Category: Uncategorized

• 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)

• Welcome, Apple! : 'The desktop version of iPhoto, and indeed all of Apple’s iOS apps until now, use Google Maps. The new iPhoto for iOS, however, uses Apple’s own map tiles – made from OpenStreetMap data (outside the US).'
  (tags: apple ios maps openstreetmap osm free iphoto)

• Apple Map Tiles : I actually really quite like these, particularly how they render parks. Good for leisure use, maybe not so hot for navigation. cute
  (tags: apple gis mapping maps)

• Why I'm Voting "No" to the Fiscal Compact : Cormac Lucey's reasons to vote against the proposed Fiscal Compact in the upcoming referendum
  (tags: fiscal-compact ireland europe eu cormac-lucey economics bailout)

• Is it any wonder the country is the way it is? : Auto-generated complaints about the dreadful state of Ireland, for the pessimistic begrudger on the go. 'We might as well face it - the cast of Fade Street, without any legal grounds, never gave a shit about people in the midlands.'
  (tags: lol funny begrudgery ireland satire via:broadsheet was-is-for-this 1916)

• Why upgrading your Linux Kernel will make your customers much happier : enabling TCP Slow Start on the HTTP server-side decreased internet round-trip page load time by 21% in this case; comments suggest an "ip route" command can also work
  (tags: tcp performance linux network web http rtt slow-start via:jacob)

• FOI docs regarding lobbying of Sean Sherlock on the copyright SI : Truly amazing outcome from Mark Tighe's FOI request regarding lobbying on the copyright SI. It turns out that (a) IRMA want all Irish ISPs to enact "3 strikes", and view the SI as a way to force this; but (b) Eircom are of the opinion that "3 strikes" is now illegal and unenforceable under EU and Irish law. Despite knowing this, Sherlock then went ahead and signed the SI into law *anyway*, just to avoid the hassle of IRMA's members bringing the government to court. Which they did anyway, regardless. What an utter shambles
  (tags: sopaireland sean-sherlock irma emi copyright ireland law eircom lobbying foi)

• Copyright Review Committee #CRC12 Survey : 95 questions for the public, corresponding to the Copyright Review Committee's Consultation Paper at http://www.djei.ie/science/ipr/crc_index.htm . I need to sit down and get through these at some stage...
  (tags: questionnaire copyright law ireland crc12)

• Artist and Hacktivists Sabotage Spanish Anti-Piracy Law | TorrentFreak : 'In an attempt to sabotage a new anti-piracy law that went into effect today, hundreds of websites in Spain are participating in a unique protest organized by a local hacktivist group. The websites all link to an “infringing” song by an artist loyal to the protest, who reported the sites to the authorities to overload them with requests.'
  (tags: hacktivism spain art music mp3 piracy p2p sinde soap hacktavistas eme-navarro sgae)

• Photo Tampering throughout History : dating back to 1860: 'This nearly iconic portrait (in the form of a lithograph) of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body.' I had no idea of many of these
  (tags: tampering photos pictures images photoshop doctoring history)

• Key Techdirt SOPA/PIPA Post Censored By Bogus DMCA Takedown Notice | Techdirt : 'our page clearly is not infringing. This is a 100% bogus DMCA takedown -- something we only discovered by complete accident over a month later -- hiding one of our key articles in an important fight about abusing copyright law to take down free speech. Seems like a perfect example of how copyright can be -- and is -- abused to suppress free speech.'
  (tags: techdirt dmca copyright sopa sopaireland armovore dirty-tricks)

• jm_links on Twitter : With any luck, ifttt.com will be gatewaying the links from http://pinboard.in/u:jm/ to this Twitter feed...
  (tags: twitter ifttt pinboard links feed)

• Adrian Weckler with "6 reasons why Irish SOPA may not work" : All spot on. 'Despite all this, the government - through Minister Sherlock - has passed this statutory instrument. In all likelihood, Sherlock’s department had decided to do it a long time ago (probably before the last election), in a (now failed) effort to get the music companies off its back. It’s a shame that Sherlock has gone along with this so easily: he is taking all the flak. It’s also not that common to see a government determined to pass new law that it knows - or strongly suspects - won’t work.'
  (tags: adrian-weckler law ireland piracy copyright sopaireland)

• Facts Are Sacred : A new Irish news site with some familiar names. 'What is a fact? In philosophy, a fact is something that makes a statement true. In science, it is a verifiable observation. In our case, we take a fact to be something that we can provably demonstrate to be true. This means that we can check the truth of a statement about the current state of affairs but we cannot check claims about the future. Inevitably, as the evidence gets more granular, our view of a fact can change but we should take the scientific approach of going where the evidence leads us, rather than the all too common habit today of starting with a conclusion and looking for supporting data. We are holding ourselves to a high standard and we want you to call us on it where you believe we have fallen short. It is more important that, as readers and writers, we collaborate to put verifiable facts into our daily discourse rather than that we save face. We are looking forward to what we’re sure will be a challenging and rewarding experience and hope you enjoy the ride.'
  (tags: science facts news ireland politics data writing)

• Censorship is inseparable from surveillance | Technology | guardian.co.uk : 'In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That's the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.' Very good point from Cory Doctorow
  (tags: cory-doctorow censorship surveillance firewalls privacy internet freedom)

• Fault Tolerance in a High Volume, Distributed System : Netflix's "DependencyCommand", a resiliency system for SOA inter-service network calls, offering builtin support for threadpools, timeouts, retries and graceful failover. Very nice
  (tags: netflix architecture concurrency distributed failover ha resiliency fail-fast failsafe soa fault-tolerance)

• **IMPORTANT** Copyright policy - boards.ie : Boards' new post-SOPAIreland copyright policy, at least for the Rugby forum. Wonder how widespread this is to the rest of the site
  (tags: boards ireland sopaireland sean-sherlock copyright rules forums linking)

• Irish Government signs disastrous (SOPA) law to reinforce online copyright laws | Manhattan Diary | IrishCentral : 'This is Fine Gael Junior Minister Sean Sherlock. It's probably not important that you remember his face because his career in Irish politics may soon be over. [...] What's particularly galling is the government's high handed act. In the United States they dropped SOPA legislation because voters objected, but in Ireland they just waited for the controversy to die down and railroaded it through. I had hoped Ireland had learned enough in recent years to move beyond this style of governance.'
  (tags: sopaireland sopa ireland law copyright emigrants)

• Danish Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident | TorrentFreak : 'Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate. The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review. “Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.'
  (tags: censorship denmark internet filtering review google facebook blocking)

• YouTube bypasses the DMCA : more on the Rumblefish-owns-birdsong Youtube fiasco
  (tags: youtube dmca rumblefish birdsong copyright)

• Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities. : 'at the end of the day what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain [specifically gambling site bodog.com] operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info (Afilias is headquartered in Ireland by operates out of the US). This is no longer a doom-and-gloom theory by some guy in a tin foil hat. It just happened.'
  (tags: via:joshea internet legal policy public sopa domains dns verisign seizure)

• DJEI - Copyright S.I. signed and consultation process launched on copyright and innovation - Minister Sherlock : Sean Sherlock says the new SI will "establish Irish copyright law on a firm footing to encourage innovation, foster creativity", which is pretty bloody hilarious. plus a nice little dig at the online campaign: "As there are clearly many diverse interests, it is important that interested parties come together and work in a constructive way to map the path forward." They really don't have a clue what they've done. After 20 years of Labour first prefs, I'm never voting Labour again
  (tags: labour ireland politics sean-sherlock copyright copyfight)

• Infovore » A Year of Links : 'I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year. Given I first used Delicious in 2004, that makes for eight books to date.' Printed via Lulu, with a tag index. Really nifty ;)
  (tags: books archives bookmarks pinboard delicious links personal history via:pinboard)

• On The Record » The hue and cry over buying and selling tickets : 'If you really think that all 14,500 tickets for a hot show at Dublin’s O2 like, let’s say, One Direction will go on sale to the general public, you probably also still believe in the tooth fairy. While 10 per cent of the tickets are usually held back for O2’s priority customers, there will always still be far less than the remaining 13,000 tickets available on Ticketmaster’s system when the show purportedly goes on sale. How else do you think tickets for those One Direction Dublin shows in March 2013 can on sale minutes after they are sold out on the supposed primary ticket-selling site, on a secondary site like Viagogo at a hugely inflated premium? Do you really think people queued overnight for those tickets to go “nah, not bothered, have to wash my hair that night” five minutes after getting them in their hands about a show 13 months away? Perhaps we need a Dispatches-type expose over here to lift a few rocks and show the type of fat, avaricious worms wiggling around underneath feasting like parasites on the wallets and credit cards of Irish music fans.'
  (tags: secondary-sales touts tickets gigs ireland music dispatches)

• Zombie Gnomes Bye Bye Birdie by ChrisandJanesPlace on Etsy : 'This is a sorry sight indeed. A poor helpless Lawn Flamingo has been taken down by zombie gnomes: Nose-less Ned, Greedy Gary, and Bartolomeu.It seems like an unlikely kill until Bartolomeu broke the elegant beasts leg and brought it crashing to the ground. Where they pounced upon their helpless victim and began their feast. So we say "Bye Bye Birdie, I'm going to miss you so, Bye Bye Birdie, Why'd you have to go?"' -- bloody hell
  (tags: etsy regretsy funny odd flamingo zombies gnomes)

• twitter/jvmgcprof - GitHub : 'gcprof is a simple utility for profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM [...] Profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM. The gcprof command runs a java command under profiling. Allocation and collection statistics are printed periodically. If -n or -no are provided, statistics are also reported in terms of the given application metric. Total allocation, allocation rate, and a survival histogram is given. The intended use for this tool is twofold: (1) monitor and test garbage allocation and GC behavior, and (2) inform GC tuning.'
  (tags: gc java performance twitter jvm tools)

• YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music - Slashdot : 'So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish's exclusive intellectual property."' Major problems with how YouTube is now policing IP infringement, it seems
  (tags: birdsong absurd google fail youtube rumblefish copyfight)

• BBC News - Sentinel project research reveals UK GPS jammer use : GPS jamming was this commonplace? I had no idea. '"We believe there's between 50 and 450 occurrences in the UK every day," said Charles Curry of Chronos Technology, the company leading the project, though he stressed that they were still analysing the data.' [...] "Most of them are used by people who don't want their vehicles to be tracked." (via Tim Bunce)
  (tags: via:timbunce jamming gps uk location chronos)

• Library Closure of Type .nu : Alan Toner on library.nu's shutdown. 'The case of library.nu is significant because the demand for the works offered there demonstrates that filesharing is not just about pop music, porn and cams of action movies, but also those forms and sources of knowledge whose acquisition are ritually celebrated within ‘enlightenment’ culture. Many of those whose works were offered derive income not from royalties, but from related activities such as teaching and research. Such people were themselves an important component library.nu’ user base. Some have other means to access the same materials, others, especially those in countries with weaker education infrastructures and more emaciated library budgets, do not. Outside of formal education, the millions of online autodidacts may be denied access to material, seriously impinging on their lives and possibilities. When one considers the cost of text books and more especially scholarly articles, that is no hyperbole, and applies not only to the global south but the post-industrial north as well, awash in its dreams of knowledge economies and human capital.'
  (tags: alan-toner library.nu ebooks education filesharing copyright piracy)

• Canadian Universities Agree To Ridiculous Copyright Agreement That Says Emailing Hyperlinks Is Equal To Photocopying | Techdirt : 'The agreement reached last month with the licensing agency includes provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and surveillance of academic staff email.' wow, incredibly bad terms
  (tags: copyright canada hyperlinks copyfight techdirt licensing academia)

• EFF Wins Protection for Time Zone Database : 'The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a 'covenant not to sue' going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions. Software engineers around the world depend on the time zone database to make sure that time-stamps for email and other files work correctly no matter where you are. However, last September, Astrolabe filed a lawsuit against Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert – the researchers who coordinated the database's development for decades – because the database includes information from an atlas in which Astrolabe claimed to own copyright. But facts – like what time the sun rises – are not copyrightable. EFF, along with co-counsel Adam Kessel and Olivia Nguyen at the Boston office of Fish & Richardson P.C, promptly signed on to defend Olson and Eggert and protect this essential tool. In January, EFF advised Astrolabe that Olson and Eggert would move for sanctions if Astrolabe did not withdraw its complaint. Today's dismissal followed.'
  (tags: copyright eff timezones via:fanf time unix olson)

• Near Neighbor Search in High Dimensional Data [PDF] : Detect near-duplicates; would be good for future Razor-like efficient near-duplicate detection. (slides)
  (tags: slides algorithms email performance programming near-neighbour-search search)

• Mailinator(tm) Blog: How Mailinator compresses email by 90% : Quite a lot of work for an extra 5% ;)
  (tags: mailinator lcs caching algorithms compression email)

• Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann - Filming in Ireland - Made in Ireland : nice work IFB! A great locations map from recent movies filmed (entirely or partially) in Ireland, showing where they were shot, what location they stood in for, and with screengrabs and clips
  (tags: ifb ireland movies locations)

• Cloudsmith Stack Hammer : something Chris Horn sent on -- using Puppet to build stacks and deploy to AWS using a simple point-and-click interface. looks cool
  (tags: github ec2 aws puppet stacks cloudsmith stack-hammer via:chorn)

• Turning Ireland's water and wind into energy exports : Ars Technica on the "Spirit Of Ireland" pumped-hydro proposal -- great comments
  (tags: ars-technica pumped-hydro spirit-of-ireland electricity renewable-energy)

• Perspectives on the Costa Concordia Incident : hey, co-worker Rory Browne gets namechecked on James Hamilton's blog! woo
  (tags: costa-concordia amazon james-hamilton disaster boats safety post-mortem)

• Barry Mason - Alamy Stock Photographer : my dad's new blog!
  (tags: family blogs photography alamy dad)

• MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases : 'I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting.'
  (tags: algorithms hadoop java mapreduce patterns distcomp)

• The OpenPhoto Project : A great getting-out-of-Flickr life-raft. self-hosted, PHP app, storing photos in Dropbox, S3, or local disk; UI screenshots look great (via Nelson)
  (tags: galleries photos php flickr images via:nelson)

• Autometrics: Self-service metrics collection : how LinkedIn built a service-metrics collection and graphing infrastructure using Kafka and Zookeeper, writing to RRD files, handling 8.8k metrics per datacenter per second
  (tags: kafka zookeeper linkedin sysadmin service-metrics)

• sbtourist/nimrod - GitHub : 'Nimrod is a metrics server, inspired by the excellent Coda Hale's Metrics library, but purely based on log processing: hence, it doesn't affect the way you write your applications, nor it has any side effect on them.'
  (tags: nimrod service-metrics logging)

• Divide and Concur « Code as Craft : Etsy's interesting approach to managing a large test suite, annotations marking potentially troublesome integration tests: "flaky", "database", "network", "sleep" and "slow".
  (tags: testing etsy php test-suites annotations integration-testing)

• The Millions : The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’ Guide to Classic Video Games : This really exists. “Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it.”
  (tags: omgwtf martin-amis video-games space-invaders pacman reviews tips funny)

• Syria Bars Text Messages With Irish-Made Gear - Bloomberg : Anti-spam/AV filtering technology turned to a different purpose: political repression. 'The next day, 225 instructed Syriatel to block messages containing the word “massacres.”'
  (tags: antispam ireland repression technology syria politics cellusys adaptivemobile)

• Turbocharging Solr Index Replication with BitTorrent : Etsy now replicating their multi-GB search index across the search farm using BitTorrent. Why not Multicast? 'multicast rsync caused an epic failure for our network, killing the entire site for several minutes. The multicast traffic saturated the CPU on our core switches causing all of Etsy to be unreachable.' fun!
  (tags: etsy multicast sev1 bittorrent search solr rsync scaling outages)

• Apache Kafka : 'Kafka provides a publish-subscribe solution that can handle all activity stream data and processing on a consumer-scale web site. This kind of activity (page views, searches, and other user actions) are a key ingredient in many of the social feature on the modern web. This data is typically handled by "logging" and ad hoc log aggregation solutions due to the throughput requirements. This kind of ad hoc solution is a viable solution to providing logging data to an offline analysis system like Hadoop, but is very limiting for building real-time processing. Kafka aims to unify offline and online processing by providing a mechanism for parallel load into Hadoop as well as the ability to partition real-time consumption over a cluster of machines.' neat
  (tags: kafka linkedin apache distributed messaging pubsub queue incubator scaling)

• An Irishman's Diary - The Irish Times - Thu, Feb 09, 2012: A History Of Ireland In 100 Excuses : '4. A shortage of natural resources.' very good
  (tags: history ireland excuses trevelyan)

• Blank Canvas Script Handler : 'This extension lets you customize web sites by running bits of JavaScript on pages. It's kind of an unofficial Greasemonkey for Chrome, and supports many of the GM_* functions used in most scripts.'
  (tags: google-chrome chrome browsers javascript ui customization greasemonkey userscripts extensions via:mmeaney)

• lrzip : 'Lrzip uses an extended version of rzip which does a first pass long distance redundancy reduction. The lrzip modifications make it scale according to memory size. [...] The unique feature of lrzip is that it tries to make the most of the available ram in your system at all times for maximum benefit. It does this by default, choosing the largest sized window possible without running out of memory.'
  (tags: zip compression via:dakami gzip bzip2 archiving benchmarks)

• Vladimir Lenin and the ‘Rathmines accent’ : this is brilliant. Turns out Lenin spoke English with what would now be called a "D4" accent, roysh!
  (tags: accents ireland dublin lenin history rathmines)

• _Intellectual property rights and innovation: Evidence from the human genome_ (PDF) : 'Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private rm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort. Across a range of empirical specications, I nd evidence that Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.' (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: via:fanf genetics ip copyright open-source celera patents papers pdf)

• Politics.ie - Labour Senator takes to twitter to defend comments, insults all around him : In which Ben Walsh memorably takes on racist/right-wing comments from a Labour senator, and gets told to "go back to D4". ho ho
  (tags: twitter funny ireland politics)

• Éire Trea May Be the World's First Irish-Eritrean Food Truck - SFoodie : Brilliant. 'The menu lists dishes like battered sausages, Irish curry with chips -- Irish curry tastes similar to Japanese curry, Hyland says -- and shepherd's pie alongside chicken doro-wat or vegetable stew served over injera bread. They've attempted a couple of fusion experiments, such as shiro (ground-chickpea stew) nachos, and have a few more ideas they're playing around with, but it's still early days.' (via Ben)
  (tags: curry irish eritrean food battered-sausages food-trucks)

• The best "why estimation is hard" parable I've read this week : 'A tense silence falls between us. The phone call goes unmade. I'll call tomorrow once my comrade regains his senses and is willing to commit to something reasonable.'
  (tags: agile development management programming teams estimation tasks software)

• Neil Young on piracy : 'I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.'
  (tags: internet filesharing piracy copyright neil-young music)

• Why should we stop online piracy? - opinion - 19 January 2012 - New Scientist : 'There's no evidence that the US is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.' Good description of 'dead weight loss' and the consumer pressure on the industry that illegal competition poses
  (tags: piracy new-scientist slate sopa filesharing dead-weight-loss economics music movies)

• Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers - Forbes : 'The data simply doesn’t suggest that piracy is causing any serious economic harm to the US economy or the entertainment industry. Heavy-handed approaches to preventing piracy are wrong-headed and reveal a dangerous level of short-term thinking on the part of both lawmakers and industry leaders. Worse, the impetus to crack down on piracy is based largely on industry data that wildly inflates the problem.'
  (tags: piracy forbes filesharing politics sopa economics law)

• Adrian Weckler confims that "Ireland's SOPA" will be vague and open-ended : 'The clear implication from [Adrian's] interview with Sean Sherlock is that the proposed measures will be lacking in any real detail, leaving it entirely up to the judges as to what types of blocking might emerge. (Possibly going beyond web blocking to also target hosting and other services.) This ambiguity -- as well as jeopardising fundamental rights -- will create intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland.' -- this is much, much worse than I thought, particularly given the level of technical knowledge among Ireland's judges (if Mr. Justice Charleton's performance in EMI v. UPC is anything to go by).
  (tags: sopa ireland law filesharing piracy internet filtering blocking)

• The Captain of the Costa Concordia is Totally Screwed [OP/ED] : 'For the most senior officer on board, the one who had been entrusted with the care and safety of this magnificent ship, his job was far from over. In fact the Captain had just added a new job title to his resume, that of ON SCENE COMMANDER. But apparently he didn’t realize it because he took off in a lifeboat, leaving this giant steaming pile to be picked up by the Italian police and Coast Guard who are continuing to search for survivors, and prevent looters from gaining access. The Captain didn’t just take off in a lifeboat, he left the entire scene completely.' oh dear. (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: via:fanf disaster ineptitude maritime boats tourism giglio sea sinking liners safety)

• Ultra Slow Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush : 36 minutes long. Actually BRILLIANT
  (tags: kate-bush music sloooow 1978 youtube video via:rosco)

• Freeman on the land - RationalWiki : fantastically encyclopedic description of the "freeman on the land" pseudolegal gibberish, now being employed in an attempt to evade unpleasant taxes or fees -- this stuff is on the rise in post-economic-collapse Ireland, unsurprisingly
  (tags: debt legal freemen freeman law taxes ireland recession)

• Project HGG: FAQ : Hackerspace Global Grid -- 'We want to understand, build and make available satellite based communication for the hackerspace community and all of mankind.' Space is the place!
  (tags: space ccc satellite communication internet hackerspace)

• Skeuomorph : word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : 'A skeuomorph /?skju??m?rf/ skew-?-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines'
  (tags: words language history objects ornament design wikipedia)

• Punching through The Great Firewall of T-Mobile : well, this is bizarre -- it seems T-Mobile UK are blocking encrypted email submission and OpenVPN traffic in their mobile internet access products. Why? Who knows -- but at least filtering RST packets evades the block, as in the Great Firewall of China
  (tags: china filtering rst internet iptables t-mobile uk payg mobile-internet)

• ChessBase.com - Chess News - A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess (part two) : An amazing article, via Nelson Minar -- careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering -- by many of the developers. 'Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.'
  (tags: chess code games open-source licensing reverse-engineering copyright infringement via:nelson)

• High Scalability - How Twitter Stores 250 Million Tweets a Day Using MySQL : MySQL as a storage backend -- basically an InnoDB store
  (tags: mysql twitter scalability gizzard innodb performance database)

• Using a Feistel Network for full-cycle permutation : nice algorithm. requires that the permuted set's size be a power of 2 however - although for smaller sets you can just skip to the next output value, since they're not going to repeat
  (tags: feistel-network full-cycle permutation shuffling algorithms)

• algorithm - Generating shuffled range using a PRNG rather than shuffling - Stack Overflow : some reasonably good answers on using an LFSR or LCG to generate a full-cycle permutation with no repeats
  (tags: lfsr lcg algorithms permutation shuffling)

• French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak : 'According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.' I love this. The data is, of course, filled with potential inaccuracies -- and that's the point
  (tags: bittorrent surveillance downloading internet privacy france hadopi)

• SiliconRepublic story on CoderDojo : 'it's both incredible and poignant that a voluntary movement that was born in Ireland during the summer is about to go international. Coder Dojo, the brainchild of 19-year-old entrepreneur and programmer James Whelton from Cork and tech entrepreneur Bill Liao, began as a Saturday morning club for kids to teach each other software programming. It has grown into a national movement up and down Ireland, a place where kids and their parents can go and learn to write software code in a friendly environment. The first UK Coder Dojo was held in London only last week and other countries in Europe are clamouring to get the initiative started there, too.' Good on them!
  (tags: coderdojo programming coding kids children teaching education tech ireland)

• Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics : The (comp.)risks of overautomation strike again. "When trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land -- the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what's going on. They'll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can't be trusted?"
  (tags: aviation crash flight flying autopilot stalls warnings alarms ui af447 risks automation)

• spark : sparklines in your terminal window. Simply give it a comma or space-separated list of data values, and it'll generate an ANSI-graphics sparkline chart. Brilliant! (via mjd)
  (tags: via:mjdominus sparklines charts graphs bash shell terminal cli ansi)

• How would my finances change if euro collapsed? - RTÉ News : RTE's sketch of the repercussions of a Euro collapse for Irish consumers. basically: you won't have any finances, particularly if you have a mortgage
  (tags: ireland euro disaster rte finance money mortgages)

• Script used by Instagram to duplicate the paged-in VM pages to another host : as seen in their "Instagram Engineering" post
  (tags: vmtouch vm linux unix tools instagram)

• vmtouch - the Virtual Memory Toucher : 'vmtouch is a tool for learning about and controlling the file system cache of unix and unix-like systems. It is BSD licensed.'
  (tags: vmtouch vm linux unix fs filesystems instagram)

• Scott Andreas - Garbage, Garbage Everywhere [slides] : 'GC Strategies for Event Processing Systems on the JVM'
  (tags: gc java jvm event-streams event-processing tuning slides presentations scott-andreas performance)

• Large file management with git-annex : 'uses Git to manage files that are larger than Git can easily handle—without checking them into the repository. But git-annex provides ways to track those files using much of the same infrastructure as Git, so that moving or deleting those files can all be tracked in much the same way as committed files. In addition, git-annex allows for branches and distributed clones of its trees.' I may investigate using this to sync my MP3s instead of SVN
  (tags: git git-annex version-control)

• collectSPACE : 'The Source for Space History and Artifacts' -- and just in time for xmas too!
  (tags: space spaaace memorabilia collecting gomi tat artifacts ebay science xmas)

• 747s using VLANs to secure in-flight access to engine management systems : 'I was contracted to test the systems on a Boeing 747. They had added a new video system that ran over IP. They segregated this from the control systems using layer 2 VLANs. We managed to break the VLANs and access other systems and with source routing could access the Engine management systems.' (via Risks)
  (tags: scary aviation flight security boeing 747 via:risks)

• LINX Public Affairs » Scarlet wins in European Court : 'The Court judgement therefore goes well beyond saying what a court may decide, by means of an injunction: it also sets out the limits of Member States’ powers to legislate to draft ISPs as copyright police. It will be a crucial precedent in future arguments about the Digital Economy Act, in the UK, HADOPI in France, various blocking requirements in Italy, and numerous other schemes across the EU. As victories for ISPs in the copyright wars go, this one was comprehensive. It will be seen as a landmark ruling for years to come.' woot
  (tags: linx scarlet isps hadopi eu privacy filtering copyright irma filesharing)

• How does LMAX's disruptor pattern work? - Stack Overflow : LMAX's "Disruptor" concurrent-server pattern, claiming to be a higher-throughput, lower-latency, and lock-free alternative to the SEDA pattern using a massive ring buffer. Good discussion here at SO. (via Filippo)
  (tags: via:filippo servers seda queueing concurrency disruptor patterns latency trading performance ring-buffers)

• Scrapheap Transhumanism : Lepht Anonym and the 'Grinders'. crazy stuff -- low-end DIY cybernetic augmentation. 'The implants sit in various places under my skin: middle fingertips of my left hand, back of the right hand, right forearm — tiny magnets, five or six millimeters across, coated in gold and then in silicon to isolate the delicate metal from the destructive environment of your body. They’re something of an investment at about thirty euros apiece, and hard to get hold of, but worth pursuing. When implanted, they become technological sensory organs. There’s an entire world of electromagnetic radiation out there, invisible to most. Our cities are saturated with it. A radio, for instance, gives off a field that’s bigger than the device itself. So do power supplies and wires in the walls. The implants pick up on the fields, and because they’re magnets, they fizz with gentle electricity, telling you this hard drive is currently active, that one is turned off, there’s the main line in the wall. Holding a mobile phone, you can feel the signals it sends and receives. You know it’s ringing before it starts to play any sounds, and when you answer it, you stick the touchscreen stylus to the back of your hand to hold it, then to your finger to type.'
  (tags: diy augmentation cybernetics transhumanism lepht-anonym grinders biohacking cyberpunk medicine)

• Apache considered harmful : ouch
  (tags: git asf apache via:hn github programming)

• IETF expedited publication of RFC6449 before J.D. Falk passed away : I had no idea JD was sick. Very saddened to hear about this, he was a nice guy and a great member of the anti-spam community :(
  (tags: jd-falk death cancer rfcs ietf anti-spam people)

• the legend of St. Columba, patron saint of copyright infringers : 'At this point IPKat team member Jeremy dons his old academic hat and excitedly draws attention to some research he did on the St Columba case.  The goodly saint was given access to a psalter that was in the possession of Abbot Finian in around the year 560.  A psalter is a book of psalms -- definitely public domain stuff, having been compiled during the reign of King David, who is generally reckoned to have died around 970 years before the common era.  Even on a life + 70 year basis, copyright would have expired around getting on for 1,500 years before Columba came on to the scene.  Having illicitly copied the psalter he refused to deliver it up to King Dermot of Tara, who famously said “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy” -- not "to every cow its calf, to every author his work".  Anyway, to cut a long story short, Columba refused to hand it over, fled the country for the safety of England (like the founder of Wikileaks), converted the Picts to Christianity, settled in Iona and became a saint.  You can read this all in "St Columba the Copyright Infringer" [1985] 12 European Intellectual Property Review 350-353.' (via Eoin O'Dell). Someone fill in the misquoting High Court judges....
  (tags: st-columba books via:cearta ireland law history filesharing copyright)

• eclim (eclipse + vim) : 'Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, Vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, Eclipse, provides many great tools for development in various languages. Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both still leave something to be desired. Vim lacks native Java support and many of the advanced features available in Eclipse. Eclipse, on the other hand, still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to Vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text. That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write an IDE in Vim or a Vim editor in Eclipse, eclim provides an Eclipse plug-in that exposes Eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of Vim plug-ins that communicate with Eclipse over that interface. This functionality can be leveraged in three primary ways, as illustrated below.'
  (tags: eclipse java programming software vim editors refactoring)

• Schwalbe Marathon Winter tyres : back in stock at ChainReactionCycles, EUR48 each. bookmarking to buy in case the weather forecast turns shitty again this year...
  (tags: weather ice cycling commute snow bikes)

• Determining response times with tcprstat : 'Tcprstat is a free, open-source TCP analysis tool that watches network traffic and computes the delay between requests and responses. From this it derives response-time statistics and prints them out.' Computes percentiles, too
  (tags: tcp tcprstat tcp-ip networking measurement statistics performance instrumentation linux unix tools cli)

• DTrace and Erlang : from Basho, via istvan. DTrace is becoming more compelling as a deep instrumentation/monitoring API -- I didn't realise disabled DTrace probes were virtually 0-overhead (a "2 NOOP instruction placeholder", apparently), that's nifty. Wonder if they've fixed the licensing mess, though
  (tags: dtrace monitoring instrumentation debugging tracing unix erlang via:istvan)

• Benchmarking Cassandra Scalability on AWS - Over a million writes per second : NetFlix' benchmarks -- impressively detailed. '48, 96, 144 and 288 instances', across 3 EC2 AZs in us-east, successfully scaling linearly
  (tags: ec2 aws cassandra scaling benchmarks netflix performance)

• Inside the mind of the octopus : "Researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself."
  (tags: octopus animals biology consciousness neuroscience science)

• Dark Sky - Weather Prediction, Reinvented by Adam Grossman & Jack Turner — Kickstarter : Yes! short-term weather prediction and dataviz. I've been vaguely considering ideas along these lines recently, but these guys have gone much further. US residents, fund it -- I really hope this gets made and makes it to Ireland...
  (tags: crowdfunding weather apps cool dataviz visualization)

• Studded Bicycle Tires : Thinking of the winter commute again. This page has a load of fantastic info on winter tyres
  (tags: ice winter tires tyres cycling shopping commute)

• Linux SS Utility To Investigate Sockets / Network Connections : 'When amount of sockets is enough large, netstat or even plain cat /proc/net/tcp/ cause nothing but pains and curses. In linux-2.4 the desease [sic] became worse: even if amount of sockets is small reading /proc/net/tcp/ is slow enough. This utility presents a new approach, which is supposed to scale well.' via scanlan
  (tags: via:scanlan ss linux sockets networking tools cli)

• Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages : HBase and Haystack; all data LZO-compressed; very interesting approach to testing -- they 'shadow the real production workload into the test cluster to test before going into production'. This catches a 'high percentage' of issues before production. nice
  (tags: testing shadowing haystack hbase facebook scalability lzo messaging sms via:james-hamilton)

• Avoiding Full GCs in HBase with MemStore-Local Allocation Buffers : Fascinating. Evading the Java GC by reimplementing a slab allocator, basically
  (tags: memory allocation java gc jvm hbase memstore via:dehora slab-allocator)

• How to beat the CAP theorem : Nathan "Storm" Marz on building a dual realtime/batch stack. This lines up with something I've been building in work, so I'm happy ;)
  (tags: nathan-marz realtime batch hadoop storm big-data cap)

• peak6/scala-ssh-shell - GitHub : 'Backdoor that gives you a scala shell over ssh on your jvm. The shell is not sandboxed, anyone access the shell can touch anything in the jvm and do anything the jvm can do including modifying and deleting files, etc.' nifty!
  (tags: scala ssh repl interactive debugging coding jvm java)

• Anrealage pixelled shop : 'Experimental japanese designer Kunihiko Morinaga has been inspired by pixel for his latest FW 2011 collection of his brand Anrealage. The best part is that this pixelled style has been applied also to his brand showroom in Harajuku, Tokyo.' Love the rug
  (tags: anrealage pixelation pixel-art via:mlkshk rugs shops tokyo kunihiko-morinaga)

• the etymology of the anatomical term "Thagomizer" : 'The term was coined by Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side comic strip, in which a group of cavemen in a faux-modern lecture hall are taught by their caveman professor that the spikes were named "after the late Thag Simmons". The term was picked up initially by Ken Carpenter, a palaeontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993. Thagomizer has since been adopted as an informal anatomical term, and is used by the Smithsonian Institution, the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, the book The Complete Dinosaur and the BBC documentary series Planet Dinosaur.' (via John Looney)
  (tags: via:john-looney thagomizer the-far-side comics til dinosaurs funny)

• Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet : 'Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives.' hmm, not quite sure how that air gap is supposed to work
  (tags: air-gap security drones viruses firewalls)

• Bayes' theorem ruled inadmissible in UK law courts : Bayes' theorem, and 'similar statistical analysis', ruled inadmissible in UK law courts (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: uk law guardian via:fanf bayes maths statistics legal)

• Amazon hiring embedded OS developers : hey, I know a few of those! 'I need more help on a project I’m driving at Amazon where we continue to make big changes in our datacenter network to improve customer experience and drive down costs while, at the same time, deploying more gear into production each day than all of Amazon.com used back in 2000. It’s an exciting time and we have big changes happening in networking. If you enjoy and have experience in operating systems, networking protocol stacks, or embedded systems and you would like to work on one of the biggest networks in the world, [get in touch].' -- James Hamilton
  (tags: james-hamilton aws jobs amazon networking embedded)