A Programmer’s Introduction to Unicode – Nathan Reed’s coding blog
Fascinating Unicode details — a lot of which were new to me. Love the heat map of usage in Wikipedia:
One more interesting way to visualize the codespace is to look at the distribution of usage—in other words, how often each code point is actually used in real-world texts. Below is a heat map of planes 0–2 based on a large sample of text from Wikipedia and Twitter (all languages). Frequency increases from black (never seen) through red and yellow to white. You can see that the vast majority of this text sample lies in the BMP, with only scattered usage of code points from planes 1–2. The biggest exception is emoji, which show up here as the several bright squares in the bottom row of plane 1.
(tags: unicode coding character-sets wikipedia bmp emoji twitter languages characters heat-maps dataviz)
Martin Fowler’s First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t
lol. I hadn’t seen this one, but it’s a good beatdown on distributed objects from back in 2003
(tags: distributed-objects dcom corba history martin-fowler laws rules architecture 2003)
Spammergate: The Fall of an Empire
Featuring this interesting reactive-block evasion tactic:
In that screenshot, a RCM co-conspirator describes a technique in which the spammer seeks to open as many connections as possible between themselves and a Gmail server. This is done by purposefully configuring your own machine to send response packets extremely slowly, and in a fragmented manner, while constantly requesting more connections. Then, when the Gmail server is almost ready to give up and drop all connections, the spammer suddenly sends as many emails as possible through the pile of connection tunnels. The receiving side is then overwhelmed with data and will quickly block the sender, but not before processing a large load of emails.
(via Tony Finch)(tags: via:fanf spam antispam gmail blocklists packets tcp networking)