly is not infringing. This is a 100% bogus DMCA takedown — something we only discovered by complete accident over a month later — hiding one of our key articles in an important fight about abusing copyright law to take down free speech. Seems like a perfect example of how copyright can be — and is — abused to suppress free speech.’
  (tags: techdirt dmca copyright sopa sopaireland armovore dirty-tricks)

• jm_links on Twitter : With any luck, ifttt.com will be gatewaying the links from http://pinboard.in/u:jm/ to this Twitter feed…
  (tags: twitter ifttt pinboard links feed)

• Adrian Weckler with “6 reasons why Irish SOPA may not work” : All spot on. ‘Despite all this, the government – through Minister Sherlock – has passed this statutory instrument. In all likelihood, Sherlock’s department had decided to do it a long time ago (probably before the last election), in a (now failed) effort to get the music companies off its back. It’s a shame that Sherlock has gone along with this so easily: he is taking all the flak. It’s also not that common to see a government determined to pass new law that it knows – or strongly suspects – won’t work.’
  (tags: adrian-weckler law ireland piracy copyright sopaireland)

• Facts Are Sacred : A new Irish news site with some familiar names. ‘What is a fact? In philosophy, a fact is something that makes a statement true. In science, it is a verifiable observation. In our case, we take a fact to be something that we can provably demonstrate to be true. This means that we can check the truth of a statement about the current state of affairs but we cannot check claims about the future. Inevitably, as the evidence gets more granular, our view of a fact can change but we should take the scientific approach of going where the evidence leads us, rather than the all too common habit today of starting with a conclusion and looking for supporting data. We are holding ourselves to a high standard and we want you to call us on it where you believe we have fallen short. It is more important that, as readers and writers, we collaborate to put verifiable facts into our daily discourse rather than that we save face. We are looking forward to what we’re sure will be a challenging and rewarding experience and hope you enjoy the ride.’
  (tags: science facts news ireland politics data writing)

• Censorship is inseparable from surveillance | Technology | guardian.co.uk : ‘In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.’ Very good point from Cory Doctorow
  (tags: cory-doctorow censorship surveillance firewalls privacy internet freedom)

• Fault Tolerance in a High Volume, Distributed System : Netflix’s “DependencyCommand”, a resiliency system for SOA inter-service network calls, offering builtin support for threadpools, timeouts, retries and graceful failover. Very nice
  (tags: netflix architecture concurrency distributed failover ha resiliency fail-fast failsafe soa fault-tolerance)

• **IMPORTANT** Copyright policy – boards.ie : Boards’ new post-SOPAIreland copyright policy, at least for the Rugby forum. Wonder how widespread this is to the rest of the site
  (tags: boards ireland sopaireland sean-sherlock copyright rules forums linking)

• Irish Government signs disastrous (SOPA) law to reinforce online copyright laws | Manhattan Diary | IrishCentral : ‘This is Fine Gael Junior Minister Sean Sherlock. It’s probably not important that you remember his face because his career in Irish politics may soon be over. [...] What’s particularly galling is the government’s high handed act. In the United States they dropped SOPA legislation because voters objected, but in Ireland they just waited for the controversy to die down and railroaded it through. I had hoped Ireland had learned enough in recent years to move beyond this style of governance.’
  (tags: sopaireland sopa ireland law copyright emigrants)

• Danish Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident | TorrentFreak : ‘Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate. The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review. “Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.’
  (tags: censorship denmark internet filtering review google facebook blocking)

• YouTube bypasses the DMCA : more on the Rumblefish-owns-birdsong Youtube fiasco
  (tags: youtube dmca rumblefish birdsong copyright)

• Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities. : ‘at the end of the day what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain [specifically gambling site bodog.com] operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info (Afilias is headquartered in Ireland by operates out of the US). This is no longer a doom-and-gloom theory by some guy in a tin foil hat. It just happened.’
  (tags: via:joshea internet legal policy public sopa domains dns verisign seizure)

• DJEI – Copyright S.I. signed and consultation process launched on copyright and innovation – Minister Sherlock : Sean Sherlock says the new SI will “establish Irish copyright law on a firm footing to encourage innovation, foster creativity”, which is pretty bloody hilarious. plus a nice little dig at the online campaign: “As there are clearly many diverse interests, it is important that interested parties come together and work in a constructive way to map the path forward.” They really don’t have a clue what they’ve done. After 20 years of Labour first prefs, I’m never voting Labour again
  (tags: labour ireland politics sean-sherlock copyright copyfight)

• Infovore » A Year of Links : ‘I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year. Given I first used Delicious in 2004, that makes for eight books to date.’ Printed via Lulu, with a tag index. Really nifty ;)
  (tags: books archives bookmarks pinboard delicious links personal history via:pinboard)

• On The Record » The hue and cry over buying and selling tickets : ‘If you really think that all 14,500 tickets for a hot show at Dublin’s O2 like, let’s say, One Direction will go on sale to the general public, you probably also still believe in the tooth fairy. While 10 per cent of the tickets are usually held back for O2’s priority customers, there will always still be far less than the remaining 13,000 tickets available on Ticketmaster’s system when the show purportedly goes on sale. How else do you think tickets for those One Direction Dublin shows in March 2013 can on sale minutes after they are sold out on the supposed primary ticket-selling site, on a secondary site like Viagogo at a hugely inflated premium? Do you really think people queued overnight for those tickets to go “nah, not bothered, have to wash my hair that night” five minutes after getting them in their hands about a show 13 months away? Perhaps we need a Dispatches-type expose over here to lift a few rocks and show the type of fat, avaricious worms wiggling around underneath feasting like parasites on the wallets and credit cards of Irish music fans.’
  (tags: secondary-sales touts tickets gigs ireland music dispatches)

• Zombie Gnomes Bye Bye Birdie by ChrisandJanesPlace on Etsy : ‘This is a sorry sight indeed. A poor helpless Lawn Flamingo has been taken down by zombie gnomes: Nose-less Ned, Greedy Gary, and Bartolomeu.It seems like an unlikely kill until Bartolomeu broke the elegant beasts leg and brought it crashing to the ground. Where they pounced upon their helpless victim and began their feast. So we say “Bye Bye Birdie, I’m going to miss you so, Bye Bye Birdie, Why’d you have to go?”‘ — bloody hell
  (tags: etsy regretsy funny odd flamingo zombies gnomes)

• twitter/jvmgcprof – GitHub : ‘gcprof is a simple utility for profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM [...] Profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM. The gcprof command runs a java command under profiling. Allocation and collection statistics are printed periodically. If -n or -no are provided, statistics are also reported in terms of the given application metric. Total allocation, allocation rate, and a survival histogram is given. The intended use for this tool is twofold: (1) monitor and test garbage allocation and GC behavior, and (2) inform GC tuning.’
  (tags: gc java performance twitter jvm tools)

• YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music – Slashdot : ‘So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish’s exclusive intellectual property.”‘ Major problems with how YouTube is now policing IP infringement, it seems
  (tags: birdsong absurd google fail youtube rumblefish copyfight)

• BBC News – Sentinel project research reveals UK GPS jammer use : GPS jamming was this commonplace? I had no idea. ‘”We believe there’s between 50 and 450 occurrences in the UK every day,” said Charles Curry of Chronos Technology, the company leading the project, though he stressed that they were still analysing the data.’ [...] “Most of them are used by people who don’t want their vehicles to be tracked.” (via Tim Bunce)
  (tags: via:timbunce jamming gps uk location chronos)

• Library Closure of Type .nu : Alan Toner on library.nu’s shutdown. ‘The case of library.nu is significant because the demand for the works offered there demonstrates that filesharing is not just about pop music, porn and cams of action movies, but also those forms and sources of knowledge whose acquisition are ritually celebrated within ‘enlightenment’ culture. Many of those whose works were offered derive income not from royalties, but from related activities such as teaching and research. Such people were themselves an important component library.nu’ user base. Some have other means to access the same materials, others, especially those in countries with weaker education infrastructures and more emaciated library budgets, do not. Outside of formal education, the millions of online autodidacts may be denied access to material, seriously impinging on their lives and possibilities. When one considers the cost of text books and more especially scholarly articles, that is no hyperbole, and applies not only to the global south but the post-industrial north as well, awash in its dreams of knowledge economies and human capital.’
  (tags: alan-toner library.nu ebooks education filesharing copyright piracy)

• Canadian Universities Agree To Ridiculous Copyright Agreement That Says Emailing Hyperlinks Is Equal To Photocopying | Techdirt : ‘The agreement reached last month with the licensing agency includes provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and surveillance of academic staff email.’ wow, incredibly bad terms
  (tags: copyright canada hyperlinks copyfight techdirt licensing academia)

• EFF Wins Protection for Time Zone Database : ‘The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a ‘covenant not to sue’ going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions. Software engineers around the world depend on the time zone database to make sure that time-stamps for email and other files work correctly no matter where you are. However, last September, Astrolabe filed a lawsuit against Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert – the researchers who coordinated the database’s development for decades – because the database includes information from an atlas in which Astrolabe claimed to own copyright. But facts – like what time the sun rises – are not copyrightable. EFF, along with co-counsel Adam Kessel and Olivia Nguyen at the Boston office of Fish & Richardson P.C, promptly signed on to defend Olson and Eggert and protect this essential tool. In January, EFF advised Astrolabe that Olson and Eggert would move for sanctions if Astrolabe did not withdraw its complaint. Today’s dismissal followed.’
  (tags: copyright eff timezones via:fanf time unix olson)

• Near Neighbor Search in High Dimensional Data [PDF] : Detect near-duplicates; would be good for future Razor-like efficient near-duplicate detection. (slides)
  (tags: slides algorithms email performance programming near-neighbour-search search)

• Mailinator(tm) Blog: How Mailinator compresses email by 90% : Quite a lot of work for an extra 5% ;)
  (tags: mailinator lcs caching algorithms compression email)

• Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann – Filming in Ireland – Made in Ireland : nice work IFB! A great locations map from recent movies filmed (entirely or partially) in Ireland, showing where they were shot, what location they stood in for, and with screengrabs and clips
  (tags: ifb ireland movies locations)

• Cloudsmith Stack Hammer : something Chris Horn sent on — using Puppet to build stacks and deploy to AWS using a simple point-and-click interface. looks cool
  (tags: github ec2 aws puppet stacks cloudsmith stack-hammer via:chorn)

• Turning Ireland’s water and wind into energy exports : Ars Technica on the “Spirit Of Ireland” pumped-hydro proposal — great comments
  (tags: ars-technica pumped-hydro spirit-of-ireland electricity renewable-energy)

• Perspectives on the Costa Concordia Incident : hey, co-worker Rory Browne gets namechecked on James Hamilton’s blog! woo
  (tags: costa-concordia amazon james-hamilton disaster boats safety post-mortem)

• Barry Mason – Alamy Stock Photographer : my dad’s new blog!
  (tags: family blogs photography alamy dad)

• MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases : ‘I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting.’
  (tags: algorithms hadoop java mapreduce patterns distcomp)

• The OpenPhoto Project : A great getting-out-of-Flickr life-raft. self-hosted, PHP app, storing photos in Dropbox, S3, or local disk; UI screenshots look great (via Nelson)
  (tags: galleries photos php flickr images via:nelson)

• Autometrics: Self-service metrics collection : how LinkedIn built a service-metrics collection and graphing infrastructure using Kafka and Zookeeper, writing to RRD files, handling 8.8k metrics per datacenter per second
  (tags: kafka zookeeper linkedin sysadmin service-metrics)

• sbtourist/nimrod – GitHub : ‘Nimrod is a metrics server, inspired by the excellent Coda Hale’s Metrics library, but purely based on log processing: hence, it doesn’t affect the way you write your applications, nor it has any side effect on them.’
  (tags: nimrod service-metrics logging)

• Divide and Concur « Code as Craft : Etsy’s interesting approach to managing a large test suite, annotations marking potentially troublesome integration tests: “flaky”, “database”, “network”, “sleep” and “slow”.
  (tags: testing etsy php test-suites annotations integration-testing)

• The Millions : The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’ Guide to Classic Video Games : This really exists. “Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it.”
  (tags: omgwtf martin-amis video-games space-invaders pacman reviews tips funny)

• Syria Bars Text Messages With Irish-Made Gear – Bloomberg : Anti-spam/AV filtering technology turned to a different purpose: political repression. ‘The next day, 225 instructed Syriatel to block messages containing the word “massacres.”’
  (tags: antispam ireland repression technology syria politics cellusys adaptivemobile)

• Turbocharging Solr Index Replication with BitTorrent : Etsy now replicating their multi-GB search index across the search farm using BitTorrent. Why not Multicast? ‘multicast rsync caused an epic failure for our network, killing the entire site for several minutes. The multicast traffic saturated the CPU on our core switches causing all of Etsy to be unreachable.’ fun!
  (tags: etsy multicast sev1 bittorrent search solr rsync scaling outages)

• Apache Kafka : ‘Kafka provides a publish-subscribe solution that can handle all activity stream data and processing on a consumer-scale web site. This kind of activity (page views, searches, and other user actions) are a key ingredient in many of the social feature on the modern web. This data is typically handled by “logging” and ad hoc log aggregation solutions due to the throughput requirements. This kind of ad hoc solution is a viable solution to providing logging data to an offline analysis system like Hadoop, but is very limiting for building real-time processing. Kafka aims to unify offline and online processing by providing a mechanism for parallel load into Hadoop as well as the ability to partition real-time consumption over a cluster of machines.’ neat
  (tags: kafka linkedin apache distributed messaging pubsub queue incubator scaling)

• An Irishman’s Diary – The Irish Times – Thu, Feb 09, 2012: A History Of Ireland In 100 Excuses : ‘4. A shortage of natural resources.’ very good
  (tags: history ireland excuses trevelyan)

• Blank Canvas Script Handler : ‘This extension lets you customize web sites by running bits of JavaScript on pages. It’s kind of an unofficial Greasemonkey for Chrome, and supports many of the GM_* functions used in most scripts.’
  (tags: google-chrome chrome browsers javascript ui customization greasemonkey userscripts extensions via:mmeaney)

• lrzip : ‘Lrzip uses an extended version of rzip which does a first pass long distance redundancy reduction. The lrzip modifications make it scale according to memory size. [...] The unique feature of lrzip is that it tries to make the most of the available ram in your system at all times for maximum benefit. It does this by default, choosing the largest sized window possible without running out of memory.’
  (tags: zip compression via:dakami gzip bzip2 archiving benchmarks)

• Vladimir Lenin and the ‘Rathmines accent’ : this is brilliant. Turns out Lenin spoke English with what would now be called a “D4″ accent, roysh!
  (tags: accents ireland dublin lenin history rathmines)

• _Intellectual property rights and innovation: Evidence from the human genome_ (PDF) : ‘Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private rm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera’s gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort. Across a range of empirical specications, I nd evidence that Celera’s IP led to reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera’s short-term IP had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.’ (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: via:fanf genetics ip copyright open-source celera patents papers pdf)

• Politics.ie – Labour Senator takes to twitter to defend comments, insults all around him : In which Ben Walsh memorably takes on racist/right-wing comments from a Labour senator, and gets told to “go back to D4″. ho ho
  (tags: twitter funny ireland politics)

• Éire Trea May Be the World’s First Irish-Eritrean Food Truck – SFoodie : Brilliant. ‘The menu lists dishes like battered sausages, Irish curry with chips — Irish curry tastes similar to Japanese curry, Hyland says — and shepherd’s pie alongside chicken doro-wat or vegetable stew served over injera bread. They’ve attempted a couple of fusion experiments, such as shiro (ground-chickpea stew) nachos, and have a few more ideas they’re playing around with, but it’s still early days.’ (via Ben)
  (tags: curry irish eritrean food battered-sausages food-trucks)

• The best “why estimation is hard” parable I’ve read this week : ‘A tense silence falls between us. The phone call goes unmade. I’ll call tomorrow once my comrade regains his senses and is willing to commit to something reasonable.’
  (tags: agile development management programming teams estimation tasks software)

• Neil Young on piracy : ‘I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.’
  (tags: internet filesharing piracy copyright neil-young music)

• Why should we stop online piracy? – opinion – 19 January 2012 – New Scientist : ‘There’s no evidence that the US is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.’ Good description of ‘dead weight loss’ and the consumer pressure on the industry that illegal competition poses
  (tags: piracy new-scientist slate sopa filesharing dead-weight-loss economics music movies)

• Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers – Forbes : ‘The data simply doesn’t suggest that piracy is causing any serious economic harm to the US economy or the entertainment industry. Heavy-handed approaches to preventing piracy are wrong-headed and reveal a dangerous level of short-term thinking on the part of both lawmakers and industry leaders. Worse, the impetus to crack down on piracy is based largely on industry data that wildly inflates the problem.’
  (tags: piracy forbes filesharing politics sopa economics law)

• Adrian Weckler confims that “Ireland’s SOPA” will be vague and open-ended : ‘The clear implication from [Adrian's] interview with Sean Sherlock is that the proposed measures will be lacking in any real detail, leaving it entirely up to the judges as to what types of blocking might emerge. (Possibly going beyond web blocking to also target hosting and other services.) This ambiguity — as well as jeopardising fundamental rights — will create intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland.’ — this is much, much worse than I thought, particularly given the level of technical knowledge among Ireland’s judges (if Mr. Justice Charleton’s performance in EMI v. UPC is anything to go by).
  (tags: sopa ireland law filesharing piracy internet filtering blocking)

• The Captain of the Costa Concordia is Totally Screwed [OP/ED] : ‘For the most senior officer on board, the one who had been entrusted with the care and safety of this magnificent ship, his job was far from over. In fact the Captain had just added a new job title to his resume, that of ON SCENE COMMANDER. But apparently he didn’t realize it because he took off in a lifeboat, leaving this giant steaming pile to be picked up by the Italian police and Coast Guard who are continuing to search for survivors, and prevent looters from gaining access. The Captain didn’t just take off in a lifeboat, he left the entire scene completely.’ oh dear. (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: via:fanf disaster ineptitude maritime boats tourism giglio sea sinking liners safety)

• Ultra Slow Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush : 36 minutes long. Actually BRILLIANT
  (tags: kate-bush music sloooow 1978 youtube video via:rosco)

• Freeman on the land – RationalWiki : fantastically encyclopedic description of the “freeman on the land” pseudolegal gibberish, now being employed in an attempt to evade unpleasant taxes or fees — this stuff is on the rise in post-economic-collapse Ireland, unsurprisingly
  (tags: debt legal freemen freeman law taxes ireland recession)

• Project HGG: FAQ : Hackerspace Global Grid — ‘We want to understand, build and make available satellite based communication for the hackerspace community and all of mankind.’ Space is the place!
  (tags: space ccc satellite communication internet hackerspace)

• Skeuomorph : word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : ‘A skeuomorph /?skju??m?rf/ skew-?-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines’
  (tags: words language history objects ornament design wikipedia)

• Punching through The Great Firewall of T-Mobile : well, this is bizarre — it seems T-Mobile UK are blocking encrypted email submission and OpenVPN traffic in their mobile internet access products. Why? Who knows — but at least filtering RST packets evades the block, as in the Great Firewall of China
  (tags: china filtering rst internet iptables t-mobile uk payg mobile-internet)

• ChessBase.com – Chess News – A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess (part two) : An amazing article, via Nelson Minar — careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering — by many of the developers. ‘Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.’
  (tags: chess code games open-source licensing reverse-engineering copyright infringement via:nelson)

• High Scalability – How Twitter Stores 250 Million Tweets a Day Using MySQL : MySQL as a storage backend — basically an InnoDB store
  (tags: mysql twitter scalability gizzard innodb performance database)

• Using a Feistel Network for full-cycle permutation : nice algorithm. requires that the permuted set’s size be a power of 2 however – although for smaller sets you can just skip to the next output value, since they’re not going to repeat
  (tags: feistel-network full-cycle permutation shuffling algorithms)

• algorithm – Generating shuffled range using a PRNG rather than shuffling – Stack Overflow : some reasonably good answers on using an LFSR or LCG to generate a full-cycle permutation with no repeats
  (tags: lfsr lcg algorithms permutation shuffling)

• French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak : ‘According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.’ I love this. The data is, of course, filled with potential inaccuracies — and that’s the point
  (tags: bittorrent surveillance downloading internet privacy france hadopi)

• SiliconRepublic story on CoderDojo : ‘it’s both incredible and poignant that a voluntary movement that was born in Ireland during the summer is about to go international. Coder Dojo, the brainchild of 19-year-old entrepreneur and programmer James Whelton from Cork and tech entrepreneur Bill Liao, began as a Saturday morning club for kids to teach each other software programming. It has grown into a national movement up and down Ireland, a place where kids and their parents can go and learn to write software code in a friendly environment. The first UK Coder Dojo was held in London only last week and other countries in Europe are clamouring to get the initiative started there, too.’ Good on them!
  (tags: coderdojo programming coding kids children teaching education tech ireland)

• Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript – What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 – Popular Mechanics : The (comp.)risks of overautomation strike again. “When trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land — the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted?”
  (tags: aviation crash flight flying autopilot stalls warnings alarms ui af447 risks automation)

• spark : sparklines in your terminal window. Simply give it a comma or space-separated list of data values, and it’ll generate an ANSI-graphics sparkline chart. Brilliant! (via mjd)
  (tags: via:mjdominus sparklines charts graphs bash shell terminal cli ansi)

• How would my finances change if euro collapsed? – RTÉ News : RTE’s sketch of the repercussions of a Euro collapse for Irish consumers. basically: you won’t have any finances, particularly if you have a mortgage
  (tags: ireland euro disaster rte finance money mortgages)

• Script used by Instagram to duplicate the paged-in VM pages to another host : as seen in their “Instagram Engineering” post
  (tags: vmtouch vm linux unix tools instagram)

• vmtouch – the Virtual Memory Toucher : ‘vmtouch is a tool for learning about and controlling the file system cache of unix and unix-like systems. It is BSD licensed.’
  (tags: vmtouch vm linux unix fs filesystems instagram)

• Scott Andreas – Garbage, Garbage Everywhere [slides] : ‘GC Strategies for Event Processing Systems on the JVM’
  (tags: gc java jvm event-streams event-processing tuning slides presentations scott-andreas performance)

• Large file management with git-annex : ‘uses Git to manage files that are larger than Git can easily handle—without checking them into the repository. But git-annex provides ways to track those files using much of the same infrastructure as Git, so that moving or deleting those files can all be tracked in much the same way as committed files. In addition, git-annex allows for branches and distributed clones of its trees.’ I may investigate using this to sync my MP3s instead of SVN
  (tags: git git-annex version-control)