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)
Author: dailylinks
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