Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

Links for 2012-02-16

Published February 16, 2012

Links for 2012-02-12

Published February 12, 2012

  • 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)

Links for 2012-02-07

Published February 7, 2012

  • 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)

Links for 2012-02-04

Published February 4, 2012

  • _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)

Links for 2012-02-03

Published February 3, 2012

Links for 2012-01-22

Published January 22, 2012

  • 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)

Links for 2012-01-17

Published January 17, 2012

Links for 2012-01-07

Published January 7, 2012

  • 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)

Links for 2012-01-04

Published January 4, 2012

Links for 2011-12-17

Published December 17, 2011

Links for 2011-12-15

Published December 15, 2011

  • 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)

Links for 2011-12-08

Published December 8, 2011

Links for 2011-12-04

Published December 4, 2011

Links for 2011-11-26

Published November 26, 2011

Links for 2011-11-23

Published November 23, 2011

  • 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)

Links for 2011-11-15

Published November 15, 2011

  • 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)

Links for 2011-11-02

Published November 2, 2011

Links for 2011-10-22

Published October 22, 2011

Links for 2011-10-11

Published October 11, 2011

Links for 2011-10-09

Published October 9, 2011

  • 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)

Links for 2011-10-02

Published October 2, 2011

  • 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)

Links for 2011-09-29

Published September 29, 2011

Links for 2011-09-25

Published September 25, 2011

Links for 2011-09-20

Published September 20, 2011

Links for 2011-09-19

Published September 19, 2011

Links for 2011-09-13

Published September 13, 2011

Links for 2011-09-12

Published September 12, 2011

Links for 2011-09-10

Published September 10, 2011

  • Dutch grepping Facebook for welfare fraud : 'The [Dutch] councils are working with a specialist Amsterdam research firm, using the type of computer software previously deployed only in counterterrorism, monitoring [LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter] traffic for keywords and cross-referencing any suspicious information with digital lists of social welfare recipients. Among the giveaway terms, apparently, are “holiday” and “new car”. If the automated software finds a match between one of these terms and a person claiming social welfare payments, the information is passed on to investigators to gather real-life evidence.' With a 30% false positive rate, apparently -- let's hope those investigations aren't too intrusive!
    (tags: grep dutch holland via:tjmcintyre privacy facebook twitter linkedin welfare dole fraud false-positives searching)

Links for 2011-09-06

Published September 6, 2011

  • The Monkeysphere Project : OpenPGP's web of trust extending further. 'Everyone who has used a web browser has been interrupted by the "Are you sure you want to connect?" warning message, which occurs when the browser finds the site's certificate unacceptable. But web browser vendors (e.g. Microsoft or Mozilla) should not be responsible for determining whom (or what) the user trusts to certify the authenticity of a website, or the identity of another user online. The user herself should have the final say, and designation of trust should be done on the basis of human interaction. The Monkeysphere project aims to make that possibility a reality.'
    (tags: via:filippo gpg pki security software ssh ssl web)

  • Convergence : 'Convergence is a secure replacement for the Certificate Authority System. Rather than employing a traditionally hard-coded list of immutable CAs, Convergence allows you to configure a dynamic set of Notaries which use network perspective to validate your communication. Convergence allows you to choose who you want to trust, rather than having someone else's decision forced on you. You can revise your trust decisions at any time, so that you're not locked in to trusting anyone for longer than you want.'
    (tags: ssl tls trust security https web via:filippo firefox plugins pki)

Links for 2011-09-04

Published September 4, 2011

  • Dave Neary on The Cost of Going it Alone : 'I’m going to talk about the costs associated with modifying and maintaining free software “out of tree” – that is, when you don’t work with the developers of the software to have your changes integrated. But I’m also going to talk about the costs of working with upstream projects. It can be easy for us to forget that working upstream takes time and money – and we ignore that to our peril. It’s in our interests as free software developers to make it as cost-effective as possible for people to work with us. Hopefully, if you’re a commercial developer, you’ll come away from this article with a better idea of when it’s worthwhile to work upstream, and when it isn’t. And if you’re a community developer, perhaps this will give you some ideas about how to make it easier for people to work with you.'
    (tags: dave-neary gnome open-source maintainers upstream forking)

Links for 2011-08-29

Published August 29, 2011

  • Microsoft's new IE "Ribbon" debunked : 'nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right? Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.' (via Nelson)
    (tags: design hci microsoft ui statistics user-hostile ribbon windows)

Links for 2011-08-28

Published August 28, 2011

Links for 2011-08-23

Published August 23, 2011

Links for 2011-08-15

Published August 15, 2011

  • Building with Legos : Netflix tech blog on how they deploy their services. Notably, they avoid the Puppet/Chef approach, citing these reasons: 'One is that it eliminates a number of dependencies in the production environment: a master control server, package repository and client scripts on the servers, network permissions to talk to all of these. Another is that it guarantees that what we test in the test environment is the EXACT same thing that is deployed in production; there is very little chance of configuration or other creep/bit rot. Finally, it means that there is no way for people to change or install things in the production environment (this may seem like a really harsh restriction, but if you can build a new AMI fast enough it doesn't really make a difference).'
    (tags: devops cloud aws netflix puppet chef deployment)

  • Bog body found in Co Laois could be that of sacrificed king : 'All of the other bog bodies were found on significant boundaries. The idea is that because the goddess is the land, by inserting bodies and other items relating to their inauguration as king along the boundaries, it gives form to the goddess.' things were pretty damn gory back then
    (tags: ireland history laois bog-bodies bog human-sacrifice)

Links for 2011-07-30

Published July 30, 2011

Links for 2011-07-26

Published July 26, 2011

Links for 2011-07-22

Published July 22, 2011

  • Why we should expel the Vatican’s Ambassador, the Papal Nuncio : 'In 2011, we have a new Government, who have stopped making excuses for the Vatican State. The Facebook campaign now has over 5,000 members, who continue to send emails and letters to their TDs and to the Minister for Foreign Affairs expressing the clear message that we want action. Enda Kenny said yesterday that the Vatican downplayed the rape and torture of Irish children to to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. We should expel the Vatican’s Papal Nuncio and send the message that they have destroyed the very things they prized the most.'
    (tags: vatican papal-nuncio religion catholicism politics diplomacy ireland child-abuse cloyne-report)

Links for 2011-07-20

Published July 20, 2011

Links for 2011-07-19

Published July 19, 2011

Links for 2011-06-28

Published June 28, 2011

Links for 2011-06-24

Published June 24, 2011

Links for 2011-06-19

Published June 19, 2011

  • Hacker News | Ooops. : brilliant thread of epic "OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE" stories
    (tags: fail ouch oops via:hn via:waxy computers software rm-rf)

  • 64yourself : Damn. my 2006 hack http://taint.org/c64ize/ reinvented, although with a lot more panache :(
    (tags: c64 images retro commodore-64 commodore)

  • _Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming_ : Gunnar Kreitz' paper on its innards! 'Spotify is a music streaming service offering lowlatency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks. Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol. In this paper, we give an overview of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide measurements of service performance and user behavior. The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and has been available in six European countries since October 2008. Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming with good results. In particular, 8.8% of music data played comes from Spotify’s servers while the median playback latency is only 265 ms (including cached tracks). We also discuss the user access patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the access patterns as they reach the server.'
    (tags: spotify via:waxy streaming p2p music architecture papers networking)

Links for 2011-06-14

Published June 14, 2011

Links for 2011-06-12

Published June 12, 2011

  • Redditor explains why Apple power cables break frequently : "As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple's products. And when I say "the most powerful", I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed."
    (tags: apple cables design industrial-design power-cables funny)

  • France To Launch a National Patent Troll : 'The operation, called "France Brevets" will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of [...] shaking down companies for money.' I think the word is: incroyable
    (tags: france fail omgwtfbbq patent-trolls swpats patents government innovation software europe)

  • The first Irish case on defamation via autocomplete : Google Instant has picked up people searching for 'Ballymascanlon hotel receivership' and is now offering this as an autocomplete option -- cue defamation lawsuit. Defamation via machine learning
    (tags: machine-learning defamation google google-instant search ballymascanlon hotels autocomplete law-enforcement)

Links for 2011-06-11

Published June 11, 2011

  • Data Protection Commissioner investigating Eircom's "three strikes" system : Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn't been updated for DST. 'this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management - i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime - for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.' As TJ explains, this could have very serious results
    (tags: dpc ireland eircom fail time dst daylight-savings three-strikes filesharing piracy)

Links for 2011-06-10

Published June 10, 2011

  • Hipster Ipsum : 'Adipisicing do Tumblr fugiat vinyl Pitchfork. Organic tempor laboris, esse Tumblr irure eu nostrud. Dolor Cosby sweater mustache qui consequat incididunt. McSweeney's ullamco occaecat Wes Anderson. Minim aute lomo, duis ea proident enim Carles. Eiusmod culpa photo booth ex. Pariatur incididunt minim qui, dolor Pitchfork wayfarers mollit vinyl fixie.' (via boogah)
    (tags: via:boogah hipster lorem-ipsum filler text markov-chains funny humour)

  • Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app : 'Wi-Fi Sync' was rejected from the App Store last May -- and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! 'Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers' kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”'
    (tags: apple walled-garden protectionism iphone wifi syncing apps ip rip-offs)

  • Why Ryanair The Cookie Monster is just an urban myth : “If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
    (tags: ryanair pricing airlines travel web shopping urban-myths)

Links for 2011-06-07

Published June 7, 2011

Links for 2011-06-01

Published June 1, 2011

Links for 2011-05-23

Published May 23, 2011

Links for 2011-05-18

Published May 18, 2011

Links for 2011-05-13

Published May 13, 2011

Links for 2011-05-04

Published May 4, 2011

Links for 2011-04-29

Published April 29, 2011

  • Online censorship now bordering on the ridiculous in Turkey - Reporters Without Borders : 'access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. ... The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.' Incredible (via Danny)
    (tags: via:mala repression internet turkey censorship filtering false-positives)

Links for 2011-04-27

Published April 27, 2011