"Crosaire" dead : the legendary compiler of the 'Irish Times' cryptic crosswords died on Saturday in Harare, Zimbabwe, aged 92
(tags: irish-times history crosswords puzzles cryptic crosaire)
Author: dailylinks
City of Portland develops iPhone app to report city infrastructure problems : ie. take a pic of a pothole and it'll be reported up to the appropriate office quickly and without hassle. wow. are you watching, Dublin?
(tags: portland cool iphone apps potholes infrastructure city)BenQ W600 projector : 600 euros all-in for an entry-level DLP home cinema projector capable of 720p HD. tempted, but stil a bit pricey
(tags: shopping tv video projectors home cinema dlp hdtv)
Grooveshark Mobile for iPhone : nifty, an official app for this music-streaming site -- although for jailbroken iPhones only
(tags: jailbreaking iphone music grooveshark streaming mp3 apps)
Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong : from David Welton. what, the lack of support for GNOME UI standards was *deliberate*? bad choice if so
(tags: gnome david-welton languages via:fanf scripting gui tk tcl)Gmail APIs and Tools: IMAP and SMTP using OAuth : 'The Gmail IMAP and SMTP servers have been extended to support authorization via the industry-standard OAuth protocol.' pretty cool, support third parties sending outbound as you, or filtering your inbound gmail
(tags: gmail mail oauth smtp imap api)creators of AMQP ditching it for ZeroMQ : 'While iMatix was the original designer of AMQP and has invested hugely in that protocol, we believe it is fundamentally flawed, and unfixable. It is too complex and the barriers to participation are massive. We do not believe that it's in the best interest of our customers and users to invest further in AMQP. Specifically, iMatix will be stepping out of the AMQP workgroup and will not be supporting AMQP/1.0 when that emerges, if it ever emerges.' wow, massive downvote there
(tags: queueing amqp zeromq imatix mq protocols openamq via:janl)
BBC News - How spam filters dictated Canadian magazine's fate : the Canadian mag "The Beaver" is changing its name due to broken filters' false positives. Bennett Haselton reckons that there's no incentive to fix FPs, which as Henry Stern notes isn't the case
(tags: anti-spam false-positives beaver canadia canada bbc)TLS-encrypted spam : the Rustock botnet is now attempting TLS encryption of spam delivery sessions
(tags: tls rustock botnets anti-spam mailchannels ssl encryption)
Pictures from the Irish Blog Awards 2010 : I like the "blogging is dead" funereal theme ;)
(tags: blogging ireland iba blog-awards coffin)
pwnat - NAT to NAT client-server communication : 'a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a NAT, without any 3rd party'. nifty, by Samy "MySpace worm" Kamkar
(tags: samy-kamkar apps firewall ip nat networking pwnat stun traversal tcp sysadmin tunneling udp)
Bulgaria: Bulgarian City Struggles as Councilors Play Farmville on Facebook - Novinite.com - Sofia News Agency : 'The troubled councilor, Dimitar Kerin, has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants. He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.'
(tags: farmville funny slackers bulgaria plovdiv games facebook)Pivotal Tracker : hmm, nice-looking Scrum tool
(tags: scrum collaboration dev management project-management tools agile)
Heathrow security man "ogles" female colleague's breasts using full-body scanner : 'John Laker, 25, allegedly copped an eyeful of Jo Margetson, 29, when the latter "entered the X-ray machine by mistake". She was "horrified" as Laker "pressed a button to take a revealing photo" and remarked [on the size of her breasts].' as Conrad says, "who didn't see this coming?" Wonder how many other "revealing photos" are on that hard drive
(tags: privacy scanners heathrow the-register uk via:cjodea)
OSSBarcamp : this year's open-source BarCamp, in Dublin, April 17th. no way I'll be able to get a talk together (again) but hopefully I can attend ;)
(tags: ossbarcamp open-source dublin ireland barcamp)How to get Google Voice working in Ireland : hacky, but I'm very tempted -- GV looks nifty and there's no indication they're bothering to roll it out on this side of the pond
(tags: google google-voice phone ireland hacks skype)
alleged Jolley Gang super-ligger chokes to death on a canapé while gatecrashing : wow, incredible irony
(tags: death humour observer ligging jolley-gang gatecrashers irony)
Ruby Best Practices - Full Book Now Available For Free! : one for the to-get queue
(tags: best-practices ruby book free download toread library pdf reference coding)Top Ten One-Liners from CommandLineFu Explained : worth it for #10: 'Capture video of a linux desktop': '$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg'
(tags: video capture x11 ffmpeg cli bash linux)Sexy Executives : 'The finest corporate photography - from their extranets, to you' (via Adrian Weckler)
(tags: via:adrianweckler funny business blogs ceo photography executives zzzz)
a sad story of connections made via second-hand small ads : '“It’s free to advertise,” Ned explained. “And we have a lot of things we don’t need.” So each week, they advertised for sale in Loot something from their apartment. This was their social life. Some weeks – the good weeks – they had three or four people who came to see what they were selling.'
(tags: loot stories london small-ads for-sale second-hand irish-times irishwomans-diary rosita-boland)
RE2: a principled approach to regular expression matching : Russ Cox' C++ lib to provide safer, guaranteed-linear-time, non-exponential regexps, at the cost of dropping support for backreferences and generalized zero-width assertions. actually looks quite useful, unlike most "I've fixed regexps" claims ;)
(tags: regular-expressions regexps efficiency linear-time exponential-time backreferences google re2)
VOGON PLIERS : quick! where's my towel?!
(tags: via:spoon funny google-maps google pliers vogons)
NexPod, Freedom of Espresso : Nespresso-compatible capsules -- fill up with your own freshly-ground coffee and use in any Nespresso machine
(tags: nespresso coffee capsules espresso)Wall anchors & plasterboard/dry lining walls : Boards thread with good advice regarding wall fixings for drylined walls
(tags: diy boards walls howto)
openstache, closestache : new nomenclature for "{" and "}". This I can get behind
(tags: moustache silly openstache closestache squiggly brackets punctuation intercal bang-splat)
DIY Burglar Alarm : Damian Beresford's experience installing his own home alarm. pretty cheap, sounds quite easy too
(tags: alarm home-alarms house security diy install)Post-mortem for February 24th, 2010 outage - Google App Engine : extremely detailed; power outage in the primary DC resulted in a degraded fleet, and on-calls didn't have up-to-date on-call docs to respond correctly
(tags: google gae appengine outages post-mortems multi-dc reliability distcomp fleets on-call)Wrex in Effect, or, Deep Space and the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem : fantastic article about Mass Effect's political allegory. I'm slightly disappointed that Mass Effect 2 didn't live up to ME1's quality, IMO
(tags: mass-effect games gaming politics)
Ubisoft DRM Authentication Servers Go Down : Assassin's Creed 2 players unable to play the game for no less than 10 hours due to failure of their DRM servers. nice work Ubisoft
(tags: drm fail defective-by-design gaming ubisoft assassins-creed)
Remote Pair Programming : using ssh, screen and emacs
(tags: ssh screen editors emacs pair-programming xp remote collaboration)
Gallery experiment proves theory that science can be fun - The Irish Times - Fri, Mar 05, 2010 : Dublin's Science Gallery is proving to be a massive success. good news. just wish I could visit more often!
(tags: science science-gallery art museums tcd dublin ireland)
More Best of the Email - The Daily WTF : the "45-hour workweek vs 80-hour vacation" one is a bureaucratic classic
(tags: email via:eoin funny daily-wtf bureaucracy hr health-and-safety omgwtfbbq)
Update News! (in first two posts) - Steam Users' Forums : mind-boggling work decoding Portal-2-related ARG content by Portal fans. as one jwz commenter put it: 'Seriously, if aliens ever contact us, the internet will have it worked out and replied to in about three hours fast.' Also, people are confused by the concept of modems and BBSes; I feel old
(tags: glados portal arg incredible effort)
Unit Testing Achievements : XBox style achievements for Python's 'nose' unit testing framework, eg. 'Major Letdown: all tests in a suite of at least 100 pass except the last.' genius!
(tags: via:simonw funny testing unit-tests python xbox gaming achievements nose)FastMail and sessions : a clever HTTP session-management trick (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf web http sessions cookies fastmail)McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter : Lovecraftian ads for chocolate. 'There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel hell-planet. The delectable Caramel Chew may be one such portal.'
(tags: caramel lovecraft mcsweeneys geek parody funny food cthulhu chocolate)Approaching 100% spam block: Spamhaus releases the Domain Block List : DBL announcement. working on the SpamAssassin support for 3.3.1...
(tags: spamassassin anti-spam dbl spamhaus dnsbls)
Phishing in Irish : someone has gone to the trouble of translating the 'Hang Seng Bank' phish to Gaeilge. I would surmise that some phisher has a table of CCTLD-to-language mappings and is pasting their text into Google Translate before spamming their .ie address list. If only they knew how few people can read it!
(tags: irish gaeilge funny languages translation)
Buzz by analise torrez from Mobile : EPIC BURRITO THREAD demonstrating the true power of Google Buzz
(tags: burritos mmmm yum food lisey google-buzz epic)2010 Irish Blog Awards Nominations : bloody hell, where did these all come from?! wow
(tags: blogs ireland blogging awards)
Search results for url:taint.org on Delicious : wow, you can search a time period for everyone who bookmarked pages on a specific site (via Britta)
(tags: delicious search nifty tools egosurfing via:britta)Mindblowing Python GIL : 'presentation about how the Python GIL actually works and why it's even worse than most people even imagine.' A good chunk btw could be rephrased as 'pthreads is worse than most people even imagine'. pretty awful data, though
(tags: python gil locking synchronization ouch performance tuning coding interpreters threads pthreads)
ElasticSearch : nifty; Apache-licensed distributed, RESTful, JSON-over-HTTP, schemaless search server with multi-tenancy
(tags: search distributed rest json apache elasticsearch http)Chip and PIN is broken : Ross Anderson's lab demo an attack on TV whereby any Chip-and-PIN debit card can be used in conjunction with a MITM device, with a PIN of "0000", verified online, and producing a receipt saying "PIN Verified". thoroughly hosed
(tags: security banking money chipandpin crypto ross-anderson)
How do we kick our synchronous addiction? : great post on the hazards of programming in an async framework, and how damn hard it is. good comments thread too (via jzawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny coding python javascript scalability ruby concurrency erlang async node.js twisted)
PeteSearch: How to split up the US : wow. fascinating results from social-network cluster analysis of Facebook, splitting up the entire USA into 7 clusters
(tags: clusters facebook data statistics maps culture analytics datamining demographics socialnetworking graph dataviz)
Inside View from Ireland: Analysing Electronic Forensics Evidence : fascinating note from Bernie Goldbach: 'MORE THAN 20 YEARS ago, I worked with message traffic and the work told me the importance of verifying source material.'
(tags: bernie spam anti-spam authentication spoofing security phishing)
Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction - NYTimes.com : MS internal politics routinely torpedoed cool new projects. surprise, surprise. 'Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed [ClearType] made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The VP for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.'
(tags: cleartype microsoft software bureaucracy politics culture management corporate nytimes)
Dublin City Development Plan 2011-2017: Public Consultation - boards.ie : Dublin City Council is offering the ability to public consultation via a Boards forum. cool
(tags: boards dublin council consultation politics civic)
Trojan torrent sites - why you should never reuse passwords : 'for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up.'
(tags: passwords security torrents warning twitter accounts)What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps : good scaling advice from Linden Labs' Ian Wilkes (who doesn't seem to have a blog, sadly)
(tags: linden ian-wilkes scaling datacenters scalability deployment ops services)
Lift View First : explaining Lift's code-free "display only" templating system. I like it. Very similar concept to WebMake's "scraped templates": http://webmake.taint.org/doc/scraping.html , nearly 10 years old now!
(tags: java scala lift templates templating scraping)Daily Links Posts from pinboard.in : hmm. may be one for the TODO list
(tags: pinboard tags blog wordpress rss links)Ross Anderson and Steven J Murdoch rip into Verified By VISA : 'this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.'
(tags: verified-by-visa security phishing web banks banking money authentication finance visa 3dsecure papers)
Spamalyser : a custom pastebin for spam messages. cool
(tags: spamalyser spam anti-spam paste pastebin web)
DNS Pre-fetch Exposure on Thunderbird and Webmail : Ugh, very bad idea indeed. A backchannel for spammers/phishers/attackers from the mail reader is something we definitely do not want to provide. This is why we chose to cut URLs at the registrar boundary for URIBL lookups in SpamAssassin
(tags: privacy email dns mozilla thunderbird prefetching urls abuse security spam)Pricewatch - The route of the problem : great article about Dublin Bus' shortcomings, featuring an interview with Antoin! Very interesting to hear about the upcoming GPS-based accurate bus timetabling service to be visible via their website, that'll be fantastic
(tags: gps busses dublin-bus dublin mass-transit commute travel)
explanation of the PS3 exploit : good walk-through by Nate Lawson
(tags: ps3 root hypervisor exploits mod-chips consoles reversing)The SAY2K10 bug [LWN.net] : LWN follows up on the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX fiasco. 'It would appear that what SpamAssassin needs is some dedicated maintenance talent which is not dependent on evening hours put in by developers committed to other projects.' I wish
(tags: spamassassin say2k10 bugs maintainance lwn commentary)
Whisky Map of Distilleries in Scotland (Malt Madness Distillery Data) : wow. my new shopping list. also: now do one for Ireland ;)
(tags: whisky yum reference maps geodata distilleries single-malts)The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache SpamAssassin Version 3.3.0 : w00t!
(tags: asf apache spamassassin releases 3.3.0 anti-spam)The New Data Center Rack From … IKEA? : the LACKRack -- IKEA's "LACK" side tables have exactly 19 inches of space, perfect for rackmounted hardware with a little hacking
(tags: lack ikea funny furniture hardware datacenter rackmount)
Waiting for the Apple Tablet, with Joel Johnson : possibly the best article written yet about the iTablet
(tags: itablet apple civilization vans bulldogs off-the-grid products consumerism joel-johnson)
Dublin & Wicklow Walks » Lugnaquilla : this is the plan for tomorrow -- looks good!
(tags: lugnaquilla walks wicklow dublin ireland hiking)
AOL sacks pretty much the entire US postmaster team : 'This is a totally devastating blow to everyone'
(tags: aol anti-spam layoffs postmaster email smtp)One Mutation per 15 Cigarettes Smoked : aka, lung cancer develops after 50 pack-years of smoking. sobering thought
(tags: cancer lung-cancer smoking tobacco risk mutation)The Top Google Search Result for each Unicode character : exactly what it says on the tin
(tags: google search unicode hublog)
How would you serve 100,000 simultaneous comet requests with node.js? : C10K microbenchmarking fun in Javascript (via:simonw)
(tags: web http javascript scaling comet c10k node.js long-poll)French Anti-Piracy Organisation Hadopi Uses Pirated Font In Own Logo : 'Of course you have to appreciate the irony – the agency in charge of enforcing France’s new anti-piracy legislation using a pirated proprietary font in its very own logo.' hoho! hoist by their own petard
(tags: hadopi piracy copyright design fail france fonts typography logos ip)YouTube - Mass Effect 2 Launch Trailer : whoa. really looking forward to this, Mass Effect was one of the best games I've ever played
(tags: mass-effect games via:colmbrophy xbox scifi video youtube trailers)
Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic: case report -- Rogozov and Bermel 339: b4965 -- BMJ : holy shit. This is absolutely amazing, a first-person account of auto-appendectomy (via infovore)
(tags: history science russian medicine antarctica medical amazing appendectomy surgery)Google Translate fail : Google reckons that the English translation of "Amhran na bhFiann" -- the Irish national anthem -- is "Save The Queen". ie. part of the *English* national anthem. the perils of machine learning (via Adam Maguire)
(tags: via:AdamMaguire funny fail google translation machine-learning)
Google Agrees to Censor Encyclopedia Dramatica Entry in Australia : nice work, Aussies! this is very stupid indeed (via Waxy)
(tags: censorship google satire australia stupid encyclopedia-dramatica trolling)
Mobile Internet access data retention (not!) : so, it seems the wireless ISPs don't have sufficient IPv4 space for their customers, and are filtering access to the internet via NAT; unfortunate side effect is that this breaks data retention as defined in the UK. wonder if the same applies here?
(tags: uk data-retention privacy nat isps wireless mobile phones networking internet filtering)I was a Doctor at an online pharmacy : Reddit thread from answers from a "doctor" at a dodgy online prescription-drugs store, supposedly not a spamvertized one though
(tags: medicine pharma spam reddit iama scummy illegal law)
Semi-Realtime Satellite Desktop Backgrounds : Russ Garrett with another set of near-realtime desktop weather imagery (cf. http://taint.org/xplanet/ )
(tags: weather desktop image satellite realtime backgrounds)Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs : no sync or automated backup yet, so more like sendspace than dropbox, limited usefulness
(tags: google backup online-backup sync storage)the MagicJack : a GSM femtocell for the home -- USB-driven, the size of a pack of cards, $40. this won't last long
(tags: femtocells gsm phone home voip telephone)Zamberlan Snow Chains : chains -- for your shoes. basically crampon overshoes, to deal with ice and snow, EUR45
(tags: chains ice snow shoes boots footwear weather crampons)
Irish Weather Network : live weather-station data from across Ireland, overlaid on a Google Map, using amateur and professional stations. fascinating
(tags: weather data mapping ireland live)Malicious App In Android Market : phisher creates a banking app for Android phones which relays the authorization details to another site, possible because of insufficient app vetting (via Mulley)
(tags: apps iphone android smartphones phones mobile phishing security banking fraud)
fixing a frozen condensate trap on a condensing boiler : another day, another broken boiler
(tags: boilers home maintainance diy fix cold frozen)
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski : nicely done; Lebowski a la Shakespeare (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy shakespeare writing humor lebowski movies parody funny)
Una "UnaRocks" Mullally on the state of Irish blogs : 'I think that ‘first wave’ of Irish blogging was over a long time ago, probably around the time Blogorrah hit the dirt, but in spite of time and an increase of participants and bigger audience there seems to be no real drive to improve content. People will always read something good – online or offline – and until that something good (hopefully in plural) starts to emerge and while good bloggers log off indefinitely, Irish blogging, for what it’s worth, is in a state of disarray.'
(tags: irish irishblogs ireland writing blogosphere blogging unarocks)
Atheist Ireland Publishes 25 Blasphemous Quotes : in protest against the Fianna Fail religious right's ludicrous new blasphemy law
(tags: blasphemy ireland law legal censorship democracy atheism religion quotes)
Body By Victoria - Secure Computing: Sec-C : Dr. Neal Krawetz brings the science on detecting Photoshop retouching
(tags: pixels images forensics jpeg photoshop fake analysis detection)jwz - How to use Facebook with a feed reader : "Justin Mason likes this"
(tags: jwz facebook feeds rss atom howto syndication)
Parselets.com : 'free, open, developer-generated APIs for a wide variety of websites. Parselets.com is a place to create and share them. [..] Check out [..] ways to use parselets from our web service, Ruby, Python, C/C++, or the *nix command-line.'
(tags: parselets scraping html web regexps sitescooper json)
RegExr: Online Regular Expression Testing Tool : a very nice interactive editor in Flash, supporting lots of the usual perlish stuff. via Joe
(tags: via:jdrumgoole regexps regular-expressions spamassassin rule-dev flash regex flex utilities)
Deployment is just a part of dev/ops cooperation, not the whole thing : metrics, monitoring, instrumentation, fault tolerance, load mitigation called out as other factors by Allspaw
(tags: ops deployment operations engineering metrics devops monitoring fault-tolerance load)Build Web Apps for iPhone using Dashcode : hmm, not too tricky
(tags: iphone html css js dev coding dashcode)
Fill and span DVD archives with Discspan : filed under "about time I did another DVD backup"
(tags: backup dvd spanning via:donncha linux storage offline recovery)
mnot’s Weblog: HTTP + Politics = ? : how the Great Firewall of Oz breaks so much more than the web browser
(tags: http web politics australia internet proxies filtering)Play framework : 'a Java framework made by Web developers. Discover a clean alternative to bloated enterprise Java stacks. Play focuses on developer productivity and targets RESTful architectures.'
(tags: java rails webdev mvc webapps play playframework)Turing-incomplete Lua? : discussion thread on the cons of using Turing-complete general-purpose programming languages in places where it's not necessary, such as configuration files
(tags: configuration turing-complete safety coding software lua)
Why it's time to lighten up about "weird" Japan : 'Being majime (too serious) is not cool in Japan; likewise it is important for voyeurs of Japanese culture to recognize that most everything pop-culture-y that is exported to the West comes at us with a wink. If you're all up in arms about it, then maybe the joke is on you.'
(tags: japan majime seriousness fun weird news journalism)
GameFAQs: Assassin's Creed II (X360) Puzzle/Codex FAQ : linked by Nelson; will return to this once i've gotten into the game
(tags: assassins-creed games via:nelson toread xbox)
How to build a Google Chrome extension in 15 minutes : wow. that _is_ easy; wonder if it'd be nearly as easy to write an extension as it is nowadays to write userscripts in Firefox
(tags: user-scripts google chrome firefox extensions coding html css)Useful Google Chrome Extensions : from Nelson. looks like it's becoming a viable browser, maybe I'll give it a go
(tags: chrome google extensions web nelson-minar)The Beer with the Green Label : Sierra Nevada tries to reclaim its cred - CHOW : 'Ask a craft brewer which other brewers he most admires, and he’s likely to mention Sierra Nevada. The Chico, California, brewery is considered to be sacred ground, and its beers expertly crafted. “When you die as a brewer, you go to Chico,” says Matthew Brynildson, brewmaster of Firestone Walker in Southern California.' paging Ben
(tags: sierra-nevada beer ipa yum via:torrez)
Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Flipping Out : Flickr don't use branches. mental
(tags: branching integration branch version-control coding flickr sysadmin wtf deployment)
best Comic Sans story ever : MeFi commenter ftw
(tags: comic-sans mefi funny morbid comments fonts via:fp)
How Google/Firefox Geolocation API works : I didn't realise Firefox's geolocation used wifi triangulation, too
(tags: wifi google linux firefox mapping geolocation triangulation)Highcharts: JavaScript Charts that don't suck : good HN thread on better charting tools in JS
(tags: javascript charts graphs js dataviz hacker-news)
Charlie's Diary: The myth of the starship : Charlie Stross' thoughts on the true viability of interstellar travel. This was about the most thought-provoking bit of 'Accelerando' for me alright
(tags: beans ships travel interstellar space ai downloading)
Church 'lied without lying' - The Irish Times - Thu, Nov 26, 2009 : you have got to be kidding. Father Ted meets the Inquisition
(tags: church catholicism ireland pathetic child-abuse appalling)
Meeting Notes 2009 11 24 - Noisebridge : notes curated by Danny O'Brien: 'I have volunteered to take the meetynge notes in the style of a 17th century essayist.'
(tags: meetings hilarity 17th-century ye-olde-wiki minutes via:3ze)All Android Phones : so many! Saw a Hero last night, it looked pretty swish -- although not quite as pretty as the iPhone ;)
(tags: phones android htc hero os g1 mobile tech shopping)explicitly running author tests from a CPAN module : we do something similar in SA
(tags: perl tests testing)
nginx_http_push_module - Comet For The People : looks great
(tags: nginx ajax webdev server comet scalability)
"Source Code Optimisation", Felix von Leitner, Linux Kongress 2009 [PDF] : Good presentation on C compiler optimization, via Cal Henderson. 'People often write less readable code because they think it will produce faster code. Unfortunately, in most cases, the code will not be faster.' I particularly like 'Fancy-Schmancy Algorithms': 'If you have 10-100 elements, use a list, not a red-black tree; Fancy data structures help on paper, but rarely in reality. (More space overhead in the data structure, less L2 cache left for actual data.)'
(tags: via:iamcal compilers c c++ optimization coding assembly speed for:colmmacc)Me and Belle de Jour – ‘Could it be Brooke?’ : LinkMachineGo knew the true identity of Belle du Jour way back when -- and set a Google trap to ensnare snooping journos. nice work
(tags: belle-du-jour google blogging blogs via:waxy privacy googlewhack identity daily-mail journalism)
JSON Format : 'your online JSON Formatter'. useful. via JKeyes
(tags: via:jkeyes json formatting tools useful format debugging)Summary of all the MIT Introduction to Algorithms lectures : good reviews and notes from Peteris Krumins
(tags: algorithms mit programming coding lectures)
MacRumors iPhone Blog: Undercover 1.5 Adds Push Notification Tool to iPhone Theft Recovery App : very clever. 'You can make the messages as enticing as you want - say, by having them pretend to be a notification from your bank account. If the crook chooses to view the push notification, Undercover will launch, [..] loading any Website of your choosing, such as the aforementioned bank's. While the thief is distracted, Undercover will be happy to save the device's GPS coordinates and IP address to Orbicule's Website.'
(tags: iphone theft crime push-notifications undercover)Boingo Wireless - AVOID : argh. wish I'd seen this page before I signed up for a month's access while travelling -- they've now charged my credit card again, over a week after I requested the account's cancellation :(
(tags: boingo avoid customer-service customer-hostile scams wifi travel)
HTC Hero is on Meteor : according to Fergal, at half of the price of O2's iPhone "deal"
(tags: htc hero o2 iphone android phones mobile ireland meteor)SSL trick certificate published : ioerror published the '\00' wild-card SSL cert for any domain (for affected SSL client libs at least)
(tags: ssl tls security nul ioerror bugs exploits)
Google employees now discouraged from using Python for new projects : 'You have to balance Python's strengths with its weaknesses: your engineers may be more productive using Python, but if they have to work around more platform-level performance/scaling limitations as volume increases, do you come out ahead? etc.'
(tags: google performance scalability python unladen-swallow languages via:preddit)
Damn Cool Algorithms: Spatial indexing : quadtrees, Hilbert curves, and geohashing, as seen in Google's new Closure library. useful for multidimensional addressing in general
(tags: algorithms mapping gis indexing quadtree datastructures spatial geometry)
Mint Studio Multi-Room Wireless Speaker : $130 speakers; outputs from computer via USB, transmits to wireless receiver, which also has an iPod dock and a line-in. exactly what I'm after! (thanks Jason for the tip)
(tags: via:jcosper music sound mp3 home wireless speakers)IT Law in Ireland: Irish law on hacking tools / dual-use software : specifically, a port of dessid to the iPhone, recently causing headlines
(tags: dessid eircom hacking dual-use software distribution law ireland tools security)
SBSettings : good overview of this jailbreak app
(tags: iphone jailbreak hack software apple sbsettings unlock)Why would I want to jailbreak an iPhone 3GS? : Ask MeFi thread, mostly recommending tethering and SBSettings
(tags: sbsettings jailbreaking askmefi metafilter iphone apple)Subversion Submitted to Become a Project at The Apache Software Foundation : woot!
(tags: svn subversion asf apache open-source incubator)
Spiritual search turns into a stampede as impatient lose faith in double visionaries - The Irish Times - Mon, Nov 02, 2009 : hilarious article on the BVM-witnessing hysterics in Knock. 'if you looked hard enough, you could indeed discern a face in the play of light and shadows. When I squinted a certain way, I thought I could make out Bruce Forsyth.'
(tags: mayo religion hysteria funny bruce-forsyth bvm fortean)Structural Regular Expressions : 'The current UNIX text processing tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line. There is a simple notation that can describe the `shape' of files when the typical array-of-lines picture is inadequate. That notation is regular expressions. Using regular expressions to describe the structure in addition to the contents of files has interesting applications, and yields elegant methods for dealing with some problems the current tools handle clumsily. When operations using these expressions are composed, the result is reminiscent of shell pipelines.' Paper by Rob Pike, via adulau. intriguing
(tags: sregex via:adulau regexp rob-pike regex library text structural parsing)sregex - Structural Regular Expressions : 'The sregex module implements Structural Regular Expressions.' Python, Apache-licensed
(tags: sregex python via:adulau regexp robpike regex library text structural parsing)The Rise and Fall of the Hobbyist Game Programmer : great article on the 80's one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)
(tags: 1980s games history programming nostalgia geek gaming hobbies coding 6502 c=64)
Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook : lots of gory details on FB's innards via Dare Obasanjo
(tags: facebook scaling scalability erlang caching architecture multifeed)Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap : sweet. HDMI out, MythTV streaming, and silent for $300
(tags: mythtv hdmi tv diy linux media-center nettop htpc xbmc hardware)MullingarHeifer.com : 'Become a virtual beef farmer. Control your personal food chain.' also deliver prime beef. mmmm
(tags: meat beef mullingar heifers cows food eating shopping ireland)
Ubuntu 9.10 Technical Overview : lots of new features, and a switch of default IM client
(tags: ubuntu 9.10 linux release-notes releases)The Best Way to Cook a Thick Steak : 30 minutes over medium heat, cooked in its own fat. whoa, I want to try this
(tags: food delicious cooking eating meat recipe steak beef howto recipes)
MAAWG notes drop in spam levels : 'MAAWG [..] says that spam and malicious emails dropped to 89 percent in the second quarter from 90.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.'
(tags: spam anti-spam maawg press-releases isps internet abuse)
Common Errors Causing DKIM Verification Failures : informative, from Cisco (via BoxOfMeat)
(tags: dkim errors typos cisco domainkeys via:boxofmeat)IAMA person who sends "spam" email for a living : Reddit mass-interview of a spammer. apparently he's working on IPv6 support
(tags: reddit spam anti-spam interviews ipv6 iama spammers)
Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks : massive fail. 'By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to [...] dump the router’s configuration file [...which] included the administrative login and password in cleartext.'
(tags: smc8014 doh privacy internet security fail time-warner via:reddit pathetic javascript)Cybercrime Organizations Turn to ‘Mafia-Style’ Structure : good research coming out of McAfee -- lots of Eastern European, Russian, and ex-USSR-country cybercrime businesses nowadays, apparently
(tags: spam scams scareware russia eastern-europe ukraine romania credit-cards antivirus mcafee security phishing)XZ Utils : 15% smaller than bzip, 30% smaller than gzip, and now shipped with Fedora and Ubuntu. uses LZMA2
(tags: xz xzdec gzip bzip compression lzma via:wmf unix compress)
Why I like Redis : Simon Willison plugs Redis as a good datastore for quick-hack scripts with requirements for lots of fast, local data storage -- the kind of thing I'd often use a DB_File for
(tags: python storage databases schemaless nosql redis simon-willison data-store)Unicorn at GitHub : new Ruby HTTP server, using a preforked process pool based on select(). Github like it because of failure-recovery problems with Ruby threading bugs in Mongrel. The preforking algo used is extremely rudimentary -- the kind of thing we used in SpamAssassin before I implemented Apache-style preforking in 3.0
(tags: web ruby rails github nginx httpd server mongrel unicorn rubyonrails preforking unix fork select process-pool)Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC : another serialization format, binary, no IDL, no code generation, from GitHub
(tags: github bert erlang ruby rpc protocol thrift serialization networking)
Jailbreaking the 3GS iPhone with PwnageTool and OS 3.1.2 : a good guide
(tags: iphone howto jailbreaking pwnagetool 3gs)Red Faction Guerilla Tales: Fully Destructible Integrity : Tom Francis gives "Red Faction: Guerilla" a truly massive plug based on its pervasive freeform environment destructability. I'm sold!
(tags: gaming games xbox360 red-faction red-faction-guerilla to-get want tom-francis)pigz : 'A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines', by Mark Adler, no less
(tags: adler pigz gzip compression performance concurrency shell parallel multicore zip software)
Charlie Brooker interview re Gameswipe : to read, yoz gives it the thumbs up
(tags: uk games gaming via:yoz interviews charlie-brooker tv gameswipe)
Track down your stolen laptop – Prey : hmm, a nifty app that takes pics of the desktop, activates the webcam etc. and uploads to a central server if you activate a 'my laptop has been stolen' bit
(tags: prey theft laptop osx linux windows tracking recovery crime lojack)DDOS mystery involving Linux and mod_ssl : connections to brutus.apache.org, "GET / HTTP/1.1", massive HTTPS DDOS. no idea what's going on
(tags: apache asf ddos https httpd mod_ssl)
O2 Ireland blocking sites listed in the UK IWF list : supposedly should only list child porn sites, but sounds like it's got frequent false positives on file upload/download services nowadays
(tags: fps o2 blocking ireland contract false-positives iwf uk law)YouTube - "charlie brooker's gameswipe" ibbstersthecrapgamer : all 6 parts of the first episode, via Waxy. will watch this at some future point when I have free time again!
(tags: towatch youtube bbc gameswipe charlie-brooker comedy)
The Duct Tape Programmer - Joel on Software : 'He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.'
(tags: duct-tape jwz funny joel-spolsky hacking coding overengineering architecture-astronauts)
Ag Tweet: Paying Customers : pay EUR3 per month to receive Twitter @replies to your SMS mobile in Ireland -- a good niche
(tags: twitter agtweet ireland mobiles sms text revenue)Dubs On Wheels : 'Where can I find an available DublinBike?' -- another DublinBikes mashup. hopefully JC Decaux won't C&D this one
(tags: mashups useful web dublin dublinbikes jc-decaux bikes cycling commute)details of the Markdown Javascript-escaping hole : as used to exploit Reddit and create a comment worm
(tags: hacks security reddit javascript md5 escaping html)
Excellent animated treemap dataviz : "How the Giants of Finance Shrank, Then Grew, Under The Financial Crisis". but the data is less interesting than the excellent dataviz technique used to display it
(tags: data dataviz visualization economy animation nyt infographic infographics treemap design flash banking nytimes bailout)
Nelson Minar plugs a new way to write web apps : Every HTML page is static -- the dynamic parts are entirely DOM-injected from server-delivered JSON by client-side Javascript. No dynamic data is delivered in HTML. I'm thinking about this, and it does seem to bring a lot of positives. hmm
(tags: dom javascript json web-apps web nelson-minar ajax)
Please don’t hesitate to contact me - a rant about Powwow Water : brilliant encounter between an inept UK water-cooler supplier, the cluetrain, and the Streisand effect
(tags: funny law streisand-effect legal-threats prfail pr powwow water uk water-coolers blogging ethics fail)