Author: dailylinks

• Under the Covers of Google App Engine Datastore : via James Hamilton. some details on BigTable
  (tags: bigtable google appengine notes implementation storage)

• French National Assembly reject HADOPI law : 'On Friday the French National Assembly rejected the HADOPI law, which would impose the toughest “three strikes” copyright enforcement law in the world on French Internet users.' phew
  (tags: hadopi sarkozy france censorship privacy law eu)

• UPC block out D-Boxes : Irish cable-TV company UPC have rolled out Nagravision 2 encryption, finally breaking the dodgy "D-Box" decoder boxes sold on a massive scale throughout Ireland for several years now. can't see it staying hacked for long though. NTL's comment: http://url.ie/1g0q
  (tags: nagravision tv cable-tv encryption security ireland upc ntl d-box)

• hatful of hollow - Visualising Sorting Algorithms : another dataviz of sorting algorithms, avoiding animation and instead coming up with a nice line-based viz. interesting, but wtf no merge sort ;)
  (tags: via:simonw sorting algorithms visualization dataviz cairo coding python)

• Bank of Ireland Credit Card Security: FAIL : if BoI need to verify a transaction out-of-band, they send an SMS to the cardholder asking them to call an unpublished number which diverts to a UK number before demanding all their card details; exactly the modus operandi of a phish. wtf are they thinking?
  (tags: omgwtfbbq banking boi ireland credit-cards verification security sms via:mulley)

• TopatoCo: Time Traveler Essentials Shirt : 'Go back in time wearing this and you'll invent heavier-than-air flight! YOU'LL discover penicillin. YOU'LL be the first to isolate aluminum. Did you know aluminum used to be more valuable than gold? YOU'RE GONNA BE RICH.'
  (tags: funny history science design clothing t-shirts awesome topato)

• EU to require internet filtering? : essentially mandating IWF-style (ie. half-assed and broken) filtering in all EU countries, I would imagine
  (tags: iwf eu europe filtering censorship privacy isps ireland ec)

• Sorting Algorithm Animations : very nice visualizations of insertion, selection, bubble, shell, merge, heap, quick and quick3 sorts
  (tags: javascript algorithms coding visualization sorting demo via:reddit)

• blekko's ambient cluster health visualization : nice, custom sysadmin dataviz, via Rich Skrenta
  (tags: sysadmin data monitoring visualization dataviz operations charts nagios)

• The reality behind Area 51 : A top-secret 1960's spy plane project called OXCART. 'The shape of OXCART was unprecedented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, "UFO".' but then -- isn't that what they'd _want_ you to think? ;)
  (tags: area51 ufo debunking fortean cold-war spy-planes oxcart u-2 nevada history)

• SpamAssassin benchmarked on LLVM : similar to Google's "Unladen Swallow" port of Python. results aren't stellar -- yet -- but there's plenty of room -- and possible contracts
  (tags: via:matt unladen-swallow google llvm perl porting benchmarks spamassassin speed optimization)

• Scheduled Tasks With Cron on Google App Engine : much needed. 'The App Engine Cron Service allows you to configure regularly scheduled tasks that operate at defined times or regular intervals.'
  (tags: cron async python google appengine gae background)

• aws : comprehensive all-in-one perl script giving easy command-line access to Amazon EC2 and S3; very nicely packaged -- installs with a single "curl" command! brilliant
  (tags: via:mattb ec2 s3 aws perl scripts command-line)

• downsides of the Akamai IP Application Accelerator : certainly not all roses. (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: via:fanf akamai networking tcp-ip private-networks routing)

• Facebook lose a RAID group : on one of their legacy NetApps? hmm
  (tags: netapp facebook raid raid5 backup storage data-loss hard-disks)

• Facebook's Haystack photo storage backend : ditching NetApp and Akamai, rolling their own massive-blob storage cloud
  (tags: storage scaling facebook web http scalability photos infrastructure distributed haystack cdn cloud netapp)

• The Game Industry - Push cx : 'Looking in, it’s clear that the [computer] game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does.' +1; a lot of people, including myself, have also come to that conclusion, over the years
  (tags: games coding work business management game-industry ea igda quality-of-life crunch-mode mismanagement scheduling)

• Message Queue evaluation notes from Second Life : fantastic research notes; they've identified a lot of niggles and problems with the existing queueing systems out there
  (tags: messaging scalability queueing rabbitmq mq amqp jms queue secondlife via:proggit)

• Full data export from discogs.com : awesome! full artist/album/track data for decades of dance music releases, released to the public domain
  (tags: discogs music dance-music public-domain open-data data tracklistings)

• comment from RabbitMQ dev regarding the Twitter/Scala/Kestrel drama : 'Writing messaging systems that work under any combination of flows, on any number of machines, and in multiple different reliability scenarios ... is a more interesting problem. Page-to-disk is a way to make RabbitMQ better and address more scenarios.'
  (tags: rabbitmq disk persistence queueing messaging async twitter scala kestrel)

• Amazon Removes Delivery Restrictions To Ireland : great news! we can buy electronics on Amazon again
  (tags: amazon ireland delivery via:mneylon shopping e-commerce electronics)

• Watch out Broughton! Street View fans plan to descend on 'privacy' village for photo fest : 'it has raised the ire of Internet users, who are now campaigning for Street View enthusiasts from across the UK to descend on the village to snap their own perfectly legal photographs.' ha!
  (tags: privacy google street-view broughton yokels)

• Damien Katz: Moving To California : another developer moves! a lot of people doing it recently, which worries me; will there be any top expertise left outside of the Bay Area at this rate? we need diversity
  (tags: diversity bay-area california living work)

• Angry villagers run Google Street View out of town : fetch the pitchforks! Street View bin worryin' my sheep! Buckinghamshire yokels fear change
  (tags: funny privacy uk google street-view buckinghamshire yokels crime paranoia)

• COBOL ON COGS : 'COBOL ON COGS SUPPORTS STANDARD TERMINALS (VT100 AND IBM 3200) IN THE MOST USEFUL SCREEN CONFIGURATIONS SUCH AS 80X20 AND 40X16' (via Nishad)
  (tags: via:nishad funny web coding ruby rails retro webdev cobol)

• Warren Ellis » The Conclusion Of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (Condensed Version) : hahaha, spot on
  (tags: bob-dylan bsg funny religion deus-ex-machina warren-ellis via:fp)

• Easy AI with Python - PyCon 2009 : 'several basic AI techniques implemented with short, open-source Python code recipes ... For each technique, learn the basic operating principle, discuss an approach using Python, and review a worked out-example. We'll cover database mining using neural nets, automated categorization with a naive Bayesian classifier, solving popular puzzles with depth-first and breath-first [sic] searches, solving more complex puzzles with constraint propagation, and playing a popular game using a probing search strategy.' video: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947373/
  (tags: python problem-solving games puzzles ai search constraint-propagation depth-first breadth-first)

• Amazon Elastic MapReduce : excellent! run Hadoop jobs on EC2, with data hosted on S3. essentially, AWS have integrated a Hadoop dashboard to provide a great web-based and command-line UI
  (tags: hadoop mapreduce scalability ec2 s3 aws amazon)

• Arthur Kade meets Angelina Jolie : best blog ever. Narcissistic meathead 'actor/model' type waxes lyrical on how Angelina Jolie is '“mother hot”, rather than “stripper hot”': 'I would probably rate her an 8.5-9 on my looks scale. I am not that sure that I would even feel the need to come up and initiate a conversation with her if I met her out somewhere.' 'I couldn’t really say that she would stick out for me if I saw her at a hot club like 1Oak or Rosebar.' The entire blog is solid gold idiocy; I'd swear it was fake, but apparently not
  (tags: wtf funny arthur-kade blogs narcissism angelina-jolie via:gerry stripper-hot beauty)

• Google uncloaks once-secret server : GOOG's servers include built-in 12V batteries (and of course lots of velcro). video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgRWURIxgbU (via wmf)
  (tags: via:wmf google hardware servers infrastructure batteries electricity energy data-center efficiency pue)

• Wrong Tomorrow - pundits vs. time : great idea from Maciej Ceglowski
  (tags: pundits windbags bullshit journalism trends futurism future prediction experts wrongtomorrow forecasting futurology predictions)

• Stable URLs in Mailman mailing list archives : hooray. I requested this ages ago, it's now being implemented
  (tags: archival mailing-lists web uris mailman urls addressing permanence mail discussion)

• Not-so-open Cloud Manifesto rains on interoperability parade : 'The controversy surrounding the Open Cloud Manifesto demonstrates the risk of trying to build interoperability behind closed doors and through exclusionary practices. Such environments are not conducive to building consensus, which is one of the key ingredients of successful standards.'
  (tags: collaboration cloud-computing sun open-source open standards politics vendors)

• Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps : more on IMVU's continuous-deployment concept. interesting that they halt SVN commits on CI build failure, that seems extreme
  (tags: imvu deployment software coding sysadmin testing automation build ci process agile continuousdeployment)

• faceboards.ie : Boards.ie a la Facebook, for April 1. thing is, I think I prefer this UI
  (tags: boards.ie community ireland facebook web forums)

• The Snooping Dragon : awesome, if terrifying research from Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson on Chinese cyber-surveillance of the Tibetan movement. 'we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They used social phishing to install rootkits on a number of machines and then downloaded sensitive data. People in Tibet may have died as a result.'
  (tags: phishing social-phishing dalai-lama security surveillance privacy law china ross-anderson research papers windows microsoft)

• German Police Raid Homes of Wikileaks.de Domain Owner : "what the Australian government's secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist has to do with Germany is a mystery. This case is a prime example of multiple governments collaborating in support of censorship." worrying.
  (tags: censorship germany legal police wikileaks brbfbi privacy)

• Fast polling using C, memcached, nginx and libevent : well-written worked-through example of a classic memcached-backed libevent front-end caching system
  (tags: http memcached caching optimization scalability plurk libevent nginx polling c)

• "The Powers That Be Want Action Taken" : 'Gardai were in the [Today FM] offices yesterday looking for email communications between the team and the artist. According to D’Arcy the team were told [..] that “the powers that be want action taken”." ffs! how's about taking action against the fraudsters who've bankrupted our country instead? appalling diversionary tactics
  (tags: diversions gardai picturegate brian-cowan art pranks today-fm ray-darcy censorship)

• AWS Toolkit for Eclipse : 'Eclipse extensions automatically configure remote debugger connections for diagnosing problems and debugging software run in the cloud' -- ie. you can set a breakpoint on code running remotely, at EC2. that's pretty awesome (via Steve Loughran)
  (tags: via:steveloughran aws ec2 programming java plugins development eclipse cloudcomputing tomcat)

• Ask a Flowchart: Which Blowhard Am I? : YES
  (tags: blowhards funny internet web2.0 magazines wired flowcharts dave-winer)

• Zooko laid off by AllMyData.com : looks like AllMyData are facing a money crunch ("focussed on keeping costs down"). hopefully this isn't bad news for Tahoe, the fault-tolerant open-source distributed filesystem -- or indeed for Zooko himself
  (tags: allmydata zooko money tahoe filesystems storage fault-tolerance funding open-source distributed scalability)

• RTE Apologise to Brian Cowen for Nudie Pics Report : the national broadcaster apologises, on air, for a news story covering the 'paintings of an Taoiseach in the nude' prank. wtf!
  (tags: rte television freedom-of-speech censorship satire wtf apologies soft weakness)

• Australian ISP abandons blocking : “We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship,” iiNet managing director Michael Malone said. “It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as ‘unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes.”
  (tags: australia freedom censorship iinet blocking filtering acma)

• Akamai have developed a parallel internet : and, most surprising of all, it _works_. holy crap. (thanks Antoin!)
  (tags: ip-application-accelerator akamai internet routing speed network networking ip latency joelonsoftware copilot via:antoin)

• Guerilla artist hangs nude Cowen paintings : some prankster put up rather disturbing paintings of Ireland's taoiseach in the National Gallery and Royal Hibernian Academy. "'It's reasonably well painted. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen,' conceded James O'Halloran of Adam's Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers."
  (tags: painting pranks ireland galleries brian-cowan politics funny)

• New Zealand Halts Internet Copyright Law Changes : excellent. good result from their blackout, then
  (tags: new-zealand copyright p2p technology freedom politics internet copyfight blackouts protests)

• Jungle Disk/Cloud Files scalability woes : Rackspace had to firefight over the weekend to deal with scaling issues with JungleDisk users backing up to their Mosso Cloud Files service. now fixed with a JungleDisk upgrade (2.60c): http://blog.jungledisk.com/2009/03/23/jungle-disk-260c-released-cloud-files-access-restored/
  (tags: jungledisk ouch mosso cloud-files scaling online-backup backup caching s3 storage)

• Puppets, chefs, and community competition : open source intra-project poaching between the Puppet and Chef deployment automation projects
  (tags: lwn puppet chef open-source poaching staff contributors developers coding)

• Creator of Cyc reviews Wolfram Alpha : the hand-curation of its source knowledge base sounds incredibly labour-intensive (and expensive)
  (tags: cyc wolfram wolframalpha ai search data ontology semantic-web via:yoz)

• interview with a 419er : 'i know my God will forgive because i pray to him to replenish the pockets of my clients [read: victims] with double of whatever they loss'
  (tags: security spam chat scam 419 fraud chat-log religion via:waxy)

• XVM : "Virtual servers for MIT". bit like a homegrown EC2, using software they wrote called Invirt ( http://invirt.mit.edu/ ). wonder why they didn't use Eucalyptus (via wmf)
  (tags: via:wmf linux virtualization mit server vm invirt xen ec2 eucalyptus nih)

• Election Officials Arrested, Charged With 'Changing Votes at E-Voting Machines' : the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers of Clay County,KY were all arrested and indicted for 'changing the votes at the voting machine', and showing others how to do it, over the course of 2002-2006; they'd send the voters away at the confirmation screen, then go back and change their votes
  (tags: politics fraud e-voting elections corruption kentucky)

• cloudkick : "the easiest way to manage the cloud". supports EC2 and slicehost servers, provides metrics, graphing, and basic monitoring. looks very nice! (via JK)
  (tags: via:jkeyes amazon aws ec2 hosting scalability sysadmin deployment management server slicehost vps cloudkick)

• AnandTech: The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ : SSDs lose performance noticeably after an initial honeymoon period, once their block map starts to contain previously-allocated blocks. benchmarks for this factor will be critical in SSD measurement
  (tags: ssds storage intel anandtech reviews benchmarks speed disk hardware flash solid-state)

• Using Btrfs with Multiple Devices : cool. looking forward to this settling down so I can play with it
  (tags: btrfs filesystems raid storage linux disks mkfs)

• ClamAV now supports Google's Safe Browsing blocklist : 'treat such data as a potential risk, that is a suspicious source of malware.' 'mainly targeted at people who are using ClamAV to filter web traffic.' (via fanf)
  (tags: via:fanf security clamav antivirus antiphishing google safe-browsing blocklists)

• Alexander Larsson summarises ext4 vs fsync : good writeup of the current state of play
  (tags: fsync ext3 ext4 filesystems linux sync crash-recovery safety reliability)

• more "top"-like utilities : htop (top with a fancy UI), iftop (top for IPs on the network) and iotop (top for per-process I/O statistics). hadn't heard of htop or iotop, so this is useful. all are "apt-get"able on 8.10. (update: Craig reminded me of "atop" -- another great util, with excellent historical process monitoring ability)
  (tags: htop iotop via:wmf iftop top processes unix sysadmin performance profiling commandline ubuntu)

• Mosso Cloud Servers : very interesting! lowest price is $0.015/hr, ie. $10/month; quite a lot cheaper than the EC2 option. no equivalent to S3 though
  (tags: ec2 s3 virtualization rackspace mosso hosting scalability servers cloud grid server)

• RTÉ Storyland : vote for my mate Luke's film: "Psych Ward". it's great!
  (tags: ireland tv film rte movies)

• Concurrence : impressive libevent-based Python async-I/O framework. looks like it hides async code's complexity nicely (via SimonW)
  (tags: web via:simonw stackless framework asynchronous concurrence async libevent messaging concurrency python scalability performance)

• Ts'o: Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem [LWN.net] : epic LWN thread on this ext4 misfeature. I'm ambivalent: it's perfectly POSIXly-compliant for ext4 to do this, but it _will_ cause data loss for me. I'll be using 'nodelalloc' if this is still in a released version
  (tags: data-loss crash ubuntu linux ext3 ext4 fsync sync filesystems reliability durability lwn nodelalloc)

• how to create a tmpfs ramdisk which "spills over" onto a disk filesystem at a certain size : neato LVM hack
  (tags: tmpfs disk speed lvm ext2 filesystems linux performance)

• how useful are the new SEI grants for green upgrades to Irish homes? : doesn't sound great. this site reckons it'd take 21 years to break even on your investment if you chose external wall insulation
  (tags: insulation green environment house home sei ireland builders)

• TechWire: ISPs' reaction to Eircom/IRMA deal: too little, too late : 'What it does not say is that Irish ISPs will fight any attempt by the music industry to coerce them into blocking websites of Irma's choice. It could have said this. But it deliberately didn't. Because ISPs will not rule this course of action out.'
  (tags: ireland isps privacy copyright irma ifpi eircom ispai)

• MetaSVM SpamAssassin plugin : a new alternative scoring plugin -- learn mail classification (ham or spam) based on an SVM applied to the SpamAssassin rules hit, instead of the static "additive scores with 5-point threshold" model. very nifty!
  (tags: spamassassin plugins scoring metasvm svm classification classifiers machine-learning anti-spam)

• Did BBC break the law by using a botnet to send spam? : Graham Cluley of Sophos weighs in
  (tags: bbc security spam graham-cluley sophos botnets ddos)

• BBC programme broke law with botnets, says lawyer : upcoming Beeb program demonstrates the use of a 22000-node botnet to send spam and DDOS-attack a host, and one lawyer asserts that their programme-makers' actions were illegal
  (tags: law botnets security bbc tv out-law legal ddos spam)

• Erlangst : 'Erlangst (n): The fear that (subject) is not smart enough to program in, or even comprehend, the Erlang programming language.'
  (tags: funny erlang via:janl angst coding software languages)

• Startup Ireland : 'designed to provide a home for all information that an entrepreneur might find useful when starting a company in Ireland.'. Good idea Joe!
  (tags: ireland startup irish joe-drumgoole business entrepreneurs)

• Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances : bulk-buy EC2 instance-hours in advance; either 1 year for $325 or 3 years for $500. great news, much more competitive now against a dedicated colo server
  (tags: amazon ec2 aws colo servers)

• SSL session resumption is essential : something worth checking if you admin an SSL site; "Session ID Length" == 0 is the tell-tale
  (tags: sessions tls ssl https sysadmin)

• kids are starting to prefer MP3s to artifact-free music : 'Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford [.. notes that] students [..] prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.'
  (tags: music mp3 sound compression audio students psychology quality perception artifacts via:slashdot)

• Building a 1.8 exabyte data center : 'Building an exabyte data center is feasible. All it takes is money - $400 million with all the goodies - and power. Time to readjust the mental model of storage possibility. Other than the NSA’s acres of disk at Fort Meade though, I’m not aware of any exabyte data centers.'
  (tags: ouch exabyte datacenters storage disk hardware provisioning nsa racks planning petabytes)

• Dustin Kirkland: When is Amazon's EC2 appropriate for your workload? : a little helper app for Ubuntu. cute (via Danny)
  (tags: ec2 linux via:danny ubuntu screen amazon aws costing)

• SpamAssassin running off the grid : powered by a wind generator and some solar panels, to be exact, in the remote northwest of Scotland (plenty of wind there!)
  (tags: scotland wind-power spamassassin linux servers electricity power)

• HubLog: Making a Lucene index of Wikipedia for MoreLikeThis queries : nice contextual hack
  (tags: context wikipedia search bbc lucene solr indexing freebase hublog php)

• SUB-MIT: The Great McMurdo Jello-Wrestling All-Hands Meeting : pen-pushing on the polar frontier
  (tags: bureaucracy denver funny mcmurdo south-pole jello jello-wrestling wtf all-hands meetings pen-pushers bigdeadplace)

• pHash - the open source perceptual hash library : 'a fingerprint of an audio, video or image file that is mathematically based on the audio or visual content contained within. Unlike cryptographic hash functions which rely on the avalanche effect of small changes in input leading to drastic changes in the output, perceptual hashes are "close" to one another if the inputs are visually or auditorily similar.'
  (tags: video audio open-source sound signature search hashing algorithms fingerprint phash perceptual hash similarity)

• Telenor shuns IFPI's 'block Pirate Bay' demands • The Register : '"Asking an ISP to control and assess what internet users can and cannot download is just as wrong as asking the post office to open and read letters and decide what should and should not be delivered," said Telenor.'
  (tags: telenor norway isps ifpi filesharing privacy internet)

• SmartBear CodeCollaborator : very nifty-looking code-review tool. supports R-T-C and C-T-R, lots of subscription/notification options, real-time web-based inline chat, open data store, and custom script triggers (via Henning on ASF members list)
  (tags: via:henning code-review coding programming review tools agie smartbear c-t-r svn p4 git)

• Using Hadoop to fight spam : Mark Risher and Jay Pujara @Y! Mail talk about their use of Hadoop's Pig and Streaming products in anti-spam number-crunching
  (tags: mark-risher jay-pujara yahoo yahoo-mail anti-spam hadoop pig stream video)

• Simon Wistow bemoans git's tendency to permit siloing : the ruby-oauth gem now has 27 forks on github. ffs
  (tags: ruby git forking github dvcs forks open-source hazards moan siloing)

• Locale : 'Locale allows you to create Situations, which specify Conditions under which your Settings should change; e.g. your "At Work" situation might notice when your location condition is "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway," and trigger your ringer to vibrate.' in essence, rule-based AI for your phone. want it! and the phone too while I'm at it!
  (tags: want android phone apps google location mapping)

• LightCloud - Distributed and persistent key-value store : built on Tokyo Tyrant, performance comparable to memcached, scale by adding nodes, supports hot backup/restore, used in production by Plurk.com, mixi.jp and scribd.com. interesting
  (tags: plurk python scaling storage databases scalability memcached distributed dht db persistent tokyotyrant lightcloud tokyocabinet via:joshua)

• 10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) : actually a very good list. some interesting papers here I hadn't heard of, particularly _ An Experimental Evaluation of The Assumption of Independence in Multi-Version Programming_ (1986)
  (tags: coding history programming papers toread education academia cs)

• /~colmmacc/ - Optimising strlen() : good post on various approaches to code optimization of a particularly common C idiom -- strlen(). I'd never seen the glibc "add to unsigned long to detect zeroes" trick before -- very nifty!
  (tags: zero c optimisation coding c++ strlen strings)

• Bord Gáis Energy - The BIG Switch tariffs : hmm. a lot of PR spooge, but not a very good deal; Airtricity are 8.4% cheaper per kWh and 11% cheaper than ESB
  (tags: electricity ireland consumer bord-gais airtricity prices savings)

(UPDATE: I was wrong! Airtricity are quoting ex-VAT. see comments below.)

• Worldchanging: Bright Green: The Last Viridian Note : Bruce Sterling says, "buy a good bed". great stuff
  (tags: bruce-sterling viridian design philosophy ideas worldchanging sustainability simplicity green environment stuff future culture)

• Xbox LIVE gets Universal Pictures content : Irish and UK Xbox Live users can now download movies. unfortunately, they only offer 30 of them! FAIL
  (tags: fail xbox-360 xbox-live via:laura ireland universal-pictures)

• How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data : what a hack! basically using MySQL as a replicated, highly-scalable storage engine and ignoring many of the RDBMS features to avoid schema change locks
  (tags: mysql hacks scaling storage scalability schema schemaless blob friendfeed sql database)

• despotify : open source Spotify client; its developers reversed the Spotify closed protocol. however, it's just blocked users with 'Free' accounts, which renders it useless; hopefully someone will fork and fix this soon
  (tags: spotify mp3 linux music despotify)

• mailfront : 'a package containing customizeable network front-ends for mail servers': SMTP, QMQP, QMTP, POP3. a bit like qpsmtpd written in C. JL has apparently written a SpamAssassin plugin for it
  (tags: smtp proxy mail filtering sysadmin qmail pop3 qpsmtpd)

• Gerrit : web-based code review tool for Git-based projects. very nice
  (tags: git code-review review web android)

• ISPs "could block" access to music labels' websites : heh. quite a nice technical response; 'such sweet revenge would take the form of blocking access to the websites of EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner and IRMA, among others. Their approach: you piss on our turf, we'll piss on yours.'
  (tags: isps ireland funny revenge irma emi sony universal warner-music adrian-weckler)

• Jorn's on Twitter! : "Web 3.0 is going to be about filtering Web 2.0". nice
  (tags: trends jorn-barger robotwisdom twitter rt web2.0 web3.0 future filtering anti-spam)

• Facebook group against the IRMA action : entitled 'let's ensure that we have an uncensored Internet for Ireland'
  (tags: facebook irma censorship ireland eircom)

• Blacknight post a copy of the IRMA letter : in full, as a 3-page PDF scan
  (tags: blacknight letter scans irma filesharing piratebay isps ireland law copyright)

• Ryanair - Their Attitude To Online PR Part Of A Bigger Reputation Problem : wow, this is really blowing up. great stuff ;)
  (tags: ryanair car-crash disaster reputation media travel ireland jason-roe blogging funny)

• how the Italian ISPs "blocked" piratebay.org : they simply intercepted DNS requests for their zones, returning 127.0.0.1. using OpenDNS evades that
  (tags: blocking censorship italy piratebay opendns dns filtering isps eircom slashdot)

• debunking “Facebook causes cancer” : two scientists, Prof. Susan Greenfield and Dr. Aric Sigman, promulgating the worst kinds of fake science. disappointing
  (tags: science facebook media health badscience cancer daily-mail susan-greenfield aric-sigman)

• Datamoshing : the use of artificially-induced video compression artifacts for artistic effect, as seen in Chairlift's "Evident Utensil" and Kanye's "Welcome to Heartbreak" videos
  (tags: compression artifacts video mpeg datamoshing music via:kottke art effects kanye-west chairlift music-videos cool)

• Explanations to common Java exceptions : 'CharConversionException: You have been trying to incinerate something noncombustible. It is also possible that you have tried turning yourself into a fish, but that's rare.'
  (tags: via:nelson funny geeky programming java exceptions language reference)

• Ryanair PR staff issue statement complaining about "idiot bloggers" : "It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again". hilarious! dicks
  (tags: ryanair funny idiotic blogging ireland wankers pr cluetrain)

• Sunday Business Post: Music-swapping sites to be blocked by internet providers : IRMA will provide Irish ISPs with a list of alleged file-sharing sites, and will take legal action if those sites are not blocked. Eircom at least are allegedly legally required to comply. need to look into this a bit more, but this sounds incredibly serious at first glance
  (tags: irma ireland filtering censorship eircom piratebay isps chilling-effects via:adrianweckler dri filesharing)

• Offensive Words List Released by Message Partners : 'Message Partners released into the public domain the world’s most extensive offensive language list for use with a spam filter. This offensive word list includes hundreds of thousands of permutations of sexually explicit language.'
  (tags: offensive swearing english filtering abuse messagepartners)

• Web2Ireland Facebook Developer Garage March 2009 : 'a place to explore, get gritty, tinker, experiment, and test out ideas for Facebook Platform', 5 March, Digital Exchange
  (tags: ireland web2ireland facebook web events dublin)

• Avoid the EUR10 credit card charge when booking with Ryanair : bookmarking, in case I ever have to fly Ryanair in future (hopefully not)
  (tags: ireland ryanair consumer credit-cards visa debit-cards entropay flights money travel)

• Jason Roe finds bug in Ryanair site, Ryanair staff act like assholes in the comments : 'We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this. If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things'
  (tags: wankers ryanair travel flights funny blogging jason-roe bugs web serious-programmers)

• OSS Bar Camp Schedule : really need to get off my arse and get writing
  (tags: ossbarcamp oss open-source barcamp talks dublin events conferences)

• Transactions Across Datacenters (and other weekend projects) : presentation by GAE's Ryan Barrett
  (tags: transactions internet wan replication backup concurrency paxos ryan-barrett distcomp)

• Mac OS X Security Update 2009-001 might break your Perl : it included parts of an old perl module, breaking anyone who uses CPAN. nice work, Apple
  (tags: apple perl cpan macosx testing updates patches)

• Pho recipe : recommended by katyusha and mrn!
  (tags: tocook food pho soup mmmm)

• ClubOrlov: Social Collapse Best Practices : more cheery stuff from Dmitry Orlov, this time in much greater depth than the "Collapse Gap" slides
  (tags: orlov collapse usa russia economy recession food history politics survival crisis long-now)

• Deploying Django with Fabric : Django community's take on Capistrano. looks really complex, configured by writing a load of Python. ugh
  (tags: django capistrano deploy server linux webdev sysadmin deployment git fabric)

• Good walkthrough of setting up a modern Ubuntu box to host multiple Django sites : using nginx, Apache 2, Django, memcached, mod_wsgi and PostgreSQL. interesting to see virtualenv in use; in Perl-land, ExtUtils::MakeMaker takes care of this for us nicely using "perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=...". also, deploying directly from a "git push"
  (tags: deployment git nginx apache django memcached python mod_wsgi postgres virtualenv sysadmin ubuntu webdev linux install)

• How Not To Sort By Average Rating : the correct way to produce a sort index given a set of [ positive_ratings, negative_ratings ] pairs; apparently it's the lower bound of the Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter. great, this may work well for SA's rule-QA system too
  (tags: spamassassin rule-qa algorithms stats statistics sorting ranking popularity average maths)

• "F{N}OSS!" : 'Free Software and related commentary from the Nordic region.' I wonder if there's room for one of these for the Isles, ie. UK and .ie? although mind you planetilug probably takes care of the .ie part already
  (tags: blogs opensource floss finland norway planet sweden community open-source)

• The Costs of Continuous Deployment : Steve Loughran with a little bad news on yesterday's post. 'CI is like a chainsaw: very powerful, can achieve great things, but if handled badly you can cut your own legs off and that hurts.'
  (tags: steve-loughran c-i continuous-integration continuous-deployment deployment ant rollout)

• 73% of cyclists killed in Dublin in 2002-2006 were hit by HGVs turning left : also: 'The Traffic department also recommends that all cycle lanes be inspected annually. Several collisions occurred when cyclists were forced to move out of the lane to avoid potholes or sunken gullies.'
  (tags: cycling dublin ireland risks hgvs lorries trucks commute danger)

• YA boards.ie thread complaining about An Post's inability to deliver parcels : an absurd situation, and unlikely to improve. I'm surprised eBay or Amazon Ireland aren't kicking up a fuss about this
  (tags: parcels an-post ireland post delivery couriers)

• IRMA harrassing Irish music blogs : nialler9 says: ‘I would have posted an MP3 but IRMA asked me to take down some major label related tunes last week'
  (tags: irma ireland mp3 music nialler9 blogs blogging)

• 2030Vision.ie : '2030 Vision is [..] the Strategic Transport Plan being developed by the Dublin Transportation Office for the Greater Dublin Area. It will be at the heart of all transport planning in the region from 2010 until 2030. [..] We wish to consult you in the development of the new transport strategy.' Give your $.02 here, online
  (tags: 2030vision dublin ireland transport road rail cycling commute life government dto ndp)

• Open Source NG Databases : big thumbs up from Artur, jzawodny and others for CouchDB. interesting thread of comments from people using it for "real-world" stuff
  (tags: databases couchdb db map-reduce erlang)

• The std deviation of accident rate among recently-qualified drivers is higher than for the more experienced : An interesting, and counter-intuitive, demo of road safety statistics from Colm
  (tags: statistics road-safety ireland driving l-plates standard-deviation)

• how to reset an NTL.ie cable box : press "Help" then the yellow button. very useful for when it loses BBC4, which it's just done _again_
  (tags: cable tv television ntl ireland tips reset stb set-top-box)

• Scaling Lucene and Solr : extremely detailed, lots of useful tips here (via mattb)
  (tags: via:mattb lucene solr scaling scalability search java)

• TxFlash : paper on "transactional flash" -- transactions implemented at the filesystem level using useful properties of SSD storage. nice research
  (tags: transactions transactional storage research flash ssd via:storagemojo)

• Ireland not open for business, says Twitter innovator : an interview with @blaine after his relocation to Antrim. not a great article, really. in fairness, he's obvs never had to relocate from Europe to the US; I've done it, and it's as much of a bureaucratic minefield in my experience
  (tags: ireland northern-ireland blaine-cook economics business)

• Elliotte Rusty Harold disses queueing : 'More likely there's something wrong with the whole design of network systems based on message queues, and we need to start developing alternatives.' blimey! sounds like an atrocious implementation, or possibly AMQP itself; I've had great results with many (non-AMQP-based) queue systems
  (tags: queueing java amqp messaging elliotte-rusty-harold)

• amazing car-crash interview attempting to justify DRM from Microsoft : interview with MS UK's Head Of Mobile attempting, and failing, to justify their DRM policy. Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service - and they're locked to my phone - what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'
  (tags: omgwtfbbq microsoft funny drm fail hugh-griffiths interviews mp3 music mobile)

• Ryanair's new €30 surcharge for >1 item of hand luggage : also applies to laptops. they truly are the most customer-hostile company in the world
  (tags: ryanair wankers flight airlines travel laptops customer-service consumer surcharges)

• Monty leaving Sun : he resigned due to the botched MySQL 5.1 release, and slowness in Sun's actions to 'fix our community and development problems'. regardless, he says they're parting on good terms. His new company, Monty Program Ab, will be run by http://zak.greant.com/hacking-business-models -- cool
  (tags: mysql databases sun opensource acquisitions business-models monty jobs work)

• ICANN loses $4.6M on the stock market : why was an important piece of internet infrastructure gambling on stocks? oh dear
  (tags: via:johnlevine icann domains stocks crash money infrastructure internet)

• Web Hooks : well-defined semantics for callbacks over HTTP, as seen in Google Code, Amazon Checkout, PayPal's IPN and more
  (tags: http web programming notification callbacks webhooks google paypal amazon)

• Facebook's Cassandra distributed database : bookmarking this a bit late, but going by the Google Code site it seems to be taking off quite nicely, and heading for the Apache Incubator
  (tags: cassandra facebook java scalability p2p papers dynamo bigtable hbase database data-store distributed data storage)

• explaining Python 2.5's "with" keyword (PEP-343) : RAII syntactic sugar. I like
  (tags: raii python with context-managers coding scope peps)

• joint press release from Eircom and IFPI re the "3 strikes" case : 'The record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements in place with all other ISPs in Ireland.'
  (tags: isps ireland eircom ifpi irma emi piracy filesharing bittorrent)

• very odd comment from an Airtricity spokesman regarding their recent customer-data leak : 'Airtricity has not taken legal action against any bloggers in relation to information posted about this incident.' well, that's good of them! wtf
  (tags: omgwtfbbq airtricity cluetrain pr leaks privacy legal ireland blogging via:damienmulley)

• An Interview With Adam Olsen, Author of Safe Threading : safethread is a nice patch for Python 3000 implementing a new approach to concurrency in the Python internals. I like the "branching-as-children" approach to threading, using variable scope to enforce the thread lifecycle
  (tags: threading safethread python python3000 programming concurrency branching-as-children scoping)

• Colm's top productivity tip : leave it broken. hmm!
  (tags: programming advice productivity coding)

• good Bloom filter implementation advice : particularly for Java; reportedly a few of the open-source Bloom filter impls use poor choices of hash algorithm
  (tags: hashing bloom-filters algorithms java programming)

• Will Proof-of-Work Die a Green Death? : 'The last thing we need is to deploy a system designed to burn all available cycles, consuming electricity and generating [CO2...] in order to produce small amounts of bitbux to get emails or spams through.' Good point
  (tags: proof-of-work hashcash anti-spam green environment john-gilmore via:emergentchaos security)

• Joey Hess on his Google Summer of Code experiences : it didn't work out so well for him. I have to concur to some degree; in my experience, GSOC mentoring is hard work
  (tags: google summer-of-code gsoc coding software open-source spamassassin debian joey-hess ikiwiki)

• Measurement Lab : new PlanetLab/Google collaboration with various web-based tools to measure your internet connection -- including a handy test to see if your ISP slows down BitTorrent
  (tags: google networking bittorrent performance bandwidth p2p speed network measurement analysis metrics isp netneutrality)

• Some Things Need To Change : Mike Arrington finds himself victimised by crazies -- 'I write about technology startups and news. In any sane world that shouldn’t make me someone who has to deal with death threats and being spat on. It shouldn’t require me to absorb more verbal abuse than a human being can realistically deal with.' holy crap
  (tags: wtf technology techcrunch life blog michael-arrington startups crazy)

• alternative Flickr photostream for my photos : via "I Hardly Know Her", a sister site to muxtape.com. great UI for viewing a set of Flickr photos
  (tags: flickr photos muxtape ui web pictures)

• pgTAP: Unit Testing for PostgreSQL : 'Unit Testing for PostgreSQL'. application of the perl-style TAP unit test protocol for testing an SQL database, good idea
  (tags: unit-tests testing sql postgres database postgresql tap perl)

• Updated: A Year Later, AOL Is Contemplating A Bebo Sale : fair dues to Bebo for pulling the wool over the eyes of the ad agencies, if this account is true. suckers!
  (tags: media advertising business bebo acquisitions aol recession marketing london suckers)

• Linus Switches From KDE to Gnome : +1, I've basically done this, too (apart from my JuK-based music system). good thread of comments, too; everyone pretty much agrees that KDE made a mess of the KDE4 release :(
  (tags: kde kde4 slashdot gnome linux linus-torvalds desktops ui software-quality releases)

• 'Megaupload auto-fill captcha' Userscript : omg this is brilliant -- a Greasemonkey user-script containing a neural network, *in Javascript*, to solve MegaUpload's CAPTCHAs in your browser. this may be the coolest userscript ever
  (tags: userscripts neural-networks javascript cool programming greasemonkey ai captcha via:reddit omg)

• behind Masal Bugduv : The Times got pranked by an anonymous Irishman
  (tags: masal-bugduv football funny the-times journalism via:bwalsh ireland irish gaeilge m-asal-beag-dubh)

• SarahLacy.com: Google Dethroned? : is Google losing its knack? Twitter/Facebook more popular than Google during the inauguration; Hulu provide a better search experience than YouTube (although not so much for non-USians). interesting theory
  (tags: google youtube hulu twitter facebook companies via:mattcutts)

• intro to RabbitMQ and py-amqplib : nice and concise, with real-world deployment data. I wish this had been around when I was evaluating AMQP systems in PutPlace
  (tags: python mq erlang amqp rabbitmq messaging queue introduction py-amqplib)

• TechWire: How to approach a newspaper interview : really great advice for tech-section interviewees from Adrian Weckler
  (tags: advice interviews newspapers journalism adrian-weckler tips pr)

• best reddit comments thread ever : re 'X# - XML oriented programming language; the foundation of an open source Enterprise Mashup Server, CRM and Groupware Suite' -- 'When you do a mashup, you're supposed to get your peanut butter in my chocolate, not lodge your fork in my goddamned eye socket'
  (tags: mashups funny xsharp omgwtfbbq xml java hilarity reddit via:damienkatz)

• xpra : 'screen for remote X apps.' sounds better-maintained and more usable than xmove or NX, to boot (via adulau)
  (tags: via:adulau unix x11 desktop gui vnc ssh screen windows xpra)

• Solvent : 'a Firefox extension that helps you write screen scrapers for [semweb scraping platform] Piggy Bank.' Nice idea -- hook directly into the browser to specify scraping rules.
  (tags: web firefox javascript scraping programming extensions xpath rdf browser semweb solvent)

• I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle : great article by @mat on the benefits -- and dangers -- of pervasive geotagging
  (tags: geotagging location mapping privacy twitter iphone mobile wired gps mobile-computing mat-honan via:waxy)

• Google AppEngine abuse : possibly the first AppEngine site run by spammers -- a fake storefront, reportedly
  (tags: google appengine abuse web spam scams)

• TweetBackup : free Twitter backup site; nicely done. runs daily; doesn't need your Twitter password; and exports to text and HTML
  (tags: twitter backup tweets web microblogging)

• Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores : exhaustive, with great comments from many of the implementors
  (tags: storage databases sca scalability memcached architecture aws performance simpledb couchdb dht voldemort scalaris hypertable hbase dynamo)

• Green party says sorry for e-mail gaffe - Times Online : wow, the "communications manager" for the Green Party is an unrepentant asshat. 'some bloggers have developed their own set of rules about how they should be approached and the e-mail in question fell foul of these rules.' Nice non-apology there! Entirely wrong -- Unsolicited Bulk Email is spam, even if you're a politician
  (tags: politics ireland spam email greens ube)

• Irish Torrents : 'Torrents of RTE, TV3, TG4 content'. a great collection of Irish TV programmes -- unclear how well they're seeded, or their rip quality, though
  (tags: irish torrents bittorrent tv television ireland rte tv3 tg4)

• Amazon.com: Your Associate Website Browsing Settings : 'We keep a record of your visits to Amazon Associate web pages that have Amazon.com content links on them. Among other things, we use this information to better personalize your web experience and improve our Amazon services.' uh, *no*
  (tags: amazon for:jkeyes opt-out ads advertising privacy personalization)

• Irish e-tailers' returns policy : Article by Adrian Weckler -- Komplett's returns policy sounds pretty good in particular. and ~50% of complaints at the European Consumer Centre are relating to delivery problems -- that's shocking :(
  (tags: delivery couriers shopping adrian-weckler komplett elara sbp returns retailers consumer)

• Capistrano: From the Beginning : wow, the Rails community have really reinvented a lot of wheels ;)
  (tags: capistrano rails deploy sysadmin ruby management)

• Why Google Employees Quit : massive leak of gripe mails from ex-Googlers about why they left the company
  (tags: google techcrunch staff employment satisfaction workplace myths recession jobs management culture hr)

• A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story Of A Kiva.org Loan : 'I decided it would be great to try and follow one [Kiva.org microloan] through the system from start to finish, for the benefit of my colleagues who I coaxed into making a loan, and for myself, and for anyone else who is interested.'
  (tags: kiva loans microloans charity money video towatch)

• Popular Chinese Filtering Circumvention Tools DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix Sell User Data : well, that's a business model I suppose
  (tags: privacy anonymity china security surveillance filtering censorship gpass gfw firephoenix database circumvention internet proxies)

• UK ISPs blocking archive.org : due to another overbroad IWF block
  (tags: iwf censorship isps uk archive.org the-register)

• behind the 'interview with an adware author' story : paperghost strongly doubting that Matt Knox was quite so squeaky-clean as his recent interview would suggest
  (tags: paperghost security malware adware blackhat nasty interviews)

• HDFS Reliability : short paper from Tom White with post-mortems of some common failures of HDFS in the field, and some best practices to avoid them
  (tags: best-practices hadoop hdfs dfs cloud-computing reliability software storage java tom-white bugs)

• Ross Anderson's anti-botnet idea : 'if you complain to abuse@ somebody or other dot com, and more than three hours after that, you get more phish or spam from the same infected machine, then you should have a legal right to claim €10 from them. No need to prove malice, no need to prove actual damage, just "here's the bill". A similar scheme has largely sorted out late flights, cancellations and overbookings among cheap airlines in Europe, because now you get €250 [if] EasyJet or Ryanair bump you off the flight to Barcelona.'
  (tags: anti-spam ross-anderson via:derek botnets security isps abuse)

• Dual Pricing.IE : exposing the rip-off pricing of products sold in both Ireland and the UK, with much more expensive prices in .ie. Boots Sanex deodorant is the current worst offender, at UKP0.99 vs EUR2.99
  (tags: ireland shopping comparison via:mulley uk pounds euro rip-off consumer)

• Spam Botnets to Watch in 2009 - Research - SecureWorks : interesting to note that spam rates from botnets unaffected by the McColo shutdown went up during that time, indicating that the spammers are simply renting botnet time and their spam is relatively portable to other engines
  (tags: anti-spam botnets secureworks 2009)

• Project Voldemort : ASL-licensed DHT from LinkedIn
  (tags: dht apache hashtable voldemort linkedin java storage networking cloud scalability)

• Twitter leaked visitor usernames to third-party sites via Google Analytics : excellent research by Des Traynor. oops! the hole has since been patched
  (tags: twitter privacy analytics tracking google des-traynor exploits vulnerabilities json javascript security)

• How to Brew - By John Palmer : book on home brewing, recommended by Glynn Foster
  (tags: beer homebrew brewing hobbies project diy book toreadf)

• How to sync Google Calendar with KOrganizer : using GCalDaemon -- this works very nicely. it'd be nicer if it was built into KOrganizer, but hey
  (tags: gcaldaemon google google-calendar scheduling calendar kde korganizer howto apps pim)

• Interview with an Adware Author : great interview. 'In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?' 'Um, run UNIX.'
  (tags: adware windows blackhat bho malware viruses spyware vista xp)

• Xarvester, the new Srizbi? : the evidence looks pretty convincing
  (tags: srizbi xarvester marshal botnets anti-spam)

• Supervisor : 'a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.' looks quite sensible, BSD licensed, Python, works on Linux, Solaris, OSX and FreeBSD (via Conall)
  (tags: via:conall supervisor daemon monitoring daemontools sysadmin management deployment service init unix linux)

• Neil Fraser: Writing: Differential Synchronization : Impressive N-way sync algorithm for syncing text. 'Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.'
  (tags: research networking sync diff patch synchronization neil-fraser google development editing collaboration algorithms differential-synchronization)

• McSweeney's Internet Tendency: The Elements of Spam : '(Excerpts courtesy of William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, and Generouss Q. Factotum.)'
  (tags: funny spam writing parody english mcsweeneys usage grammar spelling humour)

• A Warning About the Real Cost of Microformats : Gordon Luk: 'I’m done with microformats. From now on, i’m either building separate developer tools and relationship, or i’m not'
  (tags: html microformats web semweb gordon-luk xhtml)

• AWS Console : a nice AJAXy web-based GUI for EC2. awesome! Even a commandline weenie like myself can see how useful this is
  (tags: ec2 aws amazon web gui ajax)

• Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL using Gearman : A talk by Eric Day and Brian Aker at the upcoming MySQL Conference in April: '[Gearman] development is now active again with an optimized rewrite in C, along with features such as persistent message queues, queue replication, improved statistics, and advanced job monitoring. For MySQL, there is also a new user defined function to run Gearman jobs, as well as the possibility to write your own aggregate UDFs using Gearman. This gives you the ability to run functions in separate processes, separate servers, and in other languages. The Gearman framework gives you a robust interface to also run these functions reliably in the “cloud”. This session will introduce these concepts and give examples of sample applications.' Persistent queues (at last)? Gearman integration directly in the DB? excellent!
  (tags: gearman queueing mysql databases brian-aker mapreduce sql conferences talks papers)

• Twitter hack actually due to dictionary attack : see also http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/professed-twitt.html . So, some more Twitter antipatterns: 1. user account with admin privileges, instead of role account; 2. admin account without two-factor auth; 3. no rate limits or other dictionary-attack defenses
  (tags: twitter security webdev lessons antipatterns dictionary-attack accounts authorization authentication role-accounts two-factor-authentication rate-limiting via:simonw)

• Google's Browser Security Handbook : by lcamtuf, a GOOG employee these days. comprehensive. 'provide[s] web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers'
  (tags: security web google http browsers javascript html reference lcamtuf via:aecolley webdev)

• Wiggle.co.uk : another option for online bike sales, tipped by Boards.ie denizens. no free shipping here though
  (tags: shopping bikes uk cycling)

• how to install from .ISO in vmware server 2.0 : omg this is utterly idiotic. not impressed
  (tags: vmware-server vmware iso installation ui confusing broken)

• BikeToWork - boards.ie Wiki : a good collection of additional factoids about the govt bike-to-work scheme
  (tags: ireland cycling cycle-to-work bikes boards commuting tax)

• Rechargeable Battery Review AAA NiMH : same again, for AAA batteries this time (via IRR)
  (tags: aaa batteries rechargeable via:irregulars recharging nimh electronics reviews testing)

• The Great Battery Shootout : rechargeable batteries put to the test (a few years ago at least). quick summary: Panasonic shite, Energizer 2300 good (via IRR)
  (tags: via:irregulars batteries recharging rechargeable aaa aa electronics testing reviews nimh charger power)

• The cycle to work scheme : Green Party site on the new Cycle-to-Work scheme, whereby the govt will provide a tax exemption if your employer buys you a bike up to EUR1000 in value
  (tags: greens green cycling work hr cycle-to-work tax commuting)

• Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US : I came across this a while back and have been looking for it again for a while. Good document on what happened in the former USSR after its society collapsed -- pretty funny too. A bit heavy-handed in its criticism of the US though (via Bruce Sterling)
  (tags: politics history usa government society russia ussr economy collapse sustainability orlov futurism america world)

• Moviestar.ie now fulfilled by Screenclick.com : Irish DVDs-by-mail market consolidation
  (tags: screenclick moviestar.ie dvd film tv ireland business mergers)

• LINX Public Affairs - Cinema ratings and web sites : Good commentary on the absurdity of the UK govt's attempts to impose age-rating certs on websites. 'From a regulatory point of view, at least part of the Internet is more like a pub, football crowd or playground than it is like a TV programme.'
  (tags: linx ratings censorship uk politics filtering web andy-burnham free-speech)

• shouting at a disk can increase latency : funny anecdote. bookmarked mainly because of the nice SmokePing-like chart they're using to chart I/O latency stats... wonder if I can apply similar dataviz for spamassassin's rule-QA...
  (tags: rule-qa spamassassin dataviz infoviz latency smokeping graphs charts storage audio shouting disks solaris funny)

• Want to rent a house in Stoneybatter? : I'm letting out our house in the 'batter; 2 bedrooms, 15 mins from town, cosy, great neighbourhood. A little bit of heaven in Dublin 7
  (tags: stoneybatter ads housing rental dublin-7 d7 kirwan-st neighbourhood daft)

• Want to rent a house in Stoneybatter? : I'm letting out our house in the 'batter; 2 bedrooms, 15 mins from town, cosy, great neighbourhood. A little bit of heaven in Dublin 7
  (tags: stoneybatter ads housing rental dublin-7 d7 kirwan-st neighbourhood daft)

• The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3 : in-depth exploration of the C=64, right down to the I/O bus, in a 64-minute presentation
  (tags: hardware c=64 commodore-64 retrocomputing programming talks assembly 6502 6510 commodore via:vvatsa)

• Mozilla bug finds MITM attack in the wild : annoying Firefox "blah.foo.org uses an invalid security certificate" warnings cause user to open a bug at the Moz bugzilla, whereupon it is discovered that they are being haxx0red
  (tags: mitm security firefox mozilla usability pki ssl man-in-the-middle)

• The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3 : in-depth exploration of the C=64, right down to the I/O bus, in a 64-minute presentation
  (tags: hardware c=64 commodore-64 retrocomputing programming talks assembly 6502 6510 commodore via:vvatsa)

• Mozilla bug finds MITM attack in the wild : annoying Firefox "blah.foo.org uses an invalid security certificate" warnings cause user to open a bug at the Moz bugzilla, whereupon it is discovered that they are being haxx0red
  (tags: mitm security firefox mozilla usability pki ssl man-in-the-middle)

• major SSL/TLS cert vendor issued certificates without any verification whatsoever : 'Five minutes later I was in the possession of a legitimate certificate issued to mozilla.com - no questions asked - no verification checks done - no control validation - no subscriber agreement presented, nothing.' uh, massive FAIL
  (tags: fail ssl tls security encryption comodo)

• np237: The session non-manager : GNOME's current "stable" release, appearing in FC10 and Ubuntu 8.10, contains absolutely no session management, at all. wtf
  (tags: ubuntu fedora gnome releases software wtf session-management x11)

• "Holy Fucking Shit I Was Just In A Plane Crash!" : twittering a pretty scary aviation incident, no less
  (tags: news twitter microblogging planes crash aviation web)

• Hasbro has dropped their idiotic Scrabulous lawsuit : hopefully someone in there finally figured out that the massive resurgence of Scrabble's popularity was due entirely to the Scrabulous team's homage. I'm still never playing it again though: worse than crack
  (tags: scrabble scrabulous cluetrain copyright hasbro games facebook law)

• More coverage of the spam fine increase : 'Mobile-phone users must now “opt in” for a company to contact them. “If you don’t agree to be contacted, then it is an offence to contact you,” [asst DPC] Delaney said. “Opt in” agreements can now only last a year. “Within that period a company must contact you to request that you extend this “‘opt in’ phase,” he said.'
  (tags: opt-in anti-spam spam ireland dpc data-protection sms texting law)

• max fines for Irish spammers increase to EUR250k or 10% of turnover : good news. the Data Protection Commissioner: 'Increasingly, in this period of economic downturn, my Office is receiving complaints about businesses making unsolicited contact with their past customers for marketing purposes. In many cases, such contact is unlawful and, if carried out by telephone, text message or email it may be a criminal offence. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for non-compliance and I will have no hesitation in applying the full force of the new regulations to offenders."
  (tags: data-protection ireland law anti-spam sms texting spam dpc)

• Solid State Disks - time to give up that iron oxide habit : legendary Sun performance guy Adrian Cockcroft sez: 'spinning rust is dead, and a large number of basic assumptions [...] are now wrong. In 2009 SSD's will be faster for read, faster for write, faster for sequential and much much faster for random access, more reliable, more durable, lower power, higher capacity, than discs. [...] SAN's are now a complete waste of time. There is so much reliable I/O performance available in a single drive, that it makes much more sense to put SSD's in the systems and access them directly. Accessing an SSD over a SAN adds a huge latency and cost overhead. It makes much more sense to use node-to-node replication for critical data.'
  (tags: disks storage san ssd performance io future planning)

• The story of ORCH5 : via Ian. 'a one second pre-set sample supplied with the Fairlight synthesiser, and people from hip hoppers to Kate Bush used it all over the place. David Vorhaus (himself an electronic music pioneer in the 1960s) recorded what became ORCH5 in the late 1970s. The sound is the transitional bit of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird, the moment when the full orchestra come in and do their stuff.'
  (tags: fairlight sounds music audio orch5 sample david-vorhaus igor-stravinsky afrika-bambaataa planet-rock hip-hop via:ian)

• Newgrange Winter Solstice live stream : actually, it was live this morning at 8:58am. Missed it :( Still, the archived stream of the sun entering the burial chamber at Newgrange on the winter solstice is viewable here -- and one to bookmark for next year...
  (tags: newgrange ireland archaeology solstice history heritage events winter)

• Using ATA Over Ethernet On Debian Etch : fantastic tip (via Jeremy). see also http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149
  (tags: ata-over-ethernet ata ethernet aoe san iscsi server linux storage filesystems howto disks debian sysadmin)

• the new BBC Test Card for HD TV : fascinating in-depth analysis of how to actually _use_ the test card -- and yes, Carole and her clown doll still stars (via Yoz)
  (tags: via:yoz uk tv bbc geek hdtv tutorial testcard hd television nostalgia)

• database schema migration : Alias muses on massive Oracle db migration algorithms. looking forward to seeing the full db migration system when/if it eventually hits CPAN
  (tags: perl databases migration activerecordmigration sql schemas oracle)

• AWS signature version 1 is insecure : Amazon have just rolled out version 2 to avoid this bug, which uses HMAC-SHA256 instead of HMAC-SHA1. they're also now deprecating use of HTTP instead of HTTPS, since the attack requires that the attacker sniff a valid request to reuse its signature
  (tags: aws amazon sdb ec2 sqs security holes web-services authentication replay-attacks attacks hmac)

• Ubuntu on Amazon Web Services : Canonical are issuing official Ubuntu Server AMIs. very good idea; make Ubuntu Server the virtualization platform of choice
  (tags: ubuntu virtualization aws ec2 amis ubuntu-server)

• Archie In… A Different Class! : "Archie" does Pulp's "Common People". incredible
  (tags: archie pulp funny music)

• cpan2dist - The CPANPLUS distribution creator : generate RPMs, DEBs etc. from CPAN packages; apparently takes over from the deprecated (but excellent) cpan2rpm
  (tags: cpan rpm deb debian perl packaging distribution software red-hat mandriva)

• Scaling memcached at Facebook : bit late bookmarking this; awesome speedups though
  (tags: facebook memcached udp scalability performance memory scaling)

• Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it's a French web 2.0 conference! : hilarious account of Loic Le Meur's latest car-crash of a conference, LeWeb '08
  (tags: rant leweb loiclemeur paulcarr leweb08 web2.0 conferences paris guardian web funny)

• Rent or Own: Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation Comparison for Hadoop Clusters : Rapleaf do the computations on using EC2 vs "grow your own". waaay cheaper to do the latter for their use-case. also interesting to see lots of Hadoop fans in the comments
  (tags: ec2 rapleaf hadoop clustering colo hosting server-farms scalability)

• Richard Clayton on the IWF/Wikipedia fiasco : 'The bottom line is that these blocking systems are fragile, easy to evade (even unintentionally), and little more than a fig leaf to save the IWF’s blushes in being so ineffective at getting child abuse image websites removed in a timely manner.' +1
  (tags: iwf richard-clayton filtering wikipedia isps uk blocklists)

• lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library : contains a 20-line Python script to diff two HTML pages. nice!
  (tags: python scraping web http xml css lxml beautiful-soup html)

• On Why Auto-Scaling in the Cloud Rocks : asshat on the ORA blog posted something about how he didn't like auto-scaling server infrastructure, seemingly because he hadn't seen an implementation he liked. Debunked by SmugMug
  (tags: ec2 scaling auto-scaling scalability cloud-computing aws automation)

• Amazon EC2 Now Available in Europe : Euro-hosted EC2 nodes. woo! wonder if they're in the Digital Depot...
  (tags: aws ec2 amazon hosting ireland europe)

• LINX on the IWF/Wikipedia fiasco : good wrap-up. hilariously, traffic to the blocked page "increased by more than 200 times normal" [levels], after the block was imposed, due to the press their screw-up received. also the image was still available elsewhere, including Amazon. oops! nice work IWF
  (tags: iwf fiasco wikipedia filtering squid proxy blocklists http)

• Higher-Order Perl : the entire text of MJD's functional-programming-in-perl bible! awesome. (I have no less than two copies of the dead-tree version.)
  (tags: higher-order-programming perl programming books reference manual free mjd)

• np237: RubyGem is from Mars, apt-get is from Earth : on the crapness of Ruby and Python distribution mechanisms for server deployment. 'Developers are reinventing the wheel, engine and transmission. Which is not that bad per se, but by not looking at existing solutions for the problem of making a car move, they are inventing a square wheel, a steam-powered engine and a superconductor-powered magnetic transmission.'
  (tags: ruby python perl languages distribution install rpm deb apt unix)

• Flickr: Documenting Dublin's cycle lanes : a group dedicated to Dublin City Council's ineptitude where bike lanes are concerned
  (tags: flickr groups photos dublin planning dcc cycling bikes bike-lanes roads road-safety)

• surround.vim : nifty Vim plugin for working with "surrounding" text entities -- quotes, XML tags, parens etc.
  (tags: vim plugins text-editing editors)

• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/2008 IWF action : WP commentary on the repercussions of the IWF censorship
  (tags: iwf wikipedia censorship http proxies transparent-proxies cleanfeed uk)

• IWF blocked Wikipedia; Wikipedia blocks UK ISPs : ouch. IWF decided an image on WP (specifically a "Scorpions" album cover) was illegal. Due to bugs in the "Cleanfeed" implementation, this caused a block of WP's editing infrastructure for ~95% of UK ISP users. fiasco
  (tags: wikipedia wikimedia cleanfeed iwf blocklists uk filtering proxies http censorship fiasco incompetent duh)

• Install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on a T61p - ThinkWiki : lots and lots of gotchas :( avoid Ubuntu 8.10 on a T61p! I'm finding it buggy as hell
  (tags: ubuntu 8.10 intrepid-ibex thinkpad lenovo t61p linux bugs)

• How I learnt to love Perl : a great paean to Moose, Test::Class, Devel::DProf, and other good features in modern perl programming
  (tags: perl programming via:reddit moose oop objects dprof)

• Dogs in Elk : another interwebs classic thread. "I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring."
  (tags: dogs-in-elk dogs funny humour elk food wildlife carrion snoring carcass)

• Microsoft offers free access to CPAN developers : 6 VMs running different versions of Windows, in order to ensure CPAN modules run OK on 'doze. this is awesome, and UNIX vendors should be doing the same
  (tags: perl microsoft windows cpan testing porting strawberry-perl xp vista)

• Python Makes Me Nervous - Ted Dziuba : both points are pretty valid, I've been hurt by them before
  (tags: python duck-typing exceptions coding reliability ted-dziuba software)

• KDE3.5 for Ubuntu Intrepid : the Kubuntu team went with the half-baked and broken usability nightmare that is KDE 4 for the latest Ubuntu release. here's packages to revert back to the working KDE 3.5.1. I hope they work :(
  (tags: kubuntu ubuntu kde desktops linux packaging deb kde4 usability repositories)

• Misco.ie : new Irish computer bits shop, recommended by Damo
  (tags: ireland hardware shopping computers components)

• Unlocking iPhone 3Gs -- the Vietnamese way : hardware hacking, Bunnie-style. hard. core (via Danny)
  (tags: via:malaclyps hardware hacking iphone mobile apple vietnam unlocking)

• Social Media Backlash Against Cheaters and Fleshmongers : Ian Kallen on spam-battling at Technorati, Ning, Digg, YT: 'It seems to be an accepted truism that social media oft demonstrates, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites. Yep, I've talked to folks from Six Apart, WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter and elsewhere. We're all feeling the pains of success. Over the past month at Technorati, we've purged about 80% of the porn that was active in the search index. Sure, we're not spam free yet but the index is getting a lot cleaner.'
  (tags: anti-spam web technorati ning digg youtube ian-kallen)

• Mathematica on Amazon EC2 : legendary maths app can now spawn EC2 servers to perform heavyweight calculations in parallel. Very clever move! (via Waxy)
  (tags: ec2 aws mathematica cloud-computing elastic maths via:waxy)

• Garden worms : improve garden drainage using these lob worms, available to order online. my mate Eoin recommends 'em
  (tags: gardens toget worms drainage earthworms)

• Does the broken windows theory hold online? : There's an interesting side effect of forum spam -- it engenders more spam by ensuring that site appears in Google search results for the spam keyword, which is what _other_ spammers use to find target sites (via Waxy)
  (tags: broken-windows spam anti-spam forums mailing-lists archives web google via:waxy)

• Intel's X25-E Extreme solid-state drive : wow, sounds amazing. as Tim Bray said, SSDs are going to be very cool very soon. this one claims 170MB/s writes, 250MB/s reads, seeks 2 orders of magnitude faster than HD, many years of write/erase cycles, and power consumption of 0.06W idle/2.4W active
  (tags: ssh hardware intel review computers disk storage performance power)

• YouTube - THE HUNGER Music Video : classic "so bad it's brilliant" YT
  (tags: the-honger funny excruciating youtube tat egypt vampires bad-acting music-videos awful sports-bra)

• Sophos say Rustock botnet is back on the air : "Starting yesterday, the amount of spam coming to our traps has gone up 3 times (a 200% increase)." Other sources saying similar
  (tags: sophos rustock botnets spam spam-weather)

• Google decide that GMail account thefts are due to phishing : 'Attackers sent customized e-mails encouraging web domain owners to visit [phish sites ...] Once attackers gained the user credentials, they were free to modify the affected accounts as they desired. In this case, the attacker set up mail filters specifically designed to forward messages from web domain providers.'
  (tags: google gmail accounts phishing security)

• Values of n bought out by Twitter : Small software company (run by ex-ORA Rael Dornfest) is bought out; immediately gives 2 weeks notice of shutdown of their webapp products. Cue massive trainwreck as users freak out. Release the code as open source! It can't be worse than it is now...
  (tags: twitter m&a acquisitions rael-dornfest stikkit iwantsandy web-apps web2.0 trainwreck cluetrain)

• Do Your Cloud Applications Need To Be Elastic? : answer: no. ;) IMO there's useful applications of EC2-like elastic hosting services that don't require a fully-elastic horizontal scaling app
  (tags: ec2 hosting aws scalability elastic servers scaling horizontal-scaling)

• Tim Bray on the Storage Hierarchy in 2008 : Registers > Cache > DRAM > DHT (ie memcached) > SSD > Disk > Tape
  (tags: memcached via:jzawodny memory disk storage io performance tim-bray)

• good deal on a Bodum burr coffee grinder and 2 bags of coffee : EUR72.08 for grinder and 2 bags of beans from Dublin-based Java Republic's online shop. good xmas pressie methinks ;)
  (tags: coffee presents toget wishlist xmas gifts kitchen)

• 441-year-old bitmap font rendering : wow, so cool. A serif typeface from '"La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami", an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus, published in 1567.' Plus ca change... (via waxy)
  (tags: type fonts books renaissance history embroidery typography pixels giovanni-ostaus 1567 lace via:waxy)

• The Septic's Companion : 'A mercifully brief guide to British culture and slang', aimed primarily at the USAnian. Now with book, just in time for xmas!
  (tags: usa uk europe culture slang language books)

• o2sms v3.11 : oh thank god for that; scripty, scrapey access to O2.ie's web-SMS system without having to use their now-broken website. yay for Mackers
  (tags: o2 sms texting ireland mobile-phones)

• Mozilla Foundation's non-profit status in question : under audit by the IRS; it receives 88% of its revenues from one source, Google. 'While the Foundation did not automatically qualify as a public charity with public support at 33% of total support, it believes that it qualifies as a public charity under the facts and circumstances test with public support over 10%.'
  (tags: google mozilla non-profits foundations revenue irs techcrunch open-source)

• CBL on the McColo outage's effects on botnets : great article, with lots of good facts and figures. Best bit: 'if you noticed a steep decline in spam in your inbox as a result of the McColo disconnection, this is an indication that you need better spam filters.' heh
  (tags: mccolo spam anti-spam botnets cutwail cbl xbl ozdok mega-d asprox rustock bobax srizbi warezov)

• MS To Offer Free Anti-Virus Software : about time! This has been necessary for ages. It will, of course, eat McAfee/Symantec/et al's lunch on a huge scale; I guess that was probably the issue
  (tags: microsoft windows malware viruses mcafee symantec av anti-virus)

• Twixenate : Walter's Twitter profile pic editing tool; enter your username and use the Pixenate image-editing tools to hack at your profile pic, then re-upload -- all from the browser. great demo of Pixenate
  (tags: pxn8 pixenate twitter avatar images editing image-macros)

• boards.ie has second-highest unique visitor count in Ireland : ahead of the Irish Times & Myhome.ie and the Irish Independent sites, just short of RTE.ie. Web forums are certainly mainstream in Ireland now
  (tags: boards.ie web stats ireland irish-times newspapers irish-independent rte forums)

• Amazon CloudFront : Amazon's new CDN enhancement to S3; 17c per GB (plus an initial 10c/GB "origin fetch" charge), vs 10c/GB with basic S3. no upfront setup required, beyond S3 itself. Uses HTTP cache-control headers. nice! looking forward to playing with this
  (tags: cdn aws cloud hosting amazon cloudfront web http caching)

• Ordnance Survey Ireland map viewer : woo, new Google-Maps-style UI for the OSI maps. not great resolution or Google-style eye candy, but it has pretty good mapping of structures (via IIU list)
  (tags: mapping ireland osi ordnance-survey maps)

• Pixenate on Demand : if you want to add image editing for user-contributed images to your webapp, this is the way to do it -- low-cost, on-demand, zero-setup! nice one Walter, this is a great idea
  (tags: pxn8 pixenate images editing user-contributed-content saas)

• Ireland Metrix Top Irish Sites : assuming these numbers mesh with Google Analytics, taint.org is just behind moviestar.ie and ahead of redfm.ie
  (tags: metrics blogging taint.org analytics statistics visitors ireland irelandmetrix)

• Wooden Brain : MRI scan, pasted onto a block of wooden bricks. want
  (tags: mri scans bricks wood infoviz 3d want)

• objgraph.py : generates nice DOT graphs of the Python memory arena, looks like a good memory-leak diagnosis tool
  (tags: objgraph python coding memory-leaks memory-cycles debugging bugs)

• S3 Copy Support : now on general release. another S3 shortcoming rectified
  (tags: s3 amazon aws copy files storage cloud-computing)

• perl v5.8.9 : New stable release of perl 5.8.x. Useful new bundled script: "perlthanks -- a variant of perlbug, but for sending non-bug-reports [to the] authors and maintainers of Perl. Getting nothing but bug reports can become a bit demoralising." aww! we love you p5p!
  (tags: perl thanks open-source coding changelog)

• world of goo coming to wiiware in europe! : yay! "hopefully late December"
  (tags: world-of-goo goo wii wiiware games console)

• "Where The Deep Ones Are" : book mashup of "Where The Wild Things Are" and Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". yeah, pretty sure I _won't_ be buying this for Bea (via Alex)
  (tags: via:alex geek parody cthulhu lovecraft books kids)

• The End of Wall Street's Boom : article by the author of "Liar's Poker" on the sub-prime crash -- chock full of insane details about just how stupid and greedy the Wall Street bankers are. lock 'em up!
  (tags: wall-street banking corruption banks bubble cds finance money economy subprime)

• Spamhaus usage figures : 1,425,440,000 users (via fanf)
  (tags: via:fanf spamhaus usage figures scale dnsbls anti-spam)

• Best Practices for Using Amazon S3 : draft PDF of tips for advanced S3 users
  (tags: s3 aws amazon storage tips pdf)

• Irish CERT Goes Live : announcing the Irish Reporting & Information Security Service (IRISS). excellent news!
  (tags: iriss ireland security cert internet)

• Maldives seek to buy a new homeland : "We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome."
  (tags: maldives climate-change disaster environment asia land science)

• P'Ta Mon - "The Thugs Lawyer" : ever wonder, "what if lawyers did blinged-up flyers with 8 fonts and lensflare effects"? wonder no longer. "Toll Free: 1-888-88NOTME"
  (tags: funny flyers law lawyers police legal advertising reggae bling)