Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

Links for 2012-07-26

Published July 26, 2012

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

    As in statistical physics, the concept of universality plays an important, albeit qualitative, role in the field of comparative mythology. Here we apply statistical mechanical tools to analyse the networks underlying three iconic mythological narratives with a view to identifying common and distinguishing quantitative features. Of the three narratives, an Anglo-Saxon and a Greek text are mostly believed by antiquarians to be partly historically based while the third, an Irish epic [jm: "An Táin Bó Cúailnge", The Tain, to be specific], is often considered to be fictional. Here we use network analysis in an attempt to discriminate real from imaginary social networks and place mythological narratives on the spectrum between them. This suggests that the perceived artificiality of the Irish narrative can be traced back to anomalous features associated with six characters. Speculating that these are amalgams of several entities or proxies, renders the plausibility of the Irish text comparable to the others from a network-theoretic point of view.
    Here's what the Irish Times said:
    The society in the 1st century story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge looked artificial at first analysis of the networks between 404 characters in the story. However, the researchers found the society reflected real rather than fictional networks when the weakest links to six of the characters are removed. These six characters included Medb, Queen of Connacht; Conchobor, King of Ulster and Cúchulainn. They were "similar to superheroes of the Marvel universe" and are "too superhuman" or too well-connected to be real, researchers said. The researchers suggest that each of these superhuman characters may be an amalgam of many which became fused and exaggerated as the story was passed down orally through generations.

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

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

Links for 2012-07-23

Published July 23, 2012

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

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

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

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

    I am mostly fine with the concept of “selling stuff you made”, so I’m also against copyright infringement. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as theft, and I’m not sure it’s good for society that some professions can get paid over and over long after they did the work (say, in the case of a game developer), whereas others need to perform the job over and over to get paid (say, in the case of a hairdresser or a lawyer). But yeah, “selling stuff you made” is good. But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. Ideas are free. They improve on old things, make them better, and this results in all of society being better. Sharing ideas is how we improve. A common argument for patents is that inventors won’t invent unless they can protect their ideas. The problem with this argument is that patents apply even if the infringer came up with the idea independently. If the idea is that easy to think of, why do we need to reward the person who happened to be first?
    Of course, in reality it's even worse, since you don't actually have to be first to invent -- just first to file without sufficient people noticing, and people are actively dissuaded from noticing (since it makes their lives riskier if they know about the existence of patents)...
    (tags: business legal ip copyright patents notch minecraft patent-trolls)

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

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

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

Links for 2012-07-21

Published July 21, 2012

Links for 2012-07-16

Published July 16, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-07-14

Published July 14, 2012

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

Links for 2012-07-11

Published July 11, 2012

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

Links for 2012-07-10

Published July 10, 2012

Links for 2012-07-03

Published July 3, 2012

Links for 2012-06-29

Published June 29, 2012

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

Links for 2012-06-28

Published June 28, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-06-27

Published June 27, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-06-26

Published June 26, 2012

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

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

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

Links for 2012-06-25

Published June 25, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-06-23

Published June 23, 2012

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

Links for 2012-06-22

Published June 22, 2012

Links for 2012-06-21

Published June 21, 2012

Links for 2012-06-20

Published June 20, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-06-19

Published June 19, 2012

Links for 2012-06-15

Published June 15, 2012

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

Links for 2012-06-13

Published June 13, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-06-12

Published June 12, 2012

Links for 2012-06-11

Published June 11, 2012

Links for 2012-05-25

Published May 25, 2012

Telegraph spam in 1864

Published May 24, 2012

Here's a letter to the editor of The Times, dated 1st June 1864:

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.
Sir, --- On my arrival home late yesterday evening a "telegram," by "London District Telegraph," addressed in full to me, was put into my hands. It was as follows :--
"Messrs. Gabriel, dentists, 27, Harley-street, Cavendish-square. Until October Messrs. Gabriel's professional attendance at 27, Harley-street, will be 10 till 5."
I have never had any dealings with Messrs. Gabriel, and beg to ask by what right do they disturb me by a telegram which is evidently simply the medium of advertisement? A word from you would, I feel sure, put a stop to this intolerable nuisance. I enclose the telegram, and am,
Your faithful servant,
M.P.
Upper Grosvenor-street, May 30.

(thanks to Tony Finch for the forward)

Links for 2012-05-23

Published May 23, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-05-22

Published May 22, 2012

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

Links for 2012-05-20

Published May 20, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-05-16

Published May 16, 2012

Links for 2012-05-15

Published May 15, 2012

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

Links for 2012-05-13

Published May 13, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-05-12

Published May 12, 2012

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

In Dublin? Hear me talk about AWS network monitoring!

Published May 11, 2012

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

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

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

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

Links for 2012-05-10

Published May 10, 2012

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

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

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

Links for 2012-05-09

Published May 9, 2012

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

Links for 2012-05-04

Published May 4, 2012

Links for 2012-05-03

Published May 3, 2012

Links for 2012-04-30

Published April 30, 2012

Links for 2012-04-24

Published April 24, 2012

Links for 2012-04-23

Published April 23, 2012

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

Links for 2012-04-19

Published April 19, 2012

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

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

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

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

Links for 2012-04-16

Published April 16, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links for 2012-04-13

Published April 13, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-04-12

Published April 12, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-04-06

Published April 6, 2012

Links for 2012-04-04

Published April 4, 2012

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

Links for 2012-03-31

Published March 31, 2012

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

Links for 2012-03-30

Published March 30, 2012

Links for 2012-03-27

Published March 27, 2012

Links for 2012-03-22

Published March 22, 2012

Links for 2012-03-20

Published March 20, 2012

Links for 2012-03-18

Published March 18, 2012

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

Links for 2012-03-14

Published March 14, 2012

Links for 2012-03-13

Published March 13, 2012

Links for 2012-03-11

Published March 11, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-03-10

Published March 10, 2012

Links for 2012-03-09

Published March 9, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-03-07

Published March 7, 2012

Links for 2012-03-06

Published March 6, 2012

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

Links for 2012-03-04

Published March 4, 2012

Links for 2012-03-03

Published March 3, 2012

Links for 2012-03-02

Published March 2, 2012

Links for 2012-02-29

Published February 29, 2012

Links for 2012-02-27

Published February 27, 2012

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

Links for 2012-02-26

Published February 26, 2012

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

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

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

Links for 2012-02-24

Published February 24, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-02-23

Published February 23, 2012

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

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

Links for 2012-02-22

Published February 22, 2012

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