Snapshot taken at Sat Jul 4 07:16:28 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
... on Mon Jun 22 14:30:56 2009print 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
... on Sat May 30 19:58:47 2009wow, extensive. I'm impressed! good example of how to solidly test a C/C++ library (via jzawodny)
... on Sat May 30 19:56:52 2009guy writing down all the stupid things his assistant says. “I forced myself to have a concussion last night in the furnace room.”
... on Sat May 30 19:47:16 2009an interesting AWS use-case; S3, EC2, Elastic Hadoop, and browser-based POST to S3 to offload work of MMO-level logging
... on Fri May 29 13:36:46 2009scientific fact!
... on Fri May 29 13:18:01 2009Is this why Greasemonkey is moribund in Firefox -- the dev is employed by Google and working on Chromium?
... on Thu May 28 09:05:41 2009'Mr. Rubin said that, in general, carriers will be slower in the United States to introduce Android phones than in Europe.' so seeing as you still can't buy a G1 in Ireland, that would mean never?
... on Thu May 28 09:01:13 2009'The infamous deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse [...] was at its most septic over the weekend. Michael Woods [...] gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.'
... on Thu May 28 07:54:06 2009amazing -- watching the text slowly update on the screen is very evocative; brings me right back to dialing into TCD on a 2400 baud modem
... on Wed May 27 22:18:07 2009a handy Firefox extension to FF-proof your web browsing experience, "They Live"-style
... on Tue May 26 14:32:40 2009heh. I have a similar cheesy thrift-shop painting at home
... on Tue May 26 09:28:02 2009reverse-engineered list of query parameters accepted in Google Maps URLs. great reference!
... on Mon May 25 14:40:36 2009Google paper on the construction and operation of Chubby, their distributed fault-tolerant database built using the Paxos consensus algorithm
... on Mon May 25 13:53:09 2009PhDware strikes again: 'OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos.'
... on Mon May 25 13:41:57 2009'RED checks HTTP resources to see how they use HTTP, makes suggestions, and finds common protocol mistakes.' source available
... on Mon May 25 11:37:32 2009something to bookmark for my copious free time (yeah right)
... on Mon May 25 10:44:48 2009interesting hack -- apply Map-Reduce idioms to UNIX command lines across multiple machines or cores (via jzawodny, who's obviously looking at a lot of command line stuff recently ;)
... on Mon May 25 09:14:12 2009I had no idea it could do this, using its "-P" switch. cool (via jzawodny)
... on Mon May 25 09:09:17 2009a Mulley-driven link campaign I can totally support; anyone researching the church's status here needs the context of the abuse committed by its members over the past 100 years. see http://www.mulley.net/2009/05/23/catholic-church-in-ireland/ for more background
... on Sun May 24 16:20:26 2009'Python-based Universal Plug-N-Play client application designed to discover, query and interact with UPNP devices, particularly Internet Gateway Devices (aka, routers). It can be used to audit UPNP-enabled devices on a network for possible vulnerabilities.' looks also useful for non-security-related UPNP twiddling, too
... on Sun May 24 15:44:16 2009'analyzing data from the U.S. Census [shows] that for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations -- to a block level -- identifies them uniquely.' are location-based services fundamentally incompatible with privacy
... on Thu May 21 12:05:32 2009test load used 90% gets and 10% sets. sub-millisecond response times
... on Thu May 21 09:16:04 2009I had no idea my favourite condiment wasn't Thai or Vietnamese in origin. there you go
... on Thu May 21 09:01:57 2009send a USB/eSATA storage device to Amazon and they'll bulk load data to S3 (or, in future, vice versa), for $80 + $2.49 per hour of transfer time. 'If loading your data over the Internet would take a week or more, you should consider using AWS Import/Export.' aka, sneakernet now a supported interface
... on Thu May 21 08:51:29 2009recommended, apparently. I have a stack of negs at home I've been meaning to scan
... on Wed May 20 16:15:43 2009yay
... on Wed May 20 14:01:05 2009best Irish ISP, by far (via Mulley)
... on Wed May 20 09:14:22 2009'The Ubuntu One server software is closed source. This is 2009. I thought we learnt this lesson with Launchpad.' oh dear....
... on Tue May 19 14:58:43 2009'Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.' bash.org for Twitter (via @colmbrophy)
... on Tue May 19 14:46:33 2009'This plugin enables Hudson to automatically provision new instances on EC2, based on the system demand. That is, if Hudson notices that your system is overloaded, it will provision new slaves on EC2, and when those instances go unused for a certain time period, it will shut them down. You can run all your slaves on EC2 if you want, or you can maintain your local build cluster and use EC2 as a reserve capacity.' awesome
... on Tue May 19 14:12:03 2009Ted Dziuba with teh funny: 'For someone like me, Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness.'
... on Tue May 19 12:10:19 2009James Hamilton, now at Amazon, then at MSN, gives a canonical list of best practices for large-scale operations-friendly server deployments, 'accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live.' a lot of good advice here (via Tony Finch)
... on Mon May 18 15:42:56 2009plenty of spirited (ho ho) discussion of the proposed massive wind-power project and its viability
... on Mon May 18 12:38:29 2009short bash wrappers for curl to ease debugging REST APIs. looks nice, but I'm not impressed at it's stomping on the venerable lwp GET/PUT/POST commands :(
... on Mon May 18 12:21:27 2009"The most fascinating abandoned man-made creations, and their story & location". my new favourite photoblog, and great name too (via JWZ)
... on Mon May 18 09:38:59 2009and about time too! (via Tony Finch)
... on Fri May 15 16:23:58 2009'In the context of software, the word “Enterprise” has now officially come to mean software that sucks.' uh, yep. and this is new? (via wmf)
... on Fri May 15 09:54:52 2009'A lot of [FF] canvassers are finding it tough on the doorstep.' 'be seen to highlight their points in a notebook', 'ask to record their name and email address so you can get back to them', 'when you show interest, they will be inclined to soften their [anti-FF] views'. also: show interest in kids, local sports team -- what a cliche! possibly fake, though
... on Fri May 15 09:05:26 2009'some expensive technologies such as photo-voltaic cells, which take energy from sunshine, can take up to 50 years to pay for themselves in saved energy costs. However, photo-voltaic cells often have a useful life of just 20 years, making them effectively “eco-bling”.'
... on Thu May 14 20:24:30 2009An Apachecon presentation from ColmMacC -- still has a good bit of useful advice!
... on Wed May 13 20:48:34 2009oh dear. crappy proprietary code ahoy -- in a breathalyzer
... on Wed May 13 20:19:04 2009uber-pessimist author of 'Reinventing Collapse', speaking on June 9th
... on Wed May 13 20:10:17 2009a super-simple MR wrapper in Ruby, wrapping Hadoop, inspired by Sawzall
... on Tue May 12 16:58:01 2009I've been having the same problem myself, and it seems they've scraped my address and added it to their db in contravention of EU law. just sent an opt-out, it had better work
... on Tue May 12 16:46:41 2009sounds great! Mind you I prefer the original title, "128 Geeky Places To See Before You Die"
... on Tue May 12 10:01:44 2009'distributed, and persistent key-value storage compatible with memcached', GPL'd, also featuring persistent storage, data replication, dynamic partitioning, failover, etc.
... on Tue May 12 09:31:36 2009now that's scale
... on Tue May 12 09:14:18 2009"store, sync and share". looks an awful lot like Canonical have just reinvented a linux-only version of Dropbox for some reason :( here's hoping it's open source at least, right?
... on Mon May 11 16:48:49 2009hashes utilitizing a tree structure, as used for efficient delta reconciliation in Amazon's Dynamo, in next-gen hash algorithm MD6, and Sun's ZFS filesystem. see also Tiger tree hashing, used in Gnutella and DC p2p algos
... on Mon May 11 13:10:39 2009next-gen hash function, allowing immense parallel computation of hashes using a Merkle-tree-like structure. funnily enough, in use right now by the Conficker worm! (via Richi)
... on Mon May 11 13:07:40 2009A blog from Atheist Ireland as part of their campaign against the proposed new anti-blasphemy law, to replace the unenforceable old law
... on Mon May 11 10:46:45 2009get memory to contain malicious code, then make process dump core; naive directory search then reads your core file, attempts to interpret it, and runs malicious commands. This is one reason why SpamAssassin looks for specific file extensions when dir-searching for configs
... on Mon May 11 09:17:24 2009'a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code', ie. rate limiting across a server farm built on memcached
... on Sun May 10 09:06:12 2009crawling all Google-Code-hosted projects tagged with Grails and automatically hosting C-I instances for them using Hudson. wow
... on Sat May 9 18:39:59 2009good intro
... on Fri May 8 09:23:33 2009now that both MD5 and SHA-1 are heading towards obsolescence, Debian are readying the long-term actions needed to take care of this. we'll need to do this in the ASF too. Is this like Y2K and C10K? SHA1K?
... on Thu May 7 18:53:01 2009neologism for recycled PR and wire copy masquerading as journalism; new study claims that it makes up the majority of UK newspaper home news coverage
... on Thu May 7 12:17:44 2009'I am the very model of a modern major Europhobe' a la Gilbert and Sullivan. excellent stuff!
... on Wed May 6 16:37:01 2009good demo of ZooKeeper
... on Wed May 6 16:04:17 2009'Catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses -- the fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.'
... on Wed May 6 09:20:10 2009Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard implemented using MooseX::MultiMethods (Moose multi-method dispatch). class! (via Marcus Ramberg)
... on Wed May 6 08:43:36 2009nifty! uses the Wii Homebrew Channel (ie the Twilight Hack savefile hack). apparently quite doable
... on Mon May 4 14:11:10 2009'fractal tree indexes' instead of B-trees. new to me
... on Sun May 3 20:12:15 2009pretty exhaustive walkthrough of Facebook's new photo storage backend, running on XFS. nice setup for a very specific use-case
... on Sat May 2 15:48:54 2009"I just feel lately your PARTIES have not been up to PAR." "...ty"
... on Sat May 2 15:31:46 2009good advice on things to avoid in providing a REST API from a Django app
... on Fri May 1 20:15:10 2009'An order-preserving partitioner, where keys are distributed to nodes in their natural order, has huge advantages over consistent hashing, particularly the ability to do range queries across the keys in the system'
... on Fri May 1 19:50:06 2009wow, impressive i14y; also Eucalyptus now includes an S3-like service
... on Fri May 1 19:45:43 2009vote for my mate Luke's latest TV programme. it's great
... on Fri May 1 19:16:00 2009good follow-up post regarding the shitstorm that erupted in the Ruby community after a talk entitled "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star" (with content about like you'd imagine). to be honest, I can't understand why the Rubyists are being so obtuse about this teenager-level stupidity
... on Thu Apr 30 20:50:34 2009Eucalyptus Systems to provide "commercial support, integration, and development services for Eucalyptus users while continuing to develop the core code base under an open source license." hopefully they won't do a Xen and kill the goose
... on Thu Apr 30 20:39:48 2009'Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern proposes to insert a new section into the Defamation Bill, stating: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.”' wtf?! what decade is this? attempting to capture the "80-year-olds who think it's 1979" voting sector?
... on Wed Apr 29 23:01:06 2009a new agile software-dev methodology. hmm
... on Wed Apr 29 08:37:37 2009holy shit. 'In an e-mail dated 22 January 2008, a Home Office official wrote again to Phorm and said: "I should be grateful if you would review the attached document, and let me know what you think." In January 2008 the Home Office thanks Phorm for comments and changes to its draft paper, which show the company making deletions and changes to the document.'
... on Wed Apr 29 08:01:47 2009including an attempted poisoning of Recaptcha, which the author claims it was immune to, and a final manual-CAPTCHA data-entry process towards the end
... on Tue Apr 28 15:55:05 2009'a collection of high-performance C transformations (base64, URL escaping, number-to-string conversion, hex, ASCII upper/lowercasing)', BSD-licensed and tested. heh. I remember writing a modp_b64_encode() years ago ;) (via Tony Finch)
... on Sun Apr 26 22:29:03 2009one teaspoon of salt; eight teaspoons of sugar; one litre water
... on Sun Apr 26 22:21:38 2009'As the names are so similar, searches for our company in the official Norwegian registry of just-about-anything (Brønnøysundregistrene) often resulted in potential customers looking up the wrong company. To prevent this confusion we recently changed the name of the old (non-LLC) company, and figured we'd use the opportunity for some harmless - or so we thought - fun.'
... on Sat Apr 25 19:20:17 2009WANT
... on Sat Apr 25 19:14:24 2009'Consumers, media and government associate Tesco Ireland almost exclusively with price differentials between Northern Ireland and Ireland.' Talk about a massive PR fail!
... on Sat Apr 25 13:54:18 2009ie. server-deployment sysadmin teams. 'If you want to participate in this ‘as a Service’ brave new world, and your plan to bring up new servers involves a meatcloud ssh'ing their little hearts out, you might as well give up now'
... on Sat Apr 25 13:46:42 2009a much better ending than the real one
... on Fri Apr 24 19:22:19 2009"Navn/foretaksnavn: ';UPDATE TAXRATE SET RATE = 0 WHERE
... on Fri Apr 24 13:27:15 2009the reason why Twitter, Y! (and others) shut down their OAuth services recently; a massive hole in the OAuth authorization protocol. this will be tricky to fix
... on Fri Apr 24 09:25:19 2009some of the worst "top tip" sidebars collected from lowbrow UK mags. even shittier than the made-up Viz ones
... on Fri Apr 24 09:13:24 2009useful benchmarks, and another plug for Tokyo Cabinet; over 4x as fast as writes to an on-disk BerkeleyDB via its Python bindings
... on Thu Apr 23 10:33:40 2009TheyWorkForYou ported to the Irish Oireachtas -- yay John!
... on Wed Apr 22 19:39:41 2009awesome black-box analysis of what it takes to evade the Content-ID system deployed by YouTube to block use of copyrighted music in third-party videos, using Audible Magic's acoustic fingerprinting. easy workaround: skip the first 30 seconds of the track or resample by 5%
... on Wed Apr 22 12:31:34 2009great analysis, particularly where it affects ZFS and their open-source products
... on Wed Apr 22 10:10:20 2009brilliant Irish political satire
... on Wed Apr 22 09:56:05 2009claimed 99.997% catch rate, FP rate of 1 in a million, supposedly. sounds like a major leap forward if true. wonder how it works...
... on Tue Apr 21 20:59:43 2009great stat (via Tony Finch)
... on Tue Apr 21 20:53:53 2009'Encrypted Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMPE or RTMPTE) is a proprietary protocol created by Macromedia used for streaming video and DRM.' apparently used by RTE's streaming video
... on Tue Apr 21 20:22:53 2009great investigation from Leonard Lin; Tokyo Tyrant gets a strong thumbs-up. also: 'based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is.' ha!
... on Tue Apr 21 09:06:02 2009you really know you've made it as open-source infrastructure when third parties are building custom off-the-shelf hardware platforms for your code. crazy stuff, though; isn't half of the idea of memcached that you can run it on COTS hardware?
... on Tue Apr 21 08:43:13 2009aka. PSHB. 'open, web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol. Includes a [python] open source reference implementation', from a mainly-Google-based team incl Brad Fitzpatrick. note: server-to-server only; there's no NAT or COMET support
... on Tue Apr 21 08:40:35 2009I did just the same thing myself last week
... on Mon Apr 20 16:03:03 2009'Launched recently at a cost of €230,000, listeners can buy tracks heard on the station'. the tracks are DRM-laden WMA files, so don't work on iPods or any other MP3 player. sounds like the record labels browbeat RTE on this one, resulting in just another useless DRM store that nobody will use. great way to spend my license fee :(
... on Mon Apr 20 09:34:56 2009every sink (output) also provides a built-in "monitor" source. This script records the currently-playing audio to WAV
... on Mon Apr 20 09:14:44 2009_very_ comprehensive Linux system monitoring tool; looks nifty! 'Collectl tries to do it all. You can choose to monitor any of a broad set of subsystems which currently include buddyinfo, cpu, disk, inodes, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, processes, quadrics, slabs, sockets and tcp.'
... on Mon Apr 20 09:05:00 2009'a browser extension that leverages the GPU to allow users to visually navigate photos, videos, games, and news stories from their favorite sites on a full screen 3D wall'. sounds nifty, must give this a try
... on Mon Apr 20 08:53:13 2009of cancer at the age of 78. one less genius alive
... on Mon Apr 20 08:40:19 2009'Part of apertures of metal band became digital display screen. Metal band and digital figures mingle together in proportion naturally. Without the face of "timepiece", it displays figures only when needed but also quite vague existence, "time"'
... on Fri Apr 17 15:14:54 2009'"Talking gross numbers that come directly to the band, we have made more money already than we have on the last record in four years," said [Metric]'s co-manager. "Without any intermediary, we're making 77 cents on the dollar for every record we sell" on iTunes. Under a label deal [...] Metric would have earned closer to 22 cents.'
... on Fri Apr 17 08:41:43 2009the artist's childhood photos, digitally manipulated to feature the artist as an adult alongside. fantastic (via Waxy)
... on Thu Apr 16 19:13:57 2009amazing first-person report of echolocation in humans: the author calls it "FlashSonar", and teaches other blind people how to use it
... on Thu Apr 16 14:38:10 2009reading notes for the 50-year-old Hugo-Award-winning SF classic, dealing with theology, science, and Cold War terror of a nuclear armageddon
... on Thu Apr 16 09:07:59 2009'you may request specifically that your website is not scanned by Webwise. To request that your website not be scanned by Webwise, please email: website-exclusion{at}webwise.com'
... on Wed Apr 15 15:40:00 2009Amazon have opted-out of Phorm tampering for all of their domains, after prompting by ORG, along with LiveJournal, mySociety and Netmums
... on Wed Apr 15 15:36:25 2009interesting reflections on teleworking and its practicality. 'Respect [between local and remote workers] comes from knowledge and the question is: does your culture support a constant and consistent flow of knowledge to and from the remote worker?'
... on Wed Apr 15 13:53:37 2009free open-source project Git hosting, apparently itself AGPL-licensed (as opposed to the closed-source but prettier GitHub)
... on Wed Apr 15 10:29:23 2009'I am going to tweet 3 new songs this week. I can't be bothered with all this trying to sell you music. It wastes valuable time'. swiftly followed by 'I'm gonna be in so much trouble'
... on Wed Apr 15 09:50:11 2009according to these benchmarks the java.nio implementation of epoll()-based async I/O is 25% slower (albeit more C10K-scalable of course) than the blocking thread-per-fd model of java.io, on an NPTL Linux JVM. good to know
... on Wed Apr 15 09:06:40 2009via James Hamilton. some details on BigTable
... on Tue Apr 14 13:56:21 2009'On Friday the French National Assembly rejected the HADOPI law, which would impose the toughest “three strikes” copyright enforcement law in the world on French Internet users.' phew
... on Tue Apr 14 09:57:56 2009Irish cable-TV company UPC have rolled out Nagravision 2 encryption, finally breaking the dodgy "D-Box" decoder boxes sold on a massive scale throughout Ireland for several years now. can't see it staying hacked for long though. NTL's comment: http://url.ie/1g0q
... on Tue Apr 14 09:56:25 2009another dataviz of sorting algorithms, avoiding animation and instead coming up with a nice line-based viz. interesting, but wtf no merge sort ;)
... on Tue Apr 14 08:42:38 2009if BoI need to verify a transaction out-of-band, they send an SMS to the cardholder asking them to call an unpublished number which diverts to a UK number before demanding all their card details; exactly the modus operandi of a phish. wtf are they thinking?
... on Tue Apr 14 08:39:49 2009'Go back in time wearing this and you'll invent heavier-than-air flight! YOU'LL discover penicillin. YOU'LL be the first to isolate aluminum. Did you know aluminum used to be more valuable than gold? YOU'RE GONNA BE RICH.'
... on Sun Apr 12 20:45:01 2009essentially mandating IWF-style (ie. half-assed and broken) filtering in all EU countries, I would imagine
... on Fri Apr 10 20:38:58 2009very nice visualizations of insertion, selection, bubble, shell, merge, heap, quick and quick3 sorts
... on Fri Apr 10 16:23:17 2009nice, custom sysadmin dataviz, via Rich Skrenta
... on Fri Apr 10 09:18:13 2009A top-secret 1960's spy plane project called OXCART. 'The shape of OXCART was unprecedented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, "UFO".' but then -- isn't that what they'd _want_ you to think? ;)
... on Fri Apr 10 08:58:07 2009similar to Google's "Unladen Swallow" port of Python. results aren't stellar -- yet -- but there's plenty of room -- and possible contracts
... on Thu Apr 9 19:50:22 2009much needed. 'The App Engine Cron Service allows you to configure regularly scheduled tasks that operate at defined times or regular intervals.'
... on Wed Apr 8 12:09:45 2009comprehensive all-in-one perl script giving easy command-line access to Amazon EC2 and S3; very nicely packaged -- installs with a single "curl" command! brilliant
... on Wed Apr 8 11:41:43 2009certainly not all roses. (via Tony Finch)
... on Tue Apr 7 16:47:38 2009on one of their legacy NetApps? hmm
... on Tue Apr 7 16:39:03 2009ditching NetApp and Akamai, rolling their own massive-blob storage cloud
... on Tue Apr 7 16:37:28 2009'Looking in, it’s clear that the [computer] game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does.' +1; a lot of people, including myself, have also come to that conclusion, over the years
... on Tue Apr 7 08:38:26 2009fantastic research notes; they've identified a lot of niggles and problems with the existing queueing systems out there
... on Mon Apr 6 16:14:52 2009awesome! full artist/album/track data for decades of dance music releases, released to the public domain
... on Mon Apr 6 13:56:22 2009'Writing messaging systems that work under any combination of flows, on any number of machines, and in multiple different reliability scenarios ... is a more interesting problem. Page-to-disk is a way to make RabbitMQ better and address more scenarios.'
... on Mon Apr 6 11:48:58 2009great news! we can buy electronics on Amazon again
... on Sun Apr 5 21:55:27 2009'it has raised the ire of Internet users, who are now campaigning for Street View enthusiasts from across the UK to descend on the village to snap their own perfectly legal photographs.' ha!
... on Sun Apr 5 21:54:35 2009another developer moves! a lot of people doing it recently, which worries me; will there be any top expertise left outside of the Bay Area at this rate? we need diversity
... on Fri Apr 3 15:43:39 2009fetch the pitchforks! Street View bin worryin' my sheep! Buckinghamshire yokels fear change
... on Fri Apr 3 09:04:19 2009'COBOL ON COGS SUPPORTS STANDARD TERMINALS (VT100 AND IBM 3200) IN THE MOST USEFUL SCREEN CONFIGURATIONS SUCH AS 80X20 AND 40X16' (via Nishad)
... on Fri Apr 3 08:45:45 2009hahaha, spot on
... on Thu Apr 2 16:35:52 2009'several basic AI techniques implemented with short, open-source Python code recipes ... For each technique, learn the basic operating principle, discuss an approach using Python, and review a worked out-example. We'll cover database mining using neural nets, automated categorization with a naive Bayesian classifier, solving popular puzzles with depth-first and breath-first [sic] searches, solving more complex puzzles with constraint propagation, and playing a popular game using a probing search strategy.' video: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947373/
... on Thu Apr 2 12:29:52 2009excellent! run Hadoop jobs on EC2, with data hosted on S3. essentially, AWS have integrated a Hadoop dashboard to provide a great web-based and command-line UI
... on Thu Apr 2 09:04:51 2009best blog ever. Narcissistic meathead 'actor/model' type waxes lyrical on how Angelina Jolie is '“mother hot”, rather than “stripper hot”': 'I would probably rate her an 8.5-9 on my looks scale. I am not that sure that I would even feel the need to come up and initiate a conversation with her if I met her out somewhere.' 'I couldn’t really say that she would stick out for me if I saw her at a hot club like 1Oak or Rosebar.' The entire blog is solid gold idiocy; I'd swear it was fake, but apparently not
... on Thu Apr 2 08:58:03 2009GOOG's servers include built-in 12V batteries (and of course lots of velcro). video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgRWURIxgbU (via wmf)
... on Thu Apr 2 08:47:07 2009great idea from Maciej Ceglowski
... on Wed Apr 1 21:29:11 2009hooray. I requested this ages ago, it's now being implemented
... on Wed Apr 1 18:39:20 2009'The controversy surrounding the Open Cloud Manifesto demonstrates the risk of trying to build interoperability behind closed doors and through exclusionary practices. Such environments are not conducive to building consensus, which is one of the key ingredients of successful standards.'
... on Wed Apr 1 09:23:26 2009more on IMVU's continuous-deployment concept. interesting that they halt SVN commits on CI build failure, that seems extreme
... on Wed Apr 1 09:15:14 2009Boards.ie a la Facebook, for April 1. thing is, I think I prefer this UI
... on Wed Apr 1 08:33:03 2009awesome, if terrifying research from Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson on Chinese cyber-surveillance of the Tibetan movement. 'we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They used social phishing to install rootkits on a number of machines and then downloaded sensitive data. People in Tibet may have died as a result.'
... on Mon Mar 30 09:36:37 2009ie. 'the moderation technique of hiding the activity of troublemakers and trolls from everyone but the troll themselves' (via waxy)
... on Thu Mar 26 19:34:20 2009'a collection of read-only Git mirrors of Apache codebases' -- including SpamAssassin. must give this a go
... on Thu Mar 26 13:53:45 2009excellent. long may it continue
... on Thu Mar 26 12:24:56 2009'Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and I [Fernando Pereira] argue that we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.'
... on Thu Mar 26 10:19:34 2009a "Sun Modular Datacenter", ie. Sun's datacenter-in-a-shipping-container, with 63 Sun Fire x4500s running Solaris 10 with ZFS
... on Thu Mar 26 10:10:46 2009"what the Australian government's secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist has to do with Germany is a mystery. This case is a prime example of multiple governments collaborating in support of censorship." worrying.
... on Wed Mar 25 20:18:55 2009well-written worked-through example of a classic memcached-backed libevent front-end caching system
... on Wed Mar 25 19:59:10 2009'Gardai were in the [Today FM] offices yesterday looking for email communications between the team and the artist. According to D’Arcy the team were told [..] that “the powers that be want action taken”." ffs! how's about taking action against the fraudsters who've bankrupted our country instead? appalling diversionary tactics
... on Wed Mar 25 11:13:52 2009'Eclipse extensions automatically configure remote debugger connections for diagnosing problems and debugging software run in the cloud' -- ie. you can set a breakpoint on code running remotely, at EC2. that's pretty awesome (via Steve Loughran)
... on Wed Mar 25 10:15:13 2009YES
... on Wed Mar 25 09:54:33 2009looks like AllMyData are facing a money crunch ("focussed on keeping costs down"). hopefully this isn't bad news for Tahoe, the fault-tolerant open-source distributed filesystem -- or indeed for Zooko himself
... on Wed Mar 25 09:45:25 2009the national broadcaster apologises, on air, for a news story covering the 'paintings of an Taoiseach in the nude' prank. wtf!
... on Wed Mar 25 09:31:31 2009“We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship,” iiNet managing director Michael Malone said. “It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as ‘unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes.”
... on Tue Mar 24 13:45:18 2009and, most surprising of all, it _works_. holy crap. (thanks Antoin!)
... on Tue Mar 24 12:09:48 2009some prankster put up rather disturbing paintings of Ireland's taoiseach in the National Gallery and Royal Hibernian Academy. "'It's reasonably well painted. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen,' conceded James O'Halloran of Adam's Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers."
... on Tue Mar 24 09:52:03 2009excellent. good result from their blackout, then
... on Mon Mar 23 17:22:41 2009Rackspace had to firefight over the weekend to deal with scaling issues with JungleDisk users backing up to their Mosso Cloud Files service. now fixed with a JungleDisk upgrade (2.60c): http://blog.jungledisk.com/2009/03/23/jungle-disk-260c-released-cloud-files-access-restored/
... on Mon Mar 23 11:39:56 2009open source intra-project poaching between the Puppet and Chef deployment automation projects
... on Mon Mar 23 09:54:38 2009the hand-curation of its source knowledge base sounds incredibly labour-intensive (and expensive)
... on Mon Mar 23 09:39:53 2009'i know my God will forgive because i pray to him to replenish the pockets of my clients [read: victims] with double of whatever they loss'
... on Mon Mar 23 09:35:41 2009"Virtual servers for MIT". bit like a homegrown EC2, using software they wrote called Invirt ( http://invirt.mit.edu/ ). wonder why they didn't use Eucalyptus (via wmf)
... on Sun Mar 22 21:02:28 2009watching TV with Twitter-as-commentary in the background. this sounds a lot like an old idea of Danny O'Brien's, funnily enough!
... on Sat Mar 21 22:19:10 2009the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers of Clay County,KY were all arrested and indicted for 'changing the votes at the voting machine', and showing others how to do it, over the course of 2002-2006; they'd send the voters away at the confirmation screen, then go back and change their votes
... on Fri Mar 20 14:14:23 2009"the easiest way to manage the cloud". supports EC2 and slicehost servers, provides metrics, graphing, and basic monitoring. looks very nice! (via JK)
... on Thu Mar 19 16:35:04 2009SSDs lose performance noticeably after an initial honeymoon period, once their block map starts to contain previously-allocated blocks. benchmarks for this factor will be critical in SSD measurement
... on Thu Mar 19 10:28:39 2009cool. looking forward to this settling down so I can play with it
... on Wed Mar 18 17:16:11 2009'treat such data as a potential risk, that is a suspicious source of malware.' 'mainly targeted at people who are using ClamAV to filter web traffic.' (via fanf)
... on Wed Mar 18 09:59:15 2009good writeup of the current state of play
... on Wed Mar 18 09:43:53 2009htop (top with a fancy UI), iftop (top for IPs on the network) and iotop (top for per-process I/O statistics). hadn't heard of htop or iotop, so this is useful. all are "apt-get"able on 8.10. (update: Craig reminded me of "atop" -- another great util, with excellent historical process monitoring ability)
... on Wed Mar 18 09:30:33 2009very interesting! lowest price is $0.015/hr, ie. $10/month; quite a lot cheaper than the EC2 option. no equivalent to S3 though
... on Mon Mar 16 21:19:05 2009vote for my mate Luke's film: "Psych Ward". it's great!
... on Mon Mar 16 20:59:37 2009impressive libevent-based Python async-I/O framework. looks like it hides async code's complexity nicely (via SimonW)
... on Mon Mar 16 15:16:44 2009epic LWN thread on this ext4 misfeature. I'm ambivalent: it's perfectly POSIXly-compliant for ext4 to do this, but it _will_ cause data loss for me. I'll be using 'nodelalloc' if this is still in a released version
... on Mon Mar 16 09:53:33 2009neato LVM hack
... on Sun Mar 15 12:34:13 2009doesn't sound great. this site reckons it'd take 21 years to break even on your investment if you chose external wall insulation
... on Sun Mar 15 10:45:02 2009'What it does not say is that Irish ISPs will fight any attempt by the music industry to coerce them into blocking websites of Irma's choice. It could have said this. But it deliberately didn't. Because ISPs will not rule this course of action out.'
... on Sat Mar 14 15:44:07 2009a new alternative scoring plugin -- learn mail classification (ham or spam) based on an SVM applied to the SpamAssassin rules hit, instead of the static "additive scores with 5-point threshold" model. very nifty!
... on Fri Mar 13 15:32:41 2009Graham Cluley of Sophos weighs in
... on Fri Mar 13 09:57:31 2009upcoming Beeb program demonstrates the use of a 22000-node botnet to send spam and DDOS-attack a host, and one lawyer asserts that their programme-makers' actions were illegal
... on Fri Mar 13 09:56:08 2009'Erlangst (n): The fear that (subject) is not smart enough to program in, or even comprehend, the Erlang programming language.'
... on Thu Mar 12 13:16:06 2009'designed to provide a home for all information that an entrepreneur might find useful when starting a company in Ireland.'. Good idea Joe!
... on Thu Mar 12 12:44:25 2009bulk-buy EC2 instance-hours in advance; either 1 year for $325 or 3 years for $500. great news, much more competitive now against a dedicated colo server
... on Thu Mar 12 11:04:52 2009something worth checking if you admin an SSL site; "Session ID Length" == 0 is the tell-tale
... on Wed Mar 11 20:47:38 2009'Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford [.. notes that] students [..] prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.'
... on Wed Mar 11 20:45:23 2009'Building an exabyte data center is feasible. All it takes is money - $400 million with all the goodies - and power. Time to readjust the mental model of storage possibility. Other than the NSA’s acres of disk at Fort Meade though, I’m not aware of any exabyte data centers.'
... on Wed Mar 11 12:45:33 2009a little helper app for Ubuntu. cute (via Danny)
... on Tue Mar 10 20:50:38 2009powered by a wind generator and some solar panels, to be exact, in the remote northwest of Scotland (plenty of wind there!)
... on Tue Mar 10 20:47:16 2009nice contextual hack
... on Tue Mar 10 20:31:48 2009pen-pushing on the polar frontier
... on Tue Mar 10 10:27:00 2009'a fingerprint of an audio, video or image file that is mathematically based on the audio or visual content contained within. Unlike cryptographic hash functions which rely on the avalanche effect of small changes in input leading to drastic changes in the output, perceptual hashes are "close" to one another if the inputs are visually or auditorily similar.'
... on Tue Mar 10 09:29:12 2009'"Asking an ISP to control and assess what internet users can and cannot download is just as wrong as asking the post office to open and read letters and decide what should and should not be delivered," said Telenor.'
... on Mon Mar 9 13:06:02 2009go Lance ;)
... on Fri Mar 6 12:08:57 2009'not one of the kids in this photo has their eyes on the President and his wife (woah, that felt good to type), but on the tiny LCD screen on the back of their camera.' I've noticed similar scenes at gigs recently fwiw
... on Fri Mar 6 11:52:45 2009application of the BLAST pattern-discovery algorithm to malware. interesting, I should take a look to see if I can steal any bits for my "BLAST applied to anti-spam" code ;) (via adulau)
... on Fri Mar 6 08:53:52 2009very nifty-looking code-review tool. supports R-T-C and C-T-R, lots of subscription/notification options, real-time web-based inline chat, open data store, and custom script triggers (via Henning on ASF members list)
... on Thu Mar 5 09:43:16 2009Mark Risher and Jay Pujara @Y! Mail talk about their use of Hadoop's Pig and Streaming products in anti-spam number-crunching
... on Thu Mar 5 09:00:27 2009the ruby-oauth gem now has 27 forks on github. ffs
... on Thu Mar 5 08:42:35 2009Debian bug #247734. Some Debian guy decided to "fix" perceived inelegances in his laptop's hostname stuff by making up a new 127/8 address, unfortunately breaking lots of stuff down the line. wonderful. This got into Ubuntu how?
... on Wed Mar 4 22:35:45 2009like sparkling water? here's how to make it yourself, on the cheap; mantid and usagi swear by it
... on Wed Mar 4 18:11:24 2009'deployment strategy for Capistrano which combines rsync with a remote cache, allowing fast deployments from Subversion repositories behind firewalls.' Shame -- deploying direct from VC is a brilliant idea. We should be moving to git to permit this, instead
... on Wed Mar 4 14:01:26 2009'Locale allows you to create Situations, which specify Conditions under which your Settings should change; e.g. your "At Work" situation might notice when your location condition is "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway," and trigger your ringer to vibrate.' in essence, rule-based AI for your phone. want it! and the phone too while I'm at it!
... on Tue Mar 3 09:40:38 2009built on Tokyo Tyrant, performance comparable to memcached, scale by adding nodes, supports hot backup/restore, used in production by Plurk.com, mixi.jp and scribd.com. interesting
... on Mon Mar 2 13:32:09 2009actually a very good list. some interesting papers here I hadn't heard of, particularly _ An Experimental Evaluation of The Assumption of Independence in Multi-Version Programming_ (1986)
... on Mon Mar 2 11:41:55 2009good post on various approaches to code optimization of a particularly common C idiom -- strlen(). I'd never seen the glibc "add to unsigned long to detect zeroes" trick before -- very nifty!
... on Mon Mar 2 10:20:36 2009hmm. a lot of PR spooge, but not a very good deal; Airtricity are 8.4% cheaper per kWh and 11% cheaper than ESB. (UPDATE: I was wrong! Airtricity are quoting their prices ex-VAT, annoyingly. Bord Gais are indeed cheaper)
... on Sun Mar 1 17:06:33 2009Bruce Sterling says, "buy a good bed". great stuff
... on Fri Feb 27 21:16:31 2009Irish and UK Xbox Live users can now download movies. unfortunately, they only offer 30 of them! FAIL
... on Fri Feb 27 13:54:30 2009what a hack! basically using MySQL as a replicated, highly-scalable storage engine and ignoring many of the RDBMS features to avoid schema change locks
... on Fri Feb 27 10:20:59 2009open source Spotify client; its developers reversed the Spotify closed protocol. however, it's just blocked users with 'Free' accounts, which renders it useless; hopefully someone will fork and fix this soon
... on Thu Feb 26 13:40:43 2009'a package containing customizeable network front-ends for mail servers': SMTP, QMQP, QMTP, POP3. a bit like qpsmtpd written in C. JL has apparently written a SpamAssassin plugin for it
... on Thu Feb 26 13:16:01 2009web-based code review tool for Git-based projects. very nice
... on Thu Feb 26 12:20:34 2009heh. quite a nice technical response; 'such sweet revenge would take the form of blocking access to the websites of EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner and IRMA, among others. Their approach: you piss on our turf, we'll piss on yours.'
... on Thu Feb 26 11:46:41 2009"Web 3.0 is going to be about filtering Web 2.0". nice
... on Thu Feb 26 09:46:27 2009entitled 'let's ensure that we have an uncensored Internet for Ireland'
... on Wed Feb 25 17:35:34 2009in full, as a 3-page PDF scan
... on Wed Feb 25 16:50:16 2009wow, this is really blowing up. great stuff ;)
... on Wed Feb 25 15:51:49 2009they simply intercepted DNS requests for their zones, returning 127.0.0.1. using OpenDNS evades that
... on Wed Feb 25 13:27:31 2009two scientists, Prof. Susan Greenfield and Dr. Aric Sigman, promulgating the worst kinds of fake science. disappointing
... on Wed Feb 25 10:56:25 2009the use of artificially-induced video compression artifacts for artistic effect, as seen in Chairlift's "Evident Utensil" and Kanye's "Welcome to Heartbreak" videos
... on Wed Feb 25 10:34:01 2009'CharConversionException: You have been trying to incinerate something noncombustible. It is also possible that you have tried turning yourself into a fish, but that's rare.'
... on Wed Feb 25 10:16:12 2009good scaling rules-of-thumb
... on Tue Feb 24 23:44:18 2009"It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again". hilarious! dicks
... on Tue Feb 24 17:52:35 2009IRMA will provide Irish ISPs with a list of alleged file-sharing sites, and will take legal action if those sites are not blocked. Eircom at least are allegedly legally required to comply. need to look into this a bit more, but this sounds incredibly serious at first glance
... on Tue Feb 24 17:18:31 2009'Message Partners released into the public domain the world’s most extensive offensive language list for use with a spam filter. This offensive word list includes hundreds of thousands of permutations of sexually explicit language.'
... on Tue Feb 24 16:01:22 2009'a place to explore, get gritty, tinker, experiment, and test out ideas for Facebook Platform', 5 March, Digital Exchange
... on Tue Feb 24 15:04:57 2009bookmarking, in case I ever have to fly Ryanair in future (hopefully not)
... on Tue Feb 24 12:39:14 2009'We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this. If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things'
... on Tue Feb 24 12:33:59 2009really need to get off my arse and get writing
... on Tue Feb 24 12:11:46 2009presentation by GAE's Ryan Barrett
... on Tue Feb 17 10:33:12 2009it included parts of an old perl module, breaking anyone who uses CPAN. nice work, Apple
... on Tue Feb 17 10:10:40 2009recommended by katyusha and mrn!
... on Mon Feb 16 17:51:28 2009more cheery stuff from Dmitry Orlov, this time in much greater depth than the "Collapse Gap" slides
... on Mon Feb 16 14:13:26 2009Django community's take on Capistrano. looks really complex, configured by writing a load of Python. ugh
... on Mon Feb 16 11:02:45 2009using nginx, Apache 2, Django, memcached, mod_wsgi and PostgreSQL. interesting to see virtualenv in use; in Perl-land, ExtUtils::MakeMaker takes care of this for us nicely using "perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=...". also, deploying directly from a "git push"
... on Mon Feb 16 11:00:20 2009the correct way to produce a sort index given a set of [ positive_ratings, negative_ratings ] pairs; apparently it's the lower bound of the Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter. great, this may work well for SA's rule-QA system too
... on Fri Feb 13 16:26:53 2009'Free Software and related commentary from the Nordic region.' I wonder if there's room for one of these for the Isles, ie. UK and .ie? although mind you planetilug probably takes care of the .ie part already
... on Fri Feb 13 16:22:30 2009Steve Loughran with a little bad news on yesterday's post. 'CI is like a chainsaw: very powerful, can achieve great things, but if handled badly you can cut your own legs off and that hurts.'
... on Fri Feb 13 15:15:07 2009also: 'The Traffic department also recommends that all cycle lanes be inspected annually. Several collisions occurred when cyclists were forced to move out of the lane to avoid potholes or sunken gullies.'
... on Thu Feb 12 12:26:27 2009an absurd situation, and unlikely to improve. I'm surprised eBay or Amazon Ireland aren't kicking up a fuss about this
... on Wed Feb 11 17:08:34 2009nialler9 says: ‘I would have posted an MP3 but IRMA asked me to take down some major label related tunes last week'
... on Wed Feb 11 10:38:16 2009'2030 Vision is [..] the Strategic Transport Plan being developed by the Dublin Transportation Office for the Greater Dublin Area. It will be at the heart of all transport planning in the region from 2010 until 2030. [..] We wish to consult you in the development of the new transport strategy.' Give your $.02 here, online
... on Wed Feb 11 10:22:52 2009big thumbs up from Artur, jzawodny and others for CouchDB. interesting thread of comments from people using it for "real-world" stuff
... on Wed Feb 11 09:58:18 2009An interesting, and counter-intuitive, demo of road safety statistics from Colm
... on Wed Feb 11 09:21:59 2009press "Help" then the yellow button. very useful for when it loses BBC4, which it's just done _again_
... on Mon Feb 9 22:43:34 2009extremely detailed, lots of useful tips here (via mattb)
... on Mon Feb 9 21:29:15 2009paper on "transactional flash" -- transactions implemented at the filesystem level using useful properties of SSD storage. nice research
... on Mon Feb 9 13:27:06 2009an interview with @blaine after his relocation to Antrim. not a great article, really. in fairness, he's obvs never had to relocate from Europe to the US; I've done it, and it's as much of a bureaucratic minefield in my experience
... on Mon Feb 9 09:44:22 2009'More likely there's something wrong with the whole design of network systems based on message queues, and we need to start developing alternatives.' blimey! sounds like an atrocious implementation, or possibly AMQP itself; I've had great results with many (non-AMQP-based) queue systems
... on Fri Feb 6 10:51:26 2009interview with MS UK's Head Of Mobile attempting, and failing, to justify their DRM policy. Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service - and they're locked to my phone - what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'
... on Thu Feb 5 17:35:31 2009also applies to laptops. they truly are the most customer-hostile company in the world
... on Thu Feb 5 10:59:18 2009he resigned due to the botched MySQL 5.1 release, and slowness in Sun's actions to 'fix our community and development problems'. regardless, he says they're parting on good terms. His new company, Monty Program Ab, will be run by http://zak.greant.com/hacking-business-models -- cool
... on Thu Feb 5 10:26:12 2009why was an important piece of internet infrastructure gambling on stocks? oh dear
... on Wed Feb 4 13:40:44 2009well-defined semantics for callbacks over HTTP, as seen in Google Code, Amazon Checkout, PayPal's IPN and more
... on Wed Feb 4 12:05:02 2009bookmarking this a bit late, but going by the Google Code site it seems to be taking off quite nicely, and heading for the Apache Incubator
... on Tue Feb 3 17:14:59 2009RAII syntactic sugar. I like
... on Tue Feb 3 15:27:51 2009'The record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements in place with all other ISPs in Ireland.'
... on Tue Feb 3 11:49:28 2009'Airtricity has not taken legal action against any bloggers in relation to information posted about this incident.' well, that's good of them! wtf
... on Tue Feb 3 10:26:16 2009safethread is a nice patch for Python 3000 implementing a new approach to concurrency in the Python internals. I like the "branching-as-children" approach to threading, using variable scope to enforce the thread lifecycle
... on Tue Feb 3 09:51:52 2009leave it broken. hmm!
... on Sun Feb 1 22:33:46 2009particularly for Java; reportedly a few of the open-source Bloom filter impls use poor choices of hash algorithm
... on Fri Jan 30 10:06:04 2009'The last thing we need is to deploy a system designed to burn all available cycles, consuming electricity and generating [CO2...] in order to produce small amounts of bitbux to get emails or spams through.' Good point
... on Fri Jan 30 09:53:42 2009Good going for Caelen, Dave and the lads, especially given the current economic situation!
... on Thu Jan 29 23:35:03 2009it didn't work out so well for him. I have to concur to some degree; in my experience, GSOC mentoring is hard work
... on Thu Jan 29 14:37:31 2009new PlanetLab/Google collaboration with various web-based tools to measure your internet connection -- including a handy test to see if your ISP slows down BitTorrent
... on Thu Jan 29 10:50:16 2009Mike Arrington finds himself victimised by crazies -- 'I write about technology startups and news. In any sane world that shouldn’t make me someone who has to deal with death threats and being spat on. It shouldn’t require me to absorb more verbal abuse than a human being can realistically deal with.' holy crap
... on Wed Jan 28 12:21:37 2009via "I Hardly Know Her", a sister site to muxtape.com. great UI for viewing a set of Flickr photos
... on Wed Jan 28 10:57:19 2009'Unit Testing for PostgreSQL'. application of the perl-style TAP unit test protocol for testing an SQL database, good idea
... on Wed Jan 28 09:49:33 2009fair dues to Bebo for pulling the wool over the eyes of the ad agencies, if this account is true. suckers!
... on Wed Jan 28 09:45:25 2009+1, I've basically done this, too (apart from my JuK-based music system). good thread of comments, too; everyone pretty much agrees that KDE made a mess of the KDE4 release :(
... on Mon Jan 26 13:10:49 2009omg this is brilliant -- a Greasemonkey user-script containing a neural network, *in Javascript*, to solve MegaUpload's CAPTCHAs in your browser. this may be the coolest userscript ever
... on Fri Jan 23 21:51:33 2009The Times got pranked by an anonymous Irishman
... on Fri Jan 23 21:03:12 2009is Google losing its knack? Twitter/Facebook more popular than Google during the inauguration; Hulu provide a better search experience than YouTube (although not so much for non-USians). interesting theory
... on Fri Jan 23 09:51:14 2009nice and concise, with real-world deployment data. I wish this had been around when I was evaluating AMQP systems in PutPlace
... on Thu Jan 22 11:17:44 2009really great advice for tech-section interviewees from Adrian Weckler
... on Wed Jan 21 20:08:51 2009re 'X# - XML oriented programming language; the foundation of an open source Enterprise Mashup Server, CRM and Groupware Suite' -- 'When you do a mashup, you're supposed to get your peanut butter in my chocolate, not lodge your fork in my goddamned eye socket'
... on Wed Jan 21 17:45:02 2009'screen for remote X apps.' sounds better-maintained and more usable than xmove or NX, to boot (via adulau)
... on Wed Jan 21 10:09:39 2009'a Firefox extension that helps you write screen scrapers for [semweb scraping platform] Piggy Bank.' Nice idea -- hook directly into the browser to specify scraping rules.
... on Wed Jan 21 10:05:59 2009great article by @mat on the benefits -- and dangers -- of pervasive geotagging
... on Wed Jan 21 09:55:38 2009possibly the first AppEngine site run by spammers -- a fake storefront, reportedly
... on Tue Jan 20 15:41:05 2009free Twitter backup site; nicely done. runs daily; doesn't need your Twitter password; and exports to text and HTML
... on Tue Jan 20 15:13:15 2009exhaustive, with great comments from many of the implementors
... on Tue Jan 20 11:20:46 2009wow, the "communications manager" for the Green Party is an unrepentant asshat. 'some bloggers have developed their own set of rules about how they should be approached and the e-mail in question fell foul of these rules.' Nice non-apology there! Entirely wrong -- Unsolicited Bulk Email is spam, even if you're a politician
... on Tue Jan 20 10:18:38 2009'Torrents of RTE, TV3, TG4 content'. a great collection of Irish TV programmes -- unclear how well they're seeded, or their rip quality, though
... on Tue Jan 20 10:09:11 2009'We keep a record of your visits to Amazon Associate web pages that have Amazon.com content links on them. Among other things, we use this information to better personalize your web experience and improve our Amazon services.' uh, *no*
... on Mon Jan 19 15:24:35 2009Article by Adrian Weckler -- Komplett's returns policy sounds pretty good in particular. and ~50% of complaints at the European Consumer Centre are relating to delivery problems -- that's shocking :(
... on Mon Jan 19 15:05:07 2009wow, the Rails community have really reinvented a lot of wheels ;)
... on Mon Jan 19 14:39:18 2009massive leak of gripe mails from ex-Googlers about why they left the company
... on Mon Jan 19 10:07:52 2009'I decided it would be great to try and follow one [Kiva.org microloan] through the system from start to finish, for the benefit of my colleagues who I coaxed into making a loan, and for myself, and for anyone else who is interested.'
... on Mon Jan 19 10:01:21 2009well, that's a business model I suppose
... on Fri Jan 16 09:59:04 2009due to another overbroad IWF block
... on Thu Jan 15 16:58:57 2009paperghost strongly doubting that Matt Knox was quite so squeaky-clean as his recent interview would suggest
... on Thu Jan 15 15:04:17 2009short paper from Tom White with post-mortems of some common failures of HDFS in the field, and some best practices to avoid them
... on Thu Jan 15 13:53:34 2009'if you complain to abuse@ somebody or other dot com, and more than three hours after that, you get more phish or spam from the same infected machine, then you should have a legal right to claim €10 from them. No need to prove malice, no need to prove actual damage, just "here's the bill". A similar scheme has largely sorted out late flights, cancellations and overbookings among cheap airlines in Europe, because now you get €250 [if] EasyJet or Ryanair bump you off the flight to Barcelona.'
... on Thu Jan 15 12:16:07 2009exposing the rip-off pricing of products sold in both Ireland and the UK, with much more expensive prices in .ie. Boots Sanex deodorant is the current worst offender, at UKP0.99 vs EUR2.99
... on Thu Jan 15 11:06:41 2009interesting to note that spam rates from botnets unaffected by the McColo shutdown went up during that time, indicating that the spammers are simply renting botnet time and their spam is relatively portable to other engines
... on Thu Jan 15 08:19:59 2009ASL-licensed DHT from LinkedIn
... on Wed Jan 14 22:09:30 2009excellent research by Des Traynor. oops! the hole has since been patched
... on Wed Jan 14 15:14:43 2009book on home brewing, recommended by Glynn Foster
... on Wed Jan 14 13:34:11 2009using GCalDaemon -- this works very nicely. it'd be nicer if it was built into KOrganizer, but hey
... on Wed Jan 14 12:20:56 2009great interview. 'In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?' 'Um, run UNIX.'
... on Wed Jan 14 10:48:19 2009the evidence looks pretty convincing
... on Tue Jan 13 22:55:39 2009'a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.' looks quite sensible, BSD licensed, Python, works on Linux, Solaris, OSX and FreeBSD (via Conall)
... on Tue Jan 13 14:26:38 2009Impressive N-way sync algorithm for syncing text. 'Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.'
... on Mon Jan 12 12:48:02 2009'(Excerpts courtesy of William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, and Generouss Q. Factotum.)'
... on Fri Jan 9 16:45:57 2009Gordon Luk: 'I’m done with microformats. From now on, i’m either building separate developer tools and relationship, or i’m not'
... on Fri Jan 9 11:16:54 2009a nice AJAXy web-based GUI for EC2. awesome! Even a commandline weenie like myself can see how useful this is
... on Fri Jan 9 09:43:12 2009A talk by Eric Day and Brian Aker at the upcoming MySQL Conference in April: '[Gearman] development is now active again with an optimized rewrite in C, along with features such as persistent message queues, queue replication, improved statistics, and advanced job monitoring. For MySQL, there is also a new user defined function to run Gearman jobs, as well as the possibility to write your own aggregate UDFs using Gearman. This gives you the ability to run functions in separate processes, separate servers, and in other languages. The Gearman framework gives you a robust interface to also run these functions reliably in the “cloud”. This session will introduce these concepts and give examples of sample applications.' Persistent queues (at last)? Gearman integration directly in the DB? excellent!
... on Thu Jan 8 10:15:20 2009nice implementation of rate limiting for a modern web app
... on Wed Jan 7 23:50:52 2009see also http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/professed-twitt.html . So, some more Twitter antipatterns: 1. user account with admin privileges, instead of role account; 2. admin account without two-factor auth; 3. no rate limits or other dictionary-attack defenses
... on Wed Jan 7 13:11:31 2009by lcamtuf, a GOOG employee these days. comprehensive. 'provide[s] web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers'
... on Wed Jan 7 12:57:53 2009another option for online bike sales, tipped by Boards.ie denizens. no free shipping here though
... on Wed Jan 7 12:41:36 2009omg this is utterly idiotic. not impressed
... on Wed Jan 7 12:35:58 2009a good collection of additional factoids about the govt bike-to-work scheme
... on Wed Jan 7 11:59:26 2009same again, for AAA batteries this time (via IRR)
... on Wed Jan 7 11:30:15 2009rechargeable batteries put to the test (a few years ago at least). quick summary: Panasonic shite, Energizer 2300 good (via IRR)
... on Wed Jan 7 11:28:20 2009Green Party site on the new Cycle-to-Work scheme, whereby the govt will provide a tax exemption if your employer buys you a bike up to EUR1000 in value
... on Wed Jan 7 10:29:33 2009I came across this a while back and have been looking for it again for a while. Good document on what happened in the former USSR after its society collapsed -- pretty funny too. A bit heavy-handed in its criticism of the US though (via Bruce Sterling)
... on Tue Jan 6 20:36:56 2009Irish DVDs-by-mail market consolidation
... on Tue Jan 6 16:58:14 2009Good commentary on the absurdity of the UK govt's attempts to impose age-rating certs on websites. 'From a regulatory point of view, at least part of the Internet is more like a pub, football crowd or playground than it is like a TV programme.'
... on Tue Jan 6 09:56:06 2009funny anecdote. bookmarked mainly because of the nice SmokePing-like chart they're using to chart I/O latency stats... wonder if I can apply similar dataviz for spamassassin's rule-QA...
... on Mon Jan 5 10:11:07 2009right now, it's $0.80/GB/year, apparently
... on Sun Jan 4 23:31:00 2009I'm letting out our house in the 'batter; 2 bedrooms, 15 mins from town, cosy, great neighbourhood. A little bit of heaven in Dublin 7
... on Sat Jan 3 10:00:44 2009in-depth exploration of the C=64, right down to the I/O bus, in a 64-minute presentation
... on Fri Jan 2 13:25:17 2009annoying Firefox "blah.foo.org uses an invalid security certificate" warnings cause user to open a bug at the Moz bugzilla, whereupon it is discovered that they are being haxx0red
... on Fri Jan 2 11:48:53 2009this is why Confluence refuses to display HTML attachments; it's an anti-XSS-attack feature. Bugzilla also fixed it last year it seems. very annoying though; a better fix would be to have a "trusted users" set who can attach inline HTML attachments IMO
... on Wed Dec 31 12:29:07 2008good post focussing on the "autoincrement considered harmful" aspect of the MD5 CA-cert attack
... on Wed Dec 31 11:02:28 2008interesting thought on patterns to provide read permission in a social network, via Torrez' post on the same subject at http://notes.torrez.org/2008/12/defining-relationship-permisssions-and-more.html . I like this: 'The best permission structure, I think, was done by Vimeo -- permission by group, or by individual, or by password.'
... on Wed Dec 31 10:45:11 2008bookmarking for a few years down the line. Scratch looks cute
... on Wed Dec 31 10:37:36 2008awesome use of a chosen-plaintext attack, given two carefully-constructed CSRs. bad week for PKI, MD5 is now officially dead, and YA good example of "autoincrement considered harmful"
... on Tue Dec 30 16:31:50 2008WANT (via ConorO)
... on Tue Dec 30 10:15:15 2008'We ate 10 fuckin terabytes yesterday in uploads. Not bad.' -- now taking bets on how long this lasts before some Y! functionary forces it to be Bowdlerised
... on Tue Dec 30 10:11:08 2008Torrents of your favourite TV programmes, de-duped and available as RSS feeds (via Jeremy)
... on Mon Dec 29 20:43:21 20080.6% of malware files reported to MS, ~135000 files, had valid PKI code signatures
... on Mon Dec 29 10:22:46 2008Mozilla bug chasing up the Comodo failure-to-verify incident. Apparently, Comodo outsourced cert issuance to third-party resellers, and then expected _them_ to perform validation instead of doing so in-house. looks like Comodo's SSL CA certification with mozilla is now in doubt
... on Mon Dec 29 10:15:29 2008'Five minutes later I was in the possession of a legitimate certificate issued to mozilla.com - no questions asked - no verification checks done - no control validation - no subscriber agreement presented, nothing.' uh, massive FAIL
... on Sun Dec 28 15:15:20 2008GNOME's current "stable" release, appearing in FC10 and Ubuntu 8.10, contains absolutely no session management, at all. wtf
... on Sun Dec 28 14:50:03 2008twittering a pretty scary aviation incident, no less
... on Mon Dec 22 17:29:27 2008hopefully someone in there finally figured out that the massive resurgence of Scrabble's popularity was due entirely to the Scrabulous team's homage. I'm still never playing it again though: worse than crack
... on Mon Dec 22 15:27:46 2008'Mobile-phone users must now “opt in” for a company to contact them. “If you don’t agree to be contacted, then it is an offence to contact you,” [asst DPC] Delaney said. “Opt in” agreements can now only last a year. “Within that period a company must contact you to request that you extend this “‘opt in’ phase,” he said.'
... on Mon Dec 22 12:44:33 2008good news. the Data Protection Commissioner: 'Increasingly, in this period of economic downturn, my Office is receiving complaints about businesses making unsolicited contact with their past customers for marketing purposes. In many cases, such contact is unlawful and, if carried out by telephone, text message or email it may be a criminal offence. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for non-compliance and I will have no hesitation in applying the full force of the new regulations to offenders."
... on Mon Dec 22 12:43:10 2008legendary Sun performance guy Adrian Cockcroft sez: 'spinning rust is dead, and a large number of basic assumptions [...] are now wrong. In 2009 SSD's will be faster for read, faster for write, faster for sequential and much much faster for random access, more reliable, more durable, lower power, higher capacity, than discs. [...] SAN's are now a complete waste of time. There is so much reliable I/O performance available in a single drive, that it makes much more sense to put SSD's in the systems and access them directly. Accessing an SSD over a SAN adds a huge latency and cost overhead. It makes much more sense to use node-to-node replication for critical data.'
... on Mon Dec 22 10:10:24 2008via Ian. 'a one second pre-set sample supplied with the Fairlight synthesiser, and people from hip hoppers to Kate Bush used it all over the place. David Vorhaus (himself an electronic music pioneer in the 1960s) recorded what became ORCH5 in the late 1970s. The sound is the transitional bit of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird, the moment when the full orchestra come in and do their stuff.'
... on Sun Dec 21 20:25:02 2008actually, it was live this morning at 8:58am. Missed it :( Still, the archived stream of the sun entering the burial chamber at Newgrange on the winter solstice is viewable here -- and one to bookmark for next year...
... on Sun Dec 21 11:49:07 2008fantastic tip (via Jeremy). see also http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149
... on Fri Dec 19 10:38:50 2008fascinating in-depth analysis of how to actually _use_ the test card -- and yes, Carole and her clown doll still stars (via Yoz)
... on Fri Dec 19 10:32:14 2008Alias muses on massive Oracle db migration algorithms. looking forward to seeing the full db migration system when/if it eventually hits CPAN
... on Thu Dec 18 22:28:21 2008Amazon have just rolled out version 2 to avoid this bug, which uses HMAC-SHA256 instead of HMAC-SHA1. they're also now deprecating use of HTTP instead of HTTPS, since the attack requires that the attacker sniff a valid request to reuse its signature
... on Thu Dec 18 10:35:13 2008Canonical are issuing official Ubuntu Server AMIs. very good idea; make Ubuntu Server the virtualization platform of choice
... on Wed Dec 17 22:05:31 2008"Archie" does Pulp's "Common People". incredible
... on Wed Dec 17 21:15:51 2008generate RPMs, DEBs etc. from CPAN packages; apparently takes over from the deprecated (but excellent) cpan2rpm
... on Wed Dec 17 09:30:07 2008bit late bookmarking this; awesome speedups though
... on Mon Dec 15 22:00:10 2008hilarious account of Loic Le Meur's latest car-crash of a conference, LeWeb '08
... on Thu Dec 11 15:13:50 2008Rapleaf do the computations on using EC2 vs "grow your own". waaay cheaper to do the latter for their use-case. also interesting to see lots of Hadoop fans in the comments
... on Thu Dec 11 10:43:59 2008'The bottom line is that these blocking systems are fragile, easy to evade (even unintentionally), and little more than a fig leaf to save the IWF’s blushes in being so ineffective at getting child abuse image websites removed in a timely manner.' +1
... on Thu Dec 11 10:13:37 2008contains a 20-line Python script to diff two HTML pages. nice!
... on Thu Dec 11 10:08:45 2008asshat on the ORA blog posted something about how he didn't like auto-scaling server infrastructure, seemingly because he hadn't seen an implementation he liked. Debunked by SmugMug
... on Wed Dec 10 14:59:10 2008Euro-hosted EC2 nodes. woo! wonder if they're in the Digital Depot...
... on Wed Dec 10 11:12:56 2008good wrap-up. hilariously, traffic to the blocked page "increased by more than 200 times normal" [levels], after the block was imposed, due to the press their screw-up received. also the image was still available elsewhere, including Amazon. oops! nice work IWF
... on Wed Dec 10 11:05:57 2008the entire text of MJD's functional-programming-in-perl bible! awesome. (I have no less than two copies of the dead-tree version.)
... on Tue Dec 9 20:33:14 2008on the crapness of Ruby and Python distribution mechanisms for server deployment. 'Developers are reinventing the wheel, engine and transmission. Which is not that bad per se, but by not looking at existing solutions for the problem of making a car move, they are inventing a square wheel, a steam-powered engine and a superconductor-powered magnetic transmission.'
... on Tue Dec 9 17:01:49 2008a group dedicated to Dublin City Council's ineptitude where bike lanes are concerned
... on Tue Dec 9 10:12:27 2008nifty Vim plugin for working with "surrounding" text entities -- quotes, XML tags, parens etc.
... on Tue Dec 9 09:47:28 2008WP commentary on the repercussions of the IWF censorship
... on Mon Dec 8 11:11:00 2008ouch. IWF decided an image on WP (specifically a "Scorpions" album cover) was illegal. Due to bugs in the "Cleanfeed" implementation, this caused a block of WP's editing infrastructure for ~95% of UK ISP users. fiasco
... on Mon Dec 8 11:09:07 2008lots and lots of gotchas :( avoid Ubuntu 8.10 on a T61p! I'm finding it buggy as hell
... on Mon Dec 8 10:32:47 2008a great paean to Moose, Test::Class, Devel::DProf, and other good features in modern perl programming
... on Sun Dec 7 21:48:00 2008another interwebs classic thread. "I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring."
... on Sun Dec 7 21:07:12 20086 VMs running different versions of Windows, in order to ensure CPAN modules run OK on 'doze. this is awesome, and UNIX vendors should be doing the same
... on Sun Dec 7 15:49:21 2008both points are pretty valid, I've been hurt by them before
... on Sun Dec 7 14:46:28 2008the Kubuntu team went with the half-baked and broken usability nightmare that is KDE 4 for the latest Ubuntu release. here's packages to revert back to the working KDE 3.5.1. I hope they work :(
... on Sat Dec 6 11:58:59 2008new Irish computer bits shop, recommended by Damo
... on Fri Dec 5 13:57:21 2008hardware hacking, Bunnie-style. hard. core (via Danny)
... on Thu Dec 4 10:37:12 2008Ian Kallen on spam-battling at Technorati, Ning, Digg, YT: 'It seems to be an accepted truism that social media oft demonstrates, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites. Yep, I've talked to folks from Six Apart, Wordpress, Tumblr, Twitter and elsewhere. We're all feeling the pains of success. Over the past month at Technorati, we've purged about 80% of the porn that was active in the search index. Sure, we're not spam free yet but the index is getting a lot cleaner.'
... on Wed Dec 3 10:40:24 2008legendary maths app can now spawn EC2 servers to perform heavyweight calculations in parallel. Very clever move! (via Waxy)
... on Wed Dec 3 10:36:50 2008improve garden drainage using these lob worms, available to order online. my mate Eoin recommends 'em
... on Tue Dec 2 21:22:57 2008There's an interesting side effect of forum spam -- it engenders more spam by ensuring that site appears in Google search results for the spam keyword, which is what _other_ spammers use to find target sites (via Waxy)
... on Mon Dec 1 20:30:26 2008Twitter from Bradley Horowitz: “as currently implemented, you're only mucking with your own results. You can only game yourself... ;-)”
... on Fri Nov 28 00:30:24 2008wow, sounds amazing. as Tim Bray said, SSDs are going to be very cool very soon. this one claims 170MB/s writes, 250MB/s reads, seeks 2 orders of magnitude faster than HD, many years of write/erase cycles, and power consumption of 0.06W idle/2.4W active
... on Thu Nov 27 16:43:07 2008classic "so bad it's brilliant" YT
... on Wed Nov 26 12:32:47 2008"Starting yesterday, the amount of spam coming to our traps has gone up 3 times (a 200% increase)." Other sources saying similar
... on Wed Nov 26 11:44:23 2008'Attackers sent customized e-mails encouraging web domain owners to visit [phish sites ...] Once attackers gained the user credentials, they were free to modify the affected accounts as they desired. In this case, the attacker set up mail filters specifically designed to forward messages from web domain providers.'
... on Wed Nov 26 10:38:46 2008Small software company (run by ex-ORA Rael Dornfest) is bought out; immediately gives 2 weeks notice of shutdown of their webapp products. Cue massive trainwreck as users freak out. Release the code as open source! It can't be worse than it is now...
... on Wed Nov 26 10:34:07 2008answer: no. ;) IMO there's useful applications of EC2-like elastic hosting services that don't require a fully-elastic horizontal scaling app
... on Tue Nov 25 11:10:56 2008Registers > Cache > DRAM > DHT (ie memcached) > SSD > Disk > Tape
... on Mon Nov 24 17:23:20 2008EUR72.08 for grinder and 2 bags of beans from Dublin-based Java Republic's online shop. good xmas pressie methinks ;)
... on Mon Nov 24 12:20:04 2008excellent
... on Sun Nov 23 23:44:25 2008whoa, network+remote CPU cache = faster than local disk. brain hurts (via Jeremy)
... on Sun Nov 23 23:27:36 2008wow, so cool. A serif typeface from '"La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami", an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus, published in 1567.' Plus ca change... (via waxy)
... on Fri Nov 21 11:02:28 2008'A mercifully brief guide to British culture and slang', aimed primarily at the USAnian. Now with book, just in time for xmas!
... on Fri Nov 21 10:54:33 2008oh thank god for that; scripty, scrapey access to O2.ie's web-SMS system without having to use their now-broken website. yay for Mackers
... on Thu Nov 20 19:46:10 2008under audit by the IRS; it receives 88% of its revenues from one source, Google. 'While the Foundation did not automatically qualify as a public charity with public support at 33% of total support, it believes that it qualifies as a public charity under the facts and circumstances test with public support over 10%.'
... on Thu Nov 20 14:41:02 2008great article, with lots of good facts and figures. Best bit: 'if you noticed a steep decline in spam in your inbox as a result of the McColo disconnection, this is an indication that you need better spam filters.' heh
... on Thu Nov 20 11:36:52 2008about time! This has been necessary for ages. It will, of course, eat McAfee/Symantec/et al's lunch on a huge scale; I guess that was probably the issue
... on Wed Nov 19 14:27:16 2008Walter'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 cyberc
