Storm Worm estimated to net $7000 per day : at one point; that worked out as 900 million spams per day, resulting in just 72 sales each day
(tags: sales spam money storm-worm malware)RTÉ 2 FTA : "looking for free-to-air digital TV in Ireland". campaigning blog
(tags: dtv digital-tv ireland rte fta free-to-air free sky cable upc)
Author: dailylinks
Obama promises new era of scientific innovation : seriously: yay ;)
(tags: science funding obama us-politics tech green usa newscientist)
Zero Punctuation reviews 'Dead Space' : sadly turning out to be spot on the money
(tags: zero-punctuation games dead-space ea xbox360 reviews)"MP3 - 100% Compatible" logo : Britain's largest music download sites come up with something useful -- an official tick-mark to indicate that a file is DRM-free
(tags: music mp3 uk compatibility drm consumer)
Bank of Ireland leak data on another 900 customers : clowns. Also, the deputy Data Protection Commissioner gets a massive FAIL: 'While the loss of the data was a concern he said the likelihood of a fraud was "relatively remote".' Since the likelihood of me crashing my car driving at high speed is similarly "relatively remote", I'll ignore speed limits, then
(tags: relatively-remote clowns bank-of-ireland inept data-protection privacy identity-theft via:waider security banking ireland fraud)Jail Sentences For Fake Reviews : under new EU legislation, due to come into force next year, it will be illegal for businesses to "falsely represent oneself as a consumer" by, for example, writing a fake review of their own service
(tags: reviews law ireland eu europe consumer-rights)Gnip giving up on XMPP (for now) : 'XMPP is causing us pain and eating cycles' ... 'too many scattered implementations, leaving it in the "immature" bucket.' it seems Jabber.org and Google are throttling Gnip traffic
(tags: gnip xmpp jabber google twitter drama protocols microblogging via:ssethi)EMEW : 'Enhanced Message-ID as Email Watermark'. basically similar to how SpamAssassin's VBounce ruleset detects bounces by spotting mailserver fingerprints in the Received: header, but using the Message-ID: header instead
(tags: backscatter headers rfc-2821 smtp rfc-2822 message-id barricademx mdn dsn)
Doctor finds spiders in ear of boy with earache : ha! This actually happened to *me* when I was a kid, believe it or not (although with only 1 spider, not 2)
(tags: spiders ear orifices scary kids medical)A state-by-state guide to election night : even by midnight GMT, we should have some interesting results
(tags: election us-politics voting realtime drama polling states usa tv)
De-anonymizing Tor and Detecting Proxies : discover a Tor user's real IP address using Java or Flash, both of which apparently do not enforce proxy usage correctly from the browser
(tags: tor security java javascript flash privacy hack web)
Checks: The Most Dangerous Transaction : well-researched post on how checking account security is non-existent in US banking
(tags: checks cheques banking security fraud danger)Donald Knuth victim to repeated check fraud : US banks have an absurd policy of not authenticating check transactions, and this is now being actively exploited by fraudsters. As a result, Knuth will no longer mail reward checks to people who discover errors in his books :( (via adulau)
(tags: checking checks cheques banking fraud crime donald-knuth computing books security via:adulau)
SecureWorks analysis of the "Antivirus XP 2008" affiliate program : one Russian spammer appears to be earning over $5M/year by hawking fake antivirus apps via spam to gullible victims
(tags: russia spam av malware secureworks affiliates dodgy)Karl Rove's IT guy ran the Congressional firewalls and mail servers : Wonder if Democrats in the Congress are using GPG? sounds like they should be. incredible (via b1ff.org)
(tags: encryption privacy karl-rove bush us-politics incredible security snooping wiretapping firewalls)JSSpeccy : A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript. awesome. unplayably slow in FF3, but I have high hopes for the new JS interpreter in FF3.1. open-source, too, with a public SVN repository!
(tags: firefox spectrum javascript emulation zx-spectrum nostalgia)
nice Kiva.org testimonial : 'With the money that’s been paid back so far, including one loan in full, I was able to lend $25 each to two women in Peru to purchase animals. Which means I’ve been able to make $150 worth of loans, even though I’d only “invested†$100. Put another way: my $100 has done $150 worth of good in the world. This makes me really happy. '
(tags: kiva microloans charity testimonials loans developing-world)Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Counting & Timing : great blog post from Cal @ Flickr about their system-monitoring graphing backend, using custom RRDTool daemon and UDP notifications. very nice indeed
(tags: rrdtool flickr sysadmin graphing monitoring stats udp)Operation Digout - Anti Gov Builder Bailout Action : bananas. Members of an Irish web forum are lobbying the EC to intervene in the Irish govt's planned bailout of the construction industry through (more!) cheap home loans. I wish them luck
(tags: property-pin ireland housing bubble builders bailout budget eu ec europe lobbying via:mulley)
Irish Times "Pricewatch" column on cycling to work : makes good money sense: 'the Sutton-based cyclist will save themselves EUR2,329 over the course of three years while the person living in Goatstown will find themselves with an extra EUR2,611 at the end of year three, enough to pay for a couple of holidays to the Caribbean.'
(tags: pricewatch cycling dublin commute money)Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition announces support for SpamAssassin : 'SpamAssassin [is] now available from the main repository providing a supported solution for spam detection'. you've got to be kidding! Canonical took this long to get this supported?! wtf
(tags: canonical anti-spam filtering mail linux spamassassin)
Net::Mosso::CloudFiles - search.cpan.org : there's already a CPAN module to access CloudFiles, thanks to Leon "Net::Amazon::S3" Brocard
(tags: cloudfiles s3 storage backup mosso cpan leon-brocard)86% of UK users don't understand their broadband limits : '86% of UK broadband users still don’t understand the usage limits on their service and nearly one million have reached or exceeded their ISPs limit in the last year alone. [..] 6.2m people believe they have an "unlimited" service with no restrictions [..] just 22% of the major broadband providers are transparent and advertise the true limits of their packages' (via /.)
(tags: via:slashdot bandwidth broadband uk ireland bandwidth-caps isps asa advertising)
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem : another Cthulhu-influenced game, tipped by Andrew -- Gamecube, so could probably pick it up on eBay and play it on the Wii
(tags: cthulhu games gaming eternal-darkness wii gamecube toget horror)Energy rating cert will cost up to €500 : 'Owners wishing to sell or rent residential property will have to pay an estimated fee of €300-€500 to comply with new building regulations from next year'. why? is it expected that renters will refuse houses that are inefficient? not impressed, strikes me as typical Irish Green Party half-baked tokenism
(tags: greens politics ireland rip-off-ireland rip-offs inflation regulation renting crap)Sarkozy Falls for Phishing Scam : the French president fell for a phish, providing the auth details for his bank account. possibly untrue; there seem to be a lot of differing reports
(tags: sarkozy phish funny security crime france)Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Sushi Guide : sustainable sushi: avoid Oz/Japan-farmed yellowtail tuna, farmed salmon, octopus, and unagi (NOOO!)
(tags: unagi sushi sashimi food sustainable eating cuisine green)Rackspace Acquires JungleDisk, Slicehost : wow, they must be feeling flush. Slicehost: EC2-like Xen hosting, JungleDisk: S3-backed online backup. JungleDisk is to be transitioned off S3 onto Rackspace's own "CloudFS" storage cloud (via Michele)
(tags: cloudfs rackspace jungledisk backup online-backup slicehost via:mneylon cloud-computing internet hosting ec2 s3 aws)
Brad Fitzpatrick <3's Android : 'SDK is lovely. Great command-line tools' ... 'near-perfect emulator' ... 'using a production T-Mobile G1'. sounds fun
(tags: android google t-mobile phones mobiles reviews brad-fitzpatrick hacking gadgets)No 'World Of Goo' For Europeans : its EU publishers have delayed digital release until sometime next year, when the physical-media version is ready, by which time the release PR will have evaporated. idiotic
(tags: goo games releases europe distribution idiotic stupid via:techdirt)
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Uranium Ore : you can buy uranium ore on Amazon, it seems. review hilarity ensues
(tags: uranium radioactive amazon lulz pranks reviews funny)Jeff Atwood's EDC : "everyday carry" -- ie. microoptimization of your keychain. this is excellent, and a whole new way to waste time and money on gadgets (via Russell Davies)
(tags: edc gadgets geek jeff-atwood leatherman keys keychain lifehacks)
the Leatherman KeyMan : turning a Leatherman Micro into a combo multi-tool keyholder. nifty
(tags: keys multitool leatherman gadgets metalwork hacks via:ttt)
Qwitter: Catching Twitter quitters : be notified when someone unfollows you, along with the last tweet you sent before they dropped you. "was it something I said?" brilliant!
(tags: qwitter twitter social-networking microblogging funny)new US Visa Waiver Program authorization site : from Jan 2009, visitors from many countries including Ireland need to register at https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov before travelling to the US
(tags: waiver us visa travel usa via:simonw)Opera now warns about short RSA/DH keys : Opera 9.60 now issues a warning if you connect to an SSL site which has an RSA/DH public key shorter than 900 bits in length
(tags: opera web ssl tls rsa diffie-hellman security https browsers ui)
mogilefs.py threading coredump patch : avoid coredumps due to pycurl's use of a non-thread-safe signal
(tags: mogilefs threading coredumps bugs fixes python pycurl hacks)FriendFeed - Real-time : aka CrackFeed
(tags: crack friendfeed realtime live comet push http)Dead Space (xbox360: 2008): Reviews : 88/100: 'step into a third-person sci-fi survival horror experience that delivers psychological thrills and gruesome action. Set in the cold blackness of deep space, the atmosphere is soaked with a feeling of tension, dread and sheer terror.' sounds right up my street
(tags: dead-space games xbox360 reviews toget)Spamwiki : wiki tracking a few of the major botnet spammers
(tags: spam wikis databases anti-spam)details on the GenBucks/SanCash/Affking takedown : wow, these spammers were responsible for the VPXL, Canadian Pharmacy, *and* Hoodia spam runs. sounds like virtually _all_ the pharma spam for the past few years! massive result for the FTC
(tags: spam spammers takedowns ftc busts genbucks sancash affking)
[PATCH 4/4] UML - Fix FP register corruption : fix for that FP register corruption bug in UML
(tags: user-mode-linux uml fp floating-point bugs linux bugfixes)UML kernel corrupts floating-point registers : manifests as occasional NaN values in running processes (via Mark Martinec)
(tags: uml user-mode-linux bugs linux floating-point sunspots NaN)
The situation in Iceland right now : 'The world is treating us like we’re dead. Bank accounts frozen. No business without cash payments in advance. No currency can be bought. [..] Imports have stopped because of closed currency markets and diapers, flour, sugar and other necessities are selling out in the shops.'
(tags: iceland scary economy recession society)Trinity Rescue Kit : a linux boot CD to perform recovery and repair on malware-infested Windows setups; features 4 different virus scanners with online updates. essential for dealing with Windows-loving relatives
(tags: trk rescue recovery viruses malware sysadmin family bootcd linux livecd av)The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama : so the McCain campaign are letting racist psychoceramics lend a hand? nice
(tags: mccain campaigns us-politics racism obama religion intolerance fox-news)Cybercrime Supersite 'DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm : 'DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month.' omg that's awesome
(tags: cybercrime security darkmarket stings fbi carding credit-cards ncfta)
Caffeine : a more reliable way to inhibit sleepy-Macbook syndrome than InsomniaX (via Conall)
(tags: via:conall macbook hibernation laptops osx energy)
Dublin bikes delayed again : the JC Decaux scam continues. the bikes have been delayed again -- until next summer -- and the 40 sites don't even extend to Stoneybatter or all the way to the Royal Canal. ripoff
(tags: bikes jc-decaux dublin scams dublin-council rental)
Hitwise and Compete: the user data ISPs do sell : it's true, the "clickstream" companies are getting away with almost the same shit that Phorm, NebuAd et al are being pilloried for. use HTTPS where you can
(tags: clickstream privacy nebuad phorm hitwise compete http security web)Hochbahn U4 : explore the innards of a gigantic tunnel-boring machine in plan projection, using an astonishingly good Flash visualization. brilliant, in a very German-engineering way
(tags: german engineering projection plan technical-drawing flash visualization tunnel boring machines cool ui)Dr. Nicholas and Mr. Hyde : the insane bacchanalia of Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas, who built a massive hookers-and-coke-filled dungeon under his Laguna Hills mansion, and spiked his customers with Es. great article from Vanity Fair (via My Pepys)
(tags: dungeons broadcom omgwtfbbq bizarre laguna-beach orange-county bros ecstasy dot-com)
Dabble DB : looks like a web-based version of good old Filemaker
(tags: dabble-db databases web db spreadsheets analytics groupware)retrocomputing hackers reminisce about the 1541 diskette drive : skip to the comment thread, it's fantastic. I used to know lots of this stuff (via Donncha)
(tags: via:donncha commodore-64 hacks 1541 disks copy-protection drm hardware hacking history retro c64)MPLC racketeering Irish playschools : the 'Motion Picture Licensing Company' sent a letter to 2,500 Irish playschools, demanding a fee of EUR3 per child to cover license fees for the kids watching DVDs. However, it seems they themselves hadn't registered as required by law, so were acting illegally in issuing demands... oh the irony
(tags: mplc racketeering law ireland dvds movies mpaa licensing copyright legal children kindergarten playschools)Komplett's new Dublin pick-up point is open : routing around the Irish couriers and An Post's brokenness by allowing customers to pick up their items directly. a shame this is necessary
(tags: an-post delivery couriers dublin ireland komplett components pc hardware)
great set of photos from Chernobyl : scary stuff. amazing how accurate some of the Pripyat sets in Call of Duty 4 were
(tags: chernobyl urban-decay pripyat nuclear-power accidents tragedy photos images tourism decay)Quantum Crypto Broken : 'The attack is brilliant in its elegance. They essentially jam the receiver. A bright pulse of laser light is sent and it blinds the receiver, which allows the eavesdropper, Eve, to decode the same photons that Alice and Bob are decoding, and thus get their key.' doh
(tags: quantum-crypto crypto security via:emergentchaos science physics papers)Bristol Traffic: entertainment and datamining : this is actually quite a nifty idea; extending a simple "crappy parking" complaint blog with datamining opportunities, by tagging with street names, districts, license plate numbers etc. and letting the blog engine (and Google) take care of the rest
(tags: datamining data bristol parking blogging cars driving)
McAfee to pay $465 million for Secure Computing : including anti-spam product Ciphertrust. wonder how this will affect their various AS product ranges (via Herkemer)
(tags: via:herkemer anti-spam mergers buyouts mcafee ciphertrust)
Vint Cerf interviewed on spam, malware etc. : pretty much the EFF party line, I think: "every man for himself". also talks about net neutrality
(tags: vint-cerf internet filtering spam malware abuse network-neutrality anti-spam eff)video of a fake e-Passport being accepted by airport security reader : an e-Passport for "Elvis Aaron Presley", no less, happily scanned by an Amsterdam passport security station. hahahaha!
(tags: elvis funny security e-passports video via:slashdot rfid)Facebook adds Ireland as a Friend : 'Dublin will be the centre for Facebook’s international operations and will provide a range of online technical, sales and operations support to Facebook’s users and customers across EMEA region.' good news
(tags: facebook dublin ireland web2.0 emea)RFC-5321 (Obsoletes: 2821) : The newest rev to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (via fanf)
(tags: rfcs rfc-2821 standards internet smtp email rfc-5321)RFC-5322 (Obsoletes: 2822) : the newest rev to the Internet Message Format for email (via fanf)
(tags: via:fanf rfc rfc-2822 rfc-5322 standards email internet)
Tech Bubble 1.0 Stars: Where Are They Now? : wow, who the hell are these people? totally forgotten
(tags: web1.0 interwebs via:nishad trivia history)YA Mac apps list : bookmarking for more crufting of the OSX laptop
(tags: macos mac applications todo)Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services : a definition of a "Free Service", an open-source form of SaaS. uses the Affero GPL
(tags: saas cloud-computing software open-source gnu gpl affero web floss fsf freedom free-software)The Risk of ePassports and RFID - THC Blog : hacker group THC release an RFID-passport cloning/modification tool, noting that e-Passports are fundamentally insecure due to their trust of self-signed certificates. Also raises the Smart-IED attack danger: 'A Smart-IED waits until a specific person passes by before detonating or let's say until there are more than 10 americans in the room.'
(tags: via:schneier security terrorism risks rfid e-passports certificates pki)
Vim (Vi IMproved) for Mac OSÂ X : tick another item off my switch to-do list
(tags: vim gvim macos editors)
9li : Bruno 9Li -- cool Brazilian psychedelic, high-contrast art
(tags: bruno-9li art graphics psychedelia)
Neuros set-top box lets you crowd-subtitle TV : 'Neuros has a new technology to superimpose text from a dedicated chat room in real time on a TV set, allowing a sort of 'crowd narration' for events or shows.' 'crowd heckling' more like; this is a great idea that Danny O'Brien talked about a few years back
(tags: for:malaclyps tv set-top-box video chat irc discussion heckling backchannels)Is That Your Final Answer? : 'As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. Some people out there in our nation don’t have maps.' it's like Frances McDormand in Fargo, channeling Dan Quayle
(tags: funny omgwtfbbq sarah-palin foreign-policy incomprehensible babbling gibberish via:mat)
Addictions, Think Amazon, not Google : Brian "Krow" Aker: 'Google's AppEngine is much closer to [...] "Digitial Sharecropping" [...] S3 and EC2 have little tie in to them. You can end up with a physical addiction to the services but the mental addiction to a framework does not exist. S3 is just storage and EC2 for most is just a hosted Linux image.' +1!
(tags: google gae aws ec2 amazon hosting s3)The Porterhouse to get a shiny new bottling line : hooray, great news for Irish beer drinkers sick of Guinness
(tags: porterhouse beer ireland brewing)
Linux x86_64 frozen by heavy I/O on Dell PowerEdge 2950 : starting to think we may be running into this on our build machine; annoying. bookmarking for future reference
(tags: poweredge dell hardware linux drivers performance sysadmin)Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Deletionpedia : hahaha. WP deletion gnomes argued that Deletionpedia should not have an entry due to non-notability, just 24 minutes after that entry was created
(tags: wp wikipedia funny deletion processes bureaucracy deletionpedia)Atrivo/InterCage depeered : the ISP's AS (AS27595) is now offline, due apparently to coordinated lobbying of its upstreams
(tags: atrivo isps abuse intercage spam malware hosting)
baltic-avenue: An open source clone of S3 : built on top of Google App Engine. interesting hack!
(tags: gae s3 aws amazon baltic-avenue google)
THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS By Nassim Nicholas Taleb : 'Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).' (via Gary Stock)
(tags: banking probabilistic-methods probability statistics investment black-swans nassim-nicholas-taleb via:gstock essays the-edge)International Expert Group - Report - The Innovation Partnership : 'the findings and recommendations of the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property'. Very anti-Bayh-Dole and the "old IP" patent-everything regime as it pertains to biotech. great stuff (via Techdirt)
(tags: via:techdirt bayh-dole ip patents biotech canada reports)Greg Kroah-Hartman rips Canonical a new one : over allegations that they do not contribute enough development effort to the Linux ecosystem; in all major components, they push a truly miniscule amount of patch code upstream
(tags: canonical linux greg-kroah-hartman code open-source free-software distros packaging upstream debian)
A unique place for creating and preserving knowledge : swan song for Iona Technologies. as an ex-Ionian, all I can say is +1; great place to work in the '90s
(tags: iona dublin ireland software business 1990s)Deletionpedia : 'an archive of about 63,556 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia.'
(tags: wp:vfd deletion wikipedia archives web)Michelle Malkin » The story behind the Palin e-mail hacking : Yahoo!'s password recovery feature is pretty trivial to defeat: 'seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)'
(tags: yahoo passwords security web sarah-palin 4chan)
valhenson: Focus follows mouse on Mac OS X: Only $14.95! : more on the OS X FFM mess
(tags: focus-follows-mouse focus x11 macos mouse ui)Stevey's Blog Rants: Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate : if I'm to consider using OS X, this needs to work; I'm a FFM zealot
(tags: zealotry focus-follows-mouse focus ui osx mac x11 window-management)
Build a Web Page Monitor with Google Docs : incredible. the GDocs spreadsheet supports getting a remote URL, extraction using XPath, and RSS output, making it a pretty credible scraping platform
(tags: google-docs google xpath rss feeds scraping)PayPal phishes their own customers : 'Your monthly account statement is available anytime; just log in to your account at https://SECURE.UNINITIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM/au/HISTORY.' doh
(tags: paypal phish phoul funny errors anti-spam via:risks)laptopsdirect.ie crappy reviews : wow. I dodged a bullet when I bought my work Thinkpad T61p last year; since then they've accumulated a truly atrocious customer service reputation. avoid
(tags: laptopsdirect.ie laptops shopping ireland boards.ie reviews customer-service cluetrain)
Groklaw - Anonymous Speech in Email Upheld in Spammer Case : Groklaw goes into the detail of how and why the Virginia anti-spam law could be overturned. Ugh. I strongly believe that spam = UBE, not UCE, and political spam is still spam, so this is particularly disappointing for me
(tags: ube uce spam law legal virginia jeremy-jaynes groklaw anti-spam)VMware server tweaks : ugh. quite a lot of voodoo here, need to investigate to see if any of these improve performance on our little build farm vmware server
(tags: vmware performance linux tweaks kernel)consumer tips in response to the XL Airlines collapse : tour operator/airline went bust, leaving its customers well in the lurch. Those who booked flights directly on their website, using a debit card, have lost their money. Most travel insurance doesn't cover airline collapse. Moral: use a credit card
(tags: credit-cards safety consumer xl-airlines travel-agents atol flights travel)
Commtouch Plug-in for SpamAssassin : SA plugin to add the proprietary Commtouch filter to an existing SpamAssassin system; nifty
(tags: commtouch spamassassin anti-spam filtering plugins)
Va. Supreme Court Strikes Down State's Anti-Spam Law : argh! IMO the judge has confused misleading forged headers with anonymous speech
(tags: anonymity legal law jeremy-jaynes spam anti-spam virginia)Watch out for that Dropbox Public Folder : Joe has a good point: 'you hereby grant all other Dropbox users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder.' wtf
(tags: dropbox ip backup legal terms-and-conditions legalese)Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome : namely the Windows Template Library, now distributed under the (OSI-approved) Microsoft Public License. strange days (via reddit)
(tags: microsoft open-source osi google chrome wtl windows)Irishmen buy up island of England : 'an Irish consortium has emerged as the buyer of the island of England in The World development, a man-made scheme off the coast of Dubai.' hahaha!
(tags: funny ireland england dubai unintended-consequences property the-world)
Techdirt: How Patents Have Harmed University Research : the majority of university technology transfer offices have never made money, according to this. mind-boggling
(tags: bayh-dole patents ip universities academia tech-transfer techdirt)VTun - Virtual Tunnels over TCP/IP networks : 'The easiest way to create Virtual Tunnels over TCP/IP networks with traffic shaping, compression and encryption'. looks like it. UDP-based, no Windows support, but in Ubuntu's "universe" apt repository
(tags: vtun tunneling linux unix networking ip tcp udp security)Perl Best Admin Practices : good advice to those of us running systems built on perl. Every interpreted language needs a document like this
(tags: perl wiki advice sysadmin best-practices guidelines fhs unix)
Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives : good tips (via Jeremy)
(tags: for:hughescr linux ssd disks optimization performance tmpfs kernel)VW Should Bring Back The Microbus And Make It Electric : and a pony! (via fergusb)
(tags: want electric-vehicles cars volkswagen techcrunch over-ambitious and-a-pony)
Twitter API Rate Limiting : 'Clients are allowed 70 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request. This is enough to make just over one request per minute, per hour, which should meet the needs of most applications.' Fingers crossed this can be lifted for twit.ie
(tags: aggregation rate-limiting api http twitter twit.ie)Pipes: BBC AOD filter : select a BBC radio show, get an RSS feed of "Audio on Demand" RealAMRadio files as they are posted. ("radio4" works as the station ID for that station)
(tags: bbc radio4 radio realaudio via:hublog)Work at Home . . . for a Criminal? : good round-up of how those "work at home" scam spams work
(tags: work spam scams fraud teleworking telecommuting)
EC2 hack: make metadata visible in 'ec2-describe-instances' output : by creating one-off security groups to hold the metadata. hack, will be deprecated by AWS in a future release, but hey it works right now
(tags: ec2 via:elasticgrid hacks patterns aws)
eircom advertising on ThePirateBay.org?! : oh dear, someone really screwed up there
(tags: piracy pirate-bay eircom ads doubleclick google oops funny via:damien)Cheney Waits Until Last Minute Again To Buy Sept. 11 Gifts : pure Onion genius
(tags: cheney 9/11 theonion onion humor us-politics)We haven't changed the name of the conference to 'Over Quota' : moral: don't try hosting anything useful on Google App Engine until it's ready -- which it decidedly isn't yet
(tags: app-engine google quota fail bandwidth hosting via:simonw)
Atari 800 "Donkey Kong" source code review : retrogaming fans find source for 1983 game cartridge, then original developer appears with commentary. hooray for internets!
(tags: atari history retrogaming retro donkey-kong assembler coding 8-bit programming)
prescription swim googles : for $28. woo
(tags: glassyeyes glasses prescription goggles swimming beach want)Design By Humans : great tees on this US site
(tags: shirts tee-shirts apparel shopping want t-shirts)
Independent group's trigger-happy copying : allegations that Irish newspapers have copied content from blogs. There's been a lot of cases of this recently. good round-up from Cian Ginty
(tags: plagiarism ireland newspapers independent)
Review of bicycle helmet effectiveness studies : quite a few case-control studies consistently demonstrating the protective effects of bicycle helmet use on shared roadways
(tags: cycling helmets safety health statistics)Spammer-X's numbers on spam profitability : he claimed that he made net $336k per year from spamming in 2004
(tags: via:tzink spammer-x spam money pay profit motives)
Dublin's new M50 electronic toll tags : what a mess! there are no less than 8 tag operators and a bewildering array of prices and penalties. typical
(tags: ireland dublin m50 tolls roads pricing)Sustained IO on EBS == No Bueno : worrying stats for Amazon EBS data throughput, dropping from 160 MB/s to a rather paltry 42.4 MB/s
(tags: amazon ebs ec2 speed networking hosting benchmarks)MXLogic on the economics of spam : Sam Masiello of MXLogic works out that phishers may be netting a 7300% profit margin; this is why spam's not going away. mind you he does this by believing Gartner figures, which is never a good idea
(tags: sam-masiello mxlogic via:tzink phishing spam money)
30% Of Internet Users Admit To Buying From Spam : ugh. we need a reminder of the Boulder Pledge. Mind you, Marshal have put out what appear to be inaccurate figures in the past regarding the Rustock botnet, so apply a pinch of salt
(tags: marshal spam boulder-pledge commerce shopping statistics via:techdirt)more details on EC2 Elastic Block Store : achieves 70MB/s on an m1.small instance; 'performance exceeds what we’ve seen for filesystems striped across the four local drives of x-large instances'. pretty good for a network filesystem, although not great compared to fast local SATA disks. also: snapshots are incremental and perform nicely compared to local S3 copy-and-upload
(tags: ebs amazon performance benchmarks s3 ec2 disks snapshotting filesystems)Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) : 'Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances.' -- can even snapshot to S3
(tags: amazon ebs ec2 aws s3 cloud-computing hosting)
White Noise - An Electric Storm : 1969 album by David Vorhaus and Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop: 'one of the freakiest, most frightening, far out and forward thinking albums you may ever get to hear'
(tags: 1969 sixties music psych white-noise delia-derbyshire bbc radiophonics-workshop electronic)vim-flymake.vim : hooray! Flymake, on-the-fly compilation & error checking, for VIM. bit kludgy though, would be better if it integrated with vim 7.1's "compiler" support
(tags: vim flymake compilers error-checking editors vi software)
non-PC devices increasing browser share : .5 - 1.5% of visitors to Warner music sites are now coming from games consoles and smartphones. bad news for Flash sites (via Torrez)
(tags: flash web browsers via:torrez warner-music os)full(4): always full device : 'Writes to the /dev/full device will fail with an ENOSPC error. This can be used to test how a program handles disk-full errors.' - that's nifty. I can't believe I'm still finding useful new UNIX features after 18 years
(tags: devices unix linux testing disks errors edge-cases enospc manual-pages)
2 Stage Transfer Drawing (advancing to a future state) on Vimeo : some great performance art from Irish artist Joan Healy; the installation appears to be a kiosk with a screen, and a touch pad. The pad itself is supposed to have a warm, soft, fleshy feel that 'adds to the bond between people and machines'. However -- in reality, it's the artist's back; she's inside the kiosk, Mechanical Turk-style. Super-creepy
(tags: art creepy cool ireland joan-healy performance-art touchpads ui interface hci video)The Daily Show's TiVo setup : cool details on how TDS captures the news networks' TV output every day; they use TiVos, not MythTV. what they have works well enough, and that's good enough for them (via Waxy)
(tags: mythtv tv the-daily-show tivo via:lhl)
The Evolution of Pre-Launch Gmail In Screenshots : fascinating! They really did a good job improving the UI, early revs were quite uninspiring
(tags: gmail google history email web ui)SealSkinz : waterproof socks and gloves -- come recommended by Dublin's cycle-couriers to avoid wet feet in all this bloody rain. lots and lots of good testimonials
(tags: dryness feet comfort clothing rain weather cycling outdoors socks gloves)
Emergent Chaos: Certifiably Silly : Adam Shostack tells the truth re Firefox 3's stupid self-signed cert bug. 'imposing yet another security tax, based on a static analysis of attackers and some certificate authority pixie dust, isn't going to help things for very long.'
(tags: firefox firefox-3 security certificates ssl tls ca pki adam-shostack ui usability)Image Cerberus: a SpamAssassin plug-in against image spam : a new plugin, subject of a paper at this year's CEAS conference it looks like
(tags: plugins spamassassin anti-spam image-spam images ceas conferences)Twitter drops SMS-notification support for EU users : interesting, I haven't received the mail, and it claims to still be sending updates to my Irish mobile (update: I'm not actually *getting* any updates, though)
(tags: twitter phones mobile sms ireland eu uk)
The Trifecta of FAIL : ah, the hazards of monkey-patching core classes illustrated perfectly; a Ruby point-release upgrade broke Rails (via chromatic)
(tags: ruby rails monkeypatching ouch programming coding oo subclassing apis)best intranet form ever : 'The software my employer uses for booking holidays has recently been "upgraded" and we now need to specify an absence reason.' there are several hundred reasons, including 'Abortion', 'Stroke', 'Warts', 'Dementia', 'Rectal Problems', 'Manic Depression' and, um, 'Wax'. best of all, this is for booking time off in advance...
(tags: intranet funny inept hr wtf daily-wtf bureaucracy pto holidays)Sup : 'a console-based email client for people with a lot of email [..] The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere.' Looks like they've nicked a few ideas from GMail, too (via Luis)
(tags: via:tieguy console linux unix sup mail mail-readers ui apps)
Cycle Helmets and Other Religious Symbols : there appears to be a lack of published research suggesting that bike helmets help avoid serious injury and death -- in fact, research seems to suggest the _opposite_.
(tags: cycling helmets safety research bikes equipment)Clever method of near duplicate detection : 'SIGIR 2008 paper, "SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections"'. may be useful, although we've pretty much stopped deduping in SpamAssassin nowadays
(tags: corpora dupes duplicates spotsigs collections sigir papers via:jzawodny)HadoopStreaming : 'Using the streaming system you can develop working hadoop jobs with extremely limited knowldge of Java. [..] Hadoop basically becomes a system for making pipes from shell-scripting work (with some fudging) on a cluster.'
(tags: hadoop perl streams unix distcomp clusters mapreduce)political zealot using GMail's "this is spam" button to deliberately cause spamfilter problems for Obama's campaign : 'Tablemate at benihana confided how he subscribes to Obama's mailing list and marks it all as spam to train Gmail. Urge to kill rising.' - Kevin Fox on Twitter
(tags: twitter kevin-fox foaf-story benihana obama anti-spam filtering this-is-spam us-politics moveon)"Jake Leg" : 'large numbers of [adulterated Prohibition-era alcohol, Jamaican Ginger Extract] users began to lose use of their hands and feet. Some victims could walk, but they had no control over the muscles which would normally have enabled them to point their toes upward. Therefore, they would raise their feet high with the toes flopping downward, which would touch the pavement first followed by their heels. The toe first, heel second pattern made a distinctive “tap-click, tap-click" sound as they walked. This very peculiar gait became known as the jake walk and those afflicted were said to have jake leg'
(tags: jake-leg walking history prohibition alcohol odd bizarre adulteration poison 1930s)
An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability : great guide to Dan's most recent discovery. it really is quite nasty (via Jeremy)
(tags: via:jzawodny dan-kaminsky dns security exploits bind)
Green Karma - Carbon-offset your colo box must-read post from Chris. If you run a colo box, you should think about offsetting the ~2 tonnes of CO2 output it generates per year
sorenragsdale: Building a Cheap ZFS Server good set of details on MrN's new ZFS-based home disk server
Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling holy crap, those /b/tards are fucked up
TechCrunch UK campaigning for a "Digital Hub" I have to say, the Digital Hub is actually a great place to work; it's well worth duplicating, if such a thing is possible
419eater anti-scammers fool 419ers into performing the Dead Parrot sketch "Possibly, he is pining for the fee-ords"
Google taking action against Nigerian/419 fraud spammers Good news. About time, too ;)
Del.icio.us 2.0 goes live yay! I've been waiting for this for yonks
10 years of Boards.ie massive ~50GB RDF/XML dump, for open crunching, to generate interesting "SIOC Semantic Web" apps
Postmaster.comcast.net how to get mail delivered successfully to Comcast, the usual stuff
Why we'll never replace SMTP 'The reason that e-mail is uniquely useful is that you can exchange mail with people you don't already know. The reason that spam exists is that you can exchange mail with people you don't already know.' +1
"Bikes-for-Billboards" scheme exposes major planning flaws 'what was initially hailed as "free bikes" has become one of the biggest planning controversies to hit Dublin in years.' No shit. 70% of sites are on the Northside, rather than the richer Southside; and each bike will cost over EUR300k in ad revenue!
Rob Enderle's page on Wikipedia detailing this analyst's hilariously wrong pro-SCO, anti-Apple/Linux predictions over the years. John Gruber: 'the only way it would be worthwhile for reporters to [quote him] would be if they were willing to describe him as "almost always utterly wrong"'
soc.culture.irish on "Cuil" meaning knowledge 'eagerness, fearsomeness, a gnat, a horsefly, a beetle, a bluebottle, and (with the addition of a fada) a rear end, a reserve or backup, a corner, and an arse. The one thing it isn't, according to the four dictionaries I just checked, is knowledge.'
Why Spam Can’t Be Stopped – Emailappenders And Others Sell Bogus Lists Marketing company buys list of addresses, 85% of the 100k addresses bounce, marketer gets booted by ISP for spamming, marketer issues complaining press release. Let's say it again: opt-in permission can't be sold, and address list vendors are spammers
ZSFA -- I Want The Mutt Of Feed Readers Zed recommends Newsbeuter. must take a look
We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It. having worked on a project to do just this, believe me, this is doomed. DOOMED
Science Clouds 'compute cycles in the cloud for scientific communities .. allows you to provision customized compute nodes .. that you have full control over using a leasing model based on the Amazon's EC2 service.' Wonder if they'd like to give SA some time ;)
O2 Leaking Customer Photos (updated) the JBoss/Tomcat install leaks the "secret" URLs through it's default status page. this is the 3rd helping of FAIL for O2's web team; 2 previous occasions in the last year exposed customer data through "secret" URL manipulation
Avant Window Navigator "a 'dock-like' (cough) navigator bar for the Linux desktop" (via Danny, again!)
trickle 'user-space bandwidth shaper', ie. like nice(1) for network bandwidth (via Danny)
RFC 5218 - What Makes For a Successful Protocol? 'Based on case studies, this document identifies some of the factors influencing success and failure of protocol designs.' (via spicylinks)
trickle 'user-space bandwidth shaper', ie. like nice(1) for network bandwidth (via Danny)
RFC 5218 - What Makes For a Successful Protocol? 'Based on case studies, this document identifies some of the factors influencing success and failure of protocol designs.' (via spicylinks)
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ooer missus (via Kenneth)
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new cinema listings site for Ireland. nice web2.0-ish layout, but missing lots of stuff you'd expect nowadays: search-by-reviews, feeds, Upcoming.org-style social features, etc. (in fact, they'd almost be better off just using Upcoming.org IMO ;)
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paraphrased: "enough linkblogging! new content please!"
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the bug appears to affect client-side resolvers, which can be cache-poisoned by malicious DNS servers using predictable TXIDs in DNS responses. current fix is to randomize ports when making queries? I think. more: http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/800113
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good guide to diagnosing I/O bottlenecks on modern Linuxes using -d and -x
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no mention of what it does with mail from and so on, however (via Nelson)
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'a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler', defined with an IDL-style language. see also Thrift and http://teddziuba.com/2008/07/build-google-protocol-buffers.html
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by the Dutch team behind the crack of the Dutch travel card, based on the same MIFARE system as London's Oyster cards. paper coming in October
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Ryanair vs Bravofly, Bravofly scraping Ryanair's site allegedly in contravention of their T&Cs
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I'm quoted!, arguing that the death of invention in the modern age is greatly exaggerated: 'the next Wikipedia could easily come from one teenager's laptop in their back bedroom in Kildare [...] the barriers to [invention] are lower than ever.'
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'The way things are going, I half-expect to hear a quiet electric "peep" noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumland Security.'
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as usual, a description of what you _shouldn't_ be doing, provides a great illustration of what you _should_ be doing ;) (via Vinoski)
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'Four resourceful humans test the tolerance levels of four human resource managers by constantly failing to show up for work after being offered a job. The aim… To see who can hold onto their job the longest without ever working a day.' truly hilarious
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fix is to use the kernel from Intrepid Ibex, for now
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aha. this explains a long-running issue I've had on my Thinkpad at home
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'a new text markup format. Its syntax is a blend of Donald Knuth's TEX and various wiki markup.' has a formal grammar, rather than an ad-hoc parser (guilty). quite nice, although would have been better if it didn't reinvent so many wheels (via adulau)
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[the Viacom/Youtube privacy disaster demonstrates] 'what's wrong with trusting corporations with your data: if the corporation says "I'm not going to be evil," and the government says "oh yes you are," it's pretty much _the end of the conversation_.'
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alt microblogging platform with a few key wins over Twitter & Jaiku: stability (so far!), open, decentralized, and Affero-licensed OSS. I'm "jm" on it, but not writing there -- yet. but looking forward to an API so I can add it to twit.ie
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some third-party app developers get access to it, some don't. one dev says: 'It’s frustrating to just get locked out after spending so much time making stuff for Twitter users'
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910-node cluster sorting 1TB of data in 209 seconds, using Hadoop and HDFS. I wish we had a Hadoop cluster to do SpamAssassin mass-checks on ;)
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'a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service', written in C with libevent, lots of client libs for different languages. Nice lifecycle model. The queues are not persistent yet, though, unfortunately
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'a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. .. detection and annotation of potential problems based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex web 2.0 environments', by lcamtuf
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Bebo need to do some anti-abuse work
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Amazon really need to sort out some effective anti-abuse policies for EC2 soon, before things go pear-shaped
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awesome; NAT-tunneling without any prior config, even if both ends are behind NAT. written by the author of the MySpace worm, Samy Kamkar
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interesting, I would have thought they'd be in a good position to just do something like what the SpamAssassin vbounce ruleset does
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oh dear. they _really_ need to get proactive on this before the shit really hits the fan, this is not going well
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a good guide to using Wireshark to diagnose this, as used by Audible Magic and Sandvine
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in other words, Comcast's Sandvine appliances use the same technique as Audible Magic. Wonder if this works; I was under the impression that one would have to block RSTs on both ends of the connection, and many commenters agree
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using a Bayes classifier trained on intra-packet intervals and packet length. nifty! (via /.)
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good interview with Irish Times MD, Maeve Donovan, on their removal of the paywall: 'it had become clear that there were not sufficient numbers of Irish Times readers prepared to pay for online content.' seems the example of the Grauniad was influential
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make the obtuse pg_locks table more useful. 'show any queries that are waiting on a lock, and the query that currently holds the lock on which those queries are waiting.' haven't tried it out yet
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The SGAE agency will collect on sales of mobile phones (EUR 1.10), blank CDs (17c each), laser printers (EUR 10), scanners (EUR 9), CD recorders (3.40). I guess Spanish consumers have a license to download freely now, since they're already paying for it
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using a couple of mod_rewrite rules and a redirect to www.avg.com
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there goes my pocket money. I <3 the woot crew
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'It's a common enough misconception, but Irish national newspapers have not and are not currently showing the large-scale declines in readership as seen in the UK and US. The market is reasonably stable.' interesting
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A film festival is putting this on? wtf, does not compute. good line up though. at Filmbase, Curved St, Temple Bar, 10am Friday 27th June
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intro to the EAM (Execute Around Method) closure-based resource-management pattern. I was wondering what this trick was called
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I missed this at the time. great news
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yay, PutPlace on Windows is now in public beta
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handy algorithm to take N randomly-selected samples from a passing stream of data; must use this on the SpamAssassin spamtraps
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'one of my mentors told me that the chief responsibility of a CEO to his staff is to improve the CV of every staff member [..] I sincerely hope that each and every career immensely benefited as a result.' Certainly worked for me - thanks Chris!
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A company called "TenFour Sweden" apparently sold a product called "TFS Gateway" that supported virus scans, prior to Trend's patent filing. Note that they're still looking for people who _used_ TFS Gateway in 1995
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it was a Hungarian sysadmin protesting a $227M investment in MS licences throughout the Hungarian state system as a massive waste of money: "I think there are much more useful free software solutions available, for no charge."
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very good list of differences, and compelling downsides to cfengine. sounds like I need to give Puppet another chance after all
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Amazingly clear breakdown of my social groups -- great infoviz. Must try something like this for SpamAssassin spamtrap data (via Leonard)
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lovely. would prefer the tee, but it's sold out for now
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this is becoming critical for use of git as a file-synchronization mechanism for my MP3 collection, for obvious reasons. looks like it should be possible with git 1.5.6
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Ubuntu Ireland LoCo team now has a drop-in centre on Saturdays between 11am-4pm at the Camara offices in the Digital Hub, on Thomas St in Dublin 8
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'Our programs have left the desktop and found their new home on the web. System administration issues loom large.' I agree with the thesis, but Puppet as a key component to fix this? it's just cfengine in Ruby, snore
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great sketch: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett at the pitch 'n' putt (NSFW)
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to hold Django's trademarks and IP. that's a major step forward, congrats guys. although I'm sure there'd have been room at the ASF too ;)
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the 'Jura Internet Connection Kit' has a few security holes, it seems. 'Fun things you can do with a Jura coffee maker: Change the preset coffee settings; [..] Change the amount of water per cup (say 300ml for a short black) and make a puddle'
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an announcement-only Google Group for notifications about GAE downtime and outages. useful, considering they had a major datastore outage yesterday
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Boards user boasts of cheating in the Leaving Cert exams, is identified, and an epic thread unfolds. IRISH INTERNETS - SERIOUS BUSINESS
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70% of UK kids aged 18-24 download music illegally; 87% of all respondents have copied music CDs; 74% said they'd be interested in a working, DRM-free legal download service