The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server : more on the new async HTTP server from FriendFeed/Facebook, in Python. looks lovely
(tags: async http epoll python comet long-poll facebook scaling scalability web friendfeed tornado opensource)Tornado Web Server : 'an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking (epoll) infrastructure.'
(tags: epoll open-source python http scalability facebook scaling web)Embeddable Google Document Viewer : 'Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.' sweet!
(tags: google google-docs javascript iframe content pdf adobe html web documentation embedding powerpoint ppt viewer embed embedded)Chris de Burgh sees red - The Irish Times - Fri, Sep 11, 2009 : awesome vitriol from the big-in-the-80's Irish balladeer
(tags: music journalism humour irishtimes funny chris-de-bergh)Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” - UK Prime Minister : woot, nice work jgc!
(tags: jgc apologies uk england justice government computing history wwii codebreaking science turing gay rights apology alan-turing)TechCrunch falls for Facebook fakie : FB add a (working!) "Fax This Photo" feature, only visible to TechCrunch IP ranges -- and TC fall for it, pushing an unverified story to live, after waiting only 24 minutes for a verification. nice one FB
(tags: facebook fax dead-media funny pranks punkd techcrunch pr humor)
Author: dailylinks
why "anonymized" data really isn't : 'Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: "data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."'
(tags: security internet politics privacy medicine anonymity datamining anonymous data)
Creative Ireland take on Coir's "No To Lisbon" posters : photoshop phun galore. "Foreign Toilets: VOTE NO" (via Shane Hegarty)
(tags: via:shanehegarty photoshop lisbon coir funny ireland)Irish alternative to poor FedEx : Brendan plugs Wells Cargo, good international couriers if you're sending from .ie
(tags: wells-cargo plugs couriers transport shipping ireland)
100 Examples of Japanese Municipal Flags : a lot more awesome than the title would suggest (via TTT)
(tags: via:ttt design japan logos flags graphic-design graphics)Postfix - (almost) a satellite system : how to keep a small number of user accounts (ie. root) delivering locally while the rest are delivered to a smarthost
(tags: postfix sysadmin unix mail mta smtp)
Ben Collins-Sussman: The True Path : Ben C-S rejigs the legendary "ed, man! !man ed" net.humor for a new age of DVCSes
(tags: dvcs ed git funny humour zealotry unix)TCD researchers first to find genes unique to humans : go Aoife! “This is the first ever discovery of novel human-specific protein coding genes,” said Dr McLysaght. “They are found in humans and nowhere else.”
(tags: science genetics research biology evolution tcd sfi genome junk-dna)
Hudson Nabaztag Plugin : get a glowing rabbit to semaphore latest C-I build status
(tags: nabaztag hudson gadgets silly hardware c-i builds)CloudSplit – Real Time Cloud Analytics : interesting idea from Joe -- track your cloud-hosting spend in real-time
(tags: cloudsplit hosting amazon ec2 azure joe-drumgoole analytics real-time)Why WeakHashMap Sucks : 'SoftReferences are the cheap, crappy caching mechanism [...] perfect for when you'd like your cache to be cleared at random times and in random order.'
(tags: softreferences weakreferences weak references gc java jvm caching hash memory collections vm weakhashmap via:spyced)Cóir Launches No To Lisbon Campaign : Satire site The Emergency on pro-life paramilitary nutter group Coir's new scaremongering campaign: "A German Will Be In Charge Of The SKY Remote IN YOUR LIVING ROOM!!!! Unless you vote NO!" -- a pretty accurate rendition of their posters
(tags: coir politics ireland satire funny the-emergency youth-defence)
Playhouse running on Liberty Hall last night : wow, looks absolutely excellent! nice work (via Mulley)
(tags: playhouse cool art installations blinkenlights liberty-hall dublin)
Pinboard can now mirror a delicious account : yay! Let's see if this shows up at http://pinboard.in/u:jm ;)
(tags: pinboard delicious bookmarks del.icio.us web)SD, a distributed bug tracker : now available. sadly, no support for Bugzilla, which is what we use in SpamAssassin (srsly), so I won't be trying it out just yet, but still -- cool
(tags: bugs bug-tracking trac prophet distributed coding tools web sd)Simpleton's guide to git : it really is. Yet another one-page intro to git, but a good one
(tags: git tips via:joshua scm tools vc)
Pirate Bay latest: big music labels to issue injunction against Chorus NTL : UPC: "bring it on", essentially
(tags: ntl chorus isps ireland pirate-bay piracy filesharing upc)
In Which She's Every Woman : what it's like to have your photo used for stock images
(tags: stock-photos yvonne-georgina-puig photos pictures licensing ads)Hacking a Google Interview : course notes from a 4-day MIT course on tech interviewing (via Hacker News)
(tags: interviews google hiring puzzles mit questions coding computer-science algorithms)Hijack: Get A Live IRB Prompt For Any Existing Ruby Process : injects via gdb. pretty cool, if it works; one comment notes that they couldn't use it on a Rails app
(tags: gdb hijack ruby debugging irb live coding rubygems debugger)
8-bit trip : flipping amazing stop-motion LEGO animation paying homage to classic C=64 and NES gaming, featuring International Karate, Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, and Pac-Man from swedish duo Rymdreglage (via Conor)
(tags: wow 8-bit animation stop-motion video youtube rymdreglage c=64 nes international-karate pac-man pong tetris mario-rosenstock)
10 best Irish Camping Sites : including one place that includes an open farm. result
(tags: via:THRILLHO camping ireland holidays vacation farms)codepad.org : 'an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool. It's a pastebin that executes code for you. You paste your code, and codepad runs it and gives you a short URL you can use to share it.' supports C, C++, D, Haskell, Lua, OCaml, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and Tcl code; isolated by a geordi-based supervisor, in turn running inside a firewalled virt, in turn running inside a firewalled dom0. nice work!
(tags: codepad vm jails infrastructure security via:waxy c languages programming sandbox pastebin)
Hourly forecast for Dublin (Ireland) – yr.no : another weather forecasting service which may be more reliable than Met Eireann, this time from yr.no, the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. if only Met Eireann spent our taxes on something of this quality (via Stephen Mulcahy)
(tags: via:smulcahy norway met-eireann ireland weather rain dublin yr.no taxes)
Thunderbird "open in external editor" add-on : Seems to work nicely. Not quite as cleanly integrated as It's All Text! for Firefox, but getting there
(tags: thunderbird editing vim emacs gvim its-all-text mail text extensions add-ons plugins)
Socializing the Weather : so Met Eireann's crappy weather forecasts are actually just what they give out "for free"; if you pay extra, they have more accurate forecasts. what a scam for a govt department! Handily though, they are mandated by law to give out decent forecasts to pilots -- which are available online
(tags: eidw taf terminal-area-forecasts aviation flying pilots met-eireann weather forecasts government)
bank-trojan fraudsters use Twitter to control botnet : next in a long line of one-to-many communication systems used by bad guys
(tags: twitter botnet security upd4t3 banking fraud)Dublin Bikes : the new rental-bike system for Dublin from JC Decaux and Dublin City Council. woeful coverage, and eye-wateringly expensive; don't keep a bike out overnight or it'll cost you EUR30!!
(tags: dublin bikes dbs rental cycling ireland jc-decaux rip-off)
iPhone Sudoku Grab: How does it all work? : lovely run-through of the computer-vision algorithms this iPhone app uses (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy ai image programming algorithms graphics iphone ocr computervision opencv sudoku)The Irish Economy blog : features mainly posts from NAMA-sceptic economist Karl Whelan
(tags: economy karl-whelan ireland nama politics property banking)UCD Economist Karl Whelan pours cold water on the Irish Government's NAMA plans : 'What we now know is that the banks have been actively working to keep development properties off the market, so that their true values are kept out of the public domain. However, to work through our current problems, these property assets are going to have to be dealt with – either sold at a reasonable price or else demolished or returned to agricultural usage.' oh dear
(tags: nama ireland economy banking property liam-carroll zoe accbank karl-whelan)Irish College of General Practitioners' advice on H1N1 : promises to be frequently updated if/when anything might happen. certainly better advice for Irish sufferers than the useless PR spooge put out by the HSE -- as usual
(tags: ireland hse icgp medical h1n1 flu disease pandemic)
Stephen Hawking Has Not Yet Been Murdered by the NHS : hilarious response to mind-boggling US healthcare talking-point derpitude: 'People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.' fantastic
(tags: politics humour healthcare via:bwalsh stephen-hawking us-politics derp morons funny nhs uk)
Next Generation Java Programming Style : a Reddit-friendly 8-point list of new idioms for Java code in a more functional style. not sure about a couple of these, but another couple get my +1
(tags: erlang via:janl coding java oop style fluent-interfaces final encapsulation)Gadget-supported Gmail (ad-less & wide) : nice GMail userscript to remove the ads
(tags: gmail userscripts greasemonkey chrome script ads)
BBC News on Colin Powell dancing to Yahoozee : The Beeb definitely takes it too far with this one; the song isn't clearly about 419 at all
(tags: yahoozee yahoo bbc hip-hop spam colin-powell 419 nigeria)Some Say Hip-Hop Song 'Yahoozee' Is About Nigeria's Cyberscam Industry : the Washington Post on the Yahoozee thing
(tags: yahoo yahoozee nigeria spam fraud 419 scams)background on Yahoozee : bit of controversy about Colin Powell dancing (!) to a song that promotes the "Yahoo boys", 419 scammers -- but it doesn't sound like that's the case, going by this post
(tags: 419 scams fraud spam nigeria colin-powell yahoo yahoozee)
Anti Spear-phishing SpamAssassin ruleset : from Julian "MailScanner" Field (via the SA users list)
(tags: spamassassin anti-spam rulesets sa-update phishing blocklists)
Internet access is Britons' top priority : 'Britons will choose to cut back on almost anything other than food before economising on electronic communications services. Crucially, we will even cut spending on their mobile phone and TV package before foregoing Internet access'
(tags: internet broadband uk ofcom research recession cutbacks spending consumer mobile tv linx)Blinkenlights comes to Liberty Hall : 'We will turn Dublin’s tallest building into a giant public canvas—and we want you to play with it. Our simple tools allow you to animate your thoughts and broadcast them on the city skyline.' open from Aug 24 until Sep 24
(tags: dublin ireland playhouse blinkenlights art via:pbenson architecture)
Premature Flexibilization Is The Root of Whatever Evil Is Left : great blog post on the YAGNI principle. +1
(tags: yagni coding software development premature-flexibilization)
Boards.ie thread about iPhone 3GS shortages : YA set of "I got mine after queueing from 7.30am" posts. wtf Apple, this is a shambles
(tags: apple stock-control shipping ireland o2 boards just-in-time delivery retail not-very-good-at-this)A short history of btrfs [LWN.net] : wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status
(tags: btrfs history zfs linux open-source licensing storage sysadmin b-trees b+trees algorithms fs filesystems)Security Fix - Clampi Trojan: The Rise of Matryoshka Malware : '[Joe] Stewart said the sophistication and stealth of this malware strain has become so bad that it's time for Windows users to start thinking of doing their banking and other sensitive transactions on a dedicated system that is not used for everyday Web surfing.' it's that bad
(tags: joe-stewart secureworks malware reverse-engineering clampi trojans banking security danger risks windows microsoft fraud)
Programmer Competency Matrix : actually quite a good breakdown of software eng skill progression
(tags: software coding programming management hiring engineering matrix skills)filemap : 'File-based, rather than tuple-based processing'; based around UNIX command-line toolset; good UNIXish UI; lots of caching of intermediate results; low setup overhead -- although it does require a shared POSIX filesystem, e.g. NFS, for synchronization
(tags: networking python opensource grid map-reduce filemap files unix command-line parallel distcomp)Negatendo: Let’s Buy Delicious Back from Yahoo! : wow. can we (and by "we" I mean "the people in my del network") not just move en masse to Pinboard? ;)
(tags: pinboard delicious community social sns bookmarks links linkblogs yahoo del.icio.us)nifty spam-related Threadless tee : "Life would be easier if you could mark people as spam"
(tags: spam twitter clothing threadless tee-shirts apparel slogans)
GUI Icon Sets for Web Designers : lots of commercial and open-source-friendly-licensed icon sets, including the old reliable FamFamFam and Pinvoke icons
(tags: gui icons ui web graphics creative-commons via:nelson)Upgrade Xbox 360 hard drive : how to upgrade from 20GB to 120GB. this looks frankly terrifying (via Rod)
(tags: via:rod upgrades xbox360 gaming hardware xbox mod hacks voids-warranty)
o2.ie's iPhone stock levels : massive shortages of iPhones in Ireland; this forum thread is apparently the most reliable way to determine if you'll be able to get your hands on one (via Keith)
(tags: via:keith-brady phones iphone apple o2 ireland shortages drought forums)
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real : good wrap-up from Anil Dash on "the new push"
(tags: http-push http feeds atom ping standards messaging pubsubhubbub pubsub async comet realtime web)Consumer Issues forum on boards.ie : lots of stuff about one of Boards' best topics, handily arranged by company (via Eoin)
(tags: boards.ie consumer-rights consumer buying shopping an-post delivery law ireland)
Irish law regarding unsolicited SMS messages : what is the law, and how to make a complaint against an Irish company, via Donncha
(tags: via:donncha law ireland sms texting spam unsolicited bulk texts)Logitech Formula Force EX Driving Wheel And Pedals : good and cheap; good reviews; supported by Linux HID force-feedback joystick library; EUR58 at Play.com
(tags: linux hardware ui games racing controllers steering-wheel pc pedals)Joysticks, force feedback and racing games working under Linux : an alternative way to get pedal controls working; use a racing-game steering-wheel controller, instead, since they're cheaper
(tags: linux hardware ui games racing controllers steering-wheel pc pedals)Gmail now intercepting "mark as spam" and interpreting it using the List-Unsubscribe header : good call. but as one commenter notes: why isn't there an "unsubscribe from this list" button in the normal UI? now if I want to use this as a quick-unsub mechanism for mail I know is ham, I'm _forced_ to use "mark as spam" to get this shortcut, which doesn't make much sense
(tags: via:aliverson gmail google spam filtering ui mail mailing-lists unsubscribe)Spinvox in trouble after BBC investigation : 'A UK firm that turns mobile messages into text faces questions over its privacy standards, technology and finances following a BBC investigation' .. 'claims to the BBC suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines.' 'The fact that messages appear to have been read by workers outside of the European Union raises questions about the firm's data protection policy.'
(tags: data-protection privacy facebook bbc technology mobile transcription spinvox security south-africa offshoring)
Public SSL Server Database : 'an online service that enables you to look up the configuration of any public SSL web server. The configuration of known public SSL web servers will be periodically inspected and the results recorded. This service relies on the SSL Server Rating guide for the assessment'
(tags: ssl grades security tls https servers sysadmin ssl-labs)'Two wrongs don't make a right, but two bugs do' : a story of how a bug in Apollo 11's Lunar Module control software, intended to work around a deficiency of the engine hardware, barely avoided mission-endangering results
(tags: apollo-program bugs software coding engines hardware don-eyles allan-klumpp interfaces specifications)X-keys Foot Pedal : recommended by JB. 3 switches, USB, $120. Linux support seems tricky; requires running Windows apps to reprogram the pedal's firmware. ugh
(tags: x-keys hardware shopping wishlist usb keyboard foot pedals ergonomic)Sony FS-85USB foot pedal : comes with dictation transcription software and headphones, USB, UKP93.15. there's a blog post indicating that it's Linux-compatible, emulating a generic USB keyboard
(tags: hardware shopping wishlist usb keyboard foot pedals ergonomic)Foot pedal: Savant Elite dual action : from Kinesis Ergo, claims to do mouse or keyboard actions, $129, USB. Linux support unclear
(tags: hardware shopping wishlist usb keyboard foot pedals ergonomic)Thinkism : great Singularity contemplation from Kevin Kelly: 'to be useful, artificial intelligences have to be embodied in the world, and that world will often set their pace of innovations. Thinkism is not enough. Without conducting experiments, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results. It cannot think its way to solving the world's problems. There won't be instant discoveries the minute, hour, day or year a smarter-than-human AI appears. The rate of discovery will hopefully be significantly accelerated. Even better, a super AI will ask questions no human would ask. But, to take one example, it will require many generations of experiments on living organisms, not even to mention humans, before such a difficult achievement as immortality is gained.'
(tags: ai singularity ray-kurzweil kevin-kelly science progress technology future philosophy intelligence knowledge thinkism)UK company selling "have you been phished" check using stolen data : according to this, a retired cop has set up a company called Lucid Intelligence with 'the records of four million Britons, and 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans', and plans to 'charge members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached.' How is this legal under Data Protection law? wtf
(tags: privacy uk law hacking phishing fraud crime police database identity-theft lucid-intelligence data-protection security colin-holder)
Yelp.ie now open : hooray, a decent review site for Dublin at last
(tags: yelp ireland i18n dublin reviews restaurants food pubs)Infrastructures.Org: Best Practices in Automated Systems Administration and Infrastructure Architecture: Gold Server : well-written, and it's good to see version control listed right at the top of the list. But quite dead; interesting for historical reasons only at this stage
(tags: via:fanf deployment sysadmin unix rsync ssh cvs infrastructure cfengine)glTail.rb - realtime logfile visualization : 'View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way', supporting postfix/spamd/clamd logs among loads of others. very cool if a little silly
(tags: dataviz visualization tail gltail opengl linux apache spamd spamassassin logs statistics sysadmin analytics animation analysis server ruby monitoring logging logfiles)Launchpad is now open source : Canonical _finally_ open source (under the AGPL) their bug tracker/project hosting platform. yay! here's hoping it's reasonably easy to deploy. maybe it would be viable for the ASF... hmm
(tags: canonical launchpad open-source apache hosting projects ubuntu agpl)
How much did shutting down McColo help? : turns out most of the McColo-based spammers were sending easy-to-block output
(tags: mccolo spam anti-spam filtering mail smtp richard-clayton ceas)OghamBrew : 'founded in late 2007 by a small group of individuals with a common interest in brewing, but, whose experience extended to tasting only. Word of the idea spread rapidly, and such was the interest that by December of that year eight brewing teams had been formed.' next meetup is 15th Aug 2009
(tags: oghambrew homebrew beer hobbies festivals via:alan)OrbixWeb V3.1 release notes : wow, software archaeology. looks like the 3.1 release (which I worked on) still has its HTML release docs online
(tags: orbix orbixweb history java 1998)
Spam tool developer faces six years in chokey • The Register : 'Between January 2004 until September 2005, [Ralsky accomplice David S] Patton developed and marketing his illegal bulk mailing tools via a firm called Lightspeed Marketing. Nexus was designed to falsify the headers of spam messages while Proxy Scanner was designed to channel junk mail through compromised zombie proxies, typically PCs in either homes or businesses infected with [trojans].'
(tags: spam alan-ralsky david-s-patton david-patton ratware nexus proxy-scanner fbi prosecutions lightspeed-marketing botnets proxies pump-and-dump stock-spam)Vague Scientist : "The Magazine For People Who Try To Have Conversations About Science News". oh god, this is my life
(tags: vague science funny parody new-scientist comics via:bruce-sterling cartoon journalism)CompuServe "Logans Run"-Inspired Ad : "Someday, in the comfort of your home, you'll be able to shop and bank electronically, read instantly updated newswires, analyze the performance of a stock that interests you, send electronic mail across the country, then play Bridge with three strangers in LA, Chicago and Dallas." just not with CI$. oops
(tags: compuserve cis history antiques future jumpsuits logans-run scifi)
Last few remaining C=64 DTV PAL units available : 'The last few C64DTV PAL units are available for sale at £100 GBP Plus shipping. There are no more units available anywhere in the world as production ceased in 2005 and due to complicated licensing issues, it's unlikey that the unit will ever re-enter production.'
(tags: c64 commodore-64 dtv games history jeri-ellsworth c-one hardware retrogaming)Aslan claim of 25,000 illegal downloads is false : apparently the bassist went online, googled their new covers album, and totted up all the counts of search results -- including the fake ones from scam/ad sites
(tags: aslan fail figures irma music-industry mp3 music google scams funny inept)
German electronic health card test fails due to over-paranoid root CA hardware : 'Matthias Merx, the firm's managing director, told heise online that following a voltage drop, something happened in D-Trust's "Trustcenter" that does occasionally occur. "The [hardware security module] independently deleted the data [including the root CA private key] because it suspected an attack."'
(tags: security oops health smartcards pki certificates ca heise germany tests d-trust gematik coprocessors)Why I (A/L)GPL : Zed Shaw on OSS licensing and today's software industry: 'I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Good. Because I have a solution to that too.'
(tags: software copyright licensing opensource bsd gpl gnu zed-shaw)
Cache-Oblivious Algorithms : whoa, nifty. 'Retrieving items from various levels of memory and cache make up a dominant factor of running time, so for speed it is crucial to minimize these costs. The main idea of cache-oblivious algorithms is to achieve optimal use of caches on all levels of a memory hierarchy without knowledge of their size.'
(tags: cache-oblivious algorithms coding mit cache caching l2 memory lectures towatch)
Draw things from reCAPTCHA text! - The Something Awful Forums : brilliant (via Waxy)
(tags: funny recaptcha captchas art sketches somethingawful)The Associated Press: Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears : as predicted: 'Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, Chris Paget's scanner downloaded to his laptop the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.'
(tags: chris-paget rfid privacy scanning travel)
Will the Greens pay YOUR €25,000 Blasphemy fine? : good point from Jason O'Mahoney. 'let’s pass this law anyway, but instead of a €25,000 fine, make it a €25 fine. The constitution is satisfied, and the fine is so nominal as to be useless, which is what the Greens say is the effective outcome of the law anyway.' +1
(tags: greens ireland politics blasphemy law constitution absurd omgwtf)Information regarding 2 July 2009 outage - Google App Engine : extremely detailed postmortem of the recent GFS outage -- a poorly-written MapReduce client issued repeated "query of death" messages, causing server-side stack overflows
(tags: postmortem gfs appengine mapreduce google gae downtime operations communication failure bugs)Count Me Out : 'Count Me Out is a campaign seeking to lessen the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland. Our primary focus is to reduce the number of "members" of the church by encouraging people to formally defect.''
(tags: countmeout religion ireland catholicism ryan-report politics schools)
Eircom blames DNS outage on ‘irregular’ traffic volumes : a better quote than the IT article. "This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers." Hmm. an irregular volume caused by a DNS cache poisoning attack, maybe? (via Chris)
(tags: via:chris security dns eircom hacks)Dublin's long-awaited wheel deal on track for September roll-out - The Irish Times : 'There is an undisguised and frank expression of relief in Michael Sands’s voice when asked what Dublin City Council will do in the event of theft or damage to the city’s 450 bikes. “JC Decaux is responsible for that. Our deal with them is that the city must have 450 bikes fit for use at all times.” We’ll see over time who got the better half of the deal.'
(tags: jc-decaux dublin bikes cycling commute dublinbikes rental)Suspected hacker attack on Eircom internet service - The Irish Times : the _only_ press coverage so far of Eircom's DNS subversion. 'The company blamed the problems on “an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic” directed at its website, which affected the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for its customers.' uh, how does that wind up redirecting popular sites to porn ads exactly?
(tags: eircom ads exploits hacking dns isps press rte irish-times)
Groovy creator on Scala : so that's James Gosling, JRuby's Charles Nutter and Groovy's James Strachan all giving Scala big thumbs up. really have to learn this language
(tags: scala jvm languages coding groovy programming)
User Scripts ?(Chromium Developer Documentation)? : must try this out and see if it's usable in Chromium on Linux yet
(tags: greasemonkey userscripts chromium todo google javascript chrome)Possible DNS Hack at Ireland's Largest ISP - Legit links redirected to ads : 'Rik Ferguson, solutions architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, also reported about the issues. "So far there are very few details on the nature of the problem over at Eircom, but it is certainly clear that many Eircom subscribers are being redirected to bogus websites and rumours abound that Eircom’s DNS has been compromised," the researcher wrote on his blog. He suggests that affected users switch to using OpenDNS.'
(tags: eircom security dns redirections hacking isps)
Inside Postini's anti-spam systems : lots of detail
(tags: spam google postini anti-spam)Get Your API Right : 8 key gotchas when implementing RESTful web APIs. great advice
(tags: apis http web rest patterns architecture webdev web-services)
LZO compression : 'focussed on decompression speed' ... 'On modern architectures, decompression is very fast; in non-trivial cases able to exceed the speed of a straight memory-to-memory copy due to the reduced memory-reads.'
(tags: lzo compression speed memory lossless)Analyzing Apache logs with Pig : great demo and walkthrough from Cloudera
(tags: hadoop howto pig analytics cloudera apache hdfs mapreduce)
The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later : interesting CACM article updating Gray and Putzolu's "Five-Minute Rule" for RAM and disks (which postulated that a 1KB record accessed more frequently than once every 5 mins should be stored in RAM, rather than on disk). modern price/performance indicates that this still holds, once 256KB records are used. The article also suggests that a new tier of persistent flash storage should be considered, adding a new set of 5-minute-rule transitions for 2KB records migrating from RAM to flash
(tags: performance disk caching ram flash storage 5-minute-rule jim-gray memory acm)Spice burgers back on the menu due to popular demand - The Irish Times : 'The humble spice burger, one of Ireland’s few original contributions to world cuisine, has been saved.' YAY
(tags: spice-burgers ireland cuisine food yum saved chippers phew)
Filtering Companies Can’t Be Sued By Blacklisted Firms, Court Rules : 'The [Communications Decency Act] treats security software makers the same as internet service providers when they block material they find objectionable, granting them so-called “good Samaritan” immunity from civil lawsuits. Like an ISP, such companies provide an “interactive computer service” because they pull updates from a central server, the San Francisco-based appeals court said.'
(tags: us-law legal blacklists blocklists cda filtering spam zango kaspersky)
UPC's response to IRMA's legal summons demanding a "three strikes" system : 'UPC has made its position clear from the outset -- it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided under existing legislation. There is no basis under Irish law requiring ISPs to control, access or block the internet content its users download. In addition, the rights holders' proposal gives rise to serious concerns for data privacy and consumer contract law.' go UPC!
(tags: upc isps ireland law legal irma music mp3 downloading piracy three-strikes privacy)Gmail Access Methods and Login URLs : you can access an Atom feed of your inbox via https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ - I had no idea!
(tags: gmail urls api google atom feeds mail mobile url login)
MythTV support in Boxee : native support built-in -- awesome! must try this out
(tags: mythtv boxee linux pvr mythfrontend)Introducing The Computer of 2010 : hilariously off-base predictions from Forbes ASAP back in 2000. pretty much everything is wrong, except for the available disk capacity of 1TB (via Tony)
(tags: history computing prediction funny 2010 forbes frogdesign fail pc future via:fanf)Bids for the SORBS blocklist over AU$1.2m : 'Ms Sullivan said the highest "legitimate" offer was about $1.2million. Others were for much more but from unscrupulous quarters.'
(tags: sorbs blocklists filtering anti-spam auctions bids)
Evan Weaver's qcon presentation on Twitter's backend : even more techie details, good tips on JVM profiling/monitoring tools and background on their switch from Ruby to Scala
(tags: scaling twitter java rails distributed memcached queueing evan-weaver scala ruby performance profiling jvm gc)
Twitter, an Evolving Architecture : good info on Twitter's current architecture. lots of memcached
(tags: memcached twitter ruby java scalability queue architecture caching performance web)The Toaster Project : Artist attempting to build a toaster from scratch -- 'beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.' fascinating
(tags: art hardware technology economics build diy consumption capitalism crafts toaster manufacturing mass-production)Agilo : web-based tool to aid Scrum development processes, Apache-licensed, in Python
(tags: python scrum agile management development via:joshua agilo project-management)
John Graham-Cumming: The Scacco/Beber analysis of the Iranian election is bogus : 'the article in the Washington Post that supposedly gives statistical evidence for vote fraud just won't die in the blogosphere and just got a boost [..] by Tim O'Reilly. The trouble is the analysis is bogus.'
(tags: jgc statistics lies-damn-lies washington-post scacco-beber iran politics elections chi-square blogs errors)
Steven Wells Says Goodbye : legendary music journo, dead of cancer :(
(tags: steven-wells via:rosco music journalism death philadelphia cancer)Fauvist paintings of scenes from video games : Megaton and Republic of Dave from Fallout 3, NYC from GTA4, the canal barn from Half-Life 2 ep 2 (iirc) featuring the G-Man, and more. I love these so much -- genius work by spingo
(tags: games art culture painting fallout-3 gta4)
Brian Krebs on the Ralsky guilty verdict : good quote from Richard Cox of Spamhaus: "This has been a long time coming. Ralsky has been identified as one of the key drivers of [..] development in the spam world [...] among the first to commission mass-mailing Trojans to help develop spam botnets."'
(tags: alan-ralsky stock-spam busts prosecutions guilty spam law spamhaus botnets)Facebook stolen-account scam : a mate had his FB credentials stolen and the account used to attempt to scam his social group. Sample chat: 'so where should I send the money?' 'you can have it sent to my name and my present location [...] Do you know any western union outlet nearest to you?'
(tags: western-union scams facebook security phishing 419 social-networking)
Patch-oriented development made sane with git-svn : a great HOWTO
(tags: git-svn patches patch diff collaboration jira asf bug-tracking bugzilla)Federal Bureau of Investigation - The Detroit Division: Department of Justice Press Release : Alan Ralsky pleads guilty in a stock-spam case, facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under CAN-SPAM, wire fraud, and money laundering laws
(tags: alan-ralsky spam cases law stock-spam can-spam fbi)
Imminent closure of SORBS. - news.admin.net-abuse.email : 'SORBS is officially "For Sale" should anyone wish to purchase it as a going concern, but failing that and failing to find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia SORBS will be shutting down permanently in 28 days, on 20th July 2009 at 12 noon. '
(tags: sorbs filtering dnsbls anti-spam)paper taco trucks from Goopymart : print out and fold!
(tags: taco-trucks cute goopy tacos food)how to get Gwibber to load more of your Twitter feed : an undocumented registry^Wgconf tweak. hopefully this'll be fixed more cleanly soon. Gwibber's a great twitter/FB updates client!
(tags: gwibber apps linux twitter facebook updates bugs hacks undocumented)
Dublinbikes map : the 40 rent-a-bike depots around Dublin, from the Mater to the Grand Canal. coverage outside the city centre is pretty weak :(
(tags: bikes dublin rental dublinbikes jc-decaux awaycity)
Grantlee : 'a string template engine based on the Django template system and written in Qt'
(tags: templates qt django c++ coding libraries)'Chippers' nationwide mourn loss of spice burger company : NOOOOOO! also, wtf Enterprise Ireland: 'the firm closed after an appeal to Enterprise Ireland for emergency funding was rejected. “They didn’t want to know,” said an internal company source.'
(tags: enterprise-ireland ireland spice-burgers food epicurean yum nooooo chips)
PageRank sculpting : interesting details in the implementation of PageRank and how it "flows"
(tags: page-rank google seo nofollow pagerank web search)Hacker cracks TinyURL rival, redirects millions of Twitter users : oh dear. Cligs - ever heard of it?
(tags: tinyurl cligs url-shortening via:joshua web security risks twitter urls)
Buggy 'smart meters' open door to power-grid botnet : brilliant. 'The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.' Even worse: IOActive's demo worm 'exploits an automatic update feature in the meter that runs on peer-to-peer technology that doesn't use code signing or other measures to make sure the update is authorized.' omgwtfbbq
(tags: security smart-meters home technology stupid code-signing updates upgrades p2p power ioactive)
Google I/O - The Myth of the Genius Programmer : 'A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.'
(tags: talks google video collaboration culture genius presentation googleio coding slides ego)
Delicious Search Results on Google : a Greasemonkey userscript that enhances Google searches with del.icio.us hits for the same search. works quite well
(tags: greasemonkey delicious scripts extension firefox google)Matthew Garrett on the Palm Pre : sounds like a lovely Linux system under the hood; glibc, upstart, ipkg, dbus. if only it did GSM/3G...
(tags: phones mobile palm palm-pre linux)Boxing above your weight : Chris Horn with advice for Irish tech startups from his experience with IONA. lots of IONA history here
(tags: iona irish technology business history startups advice chris-horn)Real-world cloud computing : experiences of startups who've worked with "cloud" hosting platforms. all these comments match my experience. also notable: 'No one mentioned Google App Engine' doh!
(tags: startups ec2 aws amazon scaling cloud-computing rightscale gae horizontal-scaling)
Saving iPhone applications inside data URLs : a truly grody hack to work around iPhone brokenness. wtf is wrong with saving HTML pages to local flash for offline use? does it not "just work" or something?
(tags: data-uri hacks iphone web html javascript apple workarounds gross)
the Pearson correlation coefficient : a statistical measure to calculate "nearness" of items for collaborative filtering, a la "people who bought this also bought this". wonder if this would make a good Bayes p-value combiner in SpamAssassin
(tags: algorithms statistics via:fergal ruby recommendations correlation nearness collaborative-filtering)Home taping didn’t kill music - Bad Science : 'SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful. [..] Like I said: as far as I’m concerned, every [dodgy figure] from the [music] industry is false, until proven otherwise.'
(tags: science journalism p2p mp3 music copyright piracy pr statistics figures spin bullshit)Backing Up Flickr : using "flickrtouchr", a handy script by colmmacc
(tags: flickr backup tips howto python small-world)
Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong! : very funny, and a fantastic illustration of common applied-crypto pitfalls
(tags: authentication crypto 2009 encryption humour cookies security coding aes cbc sso)SHA-1 collision attacks now 2^52 complexity : 'Authored by researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, their work reveals a collision attack on SHA-1 with a complexity of 2^52 operations (the previous fastest known SHA-1 collision attack had required 2^63 operations). This is a significant improvement in finding SHA-1 collisions.' 'the attacks affect collision resistance, not pre-image or second pre-image resistance. [...] the researchers are able to generate two unique messages that hash to the same digest value.'
(tags: sha-1 security collisions collision-resistance hashing complexity attacks danger)How I Hacked Hacker News : crappy pRNG seeding; used the same source "random" stream for both security-sensitive purposes (login cookies) and non-sensitive user-visible data (in HTML page source); and no HMAC usage at all. oh dear. good example of how not to do it
(tags: prng random cookies lisp arc ycombinator hackernews dfranke security exploits)NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream : log-structured fs; instant "free" checkpoint snapshots, fast crash recovery, superfast benchmarks, in upcoming Linux kernels. sounds awesome (via JZawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny linux storage ssd filesystems backups snapshots crash-recovery fsck checkpointing nilfs)more on Google Wave and spam : 'Lars Rasmussen responded that [the spam problem] hasn't been given much thought yet [jm: !!!], since it is a closed developer's preview for now, but also mentioned that most likely Wave would use a whitelist option, where you'd have to add a friend/coworker before they could send/invite you to Waves.' ie, the IM style
(tags: im email messaging google wave anti-spam spam chat)Google Wave spam discussion : looks like the plan is for third parties to provide anti-spam services/bots to despam your Wave inbox, plus a little economic handwaving
(tags: google wave messaging wikis anti-spam spam email)
Hibernation Tool for Mac OS : OSX doesn't suspend-to-disk by default, which isn't good if you want to reduce power consumption of an unused MacBook Pro. this AppleScript provides a nice Mac-ish UI for the commandline NVRAM pokery required to fix this
(tags: macos power suspend-to-disk sleep hibernate mbp macbook-pro nvram)spamstery.com : 'The Last Social Game You Will Ever Play'. 'Want in? Sorry. You can't. We're in beta, so we are way too cool for you. If you'd like us to throw you a frickin' bone when we're ready to consider your application, follow @spamstery on Twitter and we'll see what we can do. (No promises, though. God, you're a dork.)'
(tags: twitter elitism funny satire spam sns)
Template Based Spam : good intro to the systems used in today's botnets, from Marshal8e6's TRACElabs
(tags: anti-spam templates templating marshal8e6 research pushdo asprox spam)How SQLite Is Tested : wow, extensive. I'm impressed! good example of how to solidly test a C/C++ library
(tags: sqlite testing c c++ coding coverage quality database sql)True things my assistant has said : guy writing down all the stupid things his assistant says. “I forced myself to have a concussion last night in the furnace room.”
(tags: funny omgwtfbbq assistant)
MMO logging to AWS : an interesting AWS use-case; S3, EC2, Elastic Hadoop, and browser-based POST to S3 to offload work of MMO-level logging
(tags: logging distributed mmogs games coding internet)Everything you always wanted to know about female ejaculation (but were afraid to ask) - New Scientist: scientific fact!
(tags: sex biology sexuality orgasm women female)
Issue 7254: Initial Greasemonkey support : Is this why Greasemonkey is moribund in Firefox -- the dev is employed by Google and working on Chromium?
(tags: greasemonkey chrome google open-source chromium web browsers)Google: Expect 18 Android Phones by Year’s End : 'Mr. Rubin said that, in general, carriers will be slower in the United States to introduce Android phones than in Europe.' so seeing as you still can't buy a G1 in Ireland, that would mean never?
(tags: google android g1 phones tech)Woods gives preview of the conservative fightback : 'The infamous deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse [...] was at its most septic over the weekend. Michael Woods [...] gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.'
(tags: religion ireland politics catholicism scandal abuse child-abuse ryan-report michael-woods)
See The Failure of Fianna Fail : a handy Firefox extension to FF-proof your web browsing experience, "They Live"-style
(tags: firefox fianna-fail biffo ireland politics lecraic via:jkeyes extensions)Doctor Jesus : heh. I have a similar cheesy thrift-shop painting at home
(tags: doctor-jesus funny cheesy tat thrift-shop moba art bad-art kitsch religion)
Google Map Parameters : reverse-engineered list of query parameters accepted in Google Maps URLs. great reference!
(tags: maps google hacks reverse-engineering api gmaps reference parameters cgi url)_Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective_ : Google paper on the construction and operation of Chubby, their distributed fault-tolerant database built using the Paxos consensus algorithm
(tags: google algorithms research databases chubby distcomp cs paxos fault-tolerance scalability papers toread)OpenDHT mothballed, halting Adeona : PhDware strikes again: 'OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos.'
(tags: opendht adeona phdware software coding open-source dht security)redbot : 'RED checks HTTP resources to see how they use HTTP, makes suggestions, and finds common protocol mistakes.' source available
(tags: http testing protocol conformance compression encoding web validators)Irish Craft Brewer - Brewing: How do I Start? : something to bookmark for my copious free time (yeah right)
(tags: brewing toread toget beer hobbies)bashreduce : interesting hack -- apply Map-Reduce idioms to UNIX command lines across multiple machines or cores (via jzawodny, who's obviously looking at a lot of command line stuff recently ;)
(tags: via:jzawodny algorithms hack last.fm shell cli bash commandline bashreduce distcomp mapreduce networking unix)GNU 'xargs' as a parallel process-pool driver : I had no idea it could do this, using its "-P" switch. cool (via jzawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny xargs parallel forking worker-pool process-pool parallelism multicore unix gnu)
Catholic Church in Ireland : a Mulley-driven link campaign I can totally support; anyone researching the church's status here needs the context of the abuse committed by its members over the past 100 years. see http://www.mulley.net/2009/05/23/catholic-church-in-ireland/ for more background
(tags: catholicism church religion ireland abuse atrocities google googlebombing horror)mirandaupnptool : 'Python-based Universal Plug-N-Play client application designed to discover, query and interact with UPNP devices, particularly Internet Gateway Devices (aka, routers). It can be used to audit UPNP-enabled devices on a network for possible vulnerabilities.' looks also useful for non-security-related UPNP twiddling, too
(tags: upnp firewalls firewal-traversal routers home security auditing)
Your morning commute identifies you uniquely : 'analyzing data from the U.S. Census [shows] that for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations -- to a block level -- identifies them uniquely.' are location-based services fundamentally incompatible with privacy
(tags: privacy location security fireeagle via:schneier commute where census)over 500k ops/sec from memcached with an UltraSPARC T2 : test load used 90% gets and 10% sets. sub-millisecond response times
(tags: sun solaris via:adriancockroft memcached scalability benchmarks performance)Sriracha comes from the US : I had no idea my favourite condiment wasn't Thai or Vietnamese in origin. there you go
(tags: sriracha food condiments yum thailand vietnam hot-sauce)AWS Import/Export : send a USB/eSATA storage device to Amazon and they'll bulk load data to S3 (or, in future, vice versa), for $80 + $2.49 per hour of transfer time. 'If loading your data over the Internet would take a week or more, you should consider using AWS Import/Export.' aka, sneakernet now a supported interface
(tags: amazon aws import export data-portability s3)
Amazon.com: Canon CanoScan 8800F Color Film/Negative/Photo Scanner : recommended, apparently. I have a stack of negs at home I've been meaning to scan
(tags: negatives photos scanning hardware canon images toget wishlist)Gearman now does persistent queues : yay
(tags: gearman persistent disk queueing perl drizzle mysql libmemcached)Magnet now have a customer forum on Boards.ie : best Irish ISP, by far (via Mulley)
(tags: via:mulley magnet ireland isps customer-service boards.ie)
Bug #375272 in Ubunet: “Server software is closed source” : 'The Ubuntu One server software is closed source. This is 2009. I thought we learnt this lesson with Launchpad.' oh dear....
(tags: ubuntu canonical proprietary open-source ubuntu-one web2.0)Tweeting Too Hard : 'Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.' bash.org for Twitter (via @colmbrophy)
(tags: funny twitter microblogging ego tweeting via:colmbrophy wankers)Hudson EC2 plugin : 'This plugin enables Hudson to automatically provision new instances on EC2, based on the system demand. That is, if Hudson notices that your system is overloaded, it will provision new slaves on EC2, and when those instances go unused for a certain time period, it will shut them down. You can run all your slaves on EC2 if you want, or you can maintain your local build cluster and use EC2 as a reserve capacity.' awesome
(tags: hudson ec2 ci continuous-integration build aws elastic)Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail : Ted Dziuba with teh funny: 'For someone like me, Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness.'
(tags: wolfram-alpha funny ted-dziuba search maths fail reviews)
James Hamilton, 'On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services', LISA '07 (PDF) : James Hamilton, now at Amazon, then at MSN, gives a canonical list of best practices for large-scale operations-friendly server deployments, 'accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live.' a lot of good advice here (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf sysadmin lisa deployment server-farms servers testing debugging monitoring logging operations configuration)spiritofireland.org technical forum : plenty of spirited (ho ho) discussion of the proposed massive wind-power project and its viability
(tags: power wind-power spirit-of-ireland forum discussion ireland green)resty : short bash wrappers for curl to ease debugging REST APIs. looks nice, but I'm not impressed at it's stomping on the venerable lwp GET/PUT/POST commands :(
(tags: lwp rest curl http debugging shell bash cli)Artificial Owl : "The most fascinating abandoned man-made creations, and their story & location". my new favourite photoblog, and great name too (via JWZ)
(tags: via:jwz blogs history photography travel photos architecture decay)
Ross Anderson elected as Royal Society Fellow : and about time too! (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf science royal-society frs ross-anderson security)Software AG's Chief Strategerizer on "Enterprise" : 'In the context of software, the word “Enterprise” has now officially come to mean software that sucks.' uh, yep. and this is new? (via wmf)
(tags: via:wmf funny enterprise enterprisey software-ag sap software sales)Fianna Fail's talking points memo for election canvassers : 'A lot of [FF] canvassers are finding it tough on the doorstep.' 'be seen to highlight their points in a notebook', 'ask to record their name and email address so you can get back to them', 'when you show interest, they will be inclined to soften their [anti-FF] views'. also: show interest in kids, local sports team -- what a cliche! possibly fake, though
(tags: fianna-fail politics ireland canvassing elections talking-points scans)
'eco-bling' : 'some expensive technologies such as photo-voltaic cells, which take energy from sunshine, can take up to 50 years to pay for themselves in saved energy costs. However, photo-voltaic cells often have a useful life of just 20 years, making them effectively “eco-bling”.'
(tags: eco-bling bling green technology solar-panels wind-turbines housing)
'Scaling Apache 2.x > 20000 Concurrent Downloads' : An Apachecon presentation from ColmMacC -- still has a good bit of useful advice!
(tags: colmmacc apache presentations c10k scalability httpd linux)Software Problems with a Breath Alcohol Detector : oh dear. crappy proprietary code ahoy -- in a breathalyzer
(tags: breathalyzers breath alcohol law source-code code-reviews security)Dmitry Orlov speaking in Dublin : uber-pessimist author of 'Reinventing Collapse', speaking on June 9th
(tags: talks dublin orlov collapse society economics russia ussr us-politics)
NYTimes Map/Reduce Toolkit : a super-simple MR wrapper in Ruby, wrapping Hadoop, inspired by Sawzall
(tags: hadoop ruby mapreduce nytimes distcomp sawzall dsls)Cision PR spam problems : I've been having the same problem myself, and it seems they've scraped my address and added it to their db in contravention of EU law. just sent an opt-out, it had better work
(tags: pr cision spam uk privacy)John Graham-Cumming: Why I wrote The Geek Atlas : sounds great! Mind you I prefer the original title, "128 Geeky Places To See Before You Die"
(tags: geek science jgc books reading tourism toget)Flare : 'distributed, and persistent key-value storage compatible with memcached', GPL'd, also featuring persistent storage, data replication, dynamic partitioning, failover, etc.
(tags: flare storage k-v-stores scalability memcached distributed tokyocabinet cache database)Hadoop Sorts a Petabyte in 16.25 Hours and a Terabyte in 62 Seconds : now that's scale
(tags: hadoop benchmarks yahoo mapreduce sorting hdfs)
Ubuntu One : "store, sync and share". looks an awful lot like Canonical have just reinvented a linux-only version of Dropbox for some reason :( here's hoping it's open source at least, right?
(tags: dropbox canonical ubuntu linux sync online-backup filesharing)Merkle trees : hashes utilitizing a tree structure, as used for efficient delta reconciliation in Amazon's Dynamo, in next-gen hash algorithm MD6, and Sun's ZFS filesystem. see also Tiger tree hashing, used in Gnutella and DC p2p algos
(tags: gnutella merkle-trees hash-trees hashing hashes algorithms data-structures crypto security zfs)MD6 : next-gen hash function, allowing immense parallel computation of hashes using a Merkle-tree-like structure. funnily enough, in use right now by the Conficker worm! (via Richi)
(tags: via:richi merkle-trees hashing hash-trees md6 algorithms coding hash crypto security conficker)blasphemy.ie : A blog from Atheist Ireland as part of their campaign against the proposed new anti-blasphemy law, to replace the unenforceable old law
(tags: blasphemy free-speech ireland atheism humanism laws legal constitution absurd wtf)Attack vectors deja vu : get memory to contain malicious code, then make process dump core; naive directory search then reads your core file, attempts to interpret it, and runs malicious commands. This is one reason why SpamAssassin looks for specific file extensions when dir-searching for configs
(tags: configuration filenames exploits security core logrotate cron)
mod_memcache_block : 'a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code', ie. rate limiting across a server farm built on memcached
(tags: memcached rate-limiting antispam security apache server-farms horizontal-scaling)
Automatic Continuous Integration for Grails projects on Google Code : crawling all Google-Code-hosted projects tagged with Grails and automatically hosting C-I instances for them using Hudson. wow
(tags: grails google-code continuous-integration testing web hosting open-source hudson)
HOWTO prep for migration off of SHA-1 in OpenPGP : now that both MD5 and SHA-1 are heading towards obsolescence, Debian are readying the long-term actions needed to take care of this. we'll need to do this in the ASF too. Is this like Y2K and C10K? SHA1K?
(tags: sha1k md5 sha1 signatures signing crypto debian open-source releases processes long-term gpg web-of-trust)'Churnalism’ : neologism for recycled PR and wire copy masquerading as journalism; new study claims that it makes up the majority of UK newspaper home news coverage
(tags: uk via:fanf neologisms churnalism journalism news newspapers old-media)
TechWire: Ode to Declan Ganley : 'I am the very model of a modern major Europhobe' a la Gilbert and Sullivan. excellent stuff!
(tags: libertas declan-ganley europe eu europhobes politics ireland dodgy gilbert-and-sullivan funny)Using ZooKeeper to tame system test for large-scale services : good demo of ZooKeeper
(tags: apache zookeeper yahoo hadoop networking distributed-locking locking configuration distcomp testing)How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street : 'Catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses -- the fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.'
(tags: coding capitalism work politics history programming banking money economics recession crash 2009 finance subprime mortgages complexity wallstreet securities cmo cdo)http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/FLORA/MooseX-MultiMethods-0.02/t/game.t : Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard implemented using MooseX::MultiMethods (Moose multi-method dispatch). class! (via Marcus Ramberg)
(tags: moose perl modern-perl rps rock-paper-scissors-spock-lizard funny geeky tests dispatch coding)
How to Store/Load Wii Games via USB Hard Drive : nifty! uses the Wii Homebrew Channel (ie the Twilight Hack savefile hack). apparently quite doable
(tags: wii hacks homebrew twilight-hack games backup)
review of the MySQL Tokutek storage engine : 'fractal tree indexes' instead of B-trees. new to me
(tags: fractal-tree-indexes b-trees fractals algorithms data-structures mysql performance tokutek tokudb databases)
Haystack design notes : pretty exhaustive walkthrough of Facebook's new photo storage backend, running on XFS. nice setup for a very specific use-case
(tags: storage scaling netapp facebook scalability images nfs haystack)Party Cat : "I just feel lately your PARTIES have not been up to PAR." "...ty"
(tags: party-cat parties comics funny via:fp cats)
REST worst practices : good advice on things to avoid in providing a REST API from a Django app
(tags: rest django web http webdev web-services antipatterns best-practices)Consistent hashing vs order-preserving partitioning in distributed databases : 'An order-preserving partitioner, where keys are distributed to nodes in their natural order, has huge advantages over consistent hashing, particularly the ability to do range queries across the keys in the system'
(tags: consistent-hashing order-preserving-partitioning partitioning sharding distcomp networking distributed databases k-v-stores cassandra)How to use JetS3t with Eucalyptus : wow, impressive i14y; also Eucalyptus now includes an S3-like service
(tags: ec2 eucalyptus jets3t s3 storage open-source java)Psych Ward episode 2 : vote for my mate Luke's latest TV programme. it's great
(tags: rte psychward voting tv luke)
Dear Fellow Rubyists « Dyepot, Teapot : good follow-up post regarding the shitstorm that erupted in the Ruby community after a talk entitled "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star" (with content about like you'd imagine). to be honest, I can't understand why the Rubyists are being so obtuse about this teenager-level stupidity
(tags: community conferences porn sex culture couchdb opensource)Eucalyptus devs forming commercial company : Eucalyptus Systems to provide "commercial support, integration, and development services for Eucalyptus users while continuing to develop the core code base under an open source license." hopefully they won't do a Xen and kill the goose
(tags: eucalyptus ec2 linux ubuntu xen opensource cloud-computing)
Kanban : a new agile software-dev methodology. hmm
(tags: software work agile kanban process)Home Office 'colluded with Phorm' : holy shit. 'In an e-mail dated 22 January 2008, a Home Office official wrote again to Phorm and said: "I should be grateful if you would review the attached document, and let me know what you think." In January 2008 the Home Office thanks Phorm for comments and changes to its draft paper, which show the company making deletions and changes to the document.'
(tags: phorm uk home-office politics interception advertising dpi networking internet web isps regulation)
lots more details on the "marblecake" 4chan Time poll-stuffing : including an attempted poisoning of Recaptcha, which the author claims it was immune to, and a final manual-CAPTCHA data-entry process towards the end
(tags: recaptcha captchas moot time 4chan via:waxy security web poll 2009 anonymous)
The full story behind Little Edvin Tables : 'As the names are so similar, searches for our company in the official Norwegian registry of just-about-anything (Brønnøysundregistrene) often resulted in potential customers looking up the wrong company. To prevent this confusion we recently changed the name of the old (non-LLC) company, and figured we'd use the opportunity for some harmless - or so we thought - fun.'
(tags: little-bobby-tables sql injection xss via:mikkohypponen norway sysedata security)"Carne Asada is not a crime" tee-shirts : WANT
(tags: carne-asada food mexican fashion tshirts tacos trucks taco-trucks la california)Tesco brand in Ireland "almost exclusively" associated with a Paddy Tax rip-off : 'Consumers, media and government associate Tesco Ireland almost exclusively with price differentials between Northern Ireland and Ireland.' Talk about a massive PR fail!
(tags: pr fail disaster tesco paddy-tax rip-off-ireland rip-offs surveys northern-ireland ireland)great neologism: meatcloud : ie. server-deployment sysadmin teams. 'If you want to participate in this ‘as a Service’ brave new world, and your plan to bring up new servers involves a meatcloud ssh'ing their little hearts out, you might as well give up now'
(tags: sysadmin meatcloud funny puppet agile neologism infrastructure words saas cloud-computing ec2 deployment)
Ending BioShock : a much better ending than the real one
(tags: bioshock gaming videogames narrative plot)Little Bobby Tables' Norwegian cousin : "Navn/foretaksnavn: ';UPDATE TAXRATE SET RATE = 0 WHERE NAME = 'EDVIN SYSE' " -- ahahaha!
(tags: lol sql haxx0ring xkcd funny security via:simonw norway little-bobby-tables xss escaping)OAuth Session Fixation Attack : the reason why Twitter, Y! (and others) shut down their OAuth services recently; a massive hole in the OAuth authorization protocol. this will be tricky to fix
(tags: oauth security twitter flickr holes yahoo google)Top Tips : some of the worst "top tip" sidebars collected from lowbrow UK mags. even shittier than the made-up Viz ones
(tags: top-tips viz funny advice idiotic omgwtf)
Performance comparison: key/value stores for language model counts : useful benchmarks, and another plug for Tokyo Cabinet; over 4x as fast as writes to an on-disk BerkeleyDB via its Python bindings
(tags: tokyo-cabinet benchmarks db storage berkeley-db k-v-stores)
John Handelaar goes public with KildareStreet.com : TheyWorkForYou ported to the Irish Oireachtas -- yay John!
(tags: politics ireland oireachtas john-handelaar kildarestreet)Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System : awesome black-box analysis of what it takes to evade the Content-ID system deployed by YouTube to block use of copyrighted music in third-party videos, using Audible Magic's acoustic fingerprinting. easy workaround: skip the first 30 seconds of the track or resample by 5%
(tags: via:ninnx drm hacking youtube audio analysis content fingerprint identification watermarking algorithm)RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady on the Oracle/Sun acquisition : great analysis, particularly where it affects ZFS and their open-source products
(tags: redmonk analysis mergers m&a sun oracle via:segphault)'The Emergency' now blogging : brilliant Irish political satire
(tags: the-emergency comedy funny ireland politics satire blogs)
Abaca's radical anti-spam tech wins at Yahoo! : claimed 99.997% catch rate, FP rate of 1 in a million, supposedly. sounds like a major leap forward if true. wonder how it works...
(tags: abaca anti-spam via:richi yahoo)Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music : great stat (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf filesharing p2p mp3 piracy copyright piratebay downloads file-sharing)RTMPE : 'Encrypted Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMPE or RTMPTE) is a proprietary protocol created by Macromedia used for streaming video and DRM.' apparently used by RTE's streaming video
(tags: rte drm security rtmp rtmpe macromedia flash video streaming)Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores : great investigation from Leonard Lin; Tokyo Tyrant gets a strong thumbs-up. also: 'based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is.' ha!
(tags: scaling storage distcomp k-v-stores tokyocabinet tokyotyrant voldemort mysql databases cassandra)Schooner Appliance for Memcached : you really know you've made it as open-source infrastructure when third parties are building custom off-the-shelf hardware platforms for your code. crazy stuff, though; isn't half of the idea of memcached that you can run it on COTS hardware?
(tags: appliances memcached hardware caching web)pubsubhubbub : aka. PSHB. 'open, web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol. Includes a [python] open source reference implementation', from a mainly-Google-based team incl Brad Fitzpatrick. note: server-to-server only; there's no NAT or COMET support
(tags: pshb web gae webhooks syndication xmpp pubsub pubsubhubbub google http atom feeds)
Mike Cardwell attempts to opt out of Phorm interception : I did just the same thing myself last week
(tags: phorm interception http privacy dpi advertising bt webwise org)RTÉ 'gets it wrong' with new music downloads which don't work on iPods : 'Launched recently at a cost of €230,000, listeners can buy tracks heard on the station'. the tracks are DRM-laden WMA files, so don't work on iPods or any other MP3 player. sounds like the record labels browbeat RTE on this one, resulting in just another useless DRM store that nobody will use. great way to spend my license fee :(
(tags: rte waste fail mp3 wma music 2fm via:unarocks)recording what's playing on PulseAudio : every sink (output) also provides a built-in "monitor" source. This script records the currently-playing audio to WAV
(tags: linux audio recording pulseaudio stream drm sox wav)Collectl : _very_ comprehensive Linux system monitoring tool; looks nifty! 'Collectl tries to do it all. You can choose to monitor any of a broad set of subsystems which currently include buddyinfo, cpu, disk, inodes, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, processes, quadrics, slabs, sockets and tcp.'
(tags: collectl linux tools sar processes disk cpu io monitoring sysadmin network)Cooliris For Linux : 'a browser extension that leverages the GPU to allow users to visually navigate photos, videos, games, and news stories from their favorite sites on a full screen 3D wall'. sounds nifty, must give this a try
(tags: cooliris linux 3d vizualisation photos firefox)JG Ballard dead : of cancer at the age of 78. one less genius alive
(tags: jg-ballard ballard dystopia sf fiction future literature authors)
fantastic LED "faceless" watch : 'Part of apertures of metal band became digital display screen. Metal band and digital figures mingle together in proportion naturally. Without the face of "timepiece", it displays figures only when needed but also quite vague existence, "time"'
(tags: led designer watches want wishlist design cool nifty)Metric counts its iTunes success - Los Angeles Times : '"Talking gross numbers that come directly to the band, we have made more money already than we have on the last record in four years," said [Metric]'s co-manager. "Without any intermediary, we're making 77 cents on the dollar for every record we sell" on iTunes. Under a label deal [...] Metric would have earned closer to 22 cents.'
(tags: metric bands music music-industry future itunes mp3 itms)
Chino Otsuka: "Imagine Finding Me" : the artist's childhood photos, digitally manipulated to feature the artist as an adult alongside. fantastic (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy art chino-otsuka photography photoshop history memories self-portraits)Echo vision: The man who sees with sound : amazing first-person report of echolocation in humans: the author calls it "FlashSonar", and teaches other blind people how to use it
(tags: echolocation via:eoin flashsonar sonar new-scientist blind acoustics echo perception neuroscience)notes on "A Canticle for Leibowitz" : reading notes for the 50-year-old Hugo-Award-winning SF classic, dealing with theology, science, and Cold War terror of a nuclear armageddon
(tags: theology science nuclear-war cold-war 1950s science-fiction reading books a-canticle-for-leibowitz religion)