Category: Uncategorized

• ElementCostInDataStructures

  "The cost per element in major data structures offered by Java and Guava (r11)]." A very useful reference!

  Ever wondered what's the cost of adding each entry to a HashMap? Or one new element in a TreeSet? Here are the answers: the cost per-entry for each well-known structure in Java and Guava. You can use this to estimate the cost of a structure, like this: if the per-entry cost of a structure is 32 bytes, and your structure contains 1024 elements, the structure's footprint will be around 32 kilobytes. Note that non-tree mutable structures are amortized (adding an element might trigger a resize, and be expensive, otherwise it would be cheap), making the measurement of the "average per element cost" measurement hard, but you can expect that the real answers are close to what is reported below.

  (tags: java coding guava reference memory cost performance data-structures)

• SmoothLifeL

  'A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers'. 'SmoothLifeL supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, 'wickstretchers' and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs.' paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567 , and slides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII (via jwz)

  (tags: life games emergent-behaviour algorithms graphics via:jwz cool eye-candy conways-life floating-point continuous gliders)

• Trident: a high-level abstraction for realtime computation

  built on Storm:

  Trident is a new high-level abstraction for doing realtime computing on top of Twitter Storm, available in Storm 0.8.0. It allows you to seamlessly mix high throughput (millions of messages per second), stateful stream processing with low latency distributed querying. If you're familiar with high level batch processing tools like Pig or Cascading, the concepts of Trident will be very familiar - Trident has joins, aggregations, grouping, functions, and filters. In addition to these, Trident adds primitives for doing stateful, incremental processing on top of any database or persistence store. Trident has consistent, exactly-once semantics, so it is easy to reason about Trident topologies.

  (tags: distributed realtime twitter storm trident distcomp stream-processing low-latency nathan-marz)

• Adam Ferriss

  glitch art, colour separations, etc. (via mlkshk)

  (tags: art glitch graphics colour)

• Cliff Click's 2008 JavaOne talk about the NonBlockingHashTable

  I'm a bit late to this data structure -- highly scalable, nearly lock-free, benchmarks very well (except with the G1 GC): http://edwwang.com/blog/2012/02/10/concurrent-hashmap-benchmark/ . Having said that, it doesn't cope well with frequently-changing unique keys: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3563980&group_id=194172&atid=948362 . More background at: http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2007-03-26-non-blocking-hashtable and http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2007-04-01-non-blocking-hashtable-part-2 This was used in Cassandra for a while, although I think the above bug may have caused its removal?

  (tags: nonblockinghashtable data-structures hashmap concurrency scaling java jvm)

• Ingenious Dublin

  Excellent stuff, by Mary Mulvihill:

  Where in Dublin can you see a Victorian diving bell? What about the skeleton of Tommy, the prince’s elephant? The site of the world’s first earthquake experiment? Or the world’s sports pirate radio broadcast? Our new e-book Ingenious Dublin has all these fascinating stories and more. It is packed with information, places to visit, and lots of illustrations, and covers the city and county, from Skerries windmills to Ballybetagh’s fossil deer.'

  EUR 4.99 for the Kindle e-book. I'll buy that!

  (tags: kindle reading books mary-mulvihill science facts dublin ireland history)

• Weathering the Unexpected - ACM Queue

  Failures happen, and resilience drills help organizations prepare for them.

  Good write-up on Google's DiRT (Disaster Recovery Test) procedures, clearly based on Amazon's Gameday exercises. ;) See also http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2371297 for a moderated discussion including Jesse Robbins and John Allspaw

  (tags: game-day tests disaster-recovery dirt exercises history amazon google etsy resilience acm)

• Meeting A Troll...

  This is a must-read. One journalist's experience of constant online harassment by an antisemitic internet troll, and their eventual unmasking.

  (tags: internet trolling harassment trolls antisemitism stories twitter)

• Your Approach to Saving British Newspapers Will Not Work

  the bad-anti-spam-idea checklist, repurposed

  (tags: checklists via:trish-byrne funny media news newspapers uk ireland)

• Facebook monitoring cache with Claspin

  reasonably nice heatmap viz for large-scale instance monitoring. I like the "snake" pattern for racks

  (tags: facebook monitoring dataviz heatmaps claspin cache memcached ui)

• The Oireachtas great leap backwards: it’s not just about KildareStreet.com

  'it appears that the Oireachtas has decided to save time and money by eliminating entirely the stage in their workflow that parsed raw debates records into XML. This stage has been replaced with a (presumably automated) process that generates web pages from Lotus Notes. It’s easy to see how somebody with little appreciation of the value of providing open public data in a structured format could have viewed this stage as a costly luxury, and its elimination as a simple and obvious “efficiency”. It’s particularly disappointing, however, that nobody in the decision-making process seemed to be aware of how much of a backward step this “efficiency” would represent. As John Handelaar of KildareStreet.com told The Irish Times, “We are replacing 2012 with 1995 overnight”.'

  (tags: kildare-street open-data opengov ireland data oireachtas)

• PCRE Performance Project

  Excellent stuff. Using "sljit", a stackless platform-independent JIT compiler, this compiles Perl-compatible regular expressions to machine code on ARM, x86, MIPS and PowerPC platforms, resulting in 'similar matching speed to DFA based engines (like re2) on common patterns' with Perl compatibility. 'This work has been released as part of PCRE 8.20 and above. Now (PCRE 8.31), nearly all PCRE features are supported including UTF-8/16 and partial matching.'

  (tags: pcre regexps regex performance optimization jit compilation dfa re2 via:akohli)

• Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database [PDF]

  Abstract: Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner. To appear in: OSDI'12: Tenth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, Hollywood, CA, October, 2012.

  (tags: database distributed google papers toread pdf scalability distcomp transactions cap consistency)

• NCBI ROFL: Probably the most horrifying scientific lecture ever

  In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G.S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with papaverine to induce a penile erection. This was the first time that an effective medical therapy for erectile dysfunction (ED) was described, and was a historic development in the management of ED. The way in which this information was first reported was completely unique and memorable, and provides an interesting context for the development of therapies for ED. I was present at this extraordinary lecture, and the details are worth sharing. Although this lecture was given more than 20 years ago, the details have remained fresh in my mind, for reasons which will become obvious.

  Go on, guess.

  (tags: medicine science funny erectile-dysfunction omgwtf conferences)

• Yuri Suzuki: London Underground circuit map radio

  Japanese designer yuri suzuki has sent designboom images of his 'london underground circuit maps' project developed as part of the designers in residence program at the london design museum, on show until january 13th, 2013. responding to 'thrift' as a theme, suzuki's work explores communication systems in consumer electronics. a printed circuit board (PCB) is used as a precedent for developing a electrical circuit influenced by harry beck's iconic london underground map diagrams. by strategically positioning certain speaker, resistor and battery components throughout the map, users can visually understand the complex networks associated with electricity and how power is generated within a radio.

  Beautifully done (via jwz.)

  (tags: electronics london art design underground travel yuri-suzuki circuitry)

• The meanings and origins of ‘feck’

  It's a "minced oath", apparently:

  'Feck is a popular minced oath in Ireland, occupying ground between the ultra-mild expletive flip and the often taboo (but also popular) fuck. It’s strongly associated with Irish speech, and serves a broad range of linguistic purposes that I’ll address briefly in this post.'

  It doesn't derive from the obvious source:

  So where does the curse, the not-quite-rude word, come from? It’s commonly assumed to stem from its coarser cousin fuck, the simple vowel change undercutting its power and making it more suitable for public expression. But Julian Walker, an educator at the British Library, offers a more roundabout route: “In faith” becomes the improbable “in faith’s kin” shortened to “i’fackins”, which gradually shrinks to “fac” and “feck”.

  (tags: feck swearing ireland irish hiberno-english father-ted etymology cursing)

• SnapTree benchmarks

  nice concurrent Map data structure for the JVM; beats out ConcurrentHashMap, ConcurrentLinkedHashMap from guava, ConcurrentSkipListMap under both CMS and G1 garbage collectors.

  (tags: concurrency benchmarks hashmap map data-structures java jvm snaptree)

• Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack

  Worrying stuff from the LBT team. ATM RNGs are predictable, and can be spoofed by intermediate parties:

  'So far we have performed more than 1000 transactions at more than 20 ATMs and a number of POS terminals, and are collating a data set for statistical analysis. We have developed a passive transaction logger which can be integrated into the substrate of a real bank card, which records up to 100 unpredictable numbers in its EEPROM. Our analysis is ongoing but so far we have established non-uniformity of unpredictable numbers in half of the ATMs we have looked at. First, there is an easier attack than predicting the RNG. Since the unpredictable number is generated by the terminal but the relying party is the issuing bank, any intermediate party – from POS terminal software, to payment switches, or a middleman on the phone line – can intercept and superimpose their own choice of UN. Attacks such as those of Nohl and Roth, and MWR Labs show that POS terminals can be remotely hacked simply by inserting a sabotaged smartcard into the terminal.

  (tags: atm banking security attack prngs spoofing banks chip-and-pin emv smartcards)

• New UK Conservative Party Co-Chair Grant Shapps Founded Google Spamming Business

  Wow. Scummy stuff.

  Shapps founded HowToCorp in 2005, a site that, among other products, pitches the TrafficPaymaster software. The software apparently “scrapes” or copies content from all over the web, from RSS feeds to even sets of search results, to automatically generate pages that probably make little sense to the human visitor but which may pick up some traffic from Google and, in turn, generate clicks on Google AdSense or other ads.

  Google are not happy: On Sunday sources at Google confirmed TrafficPaymaster was in “violation” of its policies and that its search engine’s algorithms had been equipped to drop the ranking of any webpages created using HowToCorp’s software. Officially, Google said it does not comment on individual cases. “We have strict policies in place to ensure web users are presented with useful ads when browsing sites in our content network and to ensure our advertisers reach an engaged audience. If we are alerted to a site which breaks our AdSense policies, we will review it and can remove it from our network.”

  (tags: grant-shapps uk politics tories spammers spamming spinning adsense google spam trafficpaymaster)

• NunatsiaqOnline 2012-09-06: The First Non-Inuk on the Moon

  No, I am not a conspiracy theorist who believes that Armstrong’s moon landing was faked at some mysterious location in the Nevada desert. Armstrong reached the moon. But his accolades are undeserved because he was not first. All right-thinking Nunavummiut know this, because we know that Inuit regularly visited the moon for centuries. David Iqaqrialu said as much in a heated exchange in the Nunavut legislature on May 6, 2002. We know it was heated because he prefaced his remarks by telling the Speaker, “I am starting to get hot under the collar...” He then went on to say, as reported in Hansard, “...it is not really related to the question that I posed, but this is background material. Inuit had reached the moon quite some time ago during the shamanistic ages, prior to the Americans reaching it with their machines and finding out it wasn’t what they thought it was.”

  (via Dave Walsh)

  (tags: inuit via:daev shaman nunavut neil-armstrong moon space exploration)

• Dublin City contact numbers for potholes, dangerous drivers, illegal parking etc.

  I'm sure these are about as useful as a chocolate teapot, but what the hey

  (tags: dublin parking cycling roads safety potholes reporting)

• Knots on Mars! (and a few thoughts on NASA's knots)

  amazing post from the International Guild of Knot Tyers Forum:

  While a few of the folks here are no doubt aware, it might surprise most people to learn that knots tied in cords and thin ribbons have probably traveled on every interplanetary mission ever flown. If human civilization ends tomorrow, interplanetary landers, orbiters, and deep space probes will preserve evidence of both the oldest and newest of human technologies for millions of years. Knots are still used in this high-tech arena because cable lacing has long been the preferred cable management technique in aerospace applications. That it remains so to this day is a testament to the effectiveness of properly chosen knots tied by skilled craftspeople. It also no doubt has a bit to do with the conservative nature of aerospace design and engineering practices. Proven technologies are rarely cast aside unless they no longer fulfill requirements or there is something substantially better available. While the knots used for cable lacing in general can be quite varied -- in some cases even a bit idiosyncratic -- NASA has in-house standards for the knots and methods used on their spacecraft. These are specified in NASA Technical Standard NASA-STD-8739.4 -- Crimping, Interconnecting Cables, Harnesses, and Wiring. As far as I've been able to identify in the rover images below, all of the lacings shown are one of two of the several patterns specified in the standard. The above illustration shows the so-called "Spot Tie". It is a clove hitch topped by two half-knots in the form of a reef (square) knot. In addition to its pure binding role, it is also used to affix cable bundles to tie-down point.

  Some amazing scholarship on knot technology in this post -- lots to learn! (via Tony Finch, iirc)

  (tags: via:fanf mars nasa science knots tying rope cables cabling geek aerospace standards)

• Estonia introduces coding classes to 8-year-olds

  'ProgreTiiger education will start with students in the first grade, which starts around the age of 7 or 8 for Estonians. The compsci education will continue through a student’s final years of public school, around age 16. Teachers are being trained on the new skills, and private sector IT companies are also getting involved, which makes sense, given that these entities will likely end up being the long-term beneficiaries of a technologically literate populace. The ProgreTiiger program is launching at a few pilot schools and will soon be rolling out to all general education schools in Estonia.'

  (tags: estonia education coding programming kids children students learning school)

• Avoiding Hash Lookups in a Ruby Implementation

  'If I were to sum up the past 6 years I've spent optimizing JRuby it would be with the following phrase: Get Rid Of Hash Lookups.' This has been a particular theme of some recent optimization hacks I've been working on. Hashes may be O(1) to read, on average, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're the right tool for performance... (via Declan McGrath)

  (tags: via:declanmcgrath hash optimization ruby performance jruby hashing data-structures big-o optimisation)

• River Poddle underneath the city of Dublin's streets

  Rarely-seen pictures of Dublin's underground river which runs beneath Dublin Castle. I wonder if these are what those blokes spotted entering the drains were up to

  (tags: hidden-dublin ireland dublin history poddle rivers waterways subterrainean)

• Striped (Guava: Google Core Libraries for Java 13.0.1 API)

  Nice piece of Guava concurrency infrastructure in the latest release:

  A striped Lock/Semaphore/ReadWriteLock. This offers the underlying lock striping similar to that of ConcurrentHashMap in a reusable form, and extends it for semaphores and read-write locks. Conceptually, lock striping is the technique of dividing a lock into many stripes, increasing the granularity of a single lock and allowing independent operations to lock different stripes and proceed concurrently, instead of creating contention for a single lock.
  The guarantee provided by this class is that equal keys lead to the same lock (or semaphore), i.e. if (key1.equals(key2)) then striped.get(key1) == striped.get(key2) (assuming Object.hashCode() is correctly implemented for the keys). Note that if key1 is not equal to key2, it is not guaranteed that striped.get(key1) != striped.get(key2); the elements might nevertheless be mapped to the same lock. The lower the number of stripes, the higher the probability of this happening.
  Prior to this class, one might be tempted to use Map, where K represents the task. This maximizes concurrency by having each unique key mapped to a unique lock, but also maximizes memory footprint. On the other extreme, one could use a single lock for all tasks, which minimizes memory footprint but also minimizes concurrency. Instead of choosing either of these extremes, Striped allows the user to trade between required concurrency and memory footprint. For example, if a set of tasks are CPU-bound, one could easily create a very compact Striped of availableProcessors() * 4 stripes, instead of possibly thousands of locks which could be created in a Map structure.

  (tags: locking concurrency java guava semaphores coding via:twitter)

• HotSpot JVM garbage collection options cheat sheet (v2)

  'In this article I have collected a list of options related to GC tuning in JVM. This is not a comprehensive list, I have only collected options which I use in practice (or at least understand why I may want to use them). Compared to previous version a few useful diagnostic options was added. Additionally section for G1 specific options was introduced.'

  (tags: hotspot jvm coding gc java performance)

• Martin "Disruptor" Thompson's Single Writer Principle

  Contains these millisecond estimates for highly-contended inter-thread signalling when incrementing a 64-bit counter in java:

  One Thread300
  One Thread with Memory Barrier4,700
  One Thread with CAS5,700
  Two Threads with CAS18,000
  One Thread with Lock10,000
  Two Threads with Lock118,000
  

  Undoubtedly not realistic for a lot of cases, but it's still useful for order-of-magnitude estimates of locking cost. Bottom line: don't lock if you can avoid it, even with 'volatile' or AtomicFoo types.

  (tags: java jvm performance coding concurrency threading cas locking)

• Locks & Condition Variables - Latency Impact

  Firstly, this is 3 orders of magnitude greater latency than what I illustrated in the previous article using just memory barriers to signal between threads. This cost comes about because the kernel needs to get involved to arbitrate between the threads for the lock, and then manage the scheduling for the threads to awaken when the condition is signalled. The one-way latency to signal a change is pretty much the same as what is considered current state of the art for network hops between nodes via a switch. It is possible to get ~1µs latency with InfiniBand and less than 5µs with 10GigE and user-space IP stacks. Secondly, the impact is clear when letting the OS choose what CPUs the threads get scheduled on rather than pinning them manually. I've observed this same issue across many use cases whereby Linux, in default configuration for its scheduler, will greatly impact the performance of a low-latency system by scheduling threads on different cores resulting in cache pollution. Windows by default seems to make a better job of this.

  (tags: locking concurrency java jvm signalling locks linux threading)

• Evolution of SoundCloud's Architecture

  nice write-up. nginx, Rails, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Cassandra, Elastic Search, HAProxy

  (tags: soundcloud webdev architecture scaling scalability)

• What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

  'Bike thievery is essentially a risk-free crime. If you were a criminal, that might just strike your fancy. If Goldman Sachs didn’t have more profitable market inefficencies to exploit, they might be out there arbitraging stolen bikes.' Good summary, and I suspect a lot applies in Dublin too -- flea markets and vanloads of stolen bikes being sent to other cities for reselling.

  (tags: via:hn economics crime bikes theft goldman-sachs)

• The urban SUVs of bicycles

  Great (Dublin-focused) writeup on cargo bikes

  (tags: cargo-bikes cycling commute kids dutch-bikes bikes)

• 1024cores

  Some good algorithms and notes by Dmitry Vyukov on 'lockfree, waitfree, obstruction-free synchronization algorithms and data structures, scalability-oriented architecture, multicore/multiprocessor design patterns, high-performance computing, threading technologies and libraries (OpenMP, TBB, PPL), message-passing systems and related topics.' The catalog of lock-free queue implementations is particularly extensive (via Sergio Bossa)

  (tags: algorithms concurrency articles dmitry-vyukov go c++ coding via:sergio-bossa)

• Sting op exposes Andrews over FF Twitter rants - National News - Independent.ie

  Incredible sting op uncovers the real identity of an anonymous Twitter account posting Fianna Fail gossip:

  He discovered that each tweet had originated from the Twitter web interface, meaning it had been posted from a web browser on a computer, rather than sent from a mobile phone or other portable device. Based on the times that tweets were posted by @brianformerff, he deduced that the Tweets were being posted while the user was on a work break, using a company computer or an internet cafe. The next stage in the hunt was uncovering the IP address of the computer where the tweets originated. "I created my own web redirection service which would allow me to take links to articles of interest, for example in the Irish Times, and then transform them into short links that would pass through a redirection server I controlled. In this way, if someone read the tweets and clicked on the link, I would be able to establish the IP address of the computer that was being used at the time." The author created a new twitter account, @john_cant _type, based on the persona of a politics student based in Kildare. He started sending several messages and tweets to "brian" and other users to establish himself as a genuine twitter user. Eventually @brianformerff responded to a post from @john_cant_type to a link to an article at Silicon Republic. The bait was taken and the IP address was tracked to an internet cafe, Amazon cyber/net Rathmines which offers web access "at the very reasonable rate of €1/hour". What happened next descended almost into the realms of farce. The author waited for tweets from @brianformerff and then rushed to the internet cafe to try and catch Chris Andrews. Eventually the plan worked and the author used photography and video surveillance, even taking covert photographs of tweets as they were being posted in the internet cafe by Chris Andrews and analysing if the word count and structure matched the tweets appearing in cyberspace under the tag @brianformerff.

  (tags: chris-andrews twitter surveillance privacy anonymity politics ireland fianna-fail)

• Rootbeer

  The Rootbeer GPU Compiler makes it easy to use Graphics Processing Units from within Java. Rootbeer is more advanced that CUDA or OpenCL Java Language Bindings. With bindings the developer must serialize complex graphs of objects into arrays of primitive types. With Rootbeer this is done automatically. Also with language bindings, the developer must write the GPU kernel in CUDA or OpenCL. With Rootbeer a static analysis of the Java Bytecode is done (using Soot) and CUDA code is automatically generated. [...] All of the familar Java code you have been writing can be executed on the GPU.

  (tags: gpu java coding cuda compiler)

• "In Which The Irish Invent Twitter in 1984"

  A fascinating story of 1980s tech history -- 'The initial Text Tell PX-1000 was developed by Text Lite Ltd. in Ireland in the early 1980s, probably in 1983. It allowed people to create simple text messages and send them by phone anywhere in the world. It had a built-in memory that could hold up to 7400 characters. The firmware inside the PX-1000 was written by West-Tec Ltd. in Ireland, who were probably also the hardware manufacturers. [... A later version was] the Philips version of the PX-1000Cr, as it features advanced cryptographic capabilities. It was intended for small companies and journalists, and was also used by the Dutch Government. [...] it played an important role in the fight for Nelson Mandela's release from prison.'

  (tags: nelson-mandela ireland history crypto texting text-lite 1980s philips)

• French illegal downloads agency Hadopi may be abolished

  According to recent statistics, Hadopi has sent 1 million warning emails, 99,000 "strike two" letters and identified 314 people for referral to the courts for possible disconnection. No one has actually been disconnected. According to Aurelie Filipetti, culture minister in the new French Government, Hadopi has been nothing but a waste of money. "€12 million per year and 60 officials; that's an expensive way to send 1 million emails," Filipetti said. "Hadopi has not fulfilled its mission of developing legal downloads. I prefer to reduce the funding of things that have not been proven to be useful."

  0 disconnections. Not one.

  (tags: hadopi privacy law three-strikes france money)

• NASA's Mars Rover Crashed Into a DMCA Takedown

  An hour or so after Curiosity’s 1.31 a.m. EST landing in Gale Crater, I noticed that the space agency’s main YouTube channel had posted a 13-minute excerpt of the stream. Its title was in an uncharacteristic but completely justified all caps: “NASA LANDS CAR-SIZE ROVER BESIDE MARTIAN MOUNTAIN.” When I returned to the page ten minutes later, [...] the video was gone, replaced with an alien message: “This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that.” That is to say, a NASA-made public domain video posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel, documenting the landing of a $2.5 billion Mars rover mission paid for with public taxpayer money, was blocked by YouTube because of a copyright claim by a private news service.

  (tags: dmca google fail nasa copyright false-positives scripps youtube video mars)

• High-frequency trading: The fast and the furious | The Economist

  "The NYMEX panel found that Infinium had finished writing the algorithm only the day before it introduced it to the market, and had tested it for only a couple of hours in a simulated trading environment to see how it would perform. The firm's normal testing processes take six to eight weeks. When the algorithm started its frenetic buying spree, the measures designed to shut it down automatically did not work. One was supposed to turn the system off if a maximum order size was breached, but because the machine was placing lots of small orders rather than a single big one the shutdown was not triggered. The other measure was meant to prevent Infinium from selling or buying more than a certain number of contracts, but because of an error in the way the rogue algorithm had been written, this, too, failed to spot a problem."

  (tags: hft automation trading markets stocks nymex bugs software)

• Lessons in website security anti-patterns by Tesco : Troy Hunt, an Aussie software architect working on a .Net security product called ASafaWeb, does a great job extensively deconstructing Tesco's appalling website security on their shopping site. In the process, he gets this wonderful tweet from their customer-care account: "@troyhunt Let me assure you that all customer passwords are stored securely & in line with industry standards across online retailers." As he says, this is a clear demonstration that Tesco is in the first stage of the four stages of competence -- "unconscious incompetence": "The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognise the deficit." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence )
  (tags: tesco security passwords web http https ssl funny dot-net shopping uk customer-care)

• Accident: Ryanair B738 and American B763 at Barcelona on Apr 14th 2011 : An accident report concerning a Ryanair flight.

  An American Airlines Boeing 767-300, registration N366AA performing flight AA-67 from Barcelona,SP (Spain) to New York JFK, NY (USA), had taxied to the holding point runway 25L and was holding short of the runway. A Ryanair Boeing 737-800, registration EI-EKB performing flight FR-8136 from Barcelona,SP (Spain) to Ibiza,SP (Spain) with 169 passengers and 6 crew, was taxiing along Barcelona's taxiway K for departure from runway 25L and was maneouvering to pass behind the Boeing 767-300. A number of passengers on board of the Boeing 737-800 observed the right hand wing of the aircraft contact the tailplane of the Boeing 767-300 and rose out of their seats attracting the attention of a flight attendant. A passenger told the flight attendant, that their aircraft had hit the aircraft besides them. The flight attendant contacted the purser, who instructed her to contact the flight deck, she contacted the flight deck and informed the captain that passengers had seen their aircraft had hit another aircraft. The captain responded however everything was fine and she continued with the takeoff about 2 minutes after the Boeing 767. Immediately after departure the passengers insisted the flight was not safe and they had collided with another aircraft, one of the passengers identified himself as an engineer. The flight attendant told the engineer that the captain had been informed and had told everything was fine. No further information was forwarded to the flight deck. After landing in Ibiza, while disembarking, the passengers again spoke up claiming the flight had been unsafe. During the turnaround the flight attendant informed the purser that one of the passengers observing the collision was an engineer. Neither approached the flight crew however. Following the return flight FR-8137 the purser talked to the captain and informed her that one of the passengers observing the collision was an engineer. In the following it was identified that the right hand winglet of the Boeing 737-800 had received damage, the Boeing 767-300 was found with damage to the left hand stabilizer following landing in New York.

  According to the story, it appears the AA flight crew were not informed of the potential damage to their plane before or during their transatlantic flight to JFK. (via Juan Flynn)
  (tags: via:juanflynn flight travel safety ryanair collisions)

• CIAIAC report : The official report on that Ryanair/AA collision in Barcelona in July 2011, on pages 211-255.
  (tags: collisions safety travel air ryanair)

• Practical machine learning tricks from the KDD 2011 best industry paper : Wow, this is a fantastic paper. It's a Google paper on detecting scam/spam ads using machine learning -- but not just that, it's how to build out such a classifier to production scale, and make it operationally resilient, and, indeed, operable. I've come across a few of these ideas before, and I'm happy to say I might have reinvented a few (particularly around the feature space), but all of them together make extremely good sense. If I wind up working on large-scale classification again, this is the first paper I'll go back to. Great info! (via Toby diPasquale.)
  (tags: classification via:codeslinger training machine-learning google ops kdd best-practices anti-spam classifiers ensemble map-reduce)

• The world’s first 3D-printed gun : I wasn't expecting to see this for a few years. The future is ahead of schedule!

  A .22-caliber pistol, formed from a 3D-printed AR-15 (M16) lower receiver, and a normal, commercial upper. In other words, the main body of the gun is plastic, while the chamber — where the bullets are actually struck — is solid metal. [...] While this pistol obviously wasn’t created from scratch using a 3D printer, the interesting thing is that the lower receiver — in a legal sense at least — is what actually constitutes a firearm. Without a lower receiver, the gun would not work; thus, the receiver is the actual legally-controlled part. In short, this means that people without gun licenses — or people who have had their licenses revoked — could print their own lower receiver and build a complete, off-the-books gun. What a chilling thought.

  
  (tags: via:peakscale guns scary future grim-meathook-future 3d-printing thingiverse weapons)

• "Are You Human?" urban intervention, 2009 : turn CAPTCHAs into cut-outs, mount them in the urban environment, and they blend into the tag landscape. This came up after contemplating "artisanal integers", and the concept of taking something digital and ephemeral and making a hand-made, long-lived physical artifact from it. (via ted byfield)
  (tags: art sculpture captchas physical artifacts tags graffiti human urban)

• Brooklyn Integers | Integers as a service : Integers artisanally hand-crafted for you. See also the sister site, missionintegers.com: "Each of our bespoke numbers is created just for you in San Francisco’s historic Mission District. What will you use it for? A letter-pressed receipt. A special touch of latte art. A globally-unique user ID. A woolen hat. The possibilities are as infinite as the space of 64-bit unsigned ints." (via John Allspaw)
  (tags: via:allspaw humour funny integers artisan satire hand-crafted)

• This park's life - The Irish Times - Thu, Jul 26, 2012 : Great article about Dublin's Phoenix Park, Europe's largest enclosed urban park (more than twice the size of New York's Central Park, in fact). Now that I have two little kids, I've been spending a good portion of my weekends there -- it's a wonderful thing to have on our doorstep. Also:

  The park even breeds celebrities. “The lion that roars at the start of the MGM movies. He’s a Dub. He was born in Dublin Zoo.”

  
  (tags: phoenix-park dublin history parks deer lion kids)

• Universal properties of mythological networks - Abstract - EPL (Europhysics Letters) - IOPscience : Abstract:

  As in statistical physics, the concept of universality plays an important, albeit qualitative, role in the field of comparative mythology. Here we apply statistical mechanical tools to analyse the networks underlying three iconic mythological narratives with a view to identifying common and distinguishing quantitative features. Of the three narratives, an Anglo-Saxon and a Greek text are mostly believed by antiquarians to be partly historically based while the third, an Irish epic [jm: "An Táin Bó Cúailnge", The Tain, to be specific], is often considered to be fictional. Here we use network analysis in an attempt to discriminate real from imaginary social networks and place mythological narratives on the spectrum between them. This suggests that the perceived artificiality of the Irish narrative can be traced back to anomalous features associated with six characters. Speculating that these are amalgams of several entities or proxies, renders the plausibility of the Irish text comparable to the others from a network-theoretic point of view.

  Here's what the Irish Times said:

  The society in the 1st century story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge looked artificial at first analysis of the networks between 404 characters in the story. However, the researchers found the society reflected real rather than fictional networks when the weakest links to six of the characters are removed. These six characters included Medb, Queen of Connacht; Conchobor, King of Ulster and Cúchulainn. They were "similar to superheroes of the Marvel universe" and are "too superhuman" or too well-connected to be real, researchers said. The researchers suggest that each of these superhuman characters may be an amalgam of many which became fused and exaggerated as the story was passed down orally through generations.

  
  (tags: networks society the-tain epics history mythology ireland statistics network-analysis papers)

• Irish campsite recommendations : the conclusion of a Twitter/Facebook recommendations-gathering exercise; winners seem to be Lough Key Forest Park, Renvyle Beach, Fintra, Eagle Point, and Hidden Valley
  (tags: camping ireland tips recommendations caravan holidays vacation)

• CloudBurst : 'Highly Sensitive Short Read Mapping with MapReduce'. current state of the art in DNA sequence read-mapping algorithms.

  CloudBurst uses well-known seed-and-extend algorithms to map reads to a reference genome. It can map reads with any number of differences or mismatches. [..] Given an exact seed, CloudBurst attempts to extend the alignment into an end-to-end alignment with at most k mismatches or differences by either counting mismatches of the two sequences, or with a dynamic programming algorithm to allow for gaps. CloudBurst uses [Hadoop] to catalog and extend the seeds. In the map phase, the map function emits all length-s k-mers from the reference sequences, and all non-overlapping length-s kmers from the reads. In the shuffle phase, read and reference kmers are brought together. In the reduce phase, the seeds are extended into end-to-end alignments. The power of MapReduce and CloudBurst is the map and reduce functions run in parallel over dozens or hundreds of processors.

  JM_SOUGHT -- the next generation ;)
  (tags: bioinformatics mapreduce hadoop read-alignment dna sequencing sought antispam algorithms)

• Expensive lessons in Python performance tuning : some good advice for large-scale Python performance: prun and guppy for profiling, namedtuples for memory efficiency, and picloud for trivial EC2-based scale-out. (via Nelson)
  (tags: picloud prun guppy namedtuples python optimization performance tuning profiling)

• On Patents : Notch comes up with a perfect analogy for software patents.

  I am mostly fine with the concept of “selling stuff you made”, so I’m also against copyright infringement. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as theft, and I’m not sure it’s good for society that some professions can get paid over and over long after they did the work (say, in the case of a game developer), whereas others need to perform the job over and over to get paid (say, in the case of a hairdresser or a lawyer). But yeah, “selling stuff you made” is good. But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. Ideas are free. They improve on old things, make them better, and this results in all of society being better. Sharing ideas is how we improve. A common argument for patents is that inventors won’t invent unless they can protect their ideas. The problem with this argument is that patents apply even if the infringer came up with the idea independently. If the idea is that easy to think of, why do we need to reward the person who happened to be first?

  Of course, in reality it's even worse, since you don't actually have to be first to invent -- just first to file without sufficient people noticing, and people are actively dissuaded from noticing (since it makes their lives riskier if they know about the existence of patents)...
  (tags: business legal ip copyright patents notch minecraft patent-trolls)

• Marsh's Library : Dublin museum of antiquarian books, open to the public -- well worth a visit, apparently (I will definitely be making my way there soon I suspect), to check out their new "Marvels of Science" exhibit. Not only that though, but they have a beautiful website with some great photos -- exemplary
  (tags: museum dublin ireland libraries books science)

• 'Poisoning Attacks against Support Vector Machines', Battista Biggio, Blaine Nelson, Pavel Laskov : The perils of auto-training SVMs on unvetted input.

  We investigate a family of poisoning attacks against Support Vector Machines (SVM). Such attacks inject specially crafted training data that increases the SVM's test error. Central to the motivation for these attacks is the fact that most learning algorithms assume that their training data comes from a natural or well-behaved distribution. However, this assumption does not generally hold in security-sensitive settings. As we demonstrate, an intelligent adversary can, to some extent, predict the change of the SVM's decision function due to malicious input and use this ability to construct malicious data. The proposed attack uses a gradient ascent strategy in which the gradient is computed based on properties of the SVM's optimal solution. This method can be kernelized and enables the attack to be constructed in the input space even for non-linear kernels. We experimentally demonstrate that our gradient ascent procedure reliably identifies good local maxima of the non-convex validation error surface, which significantly increases the classifier's test error.

  Via Alexandre Dulaunoy
  (tags: papers svm machine-learning poisoning auto-learning security via:adulau)

• C500k in Action at Urban Airship : I missed this back in 2010; 500k active TCP connections to a single EC2 large instance using Java and NIO
  (tags: c10k java linux ec2 scaling nio netty urban-airship)

• GraphChi : "big data, small machine" -- perform computation on very large graphs using an algorithm they're calling Parallel Sliding Windows. similar to Google's Pregel, apparently
  (tags: graphs graphchi big-data algorithms parallel)

• High performance network programming on the JVM, OSCON 2012 : by Erik Onnen of Urban Airship. very good presentation on the current state of the art in large-scale low-latency service operation using the JVM on Linux. Lots of good details on async vs sync, HTTPS/TLS/TCP tuning, etc.
  (tags: http https scaling jvm async sync oscon presentations tcp)

• udev - How do I change the keymap of a single device (Logitech presenter)? - Ask Ubuntu : nifty, udev lets you remap USB "keyboard" gadgets randomly. this may be handy for my new cheapo USB foot pedals
  (tags: pedals usb hid interface gadgets remapping ubuntu linux udev)

• Science funding doesn't add up - The Irish Times : '[Science Foundation Ireland] said it was continuing to support basic research, but there are a number of leading scientists here who were refused funding despite having qualified for it in the past. Dr Mike Peardon of the School of Mathematics was recently been turned down, having been “administratively withdrawn”. This means the application for funding was rejected at the first post during initial consideration and before it had a chance to be assessed by external experts. Several others in his department suffered a similar fate. “The school of mathematics at Trinity is ranked the 15th best maths department in the world and now we are not fundable by Science Foundation Ireland,” he said. “The cases I heard of have all been in pure maths,” said Prof Lorraine Hanlon in UCD’s school of physics. “All reported that the people in pure maths were returned unreviewed.” She believes other areas may also come under pressure. “Pure maths is the thin end of the wedge. The Government says mathematics is fundamental, but on the other side says we dont really care enough to support it. That is a schizophrenic approach,” she said.'
  (tags: mathematics ireland science research academia funding tcd ucd sfi)

• Microsoft's ill-chosen magic constants : 'Paolo Bonzini noticed something a little awkward in the Linux kernel support code for Microsoft's HyperV virtualisation environment - specifically, that the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor was "0xB16B00B5", or, in English, "BIG BOOBS". It turns out that this isn't an exception - when the code was originally submitted it also contained "0x0B00B135".' me, I prefer my magic constants less offensive and more Subgenius-oriented: "0xB0BD0BB5"
  (tags: constants via:kevin-lyda oh-dear microsoft fail magic-numbers boobs linux kernel)

• Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox : website-scaling tips and suggestions, "particularly for a resource-constrained, fast-growing environment that can’t always afford to do things “the right way” (i.e., any real-world engineering project". I really like the "run with fake load" trick; add additional queries/load which you can quickly turn off if the service starts browning out, giving you a few days breathing room to find a real fix before customers start being affected. Neat
  (tags: dropbox scalability webdev load scaling-up)

• Ansible : 'SSH-Based Configuration Management & Deployment'. deploy via SSH; no target-side daemons required. GPLv3 licensed, unfortunately :(
  (tags: ansible devops configuration deployment sysadmin python ssh)

• Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs : 7 reasons why working for a startup sucks. Been there, done that -- I wish I'd read this years ago. It should be permalinked at the top of Hacker News. "In 1995, a lot of talented young people went into large corporations because they saw no other option in the private sector– when, in fact, there were credible alternatives, startups being a great option. In 2012, a lot of young talent is going into startups for the same reason: a belief that it’s the only legitimate work opportunity for top talent, and that their careers are likely to stagnate if they work in more established businesses. They’re wrong, I think, and this mistaken belief allows them to be taken advantage of. The typical equity offer for a software engineer is dismally short of what he’s giving up in terms of reduced salary, and the career path offered by startups is not always what it’s made out to be. For all this, I don’t intend to argue that people shouldn’t join startups. If the offer’s good, and the job looks interesting, it’s worth trying out. I just don’t think that the current, unconditional “startups are awesome!” mentality serves us well. It’s not good for any of us, because there’s no tyrant worse than a peer selling himself short, and right now there are a lot of great people selling themselves very short for a shot at the “startup experience” -- whatever that is."
  (tags: startups work job life career tech vc companies pay stock share-options)

• Sean Sherlock to science researchers: "see ya! don't let the door hit you on the way out" : "In relation to the possibility of losing skilled people overseas, any vibrant research ecosystem will see an ebb and flow of capable people in the scientific fields – in some ways this is a good thing, as experience gained abroad has the potential to benefit Ireland in the future. The latest SFI data shows that SFI supports approximately 3,000 researchers, including some 2,000 postgraduate students and post-doctorals -- a figure that has remained relatively stable for some time." NICE
  (tags: sean-sherlock jobs ireland science research)

• 'You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?' : Brilliant responses to this stereotypically-annoying Google interview question: "Since being shrunk down like this is impossible, I can only assume this is happening inside a dream or nightmare of some kind. I sit down and meditate, summoning up my Siddartha/Neo like mental powers and realise that there is no blender, and that this terrible dream was created by the ego of a sadistic Google employee. As the kundalini fire races up my spine, and my spirit is liberated, I open my third eye and bathe said Google employee in the light of love. I forgive him, for he knows not what he does."
  (tags: funny interviewing google blenders reddit)

• Pretty Penny : Importing the good old Dutch Omafiets lady's bike to Dublin, EUR269 each. that's a great price for a solid bike!
  (tags: bikes cycling dublin fashion omafiets dutch)

• SSTable and Log Structured Storage: LevelDB : good writeup of LevelDB's native storage formats; the Sorted String Table (SSTable), Log Structured Merge Trees, and Snappy compression
  (tags: leveldb nosql data storage disk persistence google)

• Joyent Services Back After 8 Day Outage : Lest we forget. I think it was 10 days in total once everything was resolved
  (tags: joyent outages bingodisk strongspace cloud solaris zfs)

• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods : interesting categorisation, and some crazy visualisations I've not encountered before (via Aileen)
  (tags: dataviz visualization information design ui via:aileen)

• Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant : "They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy."
  (tags: microsoft bureaucracy stack-ranking hr culture)

• Facts still sacred despite Ireland's spectrum of conflicting views on abortion - The Irish Times - Fri, Jun 29, 2012 : Very good data-driven analysis. "Pro-life” groups claim abortion is a serious mental health risk for women. Youth Defence claims women who opt for an abortion rather than carrying to term or giving the baby up for adoption suffer mental maladies such as depression, suicide and other problems. But this is at heart a scientific claim, and can thus be tested. [...] Psychologist Dr Brenda Majors studied this in depth and found no evidence that ["post-abortion syndrome"] exists. As long as a woman was not depressive before an abortion, “elective abortion of an unintended pregnancy does not pose a risk to mental health”. The same results were found in several other studies [...] Essentially these studies found there was no difference in mental health between those who opted for abortion and those who carried to term. Curiously, there was a markedly increased risk to mental health for women who gave a child up for adoption. A corollary of the research was that while women did not suffer long-term mental health effects due to abortion, short-term guilt and sadness was far more likely if the women had a background where abortion was viewed negatively or their decisions were decried -- the kind of attitude fostered by “pro-life” activists."
  (tags: pro-choice pro-life abortion data facts via:irish-times research science pregnancy depression pas)

• "Machine Learning That Matters" [paper, PDF] : Great paper. This point particularly resonates: "It is easy to sit in your o?ce and run a Weka algorithm on a data set you downloaded from the web. It is very hard to identify a problem for which machine learning may o?er a solution, determine what data should be collected, select or extract relevant features, choose an appropriate learning method, select an evaluation method, interpret the results, involve domain experts, publicize the results to the relevant scienti?c community, persuade users to adopt the technique, and (only then) to truly have made a di?erence (see Figure 1). An ML researcher might well feel fatigued or daunted just contemplating this list of activities. However, each one is a necessary component of any research program that seeks to have a real impact on the world outside of machine learning."
  (tags: machine-learning ml software data real-world algorithms)

• Massive identity-theft breach in South Korea results in calls for national ID system to be abandoned : In South Korea, web users are required to provide their national ID number for "virtually every type of Internet activity, not only for encrypted communications like e-commerce, online banking and e-government services but also casual tasks like e-mail and blogging", apparently in an attempt to "curb cyber-bullying". The result is obvious -- those ID numbers being collected in giant databases at companies like "SK Communications, which runs top social networking service Cyworld and search site Nate", and those giant databases being tasty targets for black-hats. Now: "In Korea’s biggest-ever case of data theft the recent hacking attack at SK Communications, which runs top social networking service Cyworld and search site Nate, breached 35 million accounts, a mind-boggling total for a country that has about 50 million people and an economically-active population of 25 million. The compromised information includes names, passwords, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and most alarmingly, resident registration numbers, the country’s equivalent to social security numbers." This is an identity-fraudster's dream: "In the hands of criminals, resident registration numbers could become master keys that open every door, allowing them to construct an entire identity based on the quality and breadth of data involved."
  (tags: south-korea identity fraud identity-theft web bullying authentication hacking)

• WeatherSpark : Beatiful dataviz of weather data from met.no, NOAA.gov, World Weather Online and Weather Central. The main graph includes: mean and percentiles of historical temperature data for time of year, the temperature and precipitation forecast over the chosen period, wind direction and speed, with hourly data. Very nicely done! (via Una Mullally)
  (tags: via:unamullally dataviz temperature forecasts weather graphing percentiles wind rain)

• the recruiter honeypot : wow, I thought it was hard hiring in Dublin. Sounds like Silicon Valley is insane. "Unfortunately, it’s not all about the numbers. Though external recruiters perform well for start-ups, there’s another side to this story. It pains me to write this but I think it’s important to share. Meebo employed lots of external recruiters when we were getting off the ground. We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring. Most of those contracts expired in 2008-2009. However, every recruiter and firm we’d worked with who was still in the recruiting business tried to poach [the 'honeypot' employee] Pete London." (Another lesson: don't build a product in javascript, since it's impossible to hire engineers ;)
  (tags: honeypots hiring silicon-valley recruiting coding experts meebo)

• CEO Of Internet Provider Sonic.net: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your Internet Provider Should, Too. - Forbes : "what we saw was a shift towards customers being made part of a business model that involved–I don’t know if extortion is the right word–but embarassment for gain. An individual would download a movie, using bittorrent, and infringe copyright. And that might be our customer, like Bob Smith who owns a Sonic.net account, or it might be their spouse, or it might be their child. Or it might be one of his three roommates in a loft in San Francisco, who Bob is not responsible for, and who rent out their loft on AirBnB and have couch surfers and buddies from college and so on and open Wifi. When lawyers asked us for these users’ information, some of our customers I spoke with said “Oh yeah, crap, they caught me,” and were willing to admit they engaged in piracy and pay a settlement. But in other cases, it turned out the roommate did it, or no one would admit to doing it. But they would pay the settlement anyway. Because no one wants to be named in the public record in a case from So-And-So Productions vs. 1,600 names including Bob Smith for downloading a film called “Don’t Tell My Wife I B—F—— The Babysitter.” AG: Is that a real title? DJ: Yes. I’ve read about cases where a lawyer was doing this for the movie “The Expendables,” and 5% of people settled. So then he switched to representing someone with an embarassing porn title, and like 30% of people paid. It seemed like half the time, the customer wasn’t the one right one, but they rolled over because it would be very embarassing. And I think that’s an abuse of process. I was unwilling to become part of that business model. In many cases the lawyers never pursued the case, and it was all bluster. But under that threat, you pay."
  (tags: interview isps freedom copyright internet shakedown lawyers sonic.net data-retention via:oisin)

• an ex-RBSG engineer on the NatWest/RBS/UlsterBank IT fiasco : 'Turning over your systems support staff in a wave of redundancies is not the best way to manage the transfer of knowledge. Not everyone who worked the batch at [Royal Bank of Scotland Group] even knew what it is they knew; how, then, could they explain it to people who didn’t know there was knowledge to acquire? Outsourcing the work from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and sacking the staff would have exposed them to the same risks. [...] I Y2K tested one of the batch feeder systems at RBS from 1997 - 1998, and managed acceptance testing in payments processing systems from 1999 - 2001. I was one of the people who watched over the first batch of the millennium instead of going to a party. I was part of the project that moved the National Westminster batch onto the RBS software without a single failure. I haven’t worked for the bank for five years, and I am surprised at how personally affronted I am that they let that batch fail. But I shouldn’t be. Protectiveness of the batch was the defining characteristic of our community. We were proud of how well that complex structure of disparate components hummed along. It was a thing of beauty, of art and craft, and they dropped it all over the floor.'
  (tags: systems ops support maintainance legacy ca-7 banking rbs natwest ulster-bank fail outsourcing)

• Some Facts & Insights Into The Whole Discussion Of 'Ethics' And Music Business Models | Techdirt : David "Camper Van Beethoven" Lowery's blogpost about music sales, ethics, piracy etc. looks like it was pretty much riddled with errors regarding the viability of the music business, then and now. Empirical figures from Jeff Price from Tunecore, and others, to debunk it: "'Well here’s some truth about the old industry that David somehow misses. Previously, artists were not rolling in money. Most were not allowed into the system by the gatekeepers. Of those that were allowed on the major labels, over 98% of them failed. Yes, 98%?. Of the 2% that succeeded, less than a half percent of those ever got paid a band royalty from the sale of recorded music. How in the world is an artist making at least something, no matter how small, worse than 99% of the world’s unsigned artists making nothing and of the 1% signed, less than a half a percent of them ever making a single band royalty ever?'" [...] "Another example of Lowery being wrong that Price responds to is the claim that recorded music revenue to artists has been going down. Price has data: 'This is empirically false. Revenue to labels has collapsed. Revenue to artists has gone up with more artists making more money now than at any time in history, off of the sale of pre-recorded music. Taken a step further, a $17.98 list price CD earned a band $1.40 as a band royalty that they only got if they were recouped (over 99% of bands never recouped). If an artist sells just two songs for $0.99 on iTunes via TuneCore, they gross $1.40. If they sell an album for $9.99 on iTunes via TuneCore, they gross $7.00. This is an INCREASE of over 700% in revenue to artists for recorded music sales.'"
  (tags: music mp3 music-business piracy techdirt david-lowery tunecore)

• Eight Real Tales of Learning Computer Science as a High School Girl : 'All students at Stuyvesant High School are required to take a year of computer science. As it turns out, the advanced computer science classes skew mostly male anyway. But for a year, boys and girls get exposed to computer programming together. We asked Mike Zamansky, the head of the computer science program, to share some stories from his female students. They did us one better. Eight students sent in first-hand accounts of what it’s like to learn computer programming as a teenage girl.' Some interesting comments here. This topic is weighing on my mind now that I have two girls...
  (tags: schools learning education computer-science technology nyc girls teenage)

• RBS collapse details revealed - The Register : as noted in the gossip last week. 'The main batch scheduling software used by RBS is CA-7, said one source, a former RBS employee who left the company recently.' 'RBS do use CA-7 and do update all accounts overnight on a mainframe via thousands of batch jobs scheduled by CA-7 ... Backing out of a failed update to CA-7 really ought to have been a trivial matter for experienced operations and systems programming staff, especially if they knew that an update had been made. That this was not the case tends to imply that the criticisms of the policy to "offshore" also hold some water.'
  (tags: outsourcing failure software rbs natwest ulster-bank ulster-blank offshoring downsizing ca-7 upgrades)

• Natwest, RBS: When will bank glitch be fixed? Probably not today • The Register Forums : Some amazing insider-info posts on the Reg forum for the gigantic RBS/NatWest/Ulster Bank multi-day outage. Fingers pointing at their outsourcing/downsizing practices -- in a word, they've sacked the experienced staff, replaced them with noobs thousands of miles away, and not paid down any technical debt on the legacy code they're maintaining. Classic legacy IT fail. "I worked for RBS during and after the merger with Natwest, I left their Global Financial Markets Department in 2004 after a 5 year stint. They had already moved some IT functions to India at that point and have continued to do so year on year since. The numbers some people are quoting 1600/800 are possibly the more recent figures, the total is way way beyond this. The comments on documentation are comical, as if a document is the thing you turn to at a time of crisis. The fact is, when you work closely with systems and the business users, you understand not only the quirks of the systems, but the risks and consequences of failure. You work with those users on the work around solutions that will get the banking day complete. They haven't just outsourced the IT staff, but the very experienced and valuable back office / operations staff that would work with IT staff to solve the serious issues. I beleive these guys are mostly posted out in Singapore, who probably have never met the IT staff in India. The unseen cost of outsourcing is a compounding loss of shared experience and commitment, which becomes accutely apparent when the sh!t hits the ... cash machines The chaps I trained out in India were nice enough, but they simply lacked the knowledge and experience of Finacial Markets trading, trade and settlement processing, Swift messaging blah blah and the risks involved. I'll be drinking with a bunch of ex RBS/Natwesties soon enough, where we'll all be saying..... "WE TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!" Another poster says: "I understand that your description of the RBS Mainframe based batch update process is fairly accurate. The source of the problem was a software update to Batch scheduling suite CA7. The upgrade when so well that now there is no schedule to run all of those thousands of batch jobs to receive and make BACS payments, update balance, schedule printouts, etc. I am sure the problem with the CA7 upgrade and the unfortunate misplacing of the Batch schedule has absolutely nothing to do the with the last UK based technicians leaving recently. The guys in India of course are perfectly able to cope and fix their mistake. I'm sure they understand how the thousands of jobs in the schedule need to ordered to make sure there is data corruption or loss. After all the problem happened on Tuesday and it's only Friday. I wonder how many ex-RBS staff have received very lucrative short term contracts in the last few days......"
  (tags: natwest it rbs the-register outsourcing fail organisations ulster-bank ulster-blank)

• the VIM clutch : 'VIM Clutch is a hardware pedal for improved text editing speed for users of the magnificent VIM text editor. When the pedal is pressed down, the pedal types "i" causing VIM to go into Insert Mode. When released, it types and you are back in Normal Mode.' (via Andrew Delaney)
  (tags: via:delaney vim programming ui pedals vi modal foot-switch)

• Irish "Millennials" post more negative reviews than anyone else : 'Millennials are more negative when it comes to product sentiment. They give more 1-star reviews than Gen X or Boomers; the most negative Millennials in our analysis hail from Ireland, where 12% of them give products 1- or 2-star ratings.' Previously, we tended not to complain -- not any more, it seems
  (tags: ireland complaints whinging generations ratings reviews via:jim-carroll studies behaviour online opinions)

• VIDEO: Drone ‘spies’ on Mountjoy, and the Facebook and Google offices · The Daily Edge : TheJournal coverage of that drones-over-the-Aras video. some truly demented comments fearing for "intellectual property", somehow
  (tags: the-journal drones video youtube ireland privacy)

• "Finding the k shortest paths", D. Eppstein, 1994 [paper] : 35th IEEE Symp. Foundations of Comp. Sci., Santa Fe, 1994, pp. 154-165. This paper presents an algorithm that finds multiple short paths connecting two terminals in a graph (allowing repeated vertices and edges in the paths) in constant time per path after a preprocessing stage dominated by a single-source shortest path computation. The paths it finds are the k shortest in the graph, where k is a parameter given as input to the algorithm. Time complexity: O(E*log V + L*k*log k) time (L is path length)
  (tags: k-shortest-paths graph algorithms sparse-graphs)

• "K* : A Directed On-The-Fly Algorithm for Finding the k Shortest Paths", Husain Aljazzar and Stefan Leue, 2008 : "We present a new algorithm, called K*, for ?nding the k shortest paths between a designated pair of vertices in a given directed weighted graph. Compared to Eppstein’s algorithm, which is the most prominent algorithm for solving this problem, K* has two advantages. First, K* performs on-the-?y, which means that it does not require the graph to be explicitly available and stored in main memory. Portions of the graph will be generated as needed. Second, K* is a directed algorithm which enables the use of heuristic functions to guide the search. This leads to signi?cant improvements in the memory and runtime demands for many practical problem instances. We prove the correctness of K* and show that it maintains a worst-case runtime complexity of O(m+k n log(k n)) and a space complexity of O(k n + m), where n is the number of vertices and m is the number of edges of the graph. We provide experimental results which illustrate the scalability of the algorithm."
  (tags: graphs k-shortest-paths algorithms papers)

• Floyd–Warshall algorithm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : "a graph analysis algorithm for finding shortest paths in a weighted graph (with positive or negative edge weights)".
  (tags: graphs algorithms k-shortest-paths)

• Scram : noun: an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor. It has been defined as an acronym for "Safety Control Rod Axe Man", due to this story from Norman Hilberry: "When I showed up on the balcony on that December 2, 1942 afternoon [at the Chicago Pile, the world's first self-sustaining nuclear reactor], I was ushered to the balcony rail, handed a well sharpened fireman's ax and told, "if the safety rods fail to operate, cut that manila rope." The safety rods, needless to say, worked, the rope was not cut... I don't believe I have ever felt quite as foolish as I did then. ...I did not get the SCRAM [Safety Control Rod Axe Man] story until many years after the fact. Then one day one of my fellows who had been on Zinn's construction crew called me Mr. Scram."
  (tags: scram nuclear reactor history etymology words shutdown emergency wikipedia 1942 science acronyms)

• South Lake Union Eats : holy moly, that's a lot of food trucks (SLU is the district hosting Amazon's Seattle campus)
  (tags: food food-trucks seattle restaurants slu amazon)

• A Closer Look: Email-Based Malware Attacks : 'The average detection rate for these samples was 24.47 percent, while the median detection rate was just 19 percent.' That is *atrocious*. (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: via:fanf fail malware filtering av smtp email viruses)

• LOITERING THEATRE - YouTube : 'An excerpt from LOITERING THEATRE by Caroline Campbell and Nina McGowan - a film exploring forbidden and inaccessible space in Dublin through flying drones equipped with cameras.' Mountjoy Prison and Aras an Uachtairain, notably
  (tags: dublin forbidden exploration urban-exploration loitering youtube video film ireland drones hack-the-city science-gallery)

• The Hydra Bay : "How to set up a Pirate Bay proxy". Step-by-step instructions for MacOS and Linux on how to run a fully-functional reverse proxy for The Pirate Bay -- in other words, provide a duplicate URL for users to circumvent ISP blocks of TPB. http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/list.html contains about a hundred others. See also http://unblockedpiratebay.com/ for a standalone PHP script which does the same (albeit a little less efficiently). A good demonstration of how futile filtering techniques like IP or domain name blocks are, when applied to a popular website like TPB.
  (tags: piratebay filtering censorship copyright php proxies reverse-proxies ip-blocking dns-blocking)

• how to restore from iCloud backup : the trick: don't try and do it through iTunes, it won't give you the option, apparently. I have a carrier unlock, and apparently need to wipe the phone for it to take place; this scares the crap out of me
  (tags: backup iphone restore sysadmin phones icloud apple howto)

• Jim FitzPatrick's Pinterest account : *the* Jim FitzPatrick -- he of the legendary iconic 1968 Che Guevara image. "All is free to share, I only go after those who use/misuse/exploit my artwork for profit. Have fun." I particularly like http://pinterest.com/pin/46302702389391106/ ;)
  (tags: jim-fitzpatrick open-source sopa acta ireland copyright)

• Issue of web access raises hackles at conference - The Irish Times - Tue, Jun 19, 2012 : 'Prof Michael O’Flaherty, the vice-chairman of the UN Human Rights Committee, told the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) conference on internet freedom that the rights of copyright holders to make a living had to be balanced with the right to freedom of expression.' 'THE PUNISHMENT for breakers of the “three strikes” illegal download rule was “exceptionally disproportionate” [...] The internet was a vehicle for a wide range of human rights so excluding someone from it was an “extraordinary penalty”.'
  (tags: osce coverage unhrc conferences dublin copyright freedom internet censorship filtering)

• The story of St. Columba: A modern copyright battle in sixth century Ireland : a good summary of the roots of copyright, the Columcille "To every cow belongs its calf; to every book its copy" story (via TJ McIntyre)
  (tags: columcille copyright history ireland columbanus books)

• PGP founder, Navy SEALs uncloak encrypted comms biz • The Register : 'The company, called Silent Circle, will launch later this year, when $20 a month will buy you encrypted email, text messages, phone calls, and videoconferencing in a package that looks to be strong enough to have the NSA seriously worried. Zimmermann says that surveillance by the state and others has increased vastly over the last few years, and privacy improvement are again needed. "At the very least I want people, as part of their right in a free society to be able to communicate securely," he said in a promotional video. "I should be able to whisper in your ear, even if your ear is a thousand miles away." [...] While software can handle most of the work, there still needs to be a small backend of servers to handle traffic. The company surveyed the state of privacy laws around the world and found that the top three choices were Switzerland, Iceland, and Canada, so they went for the one within driving distance.'
  (tags: pgp phil-zimmermann privacy crypto silent-circle apps vc security)

• The Silencing of Maya : software patent shakedown threatens to remove a 4-year-old's only means of verbal expression: 'Maya can speak to us, clearly, for the first time in her life. We are hanging on her every word. We’ve learned that she loves talking about the days of the week, is weirdly interested in the weather, and likes to pretend that her toy princesses are driving the bus to school (sometimes) and to work (other times). This app has not only allowed her to communicate her needs, but her thoughts as well. It’s given us the gift of getting to know our child on a totally different level. I’ve been so busy embracing this new reality and celebrating, that I kind of forgot that there was an ongoing lawsuit, until last Monday. When Speak for Yourself was removed from the iTunes store.'
  (tags: speak-for-yourself children law swpats patenting stories ipad apps)

• _Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning_ [paper, PDF] : "We consider the problem of building highlevel, class-specific feature detectors from only unlabeled data. For example, is it possible to learn a face detector using only unlabeled images using unlabeled images? To answer this, we train a 9-layered locally connected sparse autoencoder with pooling and local contrast normalization on a large dataset of images (the model has 1 billion connections, the dataset has 10 million 200x200 pixel images downloaded from the Internet). We train this network using model parallelism and asynchronous SGD on a cluster with 1,000 machines (16,000 cores) for three days. Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not. Control experiments show that this feature detector is robust not only to translation but also to scaling and out-of-plane rotation. We also ?nd that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies. Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8% accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art."
  (tags: algorithms machine-learning neural-networks sgd labelling training unlabelled-learning google research papers pdf)

• I've been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result. : Epic Reddit post. "Parallels to '1984' off the top of my head: 3 superpowers, a "communist" leadership in which technology has reached as far as it needs to go (end of technology tree), barbarian (resistance) uprisings constantly being stomped out by the totalitarian government, nuclear war rendering most farmland useless, constant breaking and reassembling of treaties between the 3 superpowers, seemingly infinite war (due to the previous point), an ever present and all knowing leader making the decisions of the nation..." (via oceanclub)
  (tags: via:oceanclub gaming games civ sid-meier 1984 politics war future strategy)

• Wrapping parties around a tight budget - The Irish Times - Tue, Jun 12, 2012 : "On the birthday present front, Crowley was shocked when she totted up her family’s spending for six months and realised she was spending more on gifts than on clothes for her entire family. A few 40th birthdays aside, she says the majority of the outlay is on gifts for her children’s friends." A lot of familiar names in this story ;)
  (tags: gifts money prices dublin friends irish-times)

• Many Niches » Blog Archive » On Working At Amazon : (catching up on old posts) good article from a recent hire, discussing some unusual aspects of the corporate culture
  (tags: amazon culture work)

• Analyzing Flame's MD5 Collision Attack [slides, PDF] : really detailed slide deck by Alex Sotirov, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Trail of Bits, Inc. (via Tony Finch) Plenty of security fail by MS, and also: PKI is clearly too hard
  (tags: via:fanf flame security malware md5 collisions hashing pki tls ssl microsoft)

• Copyfraud - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : 'a term coined by Jason Mazzone (Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School) to describe situations where individuals and institutions illegally claim copyright ownership of the public domain and other breaches of copyright law with little or no oversight by authorities or legal consequence for their actions.' Good term (via Nelson)
  (tags: copyright rights ip fraud copyfraud wikipedia words terminology neologisms dmca infringement)

• Copyright Review Committee Submission : 'This site is intended to give the public a chance to comment on, and hopefully [collaboratively] improve, the text of a proposed submission to the [Irish] Copyright Review Commission.' (ie. CRC2012, deadline 31 May.)
  (tags: crc2012 copyright ireland law collaboration)

• Dropwizard : 'a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services. Developed by Yammer to power their JVM-based backend services, Dropwizard pulls together stable, mature libraries from the Java ecosystem into a simple, lightweight package that lets you focus on getting things done. Dropwizard has out-of-the-box support for sophisticated configuration, application metrics, logging, operational tools, and much more, allowing you and your team to ship a production-quality HTTP+JSON web service in the shortest time possible.' From Coda Hale/Yammer; includes Guava, Jetty, Jersey, Jackson, Metrics, slf4j. Pretty good baseline to start any new Java service with....
  (tags: framework http java rest web jersey guava jackson jetty json web-services yammer)

• satellite rescue abandoned due to patents : 'SES and Lockheed Martin explored ways to attempt to bring the functioning [AMC-14] satellite into its correct orbital position, and subsequently began attempting to move the satellite into geosynchronous orbit by means of a lunar flyby (as done a decade earlier with HGS-1). In April 2008, it was announced that this had been abandoned after it was discovered that Boeing held a patent on the trajectory that would be required. At the time, a lawsuit was ongoing between SES and Boeing, and Boeing refused to allow the trajectory to be used unless SES dropped its case.' In. credible. http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_Shuts_Down_AMC_14_Lunar_Flyby_Salvage_Attempt_999.html notes 'Industry sources have told SpaceDaily that the patent is regarded as legal "trite", as basic physics has been rebranded as a "process", and that the patent wouldn't stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as "the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters"', but still -- who'd want to go up in court against Boeing?
  (tags: boeing space patenting via:hn funny sad lockheed-martin ses amc-14 business-process patents)

• Nikola Tesla Wasn't God And Thomas Edison Wasn't The Devil : Correcting some egregious misconceptions about an Oatmeal comic regarding Tesla and Edison -- explaining some realities about invention, scientific progress, and the history of electricity. "I’d contend that nearly every invention in the engineering or sciences is an improvement on what has come before – such as Tesla’s improvements to alternating current. That’s what innovation is. It’s a social process that occurs in a social context. As Robert Heinlein once said, “When railroading time comes you can railroad -- but not before.” In other words, inventions are made in the context of scientific and engineering understanding. Individuals move things forward – some faster than others – but in the end, the most intelligent person in the world can’t invent the light bulb if the foundation isn’t there."
  (tags: nikola-tesla history electricity innovation invention progress science thomas-edison the-oatmeal)

• Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi's Secret Surveillance Network : The very scary future of state control, censorship, and totalitarianism in the age of the internet. A presentation from Amesys, a subsidiary of Bull S.A. "explained the significance of Eagle to a government seeking to control activities inside its borders. Warning of an “increasing need of high-level intelligence in the constant struggle against criminals and terrorism,” the document touted Eagle’s ability to capture bulk Internet traffic passing through conventional, satellite, and mobile phone networks, and then to store that data in a filterable and searchable database. This database, in turn, could be integrated with other sources of intelligence, such as phone recordings, allowing security personnel to pick through audio and data from a given person all at once, in real time or by historical time stamp. In other words, instead of choosing targets and monitoring them, officials could simply sweep up everything, sort it by time and target, and then browse through it later at their leisure. The title of the presentation -- ”From Lawful to Massive Interception” -- gestured at the vast difference between so-called lawful intercept (traditional law enforcement surveillance based on warrants for specific phone numbers or IP addresses) and what Amesys was offering."
  (tags: massive-interception future state-control censorship privacy internet email totalitarianism libya amesys bull-sa gadhafi surveillance)

• The Walton Bridge petition : 'IOP Ireland is campaigning to have the new bridge across the Liffey in Dublin at Marlborough Street named for ETS Walton – Ireland’s only physics Nobel prizewinner.'
  (tags: nobel physics science ireland ernest-walton scientists history naming dublin tcd)

• zen.org Communal Weblog » Digital Legacy : Elana Kehoe on dealing with Brendan's digital legacy: "What to do when you are next of kin to a geek?" A lot of good advice here, and plenty of things I need to think about...
  (tags: brendan-kehoe digital-legacy wills legacy passwords accounts tips)

• Pickstarter : 'A curated blog of notable Kickstarter projects' (via potentato)
  (tags: via:potentato blogs kickstarter funding links projects)

• Digital Rights Forum - Online Privacy : 'The Digital Rights Forum is a public debate on the important issues surrounding digital rights, with each event designed around the general over-arching topic of digital rights, puls a more narrowly focused subject. On Friday, the 18th of May, the forum will tackle the issue of Online Privacy. With our lives ever more integrated with the web and social media, staying safe online is becoming an increasing concern to everyone. From mobile apps to websites and email, protecting our personal information and online privacy has never been more complicated and more important. Faced with software vulnerabilities such as contacts being leaked onto the Internet by mobile application providers, the increasing push toward revealing more private and personal information on social networks, and attempts by some to protect their businesses through litigation or processes which require the disclosure of personal information, the modern digital landscape has made protecting one's privacy more difficult than ever before. With this in mind, this Digital Rights Forum will discuss the current state of data protection and online privacy in the current context of social networks and mobile applications.' Featuring Billy Hawkes (the DPC, no less!), and Devore from Boards.
  (tags: dpc digital-rights ireland politics online security privacy data-protection)

• Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers - YouTube : 'some portions of the experience, such as the sky, may be replaced by personalised advertising.' Uploading your consciousness in the age of copyright maximalism, as Nelson Minar put it (via Nelson)
  (tags: via:nelson grim-meathook-future future singularity funny copyright advertising)

• An IDE is not enough : Very thought-provoking response to that 'Light Table' demo which went round the aggregators a couple of weeks back. 'The fundamental reason IDEs have dead-ended is that they are constrained by the syntax and semantics of our programming languages. Our programming languages were all designed to be used with a text editor. It is therefore not surprising that our IDEs amount to tarted-up text editors. Likewise our programming languages were all designed with an imperative semantics that efficiently matches the hardware but defies static visualization. Indeed it would be a miracle if we could slap a new IDE on top of an old language and magically alter its syntactic and semantic assumptions. I don’t believe in miracles. Languages and IDEs have co-evolved and neither can change without the other also changing. That is why three years ago I put aside my IDE work to focus on language design. Getting rid of imperative semantics is one of the goals. Another is getting rid of source text files (as well as ASTs, which carry all the baggage of a textual encoding minus the readability). This has turned out to be really really hard. And lonely – no one wants to even talk about these crazy ideas. Nevertheless I firmly believe that so long as we are programming in decendants of assembly language we will continue to program in descendants of text editors.' (via Chris Horn)
  (tags: via:cjhorn ide programming coding programming-languages semantics syntax source-code text)

• Open Data Structures : A free-as-in-speech as well as -beer textbook of data structures, covering a great range, including some I hadn't heard of before. Here's the full list: ArrayStack, FastArrayStack, ArrayQueue, ArrayDeque, DualArrayDeque, RootishArrayStack, SLList, DLList, SEList, SkiplistSSet, SkiplistList, ChainedHashTable, LinearHashTable, BinaryTree, BinarySearchTree, Treap, ScapegoatTree, RedBlackTree, BinaryHeap, MeldableHeap, AdjacencyMatrix, AdjacencyLists, BinaryTrie, XFastTrie, and YFastTrie
  (tags: algorithms books data-structures computer-science coding tries skiplists arrays queues heap trees graphs hashtables)

• Chronon DVR for Java : "record entire execution of your Java app; play it back on any machine". Other features: time-travelling debugger -- step backwards, jump to any point in execution, designed for long running programs; post-execution logging -- add log statements after the program has run, and see what it would have logged. Looks extremely nifty, but I wonder how big those recording files get...
  (tags: debugging via:peakscale eclipse chronon dvr java coding logging jvm)

Reminder to Dublin-based readers -- next week, Amazon (my employers) will be putting on Under the Hood at Amazon, billed as 'A night of Beer, Pizza and Cloud Computing for Software Developers'. I'll be speaking at it.

It's partially a recruiting event, but even if you're not looking for a new job, please come along. It's also useful for us to talk about some details of what we've been doing in Dublin, since we've been operating to date with a pretty low profile, and in reality there's some very interesting stuff going on here... particularly the product I'll be talking about, naturally.

Also, there'll be free beer and some Kindles to be won ;)

It's next Thursday night, in our offices in Kilmainham. More info on this Facebook page.

• FF Chartwell : OpenType font to display charts/graphs using ligatures. 'Designed by Travis Kochel, FF Chartwell is a typeface for creating simple graphs. Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process. Using OpenType ligatures, strings of numbers are automatically transformed into charts. The data remains in a text box, allowing for easy updates and styling. It’s really easy to use; you just type a simple series of numbers like: ‘10+13+37+40’, turn on Stylistic Alternates or Stylistic Set 1 and a graph is automatically created.' (via Simon)
  (tags: ligatures via:sboyle fonts hacks charts dataviz ui)

• McGarr Solicitors' sternly-worded letter to Newspaper Licencing Ireland Ltd : In response to a letter received by a charity, warning of dire penalties for 'reproducing copyright content without permission', since doing so 'is theft'. It gets better, since in correspondence they were then informed that “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website”. Looking forward to seeing how this one plays out...
  (tags: law ireland scams shakedown copyright nli licensing linking hyperlinks)

• Goodbye, CouchDB : 'From most model-using code, using [Percona] MySQL looks exactly the same as using CouchDB did. Except it’s faster, and the DB basically never fails.'
  (tags: couchdb mysql nosql databases storage percona via:peakscale)

• Diageo Screw BrewDog : Giant booze multinational screws tiny Scottish microbrewery. "Diageo (the main sponsor) approached us at the start of the meal and said under no circumstances could the award be given to BrewDog. They said if this happened they would pull their sponsorship from all future BII events and their representatives would not present any of the awards on the evening. We were as gobsmacked as you by Diageo’s behaviour. We made the wrong decision under extreme pressure. We were blackmailed and bullied by Diageo. We should have stuck to our guns and gave the award to BrewDog."
  (tags: brewdog diageo bii awards beer brewing dirty-tricks)

• My Mexican Shop.ie : the Irish rendition of Mexican food has long been legendarily terrible, but this new web shop offers a fantastic range of authentic Mexican food ingredients, especially all those chilies you just can't get here
  (tags: chili food mexican spices cooking shop)

• UK Channel 4 News Demo – Contactless Payment Cards – viaForensics : 'During an interview with the Channel 4 correspondent we were able to touch his wallet with an Android phone while he was distracted and capture his credit card details.' ... 'viaForensics found that there are many cards in circulation, including recently issued cards, which are giving up the full card number, expiry, surname and initials.' Barclays security fail hits the headlines (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: channel-4 news barclays-bank uk banking nfc wireless android via-forensics contactless-cards via:fanf)

• The lessons I learnt from my iPhone mugging | Benjamin Cohen on Technology : some good tips on iPhone security settings, in particular disabling the ability to turn off location services via Restrictions. I should do this
  (tags: crime iphone location london mugging phones security theft)

• Spam-erican Apparel : 'LifeSphere currently offers more than 90,000 unique products and is more than likely run by one person in a suburban bungalow in Phoenix. As far as I can gather their process consists of ALPHABETICALLY(!) applying every single image in the Public Domain photography archive to every object Zazzle offers. Amazingly almost everything they make is amazing. From doggy clothes featuring macrophotography of Chex Mix, to “Thanksgiving Shrimp” skateboard decks, LifeSphere proves 90,000 times over that rigorous process-based design yields infallibly fresh results.' (via Nelson)
  (tags: bots clothing design manufacturing zazzle on-demand spam new-aesthetic future)

• Probabilistic Data Structures for Web Analytics and Data Mining « Highly Scalable Blog : Stream summary, count-min sketches, loglog counting, linear counters. Some nifty algorithms for probabilistic estimation of element frequencies and data-set cardinality (via proggit)
  (tags: via:proggit algorithms probability probabilistic count-min stream-summary loglog-counting linear-counting estimation big-data)

• On The Record: Forging a future for the music industry : The original article is now paywalled, but the comments thread contains a fantastic discussion between some very smart young, and old, musicians, discussing music in a digital age where copying is trivial, the future of the music business, copyright, etc.
  (tags: music-business bill-whelan music mp3 copyright on-the-record irish-times)

• InfoQ: Lock-free Algorithms : Michael Barker and Martin Thompson's talk at the last QCon on the LMAX Disruptor, and other nifty lock-free techniques and patterns. 'Martin Thompson and Michael Barker explain how Intel x86_64 processors and their memory model work, along with low-level techniques that help creating lock-free software.'
  (tags: lock-free locking mutexes algorithms lmax disruptor infoq slides presentations qcon java)

• Don't discount the value of price comparison sites - The Irish Times : Conor Pope recommends home-saver.ie and bonkers.ie for insurance and utilities price comparison. I've used the latter, with great results
  (tags: price-comparison ireland shopping utilities competition phone irish-times consumer)

• Cubism.js : 'a D3 plugin for visualizing time series. Use Cubism to construct better realtime dashboards.' Apache-licensed; nice realtime update style; overlays multiple data sources well. I think I now have a good use-case for this
  (tags: javascript library visualization dataviz tsd data apache open-source)

• First Music Contact - Music3.0 : 'We talk a lot about what the world of music and artists will look like five or ten years from now. But for changes to happen then, the conversations need to happen now. We believe that the next big thing in music is not going to ever appear on a stage. After the record industry (music 1.0) and the live music industry (music 2.0), it's time to pay more attention to innovation (music 3.0) and what can come from constructively disrupting how the music industry operates. It's time to open up the shop. It's time for unvested interests to see if they can use existing data and ecosystems to make a better music business. For far too long, music has been a conservative sector which views the influence of outside forces with abject suspicion and rank horror. Chalk this down to some bad experiences over the last 15 years due to misunderstandings with and ignorance of the tech and telecoms worlds. Chalk this down to rampant music industry egos which lead folks to believe no-one else can sell music bar music players. Chalk it down to fear of disruption. So, it's time for change. You can't keep doing the same things in the same way and hope you won't make the same mistakes again. It's time to listen to and learn from smart people in other areas. It's time for people who have innovative ideas or even just the stirrings of innovative ideas to take stock from people who operate in other areas and who deal with ideas, technology and the valuable currency of innovation every single working day. It's time for some different talking which is going to lead to some very different make-and-do experiences.' Looks excellent. (via Jim Carroll)
  (tags: music future technology internet disruption music-industry ireland via:jimcarroll)

• A Kiva success story : Pretty cool testimonial to Kiva's effects on the ground. 'Thanks to Mariano’s entrepreneurship and skills, and partially to the [microfinance] loans offered to him, as he said: now, his children are attending to school, something his generation couldn’t afford to, and he is able to save some money for his retirement as he won’t have any pension when that moment comes.' plus, I liked this detail: 'Meeting Mariano was funny, because at the beginning he was not convinced we were not there from the lending organization to check on him.' (via Eoin)
  (tags: kiva microfinance loans developing-world peru small-world)

• Scale Something: How Draw Something rode its rocket ship of growth : Membase, surprise answer. In general it sounds like they had a pretty crazy time -- rebuilding the plane in flight even more than usual. "This had us on our toes and working 24 hours a day. I think at one point we were up for around 60-plus hours straight, never leaving the computer. We had to scale out web servers using DNS load balancing, we had to get multiple HAProxies, break tables off MySQL to their own databases, transparently shard tables, and more. This was all being done on demand, live, and usually in the middle of the night. We were very lucky that most of our layers were scalable with little or no major modifications needed. Helping us along the way was our very detailed custom server monitoring tools which allowed us to keep a very close eye on load, memory, and even provided real time usage stats on the game which helped with capacity planning. We eventually ended up with easy to launch "clusters" of our app that included NGINX, HAProxy, and Goliath servers all of which independent of everything else and when launched, increased our capacity by a constant. At this point our drawings per second were in the thousands, and traffic that looked huge a week ago was just a small bump on the current graphs."
  (tags: scale scalability draw-something games haproxy mysql membase couchbase)

• Scaling: It's Not What It Used To Be : skamille's top 5 scaling apps. "1. Redis. I was at a NoSQL meetup last night when someone asked "if you could put a million dollars behind one of the solutions presented here tonight, which one would you choose?" And the answer that one of the participants gave was "None of the above. I would choose Redis. Everyone uses one of these products and Redis." 2. Nginx. Your ops team probably already loves it. It's simple, it scales fabulously, and you don't have to be a programmer to understand how to run it. 3. HAProxy. Because if you're going to have hundreds or thousands of servers, you'd better have good load balancing. 4. Memcached. Redis can act as a cache but using a real caching product for such a purpose is probably a better call. And finally: 5. Cloud hardware. Imagine trying to grow out to millions of users if you had to buy, install, and admin every piece of hardware you would need to do such a thing."
  (tags: scaling nginx memcached haproxy redis)

• Clay Shirky Q&A: online creativity and intellectual property | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk : Good discussion and some great points, particularly this one for pro-copyright comments from "creative class" types: "there are few absolutes in copyright. To the question of motivation, if no copyright equaled no work, the fashion business would collapse, as their products are not covered by copyright. Money is one form of reward, but there are others (many non-fiction authors make more money doing things ancillary to their writing than they do from the writing, and then there is the explosion in labors of love), and copyright is one way to arrange the flow of money, but it's a less good one than it used to be, because we are in an environment that makes that model of control less salient, and the other forms of reward moreso. So the logic of "It's copyright or chaos" isn't holding up well."
  (tags: copyright clay-shirky the-guardian creative-commons fashion)

• Sci-Fi Short Story: 'Press Enter to Execute' : a short story about a spam assassin. (via Lee Maguire)
  (tags: scifi spamassassin anti-spam spam via:lee-maguire whoa fiction short-stories)

• HN on "What it takes to build great machine learning products" : TBH, I think this discussion thread is more useful than the article itself. It's still remarkably difficult to successfully apply ML techniques to real-world problems :(
  (tags: machine-learning hacker-news discussion commentary ai algorithms)

• The Cybercrime Wave That Wasn’t - NYTimes.com : MSFT researchers discover fundamental scientific failures in almost all data on cybercrime/spam/malware damages. 'In numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors -- or outright lies -- cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population. [...] The cybercrime surveys we have examined exhibit exactly this pattern of enormous, unverified outliers dominating the data. In some, 90 percent of the estimate appears to come from the answers of one or two individuals. In a 2006 survey of identity theft by the FTC, two respondents gave answers that would have added $37 billion to the estimate, dwarfing that of all other respondents combined.' my opinion: this is what happens when PR drives the surveys -- numbers tend to inflate to make headlines
  (tags: fail science pr press cybercrime ms via:mark-russinovitch data surveys spam malware viruses phishing)

• Censoring The Pirate Bay is Useless, Research Shows : 'The assumption of BREIN and the court was that a blockade of The Pirate Bay would lower the number of infringers at [Dutch ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL], but new research from the University of Amsterdam shows that this is not the case. [...] The claim that The Pirate Bay blockade by Ziggo and XS4ALL leads to a decrease of copyright infringement by their subscribers via BitTorrent transfers must be rejected. There is no significant effect of this measure. [...] 'Ziggo and XS4ALL subscribers who use BitTorrent apparently found different routes other than 'The Pirate Bay' to share files, and remain active as seeders to upload files to others.' Unfortunately the paper is in Dutch, however
  (tags: holland brein ziggo xs4all bittorrent piratebay piracy research data)

• French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales : Hadopi report says piracy dropped in France by between 17% and 66% during 2011, while Hadopi was in force; however the SEVN report on 2011 notes that legitimate sales of video dropped by 2.7%, ironically blaming 'the continually high level of piracy despite counter measures adopted under the HADOPI law' (http://www.dvd-intelligence.com/display-article.php?article=1676), and the SNEP report on 2011 sales of audio indicates that the market dropped by 3.9% (http://www.telecompaper.com/news/french-online-music-worth-eur-110-mln-in-2011-study). Hard not to come to a conclusion that actions against piracy do not improve sales
  (tags: france hadopi legal music piracy sales revenues sevn snep video)

• Why the New Aesthetic isn’t about 8bit retro, the Robot Readable World, computer vision and pirates | : 'The New Aesthetics, or at least the aspect I’m looking at, is inspired by computer vision. And computer vision is at the point now that computer graphics was at 30 years ago. The New Aesthetics isn’t concerned with retro 8bit graphics of the past, but the 8bit graphics designed for machines of the now.' -- ie, The Robot Readable World, etc. Great essay, and exciting stuff
  (tags: art design new-aesthetic retro robotics graphics computer-vision)

• HotelClub : a decent hotel search/booking site, recommended by On The Record's Jim Carroll ?(@jimcarrollOTR on Twitter): '@sineadgleeson use HotelClub - good range of hotels & prices. Or use Hotel Tonight app for real last minute stuff'
  (tags: hotels travel recommended booking)

• Metricfire - Powerful Application Metrics Made Easy : Irish "metrics as a service" company, Python-native; they've just gone GA and announced their pricing plans
  (tags: python metrics service-metrics)

• Ask For Forgiveness Programming - Or How We'll Program 1000 Cores : Nifty concept from IBM Research's David Ungar -- "race-and-repair". Simply put, allow lock-free lossy/inconsistent calculation, and backfill later, using concepts like "freshener" threads, to reconcile inconsistencies. This is a familiar concept in distributed computing nowadays thanks to CAP, but I hadn't heard it being applied to single-host multicore parallel programming before -- I can already think of an application in our codebase...
  (tags: race-and-repair concurrency coding ibm parallelism parallel david-ungar cap multicore)

• Operations, machine learning and premature babies - O'Reilly Radar : good post about applying ML techniques to ops data. 'At a recent meetup about finance, Abhi Mehta encouraged people to capture and save "everything." He was talking about financial data, but the same applies here. We'd need to build Hadoop clusters to monitor our server farms; we'd need Hadoop clusters to monitor our Hadoop clusters. It's a big investment of time and resources. If we could make that investment, what would we find out? I bet that we'd be surprised.' Let's just say that if you like the sound of that, our SDE team in Amazon's Dublin office is hiring ;)
  (tags: ops big-data machine-learning hadoop ibm)

• Graft punk: Breaking the law to help urban trees bear fruit : This is brilliant. I find it pretty offensive that "ornamental" fruit trees are chosen by urban councils, so that fruit doesn't fall on the path and become slippery or whatever -- come on, that's just what trees do! 'They’re covertly grafting — a practice of connecting two branches in a way that will allow their vascular tissues to join together -- fruit tree limbs onto the trunks of ornamental cherry, plum, and pear trees.'
  (tags: public roads trees nature city urban fruit guerrilla grafting)

• The Cake Cafe map of Ireland : 'Now that Dublin is in our bag, on our Tea Towel and across our Aprons, The Cake Café is going to create a new map of Ireland. We want to fill this map with all of your favorite places in land. Please send us locations that turn you on, fire your imaginations, or just fulfill your dreams; what ever you think should be included. Please pass the request on to friends in far flung parts of the land so they too can send their suggestions; natural or unnatural, animal or man made, a view, a corner of a field, an island or even a journey or hidden places to enjoy a picnic. -- thecakecafe /at/ gmail.com'. Their map of Dublin is a work of genius -- I love that they include a decent chunk of the Northside, which was a notable failure of the Alljoy Design version. I can't wait to see what they come up with for Ireland.
  (tags: cake-cafe ireland maps mapping crowdsourcing dublin design tea-towels)

• Videogames, the Shirt : great Berserk/Space Invaders mashup tee from drtofu. HUMANOID MUST NOT ESCAPE
  (tags: berzerk games history videogames via:fp tees t-shirts)

• A behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering | Hacker News : Good HN discussion
  (tags: deployment engineering facebook releases)

• Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering : 'Facebook gave me an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the process it uses to deploy new functionality. I watched first-hand as the company's release engineers rolled out the new "timeline" feature for brand pages'. Hiphop, BitTorrent, 1.5GB binaries, and IRC!
  (tags: facebook deployment engineering releases via:bos)

• Secret HotSpot option improving GC pauses on large heaps : via Toby DiPasquale. nice tip
  (tags: java jvm gc performance hotspot undocumented)

• A one-line software patent – and a fix : Just another sad story of how software patenting made a standard useless. "I had once hoped that JBIG-KIT would help with the exchange of scanned documents on the Internet, facilitate online inter-library loans, and make paper archives more accessible to users all over the world. However, the impact was minimal: no web browser dared to directly support a standardized file format covered by 23 patents, the last of which expired today. About 25 years ago, large IT research organizations discovered standards as a gold mine, a vehicle to force users to buy patent licenses, not because the technology is any good, but because it is required for compatibility. This is achieved by writing the standards very carefully such that there is no way to come up with a compatible implementation that does not require a patent license, an art that has been greatly perfected since."
  (tags: via:fanf patents jbig1 swpats scanning standards rand frand licensing)

• Displaying a webpage as a screensaver on Ubuntu : using xscreensaver. sounds simple enough. UPDATE: easier: "apt-get install xtrlock", a transparent lock screen
  (tags: screensavers lock ubuntu dashboards linux xscreensaver)

• Girls and coding: female peer pressure scares them off | Education | The Observer : 'Coding and digital prowess is still niche at a young age, self-taught by the studious. It is often considered a bit nerdy in senior school, where it is not currently taught as a part of the curriculum, although this is changing in senior schools from September 2012. Therefore, generally speaking, those who code have taught themselves. Teaching yourself something that should really be covered as a part of lessons is a bit like doing extra homework – why, ask many teens, would anyone do that? There is no way the majority of hormonally challenged, desperate-to-find-their-place-in-the-world teenage girls would risk ridicule or isolation by doing such a thing – let alone be open and proud about it. (Boys of the same age have different social challenges and do not measure their societal worth so much by peer review.)'
  (tags: girls coding education peer-pressure software teaching kids)

• Can we make Irish promissory notes a bit more bonkers? Yes we can : you know Noonan's "deal" with the ECB is insane when the FT compares it to the South Park underpants gnomes. oh dear
  (tags: ecb ireland politics anglo eu euro south-park profit)

• Karl Whelan: Promissory Note “Deal”: Not What Had Been, Em, Promised : 'I can only assume that the “assuming this arrangement works out” element of Honohan’s reply to Michael McGrath didn’t actually work out. And the likely reason for this failure was that the ECB insisted, as it appears they had all along, that a €3.1 billion ELA repayment be made, something which required a cash payment.  That this cash has been temporarily sourced from NAMA and then Bank of Ireland doesn’t at all change the fact that this deal is not what had been flagged and does not have nearly the benefits of that deal.' oh ffs
  (tags: ireland economy bailout ecb eu euro anglo)

• Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon S3 Performance Tips & Tricks : Doug Grismore provides a very useful S3 performance tip; monotonically increasing keys will hurt performance, and describes a clean-enough way to avoid the problem
  (tags: s3 performance aws)

• [tahoe-dev] erasure coding makes files more fragile, not less : Zooko says: "This monitoring and operations engineering is a lot of work!" amen to that
  (tags: erasure-coding replicas fs tahoe-lafs zooko monitoring devops ops)

• Rob Ricketts' "Program Your 808" Posters : Beautiful posters 'detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine'. Planet Rock, Cybotron's Clear, and Voodoo Ray feature... very nice (via stx)
  (tags: via:stx 808 drum-machine voodoo-ray electro music acid-house posters prints)

• Stats from an Irish guy's EV driving : EUR 529.07 over ~4000 miles in his Nissan Leaf; that works out as a yearly savings of EUR 1587.21. not to be sniffed at -- although what's the premium for a Leaf over a standard diesel?
  (tags: ev cars driving nissan economy ireland fuel prices)

• Google Guava BloomFIlter : neat, Guava now has a builtin Bloom filter implementation using the murmur hash. that'll potentially save a little hassle in the future
  (tags: guava coding java bloom-filters data-structures sets)

• The Free Universal Construction Kit | F.A.T. : 'a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.' this is like a patent-infringement lawsuit magnet, surely. Will make an interesting test case...
  (tags: 3d design open-source freedom free toys lego 3d-printing patents)

• The day I tried teaching primary school kids to code (and succeeded) : via Niamh -- 'I learned a bit about teaching at primary level and I learned that it is pretty fun although REALLY hard work! I learned that if you make a complex subject engaging kids will learn it and are probably capable of a great deal more than they are often given credit for. The youngest kids on the day were year four which is aged 8-9 and although they were definitely more able than some of their peers, you can expect that by year 5-6 (aged 9-11) probably a lot of the kids could follow it and indeed learn to code.'
  (tags: coding education kids programming teaching school)

• Chromium builders vs Chrome builders - Chromium-dev | Google Groups : Chromium bug report mail contains mis-pasted porn site link instead of genuine debug output. best follow-up: 'I think that link had a few backdoors', ho ho ho (via Filippo)
  (tags: via:filippo funny porn chromium bug-reports oops cut-and-paste)

• Colm McCarthy: This burden of bank debt is simply not sustainable : Powerful burn-the-bondholders editorial from Colm McCarthy in the Indo. 'No other eurozone member has incurred bank-related debt under ECB duress. There are no provisions in the Maastricht Treaty, in the Stability and Growth Pact or in any other pact or international treaty which grant this power to the ECB, nor was any eurozone member state ever asked to accede to such an arrangement. Commissioner Rehn's Latin phrase ("pacta sunt servanda") has no pact to refer to, insofar as these imposed debts are concerned. Ireland never signed a pact or treaty which empowered the ECB to behave in this fashion. One can only speculate as to the ECB's motives, since it does not deign to explain. European banks have come to rely heavily on unsecured bond financing and the ECB may have felt that no bank bondholder should suffer losses, in order to encourage the survival of this market in bank debt. If this was the motive, the policy is being paid for, not by the ECB, but by Irish taxpayers and sovereign bondholders and financed by European taxpayers and the IMF. There is no pact which confers powers of taxation on the ECB.'
  (tags: bondholders ireland finance colm-mccarthy bailout)

• JS1k, 1k demo submission : a speech synthesizer in 1 KB of javascript. truly awesome, nice work by @p01
  (tags: js1k javascript demos speech hacks coding)

• Cloud Architecture Tutorial - Platform Component Architecture (2of3) : Amazing stuff from Adrian Cockroft at last week's QCon. Faceted object model, lots of Cassandra automation
  (tags: cassandra api design oo object-model java adrian-cockroft slides qcon scaling aws netflix)

• "A Rough Justice" : The poem, written by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, inventor of radar, on being pulled over for speeding by a radar-gun-wielding policeman. "Watson-Watt received a speeding ticket in Canada when he was 64 years old. In his autobiography, _The Pulse of Radar_, he describes the experience. His wife is in the car, and she tries to pull the "don't you know who you're giving a ticket to?" trick on the policeman. Of course he doesn't know Watson-Watt, nor, it turns out, does he even know what radar is (he only knows what his "electronic speedometer" reads out), and Watson-Watt receives a $12.50 (Canadian) dollar fine." (via Rob Manuel)
  (tags: via:robmanuel radar technology irony robert-watson-watt poetry history)

• Fake Unicode Consortium : featuring such codepoints as "I USED TO BE A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K LIKE YOU THEN I TOOK AN ARROW IN THE KNEE", "BACK TO THE FUTURE", "ENTERING HYPERSPACE", "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q TAKING A NAP", and "LOVE HOTEL". no wait, that one's real (via Tony Finch, with comments by Michael Everson!)
  (tags: unicode humor codepoints i18n fonts skyrim hyperspace funny via:fanf)

• Senator Mark McSharry call Boards.ie and Politics.ie "subversive" : 'we have Boards.ie and Politics.ie, for me frankly that doesn't amount to free speech what it amounts to is legalised subversion of the state. I think it's fundamentally wrong.' Incredible quote
  (tags: boards politics.ie ireland internet seanad regulation subversion mark-mcsharry free-speech)

• A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work : 'After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org.'
  (tags: patents swpat upcoming yahoo ip idiocy warchest)

• The Irish Times demands meme takedown : satire of whiny rich-girl complaining is not permitted
  (tags: satire irish-times ip broadsheet memes)

• Advanced PostMortem Fu and Human Error 101 (Velocity 2011) : John Allspaw's previous slides on Etsy's operations culture -- this'll be old hat to Amazon staff of course ;)
  (tags: etsy devops engineering operations reliability mttd mttr postmortems)

• I left my shutter open for 30 seconds in the wilderness at 10.30pm, under a full moon : Amazing shot. With a sufficiently long exposure, it looks like midday -- no colour correction applied. (via fp)
  (tags: via:fp pictures photos night colour landscapes long-exposure photography)

• Occursions : 'Our goal is to create the world's fastest extendable, non-transactional time series database for big data (you know, for kids)! Log file indexing is our initial focus. For example append only ASCII files produced by libraries like Log4J, or containing FIX messages or JSON objects. Occursions was built by a small team sick of creating hacks to remotely copy and/or grep through tons of large log files. We use it to index around a terabyte of new log data per day. Occursions asynchronously tails log files and indexes the individual lines in each log file as each line is written to disk so you don't even have to wait for a second after an event happens to search for it. Occursions uses custom disk backed data structures to create and search its indexes so it is very efficient at using CPU, memory and disk.'
  (tags: logs search tsd big-data log4j via:proggit)

• Microsoft's Azure Feb 29th, 2012 outage postmortem : 'The leap day bug is that the GA calculated the valid-to date by simply taking the current date and adding one to its year. That meant that any GA that tried to create a transfer certificate on leap day set a valid-to date of February 29, 2013, an invalid date that caused the certificate creation to fail.' This caused cascading failures throughout the fleet. Ouch -- should have been spotted during code review
  (tags: azure dev dates leap-years via:fanf microsoft outages post-mortem analysis failure)

• Olafur Eliasson: Your rainbow panorama : Fantastic installation on the roof of a Danish art gallery. 'it's literally the roof of the art museum, so it's open to anyone who pays the admission fee', says krautwald at http://mlkshk.com/p/DIGT
  (tags: colour rainbow spectrum denmark art installations architecture via:mlkshk)