Snapshot taken at Thu Nov 20 08:14:54 2008
Walter's Twitter profile pic editing tool; enter your username and use the Pixenate image-editing tools to hack at your profile pic, then re-upload -- all from the browser. great demo of Pixenate
... on Wed Nov 19 12:08:11 2008ahead of the Irish Times & Myhome.ie and the Irish Independent sites, just short of RTE.ie. Web forums are certainly mainstream in Ireland now
... on Wed Nov 19 11:45:21 2008Amazon's new CDN enhancement to S3; 17c per GB (plus an initial 10c/GB "origin fetch" charge), vs 10c/GB with basic S3. no upfront setup required, beyond S3 itself. Uses HTTP cache-control headers. nice! looking forward to playing with this
... on Tue Nov 18 11:05:23 2008woo, new Google-Maps-style UI for the OSI maps. not great resolution or Google-style eye candy, but it has pretty good mapping of structures (via IIU list)
... on Tue Nov 18 10:15:29 2008if you want to add image editing for user-contributed images to your webapp, this is the way to do it -- low-cost, on-demand, zero-setup! nice one Walter, this is a great idea
... on Mon Nov 17 15:21:17 2008assuming these numbers mesh with Google Analytics, taint.org is just behind moviestar.ie and ahead of redfm.ie
... on Mon Nov 17 11:53:16 2008MRI scan, pasted onto a block of wooden bricks. want
... on Fri Nov 14 15:57:00 2008generates nice DOT graphs of the Python memory arena, looks like a good memory-leak diagnosis tool
... on Fri Nov 14 15:13:13 2008now on general release. another S3 shortcoming rectified
... on Fri Nov 14 11:42:08 2008New stable release of perl 5.8.x. Useful new bundled script: "perlthanks -- a variant of perlbug, but for sending non-bug-reports [to the] authors and maintainers of Perl. Getting nothing but bug reports can become a bit demoralising." aww! we love you p5p!
... on Thu Nov 13 15:12:54 2008yay! "hopefully late December"
... on Thu Nov 13 12:02:35 2008book mashup of "Where The Wild Things Are" and Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". yeah, pretty sure I _won't_ be buying this for Bea (via Alex)
... on Thu Nov 13 11:22:11 2008article by the author of "Liar's Poker" on the sub-prime crash -- chock full of insane details about just how stupid and greedy the Wall Street bankers are. lock 'em up!
... on Thu Nov 13 11:15:02 20081,425,440,000 users (via fanf)
... on Tue Nov 11 14:59:18 2008draft PDF of tips for advanced S3 users
... on Tue Nov 11 14:33:58 2008announcing the Irish Reporting & Information Security Service (IRISS). excellent news!
... on Mon Nov 10 16:32:56 2008"We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome."
... on Mon Nov 10 16:31:43 2008ever wonder, "what if lawyers did blinged-up flyers with 8 fonts and lensflare effects"? wonder no longer. "Toll Free: 1-888-88NOTME"
... on Mon Nov 10 14:13:46 2008at one point; that worked out as 900 million spams per day, resulting in just 72 sales each day
... on Fri Nov 7 20:51:50 2008"looking for free-to-air digital TV in Ireland". campaigning blog
... on Fri Nov 7 12:52:00 2008seriously: yay ;)
... on Thu Nov 6 11:53:54 2008sadly turning out to be spot on the money
... on Wed Nov 5 17:38:00 2008Britain's largest music download sites come up with something useful -- an official tick-mark to indicate that a file is DRM-free
... on Wed Nov 5 13:58:08 2008clowns. Also, the deputy Data Protection Commissioner gets a massive FAIL: 'While the loss of the data was a concern he said the likelihood of a fraud was "relatively remote".' Since the likelihood of me crashing my car driving at high speed is similarly "relatively remote", I'll ignore speed limits, then
... on Tue Nov 4 16:05:04 2008under new EU legislation, due to come into force next year, it will be illegal for businesses to "falsely represent oneself as a consumer" by, for example, writing a fake review of their own service
... on Tue Nov 4 12:06:00 2008'XMPP is causing us pain and eating cycles' ... 'too many scattered implementations, leaving it in the "immature" bucket.' it seems Jabber.org and Google are throttling Gnip traffic
... on Tue Nov 4 10:45:40 2008'Enhanced Message-ID as Email Watermark'. basically similar to how SpamAssassin's VBounce ruleset detects bounces by spotting mailserver fingerprints in the Received: header, but using the Message-ID: header instead
... on Tue Nov 4 10:37:23 2008ha! This actually happened to *me* when I was a kid, believe it or not (although with only 1 spider, not 2)
... on Mon Nov 3 17:39:03 2008even by midnight GMT, we should have some interesting results
... on Mon Nov 3 14:15:29 2008discover a Tor user's real IP address using Java or Flash, both of which apparently do not enforce proxy usage correctly from the browser
... on Sun Nov 2 12:22:26 2008well-researched post on how checking account security is non-existent in US banking
... on Fri Oct 31 11:36:04 2008US banks have an absurd policy of not authenticating check transactions, and this is now being actively exploited by fraudsters. As a result, Knuth will no longer mail reward checks to people who discover errors in his books :( (via adulau)
... on Fri Oct 31 11:33:35 2008one Russian spammer appears to be earning over $5M/year by hawking fake antivirus apps via spam to gullible victims
... on Thu Oct 30 17:20:11 2008Wonder if Democrats in the Congress are using GPG? sounds like they should be. incredible (via b1ff.org)
... on Thu Oct 30 11:14:15 2008A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript. awesome. unplayably slow in FF3, but I have high hopes for the new JS interpreter in FF3.1. open-source, too, with a public SVN repository!
... on Thu Oct 30 11:03:03 2008Mark Pilgrim's favourite Linux apps. I might need to try gPhoto again -- I also gave up on having a "photo library" as too confining for my needs. other good recommendations there too
... on Wed Oct 29 22:37:04 2008'With the money that’s been paid back so far, including one loan in full, I was able to lend $25 each to two women in Peru to purchase animals. Which means I’ve been able to make $150 worth of loans, even though I’d only “invested” $100. Put another way: my $100 has done $150 worth of good in the world. This makes me really happy. '
... on Wed Oct 29 11:39:58 2008great blog post from Cal @ Flickr about their system-monitoring graphing backend, using custom RRDTool daemon and UDP notifications. very nice indeed
... on Wed Oct 29 10:55:05 2008bananas. Members of an Irish web forum are lobbying the EC to intervene in the Irish govt's planned bailout of the construction industry through (more!) cheap home loans. I wish them luck
... on Wed Oct 29 09:56:39 2008makes good money sense: 'the Sutton-based cyclist will save themselves EUR2,329 over the course of three years while the person living in Goatstown will find themselves with an extra EUR2,611 at the end of year three, enough to pay for a couple of holidays to the Caribbean.'
... on Mon Oct 27 21:16:01 2008'SpamAssassin [is] now available from the main repository providing a supported solution for spam detection'. you've got to be kidding! Canonical took this long to get this supported?! wtf
... on Mon Oct 27 21:11:25 2008there's already a CPAN module to access CloudFiles, thanks to Leon "Net::Amazon::S3" Brocard
... on Fri Oct 24 16:10:56 2008'86% of UK broadband users still don’t understand the usage limits on their service and nearly one million have reached or exceeded their ISPs limit in the last year alone. [..] 6.2m people believe they have an "unlimited" service with no restrictions [..] just 22% of the major broadband providers are transparent and advertise the true limits of their packages' (via /.)
... on Fri Oct 24 15:21:50 2008another Cthulhu-influenced game, tipped by Andrew -- Gamecube, so could probably pick it up on eBay and play it on the Wii
... on Thu Oct 23 19:48:43 2008'Owners wishing to sell or rent residential property will have to pay an estimated fee of €300-€500 to comply with new building regulations from next year'. why? is it expected that renters will refuse houses that are inefficient? not impressed, strikes me as typical Irish Green Party half-baked tokenism
... on Thu Oct 23 16:02:43 2008the French president fell for a phish, providing the auth details for his bank account. possibly untrue; there seem to be a lot of differing reports
... on Thu Oct 23 11:13:32 2008sustainable sushi: avoid Oz/Japan-farmed yellowtail tuna, farmed salmon, octopus, and unagi (NOOO!)
... on Thu Oct 23 10:08:43 2008wow, they must be feeling flush. Slicehost: EC2-like Xen hosting, JungleDisk: S3-backed online backup. JungleDisk is to be transitioned off S3 onto Rackspace's own "CloudFS" storage cloud (via Michele)
... on Thu Oct 23 08:43:38 2008this hurts my head. very impressive (via Waxy)
... on Wed Oct 22 22:06:23 2008'SDK is lovely. Great command-line tools' ... 'near-perfect emulator' ... 'using a production T-Mobile G1'. sounds fun
... on Tue Oct 21 10:10:29 2008its EU publishers have delayed digital release until sometime next year, when the physical-media version is ready, by which time the release PR will have evaporated. idiotic
... on Tue Oct 21 08:57:17 2008you can buy uranium ore on Amazon, it seems. review hilarity ensues
... on Mon Oct 20 21:18:33 2008"everyday carry" -- ie. microoptimization of your keychain. this is excellent, and a whole new way to waste time and money on gadgets (via Russell Davies)
... on Mon Oct 20 11:13:15 2008turning a Leatherman Micro into a combo multi-tool keyholder. nifty
... on Sat Oct 18 20:45:59 2008be notified when someone unfollows you, along with the last tweet you sent before they dropped you. "was it something I said?" brilliant!
... on Fri Oct 17 12:58:00 2008from Jan 2009, visitors from many countries including Ireland need to register at https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov before travelling to the US
... on Fri Oct 17 11:37:12 2008Opera 9.60 now issues a warning if you connect to an SSL site which has an RSA/DH public key shorter than 900 bits in length
... on Fri Oct 17 09:50:15 2008avoid coredumps due to pycurl's use of a non-thread-safe signal
... on Thu Oct 16 20:05:36 2008aka CrackFeed
... on Thu Oct 16 13:49:35 200888/100: 'step into a third-person sci-fi survival horror experience that delivers psychological thrills and gruesome action. Set in the cold blackness of deep space, the atmosphere is soaked with a feeling of tension, dread and sheer terror.' sounds right up my street
... on Thu Oct 16 13:28:12 2008wiki tracking a few of the major botnet spammers
... on Thu Oct 16 11:42:24 2008wow, these spammers were responsible for the VPXL, Canadian Pharmacy, *and* Hoodia spam runs. sounds like virtually _all_ the pharma spam for the past few years! massive result for the FTC
... on Thu Oct 16 11:24:52 2008fix for that FP register corruption bug in UML
... on Wed Oct 15 08:55:37 2008manifests as occasional NaN values in running processes (via Mark Martinec)
... on Wed Oct 15 08:54:40 2008'The world is treating us like we’re dead. Bank accounts frozen. No business without cash payments in advance. No currency can be bought. [..] Imports have stopped because of closed currency markets and diapers, flour, sugar and other necessities are selling out in the shops.'
... on Tue Oct 14 19:32:43 2008a linux boot CD to perform recovery and repair on malware-infested Windows setups; features 4 different virus scanners with online updates. essential for dealing with Windows-loving relatives
... on Tue Oct 14 09:39:53 2008so the McCain campaign are letting racist psychoceramics lend a hand? nice
... on Tue Oct 14 09:24:14 2008'DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month.' omg that's awesome
... on Tue Oct 14 09:18:12 2008a more reliable way to inhibit sleepy-Macbook syndrome than InsomniaX (via Conall)
... on Mon Oct 13 15:09:10 2008the JC Decaux scam continues. the bikes have been delayed again -- until next summer -- and the 40 sites don't even extend to Stoneybatter or all the way to the Royal Canal. ripoff
... on Sun Oct 12 20:44:40 2008nice hack
... on Fri Oct 10 16:48:33 2008good list from Russell Coker. Gandi's product is amazingly cheap at EUR6 for super-low-end nodes (UPDATE: that's because the page is wrong! in reality it's EUR10+VAT)
... on Fri Oct 10 12:06:52 2008'A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.' amazingly vicious hatchet-job on John McCain from _Rolling Stone_
... on Fri Oct 10 11:35:57 2008MessageLabs indicates a 'significant drop' in spam/botnet activity, due to loss of C&C networks located at Atrivo
... on Fri Oct 10 11:15:54 2008'Spam originating from the Storm botnet suddenly dried up in mid-September. Since that time we have not detected a single Storm spam in our traps.'
... on Fri Oct 10 10:44:27 2008handy; load initial test data into the database from JSON files. must start using these
... on Fri Oct 10 10:18:20 2008it's true, the "clickstream" companies are getting away with almost the same shit that Phorm, NebuAd et al are being pilloried for. use HTTPS where you can
... on Thu Oct 9 13:33:59 2008explore the innards of a gigantic tunnel-boring machine in plan projection, using an astonishingly good Flash visualization. brilliant, in a very German-engineering way
... on Thu Oct 9 10:09:53 2008the insane bacchanalia of Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas, who built a massive hookers-and-coke-filled dungeon under his Laguna Hills mansion, and spiked his customers with Es. great article from Vanity Fair (via My Pepys)
... on Thu Oct 9 09:03:34 2008hope this works out well for Matt and the guys
... on Wed Oct 8 21:03:56 2008great rant opposing Symantec CEO's wittering about how online privacy is a lost cause
... on Wed Oct 8 20:08:05 2008'Full Rsync layer to Amazon S3 storage'. preserves file perms, symlinks, partial files. commercial, charged at 5 cents per hour of rsync time used
... on Wed Oct 8 10:49:19 2008in 2006, T-Mobile lost data on 17m customers, but noted that they could find no evidence of misuse or compromise, so made no public announcement -- until last weekend, when _Der Spiegel_ discovered this data for sale online. so much for keeping it quiet. another argument for compulsory breach disclosure
... on Wed Oct 8 10:37:09 2008'a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X that is meant to look better and integrate more seamlessly with the Mac than the older Carbon port of Vim' (thanks MinHee Hong!)
... on Wed Oct 8 08:34:51 2008looks like a web-based version of good old Filemaker
... on Tue Oct 7 13:51:53 2008skip to the comment thread, it's fantastic. I used to know lots of this stuff (via Donncha)
... on Tue Oct 7 13:29:59 2008the 'Motion Picture Licensing Company' sent a letter to 2,500 Irish playschools, demanding a fee of EUR3 per child to cover license fees for the kids watching DVDs. However, it seems they themselves hadn't registered as required by law, so were acting illegally in issuing demands... oh the irony
... on Tue Oct 7 10:25:53 2008routing around the Irish couriers and An Post's brokenness by allowing customers to pick up their items directly. a shame this is necessary
... on Tue Oct 7 08:51:18 2008scary stuff. amazing how accurate some of the Pripyat sets in Call of Duty 4 were
... on Mon Oct 6 14:20:19 2008'The attack is brilliant in its elegance. They essentially jam the receiver. A bright pulse of laser light is sent and it blinds the receiver, which allows the eavesdropper, Eve, to decode the same photons that Alice and Bob are decoding, and thus get their key.' doh
... on Mon Oct 6 13:16:28 2008this is actually quite a nifty idea; extending a simple "crappy parking" complaint blog with datamining opportunities, by tagging with street names, districts, license plate numbers etc. and letting the blog engine (and Google) take care of the rest
... on Mon Oct 6 11:32:28 2008including anti-spam product Ciphertrust. wonder how this will affect their various AS product ranges (via Herkemer)
... on Sat Oct 4 18:28:51 2008'Google's handing of quotas is a major step backwards to the days of "this user has used too much bandwidth" errors. Probably acceptable if you're hosting pictures of Little Timmy and Sally Jo's Summer Camp Adventure on Geocities, not so acceptable if you're hosting your next big web app on what you thought was Google's infinitely-scalable Cloud solution.' +1
... on Fri Oct 3 22:39:35 2008diffed. the explicit statement that there is no length limit to mail headers is potentially tricky
... on Fri Oct 3 09:10:08 2008pretty much the EFF party line, I think: "every man for himself". also talks about net neutrality
... on Thu Oct 2 11:04:33 2008an e-Passport for "Elvis Aaron Presley", no less, happily scanned by an Amsterdam passport security station. hahahaha!
... on Thu Oct 2 10:43:44 2008'Dublin will be the centre for Facebook’s international operations and will provide a range of online technical, sales and operations support to Facebook’s users and customers across EMEA region.' good news
... on Thu Oct 2 09:43:53 2008The newest rev to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (via fanf)
... on Thu Oct 2 08:56:19 2008the newest rev to the Internet Message Format for email (via fanf)
... on Thu Oct 2 08:55:27 2008wow, who the hell are these people? totally forgotten
... on Wed Oct 1 11:11:19 2008bookmarking for more crufting of the OSX laptop
... on Wed Oct 1 10:28:13 2008a definition of a "Free Service", an open-source form of SaaS. uses the Affero GPL
... on Wed Oct 1 10:24:42 2008hacker group THC release an RFID-passport cloning/modification tool, noting that e-Passports are fundamentally insecure due to their trust of self-signed certificates. Also raises the Smart-IED attack danger: 'A Smart-IED waits until a specific person passes by before detonating or let's say until there are more than 10 americans in the room.'
... on Wed Oct 1 10:09:14 2008a few bits and bobs required to get this excellent (though ugly) UNIX mail reader app working on MacOS
... on Mon Sep 29 15:26:29 2008fixes this ExMH dependency to build on OSX
... on Mon Sep 29 15:24:27 2008"The funny thing about Facebook is that you're there with your colleagues and your friends [...] and the next thing you know, you've forgotten that your status update is all about how hung over you are."
... on Mon Sep 29 11:25:35 2008last Friday, but worth celebrating. on 26 September 1983, a little-known Russian military officer averted global nuclear war, by disobeying procedures and correctly identifying a missile-launch report as a false positive. phew!
... on Mon Sep 29 10:06:44 2008police-run anti-child-porn blocklist accidentally lists w3.org. Oops
... on Sun Sep 28 22:52:47 2008tick another item off my switch to-do list
... on Sun Sep 28 10:23:57 2008Bruno 9Li -- cool Brazilian psychedelic, high-contrast art
... on Sat Sep 27 19:39:58 2008'Neuros has a new technology to superimpose text from a dedicated chat room in real time on a TV set, allowing a sort of 'crowd narration' for events or shows.' 'crowd heckling' more like; this is a great idea that Danny O'Brien talked about a few years back
... on Fri Sep 26 15:54:06 2008'As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. Some people out there in our nation don’t have maps.' it's like Frances McDormand in Fargo, channeling Dan Quayle
... on Fri Sep 26 10:37:03 2008for 2 hours, all instances of the letter "t" in the cisco.com home page's HTML were missing, resulting in a broken page and lots of "Abou Cisco" and "Regiser" links
... on Thu Sep 25 11:22:58 2008Brian "Krow" Aker: 'Google's AppEngine is much closer to [...] "Digitial Sharecropping" [...] S3 and EC2 have little tie in to them. You can end up with a physical addiction to the services but the mental addiction to a framework does not exist. S3 is just storage and EC2 for most is just a hosted Linux image.' +1!
... on Wed Sep 24 15:22:14 2008hooray, great news for Irish beer drinkers sick of Guinness
... on Wed Sep 24 13:09:41 2008's set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X' which sit in the menubar
... on Tue Sep 23 14:35:41 2008essential know-how for UNIX refugees, including how to get your F1-F12 back
... on Mon Sep 22 22:43:25 2008starting to think we may be running into this on our build machine; annoying. bookmarking for future reference
... on Mon Sep 22 15:14:40 2008hahaha. WP deletion gnomes argued that Deletionpedia should not have an entry due to non-notability, just 24 minutes after that entry was created
... on Mon Sep 22 11:11:07 2008the ISP's AS (AS27595) is now offline, due apparently to coordinated lobbying of its upstreams
... on Mon Sep 22 09:54:26 2008built on top of Google App Engine. interesting hack!
... on Sun Sep 21 19:29:48 2008EUR120 to get a fantastic-looking 40"x30" print
... on Sat Sep 20 11:57:09 2008'Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).' (via Gary Stock)
... on Fri Sep 19 14:38:30 2008'the findings and recommendations of the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property'. Very anti-Bayh-Dole and the "old IP" patent-everything regime as it pertains to biotech. great stuff (via Techdirt)
... on Fri Sep 19 10:42:31 2008over allegations that they do not contribute enough development effort to the Linux ecosystem; in all major components, they push a truly miniscule amount of patch code upstream
... on Fri Sep 19 09:14:54 2008swan song for Iona Technologies. as an ex-Ionian, all I can say is +1; great place to work in the '90s
... on Thu Sep 18 15:25:27 2008'an archive of about 63,556 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia.'
... on Thu Sep 18 13:09:48 2008Yahoo!'s password recovery feature is pretty trivial to defeat: 'seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)'
... on Thu Sep 18 10:15:21 2008more on the OS X FFM mess
... on Wed Sep 17 14:24:50 2008if I'm to consider using OS X, this needs to work; I'm a FFM zealot
... on Wed Sep 17 13:39:33 2008incredible. the GDocs spreadsheet supports getting a remote URL, extraction using XPath, and RSS output, making it a pretty credible scraping platform
... on Tue Sep 16 11:24:11 2008'Your monthly account statement is available anytime; just log in to your account at https://SECURE.UNINITIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM/au/HISTORY.' doh
... on Tue Sep 16 11:21:54 2008wow. I dodged a bullet when I bought my work Thinkpad T61p last year; since then they've accumulated a truly atrocious customer service reputation. avoid
... on Tue Sep 16 08:45:15 2008Groklaw goes into the detail of how and why the Virginia anti-spam law could be overturned. Ugh. I strongly believe that spam = UBE, not UCE, and political spam is still spam, so this is particularly disappointing for me
... on Mon Sep 15 16:23:59 2008ugh. quite a lot of voodoo here, need to investigate to see if any of these improve performance on our little build farm vmware server
... on Mon Sep 15 15:57:20 2008tour operator/airline went bust, leaving its customers well in the lurch. Those who booked flights directly on their website, using a debit card, have lost their money. Most travel insurance doesn't cover airline collapse. Moral: use a credit card
... on Mon Sep 15 10:25:28 2008SA plugin to add the proprietary Commtouch filter to an existing SpamAssassin system; nifty
... on Sat Sep 13 17:41:55 2008argh! IMO the judge has confused misleading forged headers with anonymous speech
... on Fri Sep 12 20:26:25 2008Joe has a good point: 'you hereby grant all other Dropbox users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder.' wtf
... on Fri Sep 12 15:25:29 2008namely the Windows Template Library, now distributed under the (OSI-approved) Microsoft Public License. strange days (via reddit)