Project HGG: FAQ : Hackerspace Global Grid -- 'We want to understand, build and make available satellite based communication for the hackerspace community and all of mankind.' Space is the place!
(tags: space ccc satellite communication internet hackerspace)
Category: Uncategorized
Skeuomorph : word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : 'A skeuomorph /?skju??m?rf/ skew-?-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines'
(tags: words language history objects ornament design wikipedia)
Punching through The Great Firewall of T-Mobile : well, this is bizarre -- it seems T-Mobile UK are blocking encrypted email submission and OpenVPN traffic in their mobile internet access products. Why? Who knows -- but at least filtering RST packets evades the block, as in the Great Firewall of China
(tags: china filtering rst internet iptables t-mobile uk payg mobile-internet)
ChessBase.com - Chess News - A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess (part two) : An amazing article, via Nelson Minar -- careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering -- by many of the developers. 'Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.'
(tags: chess code games open-source licensing reverse-engineering copyright infringement via:nelson)
High Scalability - How Twitter Stores 250 Million Tweets a Day Using MySQL : MySQL as a storage backend -- basically an InnoDB store
(tags: mysql twitter scalability gizzard innodb performance database)
Using a Feistel Network for full-cycle permutation : nice algorithm. requires that the permuted set's size be a power of 2 however - although for smaller sets you can just skip to the next output value, since they're not going to repeat
(tags: feistel-network full-cycle permutation shuffling algorithms)algorithm - Generating shuffled range using a PRNG rather than shuffling - Stack Overflow : some reasonably good answers on using an LFSR or LCG to generate a full-cycle permutation with no repeats
(tags: lfsr lcg algorithms permutation shuffling)
French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak : 'According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.' I love this. The data is, of course, filled with potential inaccuracies -- and that's the point
(tags: bittorrent surveillance downloading internet privacy france hadopi)SiliconRepublic story on CoderDojo : 'it's both incredible and poignant that a voluntary movement that was born in Ireland during the summer is about to go international. Coder Dojo, the brainchild of 19-year-old entrepreneur and programmer James Whelton from Cork and tech entrepreneur Bill Liao, began as a Saturday morning club for kids to teach each other software programming. It has grown into a national movement up and down Ireland, a place where kids and their parents can go and learn to write software code in a friendly environment. The first UK Coder Dojo was held in London only last week and other countries in Europe are clamouring to get the initiative started there, too.' Good on them!
(tags: coderdojo programming coding kids children teaching education tech ireland)
Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics : The (comp.)risks of overautomation strike again. "When trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land -- the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what's going on. They'll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can't be trusted?"
(tags: aviation crash flight flying autopilot stalls warnings alarms ui af447 risks automation)spark : sparklines in your terminal window. Simply give it a comma or space-separated list of data values, and it'll generate an ANSI-graphics sparkline chart. Brilliant! (via mjd)
(tags: via:mjdominus sparklines charts graphs bash shell terminal cli ansi)
Script used by Instagram to duplicate the paged-in VM pages to another host : as seen in their "Instagram Engineering" post
(tags: vmtouch vm linux unix tools instagram)vmtouch - the Virtual Memory Toucher : 'vmtouch is a tool for learning about and controlling the file system cache of unix and unix-like systems. It is BSD licensed.'
(tags: vmtouch vm linux unix fs filesystems instagram)Scott Andreas - Garbage, Garbage Everywhere [slides] : 'GC Strategies for Event Processing Systems on the JVM'
(tags: gc java jvm event-streams event-processing tuning slides presentations scott-andreas performance)Large file management with git-annex : 'uses Git to manage files that are larger than Git can easily handle—without checking them into the repository. But git-annex provides ways to track those files using much of the same infrastructure as Git, so that moving or deleting those files can all be tracked in much the same way as committed files. In addition, git-annex allows for branches and distributed clones of its trees.' I may investigate using this to sync my MP3s instead of SVN
(tags: git git-annex version-control)
collectSPACE : 'The Source for Space History and Artifacts' -- and just in time for xmas too!
(tags: space spaaace memorabilia collecting gomi tat artifacts ebay science xmas)
747s using VLANs to secure in-flight access to engine management systems : 'I was contracted to test the systems on a Boeing 747. They had added a new video system that ran over IP. They segregated this from the control systems using layer 2 VLANs. We managed to break the VLANs and access other systems and with source routing could access the Engine management systems.' (via Risks)
(tags: scary aviation flight security boeing 747 via:risks)LINX Public Affairs » Scarlet wins in European Court : 'The Court judgement therefore goes well beyond saying what a court may decide, by means of an injunction: it also sets out the limits of Member States’ powers to legislate to draft ISPs as copyright police. It will be a crucial precedent in future arguments about the Digital Economy Act, in the UK, HADOPI in France, various blocking requirements in Italy, and numerous other schemes across the EU. As victories for ISPs in the copyright wars go, this one was comprehensive. It will be seen as a landmark ruling for years to come.' woot
(tags: linx scarlet isps hadopi eu privacy filtering copyright irma filesharing)
How does LMAX's disruptor pattern work? - Stack Overflow : LMAX's "Disruptor" concurrent-server pattern, claiming to be a higher-throughput, lower-latency, and lock-free alternative to the SEDA pattern using a massive ring buffer. Good discussion here at SO. (via Filippo)
(tags: via:filippo servers seda queueing concurrency disruptor patterns latency trading performance ring-buffers)Scrapheap Transhumanism : Lepht Anonym and the 'Grinders'. crazy stuff -- low-end DIY cybernetic augmentation. 'The implants sit in various places under my skin: middle fingertips of my left hand, back of the right hand, right forearm — tiny magnets, five or six millimeters across, coated in gold and then in silicon to isolate the delicate metal from the destructive environment of your body. They’re something of an investment at about thirty euros apiece, and hard to get hold of, but worth pursuing. When implanted, they become technological sensory organs. There’s an entire world of electromagnetic radiation out there, invisible to most. Our cities are saturated with it. A radio, for instance, gives off a field that’s bigger than the device itself. So do power supplies and wires in the walls. The implants pick up on the fields, and because they’re magnets, they fizz with gentle electricity, telling you this hard drive is currently active, that one is turned off, there’s the main line in the wall. Holding a mobile phone, you can feel the signals it sends and receives. You know it’s ringing before it starts to play any sounds, and when you answer it, you stick the touchscreen stylus to the back of your hand to hold it, then to your finger to type.'
(tags: diy augmentation cybernetics transhumanism lepht-anonym grinders biohacking cyberpunk medicine)Apache considered harmful : ouch
(tags: git asf apache via:hn github programming)
the legend of St. Columba, patron saint of copyright infringers : 'At this point IPKat team member Jeremy dons his old academic hat and excitedly draws attention to some research he did on the St Columba case. The goodly saint was given access to a psalter that was in the possession of Abbot Finian in around the year 560. A psalter is a book of psalms -- definitely public domain stuff, having been compiled during the reign of King David, who is generally reckoned to have died around 970 years before the common era. Even on a life + 70 year basis, copyright would have expired around getting on for 1,500 years before Columba came on to the scene. Having illicitly copied the psalter he refused to deliver it up to King Dermot of Tara, who famously said “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy” -- not "to every cow its calf, to every author his work". Anyway, to cut a long story short, Columba refused to hand it over, fled the country for the safety of England (like the founder of Wikileaks), converted the Picts to Christianity, settled in Iona and became a saint. You can read this all in "St Columba the Copyright Infringer" [1985] 12 European Intellectual Property Review 350-353.' (via Eoin O'Dell). Someone fill in the misquoting High Court judges....
(tags: st-columba books via:cearta ireland law history filesharing copyright)eclim (eclipse + vim) : 'Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, Vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, Eclipse, provides many great tools for development in various languages. Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both still leave something to be desired. Vim lacks native Java support and many of the advanced features available in Eclipse. Eclipse, on the other hand, still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to Vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text. That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write an IDE in Vim or a Vim editor in Eclipse, eclim provides an Eclipse plug-in that exposes Eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of Vim plug-ins that communicate with Eclipse over that interface. This functionality can be leveraged in three primary ways, as illustrated below.'
(tags: eclipse java programming software vim editors refactoring)
Determining response times with tcprstat : 'Tcprstat is a free, open-source TCP analysis tool that watches network traffic and computes the delay between requests and responses. From this it derives response-time statistics and prints them out.' Computes percentiles, too
(tags: tcp tcprstat tcp-ip networking measurement statistics performance instrumentation linux unix tools cli)
DTrace and Erlang : from Basho, via istvan. DTrace is becoming more compelling as a deep instrumentation/monitoring API -- I didn't realise disabled DTrace probes were virtually 0-overhead (a "2 NOOP instruction placeholder", apparently), that's nifty. Wonder if they've fixed the licensing mess, though
(tags: dtrace monitoring instrumentation debugging tracing unix erlang via:istvan)
Benchmarking Cassandra Scalability on AWS - Over a million writes per second : NetFlix' benchmarks -- impressively detailed. '48, 96, 144 and 288 instances', across 3 EC2 AZs in us-east, successfully scaling linearly
(tags: ec2 aws cassandra scaling benchmarks netflix performance)
Inside the mind of the octopus : "Researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself."
(tags: octopus animals biology consciousness neuroscience science)Dark Sky - Weather Prediction, Reinvented by Adam Grossman & Jack Turner — Kickstarter : Yes! short-term weather prediction and dataviz. I've been vaguely considering ideas along these lines recently, but these guys have gone much further. US residents, fund it -- I really hope this gets made and makes it to Ireland...
(tags: crowdfunding weather apps cool dataviz visualization)Studded Bicycle Tires : Thinking of the winter commute again. This page has a load of fantastic info on winter tyres
(tags: ice winter tires tyres cycling shopping commute)
Linux SS Utility To Investigate Sockets / Network Connections : 'When amount of sockets is enough large, netstat or even plain cat /proc/net/tcp/ cause nothing but pains and curses. In linux-2.4 the desease [sic] became worse: even if amount of sockets is small reading /proc/net/tcp/ is slow enough. This utility presents a new approach, which is supposed to scale well.' via scanlan
(tags: via:scanlan ss linux sockets networking tools cli)
Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages : HBase and Haystack; all data LZO-compressed; very interesting approach to testing -- they 'shadow the real production workload into the test cluster to test before going into production'. This catches a 'high percentage' of issues before production. nice
(tags: testing shadowing haystack hbase facebook scalability lzo messaging sms via:james-hamilton)
Avoiding Full GCs in HBase with MemStore-Local Allocation Buffers : Fascinating. Evading the Java GC by reimplementing a slab allocator, basically
(tags: memory allocation java gc jvm hbase memstore via:dehora slab-allocator)How to beat the CAP theorem : Nathan "Storm" Marz on building a dual realtime/batch stack. This lines up with something I've been building in work, so I'm happy ;)
(tags: nathan-marz realtime batch hadoop storm big-data cap)
peak6/scala-ssh-shell - GitHub : 'Backdoor that gives you a scala shell over ssh on your jvm. The shell is not sandboxed, anyone access the shell can touch anything in the jvm and do anything the jvm can do including modifying and deleting files, etc.' nifty!
(tags: scala ssh repl interactive debugging coding jvm java)Anrealage pixelled shop : 'Experimental japanese designer Kunihiko Morinaga has been inspired by pixel for his latest FW 2011 collection of his brand Anrealage. The best part is that this pixelled style has been applied also to his brand showroom in Harajuku, Tokyo.' Love the rug
(tags: anrealage pixelation pixel-art via:mlkshk rugs shops tokyo kunihiko-morinaga)
the etymology of the anatomical term "Thagomizer" : 'The term was coined by Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side comic strip, in which a group of cavemen in a faux-modern lecture hall are taught by their caveman professor that the spikes were named "after the late Thag Simmons". The term was picked up initially by Ken Carpenter, a palaeontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993. Thagomizer has since been adopted as an informal anatomical term, and is used by the Smithsonian Institution, the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, the book The Complete Dinosaur and the BBC documentary series Planet Dinosaur.' (via John Looney)
(tags: via:john-looney thagomizer the-far-side comics til dinosaurs funny)
Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet : 'Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives.' hmm, not quite sure how that air gap is supposed to work
(tags: air-gap security drones viruses firewalls)
Bayes' theorem ruled inadmissible in UK law courts : Bayes' theorem, and 'similar statistical analysis', ruled inadmissible in UK law courts (via Tony Finch)
(tags: uk law guardian via:fanf bayes maths statistics legal)
Amazon hiring embedded OS developers : hey, I know a few of those! 'I need more help on a project I’m driving at Amazon where we continue to make big changes in our datacenter network to improve customer experience and drive down costs while, at the same time, deploying more gear into production each day than all of Amazon.com used back in 2000. It’s an exciting time and we have big changes happening in networking. If you enjoy and have experience in operating systems, networking protocol stacks, or embedded systems and you would like to work on one of the biggest networks in the world, [get in touch].' -- James Hamilton
(tags: james-hamilton aws jobs amazon networking embedded)
feedback loop n-gram analyzer : 'a simple parser of ARF compliant FBL complaints, which normalizes the email complaints and generates a 6-tuple n-gram version of the message. These n-grams are stored in a Redis database, keyed by the file in which they can be found. An inverse index also exists that allow you to find all messages containing a particular n-gram word.'
(tags: anti-spam spam fbl feedback filtering n-grams similarity hashing redis searching)
Lovelace's Leap : a great observation from jgc. 'Lovelace realized that even though a computer was, at its heart, a mathematical machine, it wasn't restricted to doing mathematics. She realized that a computer could be used to process other types of 'information' by having numbers represent anything else. She realized that a computer could handle text, or music, or practically anything. That's Lovelace's Leap.'
(tags: jgc history ada-lovelace computing software information code babbage)Rectangular subdivisions of the world : 'Eric Fischer, who continues his string of mapping fun and doesn't even do it for his day job, maps the world in binary subdivisions. Each bounding box contains an equal number of geotagged tweets.' via Nelson
(tags: maps mapping bounding-boxes world earth geodata geotagging twitter)
Hikaru Dorodango : 'Hikaru dorodango are balls of mud, molded by hand into perfect spheres, dried, and polished to an unbelievable luster. The process is simple, but the result makes it seem like alchemy. A traditional pastime among the children of Japan, the exact origin of hikaru dorodango is unknown.'
(tags: mud dirt dorodango japan art howto sculpture hands craft play children)
Storm : 'The past decade has seen a revolution in data processing. MapReduce, Hadoop, and related technologies have made it possible to store and process data at scales previously unthinkable. Unfortunately, these data processing technologies are not realtime systems, nor are they meant to be. There's no hack that will turn Hadoop into a realtime system; realtime data processing has a fundamentally different set of requirements than batch processing. However, realtime data processing at massive scale is becoming more and more of a requirement for businesses. The lack of a "Hadoop of realtime" has become the biggest hole in the data processing ecosystem. Storm fills that hole.'
(tags: data scaling twitter realtime scalability storm queueing)Storm: distributed and fault-tolerant realtime computation : intro slideshow to this really nifty-looking distcomp platform
(tags: distcomp distributed realtime storm slides twitter)Hacker News thread on Storm : lots of good questions and answers in here
(tags: twitter storm distcomp distributed)
Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years : “This is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,” writes Khatib. “These results indicate the potential for integrating video games [like FoldIt] into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”
(tags: foldit gaming games science biology aids viruses protease protein-folding proteins vr)
Black Hat: Insulin pumps can be hacked : "Everything has an embedded processor and computer in it," he said. "Every time you hide behind [security by] obscurity, it is going to fail." Brad Smith, a researcher and Black Hat conference staffer who also is a registered nurse, said the medical field largely looks the other way when it comes to securing patient devices. "I lecture at all the medical conferences," he said during the press conference. "They just hide it. Pay attention to what [Radcliffe] is saying. His life is in this pump." (via Risks Digest)
(tags: via:risks insulin pump medicine security hacking health wireless)A few git tips you didn't know about : 'git checkout -t' alone is worth the bookmark
(tags: git tips coding unix reference tricks via:proggit)
Conor O'Neill on his freesat/DTT system : 'Our replacement for Sky TV cost €99. Ariva 120. No monthly fees!' -- sounds very intriguing, that's a good price point
(tags: digital fta satellite television dtt sky upc ireland)Golomb-coded sets : 'a probabilistic data structure conceptually similar to a Bloom filter, but with a more compact in-memory representation, and a slower query time.' could come in handy
(tags: gcs bloom-filters probabilistic data-structures memory algorithms)
The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit) : contains a surprisingly-large number which I haven't read
(tags: scifi fiction books science-fiction)
Dutch grepping Facebook for welfare fraud : 'The [Dutch] councils are working with a specialist Amsterdam research firm, using the type of computer software previously deployed only in counterterrorism, monitoring [LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter] traffic for keywords and cross-referencing any suspicious information with digital lists of social welfare recipients. Among the giveaway terms, apparently, are “holiday” and “new car”. If the automated software finds a match between one of these terms and a person claiming social welfare payments, the information is passed on to investigators to gather real-life evidence.' With a 30% false positive rate, apparently -- let's hope those investigations aren't too intrusive!
(tags: grep dutch holland via:tjmcintyre privacy facebook twitter linkedin welfare dole fraud false-positives searching)
The Monkeysphere Project : OpenPGP's web of trust extending further. 'Everyone who has used a web browser has been interrupted by the "Are you sure you want to connect?" warning message, which occurs when the browser finds the site's certificate unacceptable. But web browser vendors (e.g. Microsoft or Mozilla) should not be responsible for determining whom (or what) the user trusts to certify the authenticity of a website, or the identity of another user online. The user herself should have the final say, and designation of trust should be done on the basis of human interaction. The Monkeysphere project aims to make that possibility a reality.'
(tags: via:filippo gpg pki security software ssh ssl web)Convergence : 'Convergence is a secure replacement for the Certificate Authority System. Rather than employing a traditionally hard-coded list of immutable CAs, Convergence allows you to configure a dynamic set of Notaries which use network perspective to validate your communication. Convergence allows you to choose who you want to trust, rather than having someone else's decision forced on you. You can revise your trust decisions at any time, so that you're not locked in to trusting anyone for longer than you want.'
(tags: ssl tls trust security https web via:filippo firefox plugins pki)
Dave Neary on The Cost of Going it Alone : 'I’m going to talk about the costs associated with modifying and maintaining free software “out of tree” – that is, when you don’t work with the developers of the software to have your changes integrated. But I’m also going to talk about the costs of working with upstream projects. It can be easy for us to forget that working upstream takes time and money – and we ignore that to our peril. It’s in our interests as free software developers to make it as cost-effective as possible for people to work with us. Hopefully, if you’re a commercial developer, you’ll come away from this article with a better idea of when it’s worthwhile to work upstream, and when it isn’t. And if you’re a community developer, perhaps this will give you some ideas about how to make it easier for people to work with you.'
(tags: dave-neary gnome open-source maintainers upstream forking)
Google App Engine Price Hike Stuns Developers - - Platform as a Service - Informationweek : 'Now that Google has begun offering App Engine users a way to calculate the new rate and compare it with the old rate, developers are realizing their bills will rise, by a factor of 10 or 100 or more in some cases, when the pricing change takes effect in a few months.' - ouch
(tags: google gae appengine costs pricing paas)
Through speed of traffic on San Francisco area streets vs. popularity with Flickr and Twitter users : "slower streets" generate more photos/tweets than "faster streets", with a peak around 9 mph
(tags: data san-francisco photos flickr twitter speed driving)
Microsoft's new IE "Ribbon" debunked : 'nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right? Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.' (via Nelson)
(tags: design hci microsoft ui statistics user-hostile ribbon windows)
The Daily Mail's frequent copyright abuse finally catches up with them : This is how you do it -- bravo to Alice Taylor, who got them fair and square as they did their usual trick of lifting copyrighted content without permission
(tags: copyright journalism photography daily-mail via:torrentfreak)Real-World Scala: Dependency Injection (DI) : I think I prefer the structural-typing approach, TBH
(tags: scala patterns programming oo coding dependency-injection)
Bog Body: Committing to Open Source : Oisin Hurley on viable strategies for a commercial software company to handle participation in open source. Shame I've never found anywhere to viably put these into action, but they sound accurate
(tags: open-source oisin-hurley oss corporate work)
Fastest sort of fixed length 6 int array - Stack Overflow : huh, I'd never heard of sorting networks before
(tags: sorting-networks c algorithms sorting optimization sort stack-overflow)
'What Idiot Wrote The Patent That Might Invalidate Software Patents? Oh, Wait, That Was Me' | Techdirt : 'So I was thinking - great they invalidated software patents, lets see what crappy patent written by an idiot they picked to do it - then I realized the idiot in question was me :-) Not sure how I feel about this. John - inventor of the patent in question.'
(tags: patents swpats reform usa software-development coding funny techdirt)
good taxonomy of memcached use cases : via Jeff Barr's announcement of the Elasticache launch. from 2008, but a better taxonomy than I've seen elsewhere
(tags: memcached caching mysql performance scalability via:jeffbarr)Bootstrap, from Twitter : 'a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites'; 'includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.' Very, very nice, AL2 licensed (via Mick Twomey)
(tags: via:micktwomey twitter ui css design html styling web-apps layout)echolibre & Orchestra : 'In particular, we want to thank the Irish and Dublin web communities. I've met other web communities in Europe and in the USA, and I can say, hand on heart, they don't have a patch on you guys.' awww ;) Congrats, guys
(tags: echolibre php web startups ireland paas orchestra.io engine-yard)
Building with Legos : Netflix tech blog on how they deploy their services. Notably, they avoid the Puppet/Chef approach, citing these reasons: 'One is that it eliminates a number of dependencies in the production environment: a master control server, package repository and client scripts on the servers, network permissions to talk to all of these. Another is that it guarantees that what we test in the test environment is the EXACT same thing that is deployed in production; there is very little chance of configuration or other creep/bit rot. Finally, it means that there is no way for people to change or install things in the production environment (this may seem like a really harsh restriction, but if you can build a new AMI fast enough it doesn't really make a difference).'
(tags: devops cloud aws netflix puppet chef deployment)Bog body found in Co Laois could be that of sacrificed king : 'All of the other bog bodies were found on significant boundaries. The idea is that because the goddess is the land, by inserting bodies and other items relating to their inauguration as king along the boundaries, it gives form to the goddess.' things were pretty damn gory back then
(tags: ireland history laois bog-bodies bog human-sacrifice)
nifty Cydia iPhone signal-strength app : very nifty. pity my phone's not jailbroken, or I'd be trying this out
(tags: jailbreaking cydia iphone signal-strength 3g wireless mapping)Pavo Real : amazingly detailed peacock print by Argentinian artist Azul de Corso; very nice
(tags: prints toget peacock azul-de-corso art)
Unbound: The Crowdfunding Cargo Cult – Telegraph Blogs : 'why was Unbound set up in the first place? It’s because they constructed a cargo cult, believing that if they mimicked the superficial elements of successful crowdfunding, they could enjoy the same success as others – but perhaps even more, thanks to their relationships with publishers, agents, authors, and the media.' They're not the only Kickstarter-cargo-culting company, too. via waxy
(tags: via:waxy unbound kickstarter cargo-cult funding crowdfunding books uk)
Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies : bored on maternity leave, this is what happens (via Niamh)
(tags: movies babies funny via:niamh)IT expenditure and failure – submission to public expenditure consultation : Antoin lays into the disfunctional Irish IT procurement system. "The status quo isn’t just making things expensive and slow, it’s asphyxiating the government’s ability to serve."
(tags: antoin it procurement ireland government civil-service letters)
Why we should expel the Vatican’s Ambassador, the Papal Nuncio : 'In 2011, we have a new Government, who have stopped making excuses for the Vatican State. The Facebook campaign now has over 5,000 members, who continue to send emails and letters to their TDs and to the Minister for Foreign Affairs expressing the clear message that we want action. Enda Kenny said yesterday that the Vatican downplayed the rape and torture of Irish children to to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. We should expel the Vatican’s Papal Nuncio and send the message that they have destroyed the very things they prized the most.'
(tags: vatican papal-nuncio religion catholicism politics diplomacy ireland child-abuse cloyne-report)
Paintings by Daniel Castan : really striking oil paintings of Manhattan; looks like small-format canvases can be bought at http://en.carredartistes.com/acheter-un-tableau-peintre-et-vente-peinture-artiste/petit-format/daniel-castan
(tags: daniel-castan art via:mlkshk paintings toget cities new-york nyc manhattan)
Facebook group: Expel the Irish Papal Nuncio : "The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse in the Dublin ArchDiocese clearly states that the Papal Nuncio, the Diplomatic representative of the Vatican, refused to reply to investigators. Now the Cloynes Report has found that the Vatican's Ambassador intervened to undermine the efforts to protect children as recently as 1996. This is not acceptable. The Irish Government has the power to expel diplomats. If we are to take the reports' findings seriously, we must expel the Papal Nuncio."
(tags: vatican politics ireland abuse facebook lobbying cloyne-report)zen.org Communal Weblog » Bigger Than His Body : 'My beautiful, smart, funny, geeky, blue-eyed, bearded, amazing husband died last night with me and two of his aunts holding him.' So sorry for Elana and their boys -- Brendan was a nice guy and a great hacker :(
(tags: brendan-kehoe awful leukemia life death rip)Death Notice Of Brendan KEHOE, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland : 'Removal on Saturday from Quinn's of Glasthule to Mount Jerome Crematorium for service at 2pm. No flowers, please. Donations, if desired, to Educate Together.'
(tags: rip brendan-kehoe)
Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief | Stanford Center for Internet and Society : jaysus. the Epic Marketplace online ad network performs a history stealing attack to determine if the viewer has recently visited 'pages about getting pregnant and fertility, including at the Mayo Clinic'. very very scummy -- massive privacy violation (via Adam Shostack)
(tags: privacy history browsers history-stealing css attacks security via:adamshostack epic-marketplace nai ads)How we use Redis at Bump : via Simon Willison. some nice ideas here, particularly using a replication slave to handle the potentially latency-impacting disk writes in AOF mode
(tags: queueing redis nosql databases storage via:simonw replication bump)
SSL perf tip : don't use Diffie-Hellman ciphers, they're slow
(tags: ssl tls nginx performance web diffie-hellman ciphers)stud : 'a network proxy that terminates TLS/SSL connections and forwards the unencrypted traffic to some backend. It's designed to handle 10s of thousands of connections efficiently on multicore machines.'
(tags: stud tls ssl security networking web proxies performance)
an ex-Skype employee dishes the dirt on their buyout and acquisition : some incredible stories -- pretty mind-boggling stuff, I'm amazed people stuck around
(tags: skype startups legal share-options shares economics)PSI License [PDF] : the license under which the open data from various councils around Fingal and Dublin (see www.dublinked.ie) is being published
(tags: licensing open-data dublin fingal open public government county-councils city-council ireland)
Great Hacker News thread on Andy Baio's "Kind Of Screwed" shakedown : full of good commentary on the rather horrific result. here's one: "I wonder how the photographer would feel if the company that manufactured the trumpet played by Miles Davis had claimed that his photograph violated the copyright of their "sculpture" and the tailor Miles got his suit from also protested. Of all art forms, photography has some of the least claim on being an entirely original creation of the artist."
(tags: photography miles-davis jay-maisel andy-baio waxy hn discussion copyright copyfight creativity art)
_Scaling with MongoDB_, Michael Schurter 2011 [PDF] : presentation with some rather terrifying MongoDB war stories
(tags: mongodb performance presentation scaling war-stories)
F.B.I. Seizes Web Servers, Knocking Sites Offline : law enforcement fail. "the agents took entire server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that “one enclosure is = to one server,” [DigitalOne's CEO] said in an e-mail."
(tags: search-and-seizure law-enforcement fbi fail datacenters racks digitalone usa hosting)
Hero orang-utan sparks copyright row - The Irish Times - Thu, Jun 16, 2011 : "They did not have the right to sell it and have infringed his copyright. It is as simple as that." Scummy -- some company called "News Team International" taking YouTube content and passing it off as their own
(tags: youtube copyright scummy news-team-international video)
Hacker News | Ooops. : brilliant thread of epic "OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE" stories
(tags: fail ouch oops via:hn via:waxy computers software rm-rf)64yourself : Damn. my 2006 hack http://taint.org/c64ize/ reinvented, although with a lot more panache :(
(tags: c64 images retro commodore-64 commodore)_Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming_ : Gunnar Kreitz' paper on its innards! 'Spotify is a music streaming service offering lowlatency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks. Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol. In this paper, we give an overview of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide measurements of service performance and user behavior. The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and has been available in six European countries since October 2008. Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming with good results. In particular, 8.8% of music data played comes from Spotify’s servers while the median playback latency is only 265 ms (including cached tracks). We also discuss the user access patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the access patterns as they reach the server.'
(tags: spotify via:waxy streaming p2p music architecture papers networking)
Asciiflow : 'ASCII Flow Diagram Tool'. great web-based ASCII-art drawing app; create diagrams in your browser
(tags: ascii art ascii-art diagrams drawing html)Python Idioms and Efficiency Suggestions : will have to run this by our resident Pythonistas in work as a good set of guidelines
(tags: idioms programming python reference tips via:hn)Scala: The Static Language that Feels Dynamic : a good intro from Bruce Eckel. We need a good excuse to deploy some Scala ;)
(tags: scala actors java language programming jvm coding)
Redditor explains why Apple power cables break frequently : "As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple's products. And when I say "the most powerful", I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed."
(tags: apple cables design industrial-design power-cables funny)France To Launch a National Patent Troll : 'The operation, called "France Brevets" will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of [...] shaking down companies for money.' I think the word is: incroyable
(tags: france fail omgwtfbbq patent-trolls swpats patents government innovation software europe)The first Irish case on defamation via autocomplete : Google Instant has picked up people searching for 'Ballymascanlon hotel receivership' and is now offering this as an autocomplete option -- cue defamation lawsuit. Defamation via machine learning
(tags: machine-learning defamation google google-instant search ballymascanlon hotels autocomplete law-enforcement)
Data Protection Commissioner investigating Eircom's "three strikes" system : Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn't been updated for DST. 'this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management - i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime - for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.' As TJ explains, this could have very serious results
(tags: dpc ireland eircom fail time dst daylight-savings three-strikes filesharing piracy)
Hipster Ipsum : 'Adipisicing do Tumblr fugiat vinyl Pitchfork. Organic tempor laboris, esse Tumblr irure eu nostrud. Dolor Cosby sweater mustache qui consequat incididunt. McSweeney's ullamco occaecat Wes Anderson. Minim aute lomo, duis ea proident enim Carles. Eiusmod culpa photo booth ex. Pariatur incididunt minim qui, dolor Pitchfork wayfarers mollit vinyl fixie.' (via boogah)
(tags: via:boogah hipster lorem-ipsum filler text markov-chains funny humour)Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app : 'Wi-Fi Sync' was rejected from the App Store last May -- and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! 'Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers' kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”'
(tags: apple walled-garden protectionism iphone wifi syncing apps ip rip-offs)Why Ryanair The Cookie Monster is just an urban myth : “If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
(tags: ryanair pricing airlines travel web shopping urban-myths)
Piracy: are we being conned? : The Age with a cynical take on pro-music-biz anti-piracy "reports". "The quality of data and analysis is very weak as its political objective is so clear. It does not use actual ABS data but data taken from Europe. It's an elemental statistical error, it's fudging with numbers to come out with a figure which is 'kinda sorta' plausible."
(tags: piracy filesharing copyright australia the-age newspapers ifpi acta)Our 256,000 (and counting) atheists, agnostics, humanists and non-religious - The Irish Times : "The ‘non-religious’ are the largest group in the State after Catholics, according to the [2006] census." Doubtless higher in this year's, too...
(tags: humanism atheism religion census ireland)Dr. Neal Krawetz explains perceptual hashing : ie. TinEye and other "images like this one" search engines. nice explanation
(tags: algorithm images analysis programming dct hashing perceptual-hash tineye via:hn image)
Telehack: May the command line live forever : 'Connected to TELEHACK port 13 / It is 8:16 am on Saturday, April 30, 2011 in Mountain View, California, USA. There are 10 local users. There are 24139 hosts on the network.' via Waxy
(tags: via:waxy simulation history telnet arpanet networking unix bbs)
irishindoleaks : 'leaking the indo's offline wikileaks coverage online where it belongs' - scans of each article
(tags: irish-independent ireland politics wikileaks newspapers scans)
_Tim Robinson: Connemara_ : a new documentary, based on the work of Tim Robinson, the great Connemara map-maker. showing this Sunday at 1pm at the IFI in Dublin
(tags: ifi films ireland connemara tim-robinson mapping nature)bump2babe - The Consumer Guide to Maternity Services in Ireland : wow, they've done a really good job on the statistics collation here
(tags: statistics birth childbirth ireland health maternity)GTA4 Google Map : wow, very impressive -- as far as I can tell, it really _is_ using GMaps infrastructure to some degree
(tags: google-maps google maps gta4 grand-theft-auto via:nelson games)
Gunnar Kreitz, _Spotify - Behind The Scenes_ : the innards of Spotify's client, server fleet, and P2P layer, from the dev team themselves. good stuff
(tags: spotify streaming servers networking music mp3 dns p2p)
Kill Screen - Profile: Bennett Foddy : The author of cult web-games QWOP and GIRP is a member of Cut Copy! crazy
(tags: games interview cut-copy music via:infovore web qwop girp)"Treasure Map" - Threadless.com : great tee
(tags: tee-shirts threadless apparel clothing)
Today in nose-leech news -- it's a species! : 'The T. rex leech uses its teeth to saw into the tissues of mammals' orifices, including eyes, urethras, rectums, and vaginas.' OH JESUS
(tags: nose nose-leech leeches nature horror omgwtf via:jwz nightmare parasites)The Secrets of Building Realtime Big Data Systems : great slides, via HN. recommends a canonical Hadoop long-term store and a quick, realtime, separate datastore for "not yet processed by Hadoop" data
(tags: hadoop big-data data scalability datamining realtime slides presentations)
Javascript PC Emulator : truly incredible -- quite fast (about 386 speeds) under Chrome, even! from the HN comments: 'I just forkbombed my browser. Nothing is sacred anymore.' more comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349
(tags: browser javascript linux emulation fabrice-bellard hacks amazing cool google-chrome x86)Graham Linehan and Osama Bin Laden : a master-stroke of Twitter-based media hoaxing, very funny. particularly like the assist from @Mike_FTW!
(tags: funny twitter graham-linehan osama-bin-laden news media)The Hargreaves Report : 'The publication of Digital Opportunity follows a six-month independent review of IP and Growth, led by Professor Ian Hargreaves. He was asked to consider how the national and international IP system can best work to promote innovation and growth.' Some fantastic recommendations here. I hope this provides clear direction to similar Irish efforts...
(tags: ip law hargreaves uk patents copyright)Netflix Beats BitTorrent’s Bandwidth : 'For perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.' A great demo of how *good*, legit, for-pay services, can beat out less usable, dodgy, but free ones (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy piracy bandwidth bittorrent internet netflix filesharing)The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog - MongoDB live at Craigslist : '>MongoDB is now live at Craigslist, where it is being used to archive [10TB] of [old posts]'. iiiinteresting
(tags: mongodb nosql craigslist systems)Worldtime Buddy : easy timezone conversion -- bookmarkable URLs, sensible levels of AJAX/JS, nicely done
(tags: timezones time conversion javascript world)How to make WIFI work at tech conferences : a success story from JSConf. great tips, I'm sure some will be practical at smaller scales ;)
(tags: wifi 802.11b 802.11n networking 802.11g conferences jsconf wireless)
TwitPic assert ownership over images posted to it, signs licensing deal with sleb-photos agency : scummy. don't use TwitPic if they are planning to monetize your photos, even if it's currently just for a "small number of celebrities". (via my dad)
(tags: twitpic ip privacy copyright via:dad photography)Cool, but obscure unix tools : these are great - some new ones on me!
(tags: cli linux terminal unix tools command-line)
Charanjit Singh on how he invented acid house ... by mistake : An interview (of sorts)! 'Cast your mind to the acid house scene and your immediate thought probably doesn't involve an ageing Bollywood session musician. Yet the softly spoken Indian man who greets me at the door of his friend's suburban Acton home on a sunny Sunday morning is credited with creating what some have labelled the first ever acid house record.'
(tags: acid-house music via:xxjfg guardian interviews history india bollywood ragas)
Indian Street Graphics - a set on Flickr : a great collection (via Bruce Sterling)
(tags: via:bruces art culture design flickr india)
TextAid - Google Chrome extension : "It's All Text" for Chrome. annoyingly, Chrome blocks forking of processes by extensions, so a daemon process (provided) needs to be running separately, but otherwise it works nicely. Particularly nice is that the daemon is just written in dependency-hell-free perl rather than Node.JS ;)
(tags: text editing chrome extensions add-ons browsers web)Chrome to get HTTPS public key pinning : 'Starting with Chrome 13, we'll have HTTPS pins for most Google properties. This means that certificate chains for, say, https://www.google.com, must include a whitelisted public key. It's a fatal error otherwise.' good anti-MITM protection
(tags: https ssl http web security mitm sniffing chrome)
Online censorship now bordering on the ridiculous in Turkey - Reporters Without Borders : 'access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. ... The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.' Incredible (via Danny)
(tags: via:mala repression internet turkey censorship filtering false-positives)
Yahoo Sells Delicious To YouTube Founders : 'Q: Will AVOS maintain the Delicious service with all of its functionality A: Yes, that’s the plan. There may be a time of adjustment as AVOS re-launches Delicious, but the company’s intention is to add new features and grow the service overall.'
(tags: avos yahoo delicious acquisitions)Linux Profiling tools and techniques : great tips for system-level and app-level profiling on Linux from Padraig
(tags: profiling optimization linux cache valgrind)
SmugMug's Don MacAskill on last week's EBS outage : comme il faut
(tags: EBS outages aws smugmug)LRB · James Meek · In the Sorting Office : 'The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out. Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the internet age private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that’s only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries.' (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf post mail postal-service holland dutch postmen work jobs business politics lrb)Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned : Rightscale CTO on last week's outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too
(tags: ebs ec2 aws cloud availability slas rightscale amazon)Dropbox dedupe feature allows materialization of any file, if you know its hash : 'allows users to exploit Dropbox’s file hashing scheme to copy files into their account without actually having them. Dropship will save the hashes of a file in JSON format. Anyone can then take these hashes and load the original file into their Dropbox account using Dropship.' heh. that sounds very familiar, I seem to recall thinking about this problem on several occasions... ;) Dropbox certainly didn't like it, going by this account
(tags: security filesharing dropbox online-backup online-storage p2p hashes sha dmca)Hacker News comments thread on the Dropbox dedupe bug : some good discussion on workarounds
(tags: dropbox hashes p2p filesharing tech security sha)DuoSecurity : well-packaged, well-designed, two-factor auth for SSH from Dug Song. free for small-scale use, too, it looks like. awesome! I've signed up (via Nelson)
(tags: via:nelson security authentication authorization two-factor-auth openssh ssh dug-song)
Dylan Collins asks: has Ireland peaked as an Internet hub? : based on Twitter's surprise move passing over Dublin for London, and how to fix it: "launch the Internet Visa, an aggressive program that allows all Irish Internet companies to recruit from anywhere in the world. Reduce the red tape (combine all permit and visa documentation), guarantee a turnaround time measured in days (a small number) and avoid all the mistakes the UK has made with its Startup Visa initiative. Bring the talent from everywhere outside the EU to Ireland. Ireland doesn’t scale organically. So it needs to in-source. We need to be honest about our shortcomings and tackle them with something which will make HR Directors smile. Imagine a country with all the existing advantages of Ireland plus the ability to hire anyone in the world you wanted. Who in their right mind wouldn’t establish their European base there?" He's dead right, this is a massive problem for the Irish tech industry right now
(tags: ireland bureaucracy red-tape twitter tech business visas work government dylan-collins)Bug 647959 – Add Honest Achmed's root certificate to Mozilla : 'Honest Achmed is at least more honest than Comodo.' lol
(tags: comodo security security-theatre ssl tls certificates funny trust firefox)
demerphq on "perl's regexps are slow" : His classic response to the Russ Cox DFA-over-NFA regular expressions paper. 'A general purpose regex engine like that required for perl has to be able to do a lot, and has to balance considerations ranging from memory footprint of a compiled object, construction time, flexibility, rich feature-sets, the ability to accomodate huge character sets, and of course most importantly matching performance. And it turns out that while DFA engines have a very good worst case match time, they dont actually have too many other redeeming features. Construction can be extremely slow, the memory footprint vast, all kinds of trickery is involved to do unicode or capturing properly and they aren't suitable for patterns with backreferences.' -- Also interesting to note that he mentions an approach I've used in several SpamAssassin speedup add-ons, too ;)
(tags: performance perl regular-expressions perlmonks demerphq regexps dfa nfa state-machines)
This sounds very cool! Nice one, hackerspace ppl.
Ireland's Hackerspaces and Makerspaces (091 Labs - Galway, Belfast Hackerspace, MilkLabs - Limerick, Nexus Cork and TOG - Dublin) have been asked to build and man a temporary hackerspace during the MindField - International Festival of Ideas (http://www.mindfield.ie/). MindField will take place over the weekend of 29 April - 1 May in Merrion Square.
During MindField our temporary hackerspace will provide a range of events where festival participants can learn about diybio, 3D printing, basic electronics and micro controllers, electronic fashion/crafting and open data. These events are included in the festival schedule (http://mindfield.ie/festival-schedul/).
In parallel with these events we have an opportunity run a Hardware Hacking Challenge. In this challenge we will try to engage a group of willing hacker, makers and festival participants in the challenge to create or construct interesting or innovative projects out of recycled hardware. We are trying to source interesting materials, electronic devices or equipment that can be used to based projects off or as sources of components.
We are particularly interested in devices that contain various types of transducers which can then be hooked up to micro controllers and computers. We're not looking for normal computer equipment or servers we've got lots of that, but more unusual stuff that people have lying around.
If you think you've got something they might like, contact Robert Fitzsimons.
brandnewretro | scans from the past : a mate of mine, scanning Irish cultural artifacts from Ireland in the '70s and '80s. fanzines!
(tags: fanzines irish ireland history 1980s 1970s dundalk culture scans)Pound : 'a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively. Pound is distributed under the GPL'
(tags: https ssl http proxy web pound reverse-proxy)What is Facebook's architecture? - Quora : nicely detailed summary
(tags: quora architecture facebook http web websites)How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? : 'after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.'
(tags: sleep rest brain science neuroscience)
Permanent TSB's tracker-mortgage paydown option isn't such a good deal after all : 'it might be in your interest if you have a tracker mortgage and are unable to get a better rate of interest on the €5,000 that you are being tempted to repay PTSB. You can get up to 4.2% from PTSB deposit accounts, 9.7% from 10-year Irish sovereign bonds, 9% from residential property. Yet PTSB is prepared to give you less than a measly 2% over a five year period on your €5,000 repayment.'
(tags: ptsb permanent-tsb finance money mortgages tracker-mortgage investment)This Bacteria is Violating Copyright | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts : the Joyce estate playing their usual role. 'are we now nearing a point where copyright law can result in the retraction of a life form?' (via John Looney)
(tags: copyright dna bacteria james-joyce joyce-estate frivolous lawsuits copyfight craig-venter)Virgin and NTL filtering fail : 'Virgin and NTL [in the UK] blocked [del.icio.us] for years' due to a false positive -- joshua
(tags: del.icio.us false-positives filtering uk isps virgin ntl fail via:hackernews)
Nelson Minar on map tiles : quite a lot of detail into the prevailing state of the art in how online zoomable maps store their tiles
(tags: mapping maps google-maps nelson reference tiling storage)pyflakes.vim - on-the-fly Python code checking in Vim : Vim gets a good IDE feature. 'highlights common Python errors like misspelling a variable name on the fly. It also warns about unused imports, redefined functions, etc.'
(tags: ide vim python programming via:preddit coding)
Rumor: Google “Disgusted” With Record Labels : 'Once again, Warner is the fly in the ointment, the same company that praises Spotify one day, renews their licenses for the rest of the world and then the next day doesn’t want to license them in the US.'
(tags: google music cloud licensing music-industry record-labels warner-music streaming)
Dublin - Europe’s Next Startup Petri Dish? - NYTimes.com : 'Ireland’s tech scene continues to expand in spite of the woeful state of the rest of the economy with a plethora of accelerator programs, seed funds and events like Founders and the IBM smartcamp global finals happening there in the last year or two. '
(tags: ireland tech software startups)
Digital Rights Ireland » Garda plans to introduce web blocking in Ireland : 'Last year we revealed that the Department of Justice was working on secret plans to introduce internet filtering in Ireland. Now, despite a complete lack of any legislation, public consultation or democratic discussion, these plans have moved to the implementation stage.' wtf, this is just appalling lack of oversight
(tags: gardai blocking filtering ireland politics legislation oversight isps ispai alto censorship eff)Daragh O'Brien on the Gardai's plans to force ISPs to implement IP filtering : 'Internet blocking is ineffective. The current proposal lacks sufficient checks and balances, and may even require ISPs and telcos to break other laws to comply. It will inevitably result in innocents being tarred as offenders. Data Protection principles (such as “Adequate, Relevant, and Not Excessive” are being blatantly ignored to implement an ineffective solution. Far better is to shut down the shop by removing the images at source and invest time, energy, and resources into a more transparent effort to manage this issue.' well said
(tags: internet filtering censorship blocking gardai isps ireland data-protection privacy)
RIM: The inmates have taken over the asylum : some notes from Blackberry's slow circle round the toilet, as it's hammered by iPhones and Androids. also: I can't believe QNX is still alive
(tags: rim mobile blackberry qnx embedded phones)
Improving Linux performance by preserving Buffer Cache State : handy -- a patch to rsync(1) which will not disturb the buffer cache, so that large file transfers and backups will not interfere with what's been cached previously
(tags: performance linux caching buffer-cache rsync io cache patches backups)
ImperialViolet - Revocation doesn't work : OCSP doesn't work -- the browser vendors have failed to implement it safely
(tags: security ssl https tls ocsp revocation crl via:fanf)L. MULLIGAN. GROCER.: Beer of the Week: Metalman Pale Ale : *excellent* Irish pale ale, brewed by ex-co-worker Grainne and her partner Tim, now on sale in my favourite pub. yay!
(tags: mulligans beer ipa pale-ale metalman coworkers)TomatoUSB : 'an alternative Linux-based firmware for powering Broadcom-based ethernet routers. It is a modification of the famous Tomato firmware, with additional built-in support for USB port, wireless-N mode support, support for several newer router models, and various enhancements. Tomato USB supports many Broadcom-based routers from Asus, Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear and other manufacturers.' Looks good -- I've been a Tomato fan for many years -- and jzawodny-approved
(tags: router tomato firmware linux routers wireless wifi)
Detecting Certificate Authority compromises and web browser collusion | The Tor Blog : 'If I had to make a bet, I'd wager that an attacker was able to issue high value [SSL] certificates, probably by compromising [the USERTRUST SSL certificate authority] in some manner, this was discovered sometime before the revocation date, each certificate was revoked, the vendors notified, the patches were written, and binary builds kicked off - end users are probably still updating and thus many people are vulnerable to the failure that is the CRL and OCSP method for revocation.' It seems addons.mozilla.org was one of the bogus certs acquired. Major ouch. Thanks to EFF/Tor et al for investigating this -- SSL cert revocation is a shambles
(tags: security ssl tls certificates ca revocation crypto exploits eff tor comodo usertrust)