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This is something Jenkins have come up to randomize and distribute load, in order to avoid the “thundering-herd” bug. Good call
(tags: jenkins randomization load-balancing load thundering-herd ops capacity sleep)
Shared Space and other bad junction designs lead to crashes and injuries
Just because something is “Dutch”, that doesn’t mean it’s good. The Netherlands has many excellent examples, but you have to be very selective about what serves as a model. Cyclists fare best where their interactions with motor vehicles are limited and controlled. They fare best where infrastructure ensures that minor mistakes do not result in injuries. Anywhere that we rely upon everyone behaving perfectly but where we do not protect the most vulnerable, there will be injuries. Good design takes human nature into account and removes the causes of danger from those who are most vulnerable.
via Tony Finch(tags: cycling design junctions shared-space dutch holland roads safety crashes)
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A sane Google Protocol Buffers library for Ruby. It’s all about being Buf; ProtoBuf.
(tags: protobuf google protocol-buffers ruby coding libraries gems open-source)
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When I said that we expected better of OpenSSL, it’s not merely that there’s some sense that security-driven code should be of higher quality. (OpenSSL is legendary for being considered a mess, internally.) It’s that the number of systems that depend on it, and then expose that dependency to the outside world, are considerable. This is security’s largest contributed dependency, but it’s not necessarily the software ecosystem’s largest dependency. Many, maybe even more systems depend on web servers like Apache, nginx, and IIS. We fear vulnerabilities significantly more in libz than libbz2 than libxz, because more servers will decompress untrusted gzip over bzip2 over xz. Vulnerabilities are not always in obvious places – people underestimate just how exposed things like libxml and libcurl and libjpeg are. And as HD Moore showed me some time ago, the embedded space is its own universe of pain, with 90’s bugs covering entire countries. If we accept that a software dependency becomes Critical Infrastructure at some level of economic dependency, the game becomes identifying those dependencies, and delivering direct technical and even financial support. What are the one million most important lines of code that are reachable by attackers, and least covered by defenders? (The browsers, for example, are very reachable by attackers but actually defended pretty zealously – FFMPEG public is not FFMPEG in Chrome.) Note that not all code, even in the same project, is equally exposed. It’s tempting to say it’s a needle in a haystack. But I promise you this: Anybody patches Linux/net/ipv4/tcp_input.c (which handles inbound network for Linux), a hundred alerts are fired and many of them are not to individuals anyone would call friendly. One guy, one night, patched OpenSSL. Not enough defenders noticed, and it took Neel Mehta to do something.
(tags: development openssl heartbleed ssl security dan-kaminsky infrastructure libraries open-source dependencies)
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‘a command line tool for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Written in Python, easy_install the package to install as an egg. Supports multithreaded operations for large volumes. Put, get, or delete many items concurrently, using a fixed-size pool of threads. Built on workerpool for multithreading and boto for access to the Amazon S3 API. Unix-friendly input and output. Pipe things in, out, and all around.’ MIT-licensed open source. (via Paul Dolan)
(tags: via:pdolan s3 s3funnel tools ops aws python mit open-source)