Snapshot taken at Thu Sep 2 07:11:22 2010
free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
... on Wed Sep 1 13:25:15 2010'The system demand displayed here represents the electricity production required to meet [Irish] national electricity consumption, including system losses, but net of generators' requirements. It includes power imported via the interconnector and an estimate of the power produced by wind generators, but excludes some non-centrally monitored generation (i.e. small scale CHP).' via Juan Flynn
... on Mon Aug 30 11:39:16 2010painfully accurate sketch about the crappy conference call UI. "hi, who just joined?"
... on Mon Aug 30 10:04:13 2010do you trust the default set of root CAs in modern web browsers? sounds like we probably shouldn't
... on Fri Aug 27 20:58:40 2010GFDL-licensed legal boilerplate agreement for the Irish market. Nice one -- although did I see a commercial company charging for what appears to be a derivative work of this document? is that a breach of the license terms?
... on Fri Aug 27 10:22:26 2010opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though
... on Thu Aug 26 13:23:05 2010from the Irish Times property section: 'There’s a guy in Inchicore with an aircraft simulator in his shed. Not one of those fancy computer games, this is the real thing – a decommissioned 747 simulator, cockpit and all.' Unfortunately, the sim doesn't come with the house
... on Thu Aug 26 13:19:20 2010scary stuff. East Texas patent-troll court has ruled that EchoStar must remotely disable customers' DVRs due to patent infringement, which they are (thankfully) refusing to do and are now held in contempt for $200M -- the blog suggests this could happen due to the Google-Oracle suit, to Android phones
... on Thu Aug 26 10:33:38 2010really interesting parallel algorithm concepts. I'd seen parallel merge sort before from the map-reduce world, but some others are new to me and worth thinking about (via Hacker News)
... on Tue Aug 24 20:15:31 2010an "endless page" of images culled from newsfeeds. Very good for video games and art, particularly. definitely a new addition to my daily list (via Andre)
... on Tue Aug 24 12:37:23 2010very funny. 'Wait, does this mean that those cyclists that wiped out a few blocks back are going to catch up to me right before I get to my destination, even though I didn't crash once?' (commenter on Kotaku)
... on Tue Aug 24 12:28:56 2010great Mike Masnick post responding to the latest woe-is-me missive from U2's asshat-in-residence Paul McGuinness (via Jim Carroll)
... on Mon Aug 23 11:26:40 2010is the CAO (Ireland's Central Applications Office, for university admissions) being DDOS'd? sounds like it
... on Mon Aug 23 11:17:23 2010in the style of BBC Radiophonics Workshop, with copious flange -- my favourite is heap sort. this is brilliant (via jwz)
... on Thu Aug 19 09:30:21 2010stories drawn by a guy I vaguely know online. really funny!
... on Tue Aug 17 13:44:18 2010'just how much is €25 billion that [Ireland's taxpayers] have to borrow for [failed bank] Anglo?' some great answers, including: start our own space program with 20 space shuttles; build 6 LHCs or 2 ITER fusion reactors; scrap fares on all public transport for 33 years; buy 2 of Asia's largest banks; buy Steve Jobs himself; detach the People's Republic of Cork by building a ten-metre-wide moat; buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie
... on Tue Aug 17 09:53:08 2010'Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading
'Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.' no shit, Sherlock
... on Thu Aug 12 12:42:14 2010'A man known as one of the world’s top purveyors of junk e-mail has been imprisoned in Russia for allegedly molesting [more than *50*] underage girls from a Moscow orphanage, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.' lovely
... on Thu Aug 12 10:20:04 2010another variation of the Nancy Silverton recipe, and a loaf recipe to go with it
... on Wed Aug 11 22:01:22 2010lots of recommendations, but looks like hard work; grown from natural grape yeast
... on Wed Aug 11 22:00:21 2010Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats
... on Wed Aug 11 12:39:03 2010wow, fantastic review -- real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA's latest videogame
... on Tue Aug 10 20:08:47 2010'In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.' brilliant pisstake of mid-'90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)
... on Tue Aug 10 10:51:27 2010hackerspaces in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast, running events all next week (08-14 - 08-22)
... on Tue Aug 10 10:03:22 2010on "Haystack", a vaporous censorship-evading product aimed at Iran's internet surveillance, which as of yet is a site soliciting donations and a lot of press, and not a lot of techie details
... on Mon Aug 9 11:38:20 2010Mind-boggling presentation; a load of sites are exposing memcacheds to the public internet, with no auth, and full of juicy data (samples included). iptables is hard
... on Thu Aug 5 20:53:49 2010surprise! 'The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.'
... on Thu Aug 5 10:23:12 2010"benchmarks disprove common wisdom" shocker
... on Wed Aug 4 15:44:14 2010some good Cydia app tips. also glad to see piracy didn't appear 'til page 3
... on Tue Aug 3 20:42:42 2010'6174 .. is notable for the following property: Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits. (Leading zeros are allowed.); Arrange the digits in ascending and then in descending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary; Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number; Go back to step 2. The process will reach 6174 in at most 7 iterations'
... on Mon Aug 2 21:07:29 2010from Tony Finch. great stuff, I used to use shortcuts like this all the time on my Linux desktops to avoid rodentage
... on Fri Jul 30 12:54:24 2010Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking "workarounds" (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?
... on Fri Jul 30 10:35:47 2010'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'
... on Mon Jul 26 16:06:01 2010classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
... on Mon Jul 26 14:10:30 2010interesting idea; extend "cd" to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to "jump" to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
... on Mon Jul 26 10:04:20 2010not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I'm stuck using the missus' laptop ;)
... on Mon Jul 26 09:58:29 2010'Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.'
... on Fri Jul 23 19:45:48 2010from last week's CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
... on Fri Jul 23 14:50:36 2010another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
... on Fri Jul 23 11:36:52 2010document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it'll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
... on Fri Jul 23 11:31:29 2010some gems here
... on Thu Jul 22 22:05:01 2010wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
... on Tue Jul 20 11:54:10 2010AWS-based service to resize images, encode video files, extract thumbnails, and store to S3, for use by third-party web apps. Transcoding-as-a-service
... on Mon Jul 19 22:23:08 2010TunePal -- "Shazam for trad". play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it'll link to the tune's name, history, discography, and where it's been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
... on Fri Jul 16 11:18:05 2010'The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society': among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
... on Thu Jul 15 10:45:18 2010establish an overlay, encrypted private "virtual LAN" for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
... on Thu Jul 15 10:16:52 2010so that's how it's done. now to retry my DIY botch job
... on Wed Jul 14 13:24:22 2010using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
... on Wed Jul 14 13:19:53 2010good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn't a usable approach for block-oriented languages
... on Wed Jul 14 09:23:27 2010first 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)
... on Tue Jul 13 16:21:17 2010'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.'
... on Fri Jul 9 10:59:56 2010'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)
... on Wed Jul 7 10:48:49 2010I should do this on my hosts
... on Tue Jul 6 16:15:29 2010torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
... on Tue Jul 6 10:56:10 2010neat 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
... on Mon Jul 5 13:07:47 2010techie 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
... on Mon Jul 5 12:50:29 2010hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
... on Mon Jul 5 12:45:04 2010apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
... on Fri Jul 2 10:47:22 2010'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.'
... on Thu Jul 1 13:02:45 2010there 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
... on Thu Jul 1 09:01:37 2010"XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly" -- caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
... on Wed Jun 30 20:34:49 2010another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
... on Wed Jun 30 10:12:44 2010on 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)
... on Tue Jun 29 13:09:37 2010sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
... on Tue Jun 29 10:25:07 2010'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
... on Mon Jun 28 10:08:51 2010using 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 ;)
... on Sun Jun 27 09:34:02 2010wonderful; 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?
... on Sat Jun 26 14:04:39 2010Macromedia 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
... on Fri Jun 25 12:45:18 2010PDFs, docs, links
... on Thu Jun 24 14:56:45 2010The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too
... on Thu Jun 24 10:21:55 2010big thumbs-up for 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution'. I'm looking forward to it
... on Wed Jun 23 20:20:58 2010MongoDB war story -- records going missing, eek
... on Wed Jun 23 20:03:19 2010Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale
... on Wed Jun 23 16:06:32 2010log analyzer; removes common strings and patterns from log files, identifying outliers and hapaxen as "interesting". also does charting of frequencies etc.
... on Wed Jun 23 12:42:19 2010The "spaceship" configuration replicates in 33699586 generations, using 2 construction arms and a volley of gliders circulating between them
... on Wed Jun 23 12:38:10 2010it'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
... on Tue Jun 22 09:16:00 2010good idea -- generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)
... on Mon Jun 21 14:02:00 2010nifty link from Heise; works for 802.11b and 11g. Unfortunately I think my own wifi issues are to do with dying AP hardware
... on Mon Jun 21 12:42:08 2010interesting thoughts from Kragen
... on Mon Jun 21 11:21:46 2010'What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here's what I'd do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70's, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.' Beautifully done
... on Sun Jun 20 23:11:02 2010wow, 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
... on Thu Jun 17 14:20:38 2010excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)
... on Thu Jun 17 11:28:37 2010just *male* genitalia, mind. I dread to think of what the training corpus looks like
... on Wed Jun 16 08:49:51 2010create wireframe mock-ups quickly, via Confluence/JIRA/desktop/fogbugz plugins (via Joe)
... on Tue Jun 15 10:23:29 2010Back looking at these again, as Padraig noted the SundTek drivers are closed source; at least pvrusb2 is OSS
... on Mon Jun 14 13:30:57 2010'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.'
... on Mon Jun 14 09:18:26 2010CPAN 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
... on Fri Jun 11 10:05:33 2010'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
... on Fri Jun 11 09:44:42 2010'I can recommend that USB device, I never had a device which has such an easy installation under linux.'
... on Fri Jun 11 09:42:54 2010official, and pretty voluminous. looks good
... on Fri Jun 11 09:42:31 2010seems to be a safe option for MythTV analog TV and DVB-T support on this side of the pond
... on Thu Jun 10 14:54:23 2010Jesus Christ Hauppauge. get a clue already, why are you making it so hard for Linux users to buy your bloody hardware?!
... on Thu Jun 10 13:23:55 2010Phil 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
... on Thu Jun 10 09:31:07 2010"unchi" / "unchimaaku", a little Emoji icon of a dog turd. unfortunately still in "proposed" status, not yet a Unicode point, boo
... on Thu Jun 3 15:14:38 2010from Padraig Brady. lots of nice one-liners I wasn't familiar with
... on Thu Jun 3 14:21:34 2010a 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
... on Thu Jun 3 13:18:57 2010vendors of fake Raketas -- pretty much all of the current eBay auctions are on this list :(
... on Tue Jun 1 21:13:42 201024-hour analog CCCP-era Raketa watches. want. almost definitely fake going by the price, but still very nifty (via adampsyche)
... on Tue Jun 1 21:10:00 2010suggests using the OSMTrack app, start driving, upload and that's it
... on Mon May 31 23:03:25 2010$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
... on Mon May 31 15:37:33 2010open 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
... on Mon May 31 15:13:27 2010pretty basic
... on Mon May 31 10:04:56 2010wow, this sounds good. a lot of 100% reviews and a 95% overall
... on Sun May 30 22:28:30 2010good comments on the processes useful for large-scale Redis upgrades
... on Fri May 28 21:58:07 2010'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
... on Fri May 28 15:32:12 2010many 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 ;)
... on Fri May 28 15:02:39 2010via 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
... on Thu May 27 19:43:38 2010'We recognize that only through your apps and hacks, can SoundCloud fully realize its potential as the audio platform.'
... on Thu May 13 14:59:27 2010European air traffic control Twitter feed and NOC site, via Boards.ie. The thread itself is a good reference, too
... on Thu May 13 11:05:47 2010using 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
... on Thu May 13 10:46:01 2010interview 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
... on Tue May 11 12:40:29 2010some 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)
... on Mon May 10 12:44:00 2010'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)
... on Mon May 10 12:36:09 2010updated 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 :(
... on Sun May 9 11:33:17 2010upshot: 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
... on Fri May 7 16:07:28 2010"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."
... on Fri May 7 12:45:53 2010'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
... on Fri May 7 10:48:05 2010I'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
... on Thu May 6 11:08:39 2010SnapStream's 100TB rack which records 50 analog TV channels simultaneously
... on Thu May 6 10:59:48 2010'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)
... on Thu May 6 10:00:34 2010quite easy, using a Metaphone sound-like indexing scheme to provide the fuzz
... on Wed May 5 17:08:53 2010yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less
... on Wed May 5 16:23:36 2010by an ex-Hot-Press staffer. interesting: Hot Press 'also publish MQ, the IMRO members’ periodical.' well, that would explain a lot
... on Wed May 5 13:56:48 2010Martin 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
... on Wed May 5 13:27:02 2010join this group to add your voice
... on Sun May 2 21:35:18 2010it seems Hot Press have come up with some Paul-McGuinness-esque pro-IMRO one-sided turdery masquerading as journalism. shock me
... on Sun May 2 21:35:17 2010fair play to The Cast Of Cheers and Mia Sparrow, cancelling their show in response to IMRO's actions
... on Sun May 2 21:22:14 2010incredible. 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)
... on Sun May 2 21:06:00 2010more recipes. This one looks like a good guide to creating a starter culture, something I've been meaning to do for a while
... on Fri Apr 30 16:34:22 2010some pretty good "ports" of Mexican recipes to ingredients available over here, must try these
... on Fri Apr 30 16:32:29 2010truly 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.'
... on Fri Apr 30 15:42:01 2010a generated set of SpamAssassin rules containing known-phisher addresses
... on Thu Apr 29 14:27:26 2010including Roundstone Bog, burned to a crisp last week :(
... on Thu Apr 29 13:55:14 2010'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.'
... on Thu Apr 29 13:31:20 2010'I am going to consume and review every item in my office vending machine and there is nothing you can do to stop me.'
... on Thu Apr 29 13:23:46 2010good post from online music marketing site Amp.ie
... on Thu Apr 29 10:04:17 2010Jim Carroll's blog post on the IMRO mp3blog shakedown. Comment thread has some good stuff from Irish music heads
... on Thu Apr 29 10:02:04 2010what 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.'
... on Thu Apr 29 09:51:57 2010Irish 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 (!)
... on Thu Apr 29 09:46:18 2010ha! '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
... on Wed Apr 28 10:20:53 2010it'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
... on Tue Apr 27 15:59:56 2010SMB setup details
... on Mon Apr 26 21:10:28 2010'a homebrew media player for the Nintendo Wii. It was initially created as a fork of Team Twiizers' port of MPlayer, combining elements of MPlayerWii, GeeXboX and other great homebrew contributions.' recommended by conoro
... on Mon Apr 26 21:07:47 2010this promises to make Evernote a good deal more usable for me, if it works (edit: it certainly does! result)
... on Mon Apr 26 20:55:16 2010good set of slides from Dropbox. traditional marketing and AdWords failed utterly; word-of-mouth (and a great product) was how they've succeeded
... on Mon Apr 26 14:03:34 2010'a Perl script that generates an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet which loads up SpamAssassin configuration and known spam and ham messages. Once loaded, you can tweak individual SpamAssassin scores in the spreadsheet itself and see their effect on spam/ham classification in real-time. The script also shows you the number of false positives and negatives for a set of scores in real-time.' by Raj Mathur <raju at linux-delhi.org>
... on Mon Apr 26 13:41:11 2010"By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non- transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamestation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."
... on Mon Apr 26 12:58:35 2010'This clip is raw from Camera E-8 on the launch umbilical tower/mobile launch program of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. This is an HD transfer from the 16mm original. The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time.'
... on Sat Apr 24 22:12:24 2010woo, interesting stuff on the Wii homebrew scene! MPlayer CE is apparently quite promising
... on Fri Apr 23 22:55:32 2010Conservapedia gold. "His father was half-English, half-Russian. His mother was dutch. He speaks English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish. His wife is Roman Catholic. Aged sixteen, Clegg was arrested in Germany and charged with arson. He and his friends destroyed a priceless collection of rare cacti while he was drunk."
... on Fri Apr 23 10:44:32 2010Soviet animators' cartoons based on classic sci-fi
... on Thu Apr 22 14:31:12 2010specifically, Hadoop and Pig for log/metrics analytics, Cassandra going forward; great preso, lots of detail and code examples. also, impressive number-crunching going on at Twitter
... on Thu Apr 22 10:33:14 2010also, an RFID "jammer" to block reads of RFID chips within range. related: the Israeli govt is considering voting cards with RFID chips, apparently
... on Wed Apr 21 14:54:04 2010interesting
... on Wed Apr 21 13:25:24 2010and starting a new company around Hudson
... on Wed Apr 21 12:56:24 2010free e-bill aggregation/archival service from an Irish company, for Irish users (right now at least). looks very useful
... on Wed Apr 21 10:54:29 2010'The justice refers to legal alternatives to illicit downloading, such as "an I-player system," when he's writing about the BBC's well-known iPlayer catch-up service [which is not available here]. He refers numerous times in the order to "DetectNet," a company which can find P2P infringers, when he really means DtecNet. A strong grasp of the technical details won't be found in this ruling'
... on Tue Apr 20 20:06:32 2010free (excellent) city guide apps for Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Istanbul, London, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna until April 22nd; normally $10-$15!
... on Tue Apr 20 09:14:27 2010excellent post on the 'three strikes' judgement
... on Mon Apr 19 15:38:26 2010'it becomes clear that for some time now the Department of Justice has been proposing the introduction of internet blocking in Ireland – and has been doing this under the radar, without any public consultation or legislative approval. Indeed, it is clear from the list that the Department is not planning on introducing legislation but instead intends to introduce this new form of censorship without any legal basis, based on the now discredited Norwegian and Danish models.' This is very bad news indeed
... on Fri Apr 16 15:39:47 2010according to DRI's TJ McIntyre via Karlin Lillington. “Blocking involves censorship taken on no legal basis. There is no judge, no jury and no right to be heard if you are blocked,” says McIntyre. “The chances are it also will be used in unaccountable ways by unaccountable organisations.”
... on Fri Apr 16 13:43:03 2010version 0.94.x got end-of-lifed a year after the release of .95, to fix a bug that would increase bandwidth consumption on their mirrors. To mandate upgrades, the devs sent a kill-switch trigger to .94 installations in the field. chaos ensues, unsurprisingly
... on Fri Apr 16 13:38:01 2010interesting prez from some IBM researchers on using Cassandra as a mail store, via Jeremy
... on Thu Apr 15 11:14:59 2010too nerdy? it seems possible
... on Thu Apr 15 11:10:11 2010fatty pork deep fried in lard. oh yeah. thanks Ben!
... on Wed Apr 14 21:02:59 2010new lunch spot serving Mexican food in Dublin. hopefully good, haven't tried it yet, menu looks promising though
... on Wed Apr 14 16:04:41 2010whoa, amazing street performer outfit
... on Wed Apr 14 15:51:12 2010"Never warp your brain with time zone math again." Quite a useful javascript TZ conversion tool, although it could be more intuitive still
... on Wed Apr 14 10:22:45 2010new Apple reseller on Dublin's Grafton Street, sounds like a good deal
... on Wed Apr 14 10:09:09 2010by a Bugzilla developer. ;)
... on Tue Apr 13 17:05:28 2010ASF's Paul Querna: 'Security on the Internet sucks, and it is only getting worse. The problem is systemic, with security researchers and developers not producing viable ways for the average user to live on the Internet in a secure fashion without excessive paranoia.'
... on Mon Apr 12 13:50:21 2010Damien shares his atrocious experiences with a Galway hotel, and (naturally) commenters from the hotel's IP address range pile on what looks like astroturf in the comments
... on Fri Apr 9 10:11:02 2010from Twitter. looks interesting
... on Thu Apr 8 11:18:28 2010good info from Google's "Seti" project
... on Wed Apr 7 22:27:16 2010the legendary compiler of the 'Irish Times' cryptic crosswords died on Saturday in Harare, Zimbabwe, aged 92
... on Wed Apr 7 10:21:11 2010ie. take a pic of a pothole and it'll be reported up to the appropriate office quickly and without hassle. wow. are you watching, Dublin?
... on Mon Apr 5 21:34:56 2010600 euros all-in for an entry-level DLP home cinema projector capable of 720p HD. tempted, but stil a bit pricey
... on Mon Apr 5 21:28:51 2010nifty, an official app for this music-streaming site -- although for jailbroken iPhones only
... on Fri Apr 2 16:41:23 2010from David Welton. what, the lack of support for GNOME UI standards was *deliberate*? bad choice if so
... on Wed Mar 31 17:10:30 2010'The Gmail IMAP and SMTP servers have been extended to support authorization via the industry-standard OAuth protocol.' pretty cool, support third parties sending outbound as you, or filtering your inbound gmail
... on Wed Mar 31 16:35:08 2010'While iMatix was the original designer of AMQP and has invested hugely in that protocol, we believe it is fundamentally flawed, and unfixable. It is too complex and the barriers to participation are massive. We do not believe that it's in the best interest of our customers and users to invest further in AMQP. Specifically, iMatix will be stepping out of the AMQP workgroup and will not be supporting AMQP/1.0 when that emerges, if it ever emerges.' wow, massive downvote there
... on Wed Mar 31 11:01:16 2010the Canadian mag "The Beaver" is changing its name due to broken filters' false positives. Bennett Haselton reckons that there's no incentive to fix FPs, which as Henry Stern notes isn't the case
... on Tue Mar 30 15:34:39 2010the Rustock botnet is now attempting TLS encryption of spam delivery sessions
... on Tue Mar 30 10:31:48 2010I like the "blogging is dead" funereal theme ;)
... on Mon Mar 29 11:33:22 2010'a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a NAT, without any 3rd party'. nifty, by Samy "MySpace worm" Kamkar
... on Sun Mar 28 20:45:22 2010'The troubled councilor, Dimitar Kerin, has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants. He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.'
... on Fri Mar 26 15:08:05 2010hmm, nice-looking Scrum tool
... on Fri Mar 26 12:17:37 2010'John Laker, 25, allegedly copped an eyeful of Jo Margetson, 29, when the latter "entered the X-ray machine by mistake". She was "horrified" as Laker "pressed a button to take a revealing photo" and remarked [on the size of her breasts].' as Conrad says, "who didn't see this coming?" Wonder how many other "revealing photos" are on that hard drive
... on Thu Mar 25 11:07:22 2010this year's open-source BarCamp, in Dublin, April 17th. no way I'll be able to get a talk together (again) but hopefully I can attend ;)
... on Tue Mar 23 14:23:09 2010hacky, but I'm very tempted -- GV looks nifty and there's no indication they're bothering to roll it out on this side of the pond
... on Tue Mar 23 13:00:48 2010wow, incredible irony
... on Mon Mar 22 17:49:47 2010GDC post-mortem; Facebook takes over the games industry. 'the three primary designers of the Civilization franchise (Sid [Meier], Brian, and myself [Soren Johnson]) are all now making social/online games.' -- wow
... on Sun Mar 21 22:42:30 2010new bike shop in Dublin, comes strongly recommended by waider
... on Fri Mar 19 11:18:07 2010one for the to-get queue
... on Thu Mar 18 22:01:16 2010worth it for #10: 'Capture video of a linux desktop': '$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg'
... on Thu Mar 18 13:58:27 2010'The finest corporate photography - from their extranets, to you' (via Adrian Weckler)
... on Thu Mar 18 11:59:31 2010dealing with the biggest problem with St. Patrick's Day
... on Wed Mar 17 23:48:37 2010"Yeah, we used Buildbot until recently, then I switched us to Hudson and my life got a lot better" -- heh ;)
... on Tue Mar 16 23:35:55 2010a Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge Nat Labs -- check out that amazing skin! I've never seen a skinned datacenter before
... on Tue Mar 16 23:23:38 2010'“It’s free to advertise,” Ned explained. “And we have a lot of things we don’t need.” So each week, they advertised for sale in Loot something from their apartment. This was their social life. Some weeks – the good weeks – they had three or four people who came to see what they were selling.'
... on Tue Mar 16 11:59:44 2010GFS, warts and all
... on Mon Mar 15 23:30:21 2010Russ Cox' C++ lib to provide safer, guaranteed-linear-time, non-exponential regexps, at the cost of dropping support for backreferences and generalized zero-width assertions. actually looks quite useful, unlike most "I've fixed regexps" claims ;)
... on Mon Mar 15 12:09:20 2010quick! where's my towel?!
... on Fri Mar 12 18:31:39 2010Nespresso-compatible capsules -- fill up with your own freshly-ground coffee and use in any Nespresso machine
... on Thu Mar 11 14:30:08 2010Boards thread with good advice regarding wall fixings for drylined walls
... on Thu Mar 11 11:11:08 2010new nomenclature for "{" and "}". This I can get behind
... on Wed Mar 10 16:58:35 2010'What'd I say?' 'MONORAIL!' 'What's it called?' 'MONORAIL!' 'That's right, Monorail!' 'Any questions?'
... on Wed Mar 10 00:19:20 2010Damian Beresford's experience installing his own home alarm. pretty cheap, sounds quite easy too
... on Mon Mar 8 22:52:11 2010extremely detailed; power outage in the primary DC resulted in a degraded fleet, and on-calls didn't have up-to-date on-call docs to respond correctly
... on Mon Mar 8 22:31:01 2010fantastic article about Mass Effect's political allegory. I'm slightly disappointed that Mass Effect 2 didn't live up to ME1's quality, IMO
... on Mon Mar 8 14:24:22 2010Assassin's Creed 2 players unable to play the game for no less than 10 hours due to failure of their DRM servers. nice work Ubisoft
... on Sun Mar 7 21:02:05 2010using ssh, screen and emacs
... on Sat Mar 6 21:46:49 2010Dublin's Science Gallery is proving to be a massive success. good news. just wish I could visit more often!
... on Fri Mar 5 12:13:49 2010the "45-hour workweek vs 80-hour vacation" one is a bureaucratic classic
... on Thu Mar 4 17:37:41 2010mind-boggling work decoding Portal-2-related ARG content by Portal fans. as one jwz commenter put it: 'Seriously, if aliens ever contact us, the internet will have it worked out and replied to in about three hours fast.' Also, people are confused by the concept of modems and BBSes; I feel old
... on Wed Mar 3 11:00:51 2010XBox style achievements for Python's 'nose' unit testing framework, eg. 'Major Letdown: all tests in a suite of at least 100 pass except the last.' genius!
... on Mon Mar 1 21:51:34 2010a clever HTTP session-management trick (via Tony Finch)
... on Mon Mar 1 16:35:38 2010Lovecraftian ads for chocolate. 'There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel hell-planet. The delectable Caramel Chew may be one such portal.'
... on Mon Mar 1 16:24:39 2010DBL announcement. working on the SpamAssassin support for 3.3.1...
... on Mon Mar 1 11:45:18 2010someone has gone to the trouble of translating the 'Hang Seng Bank' phish to Gaeilge. I would surmise that some phisher has a table of CCTLD-to-language mappings and is pasting their text into Google Translate before spamming their .ie address list. If only they knew how few people can read it!
... on Wed Feb 24 14:22:07 2010EPIC BURRITO THREAD demonstrating the true power of Google Buzz
... on Mon Feb 22 22:30:26 2010bloody hell, where did these all come from?! wow
... on Mon Feb 22 11:53:29 20102 suits in the US, one vs Comerica, one vs PlainsCapital
... on Sun Feb 21 23:10:21 2010wow, you can search a time period for everyone who bookmarked pages on a specific site (via Britta)
... on Fri Feb 19 14:37:46 2010'presentation about how the Python GIL actually works and why it's even worse than most people even imagine.' A good chunk btw could be rephrased as 'pthreads is worse than most people even imagine'. pretty awful data, though
... on Fri Feb 19 11:55:55 2010John Levine gets DNS*Ls standardized, at last. we should really check SpamAssassin to see if it's compliant, I guess ;)
... on Thu Feb 18 21:59:06 2010nifty; Apache-licensed distributed, RESTful, JSON-over-HTTP, schemaless search server with multi-tenancy
... on Fri Feb 12 21:24:08 2010Ross Anderson's lab demo an attack on TV whereby any Chip-and-PIN debit card can be used in conjunction with a MITM device, with a PIN of "0000", verified online, and producing a receipt saying "PIN Verified". thoroughly hosed
... on Fri Feb 12 12:27:18 2010well done O2, you've made it insanely complicated and marginally useless
... on Thu Feb 11 13:45:30 2010great post on the hazards of programming in an async framework, and how damn hard it is. good comments thread too (via jzawodny)
... on Wed Feb 10 14:45:36 2010wow. fascinating results from social-network cluster analysis of Facebook, splitting up the entire USA into 7 clusters
... on Mon Feb 8 15:25:42 2010fascinating note from Bernie Goldbach: 'MORE THAN 20 YEARS ago, I worked with message traffic and the work told me the importance of verifying source material.'
... on Sun Feb 7 22:32:00 2010MS internal politics routinely torpedoed cool new projects. surprise, surprise. 'Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed [ClearType] made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The VP for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.'
... on Fri Feb 5 10:41:42 2010Dublin City Council is offering the ability to public consultation via a Boards forum. cool
... on Thu Feb 4 16:06:46 2010'for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up.'
... on Wed Feb 3 12:45:03 2010good scaling advice from Linden Labs' Ian Wilkes (who doesn't seem to have a blog, sadly)
... on Wed Feb 3 12:33:37 2010explaining Lift's code-free "display only" templating system. I like it. Very similar concept to WebMake's "scraped templates": http://webmake.taint.org/doc/scraping.html , nearly 10 years old now!
... on Tue Feb 2 15:48:34 2010hmm. may be one for the TODO list
... on Tue Feb 2 13:48:16 2010'this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.'
... on Tue Feb 2 13:41:58 2010a custom pastebin for spam messages. cool
... on Mon Feb 1 15:08:13 2010'This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence. This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.'
... on Sun Jan 31 23:55:42 2010interesting Django/Pythonic approach, based on concepts from AppEngine
... on Fri Jan 29 23:27:40 2010Ugh, very bad idea indeed. A backchannel for spammers/phishers/attackers from the mail reader is something we definitely do not want to provide. This is why we chose to cut URLs at the registrar boundary for URIBL lookups in SpamAssassin
... on Thu Jan 28 12:30:58 2010great article about Dublin Bus' shortcomings, featuring an interview with Antoin! Very interesting to hear about the upcoming GPS-based accurate bus timetabling service to be visible via their website, that'll be fantastic
... on Thu Jan 28 12:28:16 2010good walk-through by Nate Lawson
... on Wed Jan 27 13:30:54 2010LWN follows up on the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX fiasco. 'It would appear that what SpamAssassin needs is some dedicated maintenance talent which is not dependent on evening hours put in by developers committed to other projects.' I wish
... on Wed Jan 27 12:30:48 2010wow. my new shopping list. also: now do one for Ireland ;)
... on Tue Jan 26 21:49:47 2010w00t!
... on Tue Jan 26 16:34:43 2010the LACKRack -- IKEA's "LACK" side tables have exactly 19 inches of space, perfect for rackmounted hardware with a little hacking
... on Tue Jan 26 10:01:41 2010reverse-engineering the output of spam templates. paper isn't published yet, but sounds very interesting, particularly since it overlaps with the SpamAssassin SOUGHT ruleset's methodology, a little, it sounds like. looking forward to reading it
... on Tue Jan 26 00:11:18 2010possibly the best article written yet about the iTablet
... on Mon Jan 25 22:31:44 2010this is the plan for tomorrow -- looks good!
... on Sat Jan 23 22:54:01 2010'This is a totally devastating blow to everyone'
... on Fri Jan 22 22:25:32 2010aka, lung cancer develops after 50 pack-years of smoking. sobering thought
... on Fri Jan 22 17:47:14 2010exactly what it says on the tin
... on Fri Jan 22 17:17:12 2010C10K microbenchmarking fun in Javascript (via:simonw)
... on Thu Jan 21 16:26:02 2010'Of course you have to appreciate the irony – the agency in charge of enforcing France’s new anti-piracy legislation using a pirated proprietary font in its very own logo.' hoho! hoist by their own petard
... on Thu Jan 21 14:03:54 2010whoa. really looking forward to this, Mass Effect was one of the best games I've ever played
... on Thu Jan 21 12:14:08 2010holy shit. This is absolutely amazing, a first-person account of auto-appendectomy (via infovore)
... on Wed Jan 20 17:33:49 2010Google reckons that the English translation of "Amhran na bhFiann" -- the Irish national anthem -- is "Save The Queen". ie. part of the *English* national anthem. the perils of machine learning (via Adam Maguire)
... on Wed Jan 20 16:07:21 2010nice work, Aussies! this is very stupid indeed (via Waxy)
... on Tue Jan 19 15:38:13 2010so, it seems the wireless ISPs don't have sufficient IPv4 space for their customers, and are filtering access to the internet via NAT; unfortunate side effect is that this breaks data retention as defined in the UK. wonder if the same applies here?
... on Thu Jan 14 15:53:16 2010Reddit thread from answers from a "doctor" at a dodgy online prescription-drugs store, supposedly not a spamvertized one though
... on Thu Jan 14 14:25:24 2010Russ Garrett with another set of near-realtime desktop weather imagery (cf. http://taint.org/xplanet/ )
... on Tue Jan 12 20:59:02 2010no sync or automated backup yet, so more like sendspace than dropbox, limited usefulness
... on Tue Jan 12 18:13:29 2010a GSM femtocell for the home -- USB-driven, the size of a pack of cards, $40. this won't last long
... on Tue Jan 12 11:44:31 2010chains -- for your shoes. basically crampon overshoes, to deal with ice and snow, EUR45
... on Tue Jan 12 11:40:04 2010live weather-station data from across Ireland, overlaid on a Google Map, using amateur and professional stations. fascinating
... on Mon Jan 11 14:02:33 2010phisher creates a banking app for Android phones which relays the authorization details to another site, possible because of insufficient app vetting (via Mulley)
... on Mon Jan 11 11:35:17 2010another day, another broken boiler
... on Sat Jan 9 22:01:08 2010nicely done; Lebowski a la Shakespeare (via Waxy)
... on Fri Jan 8 12:10:26 2010good thread, despite a lot of patronising asshattery
... on Thu Jan 7 11:22:11 2010'I think that ‘first wave’ of Irish blogging was over a long time ago, probably around the time Blogorrah hit the dirt, but in spite of time and an increase of participants and bigger audience there seems to be no real drive to improve content. People will always read something good – online or offline – and until that something good (hopefully in plural) starts to emerge and while good bloggers log off indefinitely, Irish blogging, for what it’s worth, is in a state of disarray.'
... on Wed Jan 6 14:33:11 2010in protest against the Fianna Fail religious right's ludicrous new blasphemy law
... on Fri Jan 1 21:56:45 2010Dr. Neal Krawetz brings the science on detecting Photoshop retouching
... on Tue Dec 29 14:50:51 2009"Justin Mason likes this"
... on Tue Dec 29 14:47:51 2009'free, open, developer-generated APIs for a wide variety of websites. Parselets.com is a place to create and share them. [..] Check out [..] ways to use parselets from our web service, Ruby, Python, C/C++, or the *nix command-line.'
... on Wed Dec 23 16:55:59 2009+1
... on Sat Dec 19 00:00:30 2009a very nice interactive editor in Flash, supporting lots of the usual perlish stuff. via Joe
... on Fri Dec 18 21:00:52 2009metrics, monitoring, instrumentation, fault tolerance, load mitigation called out as other factors by Allspaw
... on Thu Dec 17 22:40:50 2009hmm, not too tricky
... on Thu Dec 17 19:35:25 2009mmmm, thanks Katyusha! looks good
... on Wed Dec 16 23:16:16 2009filed under "about time I did another DVD backup"
... on Wed Dec 16 15:04:52 2009'Lsyncd uses rsync to synchronize local directories with a remote machine running rsyncd. Lsyncd watches multiple directories trees through inotify. The first step after adding the watches is to rsync all directories with the remote host, and then sync single file by collecting the inotify events. So lsyncd is a light-weight live mirror solution that should be easy to install and use while blending well with your system.' (via adulau)
... on Tue Dec 15 23:08:14 2009how the Great Firewall of Oz breaks so much more than the web browser
... on Tue Dec 15 21:45:01 2009'a Java framework made by Web developers. Discover a clean alternative to bloated enterprise Java stacks. Play focuses on developer productivity and targets RESTful architectures.'
... on Tue Dec 15 16:38:51 2009discussion thread on the cons of using Turing-complete general-purpose programming languages in places where it's not necessary, such as configuration files
... on Tue Dec 15 11:05:33 2009'Being majime (too serious) is not cool in Japan; likewise it is important for voyeurs of Japanese culture to recognize that most everything pop-culture-y that is exported to the West comes at us with a wink. If you're all up in arms about it, then maybe the joke is on you.'
... on Mon Dec 14 21:13:28 2009linked by Nelson; will return to this once i've gotten into the game
... on Sat Dec 12 21:46:57 2009'an open source JavaScript library that produces produces interactive, zoomable charts of time series. It is designed to display dense data sets and enable users to explore and interpret them.' quite pretty
... on Thu Dec 10 23:17:31 2009very new, but heading in the right direction (although the idea of using a browser action is probably not correct). This is the last hold-up for me to switch
... on Thu Dec 10 22:30:41 2009wow. that _is_ easy; wonder if it'd be nearly as easy to write an extension as it is nowadays to write userscripts in Firefox
... on Wed Dec 9 22:05:26 2009from Nelson. looks like it's becoming a viable browser, maybe I'll give it a go
... on Wed Dec 9 21:27:19 2009'Ask a craft brewer which other brewers he most admires, and he’s likely to mention Sierra Nevada. The Chico, California, brewery is considered to be sacred ground, and its beers expertly crafted. “When you die as a brewer, you go to Chico,” says Matthew Brynildson, brewmaster of Firestone Walker in Southern California.' paging Ben
... on Wed Dec 9 11:49:55 2009great line: 'In the future perhaps every artist will be famous for 15 comments'
... on Mon Dec 7 23:26:01 2009Flickr don't use branches. mental
... on Fri Dec 4 21:27:31 2009MeFi commenter ftw
... on Thu Dec 3 22:58:06 2009I didn't realise Firefox's geolocation used wifi triangulation, too
... on Wed Dec 2 11:05:50 2009good HN thread on better charting tools in JS
... on Wed Dec 2 10:39:20 2009Charlie Stross' thoughts on the true viability of interstellar travel. This was about the most thought-provoking bit of 'Accelerando' for me alright
... on Sun Nov 29 21:15:05 2009you have got to be kidding. Father Ted meets the Inquisition
... on Thu Nov 26 18:45:57 2009notes curated by Danny O'Brien: 'I have volunteered to take the meetynge notes in the style of a 17th century essayist.'
... on Wed Nov 25 21:17:56 2009so many! Saw a Hero last night, it looked pretty swish -- although not quite as pretty as the iPhone ;)
... on Wed Nov 25 21:15:18 2009we do something similar in SA
... on Wed Nov 25 09:34:48 2009A good guide to installation on Jaunty. I'm trying out sup. It does a really good job of bringing the GMail experience to the commandline, so far so good; now to see if I can switch my work email over!
... on Wed Nov 25 00:01:25 2009I'm late to the party, but this sounds lovely
... on Mon Nov 23 21:28:05 2009looks great
... on Wed Nov 18 22:37:50 2009Good presentation on C compiler optimization, via Cal Henderson. 'People often write less readable code because they think it will produce faster code. Unfortunately, in most cases, the code will not be faster.' I particularly like 'Fancy-Schmancy Algorithms': 'If you have 10-100 elements, use a list, not a red-black tree; Fancy data structures help on paper, but rarely in reality. (More space overhead in the data structure, less L2 cache left for actual data.)'
... on Tue Nov 17 15:34:43 2009LinkMachineGo knew the true identity of Belle du Jour way back when -- and set a Google trap to ensnare snooping journos. nice work
... on Tue Nov 17 15:03:56 2009'your online JSON Formatter'. useful. via JKeyes
... on Sun Nov 15 21:03:46 2009good reviews and notes from Peteris Krumins
... on Sun Nov 15 21:02:17 2009very clever. 'You can make the messages as enticing as you want - say, by having them pretend to be a notification from your bank account. If the crook chooses to view the push notification, Undercover will launch, [..] loading any Website of your choosing, such as the aforementioned bank's. While the thief is distracted, Undercover will be happy to save the device's GPS coordinates and IP address to Orbicule's Website.'
... on Sat Nov 14 22:24:33 2009argh. wish I'd seen this page before I signed up for a month's access while travelling -- they've now charged my credit card again, over a week after I requested the account's cancellation :(
... on Sat Nov 14 12:34:48 2009according to Fergal, at half of the price of O2's iPhone "deal"
... on Thu Nov 12 22:45:07 2009ioerror published the '\00' wild-card SSL cert for any domain (for affected SSL client libs at least)
... on Thu Nov 12 21:56:41 2009'You have to balance
quadtrees, Hilbert curves, and geohashing, as seen in Google's new Closure library. useful for multidimensional addressing in general
... on Mon Nov 9 19:27:40 2009$130 speakers; outputs from computer via USB, transmits to wireless receiver, which also has an iPod dock and a line-in. exactly what I'm after! (thanks Jason for the tip)
... on Sun Nov 8 21:06:43 2009specifically, a port of dessid to the iPhone, recently causing headlines
... on Sun Nov 8 20:56:41 2009'shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose. Flogr is powered by PHP, MySQL (optional), and Flickr.' excellent! via yoz
... on Fri Nov 6 00:31:06 2009quite a few excellent teeshirts, along with tea-related items -- and again they have a great kids' range. based in Northern Ireland! (via Ruth)
... on Thu Nov 5 23:15:04 2009Dublin shop selling fairly-traded and cool kids clothes and accessories; they also do stalls at various local markets now and again. think Mae and Bea have a few of their goods already ;)
... on Thu Nov 5 23:10:53 2009github's take on a good, distributed queueing system in Ruby
... on Thu Nov 5 22:22:53 2009'A variable-length format for positive integers is defined where the high-order bit of each byte indicates whether more bytes remain to be read. The low-order seven bits are appended as increasingly more significant bits in the resulting integer value. Thus values from zero to 127 may be stored in a single byte, values from 128 to 16,383 may be stored in two bytes, and so on.' UTF8-ish compression, used in Avro
... on Wed Nov 4 23:16:01 2009good overview of this jailbreak app
... on Wed Nov 4 22:17:19 2009Ask MeFi thread, mostly recommending tethering and SBSettings
... on Wed Nov 4 22:07:33 2009woot!
... on Wed Nov 4 17:56:42 2009hilarious article on the BVM-witnessing hysterics in Knock. 'if you looked hard enough, you could indeed discern a face in the play of light and shadows. When I squinted a certain way, I thought I could make out Bruce Forsyth.'
... on Tue Nov 3 13:34:08 2009'The current UNIX text processing tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line. There is a simple notation that can describe the `shape' of files when the typical array-of-lines picture is inadequate. That notation is regular expressions. Using regular expressions to describe the structure in addition to the contents of files has interesting applications, and yields elegant methods for dealing with some problems the current tools handle clumsily. When operations using these expressions are composed, the result is reminiscent of shell pipelines.' Paper by Rob Pike, via adulau. intriguing
... on Tue Nov 3 12:17:36 2009'The sregex module implements Structural Regular Expressions.' Python, Apache-licensed
... on Tue Nov 3 12:16:43 2009great article on the 80's one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)
... on Tue Nov 3 11:45:22 2009'I grew up in a college town, and one Halloween our doorbell rang and we opened the door expecting to see trickortreaters-- but what was in front of our open door--was another door! Like, a full-on wooden door, that had a sign that said "Please knock." So we did, and the door swung open to reveal a bunch of college dudes dressed as really old grandmothers, curlers in their hair, etc, who proceeded to coo over our "costumes" and tell us we were "such cute trick or treaters!" One even pinched my cheek. Then THEY gave US candy, closed their door, picked it up and walked to the next house.'
... on Tue Nov 3 00:46:57 2009this is incredible. Looking at this reminds me so much of hacking in the old TCD comp labs
... on Sat Oct 31 22:07:54 2009why HMAC is more secure than secret-suffix and secret-prefix keyed hashing. good to know
... on Fri Oct 30 22:23:02 2009lots of gory details on FB's innards via Dare Obasanjo
... on Fri Oct 30 15:46:46 2009sweet. HDMI out, MythTV streaming, and silent for $300
... on Fri Oct 30 15:45:16 2009'Become a virtual beef farmer. Control your personal food chain.' also deliver prime beef. mmmm
... on Fri Oct 30 12:27:53 2009lots of new features, and a switch of default IM client
... on Thu Oct 29 14:31:35 200930 minutes over medium heat, cooked in its own fat. whoa, I want to try this
... on Thu Oct 29 12:06:03 2009'MAAWG [..] says that spam and malicious emails dropped to 89 percent in the second quarter from 90.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.'
... on Wed Oct 28 17:41:44 2009Google resync to the latest kernel every 17 months or so -- not bad, actually
... on Wed Oct 28 00:01:22 2009informative, from Cisco (via BoxOfMeat)
... on Tue Oct 27 21:26:58 2009Reddit mass-interview of a spammer. apparently he's working on IPv6 support
... on Tue Oct 27 13:03:19 2009massive fail. 'By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to [...] dump the router’s configuration file [...which] included the administrative login and password in cleartext.'
... on Fri Oct 23 20:35:12 2009good research coming out of McAfee -- lots of Eastern European, Russian, and ex-USSR-country cybercrime businesses nowadays, apparently
... on Fri Oct 23 13:25:10 200915% smaller than bzip, 30% smaller than gzip, and now shipped with Fedora and Ubuntu. uses LZMA2
... on Fri Oct 23 09:03:09 2009Simon Willison plugs Redis as a good datastore for quick-hack scripts with requirements for lots of fast, local data storage -- the kind of thing I'd often use a DB_File for
... on Thu Oct 22 14:21:35 2009new Ruby HTTP server, using a preforked process pool based on select(). Github like it because of failure-recovery problems with Ruby threading bugs in Mongrel. The preforking algo used is extremely rudimentary -- the kind of thing we used in SpamAssassin before I implemented Apache-style preforking in 3.0
... on Thu Oct 22 11:12:38 2009another serialization format, binary, no IDL, no code generation, from GitHub
... on Thu Oct 22 11:04:20 2009a good guide
... on Wed Oct 21 21:35:14 2009Tom Francis gives "Red Faction: Guerilla" a truly massive plug based on its pervasive freeform environment destructability. I'm sold!
... on Wed Oct 21 10:27:47 2009'A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines', by Mark Adler, no less
... on Wed Oct 21 10:09:18 2009to read, yoz gives it the thumbs up
... on Tue Oct 20 11:41:18 2009oh, nifty, an augmented reality property app in Dublin
... on Mon Oct 19 23:24:48 2009hmm, a nifty app that takes pics of the desktop, activates the webcam etc. and uploads to a central server if you activate a 'my laptop has been stolen' bit
... on Mon Oct 19 22:00:59 2009connections to brutus.apache.org, "GET / HTTP/1.1", massive HTTPS DDOS. no idea what's going on
... on Mon Oct 19 15:09:38 2009supposedly should only list child porn sites, but sounds like it's got frequent false positives on file upload/download services nowadays
... on Fri Oct 2 13:28:09 2009all 6 parts of the first episode, via Waxy. will watch this at some future point when I have free time again!
... on Fri Oct 2 11:09:05 2009'He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.'
... on Wed Sep 30 15:39:53 2009pay EUR3 per month to receive Twitter @replies to your SMS mobile in Ireland -- a good niche
... on Tue Sep 29 12:40:24 2009'Where can I find an available DublinBike?' -- another DublinBikes mashup. hopefully JC Decaux won't C&D this one
... on Tue Sep 29 11:07:52 2009as used to exploit Reddit and create a comment worm
... on Tue Sep 29 10:27:14 2009"How the Giants of Finance Shrank, Then Grew, Under The Financial Crisis". but the data is less interesting than the excellent dataviz technique used to display it
... on Tue Sep 22 18:12:10 2009Irish-made iPhone apps. there's a surprising number of 'em
... on Sun Sep 20 17:16:00 2009Every HTML page is static -- the dynamic parts are entirely DOM-injected from server-delivered JSON by client-side Javascript. No dynamic data is delivered in HTML. I'm thinking about this, and it does seem to bring a lot of positives. hmm
... on Sat Sep 19 16:40:56 2009(via Pierce) Kim Stanley Robinson on today's British SF "golden age". I have a lot of reading to catch up on
... on Fri Sep 18 23:47:57 2009brilliant encounter between an inept UK water-cooler supplier, the cluetrain, and the Streisand effect
... on Fri Sep 18 17:12:37 2009a slightly cheaper option
... on Fri Sep 18 03:25:02 2009Mark Bregman: “I don’t let my IT department near my laptop.”
... on Thu Sep 17 23:19:02 2009it's not sufficiently evenly-distributed, apparently. Also: got linked from Hack The Planet!
... on Wed Sep 16 04:10:41 2009interesting concept, designing a typeface only for use on LCDs (via Waxy)
... on Wed Sep 16 04:08:50 2009more on the new async HTTP server from FriendFeed/Facebook, in Python. looks lovely
... on Fri Sep 11 16:45:11 2009'an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking (epoll) infrastructure.'
... on Fri Sep 11 11:06:09 2009'Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.' sweet!
... on Fri Sep 11 11:02:07 2009awesome vitriol from the big-in-the-80's Irish balladeer
... on Fri Sep 11 10:50:18 2009woot, nice work jgc!
... on Fri Sep 11 08:56:50 2009FB add a (working!) "Fax This Photo" feature, only visible to TechCrunch IP ranges -- and TC fall for it, pushing an unverified story to live, after waiting only 24 minutes for a verification. nice one FB
... on Fri Sep 11 08:50:03 2009'Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: "data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."'
... on Tue Sep 8 20:48:19 2009photoshop phun galore. "Foreign Toilets: VOTE NO" (via Shane Hegarty)
... on Mon Sep 7 13:23:33 2009Brendan plugs Wells Cargo, good international couriers if you're sending from .ie
... on Mon Sep 7 10:13:10 2009a lot more awesome than the title would suggest (via TTT)
... on Fri Sep 4 16:45:39 2009how to keep a small number of user accounts (ie. root) delivering locally while the rest are delivered to a smarthost
... on Fri Sep 4 11:08:20 2009Ben C-S rejigs the legendary "ed, man! !man ed" net.humor for a new age of DVCSes
... on Wed Sep 2 20:50:55 2009go Aoife! “This is the first ever discovery of novel human-specific protein coding genes,” said Dr McLysaght. “They are found in humans and nowhere else.”
... on Wed Sep 2 09:28:21 2009get a glowing rabbit to semaphore latest C-I build status
... on Tue Sep 1 20:54:33 2009interesting idea from Joe -- track your cloud-hosting spend in real-time
... on Tue Sep 1 20:34:26 2009'SoftReferences are the cheap, crappy caching mechanism [...] perfect for when you'd like your cache to be cleared at random times and in random order.'
... on Tue Sep 1 17:06:24 2009Satire site The Emergency on pro-life paramilitary nutter group Coir's new scaremongering campaign: "A German Will Be In Charge Of The SKY Remote IN YOUR LIVING ROOM!!!! Unless you vote NO!" -- a pretty accurate rendition of their posters
... on Tue Sep 1 09:00:18 2009wow, looks absolutely excellent! nice work (via Mulley)
... on Fri Aug 28 16:09:26 2009yay! Let's see if this shows up at http://pinboard.in/u:jm ;)
... on Thu Aug 27 17:03:22 2009now available. sadly, no support for Bugzilla, which is what we use in SpamAssassin (srsly), so I won't be trying it out just yet, but still -- cool
... on Thu Aug 27 16:32:02 2009it really is. Yet another one-page intro to git, but a good one
... on Thu Aug 27 13:39:24 2009UPC: "bring it on", essentially
... on Wed Aug 26 10:27:10 2009what it's like to have your photo used for stock images
... on Tue Aug 25 21:48:13 2009course notes from a 4-day MIT course on tech interviewing (via Hacker News)
... on Tue Aug 25 21:12:53 2009injects via gdb. pretty cool, if it works; one comment notes that they couldn't use it on a Rails app
... on Tue Aug 25 13:46:08 2009flipping amazing stop-motion LEGO animation paying homage to classic C=64 and NES gaming, featuring International Karate, Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, and Pac-Man from swedish duo Rymdreglage (via Conor)
... on Mon Aug 24 20:42:50 2009including one place that includes an open farm. result
... on Fri Aug 21 13:08:15 2009'an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool. It's a pastebin that executes code for you. You paste your code, and codepad runs it and gives you a short URL you can use to share it.' supports C, C++, D, Haskell, Lua, OCaml, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and Tcl code; isolated by a geordi-based supervisor, in turn running inside a firewalled virt, in turn running inside a firewalled dom0. nice work!
... on Fri Aug 21 12:51:51 2009another weather forecasting service which may be more reliable than Met Eireann, this time from yr.no, the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. if only Met Eireann spent our taxes on something of this quality (via Stephen Mulcahy)
... on Wed Aug 19 13:13:51 2009Seems to work nicely. Not quite as cleanly integrated as It's All Text! for Firefox, but getting there
... on Tue Aug 18 10:06:10 2009so Met Eireann's crappy weather forecasts are actually just what they give out "for free"; if you pay extra, they have more accurate forecasts. what a scam for a govt department! Handily though, they are mandated by law to give out decent forecasts to pilots -- which are available online
... on Mon Aug 17 21:11:30 2009next in a long line of one-to-many communication systems used by bad guys
... on Fri Aug 14 16:42:20 2009the new rental-bike system for Dublin from JC Decaux and Dublin City Council. woeful coverage, and eye-wateringly expensive; don't keep a bike out overnight or it'll cost you EUR30!!
... on Fri Aug 14 11:37:52 2009lovely run-through of the computer-vision algorithms this iPhone app uses (via Waxy)
... on Thu Aug 13 11:43:47 2009features mainly posts from NAMA-sceptic economist Karl Whelan
... on Thu Aug 13 11:39:31 2009'What we now know is that the banks have been actively working to keep development properties off the market, so that their true values are kept out of the public domain. However, to work through our current problems, these property assets are going to have to be dealt with – either sold at a reasonable price or else demolished or returned to agricultural usage.' oh dear
... on Thu Aug 13 11:38:43 2009promises to be frequently updated if/when anything might happen. certainly better advice for Irish sufferers than the useless PR spooge put out by the HSE -- as usual
... on Thu Aug 13 10:12:26 2009'I work for a for-profit company that is willing to sponsor projects in exactly the way described in this article. We are looking for (a) control, (b) stability, and (c) a development model that is cheaper than doing it ourselves. If such cooperatives existed we would be interested in them. I'm sure we are not alone, because this is how all for-profit businesses tend to think. The cooperative is a viable model because of the way it reinforces and maximizes member interests.'
... on Tue Aug 11 23:43:17 2009hilarious response to mind-boggling US healthcare talking-point derpitude: 'People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.' fantastic
... on Tue Aug 11 10:05:41 2009'Facing customer complaints - one customer has waited three weeks for their new iPhone - O2 firmly pinned the blame on Apple, "There has been unprecedented demand for the new iPhone 3GS since it went on sale in June, not just in Ireland but around the world. We continue to work with Apple to ensure frequent deliveries of stock into Ireland,” an O2 spokesman said.'
... on Mon Aug 10 22:12:21 2009a Reddit-friendly 8-point list of new idioms for Java code in a more functional style. not sure about a couple of these, but another couple get my +1
... on Mon Aug 10 13:29:30 2009nice GMail userscript to remove the ads
... on Mon Aug 10 10:47:05 2009The Beeb definitely takes it too far with this one; the song isn't clearly about 419 at all
... on Sun Aug 9 13:01:32 2009the Washington Post on the Yahoozee thing
... on Sun Aug 9 12:58:22 2009bit of controversy about Colin Powell dancing (!) to a song that promotes the "Yahoo boys", 419 scammers -- but it doesn't sound like that's the case, going by this post
... on Sun Aug 9 12:57:56 2009from Julian "MailScanner" Field (via the SA users list)
... on Fri Aug 7 09:06:23 2009'Britons will choose to cut back on almost anything other than food before economising on electronic communications services. Crucially, we will even cut spending on their mobile phone and TV package before foregoing Internet access'
... on Thu Aug 6 21:09:23 2009'We will turn Dublin’s tallest building into a giant public canvas—and we want you to play with it. Our simple tools allow you to animate your thoughts and broadcast them on the city skyline.' open from Aug 24 until Sep 24
... on Thu Aug 6 14:39:07 2009'The platform API remains fundamentally broken and gives users no way to prevent applications from accessing their photos. Facebook would be best served by fixing this instead of dismissing users’ concern for privacy as “misleading rumors.”'
... on Wed Aug 5 22:35:38 2009great blog post on the YAGNI principle. +1
... on Tue Aug 4 16:31:12 2009YA set of "I got mine after queueing from 7.30am" posts. wtf Apple, this is a shambles
... on Sat Aug 1 12:21:00 2009wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status
... on Sat Aug 1 10:31:58 2009'[Joe] Stewart said the sophistication and stealth of this malware strain has become so bad that it's time for Windows users to start thinking of doing their banking and other sensitive transactions on a dedicated system that is not used for everyday Web surfing.' it's that bad
... on Sat Aug 1 10:21:06 2009actually quite a good breakdown of software eng skill progression
... on Fri Jul 31 09:18:50 2009'File-based, rather than tuple-based processing'; based around UNIX command-line toolset; good UNIXish UI; lots of caching of intermediate results; low setup overhead -- although it does require a shared POSIX filesystem, e.g. NFS, for synchronization
... on Fri Jul 31 09:14:40 2009wow. can we (and by "we" I mean "the people in my del network") not just move en masse to Pinboard? ;)
... on Fri Jul 31 09:09:41 2009"Life would be easier if you could mark people as spam"
... on Fri Jul 31 08:02:33 2009lots of commercial and open-source-friendly-licensed icon sets, including the old reliable FamFamFam and Pinvoke icons
... on Thu Jul 30 21:02:39 2009how to upgrade from 20GB to 120GB. this looks frankly terrifying (via Rod)
... on Thu Jul 30 11:50:17 2009'Screams of "Of course, yes, I too can see the phone," were also heard at this time.'
... on Wed Jul 29 20:26:32 2009massive shortages of iPhones in Ireland; this forum thread is apparently the most reliable way to determine if you'll be able to get your hands on one (via Keith)
... on Tue Jul 28 13:51:32 2009good wrap-up from Anil Dash on "the new push"
... on Fri Jul 24 15:48:47 2009lots of stuff about one of Boards' best topics, handily arranged by company (via Eoin)
... on Fri Jul 24 12:32:36 2009what is the law, and how to make a complaint against an Irish company, via Donncha
... on Thu Jul 23 11:50:25 2009good and cheap; good reviews; supported by Linux HID force-feedback joystick library; EUR58 at Play.com
... on Thu Jul 23 09:30:15 2009an alternative way to get pedal controls working; use a racing-game steering-wheel controller, instead, since they're cheaper
... on Thu Jul 23 09:29:03 2009good call. but as one commenter notes: why isn't there an "unsubscribe from this list" button in the normal UI? now if I want to use this as a quick-unsub mechanism for mail I know is ham, I'm _forced_ to use "mark as spam" to get this shortcut, which doesn't make much sense
... on Thu Jul 23 09:07:08 2009'A UK firm that turns mobile messages into text faces questions over its privacy standards, technology and finances following a BBC investigation' .. 'claims to the BBC suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines.' 'The fact that messages appear to have been read by workers outside of the European Union raises questions about the firm's data protection policy.'
... on Thu Jul 23 09:03:44 2009'an online service that enables you to look up the configuration of any public SSL web server. The configuration of known public SSL web servers will be periodically inspected and the results recorded. This service relies on the SSL Server Rating guide for the assessment'
... on Wed Jul 22 20:34:25 2009a story of how a bug in Apollo 11's Lunar Module control software, intended to work around a deficiency of the engine hardware, barely avoided mission-endangering results
... on Wed Jul 22 13:40:52 2009recommended by JB. 3 switches, USB, $120. Linux support seems tricky; requires running Windows apps to reprogram the pedal's firmware. ugh
... on Wed Jul 22 11:52:16 2009comes with dictation transcription software and headphones, USB, UKP93.15. there's a blog post indicating that it's Linux-compatible, emulating a generic USB keyboard
... on Wed Jul 22 11:49:05 2009from Kinesis Ergo, claims to do mouse or keyboard actions, $129, USB. Linux support unclear
... on Wed Jul 22 11:46:55 2009great Singularity contemplation from Kevin Kelly: 'to be useful, artificial intelligences have to be embodied in the world, and that world will often set their pace of innovations. Thinkism is not enough. Without conducting experiments, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results. It cannot think its way to solving the world's problems. There won't be instant discoveries the minute, hour, day or year a smarter-than-human AI appears. The rate of discovery will hopefully be significantly accelerated. Even better, a super AI will ask questions no human would ask. But, to take one example, it will require many generations of experiments on living organisms, not even to mention humans, before such a difficult achievement as immortality is gained.'
... on Wed Jul 22 11:12:41 2009according to this, a retired cop has set up a company called Lucid Intelligence with 'the records of four million Britons, and 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans', and plans to 'charge members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached.' How is this legal under Data Protection law? wtf
... on Wed Jul 22 08:56:42 2009hooray, a decent review site for Dublin at last
... on Tue Jul 21 15:49:40 2009well-written, and it's good to see version control listed right at the top of the list. But quite dead; interesting for historical reasons only at this stage
... on Tue Jul 21 12:13:05 2009'View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way', supporting postfix/spamd/clamd logs among loads of others. very cool if a little silly
... on Tue Jul 21 09:28:15 2009Canonical _finally_ open source (under the AGPL) their bug tracker/project hosting platform. yay! here's hoping it's reasonably easy to deploy. maybe it would be viable for the ASF... hmm
... on Tue Jul 21 08:59:49 2009good on them, spilling the beans at last! '“We haven’t seen any further attempts at cache poisoning since last week,” the spokesman added.'
... on Fri Jul 17 22:40:26 2009turns out most of the McColo-based spammers were sending easy-to-block output
... on Fri Jul 17 20:33:52 2009'founded in late 2007 by a small group of individuals with a common interest in brewing, but, whose experience extended to tasting only. Word of the idea spread rapidly, and such was the interest that by December of that year eight brewing teams had been formed.' next meetup is 15th Aug 2009
... on Fri Jul 17 13:40:14 2009wow, software archaeology. looks like the 3.1 release (which I worked on) still has its HTML release docs online
... on Fri Jul 17 13:22:05 2009'Between January 2004 until September 2005, [Ralsky accomplice David S] Patton developed and marketing his illegal bulk mailing tools via a firm called Lightspeed Marketing. Nexus was designed to falsify the headers of spam messages while Proxy Scanner was designed to channel junk mail through compromised zombie proxies, typically PCs in either homes or businesses infected with [trojans].'
... on Thu Jul 16 15:31:23 2009"The Magazine For People Who Try To Have Conversations About Science News". oh god, this is my life
... on Thu Jul 16 14:04:06 2009"Someday, in the comfort of your home, you'll be able to shop and bank electronically, read instantly updated newswires, analyze the performance of a stock that interests you, send electronic mail across the country, then play Bridge with three strangers in LA, Chicago and Dallas." just not with CI$. oops
... on Thu Jul 16 12:20:34 2009'The last few C64DTV PAL units are available for sale at £100 GBP Plus shipping. There are no more units available anywhere in the world as production ceased in 2005 and due to complicated licensing issues, it's unlikey that the unit will ever re-enter production.'
... on Wed Jul 15 11:38:49 2009apparently the bassist went online, googled their new covers album, and totted up all the counts of search results -- including the fake ones from scam/ad sites
... on Wed Jul 15 11:09:03 2009'Matthias Merx, the firm's managing director, told heise online that following a voltage drop, something happened in D-Trust's "Trustcenter" that does occasionally occur. "The [hardware security module] independently deleted the data [including the root CA private key] because it suspected an attack."'
... on Tue Jul 14 16:10:11 2009Zed Shaw on OSS licensing and today's software industry: 'I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Good. Because I have a solution to that too.'
... on Tue Jul 14 10:40:55 2009whoa, nifty. 'Retrieving items from various levels of memory and cache make up a dominant factor of running time, so for speed it is crucial to minimize these costs. The main idea of cache-oblivious algorithms is to achieve optimal use of caches on all levels of a memory hierarchy without knowledge of their size.'
... on Mon Jul 13 14:40:56 2009brilliant (via Waxy)
... on Sun Jul 12 20:39:59 2009as predicted: 'Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, Chris Paget's scanner downloaded to his laptop the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.'
... on Sun Jul 12 20:37:47 2009good point from Jason O'Mahoney. 'let’s pass this law anyway, but instead of a €25,000 fine, make it a €25 fine. The constitution is satisfied, and the fine is so nominal as to be useless, which is what the Greens say is the effective outcome of the law anyway.' +1
... on Thu Jul 9 20:22:13 2009extremely detailed postmortem of the recent GFS outage -- a poorly-written MapReduce client issued repeated "query of death" messages, causing server-side stack overflows
... on Thu Jul 9 16:56:35 2009'Count Me Out is a campaign seeking to lessen the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland. Our primary focus is to reduce the number of "members" of the church by encouraging people to formally defect.''
... on Thu Jul 9 12:08:01 2009'Wouldn't the take-up rate on spam improve with a more personal approach, like going around door-to-door?' 'I happen to be the cousin of the President of Nigeria' -- brilliant
... on Wed Jul 8 22:35:46 2009'Your family photos are accompanied by text ads for skin care and diet plans.' 'Changes your icons daily, forcing you to look up which obscure scientific figure is having a birthday.'
... on Wed Jul 8 22:31:22 2009a better quote than the IT article. "This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers." Hmm. an irregular volume caused by a DNS cache poisoning attack, maybe? (via Chris)
... on Wed Jul 8 20:22:17 2009'There is an undisguised and frank expression of relief in Michael Sands’s voice when asked what Dublin City Council will do in the event of theft or damage to the city’s 450 bikes. “JC Decaux is responsible for that. Our deal with them is that the city must have 450 bikes fit for use at all times.” We’ll see over time who got the better half of the deal.'
... on Wed Jul 8 13:27:43 2009the _only_ press coverage so far of Eircom's DNS subversion. 'The company blamed the problems on “an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic” directed at its website, which affected the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for its customers.' uh, how does that wind up redirecting popular sites to porn ads exactly?
... on Wed Jul 8 08:56:34 2009so that's James Gosling, JRuby's Charles Nutter and Groovy's James Strachan all giving Scala big thumbs up. really have to learn this language
... on Tue Jul 7 09:21:28 2009must try this out and see if it's usable in Chromium on Linux yet
... on Mon Jul 6 10:15:53 2009'Rik Ferguson, solutions architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, also reported about the issues. "So far there are very few details on the nature of the problem over at Eircom, but it is certainly clear that many Eircom subscribers are being redirected to bogus websites and rumours abound that Eircom’s DNS has been compromised," the researcher wrote on his blog. He suggests that affected users switch to using OpenDNS.'
... on Mon Jul 6 10:11:33 2009lots of detail
... on Sun Jul 5 21:42:24 20098 key gotchas when implementing RESTful web APIs. great advice
... on Sun Jul 5 08:00:03 2009'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.'
... on Sat Jul 4 21:08:28 2009great demo and walkthrough from Cloudera
... on Sat Jul 4 21:06:27 2009interesting 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
... on Fri Jul 3 11:13:50 2009'The humble spice burger, one of Ireland’s few original contributions to world cuisine, has been saved.' YAY
... on Fri Jul 3 08:57:18 2009'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.'
... on Thu Jul 2 09:16:57 2009'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!
... on Wed Jul 1 10:40:51 2009you can access an Atom feed of your inbox via https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ - I had no idea!
... on Wed Jul 1 08:46:24 2009native support built-in -- awesome! must try this out
... on Tue Jun 30 20:04:12 2009hilariously off-base predictions from Forbes ASAP back in 2000. pretty much everything is wrong, except for the available disk capacity of 1TB (via Tony)
... on Tue Jun 30 14:00:24 2009'Ms Sullivan said the highest "legitimate" offer was about $1.2million. Others were for much more but from unscrupulous quarters.'
... on Tue Jun 30 09:32:12 2009using gitosis. looks quite usable (via Tony)
... on Mon Jun 29 22:32:03 2009even more techie details, good tips on JVM profiling/monitoring tools and background on their switch from Ruby to Scala
... on Mon Jun 29 15:00:07 2009good info on Twitter's current architecture. lots of memcached
... on Sun Jun 28 20:16:28 2009Artist 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
... on Sun Jun 28 13:04:52 2009web-based tool to aid Scrum development processes, Apache-licensed, in Python
... on Sun Jun 28 12:39:01 2009'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.'
... on Fri Jun 26 08:35:46 2009legendary music journo, dead of cancer :(
... on Thu Jun 25 17:10:24 2009Megaton 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
... on Thu Jun 25 09:00:03 2009good quote from Richard Cox of Spamhaus: "This has been a long time coming. Ralsky has been identified as one of the key drivers of [..] development in the spam world [...] among the first to commission mass-mailing Trojans to help develop spam botnets."'
... on Wed Jun 24 13:20:58 2009a mate had his FB credentials stolen and the account used to attempt to scam his social group. Sample chat: 'so where should I send the money?' 'you can have it sent to my name and my present location [...] Do you know any western union outlet nearest to you?'
... on Wed Jun 24 09:11:22 2009a great HOWTO
... on Tue Jun 23 22:00:27 2009Alan Ralsky pleads guilty in a stock-spam case, facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under CAN-SPAM, wire fraud, and money laundering laws
... on Tue Jun 23 12:44:49 2009'SORBS is officially "For Sale" should anyone
print out and fold!
... on Mon Jun 22 14:27:06 2009an undocumented registry^Wgconf tweak. hopefully this'll be fixed more cleanly soon. Gwibber's a great twitter/FB updates client!
... on Mon Jun 22 09:46:07 2009the 40 rent-a-bike depots around Dublin, from the Mater to the Grand Canal. coverage outside the city centre is pretty weak :(
... on Sun Jun 21 13:43:52 2009'a string template engine based on the Django template system and written in Qt'
... on Thu Jun 18 14:33:46 2009NOOOOOO! also, wtf Enterprise Ireland: 'the firm closed after an appeal to Enterprise Ireland for emergency funding was rejected. “They didn’t want to know,” said an internal company source.'
... on Thu Jun 18 10:22:27 2009interesting details in the implementation of PageRank and how it "flows"
... on Wed Jun 17 16:12:38 2009oh dear. Cligs - ever heard of it?
... on Wed Jun 17 10:26:22 2009brilliant. 'The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.' Even worse: IOActive's demo worm 'exploits an automatic update feature in the meter that runs on peer-to-peer technology that doesn't use code signing or other measures to make sure the update is authorized.' omgwtfbbq
... on Sat Jun 13 15:00:19 2009'A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.'
... on Thu Jun 11 20:44:15 2009a Greasemonkey userscript that enhances Google searches with del.icio.us hits for the same search. works quite well
... on Wed Jun 10 21:58:16 2009sounds like a lovely Linux system under the hood; glibc, upstart, ipkg, dbus. if only it did GSM/3G...
... on Wed Jun 10 20:14:41 2009Chris Horn with advice for Irish tech startups from his experience with IONA. lots of IONA history here
... on Wed Jun 10 20:08:40 2009experiences of startups who've worked with "cloud" hosting platforms. all these comments match my experience. also notable: 'No one mentioned Google App Engine' doh!
... on Wed Jun 10 14:04:37 2009a great YouTube Downfall dub to commemorate Libertas' passing from the EU political scene ;)
... on Mon Jun 8 23:13:48 2009a truly grody hack to work around iPhone brokenness. wtf is wrong with saving HTML pages to local flash for offline use? does it not "just work" or something?
... on Sun Jun 7 14:27:35 2009a statistical measure to calculate "nearness" of items for collaborative filtering, a la "people who bought this also bought this". wonder if this would make a good Bayes p-value combiner in SpamAssassin
... on Sat Jun 6 21:28:37 2009'SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful. [..] Like I said: as far as I’m concerned, every [dodgy figure] from the [music] industry is false, until proven otherwise.'
... on Sat Jun 6 12:38:46 2009using "flickrtouchr", a handy script by colmmacc
... on Sat Jun 6 12:15:25 2009looks awesome. AC1 was one of the best games I played last year, really looking forward to this
... on Thu Jun 4 22:43:43 2009I'd forgotten how this works. good reminder
... on Thu Jun 4 22:22:27 2009very funny, and a fantastic illustration of common applied-crypto pitfalls
... on Thu Jun 4 16:59:39 2009'Authored by researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, their work reveals a collision attack on SHA-1 with a complexity of 2^52 operations (the previous fastest known SHA-1 collision attack had required 2^63 operations). This is a significant improvement in finding SHA-1 collisions.' 'the attacks affect collision resistance, not pre-image or second pre-image resistance. [...] the researchers are able to generate two unique messages that hash to the same digest value.'
... on Thu Jun 4 16:31:16 2009crappy pRNG seeding; used the same source "random" stream for both security-sensitive purposes (login cookies) and non-sensitive user-visible data (in HTML page source); and no HMAC usage at all. oh dear. good example of how not to do it
... on Thu Jun 4 15:31:12 2009log-structured fs; instant "free" checkpoint snapshots, fast crash recovery, superfast benchmarks, in upcoming Linux kernels. sounds awesome (via JZawodny)
... on Thu Jun 4 15:19:20 2009'Lars Rasmussen responded that [the spam problem] hasn't been given much thought yet [jm: !!!], since it is a closed developer's preview for now, but also mentioned that most likely Wave would use a whitelist option, where you'd have to add a friend/coworker before they could send/invite you to Waves.' ie, the IM style
... on Thu Jun 4 11:01:05 2009looks like the plan is for third parties to provide anti-spam services/bots to despam your Wave inbox, plus a little economic handwaving
... on Thu Jun 4 10:56:07 2009OSX doesn't suspend-to-disk by default, which isn't good if you want to reduce power consumption of an unused MacBook Pro. this AppleScript provides a nice Mac-ish UI for the commandline NVRAM pokery required to fix this
... on Sun May 31 10:46:11 2009'The Last Social Game You Will Ever Play'. 'Want in? Sorry. You can't. We're in beta, so we are way too cool for you. If you'd like us to throw you a frickin' bone when we're ready to consider your application, follow @spamstery on Twitter and we'll see what we can do. (No promises, though. God, you're a dork.)'
... on Sun May 31 10:14:00 2009good intro to the systems used in today's botnets, from Marshal8e6's TRACElabs
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