Author: dailylinks

nice demo of sharding a counter to avoid locking overhead under heavy load

great detailed post about SmugMug’s EC2 horizontal-scaling controller

insanely complex, requiring hacks in about:config followed by pasting a line of raw Javascript into the address bar. wtf Firefox? (via:wwhyte)

“xdotool”, command-line app to perform window management manipulation for X11, similar to sawfish-ui or Enlightenment’s proprietary UIs, can now activate/warp to windows. must use this to reinstate the Pidgin feature I miss

I’m getting more hits from this Polish article about the Debian/OpenSSL security fiasco, than from many other sources

‘There will be a demonstration at the Barbican in London on July 16th 2008 (outside the BT AGM) protesting against the use of Deep Packet Inspection for the purpose of behavioural advertising (specifically Phorm).’ good plan IMO

good news, Hudson is a fantastic app!

Rev3 closed off access to their BitTorrent tracker, used to distribute legit files; MediaDefender, a supposedly legit company, launched a massive SYN flood in response, wiping out their network for a holiday weekend. incredible — here’s hoping Rev3 sue

‘when he’s hauled out of the swamp by somebody throwing a snake, it was too rubbery and long to be an anaconda. If it was a real anaconda, 2 or 3 people wouldn’t be able to hold it, I can tell you; I’ve tried, and they are enormously strong.’ etc.

Use old user accounts; reject with “550 user unknown” for 6 months; recycle into a spamtrap. This is the technique myself and Matt Sergeant have used for several years; I don’t think I’ve ever noted it on a web-accessible URL though, so here it is

‘Janek Simon unites the old geometric designs of Caucasian and Armenian carpets with the low-resolution abstractness of the Space Invaders’ (via deepdisco)

This GIF is both (a) an imitation-Apple ][-screenshot and (b) valid, compilable C code for Hunt The Wumpus. amazing! it reads: “COMPILE THIS FLAG: gcc -no-integrated-cpp -DGIF89a=”char *s=\”” -x c -W flag.gif”

covering MapReduce, GFS, and — a new one to me — Global Work Queue: ‘like old-time batch processing .. schedules queries into batch jobs and places them on pools of machines. The setup is optimized for running random computations over tons of data.’

more info on the Google backend systems

milk crates hold special status down under — this is excellent

hmm; either the Irish government is hedging its bets regarding stem cells — or the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. Better, but still unclear….

‘the Council (a) doesn’t get it (b) isn’t interested and (c) doesn’t think anyone else would care enough for it to be worth its while’. pathetic — that could do incredible things for Dublin

‘I’ve noticed that in several places (most prominently, Help-About), there is the product version, build number, etc. … We don’t want the customers knowing this information and need it removed.’ genius (via Donal)

‘The Government will ban any EU funding for stem cell research in Ireland, the Irish Foreign Affairs Minister told the Pope today.’ Amazing. This is not the Ireland I was hoping to return to! Are we back in 1980 again? wtf…

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m in a select club of the first victims of the Year 2038 Bug.’

fancy infoviz of discussion threads; as I comment on the page, I think this is overkill, and GMail’s “conversation” view does just fine

“Google TypeKey” in other words

just firewall out RSTs, and the Great Firewall’s keyword blocker is defeated

Mark Pilgrim’s suggested apps for an Ubuntu desktop — some quite good suggestions here, with lots of KDE goodness. I just wish amaroK was as user-friendly and usable as the amazing (but not well-maintained) JuK, though

wow, Adam Shostack joins MS!

The set designer for ’24’ helped design the operations center at the National Counterterrorism Center, apparently. I bet that really helps (via substitute)

‘Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK’, via Ben. I fall between these two stools on a regular basis, or three if you count Hiberno-English as well

author of “Phishing Exposed”, general smart guy where phishing attacks are concerned. (also: Amazon does blogs now?)

Bible annotation using Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” HIT service; a success. However they did invite their blog readers to participate, which would have skewed results by providing willing participants

a great post from John Gruber, pointing out the key problem with DRM — it forces vendor lock-in, and precludes interoperability, as a core design goal

this year’s CEAS, July 27-28 2006. CEAS is reliably the best anti-spam conference; worth attending, although I won’t be this year

‘[the book] is about functional programming techniques in Perl. It’s about how to write functions that can modify and manufacture other functions.’ wow, missed this — sounds AWESOME

it’s pretty hard to find decent maps of Dublin online — these are very good, although not quite Google-maps-shiny, they surpass GMaps’ quality in terms of data (via Sander Temme)

Michi Henning (!) slates the history of CORBA extensively, blaming the OMG’s process and praising the open source community. wow (via slashdot)

for sale: one partially plutonium–contaminated Pacific atoll, 718 miles from its nearest neighbour; unfortunately the golf course is closed. see also Ballard’s ‘Terminal Beach’

Mail.app proprietary crapness. ‘I’m forced to migrate all my mail yet again from yet another proprietary format, and the best documentation I’ve found so far is on LiveJournal. .. somebody deserves to be fired for that.’

Maya meticulously recorded almost every penny/baht/kip/ringgit spent over the course of her 6-month travels through SE Asia. about right, going by my own experience; I wish I’d bought more souvenirs

‘focuses on the development of interoperability solutions for digital media, and the reverse engineering of proprietary systems for which licensing options are non-existent or impractical’ — and have hired Jon Lech Johansen

C|Net’s distributed filesystem, a la GFS, Mogilefs (via acme)

good data on large-scale spammer behaviour as of 2006, presented at NANOG37. Relay-IP-based techniques not so good any more, but we knew that. Unfortunately doesn’t analyze SURBL/URIBL content-oriented DNSBLs, which have picked up the slack nicely

fake 419s, ‘How to Explain Enron to Your Children’, and ‘we falsify commodity markets so that we can deliver physical commodities to our customers at a ridiculously unsustainable price’ — all scraped from the Enron mail corpus

great notes on speeding up javascript; I have a Greasemonkey script this will be useful with, once I get some tuits (via yoz)

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer attends wedding; a parent asks if he’d have a look at their PC; Ballmer spends _no less than two days_ attempting to rid it of encrusted malware infestations — before giving up and shipping it back to Redmond. hilarious

I got slashdotted yesterday! Unfortunately, stock WordPress falls over pretty quickly. Once I managed to get this plugin installed, though, things were a lot better… thumbs up for WP-Cache

I need to do this soon; damn copy-on-write disk images are chewing up my disk space

one large website’s password list analysed; 1.4% of passwords were “123456”, and 2.5% overall began with 1234

Dapper is now released — and is live-upgradable via apt-get. am I stupid enough to do this? quite possibly; I’ve done it for the past 5 upgrades

a message router for pings, for web pages containing microformat data. Interesting to see that Upcoming.org is currently the only ping producer — their pings are then consumed by evdb, the only third-party ping receiver listed

graph of request frequency over the past few days at taint.org; that spike was pretty major

great article on current grid computing, featuring MPI, MapReduce, Hadoop, and promising a new UNIXy thing from tbray called Sigrid (ha!). Mind-boggling quote from Jim Gray: ‘Memory is the new disk. Disk is the new tape.’

spontaneously converts the off-patent anhydrous form of the drug into the patented hemihydrate form, which then successively converts more and more of the anhydrous form, Ice-9-style. Never mind “viral” licenses, this takes the biscuit! (via substitute)

yay me!

argh. avoid iTunes 6 like the plague; Apple changed the DRM again, it’s as yet unbroken, and once you purchase a track, your account is “locked” to the new DRM. This page gives details of the (labourious) process required to escape this nasty trap

Polypaudio looks like Linux sound done right (at last). questions 21-24 of this FAQ list hint at awesome possibilities for LAN-networked speaker systems, even better than http://taint.org/wk/RemotePlaybackWithEsd .

the Ordnance Survey has set up an online shop to sell access to out-of-copyright, public domain maps of Ireland. thanks lads, but I think there’s a word for paying for something that one should be getting for free

‘The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. “Heaven spelled backwards,” he said.’ you stupid, stupid people

oh dear. tip: allowing your “VP of Corporate Communications” to respond is not the way to do it cluetrain-style

‘Tom from GBH and guests, playing Robot-Rock, Distortion-Disko, Electronic, Rock, New Wave Hip-hop, house, punk, electro, downbeat and classics.’ lots of good mashups and remixes, one 2-hour 128kbps MP3 every week

That evening, Ms. Li and her brother joined 15 strangers at the store to demand a group discount on a new television, refrigerator, and washing machine.’ wow (via EirePreneur)

old Llamasoft game images may be distributed and used free of charge to and by anyone. awesome!

any mention of “web 2.0” in a conference, and O’Reilly are firing legal letters — even for events outside the US

Criminal Records Bureau’s “erring on the side of caution” has resulted in around a 9.7% false positive rate, with 2,700 UK job-seekers falsely listed as being convicted criminals

I was wondering why this was such a shambles; now it makes sense. ‘Inefficiency has become a virtue in government’ (via waxy)

Actual running hardware! Looks a lot more realistic than the last mock-ups. I’m more positive now that I hear they have Chris Blizzard and Jim Gettys involved, too

the guy behind the “more DoTs more DoTs more DoTs! 50 DKP MINUS!!” WoW voice-chat recording. I don’t play WoW, but this control freak’s incoherent freakout is hilarious even without knowing all the details

I’ve come around to this conclusion too — attempting to use continuations to implement a web app ‘requires you to write your code in such a way that it can tolerate sudden halts, thread switches, rewinding, and forking of execution’ (via Miguel de Icaza)

‘The response to my essay on plagiarism last week (“Where Have I Read That Before?”) was swift, so here goes: Yes, it is plagiarized. 99% of it. The only original lines, in fact, are the first and the last two’

actually quite accurate! Deserved props for eMusic, Stereogum, Fluxblog, KCRW, Lemon-Red, ILM, and Music For Robots; missed the Hype Machine, though. mind you, that may be just as well

a new website-ribbon campaign from ISIPP, aimed at educating less-techie users on virus/malware avoidance; if you run a consumer-facing website, it’d be fantastic to get this up there

Trial a Niagara, get a free trip to SF! nice one Colm ;)

cat-and-mouse fun with the Bank of England; interesting to hear that Google’s cache is still trackable via CSS references

A python framework based on one-way pipes and generators, from the BBC, used to build their “Macro” super-PVR. May be some ideas for IPC::DirQueue here

according to social-network graph analysis of the Enron mail corpus, “one of the ‘central’ players was Ken Lay’s secretary”. ha! (via robotwisdom)

Harri Hursti’s report for BlackBoxVoting.org; it appears the boot loader will automatically reflash itself, if presented with a suitably-named file on PCMCIA media, and access to the PCMCIA slot is protected only by a few standard Philips-head screws. wow

great thread of comments sparked off by Paul Graham’s rather ill-informed presentation at XTech2006. Cory’s comment is spot-on, on both sides

Google’s scrapbook-clone service. first impressions: Firefox extension = good, lots of Flash, URL’s hardly catchy, no sign of RSS feeds

spam filters beating humans at performing spam classification quite a lot, it turns out. Everyone should give SpamOrHam.org a go!

good data; there does seem to be an appreciable effect

photo of Coldcut’s live setup — structured cabling system required

Downloadable filesystem images for Xen; all Linux so far, modified to run as Xen guests out of the box

‘what if your Singleton has a handle to some limited resource, like a database or file handle? I guess you get to keep that sucker open until your program ends’. YES (via mjd)

excellent software-development interview advice

iPod-sized ambient hardware loop player from China; the tee-shirts are fantastic

DHS ineptitude strikes again

some really authoritative thumbs-down comments from Valdis Krebs and John Robb

interesting further notes; apparently the Trintech Smart 5000 PINPad terminals run Linux, and can be managed remotely

‘Communities are human business debuggers. Why not know the problems, address them and prove that they’re fixed all in public?’ excellent article, with the solid testimonial of Threadless backing it up

‘former Iowa congressman Edward Mezvinsky was caught up in a 419 scam, and stole from his law clients, friends, and even his mother-in-law .. He is serving more than six years in prison after pleading guilty to thirty-one counts of fraud.’ bloody hell

Suw Charman and a load of others (see comments) lay into the BBC’s “citizen journalism” conference: “a complete waste of time”. ouch

‘Please visit and take a minute to post positive comments about BlueSecurity. BlueSecurity is encouraging us to do such things so let’s help them spread the good word.’ explains a lot; several other astroturf coordination forums at castlecops.com, too

they’re no longer shipping games, electronics, or home/garden items to Ireland. what with this and the crappy shipping, looks like they’ve written off the Irish market for some reason

good points from Joe Drumgoole; what works for Irish VCs isn’t necessarily aligned with what’s good for Ireland’s high-tech industry

First doodled on a placemat by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike for Plan 9 in 1992 (via era)