Introduction to parallel & distributed algorithms : really interesting parallel algorithm concepts. I’d seen parallel merge sort before from the map-reduce world, but some others are new to me and worth thinking about (via Hacker News)
(tags: via:hackernews algorithms distributed parallel map-reduce merge-sort sorting)image soak : an “endless page” of images culled from newsfeeds. Very good for video games and art, particularly. definitely a new addition to my daily list (via Andre)
(tags: via:torrez news images feed sources art)Mario Kart graffiti in Portland bike lanes : very funny. ‘Wait, does this mean that those cyclists that wiped out a few blocks back are going to catch up to me right before I get to my destination, even though I didn’t crash once?’ (commenter on Kotaku)
(tags: cycling portland videogames gaming mario-kart graffiti)
Author: dailylinks
U2 Manager Blames ‘Free’ And Anonymous Internet Bloggers For Industry Troubles | Techdirt : great Mike Masnick post responding to the latest woe-is-me missive from U2’s asshat-in-residence Paul McGuinness (via Jim Carroll)
(tags: via:jimcarroll u2 mp3blogs paul-mcguinness mike-masnick techdirt music mp3 downloading filesharing piracy blogging)RTÉ News: CAO website blocked by malicious attack : is the CAO (Ireland’s Central Applications Office, for university admissions) being DDOS’d? sounds like it
(tags: cao ddos security ireland)
jwz – What different sorting algorithms sound like : in the style of BBC Radiophonics Workshop, with copious flange — my favourite is heap sort. this is brilliant (via jwz)
(tags: via:jwz sound music sorting algorithms)
Books of Adam : stories drawn by a guy I vaguely know online. really funny!
(tags: blog comic funny fp)100 ways to spend the Anglo €25,000,000,000 : ‘just how much is €25 billion that [Ireland’s taxpayers] have to borrow for [failed bank] Anglo?’ some great answers, including: start our own space program with 20 space shuttles; build 6 LHCs or 2 ITER fusion reactors; scrap fares on all public transport for 33 years; buy 2 of Asia’s largest banks; buy Steve Jobs himself; detach the People’s Republic of Cork by building a ten-metre-wide moat; buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie
(tags: money omgwtfbbq insane argh funny nama anglo sean-fitzpatrick ireland)
[osol-discuss] OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express : ‘Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC and x64. We have more than twice the application base of AIX and HP-UX combined.’ Well, that about sums it up. Enterprisey!
(tags: enterprisey open-source closed-source oracle solaris opensolaris hp-ux history)
Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents : ‘Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.’ no shit, Sherlock
(tags: ip patents techcrunch startups swpats via:brian-caulfield software)Spam King Leo Kuvayev Jailed on Child Sex Charges — Krebs on Security : ‘A man known as one of the world’s top purveyors of junk e-mail has been imprisoned in Russia for allegedly molesting [more than *50*] underage girls from a Moscow orphanage, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.’ lovely
(tags: spam russia jail crime moscow leo-kuvayev)
La Brea Starter And Rustic Bread Recipe : another variation of the Nancy Silverton recipe, and a loaf recipe to go with it
(tags: recipes food bread baking sourdough la-brea-bakery)Nancy Silverton’s La Brea Bakery sourdough starter recipe : lots of recommendations, but looks like hard work; grown from natural grape yeast
(tags: sourdough starter la-brea-bakery baking food recipes)On The Record » Guest post – 500 Words of Summer – Mumblin’ Deaf Ro : Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats
(tags: mumblin-deaf-ro statistics music irma music-industry piracy filesharing)
Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza : wow, fantastic review — real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA’s latest videogame
(tags: crime games japan videogames yakuza sega)Man Lives In Futuristic Sci-Fi World Where All His Interactions Take Place In Cyberspace | The Onion : ‘In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.’ brilliant pisstake of mid-’90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)
(tags: the-onion funny future futurism humour internet sf via:walter journalism cyberpunk 1990s cyberspace)Irish Hackerspaces Week : hackerspaces in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast, running events all next week (08-14 – 08-22)
(tags: hackerspace hacking ireland conferences events)
John Graham-Cumming: Shut up and ship : on “Haystack”, a vaporous censorship-evading product aimed at Iran’s internet surveillance, which as of yet is a site soliciting donations and a lot of press, and not a lot of techie details
(tags: haystack privacy censorship filtering surveillance jgc crypto open-source)
Cache on Delivery : Mind-boggling presentation; a load of sites are exposing memcacheds to the public internet, with no auth, and full of juicy data (samples included). iptables is hard
(tags: memcached security hacks exploits)Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images : surprise! ‘The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.’
(tags: airport dhs fail privacy security surveillance tsa big-brother x-ray)
Zed Shaw debunking some poll/epoll myths : “benchmarks disprove common wisdom” shocker
(tags: epoll io linux networking performance scalability mongrel2 zedshaw poll)
Why Jailbreak? – The Unofficial Apple Weblog : some good Cydia app tips. also glad to see piracy didn’t appear ’til page 3
(tags: cydia jailbreak iphone apps)
Kaprekar’s constant : ‘6174 .. is notable for the following property: Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits. (Leading zeros are allowed.); Arrange the digits in ascending and then in descending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary; Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number; Go back to step 2. The process will reach 6174 in at most 7 iterations’
(tags: 6174 constants cool maths mathematics numbers kaprekar wow)
Keyboard shortcuts for positioning windows in Mac OS X : from Tony Finch. great stuff, I used to use shortcuts like this all the time on my Linux desktops to avoid rodentage
(tags: mouse keyboard navigation windows shortcuts scripting ui automator)Draft Functional Spec of Hadopi “securisation” software : Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking “workarounds” (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?
(tags: hadopi piracy filtering snooping big-brother 1984 via:adulau vpn tor blocklists)
XOR patent killed Commodore-Amiga : ‘Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn’t allow any CD-32’s into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32’s that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end’
(tags: cd32 commodore computers history ip patents software swpats xor amiga)Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O [PDF] : classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
(tags: java async io jvm linux performance scalability threading threads server nio paul-tyma mailinator)autojump : interesting idea; extend “cd” to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to “jump” to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
(tags: autojump cli bash command-line navigation terminal shell directory cd)Mac OS X command-line tricks : not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I’m stuck using the missus’ laptop ;)
(tags: apple bash cli osx mac sysadmin shell tricks command-line)
Schneier on Security: Internet Worm Targets SCADA : ‘Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.’
(tags: wow malware worms passwords security schneier policies defaults)Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution : from last week’s CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
(tags: spam anti-spam ceas conference papers research spamassassin adversarial-classification evolution arms-race via:jd)JotNot for iPhone : another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
(tags: apps document evernote iphone jotnot scanner scan photos dropbox google-docs)DocScanner : document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it’ll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
(tags: android apps evernote iphone mobile ocr pdf document scanner scan)
Computer History Museum: MacPaint and QuickDraw source code : wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
(tags: via:jgc apple code history mac source bill-atkinson macpaint pascal quickdraw graphics)
Technology to track trad : TunePal — “Shazam for trad”. play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it’ll link to the tune’s name, history, discography, and where it’s been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
(tags: trad irish via:klillington music recognition machine-learning)
Brick, A Literary Journal: Issue 85: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock : ‘The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society’: among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
(tags: france paris underground toread ux catacombs marquis writing)NeoRouter : establish an overlay, encrypted private “virtual LAN” for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
(tags: firewall hamachi network openwrt remote router security vpn desktop-sharing neorouter tomato)
How do I do silicone sealant neatly? : so that’s how it’s done. now to retry my DIY botch job
(tags: silicone sealant diy home howto)GNU coreutils sort(1) now uses all available CPUs : using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
(tags: via:pixelbeat sort coreutils gnu multicore parallelism)REPLs suck, I want something block oriented : good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn’t a usable approach for block-oriented languages
(tags: languages repl programming ruby hacking coding block-oriented)
Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail : first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws — for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
(tags: dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet)
xboxdrv : ‘a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.’
(tags: drivers xbox360 controllers remote linux ubuntu xboxdrv joystick input)
moreutils : ‘a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.’ these are really, really nifty (via popey)
(tags: via:popey unix cli command-line linux moreutils sponge pee ts vipe zrun perl for:pixelbeat)
Ubuntu One Time Passwords/Single Use Passwords HOWTO : I should do this on my hosts
(tags: ssh server security opie otp skey one-time-passwords ubuntu linux sshd)FlexGet : torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
(tags: bittorrent automation boxee linux python rss torrents tv flexget)
Interpolation search : neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
(tags: algorithms programming search via:jzawodny)Overclocking SSL : techie details from Adam Langley on how Google’s been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
(tags: certificates encryption google https latency speed ssl tcp tls web performance)Cory Doctorow’s working environment : hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
(tags: cory-doctorow geek howto lifehacks ubuntu productivity tips tools)
O2.ie blocking popular image-hosting sites imgur.com, imageshack.com : apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
(tags: iwf fail blocking filtering o2 ireland imgur imageshack censorship fps)
Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right : ‘every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.’
(tags: broadband finland legal rights law human-rights three-strikes)new gastropub opening in Stoneybatter : there goes the neighbourhood! ‘L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.’ Sign me up
(tags: gastropubs stoneybattery dublin d7 food drink)
Date::Manip Error in Ubuntu 10.04 : “XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly” — caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
(tags: date-manip xmltv breakage mythtv ubuntu lucid 10.04)Misco.ie : another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
(tags: shopping components hardware ireland)
Signature-based AV is failing : on average across the AV industry, 40% block rates just after 0-hour of a new malware sample, rising to 60% after 5 days. sounds like the AV industry is losing, if this chart is valid. (via Terry Zink)
(tags: via:tzink malware av fail accuracy detection false-negatives scanners viruses)Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs [PDF] : sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
(tags: sort merge hash join databases performance cpu simd multicore)
Network Advertising Initiative: Opt-Out of Behavioural Advertising : ‘developed for the express purpose of allowing consumers to “opt out” of the behavioral advertising delivered by our member companies’ — opt out of the top 50 or so ad programs with a couple of clicks, via Jordan Sissel. great stuff
(tags: ads advertising browser cookies via:jordansissel google marketing opt-out privacy tracking web behavioral)
Monitor anything and get free notifications on your iPhone – amix.dk : using notifo.com, which has an app in the App Store allowing anyone to send push notifications via their web site. I can see lots of uses for this, not least to evade SMS fees ;)
(tags: notification push sms iphone notifo)
Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market “flash crash?” : wonderful; our world’s economies are now more networked than ever, and vulnerable to the attacks which that enables. Have we learned nothing from the last few years?
(tags: networking internet ddos stock-markets security)
John Graham-Cumming: What’s wrong with Flash Cookies? : Macromedia created a “parallel” cookie infrastructure, which is not cleared/controlled by browser cookie controls. Heinous! I had no idea. Checking mine, it was full of ad-tracking crap
(tags: cookies flash privacy crapware ads)
All slides/notes from the first 2 days of Velocity 2010 : PDFs, docs, links
(tags: slides scalability velocity conferences scaling pdf)Introduction to Unity Launcher « Canonical Design : The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too
(tags: canonical ui unity linux gnome desktop design)
The Deus Ex 3 demonstration, blow-by-blow : PC Gamer : big thumbs-up for ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution’. I’m looking forward to it
(tags: deus-x games xbox previews)We’re Back… so long MongoDB! · Blue74 : MongoDB war story — records going missing, eek
(tags: mongodb mysql nosql rant stability beta)Hadoop and the fight against shape-shifting spam : Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale
(tags: hadoop yahoo anti-spam filtering)Petit: Log Analysis : log analyzer; removes common strings and patterns from log files, identifying outliers and hapaxen as “interesting”. also does charting of frequencies etc.
(tags: logs logging analysis loganalysis syslog tools)self-replicating configuration in Conway’s Game Of Life created : The “spaceship” configuration replicates in 33699586 generations, using 2 construction arms and a volley of gliders circulating between them
(tags: via:newscientist game-of-life life cellular-automata gliders self-replicating)
UPC file-sharing court action begins – The Irish Times : it’s with Mr Justice Peter Charleton again — the Colmcille-misquoting judge from the Eircom case. here’s hoping the Data Protection Commissioner gets off their arse and does their job this time around
(tags: upc ireland law filesharing irma copyright)
SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder : good idea — generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)
(tags: via:omgubuntu avi mplayer conversion divx encoding howto rip xvid video mencoder)build a Yagi-Uda wifi booster from styrofoam and copper wire : nifty link from Heise; works for 802.11b and 11g. Unfortunately I think my own wifi issues are to do with dying AP hardware
(tags: wifi 802.11g 802.11b wireless yagi antennas diy hacking hardware)MapReduce as a way to cope with high-latency memory : interesting thoughts from Kragen
(tags: kragen thoughts random mapreduce memory speed latency)
O2 iPhone Customers – Get out of contract! – boards.ie : wow, O2 Ireland seem to have dropped the ball something rotten here. customers taking advantage of this in droves to escape the heinous 18-month lock-in
(tags: o2 ireland loophole contract law)Designing an Integrated Map for a Visionary Public Transport System for Dublin : excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)
(tags: via:antoin bus travel dublin ireland rapid-transit public-transport design usability maps mapping)
Chatroulette Working On Genital Recognition Algorithm : just *male* genitalia, mind. I dread to think of what the training corpus looks like
(tags: chatroulette algorithms machine-learning genitalia nsfw slashdot)