Author: dailylinks

Hero orang-utan sparks copyright row - The Irish Times - Thu, Jun 16, 2011 : "They did not have the right to sell it and have infringed his copyright. It is as simple as that." Scummy -- some company called "News Team International" taking YouTube content and passing it off as their own
(tags: youtube copyright scummy news-team-international video)

Hacker News | Ooops. : brilliant thread of epic "OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE" stories
(tags: fail ouch oops via:hn via:waxy computers software rm-rf)

64yourself : Damn. my 2006 hack http://taint.org/c64ize/ reinvented, although with a lot more panache :(
(tags: c64 images retro commodore-64 commodore)

_Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming_ : Gunnar Kreitz' paper on its innards! 'Spotify is a music streaming service offering lowlatency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks. Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol. In this paper, we give an overview of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide measurements of service performance and user behavior. The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and has been available in six European countries since October 2008. Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming with good results. In particular, 8.8% of music data played comes from Spotify’s servers while the median playback latency is only 265 ms (including cached tracks). We also discuss the user access patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the access patterns as they reach the server.'
(tags: spotify via:waxy streaming p2p music architecture papers networking)

Asciiflow : 'ASCII Flow Diagram Tool'. great web-based ASCII-art drawing app; create diagrams in your browser
(tags: ascii art ascii-art diagrams drawing html)

Python Idioms and Efficiency Suggestions : will have to run this by our resident Pythonistas in work as a good set of guidelines
(tags: idioms programming python reference tips via:hn)

Scala: The Static Language that Feels Dynamic : a good intro from Bruce Eckel. We need a good excuse to deploy some Scala ;)
(tags: scala actors java language programming jvm coding)

Redditor explains why Apple power cables break frequently : "As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple's products. And when I say "the most powerful", I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed."
(tags: apple cables design industrial-design power-cables funny)

France To Launch a National Patent Troll : 'The operation, called "France Brevets" will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of [...] shaking down companies for money.' I think the word is: incroyable
(tags: france fail omgwtfbbq patent-trolls swpats patents government innovation software europe)

The first Irish case on defamation via autocomplete : Google Instant has picked up people searching for 'Ballymascanlon hotel receivership' and is now offering this as an autocomplete option -- cue defamation lawsuit. Defamation via machine learning
(tags: machine-learning defamation google google-instant search ballymascanlon hotels autocomplete law-enforcement)

Data Protection Commissioner investigating Eircom's "three strikes" system : Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn't been updated for DST. 'this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management - i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime - for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.' As TJ explains, this could have very serious results
(tags: dpc ireland eircom fail time dst daylight-savings three-strikes filesharing piracy)

Hipster Ipsum : 'Adipisicing do Tumblr fugiat vinyl Pitchfork. Organic tempor laboris, esse Tumblr irure eu nostrud. Dolor Cosby sweater mustache qui consequat incididunt. McSweeney's ullamco occaecat Wes Anderson. Minim aute lomo, duis ea proident enim Carles. Eiusmod culpa photo booth ex. Pariatur incididunt minim qui, dolor Pitchfork wayfarers mollit vinyl fixie.' (via boogah)
(tags: via:boogah hipster lorem-ipsum filler text markov-chains funny humour)

Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app : 'Wi-Fi Sync' was rejected from the App Store last May -- and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! 'Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers' kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”'
(tags: apple walled-garden protectionism iphone wifi syncing apps ip rip-offs)

Why Ryanair The Cookie Monster is just an urban myth : “If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
(tags: ryanair pricing airlines travel web shopping urban-myths)

Piracy: are we being conned? : The Age with a cynical take on pro-music-biz anti-piracy "reports". "The quality of data and analysis is very weak as its political objective is so clear. It does not use actual ABS data but data taken from Europe. It's an elemental statistical error, it's fudging with numbers to come out with a figure which is 'kinda sorta' plausible."
(tags: piracy filesharing copyright australia the-age newspapers ifpi acta)

Our 256,000 (and counting) atheists, agnostics, humanists and non-religious - The Irish Times : "The ‘non-religious’ are the largest group in the State after Catholics, according to the [2006] census." Doubtless higher in this year's, too...
(tags: humanism atheism religion census ireland)

Dr. Neal Krawetz explains perceptual hashing : ie. TinEye and other "images like this one" search engines. nice explanation
(tags: algorithm images analysis programming dct hashing perceptual-hash tineye via:hn image)

Telehack: May the command line live forever : 'Connected to TELEHACK port 13 / It is 8:16 am on Saturday, April 30, 2011 in Mountain View, California, USA. There are 10 local users. There are 24139 hosts on the network.' via Waxy
(tags: via:waxy simulation history telnet arpanet networking unix bbs)

irishindoleaks : 'leaking the indo's offline wikileaks coverage online where it belongs' - scans of each article
(tags: irish-independent ireland politics wikileaks newspapers scans)

_Tim Robinson: Connemara_ : a new documentary, based on the work of Tim Robinson, the great Connemara map-maker. showing this Sunday at 1pm at the IFI in Dublin
(tags: ifi films ireland connemara tim-robinson mapping nature)

bump2babe - The Consumer Guide to Maternity Services in Ireland : wow, they've done a really good job on the statistics collation here
(tags: statistics birth childbirth ireland health maternity)

GTA4 Google Map : wow, very impressive -- as far as I can tell, it really _is_ using GMaps infrastructure to some degree
(tags: google-maps google maps gta4 grand-theft-auto via:nelson games)

Gunnar Kreitz, _Spotify - Behind The Scenes_ : the innards of Spotify's client, server fleet, and P2P layer, from the dev team themselves. good stuff
(tags: spotify streaming servers networking music mp3 dns p2p)

Kill Screen - Profile: Bennett Foddy : The author of cult web-games QWOP and GIRP is a member of Cut Copy! crazy
(tags: games interview cut-copy music via:infovore web qwop girp)

"Treasure Map" - Threadless.com : great tee
(tags: tee-shirts threadless apparel clothing)

Today in nose-leech news -- it's a species! : 'The T. rex leech uses its teeth to saw into the tissues of mammals' orifices, including eyes, urethras, rectums, and vaginas.' OH JESUS
(tags: nose nose-leech leeches nature horror omgwtf via:jwz nightmare parasites)

The Secrets of Building Realtime Big Data Systems : great slides, via HN. recommends a canonical Hadoop long-term store and a quick, realtime, separate datastore for "not yet processed by Hadoop" data
(tags: hadoop big-data data scalability datamining realtime slides presentations)

Javascript PC Emulator : truly incredible -- quite fast (about 386 speeds) under Chrome, even! from the HN comments: 'I just forkbombed my browser. Nothing is sacred anymore.' more comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349
(tags: browser javascript linux emulation fabrice-bellard hacks amazing cool google-chrome x86)

Graham Linehan and Osama Bin Laden : a master-stroke of Twitter-based media hoaxing, very funny. particularly like the assist from @Mike_FTW!
(tags: funny twitter graham-linehan osama-bin-laden news media)

The Hargreaves Report : 'The publication of Digital Opportunity follows a six-month independent review of IP and Growth, led by Professor Ian Hargreaves. He was asked to consider how the national and international IP system can best work to promote innovation and growth.' Some fantastic recommendations here. I hope this provides clear direction to similar Irish efforts...
(tags: ip law hargreaves uk patents copyright)

Netflix Beats BitTorrent’s Bandwidth : 'For perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.' A great demo of how *good*, legit, for-pay services, can beat out less usable, dodgy, but free ones (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy piracy bandwidth bittorrent internet netflix filesharing)

The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog - MongoDB live at Craigslist : '>MongoDB is now live at Craigslist, where it is being used to archive [10TB] of [old posts]'. iiiinteresting
(tags: mongodb nosql craigslist systems)

Worldtime Buddy : easy timezone conversion -- bookmarkable URLs, sensible levels of AJAX/JS, nicely done
(tags: timezones time conversion javascript world)

How to make WIFI work at tech conferences : a success story from JSConf. great tips, I'm sure some will be practical at smaller scales ;)
(tags: wifi 802.11b 802.11n networking 802.11g conferences jsconf wireless)

TwitPic assert ownership over images posted to it, signs licensing deal with sleb-photos agency : scummy. don't use TwitPic if they are planning to monetize your photos, even if it's currently just for a "small number of celebrities". (via my dad)
(tags: twitpic ip privacy copyright via:dad photography)

Cool, but obscure unix tools : these are great - some new ones on me!
(tags: cli linux terminal unix tools command-line)

Charanjit Singh on how he invented acid house ... by mistake : An interview (of sorts)! 'Cast your mind to the acid house scene and your immediate thought probably doesn't involve an ageing Bollywood session musician. Yet the softly spoken Indian man who greets me at the door of his friend's suburban Acton home on a sunny Sunday morning is credited with creating what some have labelled the first ever acid house record.'
(tags: acid-house music via:xxjfg guardian interviews history india bollywood ragas)

Indian Street Graphics - a set on Flickr : a great collection (via Bruce Sterling)
(tags: via:bruces art culture design flickr india)

TextAid - Google Chrome extension : "It's All Text" for Chrome. annoyingly, Chrome blocks forking of processes by extensions, so a daemon process (provided) needs to be running separately, but otherwise it works nicely. Particularly nice is that the daemon is just written in dependency-hell-free perl rather than Node.JS ;)
(tags: text editing chrome extensions add-ons browsers web)

Chrome to get HTTPS public key pinning : 'Starting with Chrome 13, we'll have HTTPS pins for most Google properties. This means that certificate chains for, say, https://www.google.com, must include a whitelisted public key. It's a fatal error otherwise.' good anti-MITM protection
(tags: https ssl http web security mitm sniffing chrome)

Online censorship now bordering on the ridiculous in Turkey - Reporters Without Borders : 'access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. ... The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.' Incredible (via Danny)
(tags: via:mala repression internet turkey censorship filtering false-positives)

Yahoo Sells Delicious To YouTube Founders : 'Q: Will AVOS maintain the Delicious service with all of its functionality A: Yes, that’s the plan. There may be a time of adjustment as AVOS re-launches Delicious, but the company’s intention is to add new features and grow the service overall.'
(tags: avos yahoo delicious acquisitions)

Linux Profiling tools and techniques : great tips for system-level and app-level profiling on Linux from Padraig
(tags: profiling optimization linux cache valgrind)

SmugMug's Don MacAskill on last week's EBS outage : comme il faut
(tags: EBS outages aws smugmug)

LRB · James Meek · In the Sorting Office : 'The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out. Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the internet age private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that’s only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries.' (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf post mail postal-service holland dutch postmen work jobs business politics lrb)

Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned : Rightscale CTO on last week's outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too
(tags: ebs ec2 aws cloud availability slas rightscale amazon)

Dropbox dedupe feature allows materialization of any file, if you know its hash : 'allows users to exploit Dropbox’s file hashing scheme to copy files into their account without actually having them. Dropship will save the hashes of a file in JSON format. Anyone can then take these hashes and load the original file into their Dropbox account using Dropship.' heh. that sounds very familiar, I seem to recall thinking about this problem on several occasions... ;) Dropbox certainly didn't like it, going by this account
(tags: security filesharing dropbox online-backup online-storage p2p hashes sha dmca)

Hacker News comments thread on the Dropbox dedupe bug : some good discussion on workarounds
(tags: dropbox hashes p2p filesharing tech security sha)

DuoSecurity : well-packaged, well-designed, two-factor auth for SSH from Dug Song. free for small-scale use, too, it looks like. awesome! I've signed up (via Nelson)
(tags: via:nelson security authentication authorization two-factor-auth openssh ssh dug-song)

Dylan Collins asks: has Ireland peaked as an Internet hub? : based on Twitter's surprise move passing over Dublin for London, and how to fix it: "launch the Internet Visa, an aggressive program that allows all Irish Internet companies to recruit from anywhere in the world. Reduce the red tape (combine all permit and visa documentation), guarantee a turnaround time measured in days (a small number) and avoid all the mistakes the UK has made with its Startup Visa initiative. Bring the talent from everywhere outside the EU to Ireland. Ireland doesn’t scale organically. So it needs to in-source. We need to be honest about our shortcomings and tackle them with something which will make HR Directors smile. Imagine a country with all the existing advantages of Ireland plus the ability to hire anyone in the world you wanted. Who in their right mind wouldn’t establish their European base there?" He's dead right, this is a massive problem for the Irish tech industry right now
(tags: ireland bureaucracy red-tape twitter tech business visas work government dylan-collins)

Bug 647959 – Add Honest Achmed's root certificate to Mozilla : 'Honest Achmed is at least more honest than Comodo.' lol
(tags: comodo security security-theatre ssl tls certificates funny trust firefox)

demerphq on "perl's regexps are slow" : His classic response to the Russ Cox DFA-over-NFA regular expressions paper. 'A general purpose regex engine like that required for perl has to be able to do a lot, and has to balance considerations ranging from memory footprint of a compiled object, construction time, flexibility, rich feature-sets, the ability to accomodate huge character sets, and of course most importantly matching performance. And it turns out that while DFA engines have a very good worst case match time, they dont actually have too many other redeeming features. Construction can be extremely slow, the memory footprint vast, all kinds of trickery is involved to do unicode or capturing properly and they aren't suitable for patterns with backreferences.' -- Also interesting to note that he mentions an approach I've used in several SpamAssassin speedup add-ons, too ;)
(tags: performance perl regular-expressions perlmonks demerphq regexps dfa nfa state-machines)

brandnewretro | scans from the past : a mate of mine, scanning Irish cultural artifacts from Ireland in the '70s and '80s. fanzines!
(tags: fanzines irish ireland history 1980s 1970s dundalk culture scans)

Pound : 'a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively. Pound is distributed under the GPL'
(tags: https ssl http proxy web pound reverse-proxy)

What is Facebook's architecture? - Quora : nicely detailed summary
(tags: quora architecture facebook http web websites)

How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? : 'after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.'
(tags: sleep rest brain science neuroscience)

Permanent TSB's tracker-mortgage paydown option isn't such a good deal after all : 'it might be in your interest if you have a tracker mortgage and are unable to get a better rate of interest on the €5,000 that you are being tempted to repay PTSB. You can get up to 4.2% from PTSB deposit accounts, 9.7% from 10-year Irish sovereign bonds, 9% from residential property. Yet PTSB is prepared to give you less than a measly 2% over a five year period on your €5,000 repayment.'
(tags: ptsb permanent-tsb finance money mortgages tracker-mortgage investment)

This Bacteria is Violating Copyright | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts : the Joyce estate playing their usual role. 'are we now nearing a point where copyright law can result in the retraction of a life form?' (via John Looney)
(tags: copyright dna bacteria james-joyce joyce-estate frivolous lawsuits copyfight craig-venter)

Virgin and NTL filtering fail : 'Virgin and NTL [in the UK] blocked [del.icio.us] for years' due to a false positive -- joshua
(tags: del.icio.us false-positives filtering uk isps virgin ntl fail via:hackernews)

Nelson Minar on map tiles : quite a lot of detail into the prevailing state of the art in how online zoomable maps store their tiles
(tags: mapping maps google-maps nelson reference tiling storage)

pyflakes.vim - on-the-fly Python code checking in Vim : Vim gets a good IDE feature. 'highlights common Python errors like misspelling a variable name on the fly. It also warns about unused imports, redefined functions, etc.'
(tags: ide vim python programming via:preddit coding)

Rumor: Google “Disgusted” With Record Labels : 'Once again, Warner is the fly in the ointment, the same company that praises Spotify one day, renews their licenses for the rest of the world and then the next day doesn’t want to license them in the US.'
(tags: google music cloud licensing music-industry record-labels warner-music streaming)

Dublin - Europe’s Next Startup Petri Dish? - NYTimes.com : 'Ireland’s tech scene continues to expand in spite of the woeful state of the rest of the economy with a plethora of accelerator programs, seed funds and events like Founders and the IBM smartcamp global finals happening there in the last year or two. '
(tags: ireland tech software startups)

Travel Hacks: What are the best travel hacks? - Quora : lots of good "Up In The Air"-style tips
(tags: quora travel howto tips flying hacks)

Digital Rights Ireland » Garda plans to introduce web blocking in Ireland : 'Last year we revealed that the Department of Justice was working on secret plans to introduce internet filtering in Ireland. Now, despite a complete lack of any legislation, public consultation or democratic discussion, these plans have moved to the implementation stage.' wtf, this is just appalling lack of oversight
(tags: gardai blocking filtering ireland politics legislation oversight isps ispai alto censorship eff)

Daragh O'Brien on the Gardai's plans to force ISPs to implement IP filtering : 'Internet blocking is ineffective. The current proposal lacks sufficient checks and balances, and may even require ISPs and telcos to break other laws to comply. It will inevitably result in innocents being tarred as offenders. Data Protection principles (such as “Adequate, Relevant, and Not Excessive” are being blatantly ignored to implement an ineffective solution. Far better is to shut down the shop by removing the images at source and invest time, energy, and resources into a more transparent effort to manage this issue.' well said
(tags: internet filtering censorship blocking gardai isps ireland data-protection privacy)

RIM: The inmates have taken over the asylum : some notes from Blackberry's slow circle round the toilet, as it's hammered by iPhones and Androids. also: I can't believe QNX is still alive
(tags: rim mobile blackberry qnx embedded phones)

Improving Linux performance by preserving Buffer Cache State : handy -- a patch to rsync(1) which will not disturb the buffer cache, so that large file transfers and backups will not interfere with what's been cached previously
(tags: performance linux caching buffer-cache rsync io cache patches backups)

ImperialViolet - Revocation doesn't work : OCSP doesn't work -- the browser vendors have failed to implement it safely
(tags: security ssl https tls ocsp revocation crl via:fanf)

L. MULLIGAN. GROCER.: Beer of the Week: Metalman Pale Ale : *excellent* Irish pale ale, brewed by ex-co-worker Grainne and her partner Tim, now on sale in my favourite pub. yay!
(tags: mulligans beer ipa pale-ale metalman coworkers)

TomatoUSB : 'an alternative Linux-based firmware for powering Broadcom-based ethernet routers. It is a modification of the famous Tomato firmware, with additional built-in support for USB port, wireless-N mode support, support for several newer router models, and various enhancements. Tomato USB supports many Broadcom-based routers from Asus, Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear and other manufacturers.' Looks good -- I've been a Tomato fan for many years -- and jzawodny-approved
(tags: router tomato firmware linux routers wireless wifi)

Detecting Certificate Authority compromises and web browser collusion | The Tor Blog : 'If I had to make a bet, I'd wager that an attacker was able to issue high value [SSL] certificates, probably by compromising [the USERTRUST SSL certificate authority] in some manner, this was discovered sometime before the revocation date, each certificate was revoked, the vendors notified, the patches were written, and binary builds kicked off - end users are probably still updating and thus many people are vulnerable to the failure that is the CRL and OCSP method for revocation.' It seems addons.mozilla.org was one of the bogus certs acquired. Major ouch. Thanks to EFF/Tor et al for investigating this -- SSL cert revocation is a shambles
(tags: security ssl tls certificates ca revocation crypto exploits eff tor comodo usertrust)

HBGary planned to "BLOW THE BALLS OFF OF NMAP" : 'I would like to call it "B.E.S.T. Scanner" so people kind of get stuck calling it "the best scanner". We can figure out what BEST means later.' omgwtf. Is this guy 12 years old?
(tags: funny security humor anonymous scanner nmap hbgary open-source fail idiots)

Ireland’s new coalition on media, IT & IP law | Lex Ferenda : 'some first thoughts on how the just-published coalition agreement (Fine Gael and Labour) in Ireland proposes to deal with issues of interest to cyberlaw and media law.'
(tags: lex-ferenda law ireland ip content internet fair-use copyright tv)

Nuclear energy: Inside the black box : What's going on inside the Fukushima nuclear reactor, and how it is hoped meltdown can be averted
(tags: nuclear-power meltdown disasters japan fukushima power electricity nuclear)

Backdoor legislation is no way to tackle thorny issue of copyright - The Irish Times - Fri, Mar 11, 2011 : good article by Karlin Lillington on the attempted sneaking-through of an SI to 'deal with' filesharing. agreed on all counts
(tags: filesharing piracy ireland law karlin-lillington legislation fianna-fail)

The Remarkable Notability Of Old Man Murray | Rock, Paper, Shotgun : wow, the *entire games industry* (basically) comes out to praise Old Man Murray -- the influential satire site. I'd forgotten about their Time-To-Crate game rating system (which I still apply)
(tags: gaming humor old-man-murray games crates)

Old Man Murray Deleted From Wikipedia | Rock, Paper, Shotgun : more idiotic deletionism from Wikipedia. when will someone fork WP with a saner community?
(tags: wikipedia deletionpedia deletion gaming history old-man-murray web community asshats)

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | A lesson for colony cousin : So much win in one article. (a) the Bengali equivalent of "craic" is, roughly, "phatiphati"; (b) "In Irish pubs, amid the tiddly-doo music, this is a craic"; (c) wtf Gadaffi references; (d) shared post-colonialist glee
(tags: craic funny colonialism bengali phatiphati tiddly-doo libya india cricket)

O2's page on their new "block 18+ content on mobile internet" policy : O2 UK have just instituted a mandatory block for all "18+" content, which is only removed once the customer pays a UKP1 fee via credit card (which is immediately refunded). Twitter is *full* of angry UK O2 users right now
(tags: o2 uk content credit-cards filtering censorship adult)

TechWire: Don't do it, Enda and Eamon : Adrian Weckler with a plea for the incoming govt regarding the attempt to rush through '3 Strikes' by the outgoing one: 'Such a law will have absolutely no effect on the practice of illegal filesharing. None. Zero. It hasn't worked in France. It hasn't worked in Britain. And it certainly won't work in Ireland. On the other hand, it may well send a signal to huge, jobs-creating digital IT companies that Ireland is a place that tries to legislate away personal digital freedoms.'
(tags: 3-strikes ireland adrian-weckler politics filesharing piracy filtering internet freedom)

Notch on piracy: “if a pirated game is a lost sale, should bad reviews be illegal?” | PC Gamer : wish more "piracy = theft" people would think about this viewpoint. mind you, fwiw, I buy my games, and have paid for Minecraft ;)
(tags: piracy gaming games minecraft notch)

UK Government Agency wants your spam, but filters the submission address : doh (via Graham Cluley)
(tags: via:gcluley spam uk filtering anti-spam doh funny)

BikeDroid : Warren's Android app to track DublinBike availability: 'Use BikeDroid to locate the nearest free bike or stand to you. Get real-time status of all bike stands displayed on a map of your city.'
(tags: bikes dublinbikes apps android mobile)

How to block retweets : in Twitter, obvs. This is incredibly handy, and very poorly-documented
(tags: twitter retweets annoying ui)

BallotBox.ie Posts Emigrant-Vote Results : FG 63 seats, Labour 51, SF 23, Greens 10, Ind 11, FF 2. interesting to see SF's strong showing among emigrants -- something for electoral reformers to think about ;)
(tags: ireland politics voting e-voting emigration)

Dublin Bikes 2 Go! : 'an [unofficial] mobile web application that the public can use to find 'Dublin Bikes' stations and information about bike availability'
(tags: bikes dublin dublinbikes cycling mobile apps iphone android)

Frank Zappa proposed EMusic in 1983 : incredlble -- way ahead of his time on this one
(tags: music internet filesharing business p2p emusic mp3)

Tom Morris - Request for comment: a ‘Good API’ checklist and committee : Sane suggestions for good HTTP APIs
(tags: apis http rest open-data)

Votomatic : Brilliant! "find out which political parties are compatible with you." The app asks a few questions, you furnish survey-style responses, and it figures out which party is closest in published policy. It works quite well, determining that my optimum is Labour (correct)
(tags: policies politics ireland voting elections surveys)

How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become Cybercrime Central | Magazine : the story of Ramnicu Valcea -- Romania's Silicon Valley of phishing
(tags: ramnica-valcea crime romania wired security spam phishing)

U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’ | TorrentFreak : DHS/ICE domain seizures suffer a serious false positive problem, resulting in the seizure and shutting down of 84,000 subdomains of a free DNS provider, replacing them with a banner accusing the site of trafficking in child porn. whoops!
(tags: dhs ice censorship internet domains dns seizure false-positives child-porn)

Israeli general claims Stuxnet attacks as one of his successes : 'Haaretz reports [on a] video that was played at a party organized for General Gabi Ashkenazi's last day on the job. The video contained references to the successes he achieved during his stint as chief of staff, [including] the Stuxnet worm attack on Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and and the nuclear reactor at Bushehr.'
(tags: israel iran stuxnet cyberwar via:slashdot malware)

Gerrit, Git and Jenkins : This is the future of code review. Commit directly from your git checkout to the Gerrit code-review system; change is immediately web-visible and enters the review workflow; at the same time, Jenkins checks out the proposed change and runs the test suite; once it's approved, it automatically gets checked in. Brilliant!
(tags: git coding code-review workflows jenkins gerrit c-i testing automation)

FareBot: Read data from public transit cards with your NFC-equipped Android phone - codebutler : 'When demonstrating FareBot, many people are surprised to learn that much of the data on their ORCA card is not encrypted or protected. This fact is published by ORCA, but is not commonly known and may be of concern to some people who would rather not broadcast where they’ve been to anyone who can brush against the outside of their wallet. Transit agencies across the board should do a better job explaining to riders how the cards work and what the privacy implications are.' (via Boing Boing)
(tags: via:boingboing privacy android rfid security transit mobile encryption mifare desfire farebot)

Storymap : great UI for a little Dublin oral-history site -- just a GMaps mashup with links to YouTube, but it works very well
(tags: dublin ireland storymap stories oral-history people google-maps mashups youtube video)

Spotify Second Largest Source Of Revenue In Europe For Labels : wow. the WinAmp guys were right -- 'on a European level, Spotify is the second single largest source of revenue for record labels. This means that 2010 saw dramatic increase in its usage as well as payouts to record labels and artists themselves.' this via an IFPI report
(tags: ifpi music spotify streaming revenue record-labels europe sweden isps mp3)

Zero stroke - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : 'With the price of bread running into billions a loaf the German people [...] had to get used to counting in thousands of billions. This, according to some German physicians, brought on a new nervous disease known as "zero stroke," or "cipher stroke" [...] The persons afflicted with the malady are perfectly normal, except "for a desire to write endless rows of ciphers and engage in computations more involved than the most difficult problems in logarithms."' (via Joe Drumgoole)
(tags: germany zero hyperinflation inflation via:jdrumgoole money brain mental-illness)

Fine Gael's Facebook spam campaign : jesus. Not only do they coin the cramp-inducing neologism "twolicy", they then have the temerity to suggest that people should "donate" their Facebook status so that FG can spam their social group. awful
(tags: facebook fine-gael twitter social-media twolicy spam)

No Sleep 'Til Brooklands: A True Story Of Daily Mail Lies (guest post) : how the Daily Mail (UK) works, via b3ta. mind-boggling misuse of one woman's comments to concoct a story, according to this
(tags: daily-mail journalism libel media newspapers law uk via:b3ta)

Using Git to manage a web site : simple, basic demo of a git post-receive hook to auto-check-out every rev committed to a git repository
(tags: git deployment howto via:hackernews)

Gamasutra - News - Opinion: Minecraft And The Question Of Luck : 'Notch’s luck was that he came across the idea of doing a first-person fortress building game. His alignment was that the game that he wanted to make was culturally connected to [he PC gamer] tribe. While the game may appear ugly, and its purchase process etc seem naive to many a gaming professional, all of those decisions that Notch made along the road to releasing his game were from the point of view of a particular perspective of what games are, what matters and what were the things that he could trust the tribe to figure out for themselves.'
(tags: tribes viral minecraft gaming analysis games culture gamasutra via:nelson future software marketing)

Spamwiki : good wiki tracking spam operations, their current campaigns, who's doing it etc.
(tags: wiki spam anti-spam)

Spammers Are Now Using Verified By Visa : Visa's atrociously-designed "security" program is now being used by criminals to process their credit-card payments, allegedly
(tags: verified-by-visa spam visa security)

Michael "Liar's Poker" Lewis on Ireland's economic collapse : PDF of the 15-page Vanity Fair article -- from interviews I've read in advance, this seems pretty good
(tags: michael-lewis vanity-fair articles pdf toread economy ireland disaster collapse)

Dublin bikes revisited : Fantastic comparative number crunching on the JC Decaux Dublin Bikes scheme, compared to their other European cities (Brussels, Lyons, Paris, Seville), times of day, busiest stations, rainfall, etc.
(tags: bikes dublin-bikes cycling dublin ireland jc-decaux number-crunching analysis statistics)

Wired: how a Toronto statistician cracked the state lottery : 'The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.'
(tags: toronto hacks money statistics probability wired tic-tac-toe singleton)

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results : laaaame, Microsoft
(tags: lame microsoft google search honeypots stings)

Java Hangs When Converting 2.2250738585072012e-308 : ie. the same value as the PHP bug. 'Konstantin [Pressier] reported this problem to Oracle three weeks ago, but is still waiting for a reply.' good job, Oracle!
(tags: oracle fail security java bugs floating-point)

Keeping Track of Electioneering | Election Leaflets 2011 : 'See or post leaflets shoved through your door by parties and candidates across the land. RSS feeds and email alerts available by constituency. Add new leaflets through a web form or by email.'
(tags: election leaflets pamphlets ge11 ireland politics fianna-fail)

Data Protection Commissioner warns the parties not to spam in advance of the coming election : Any teeth though?
(tags: dpc data-protection ireland spam law)

The worst week for the worst Taoiseach in the State's history : incredible insider account of Cowen's final ineptitudes as FF leader. Beyond GUBU
(tags: gubu funny inept ireland brian-cowen fianna-fail dail crazy politics)

where Fine Gael got their new poster source images : "Google Image 'People' = Ethnic Diversity". bwahahahaha
(tags: funny fg fine-gael inept design lame google stock-photos people enda-kenny boards)

gist: 782263 - How to redirect a running process' output to a file and logout : a nifty gdb hack; essentially dup()s a couple of files in /tmp in place of fd 1 and 2, then uses the bashism "detach" to nohup the running process
(tags: gdb hacks linux process shell unix via:hn nifty dup detach bash)

apenwarr/sshuttle - GitHub : 'Any TCP session you initiate to one of the proxied IP addresses [specified on the command line] will be captured by sshuttle and sent over an ssh session to the remote copy of sshuttle, which will then regenerate the connection on that end, and funnel the data back and forth through ssh. Fun, right? A poor man's instant VPN, and you don't even have to have admin access on the server.'
(tags: vpn ssh security linux opensource tcp networking tunnelling port-forwarding)

Why djb redo won't be the Git of build systems : A counter-argument: "so, redo, from a conceptual point of view, has a really good and simple approach (very djb-y), and I'm sure it's an excellent tool for new projects, but for existing projects that already use make in a non-recursive fashion, it would a maintenance PITA. And that's why I conclude that redo in its current conceptual state will never be the Git of build systems. make is still more flexible, and even though it has its flaws, it's still good enough for most people, and also a de-facto standard."
(tags: redo build djb building make compilation)

The things make got right (and how to make it better) : jgc provides a good demonstration of how a general-purpose programming language tends to make a crappy DSL -- specifically Rakefiles
(tags: dsl build make coding jgc languages configuration makefiles rake ruby)

good Hacker News thread on djb's "redo" : YA make-replacement build system. the thread is better than the linked article, btw
(tags: hacker-news via:fanf make build djb redo compilation building coding open-source)

CareerZoo : jobs fair this weekend in Dublin, in The Mansion House -- if you're interested in talking to someone about working for Amazon, come along! (plug plug)
(tags: amazon work dublin hiring careers jobs)

A new quiz puzzle game: Movie Triangles : cool web-based, wikipedia-driven game from Jim Blackler; test your movie knowledge
(tags: games puzzles quiz movies wikipedia)

Hudson's future : renaming to "Jenkins" due to Oracle asshattery
(tags: oracle hudson exodus stupid ci via:jamesc)

Bicycle Safety: How to Not Get Hit by Cars : really quite good advice -- all except for "take the whole lane", which in my experience aggravates drivers and causes road rage and risky behaviour. avoid
(tags: safety bike cycling bikes)

tvrenamer.pl : Another TV file-renaming script. looks a little fragile/hacky at a glance though
(tags: tv downloading torrents boxee xbmc)

Boxee TV Show Download Automation : organise downloaded TV shows into the directory format Boxee (and by extension, XBMC) wants; some votes for Sickbeard here
(tags: tv torrents downloading boxee xbmc automation)

Reset Ireland : 'Greater access to information on the workings of government empower the public in making informed decisions on the direction they want the country to take. Open Government and media reforms can make this a reality. The key inspiration for Reset Ireland comes from projects such as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative along with various other projects promoting openness, transparency and accountability in Government around the world.'
(tags: ireland politics open-data open-access open-government data)

Rules of SCRAM : 'GOATS just stand around during this phase and stare at each other, rolling their eyes frequently at howlers (such as using serialization to SOAP for storage, or databases as RPC mechanisms). It is often useful for GOATS — or anybody, really — to take notes for the monthly BACKSTABBING drill.'
(tags: funny scrum software project-management coding work)

Tunisian government harvesting usernames and passwords : injects JS onto Google, Facebook, Yahoo! non-encrypted login pages to submit the typed username and password against nonexistent http URLs, e.g. 'http://www.google.com/wo0dh3ad', presumably so that DPI logging can collect them. apparently the HTTPS login pages are blocked to force use of HTTP
(tags: tunisia via:pjakma security snooping surveillance https javascript)

Hacker Culture: A Response to Bruce Sterling on WikiLeaks : good article from Gabriella Coleman in The Atlantic
(tags: hackers bruce-sterling wikileaks julian-assange politics blackhat hacking)

The 2011 Cricket World Cup: A Documentary : my mate Sush is looking to fund 'a documentary set in India during the World Cup of Cricket in 2011 about Indian cricket fans and their personal stories.' Looks great -- might blog about this a bit more...
(tags: sush movies kickstarter funding documentaries cricket india)

on URL Design : from one of GitHub's designers, good tips on how the URL UI needs to work these days
(tags: github urls design ui usability webdev webdesign http)

27C3: Console Hacking 2010 : great preso on the PS3 hack from the fail0verflow team. love the LaTeX "science bit". Sony's epic fail: non-random "random" key data
(tags: ps3 hacks console crypto hypervisor security ccc fail0verflow)

One of the ICE domain seizures was a legit mp3 blog, posting legal promo mp3s : At least one of the sites seized by DHS was an mp3 blog which posted authorised, promotional mp3s, sent from record label VPs and artists -- ie. none of the supposedly "infringing" files, actually were infringing. (via Tony Finch)
(tags: mp3 music piracy law ice dhs filesharing copyright copyfight techdirt via:fanf seizure mp3blogs for:nialler9)

Your Country Your Call: How bloggers pushed a story into the media limelight : good round-up on this FF quango fiasco
(tags: fianna-fail bloggers ireland politics ycyc lobbying quangos)

Independent Media Sites in Belarus Reportedly Hijacked During Election, SSL Blocked : duplicate (fake) news sites created, possibly to put out fake stories; also interesting that international HTTPS was blocked.
(tags: election belarus netfreedom via:malaclyps eff filtering censorship)

opendata.ie : 'to help citizens access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Irish Government and public sector authorities; to improve access to the Irish Government data and to establish an innovative platform that can demonstrate to government how and why they should share data'
(tags: open data ireland open-data open-source free datasets)

RunwayFinder shut down by patent trolls : “While we appreciate your offer to shut down the website to stop future infringement, we notice that your website is still operation. And without further information from you, our only means to assess the potential damages is the observation that your website had 22,256 unique visitors in July 2010. Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale. This damage calculation exceeds $3.2 million per month in lost revenue.”
(tags: patents swpats patent-trolls flightprep runwayfinder aviation web law)

The Background Dope on DHS Recent Seizure of Domains : according to this, the US Dept of Homeland Security is "seizing" domains through a back-channel to Verisign, since they directly control the .com TLD's nameservers. Expect to see dodgy sites start using non-US TLDs, names in multiple TLDs a la Pirate Bay, and eventually IPs instead of DNS records
(tags: tlds dns security dhs seizure domains cctlds filesharing icann immixgroup)

Chernobyl: now open to tourists : wow, sign me up ;)
(tags: chernobyl pripyat tourism nuclear-power gawking)

Facebook | Visualizing Friendships : nifty data-mined map of cross-border friendships on Facebook

Accentuate.us : 'We are proud to announce the free and open-source Accentuate.us, a new method of input for over 100 languages that uses statistical reasoning so that users can type effortlessly in plain ASCII while ultimately producing accurate text. This allows Vietnamese users, for example, to simply type “Moi nguoi deu co quyen tu do ngon luan va bay to quan diem,” which will be automatically corrected to “M?i ng??i ??u có quy?n t? do ngôn lu?n và b?y t? quan ?i?m” after Accentuation. To date, we support four clients: Mozilla Firefox, Perl, Python, and Vim, with more to be added shortly.' cool
(tags: accents language web-services typing text-entry ascii unicode characters)

The Day MAME Saved My Ass : 'Publishers would have people believe that MAME and the emulation scene is the root of all evil, that it promotes piracy and ultimately hurts the poor, starving developers slaving away on the game. Not only is this claim patently false, it ignores the fact that many developers use things like MAME, mod chips, and homebrew development utilities to help us overcome the day-to-day frustrations caused by the people behind the real problems in our industry.'
(tags: mame games coding legal spy-hunter emulation rips takedowns)

Digital Socket Awards : 'We’d like you to nominate the longlist of best music of 2010 on www.digitalsocketawards.com. From this, 26 blogger judges from towns and cities all over Ireland will each score their top choices to reach a shortlist of three finalists in each category. The winners will be announced on 3 February 2011 at a live event in Dublin’s Grand Social.'
(tags: blogs blogging irishblogs music mp3 mp3blogs ireland awards)

Flattr - Social micropayments : click a "Flattr" button on content-creator websites, pay a monthly $5 fee, and the content creators get a share of your $5. Very interesting, and seems well thought out -- think I may sign up when I see some content I like
(tags: flattr payment content business social pay music)

Some figures about Eircom's "3 strikes" system : 1000 notifications a month, and 'Eircom is guaranteeing that it will never hand subscribers’ personal details to the music industry and will never monitor their online activities. They will, however, take the word of the music industry and their monitors on face value and presume it is accurate as a matter of course.'
(tags: eircom filesharing three-strikes piracy music mp3)

Eric Cantona's call for a bank run : a French campaign to "bring down the banks" by engineering a massive consumer bank run, tomorrow, Dec 7th. I can see this happening in Ireland if we don't get an election soon
(tags: ireland france banking bank-runs economy bailout eric-cantona)

Bailout will sink Ireland before we can even swim | David McWilliams : 'This is not capitalism, it is not European diplomacy; it is a stitch-up.' Adding another voice in favour of default -- starting to look like the only sane option given the crappy ECB deal :(
(tags: david-mcwilliams economy ireland bailout eu)

Daft: Gallery Quay, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin 2, South Dublin City - Studio apartment to let : '€57 Weekly. Deceptively spacious open plan unfurnished studio in one of Dublin's top locations. Carbon neutral, hand crafted inuit design. beautiful ambient light leading to rooftop garden. The studio comfortably sleeps five. Pets allowed, no parking. Short term lease for the month of December. Owner is interested in selling if market warms up.' It's an igloo. With a snowman head on top.
(tags: funny igloos daft property dublin apartments snow sneachta)

The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (TDD) : huh. Test-driven development is slower than traditional write-first-test-at-the-end development, but it results in less bugs. Grokcode theorise that its big win is amortising the cost of testing throughout the product iteration, hence reducing the temptation to skip testing when the crunch phase happens
(tags: tdd programming testing qa coding)

What now for Irish Politics? : Leo on the current political situation in Ireland. I'm mostly in agreement
(tags: ireland politics labour ff bailout)

Barry Eichengreen on the Irish bailout : 'The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year. This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable.'
(tags: ireland economy bailout eu euro)

Video: Robots Explain The Irish Economic Crisis : Pretty good explanation, actually
(tags: news ireland robots youtube debt eu politics economy)

WikiLeaks Archive: A CAUCASUS WEDDING : Dagestan knows how to party. 'The main activity of the day was eating and drinking -- starting from 4 p.m., about eight hours worth, all told -- punctuated, when all were laden with food and sodden with drink, with a bout of jet skiing in the Caspian'
(tags: russia government politics leaks wikileaks weddings funny dagestan caucasus)

Eric Cantona's call for bank protest sparks online campaign : bank runs appear to be a hot topic at the moment
(tags: banking crisis economics finance protest france eric-cantona)

Copyright and defamation law is repelling investors - The Irish Times : 'UNLESS CHANGES are made to Ireland’s legal and regulatory framework in areas like copyright and defamation, digital businesses will be discouraged from locating operations here, say legal experts and businesses.'
(tags: law legal copyright defamation ireland irish-times)

Copyright and defamation law is repelling investors - The Irish Times : 'UNLESS CHANGES are made to Ireland’s legal and regulatory framework in areas like copyright and defamation, digital businesses will be discouraged from locating operations here, say legal experts and businesses.'
(tags: law legal copyright defamation ireland irish-times)

The Moon Museum : a Grumman engineer, working with artist Frosty Myers, hid a tiny ceramic plate of modern art on one leg of the Apollo 12 moon lander -- including a crude penis drawn by Andy Warhol
(tags: 1960s art culture funny hack history museums space nasa apollo andy-warhol)

Anti-piracy lawyers 'knowingly targeted the innocent', says law body : 'Following complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), Davenport Lyons now stands accused of deliberately ignoring concerns over the standard of its evidence. It matched IP addresses captured from movie and videogame BitTorrent swarms with customer records obtained from ISPs by court order. David Gore and Brian Miller, two Davenport Lyons partners, will face disciplinary proceedings in March.'
(tags: piracy three-strikes uk law solicitors bittorrent filesharing shakedown)

GitHub outage post-mortem : continuous-integration system was accidentally run against the production db. result: the entire production database got wiped. ouuuuch
(tags: ouch github outages post-mortem databases testing c-i production firewalls)

logstash : open-source app to manage events and logs; collect logs, parse them, store, search, with web UI
(tags: logs logging logstash metrics)

Loggly : 'Logging as a Service' - a cloud-based logging service
(tags: logging loggly cloud logs data metrics)

Fingal Open Data : quite a bit of open datasets from Fingal County Council. wow (via John Handelaar)
(tags: via:handelaar open-data open fingal ireland)

Boxee Box issues feedback and response : 'Using Boxee to play local files? having issues? Here's what were going to do about it.' It's amazing to see this level of responsiveness from an appliance vendor!
(tags: appliances boxee set-top-box tv video home customer-service)

Open Data Ireland Google Group : 'a group for community-based discussion around Open Data in Ireland'
(tags: open-data open data ireland free-data free)

Tony Finch - Some notes on Bloom filters : more good Bloom Filter tips. he says: 'I take a slightly different tack, starting with a target population in mind which determines the size of the filter. Also there's a minor error regarding performance in the corte.si post. You only need to calculate two hash functions, and use a linear combination of them to index the Bloom filter. This simplifies the coding a lot, and if hash calculation dominates filter indexing, it's also a lot faster.'
(tags: bloom-filters tips coding via:fanf false-positives)

GoCar : pay as you go car-sharing and short-term car rental in Dublin
(tags: cars travel dublin ireland)

The National Wax Museum Plus - Join in the celebration of Irish scientific inventors, designers and scientists : wait a sec, I know someone whose likeness appears in the National Wax Museum?!
(tags: aoife-mclysaght wax-museum small-world science cool)

Free iPhone satnav app for UK and Ireland : hmm, must try this out
(tags: satnav ireland uk navigation iphone apps)

iPhone users not waking up on time due to DST bug : lots of people complaining about this on Twitter -- seems the clock changes, but the alarms do not! Internationali[sz]ation Is Hard
(tags: apple iphone alarms dst daylight-savings i18n)

That mysterious J : "in e-mail from Microsoft employees, you may find a stray J [...] The J started out its life as a smiley-face. The WingDings font puts a smiley face where the letter J goes. [...] As the message travels from machine to machine, the font formatting may get lost or mangled, resulting in the letter J appearing when a smiley face was intended." aha! mystery solved. Amazon is full of mysterious "J"s in emails, and now I know why
(tags: amazon j letters wingdings microsoft spoor fonts noise)

Using genetic algorithms to find Starcraft 2 build orders : discovered a previously-unknown optimal build strategy for the Zerg race -- how cool is that
(tags: zerg-rush starcraft ga genetic-algorithms evolution gaming coding)

Minecraft Subreddit : this is not going to help my addiction
(tags: minecraft community games reddit)

Maatkit : MySQL/PostgreSQL admin helper tools -- check replication status, archive, analyse logs, find deadlocks
(tags: sysadmin db mysql replication maatkit dba)

simon listens : open-source speech recognition for Linux and Windows. must give this a go! (Via Alexander Seewald)
(tags: speech-recognition floss free-software kde speech recognition linux audio accessibility)

Project Middleman : another concurrency shell command; interesting approach to dashboarding the results, with the "mdm.screen" utility provided
(tags: mdm unix concurrency shell linux forking background xargs parallelism)

GNU Parallel - build and execute command lines from standard input in parallel : by Ole Tange. pretty extensive, if inscrutable (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf unix concurrency gnu linux job parallel scripting shell)

Alebrije : 'Alebrijes are brightly colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical creatures'. ah, I was wondering what they were -- I thought there was one, extremely prolific, artist
(tags: alebrijes art folk-art mexico pedro-linares oaxaca sculpture)

Amazon.com: ASUS RT-N16 Wireless-N Gigabit Router: Electronics: Reviews, Prices & more : tipped as the next generation of hackable router; 128MB RAM, 533MHz CPU, supports 802.11N and 1000Base-T, and runs Tomato firmware. pity I just bought another WRT54GL a couple of months back
(tags: hackable devices hardware asus rt-n16 tomato firmware open 802.11n wifi)

UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing : 'Client software, such as browsers and emailers, faces a difficult transition from the version of international domain names approved in 2003 (IDNA2003), to the revision approved in 2010 (IDNA2008). The specification in this document provides a mechanism that minimizes the impact of this transition for client software, allowing client software to access domains that are valid under either system.' wow, this is hairy stuff
(tags: idn unicode domains interop)

http://isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/ : does exactly what it says on the tin
(tags: dead thatcher uk politics morbid single-use-sites)

Curious Wines : finalist for a RealEx Web Award, free next-day delivery and returns throughout Ireland, and some excellent prices here. hmm
(tags: wine ireland shopping online-shopping)

ioprofile : wraps strace(1) to summarise and aggregate I/O ops performed by a Linux process. looks pretty nifty (via Jeremy Zawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny io strace linux monitoring debugging performance profiling sysadmin ioprofile unix tools)

Conall's Blog » DIY Multimedia Centre : good data on a reasonably-priced 1080p setup. I'm struggling through this right now, particularly on attempting to reuse an old laptop which can't play 720p output reliably, let alone 1080p. But EUR799 for a new Mac Mini seems steep
(tags: 1080p 720p hdmi display tv hardware home)

Flash Crash - Norwegians Convicted for Outwitting 'Trading Robots' - CNBC : 'The two men worked out how the computerized system would react to certain trading patterns – allowing them to influence the price of low-volume stocks.' Yet another risk of automated traders
(tags: trading stocks automated-trading flash-crash high-frequency-trading)

Irish ISP was lucky - l@w.geek.nz : Kiwi lawyer on the EMI v UPC case, lots of good commentary (via Eoin O'Dell)
(tags: emi upc law ireland nz via:cearta copyfight)

Cisco SCE 8000 Series Service Control Engine - Products & Services - Cisco Systems : used by UPC for deep packet inspection, according to the EMI v UPC judgement
(tags: dpi upc ireland isps cisco networking internet)

Unicode 6.0 released : including PILE OF POO, at codepoint 1F4A9:
(tags: pile-of-poo poo unicode funny emoji characters)

Strike One? « A Clatter of the Law : Rossa McMahon rounds up some highlights from Mr. Justice Charleton's judgement on the UPC case; good post
(tags: law ireland upc irma emi ip)

Senator Paschal Mooney parrots the EMI "Aslan filesharing" story : 'There is a perception that the big five record companies, all international companies, have been ripping off the consumer for many years. I do not want to be seen as an apologist for the music industry [jm: oh really], but at the lower level I can give a specific example to highlight the impact of illegal downloading on Aslan, an Irish band. [... blah blah...] Why must we wait for a High Court judgment to be made before we introduce relevant legislation? This is not the first time it has happened in the copyright sector.' -- wait, the what? It's a SECTOR now?!! wtf (via Charles Julienne)
(tags: copyright-sector copyfight omgwtf paschal-mooney seanad ireland aslan emi irma filesharing)

Blosc : A high-performance compressor optimized for binary data -- 'designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than a traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch via memcpy()' (via Bill de hOra)
(tags: via:dehora compression memcpy caching l1 software memory optimization performance python pytables)

Is The UPC Decision A Victory? - Michele Neylon : Michele quotes Mr Justice Charleton's judgement: 'It is not surprising that the legislative response laid down in our country in the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, at a time when this problem was not perceived to be as threatening to the creative and retail economy as it has become in 2010, has made no proper provision for the blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications intent on breaching copyright. In failing to provide legislative provisions for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft, Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law.' Blocking, diverting and interrupting IP traffic? _wonderful_
(tags: wtf ireland law upc irma filtering)

Record labels lose file sharing case against UPC - The Irish Times - Mon, Oct 11, 2010 : IRMA's comment: "we reserve the right to seek compensation for the past and continuing losses from the State." You have GOT to be joking. As TJ McIntyre put it: IRMA wants taxpayers to pay for Bono's losses
(tags: irma upc filesharing bono u2 omgwtfbbq entitlement taxes ireland nfw)

Music Industry Fails In High Court Bid To Force 3 Strikes on ISP | TorrentFreak : UPC Ireland: “Our whole premise and defence focused on the 'mere conduit' principle, which provides that an internet service provider cannot be held liable for content transmitted across its network, and today’s decision supports the principle that ISPs are not liable for the actions of internet subscribers.” woot! Now to the High Court, I guess
(tags: upc ireland filesharing irma law three-strikes)

All About Skimmers — Krebs on Security : photos of the current state-of-the-art in ATM skimmers via Brian Krebs
(tags: brian-krebs atm skimmers security photos banking fraud)

EMAIL AND BACON : This car has everything (via Box Of Meat)
(tags: via:boxofmeat email bacon car funny lol demotivational posters)