Alebrije : 'Alebrijes are brightly colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical creatures'. ah, I was wondering what they were -- I thought there was one, extremely prolific, artist
(tags: alebrijes art folk-art mexico pedro-linares oaxaca sculpture)Amazon.com: ASUS RT-N16 Wireless-N Gigabit Router: Electronics: Reviews, Prices & more : tipped as the next generation of hackable router; 128MB RAM, 533MHz CPU, supports 802.11N and 1000Base-T, and runs Tomato firmware. pity I just bought another WRT54GL a couple of months back
(tags: hackable devices hardware asus rt-n16 tomato firmware open 802.11n wifi)UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing : 'Client software, such as browsers and emailers, faces a difficult transition from the version of international domain names approved in 2003 (IDNA2003), to the revision approved in 2010 (IDNA2008). The specification in this document provides a mechanism that minimizes the impact of this transition for client software, allowing client software to access domains that are valid under either system.' wow, this is hairy stuff
(tags: idn unicode domains interop)http://isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/ : does exactly what it says on the tin
(tags: dead thatcher uk politics morbid single-use-sites)
Category: Uncategorized
Submitted via email to their letters page. This may be a bit too long for the format, but hey. Enjoy.
Madam, -- Commentary in this paper and elsewhere has given the impression that Mr. Justice Charleton's judgement on the EMI v. UPC case was a poor result for EMI and the other record companies represented. This is not necessarily the case. While UPC may not yet have to implement "three strikes", there are many things to worry the Irish internet user in the judgement.
Mr. Justice Charleton states that he is satisfied that the business of the recording companies is being devastated by piracy, entirely based on evidence submitted by the record companies and IRMA. One of these assertions was that over 20,000 illegal downloads of an "Aslan" album had been "traced" -- but no details of the methodology of this "tracing" has been produced.
Third-party attempts to reproduce this figure indicate that it is probable that an extremely naive approach was taken in this testing -- the putative copies of the album available to download, and their large download figures, are in reality a lure used by criminals to persuade unwitting victims to provide their credit card details to fraudulent websites.
Worryingly, this flawed evidence has already been represented as fact in the Seanad by FF senator Paschal Mooney.
Other studies cited in the judgement have been criticised widely elsewhere, including by the US Government Accountability Office in its April 2010 report to the US Congress.
Mr. Justice Charleton goes on to suggest that all internet access from UPC (and presumably other ISPs) be filtered through a piracy-detection system. One wonders what the many companies who currently run internet-based services from Ireland would make of this proposal.
The government now seems keen to rush in and implement the filtering and blocking systems requested by IRMA and the music companies, as Mr. Justice Charleton recommends, or possibly even to give hand-outs to the music industry to compensate them, as IRMA demands. One hopes that more technical expertise will be brought to bear on the supposed "evidence" before this happens.
Yours, etc., Justin Mason
Curious Wines : finalist for a RealEx Web Award, free next-day delivery and returns throughout Ireland, and some excellent prices here. hmm
(tags: wine ireland shopping online-shopping)
ioprofile : wraps strace(1) to summarise and aggregate I/O ops performed by a Linux process. looks pretty nifty (via Jeremy Zawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny io strace linux monitoring debugging performance profiling sysadmin ioprofile unix tools)
Conall's Blog » DIY Multimedia Centre : good data on a reasonably-priced 1080p setup. I'm struggling through this right now, particularly on attempting to reuse an old laptop which can't play 720p output reliably, let alone 1080p. But EUR799 for a new Mac Mini seems steep
(tags: 1080p 720p hdmi display tv hardware home)
Flash Crash - Norwegians Convicted for Outwitting 'Trading Robots' - CNBC : 'The two men worked out how the computerized system would react to certain trading patterns – allowing them to influence the price of low-volume stocks.' Yet another risk of automated traders
(tags: trading stocks automated-trading flash-crash high-frequency-trading)Irish ISP was lucky - l@w.geek.nz : Kiwi lawyer on the EMI v UPC case, lots of good commentary (via Eoin O'Dell)
(tags: emi upc law ireland nz via:cearta copyfight)Cisco SCE 8000 Series Service Control Engine - Products & Services - Cisco Systems : used by UPC for deep packet inspection, according to the EMI v UPC judgement
(tags: dpi upc ireland isps cisco networking internet)
Unicode 6.0 released : including PILE OF POO, at codepoint 1F4A9:
(tags: pile-of-poo poo unicode funny emoji characters)Strike One? « A Clatter of the Law : Rossa McMahon rounds up some highlights from Mr. Justice Charleton's judgement on the UPC case; good post
(tags: law ireland upc irma emi ip)Senator Paschal Mooney parrots the EMI "Aslan filesharing" story : 'There is a perception that the big five record companies, all international companies, have been ripping off the consumer for many years. I do not want to be seen as an apologist for the music industry [jm: oh really], but at the lower level I can give a specific example to highlight the impact of illegal downloading on Aslan, an Irish band. [... blah blah...] Why must we wait for a High Court judgment to be made before we introduce relevant legislation? This is not the first time it has happened in the copyright sector.' -- wait, the what? It's a SECTOR now?!! wtf (via Charles Julienne)
(tags: copyright-sector copyfight omgwtf paschal-mooney seanad ireland aslan emi irma filesharing)
Blosc : A high-performance compressor optimized for binary data -- 'designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than a traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch via memcpy()' (via Bill de hOra)
(tags: via:dehora compression memcpy caching l1 software memory optimization performance python pytables)
Oh dear. Quoting Mr Justice Charleton's judgement in favour of UPC vs. EMI, Sony, et al:
'This scourge of internet piracy strongly affects Irish musicians, most of whom pay tax in Ireland. ‘Aslan’ is a distinguished Irish group which has a loyal fan base; but not all of them believe in paying for music.Previous sales of their albums were excellent, about 35,000 per album, and in respect of one called “Platinum Collection”, a three CD box set, 50,000 copies were sold. More recently, an album called “Uncased” was released and only 6,000 copies were sold.Perhaps, it might be thought, the album was not popular and did not sell well? In contrast, a search was made to see how many illegal downloads had been made on the internet from that album, and 22,000 were traced.'
Aslan, eh?
So, that would be about the same figure as EMI quoted in a press statement in July 2009, which 'Gambra' on the thumped.com boards thoroughly debunked at the time:
'I've just been listening to the first minute or two of this and have done a mere 10 minutes of googling to try verify the claim of 25,000 downloads. The EMI press statement mentioned that they've tracked that amount of downloads "through Torrents Nova and Pirate Bay alone." The first problem with that is that there's no such site as Torrents Nova (I presumed they meant mininova but Aslan gets zero hits over there) but never mind, we'll carry on. Next I search for ever possible permutation for downloads of the new Aslan album and I kept getting the same result which is "Aslan - Uncase'd (2009) KompletlyWyred Dhz.inc" which was uploaded to thepiratebay. However this file only has a grand total of 9 seeders and 6 leechers and has been alive since the 26th of June. There's no way of telling how many times it's been leeched exactly but even if it was 6 new leechers every day it'd be a total of 108 downloads. It is fair to assume that only 9 of these bothered to seed back so I'd say the total is right.
Wondering still where the hell they got their mystical 25,000 total from I just searched for "Aslan Uncased" and was surprised to see 5 links to torrents of the album in the first two pages of results. However 4 of the 5 just link back to the one on TPB with 9 seeders. The 5th is where I think they got their mystical 25,000 total from:
http://www.nowtorrents.com/torrents/aslan-uncased.html
This is the 7th result you get on google for the album title and when you click it you actually get "No Matches were found" but up at the top are FAKE results that are actually just ad links. You could search for anything and you'll get those exact same four ad results.
http://www.nowtorrents.com/torrents/gambra-thumped.html
If you refresh the totals change each time so it's safe to say they found this link by googling the name, added up the total of listed downloads they got (which is totally random) and are using that to moan about their loss of sales. Incredible.'
Indeed, according to the site, an album called 'Justin Mason on the nose flute' has been downloaded 24,752 times -- I never knew! Where's my cheque?
Some quality facts and figures from EMI there, I suspect.
Is The UPC Decision A Victory? - Michele Neylon : Michele quotes Mr Justice Charleton's judgement: 'It is not surprising that the legislative response laid down in our country in the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, at a time when this problem was not perceived to be as threatening to the creative and retail economy as it has become in 2010, has made no proper provision for the blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications intent on breaching copyright. In failing to provide legislative provisions for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft, Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law.' Blocking, diverting and interrupting IP traffic? _wonderful_
(tags: wtf ireland law upc irma filtering)Record labels lose file sharing case against UPC - The Irish Times - Mon, Oct 11, 2010 : IRMA's comment: "we reserve the right to seek compensation for the past and continuing losses from the State." You have GOT to be joking. As TJ McIntyre put it: IRMA wants taxpayers to pay for Bono's losses
(tags: irma upc filesharing bono u2 omgwtfbbq entitlement taxes ireland nfw)Music Industry Fails In High Court Bid To Force 3 Strikes on ISP | TorrentFreak : UPC Ireland: “Our whole premise and defence focused on the 'mere conduit' principle, which provides that an internet service provider cannot be held liable for content transmitted across its network, and today’s decision supports the principle that ISPs are not liable for the actions of internet subscribers.” woot! Now to the High Court, I guess
(tags: upc ireland filesharing irma law three-strikes)
All About Skimmers — Krebs on Security : photos of the current state-of-the-art in ATM skimmers via Brian Krebs
(tags: brian-krebs atm skimmers security photos banking fraud)EMAIL AND BACON : This car has everything (via Box Of Meat)
(tags: via:boxofmeat email bacon car funny lol demotivational posters)
NAMAland : 'At NAMAland we like to look on the bright side. OK, the downside of NAMA is that it's costing you €54 billion -- the upside is that you now own some of the best (and worst) properties in Dublin. So grab your phone, put on your tophat and enjoy your new role as a property tycoon with our augmented reality tour of NAMAland. Remember, we-are-where-we-are, there's no point playing the blame game, we were all living beyond our means and it was like that when we got here...' Excellent! a Layar Augmented Reality layer for Layar which lets you see properties in Dublin owned by NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency
(tags: nama funny ouch augmented-reality layar dublin ireland)
Web service - current time zone for a city? - Stack Overflow : 'a web service of some sort (or any other way) to pull a current time zone settings for a (US) city. For the parts of the country that don't follow the Daylight Saving Time and basically jump timezones when everyone else is switching summer/winter time... I don't fancy creating own database of the places that don't follow DST. Is there a way to pull this data on demand?' earthtools.org seems the closest thing
(tags: dst daylight-savings local timezones iso8601 dates times web-services http)Facebook now does export : 'we've built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. If you want a copy of the information you've put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download.' excellent
(tags: facebook export data control privacy personal-data)
Government gets no 'serious offers' for e-voting machines : 2 *other* govt departments (nice try) wondered about buying them, for utterly random purposes for which they're totally unfit. Total cost of the e-voting fiasco is now EUR54.6 million. Another fine Fianna Fail mess
(tags: fianna-fail fail e-voting ireland fiasco)XKCD's updated map of online communities : Urban Dead is still around?
(tags: xkcd maps humor infographic community online)
Lone Sale of $4.1 Billion in Contracts Led to ‘Flash Crash’ in May : 'as the computers of the high-frequency traders traded contracts back and forth, a “hot potato” effect was created, the report said, as contracts changed hands 27,000 times in 14 seconds, but with eventually only 200 actually being bought or sold.' upshot: horrifically complex distributed feedback loops now directly impact our economies -- great :(
(tags: distributed-systems distcomp flash-crash stock-market trading automation via:nelson sec nyse high-frequency-trading)Changes at dnswl.org : DNSWL will charge for subscriptions to "heavy" users and anti-spam vendors
(tags: dnswl dns whitelists dnsbls filtering anti-spam)
'Ireland' Reddit : quite a busy news aggregator, it turns out -- 1,960 registered readers and a lot of traffic at this stage. worth bookmarking
(tags: ireland reddit local news aggregation)
The MySQL “swap insanity” problem and the effects of the NUMA architecture : very interesting; modern multicore x86 architectures use a NUMA memory architecture, which can cause a dip into swap, even when there appears to be plenty of free RAM available
(tags: linux memory mysql optimization performance swap tuning vm numa swap-insanity swapping)
law firm's mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k : 'Off-the-cuff bravado aimed at [4chan] has led to what must already rank as one of the worst ever data leaks, by the anti-filesharing solicitors ACS:Law' [...] 'the law firm is faced with the threat of a fine by the [UK] Information Commissioner, who is keen to use new powers that raise the maximum penalty to £500,000.'
(tags: ouch 4chan acs-law filesharing data-leaks privacy data-protection fines uk)
http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/ : extensive. the NSFW words that Google Instant won't search for (via Waxy)
(tags: nsfw censorship filtering google keywords search blacklist google-instant)RecordStream : 'A set of programs for creating, manipulating, and outputing a stream of Records, or hashes. Inspired by Monad.' looks very powerful
(tags: monad recordstream open-source recs cli grep)
The Spamhaus Whitelist : exactly what it says on the tin
(tags: spamhaus anti-spam whitelisting spamassassin)
why James Gosling left Oracle : 1. made him take an effective pay cut; 2. removed decision authority on Java; 3. he felt Oracle was "ethically challenged". also: 'he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java'; “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” he doesn't pull any punches. oh dear, this is all adding up...
(tags: java oracle opensource sun james-gosling larry-ellison gossip)
Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python" : Linux distros ship ancient Python interpreters, hence it's impossible to rely on recent language features because they won't be there, making it useless to write code in Python. We have similar problems in perl-land, but it's easy enough to get by without the latest-and-greatest; maybe Python is different in that regard? ... or is it Zed?
(tags: zed-shaw python mongrel distros linux sysadmin packaging)
Bunnie Huang on the simulated 6502 : 'It makes my head spin to think that the CPU from the first real computer I used, the Apple II, is now simulateable at the mask level as a browser plug-in. Nothing to install, and it’s Open-licensed. How far we have come…a little more than a decade ago, completing a project like this would have resulted in a couple PhDs being awarded, or regarded as trade secret by some big EDA vendor. This is just unreal…but very cool!'
(tags: simulation bunnie-huang 6502 cpu chips emulation hardware)www.Visual6502.org : 'working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip. This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.' Awesome
(tags: 6502 emulation physics simulation mos atari-2600 pet commodore c-64 cpu silicon)
JAM Software - SpamAssassin for Windows : 'adapted for Windows by JAM Software' -- cool! Thanks Daniel
(tags: windows spamassassin anti-spam software win32 jam-software)
MineCraft: Mine The Gap, Day 1 : Rock, Paper, Shotgun review the current lo-fi sandbox indie-game hit
(tags: pixels minecraft gaming fun walkthroughs)The Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box : this is fantastic -- a (physical) puzzle, which must be brought to a specific location on the planet to be opened
(tags: geocaching cool electronics geolocation gps hardware puzzles arduino)
John Graham-Cumming: The Myth of the Boy Wizard : JGC on the Haystack mess. bad journalism by The Guardian, Newsweek and the Beeb, basically, single-sourcing articles without any corroborating backup from domain experts
(tags: journalism haystack the-grauniad newsweek bbc news cpj jgc)
Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music "free" : open-source classical music: now very well-funded. awesome!
(tags: musopen classical music copyright funding opensource free)
P2P investigations now illegal in Switzerland : 'The country's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can't go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.'
(tags: p2p privacy ip-addresses pii logistep switzerland piracy)Forking is a Feature - Anil Dash : thought-provoking piece about GitHub-style forking applied to other disciplines; Tumblr, Dribbble, Forrst being cases where it's happening now
(tags: community development forking github git opensource tumblr dribbble forrst wikipedia)
Game On : exhibition billing itself as "the world's biggest celebration of games", arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. 'Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.' tix are EUR10
(tags: games gaming exhibitions dublin)Your Country, Your Call, You’re Doomed : Bock on the predictably-crap biz-waffle results from the YCYC "get Ireland back on track" competition. 'If we don’t take this seriously, we’re doomed to repeat the current economic disaster over and over again, each generation with its own Bertie Ahern, its own Seanie Fitzpatrick, its own Fingers Fingleton, and all the other assorted, integrity-free panhandlers and parasites who have soiled the reputation of this country and sold us down the Swanee for their own, ignorant, self-serving enrichment. Forget about Eamon Ryan’s smart economy. Let’s put all our effort into creating the Honest Economy.'
(tags: ycyc waffle business ireland vision-lock integrity bock-the-robber economy)
Hit The Road: Public Transport Directions for Dublin : 'a public-transport route-planning service for Dublin city, which shows you how to get from A to B using buses, Luas or DART services. The original version was built during the first Startup Weekend Dublin in May 2010.' Pretty good; although in my tests it wasn't able to find the optimal route, it always came up with something that made a good starting point
(tags: routes dublin public-transport buses hit-the-road)o2 Broadband Dongle Working on Ubuntu 10.04 : the Huawei E1752 dongle does that horrible thing where it defaults to acting as a USB storage device containing the Windows drivers, instead of acting as a 3G modem by default. usb_modeswitch should be in the Ubuntu base install to deal with this crap
(tags: usb broadband o2 hauwei e1752 ubuntu dongle)
Twitter's misuse of OAuth : Twitter seem to be attempting to control misbehaving clients, by using the "consumer key" pair as a secret key for app developers. This is proving impossible for FOSS clients to work with, and is trivially hacked to allow third-party app impersonation. Bad idea, Twitter
(tags: twitter fail oauth standards open-source gwibber security)Boxee Blog » How Boxee Sees the Apple TV : go Boxee! open TV is the way to go
(tags: boxee apple tv set-top)"if slalom" : a great name for a common "code smell" of too much indentation, calling for merciless usage of Extract Method (via Aman)
(tags: via:akohli code-smells refactoring if-slalom programming funny if-else indentation)/~colmmacc/ » Prime and Proper : algorithm to perform set membership tests on enumerated sets quickly and memory-efficiently, using multiplication by primes. Nice trick
(tags: hacks colmmacc prime-numbers set-membership bloom-filters bignums algorithms programming)
_Fast Cache for Your Text: Accelerating Exact Pattern Matching with Feed-Forward Bloom Filters_ [PDF] : intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick -- or possibly re2c, as used in "sa-compile". On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn't perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
(tags: bloom-filters grep filtering spamassassin sa-compile text-matching caches aho-corasick)SuperTweet.Net : free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
(tags: via:pixelbeat api oauth proxy twitter web http curl supertweet)
Eirgrid System Demand : 'The system demand displayed here represents the electricity production required to meet [Irish] national electricity consumption, including system losses, but net of generators' requirements. It includes power imported via the interconnector and an estimate of the power produced by wind generators, but excludes some non-centrally monitored generation (i.e. small scale CHP).' via Juan Flynn
(tags: via:juanflynn eirgrid national-grid ireland power charts statistics)Dave Grady on "the conference call" : painfully accurate sketch about the crappy conference call UI. "hi, who just joined?"
(tags: hi-who-just-joined conference-calls phone funny ui dave-grady comedy sketches)
Life without a CA | The Tor Blog : do you trust the default set of root CAs in modern web browsers? sounds like we probably shouldn't
(tags: ca certificates https encryption firefox ssl trust privacy web root-cas)Topfloor - Free Residential Lease/Letting Agreement Download : GFDL-licensed legal boilerplate agreement for the Irish market. Nice one -- although did I see a commercial company charging for what appears to be a derivative work of this document? is that a breach of the license terms?
(tags: gfdl gnu topfloor letting leases legal documents ireland)
tcpcrypt : opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though
(tags: cryptography encryption tcp security internet tcpcrypt opportunistic)Inchicore family home ready for take-off : from the Irish Times property section: 'There’s a guy in Inchicore with an aircraft simulator in his shed. Not one of those fancy computer games, this is the real thing – a decommissioned 747 simulator, cockpit and all.' Unfortunately, the sim doesn't come with the house
(tags: houses flight-simulators gaming inchicore dublin irish-times property)Fried Androids? :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It : scary stuff. East Texas patent-troll court has ruled that EchoStar must remotely disable customers' DVRs due to patent infringement, which they are (thankfully) refusing to do and are now held in contempt for $200M -- the blog suggests this could happen due to the Google-Oracle suit, to Android phones
(tags: google via:tieguy law east-texas dvr remote-disabling internet oracle swpats)
Introduction to parallel & distributed algorithms : really interesting parallel algorithm concepts. I'd seen parallel merge sort before from the map-reduce world, but some others are new to me and worth thinking about (via Hacker News)
(tags: via:hackernews algorithms distributed parallel map-reduce merge-sort sorting)image soak : an "endless page" of images culled from newsfeeds. Very good for video games and art, particularly. definitely a new addition to my daily list (via Andre)
(tags: via:torrez news images feed sources art)Mario Kart graffiti in Portland bike lanes : very funny. 'Wait, does this mean that those cyclists that wiped out a few blocks back are going to catch up to me right before I get to my destination, even though I didn't crash once?' (commenter on Kotaku)
(tags: cycling portland videogames gaming mario-kart graffiti)
U2 Manager Blames 'Free' And Anonymous Internet Bloggers For Industry Troubles | Techdirt : great Mike Masnick post responding to the latest woe-is-me missive from U2's asshat-in-residence Paul McGuinness (via Jim Carroll)
(tags: via:jimcarroll u2 mp3blogs paul-mcguinness mike-masnick techdirt music mp3 downloading filesharing piracy blogging)RTÉ News: CAO website blocked by malicious attack : is the CAO (Ireland's Central Applications Office, for university admissions) being DDOS'd? sounds like it
(tags: cao ddos security ireland)
jwz - What different sorting algorithms sound like : in the style of BBC Radiophonics Workshop, with copious flange -- my favourite is heap sort. this is brilliant (via jwz)
(tags: via:jwz sound music sorting algorithms)
Books of Adam : stories drawn by a guy I vaguely know online. really funny!
(tags: blog comic funny fp)100 ways to spend the Anglo €25,000,000,000 : 'just how much is €25 billion that [Ireland's taxpayers] have to borrow for [failed bank] Anglo?' some great answers, including: start our own space program with 20 space shuttles; build 6 LHCs or 2 ITER fusion reactors; scrap fares on all public transport for 33 years; buy 2 of Asia's largest banks; buy Steve Jobs himself; detach the People's Republic of Cork by building a ten-metre-wide moat; buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie
(tags: money omgwtfbbq insane argh funny nama anglo sean-fitzpatrick ireland)
[osol-discuss] OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express : 'Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC and x64. We have more than twice the application base of AIX and HP-UX combined.' Well, that about sums it up. Enterprisey!
(tags: enterprisey open-source closed-source oracle solaris opensolaris hp-ux history)
Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents : 'Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.' no shit, Sherlock
(tags: ip patents techcrunch startups swpats via:brian-caulfield software)Spam King Leo Kuvayev Jailed on Child Sex Charges — Krebs on Security : 'A man known as one of the world’s top purveyors of junk e-mail has been imprisoned in Russia for allegedly molesting [more than *50*] underage girls from a Moscow orphanage, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.' lovely
(tags: spam russia jail crime moscow leo-kuvayev)
La Brea Starter And Rustic Bread Recipe : another variation of the Nancy Silverton recipe, and a loaf recipe to go with it
(tags: recipes food bread baking sourdough la-brea-bakery)Nancy Silverton's La Brea Bakery sourdough starter recipe : lots of recommendations, but looks like hard work; grown from natural grape yeast
(tags: sourdough starter la-brea-bakery baking food recipes)On The Record » Guest post – 500 Words of Summer – Mumblin’ Deaf Ro : Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats
(tags: mumblin-deaf-ro statistics music irma music-industry piracy filesharing)
Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza : wow, fantastic review -- real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA's latest videogame
(tags: crime games japan videogames yakuza sega)Man Lives In Futuristic Sci-Fi World Where All His Interactions Take Place In Cyberspace | The Onion : 'In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.' brilliant pisstake of mid-'90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)
(tags: the-onion funny future futurism humour internet sf via:walter journalism cyberpunk 1990s cyberspace)Irish Hackerspaces Week : hackerspaces in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast, running events all next week (08-14 - 08-22)
(tags: hackerspace hacking ireland conferences events)
John Graham-Cumming: Shut up and ship : on "Haystack", a vaporous censorship-evading product aimed at Iran's internet surveillance, which as of yet is a site soliciting donations and a lot of press, and not a lot of techie details
(tags: haystack privacy censorship filtering surveillance jgc crypto open-source)
Cache on Delivery : Mind-boggling presentation; a load of sites are exposing memcacheds to the public internet, with no auth, and full of juicy data (samples included). iptables is hard
(tags: memcached security hacks exploits)Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images : surprise! 'The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.'
(tags: airport dhs fail privacy security surveillance tsa big-brother x-ray)
Zed Shaw debunking some poll/epoll myths : "benchmarks disprove common wisdom" shocker
(tags: epoll io linux networking performance scalability mongrel2 zedshaw poll)
Why Jailbreak? - The Unofficial Apple Weblog : some good Cydia app tips. also glad to see piracy didn't appear 'til page 3
(tags: cydia jailbreak iphone apps)
Kaprekar's constant : '6174 .. is notable for the following property: Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits. (Leading zeros are allowed.); Arrange the digits in ascending and then in descending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary; Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number; Go back to step 2. The process will reach 6174 in at most 7 iterations'
(tags: 6174 constants cool maths mathematics numbers kaprekar wow)
Keyboard shortcuts for positioning windows in Mac OS X : from Tony Finch. great stuff, I used to use shortcuts like this all the time on my Linux desktops to avoid rodentage
(tags: mouse keyboard navigation windows shortcuts scripting ui automator)Draft Functional Spec of Hadopi "securisation" software : Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking "workarounds" (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?
(tags: hadopi piracy filtering snooping big-brother 1984 via:adulau vpn tor blocklists)
XOR patent killed Commodore-Amiga : 'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'
(tags: cd32 commodore computers history ip patents software swpats xor amiga)Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O [PDF] : classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
(tags: java async io jvm linux performance scalability threading threads server nio paul-tyma mailinator)autojump : interesting idea; extend "cd" to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to "jump" to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
(tags: autojump cli bash command-line navigation terminal shell directory cd)Mac OS X command-line tricks : not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I'm stuck using the missus' laptop ;)
(tags: apple bash cli osx mac sysadmin shell tricks command-line)
Schneier on Security: Internet Worm Targets SCADA : 'Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.'
(tags: wow malware worms passwords security schneier policies defaults)Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution : from last week's CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
(tags: spam anti-spam ceas conference papers research spamassassin adversarial-classification evolution arms-race via:jd)JotNot for iPhone : another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
(tags: apps document evernote iphone jotnot scanner scan photos dropbox google-docs)DocScanner : document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it'll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
(tags: android apps evernote iphone mobile ocr pdf document scanner scan)
Computer History Museum: MacPaint and QuickDraw source code : wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
(tags: via:jgc apple code history mac source bill-atkinson macpaint pascal quickdraw graphics)
Technology to track trad : TunePal -- "Shazam for trad". play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it'll link to the tune's name, history, discography, and where it's been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
(tags: trad irish via:klillington music recognition machine-learning)
Brick, A Literary Journal: Issue 85: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock : 'The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society': among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
(tags: france paris underground toread ux catacombs marquis writing)NeoRouter : establish an overlay, encrypted private "virtual LAN" for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
(tags: firewall hamachi network openwrt remote router security vpn desktop-sharing neorouter tomato)
How do I do silicone sealant neatly? : so that's how it's done. now to retry my DIY botch job
(tags: silicone sealant diy home howto)GNU coreutils sort(1) now uses all available CPUs : using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
(tags: via:pixelbeat sort coreutils gnu multicore parallelism)REPLs suck, I want something block oriented : good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn't a usable approach for block-oriented languages
(tags: languages repl programming ruby hacking coding block-oriented)
Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail : first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws -- for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
(tags: dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet)
xboxdrv : 'a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.'
(tags: drivers xbox360 controllers remote linux ubuntu xboxdrv joystick input)
Ubuntu One Time Passwords/Single Use Passwords HOWTO : I should do this on my hosts
(tags: ssh server security opie otp skey one-time-passwords ubuntu linux sshd)FlexGet : torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
(tags: bittorrent automation boxee linux python rss torrents tv flexget)
Interpolation search : neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
(tags: algorithms programming search via:jzawodny)Overclocking SSL : techie details from Adam Langley on how Google's been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
(tags: certificates encryption google https latency speed ssl tcp tls web performance)Cory Doctorow's working environment : hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
(tags: cory-doctorow geek howto lifehacks ubuntu productivity tips tools)
O2.ie blocking popular image-hosting sites imgur.com, imageshack.com : apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
(tags: iwf fail blocking filtering o2 ireland imgur imageshack censorship fps)
Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right : 'every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.'
(tags: broadband finland legal rights law human-rights three-strikes)new gastropub opening in Stoneybatter : there goes the neighbourhood! 'L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.' Sign me up
(tags: gastropubs stoneybattery dublin d7 food drink)
Date::Manip Error in Ubuntu 10.04 : "XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly" -- caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
(tags: date-manip xmltv breakage mythtv ubuntu lucid 10.04)Misco.ie : another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
(tags: shopping components hardware ireland)
Signature-based AV is failing : on average across the AV industry, 40% block rates just after 0-hour of a new malware sample, rising to 60% after 5 days. sounds like the AV industry is losing, if this chart is valid. (via Terry Zink)
(tags: via:tzink malware av fail accuracy detection false-negatives scanners viruses)Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs [PDF] : sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
(tags: sort merge hash join databases performance cpu simd multicore)
Network Advertising Initiative: Opt-Out of Behavioural Advertising : 'developed for the express purpose of allowing consumers to "opt out" of the behavioral advertising delivered by our member companies' -- opt out of the top 50 or so ad programs with a couple of clicks, via Jordan Sissel. great stuff
(tags: ads advertising browser cookies via:jordansissel google marketing opt-out privacy tracking web behavioral)
Monitor anything and get free notifications on your iPhone - amix.dk : using notifo.com, which has an app in the App Store allowing anyone to send push notifications via their web site. I can see lots of uses for this, not least to evade SMS fees ;)
(tags: notification push sms iphone notifo)
Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market "flash crash?" : wonderful; our world's economies are now more networked than ever, and vulnerable to the attacks which that enables. Have we learned nothing from the last few years?
(tags: networking internet ddos stock-markets security)
All slides/notes from the first 2 days of Velocity 2010 : PDFs, docs, links
(tags: slides scalability velocity conferences scaling pdf)Introduction to Unity Launcher « Canonical Design : The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too
(tags: canonical ui unity linux gnome desktop design)
The Deus Ex 3 demonstration, blow-by-blow : PC Gamer : big thumbs-up for 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution'. I'm looking forward to it
(tags: deus-x games xbox previews)We’re Back… so long MongoDB! · Blue74 : MongoDB war story -- records going missing, eek
(tags: mongodb mysql nosql rant stability beta)Hadoop and the fight against shape-shifting spam : Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale
(tags: hadoop yahoo anti-spam filtering)Petit: Log Analysis : log analyzer; removes common strings and patterns from log files, identifying outliers and hapaxen as "interesting". also does charting of frequencies etc.
(tags: logs logging analysis loganalysis syslog tools)self-replicating configuration in Conway's Game Of Life created : The "spaceship" configuration replicates in 33699586 generations, using 2 construction arms and a volley of gliders circulating between them
(tags: via:newscientist game-of-life life cellular-automata gliders self-replicating)
UPC file-sharing court action begins - The Irish Times : it's with Mr Justice Peter Charleton again -- the Colmcille-misquoting judge from the Eircom case. here's hoping the Data Protection Commissioner gets off their arse and does their job this time around
(tags: upc ireland law filesharing irma copyright)
SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder : good idea -- generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)
(tags: via:omgubuntu avi mplayer conversion divx encoding howto rip xvid video mencoder)build a Yagi-Uda wifi booster from styrofoam and copper wire : nifty link from Heise; works for 802.11b and 11g. Unfortunately I think my own wifi issues are to do with dying AP hardware
(tags: wifi 802.11g 802.11b wireless yagi antennas diy hacking hardware)MapReduce as a way to cope with high-latency memory : interesting thoughts from Kragen
(tags: kragen thoughts random mapreduce memory speed latency)
O2 iPhone Customers - Get out of contract! - boards.ie : wow, O2 Ireland seem to have dropped the ball something rotten here. customers taking advantage of this in droves to escape the heinous 18-month lock-in
(tags: o2 ireland loophole contract law)Designing an Integrated Map for a Visionary Public Transport System for Dublin : excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)
(tags: via:antoin bus travel dublin ireland rapid-transit public-transport design usability maps mapping)
Chatroulette Working On Genital Recognition Algorithm : just *male* genitalia, mind. I dread to think of what the training corpus looks like
(tags: chatroulette algorithms machine-learning genitalia nsfw slashdot)
Balsamiq Mockups : create wireframe mock-ups quickly, via Confluence/JIRA/desktop/fogbugz plugins (via Joe)
(tags: via:jdrumgoole wireframes mockups ui web usability balsamiq layout prototype)
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1900 Hybrid TV (1179) - dabs.com : Back looking at these again, as Padraig noted the SundTek drivers are closed source; at least pvrusb2 is OSS
(tags: hauppauge drivers hardware linux tv tuners os)SEO Is Mostly Quack Science : 'There is no hypothesis being tested here. It's just graphs, and misleading graphs at that. The sad part is, SEOMoz is as close as the SEO industry comes to real science. They may be presenting specious results in hopes of looking like they know what they're talking about, but at least they are collecting some sort of data. Everything else in the field is either anecdotal hocus-pocus or a decree from Matt Cutts. When you hire an SEO consultant, what you are really paying for is domain experience in the not-failing-at-web-design field.'
(tags: seo ted-dziuba rants science seomoz quality correlation statistics google)
gitPAN : CPAN and BackPAN, as a set of git repositories; essentially a read-only view of all CPAN releases, ever. good plan; I like the way git is useful as a kind of general-purpose distributed archive system
(tags: git gitpan cpan backpan perl releases archives history version-control)SundTek MythTV analog setup : 'Analog TV is working again with MythTV which comes with the final Ubuntu 10.04 release' -- MythTV support is officially tested by SundTek support staff! I think we have a clear winner
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)Sundtek MediaTV Pro (TV Cards) - Ubuntu Linux Hardware Compatibility List : 'I can recommend that USB device, I never had a device which has such an easy installation under linux.'
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)SundTek Media TV Pro Linux install docs : official, and pretty voluminous. looks good
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)
Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1900 Hybrid Analogue and Digital USB TV Tuner : seems to be a safe option for MythTV analog TV and DVB-T support on this side of the pond
(tags: tv hauppauge linux mythtv ireland tuner)pvrusb2 Linux drivers for the Hauppauge product line : Jesus Christ Hauppauge. get a clue already, why are you making it so hard for Linux users to buy your bloody hardware?!
(tags: htpc linux pvr mythtv usb hauppauge pvrusb2 drivers hardware)Today's Guardian : Phil Gyford reworks the Grauniad's website using their open content API. I really like the navigation and just-the-text nature, but I still feel a need to know what other articles are "nearby", which this doesn't quite provide. Still, excellent work
(tags: phil-gyford news newspapers gu guardian design usability reading readability webdesign)
Emoji Symbols in Unicode: PILE OF POO : "unchi" / "unchimaaku", a little Emoji icon of a dog turd. unfortunately still in "proposed" status, not yet a Unicode point, boo
(tags: poo funny emoji unicode unchi shit)practical Linux commands quick-ref sheet : from Padraig Brady. lots of nice one-liners I wasn't familiar with
(tags: padraig-brady bash cli linux reference sysadmin tips commands)Point Village Market : a new outdoor weekend market for Dublin, at the O2 on the north quays. good farmer's market selection, and plans to do free-for-all stalls for random members of the public to sell "yard sale" type stuff, a la the Dublin Flea Market
(tags: the-point o2 ireland dublin markets farmers-markets shopping via:sboyle)
Petrodvorets Watch Factory's black list : vendors of fake Raketas -- pretty much all of the current eBay auctions are on this list :(
(tags: fakes raketa watches ebay)Russian watch RAKETA 24 hour white dial. Polar design. on eBay : 24-hour analog CCCP-era Raketa watches. want. almost definitely fake going by the price, but still very nifty (via adampsyche)
(tags: russia raketa watches analog want 24-hour via:adampsyche)
This page has been floating around in links over the past couple of weeks, as a collection of test cases to compare e-mail address validating regular expressions. However, watch out: it's wrong.
RFC822/2822 defines an email address with a bare IP address domain part as using:
domain-literal = [CFWS] "[" *([FWS] dcontent) [FWS] "]" [CFWS]
In other words, this test case is not valid at all:
IPInsteadOfDomain@127.0.0.1
Instead, it should be:
IPInsteadOfDomain@[127.0.0.1]
ditto for the other addrs using IP addresses in the domain part. They're rare, but the non-bracketed form is definitely not legal and should not be considered so in the test cases.
I sent a mail to the author a few days ago without response, hence this post.
Amazon.com: Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player : $99, 10-watt, fanless device to stream HD1080p video, in pretty much any format, from a network server to your TV. crazy. quite competitive with the Acer Aspire Revo; downside: less open
(tags: tv wd wd-tv-live hdtv hd video set-top-box home)WebM : open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I'd guess
(tags: codec foss google open-source patents audio video vp8 webm standards mozilla open web)How Etsy deploy their site : pretty basic
(tags: etsy infrastructure ops sysadmin continuousintegration deployinator deployment)
GitHub scheduled maintainance due to Redis upgrade : good comments on the processes useful for large-scale Redis upgrades
(tags: upgrades redis spof nosql databases github deployment)Mea Culpa : 'Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.' Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt
(tags: via:janl coding programming software philosophy languages lisp elitism)Ca'n Quiros, Soller, Spain : many atrocious TripAdvisor reviews of this kip which ripped us off heavily last week. looking forward to adding my $.02. roll on data roaming limits so I can check TA via 3G before we sit down ;)
(tags: restaurants food soller spain rip-offs scams dodgy tripadvisor)
iPhone 3GS GPS suddenly stops working? here's the fix : via a forum on MacRumors -- blow away the locationd cache. Worked perfectly for me after my GPS crapped out halfway through my holidays :( Requires that the phone be jailbroken first
(tags: iphone gps software 3gs reliability bugs macrumors jailbreaking locationd)
SoundCloud Developers Manifesto : 'We recognize that only through your apps and hacks, can SoundCloud fully realize its potential as the audio platform.'
(tags: apps hacks soundcloud mp3 music hosting files json rest oauth apis http)Good volcanic-ash links : European air traffic control Twitter feed and NOC site, via Boards.ie. The thread itself is a good reference, too
(tags: volcano ash vaac twitter boards.ie threads travel air holidays)2-day volcanic ash forecasts over Europe : using SNAP, the Norwegian Meterological Institute's nuclear-fallout modelling system. Very useful, much niftier than the UK version, and much more *publicly available* than the Irish version
(tags: europe volcano norway yr.no met.no weather ash snap modelling forecasts)
The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City « Viceland Games : interview with the guy behind the "Magnasanti" video. [Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi] 'presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar - depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society - with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.' WHOA
(tags: whoa mental architecture culture gaming society video simcity urban vice)
New programming jargon you coined? - Stack Overflow : some nice coding neologisms here. aside from "Refuctoring" (see other link), I like "The Duck" (a sacrificial feature, used to distract cut-crazy bosses from useful features) and "Stringly Typed" (an implementation that needlessly relies on strings when programmer and refactor friendly options are available)
(tags: coding funny slang neologisms jargon stack-overflow the-duck stringly-typed)Refuctoring : 'the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself' (via Mozai)
(tags: funny refuctoring via:Mozai coding tests tdd programming software)
UK Met Office: Volcanic Ash Cloud Maps : updated 4 times daily, maps of Europe indicating coverage of the ash cloud. I'm going to be F5'ing this constantly over the next week as I'm supposed to be flying on Sunday :(
(tags: airports hazards iceland travel maps weather volcanic-ash ash forecast europe met-office holidays ash-cloud)
The result of the IMRO & music blogger meeting | Nialler9 Music Blog : upshot: IMRO will think about it and get back to Nialler et al; in the meantime, everyone operates as before. one to keep an eye on, even if you're not Irish; this will play out overseas soon too. Good call getting Simon McGarr along
(tags: music mp3 shakedown imro nialler9 ip)EU must break down national copyright barriers, says EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes : "There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material. The problem is that it's illegal [...] We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed." "While the internet is borderless, Europe’s online markets are not. It is often easier to buy something from a US website than online from the country next-door in Europe. Often you cannot buy it at all within Europe."
(tags: copyright piracy neelie-kroes quotes eu ec music ip)Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites : 'Falling victim to a [phish] isn’t just a matter of not being wise to the ways of the world: it’s a matter of being caught out in a moment of distraction and of unlikely circumstance.' +1, that matches with the personal phishing stories I've heard from others
(tags: phishing cory-doctorow security anti-phishing scams distraction twitter)
Dutch forum thread on splitting analog signals from a UPC Thomson DCI-6221 DVR : I'm trying to figure out how I can rebuild a MythTV box with new UPC equipment. this claims that you can split the cable before it enters the Cisco cablemodem, and get analog TV off the basic cable that way. hmm
(tags: analog tv upc mythtv dci6221 mediabox cable-tv)the world’s largest DVR : SnapStream's 100TB rack which records 50 analog TV channels simultaneously
(tags: snapstream video tv storage hardware analog television)Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks — PNAS : 'we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (E. coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. ... both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. ... These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.' (via adulau)
(tags: via:adulau papers toread genetics genome call-graph linux kernel e-coli operating-systems transcriptional-regulatory-network)
A fast, fuzzy, full-text index using Redis : quite easy, using a Metaphone sound-like indexing scheme to provide the fuzz
(tags: metaphone sounds-like indexing python redis search full-text fuzzy)Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit : yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less
(tags: ip law legal novell linux open-source patents redhat swpats uspto acacia-technologies)article on the IMRO-vs-blogs LOEL spat : by an ex-Hot-Press staffer. interesting: Hot Press 'also publish MQ, the IMRO members’ periodical.' well, that would explain a lot
(tags: hot-press ireland music mp3 loel imro shakedown)Indie music mogul: The net's great for us : Martin Mills of Beggar's Banquet. thought-provoking interview, and he nails it on this: "People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You've got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You'll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links." That EXACTLY described my situation a few years back
(tags: martin-mills beggars-banquet music record-labels xl mp3 filesharing)
Facebook | Save Irish Music Blogs From IMRO! : join this group to add your voice
(tags: facebook imro shakedown blogs ireland music mp3)the torture garden: On Hot Press and My Place In The Real Economy : it seems Hot Press have come up with some Paul-McGuinness-esque pro-IMRO one-sided turdery masquerading as journalism. shock me
(tags: imro shakedown hot-press tat journalism ireland dublin)Two bands pull out of IMRO show in blog protest : fair play to The Cast Of Cheers and Mia Sparrow, cancelling their show in response to IMRO's actions
(tags: imro shakedown bands music ireland the-cast-of-cheers the-richter-collective)Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA : incredible. Almost every single modern camera capable of recording video now requires that you obtain a license from MPEG-LA to use recorded footage for commercial purposes. These clauses are currently not enforced, but could be. Horrifying (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf patents mpeg2 codec compression consumer-rights copyright legal law mpeg h264 mpegla codecs)
Make your own sourdough | Life and style | The Guardian : more recipes. This one looks like a good guide to creating a starter culture, something I've been meaning to do for a while
(tags: sourdough bread recipes food guardian)Thomasina Miers' simple Mexican recipes | Life and style | The Observer : some pretty good "ports" of Mexican recipes to ingredients available over here, must try these
(tags: mexican food guardian recipes tortas tlayudas ceviche tacos burritos)Stephen Walter's The Island : truly amazing artwork, as featured in the BBC4 documentary 'Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art' last week. 'The Island satirises the London-centric view of the English capital and its commuter towns as independent from the rest of the country. The artist, a Londoner with a love of his native city, offers up a huge range of local and personal information in words and symbols. Walter speaks in the dialect of today, focusing on what he deems interesting or mundane.'
(tags: maps stephen-walter cool detail the-island london)
ScamNailer - Anti-Phishing Filter : a generated set of SpamAssassin rules containing known-phisher addresses
(tags: scams phishing spear-phishing spamassassin rules anti-phishing)Endangered sites in Britain and Ireland to see before they die : including Roundstone Bog, burned to a crisp last week :(
(tags: roundstone bogs ireland connemara tourism endangered)Irish music blogs under attack over royalties | Music | guardian.co.uk : 'If IMRO goes ahead with its plan, targeting music blogs around the world, there will soon be legions of frustrated bloggers. And it will be much worse if other regional publishers follow suit.'
(tags: imro ireland guardian news blogs music mp3 shakedown)Vending Spree : 'I am going to consume and review every item in my office vending machine and there is nothing you can do to stop me.'
(tags: vending-machines funny blogs food daily)Why We’re Siding With The Bloggers and Why IMRO’s LOEL Blog License Won’t Work : good post from online music marketing site Amp.ie
(tags: music mp3 blogging blogs ireland imro shakedown loel)On The Record » “This music blogger IMRO licence thing” : Jim Carroll's blog post on the IMRO mp3blog shakedown. Comment thread has some good stuff from Irish music heads
(tags: imro mp3 blogs music ireland jim-carroll shakedown)IMRO propose massive increase in indie cinema fees : what are they up to? '1 per cent levy on the gross box-office takings of every cinema in the country ... Smaller cinema operators who attended a meeting ... said the proposal amounted in some cases to a five to sevenfold increase on their existing royalties payments.'
(tags: imro wtf cinema movies ireland shakedown)Nialler9's getting the IMRO shakedown : Irish music blogs apparently need to pay a minimum of EUR150/year to the collection agency for "making copyrighted music available online" -- and they intend to ask _all_ sites who offer music, Irish or not, to pay this fee (!)
(tags: imro shakedown nialler9 ireland music mp3 blogs blogging)
Mix Tape Amnesty : ha! 'The amnesty was created in an effort to finally rid the country of illegally taped music. Although technology has evolved, the law on this issue has remained unchanged and these mix-tapes still constitute a threat to artist royalties.' Remember: home taping is killing music
(tags: mixtapes funny history ireland virals music mp3 filesharing)
"Child pornography is great", according to one EU music-business lobbyist : it's the perfect 'gateway' to allow anti-filesharing filtering of the internet. 'Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.' Via TJ McIntyre
(tags: via:tjmcintyre ifpi filesharing child-porn filtering internet johan-schluter anti-piracy-group sweden denmark eu)