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Eircom have run out of network capacity

This is due in part to huge growth in the data volumes and data traffic that is transported over our network, which has exceeded our forecasted growth. We are making a number of improvements to our international connectivity which will add significant capacity and this work will be completed in the next two or three weeks.

(tags: eircom fail internet capacity forecasting networking)

Apple site lets you deactivate iMessage and solve your missing text problem

FINALLY.

(tags: apple imessage android switch hardware lock-in)

Yes, Isis exploits technology. But that’s no reason to compromise our privacy | Technology | The Observer

From the very beginning, Isis fanatics have been up to speed on [social media]. Which raises an interesting question: how come that GCHQ and the other intelligence agencies failed to notice the rise of the Isis menace until it was upon us? Were they so busy hoovering metadata and tapping submarine cables and “mastering the internet” (as the code name of one of their projects puts it) that they didn’t have time to see what every impressionable Muslim 14-year-old in the world with an internet connection could see?

(tags: gchq guardian encryption nsa isis technology social-media snooping surveillance)

This Canadian Artist Halted Pipeline Development by Copyrighting His Land as a Work of Art

One of the really important pieces on my land was this white-picket fence. The picket fence is probably 100 yards or less, within 100 yards of where they wanted to build this pipeline. I [plan to] extend it 8 feet every year for the rest of my life and I’ve been doing that for 25 years. It got me thinking, where does this piece end? Does it end at the actual structure of the fence or the things growing around it, growing through it, that are part of the photography, the documentation of it? I realized at that point that [the fence], and the other sculptures and pieces and incursions and conceptual works, were actually integral to that piece of land and to my practice. I had not intended for it to be a political piece, it was just a piece, an idea the follow-through of which at some point became poetic, you go, “Wait a minute the fence actually stopped them!” But the fence doesn’t actually enclose anything. It’s just a straight line. And it’s marking something that’s actually unmarkable, which is time. And one day it’ll be gone, as will I. The land will be changed–but it was just this crazy irony that kicked into play when I was standing there with those oil negotiators.

(tags: copyright art pipelines canada politics oil land conceptual-art ip)

wrk2

‘A constant throughput, correct latency-recording variant of wrk. This is a must-have when measuring network service latency — corrects for Coordinated Omission error:

wrk’s model, which is similar to the model found in many current load generators, computes the latency for a given request as the time from the sending of the first byte of the request to the time the complete response was received. While this model correctly measures the actual completion time of individual requests, it exhibits a strong Coordinated Omission effect, through which most of the high latency artifacts exhibited by the measured server will be ignored. Since each connection will only begin to send a request after receiving a response, high latency responses result in the load generator coordinating with the server to avoid measurement during high latency periods.

(tags: wrk latency measurement tools cli http load-testing testing load-generation coordinated-omission gil-tene)

The problem of managing schemas

Good post on the pain of using CSV/JSON as a data interchange format:

eventually, the schema changes. Someone refactors the code generating the JSON and moves fields around, perhaps renaming few fields. The DBA added new columns to a MySQL table and this reflects in the CSVs dumped from the table. Now all those applications and scripts must be modified to handle both file formats. And since schema changes happen frequently, and often without warning, this results in both ugly and unmaintainable code, and in grumpy developers who are tired of having to modify their scripts again and again.

(tags: schema json avro protobuf csv data-formats interchange data hadoop files file-formats)