Author: dailylinks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XBMC & Broadcom Bring 1080p Decode Upgrade to ill-equipped netbooks, nettops, Apple TVs : drat, my old Dell laptop I’m using as a Boxee platform (which can’t keep up with 720p) doesn’t have a mini-PCIe slot either :(
(tags: video hd 720p 1080p mini-pcie broadcom hardware boxee xbmc)

NAMAland : ‘At NAMAland we like to look on the bright side. OK, the downside of NAMA is that it’s costing you €54 billion — the upside is that you now own some of the best (and worst) properties in Dublin. So grab your phone, put on your tophat and enjoy your new role as a property tycoon with our augmented reality tour of NAMAland. Remember, we-are-where-we-are, there’s no point playing the blame game, we were all living beyond our means and it was like that when we got here…’ Excellent! a Layar Augmented Reality layer for Layar which lets you see properties in Dublin owned by NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency
(tags: nama funny ouch augmented-reality layar dublin ireland)

Web service – current time zone for a city? – Stack Overflow : ‘a web service of some sort (or any other way) to pull a current time zone settings for a (US) city. For the parts of the country that don’t follow the Daylight Saving Time and basically jump timezones when everyone else is switching summer/winter time… I don’t fancy creating own database of the places that don’t follow DST. Is there a way to pull this data on demand?’ earthtools.org seems the closest thing
(tags: dst daylight-savings local timezones iso8601 dates times web-services http)

Facebook now does export : ‘we’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download.’ excellent
(tags: facebook export data control privacy personal-data)

Government gets no ‘serious offers’ for e-voting machines : 2 *other* govt departments (nice try) wondered about buying them, for utterly random purposes for which they’re totally unfit. Total cost of the e-voting fiasco is now EUR54.6 million. Another fine Fianna Fail mess
(tags: fianna-fail fail e-voting ireland fiasco)

XKCD’s updated map of online communities : Urban Dead is still around?
(tags: xkcd maps humor infographic community online)

Lone Sale of $4.1 Billion in Contracts Led to ‘Flash Crash’ in May : ‘as the computers of the high-frequency traders traded contracts back and forth, a “hot potato” effect was created, the report said, as contracts changed hands 27,000 times in 14 seconds, but with eventually only 200 actually being bought or sold.’ upshot: horrifically complex distributed feedback loops now directly impact our economies — great :(
(tags: distributed-systems distcomp flash-crash stock-market trading automation via:nelson sec nyse high-frequency-trading)

Changes at dnswl.org : DNSWL will charge for subscriptions to “heavy” users and anti-spam vendors
(tags: dnswl dns whitelists dnsbls filtering anti-spam)

‘Ireland’ Reddit : quite a busy news aggregator, it turns out — 1,960 registered readers and a lot of traffic at this stage. worth bookmarking
(tags: ireland reddit local news aggregation)

The MySQL “swap insanity” problem and the effects of the NUMA architecture : very interesting; modern multicore x86 architectures use a NUMA memory architecture, which can cause a dip into swap, even when there appears to be plenty of free RAM available
(tags: linux memory mysql optimization performance swap tuning vm numa swap-insanity swapping)

law firm’s mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k : ‘Off-the-cuff bravado aimed at [4chan] has led to what must already rank as one of the worst ever data leaks, by the anti-filesharing solicitors ACS:Law’ […] ‘the law firm is faced with the threat of a fine by the [UK] Information Commissioner, who is keen to use new powers that raise the maximum penalty to £500,000.’
(tags: ouch 4chan acs-law filesharing data-leaks privacy data-protection fines uk)

http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/ : extensive. the NSFW words that Google Instant won’t search for (via Waxy)
(tags: nsfw censorship filtering google keywords search blacklist google-instant)

RecordStream : ‘A set of programs for creating, manipulating, and outputing a stream of Records, or hashes. Inspired by Monad.’ looks very powerful
(tags: monad recordstream open-source recs cli grep)

The Spamhaus Whitelist : exactly what it says on the tin
(tags: spamhaus anti-spam whitelisting spamassassin)

why James Gosling left Oracle : 1. made him take an effective pay cut; 2. removed decision authority on Java; 3. he felt Oracle was “ethically challenged”. also: ‘he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java’; “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” he doesn’t pull any punches. oh dear, this is all adding up…
(tags: java oracle opensource sun james-gosling larry-ellison gossip)

Mongrel2 Says, “Goodbye Python” : Linux distros ship ancient Python interpreters, hence it’s impossible to rely on recent language features because they won’t be there, making it useless to write code in Python. We have similar problems in perl-land, but it’s easy enough to get by without the latest-and-greatest; maybe Python is different in that regard? … or is it Zed?
(tags: zed-shaw python mongrel distros linux sysadmin packaging)

Bunnie Huang on the simulated 6502 : ‘It makes my head spin to think that the CPU from the first real computer I used, the Apple II, is now simulateable at the mask level as a browser plug-in. Nothing to install, and it’s Open-licensed. How far we have come…a little more than a decade ago, completing a project like this would have resulted in a couple PhDs being awarded, or regarded as trade secret by some big EDA vendor. This is just unreal…but very cool!’
(tags: simulation bunnie-huang 6502 cpu chips emulation hardware)

www.Visual6502.org : ‘working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip’s physical components – about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip. This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their ‘high’ or ‘low’ logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the ‘clock’) on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.’ Awesome
(tags: 6502 emulation physics simulation mos atari-2600 pet commodore c-64 cpu silicon)

JAM Software – SpamAssassin for Windows : ‘adapted for Windows by JAM Software’ — cool! Thanks Daniel
(tags: windows spamassassin anti-spam software win32 jam-software)

MineCraft: Mine The Gap, Day 1 : Rock, Paper, Shotgun review the current lo-fi sandbox indie-game hit
(tags: pixels minecraft gaming fun walkthroughs)

The Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box : this is fantastic — a (physical) puzzle, which must be brought to a specific location on the planet to be opened
(tags: geocaching cool electronics geolocation gps hardware puzzles arduino)

John Graham-Cumming: The Myth of the Boy Wizard : JGC on the Haystack mess. bad journalism by The Guardian, Newsweek and the Beeb, basically, single-sourcing articles without any corroborating backup from domain experts
(tags: journalism haystack the-grauniad newsweek bbc news cpj jgc)

Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music “free” : open-source classical music: now very well-funded. awesome!
(tags: musopen classical music copyright funding opensource free)

P2P investigations now illegal in Switzerland : ‘The country’s Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can’t go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.’
(tags: p2p privacy ip-addresses pii logistep switzerland piracy)

Forking is a Feature – Anil Dash : thought-provoking piece about GitHub-style forking applied to other disciplines; Tumblr, Dribbble, Forrst being cases where it’s happening now
(tags: community development forking github git opensource tumblr dribbble forrst wikipedia)

Ubuntu’s cron package silently ignores files : Ubuntu have hack-patched Vixie Cron to silently ignore cron files which contain a “.”. omgwtf
(tags: omgwtfbbq broken ubuntu patching quality bugs software stupid packaging)

Game On : exhibition billing itself as “the world’s biggest celebration of games”, arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. ‘Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.’ tix are EUR10
(tags: games gaming exhibitions dublin)

Your Country, Your Call, You’re Doomed : Bock on the predictably-crap biz-waffle results from the YCYC “get Ireland back on track” competition. ‘If we don’t take this seriously, we’re doomed to repeat the current economic disaster over and over again, each generation with its own Bertie Ahern, its own Seanie Fitzpatrick, its own Fingers Fingleton, and all the other assorted, integrity-free panhandlers and parasites who have soiled the reputation of this country and sold us down the Swanee for their own, ignorant, self-serving enrichment. Forget about Eamon Ryan’s smart economy. Let’s put all our effort into creating the Honest Economy.’
(tags: ycyc waffle business ireland vision-lock integrity bock-the-robber economy)

Hit The Road: Public Transport Directions for Dublin : ‘a public-transport route-planning service for Dublin city, which shows you how to get from A to B using buses, Luas or DART services. The original version was built during the first Startup Weekend Dublin in May 2010.’ Pretty good; although in my tests it wasn’t able to find the optimal route, it always came up with something that made a good starting point
(tags: routes dublin public-transport buses hit-the-road)

o2 Broadband Dongle Working on Ubuntu 10.04 : the Huawei E1752 dongle does that horrible thing where it defaults to acting as a USB storage device containing the Windows drivers, instead of acting as a 3G modem by default. usb_modeswitch should be in the Ubuntu base install to deal with this crap
(tags: usb broadband o2 hauwei e1752 ubuntu dongle)

Twitter’s misuse of OAuth : Twitter seem to be attempting to control misbehaving clients, by using the “consumer key” pair as a secret key for app developers. This is proving impossible for FOSS clients to work with, and is trivially hacked to allow third-party app impersonation. Bad idea, Twitter
(tags: twitter fail oauth standards open-source gwibber security)

Boxee Blog » How Boxee Sees the Apple TV : go Boxee! open TV is the way to go
(tags: boxee apple tv set-top)

“if slalom” : a great name for a common “code smell” of too much indentation, calling for merciless usage of Extract Method (via Aman)
(tags: via:akohli code-smells refactoring if-slalom programming funny if-else indentation)

/~colmmacc/ » Prime and Proper : algorithm to perform set membership tests on enumerated sets quickly and memory-efficiently, using multiplication by primes. Nice trick
(tags: hacks colmmacc prime-numbers set-membership bloom-filters bignums algorithms programming)

_Fast Cache for Your Text: Accelerating Exact Pattern Matching with Feed-Forward Bloom Filters_ [PDF] : intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick — or possibly re2c, as used in “sa-compile”. On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn’t perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
(tags: bloom-filters grep filtering spamassassin sa-compile text-matching caches aho-corasick)

SuperTweet.Net : free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
(tags: via:pixelbeat api oauth proxy twitter web http curl supertweet)

Eirgrid System Demand : ‘The system demand displayed here represents the electricity production required to meet [Irish] national electricity consumption, including system losses, but net of generators’ requirements. It includes power imported via the interconnector and an estimate of the power produced by wind generators, but excludes some non-centrally monitored generation (i.e. small scale CHP).’ via Juan Flynn
(tags: via:juanflynn eirgrid national-grid ireland power charts statistics)

Dave Grady on “the conference call” : painfully accurate sketch about the crappy conference call UI. “hi, who just joined?”
(tags: hi-who-just-joined conference-calls phone funny ui dave-grady comedy sketches)

Life without a CA | The Tor Blog : do you trust the default set of root CAs in modern web browsers? sounds like we probably shouldn’t
(tags: ca certificates https encryption firefox ssl trust privacy web root-cas)

Topfloor – Free Residential Lease/Letting Agreement Download : GFDL-licensed legal boilerplate agreement for the Irish market. Nice one — although did I see a commercial company charging for what appears to be a derivative work of this document? is that a breach of the license terms?
(tags: gfdl gnu topfloor letting leases legal documents ireland)

tcpcrypt : opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though
(tags: cryptography encryption tcp security internet tcpcrypt opportunistic)

Inchicore family home ready for take-off : from the Irish Times property section: ‘There’s a guy in Inchicore with an aircraft simulator in his shed. Not one of those fancy computer games, this is the real thing – a decommissioned 747 simulator, cockpit and all.’ Unfortunately, the sim doesn’t come with the house
(tags: houses flight-simulators gaming inchicore dublin irish-times property)

Fried Androids? :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It : scary stuff. East Texas patent-troll court has ruled that EchoStar must remotely disable customers’ DVRs due to patent infringement, which they are (thankfully) refusing to do and are now held in contempt for $200M — the blog suggests this could happen due to the Google-Oracle suit, to Android phones
(tags: google via:tieguy law east-texas dvr remote-disabling internet oracle swpats)