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as used in the Apollo guidance computer systems — hand-woven by “little old ladies”. Amazing
(tags: core-memory memory rope-core guidance apollo space nasa history 1960s via:hn)
How I used Heartbleed to steal a site’s private crypto key
good writeup from Robin Xu
(tags: robin-xu heartbleed rsa private-keys openssl hacking security tls ssl)
Making runbooks more useful by exposing them through monitoring
Nice example of an ops runbook wiki for a service
(tags: runbooks ops devops monitoring sysadmin documentation wiki)
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Ubuntu, C*, HAProxy, MySQL, RDS, multiple AWS regions.
(tags: hailo cassandra ubuntu mysql rds aws ec2 haproxy architecture)
They called it “big iron” for a reason: the Cray Motor-Generator Unit
I think the deal with the Motor-Generator Unit was that the Cray 1 needed not just enormous amounts of power (over a hundred kilowatts!), but also very stable power. So it ran from a huge electric generator connected directly to a huge electric motor, the motor running from dirty grid power and the generator, in turn, feeding the computer’s own multi-voltage PSU. The Cray 1 itself weighed a mere 2.4 tonnes, but all this support stuff added several more tonnes.
via RobS.(tags: via:rob-synnott cray history big-iron motors power electricity generators)
Go: Best Practices for Production Environments
how Soundcloud deploy their Go services, after 2.5 years of Go in production
(tags: go tips deployment best-practices soundcloud ops)
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‘Location Codes for Irish Addresses’. Looks like, as expected, this will not have no-cost licensing terms; companies and non-profit orgs will all have to pay Capita Business Support Services Ireland for access. boo.
(tags: eircode mapping addressing geocoding ireland open-source licensing postcodes)
Why your company shouldn’t use Git submodules
‘It is not uncommon at all when working on any kind of larger-scale project with Git to find yourself wanting to share code between multiple different repositories – whether it be some core system among multiple different products built on top of that system, or perhaps a shared utility library between projects. At first glance, Git submodules seem to be the perfect answer for this: they come built-in with Git, they act like miniature repositories (so people are already familiar with how to change them), et cetera. They even support pointing at specific versions of the shared code, so if one project doesn’t want to deal with integrating the “latest and greatest” version, it doesn’t have to. It’s after you’ve actually worked with submodules for a while that you start to notice just how half-baked Git’s submodules system really is.’
(tags: git source-control revision-control submodules storage)
Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied on a Whole City
The law-enforcement pervasive-surveillance CCTV PVR.
In a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sent a civilian aircraft* over Compton, California, capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that 10-square-mile municipality. Compton residents weren’t told about the spying, which happened in 2012. “We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,” Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first reporting on this important story. The technology he’s trying to sell to police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened anywhere they weren’t watching in real time.
(via New Aesthetic)(tags: pvr cctv law-enforcement police compton los-angeles law surveillance future)
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Blog post from the ES team. They use “evil tests” — basically unit/system tests, particularly using randomized error-injecting mock infrastructure. Good practices; I’ve done the same myself quite recently for Swrve’s realtime infrastructure
(tags: elasticsearch resiliency network-partitions reliability testing mocking error-injection)
Meet Ireland’s first bitcoin politician
Ossian Smyth — Green Party internet spokesman and representative for communications, energy, and natural resources, with a top wheeze: “I think it is one of the most transparent ways of receiving donations. No one would know how much money can be donated into a bank account, but with bitcoin anyone can go to the block chain and look at the wallet.” excellent ;)
(tags: ossian-smyth bitcoin fundraising greens politics ireland dublin green-party internet)
OpenPostCode demolishes the planned “Eircode” postcode system
Comprehensively ripped to shreds. Bottom line: ‘Postcodes will be largely meaningless to anyone without access to the pay-walled database. It is another tax on business.’
(tags: postcodes ireland eircode addressing geocoding mapping maps open-data)