LZO compression : ‘focussed on decompression speed’ … ‘On modern architectures, decompression is very fast; in non-trivial cases able to exceed the speed of a straight memory-to-memory copy due to the reduced memory-reads.’
(tags: lzo compression speed memory lossless)

Analyzing Apache logs with Pig : great demo and walkthrough from Cloudera
(tags: hadoop howto pig analytics cloudera apache hdfs mapreduce)

The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later : interesting CACM article updating Gray and Putzolu’s “Five-Minute Rule” for RAM and disks (which postulated that a 1KB record accessed more frequently than once every 5 mins should be stored in RAM, rather than on disk). modern price/performance indicates that this still holds, once 256KB records are used. The article also suggests that a new tier of persistent flash storage should be considered, adding a new set of 5-minute-rule transitions for 2KB records migrating from RAM to flash
(tags: performance disk caching ram flash storage 5-minute-rule jim-gray memory acm)

Spice burgers back on the menu due to popular demand - The Irish Times : ‘The humble spice burger, one of Ireland’s few original contributions to world cuisine, has been saved.’ YAY
(tags: spice-burgers ireland cuisine food yum saved chippers phew)

Filtering Companies Can’t Be Sued By Blacklisted Firms, Court Rules : ‘The [Communications Decency Act] treats security software makers the same as internet service providers when they block material they find objectionable, granting them so-called “good Samaritan” immunity from civil lawsuits. Like an ISP, such companies provide an “interactive computer service” because they pull updates from a central server, the San Francisco-based appeals court said.’
(tags: us-law legal blacklists blocklists cda filtering spam zango kaspersky)

UPC’s response to IRMA’s legal summons demanding a “three strikes” system : ‘UPC has made its position clear from the outset — it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided under existing legislation. There is no basis under Irish law requiring ISPs to control, access or block the internet content its users download. In addition, the rights holders’ proposal gives rise to serious concerns for data privacy and consumer contract law.’ go UPC!
(tags: upc isps ireland law legal irma music mp3 downloading piracy three-strikes privacy)

Gmail Access Methods and Login URLs : you can access an Atom feed of your inbox via https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ - I had no idea!
(tags: gmail urls api google atom feeds mail mobile url login)

MythTV support in Boxee : native support built-in — awesome! must try this out
(tags: mythtv boxee linux pvr mythfrontend)

Introducing The Computer of 2010 : hilariously off-base predictions from Forbes ASAP back in 2000. pretty much everything is wrong, except for the available disk capacity of 1TB (via Tony)
(tags: history computing prediction funny 2010 forbes frogdesign fail pc future via:fanf)

Bids for the SORBS blocklist over AU$1.2m : ‘Ms Sullivan said the highest “legitimate” offer was about $1.2million. Others were for much more but from unscrupulous quarters.’
(tags: sorbs blocklists filtering anti-spam auctions bids)

Evan Weaver’s qcon presentation on Twitter’s backend : even more techie details, good tips on JVM profiling/monitoring tools and background on their switch from Ruby to Scala
(tags: scaling twitter java rails distributed memcached queueing evan-weaver scala ruby performance profiling jvm gc)

Twitter, an Evolving Architecture : good info on Twitter’s current architecture. lots of memcached
(tags: memcached twitter ruby java scalability queue architecture caching performance web)

The Toaster Project : Artist attempting to build a toaster from scratch — ‘beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.’ fascinating
(tags: art hardware technology economics build diy consumption capitalism crafts toaster manufacturing mass-production)

Agilo : web-based tool to aid Scrum development processes, Apache-licensed, in Python
(tags: python scrum agile management development via:joshua agilo project-management)

John Graham-Cumming: The Scacco/Beber analysis of the Iranian election is bogus : ‘the article in the Washington Post that supposedly gives statistical evidence for vote fraud just won’t die in the blogosphere and just got a boost [..] by Tim O’Reilly. The trouble is the analysis is bogus.’
(tags: jgc statistics lies-damn-lies washington-post scacco-beber iran politics elections chi-square blogs errors)

Steven Wells Says Goodbye : legendary music journo, dead of cancer :(
(tags: steven-wells via:rosco music journalism death philadelphia cancer)

Fauvist paintings of scenes from video games : Megaton and Republic of Dave from Fallout 3, NYC from GTA4, the canal barn from Half-Life 2 ep 2 (iirc) featuring the G-Man, and more. I love these so much — genius work by spingo
(tags: games art culture painting fallout-3 gta4)