Category: Uncategorized

Mongrel2 Says, "Goodbye Python" : Linux distros ship ancient Python interpreters, hence it's impossible to rely on recent language features because they won't be there, making it useless to write code in Python. We have similar problems in perl-land, but it's easy enough to get by without the latest-and-greatest; maybe Python is different in that regard? ... or is it Zed?
(tags: zed-shaw python mongrel distros linux sysadmin packaging)

Bunnie Huang on the simulated 6502 : 'It makes my head spin to think that the CPU from the first real computer I used, the Apple II, is now simulateable at the mask level as a browser plug-in. Nothing to install, and it’s Open-licensed. How far we have come…a little more than a decade ago, completing a project like this would have resulted in a couple PhDs being awarded, or regarded as trade secret by some big EDA vendor. This is just unreal…but very cool!'
(tags: simulation bunnie-huang 6502 cpu chips emulation hardware)

www.Visual6502.org : 'working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip. This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.' Awesome
(tags: 6502 emulation physics simulation mos atari-2600 pet commodore c-64 cpu silicon)

JAM Software - SpamAssassin for Windows : 'adapted for Windows by JAM Software' -- cool! Thanks Daniel
(tags: windows spamassassin anti-spam software win32 jam-software)

MineCraft: Mine The Gap, Day 1 : Rock, Paper, Shotgun review the current lo-fi sandbox indie-game hit
(tags: pixels minecraft gaming fun walkthroughs)

The Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box : this is fantastic -- a (physical) puzzle, which must be brought to a specific location on the planet to be opened
(tags: geocaching cool electronics geolocation gps hardware puzzles arduino)

John Graham-Cumming: The Myth of the Boy Wizard : JGC on the Haystack mess. bad journalism by The Guardian, Newsweek and the Beeb, basically, single-sourcing articles without any corroborating backup from domain experts
(tags: journalism haystack the-grauniad newsweek bbc news cpj jgc)

Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music "free" : open-source classical music: now very well-funded. awesome!
(tags: musopen classical music copyright funding opensource free)

P2P investigations now illegal in Switzerland : 'The country's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can't go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.'
(tags: p2p privacy ip-addresses pii logistep switzerland piracy)

Forking is a Feature - Anil Dash : thought-provoking piece about GitHub-style forking applied to other disciplines; Tumblr, Dribbble, Forrst being cases where it's happening now
(tags: community development forking github git opensource tumblr dribbble forrst wikipedia)

Ubuntu's cron package silently ignores files : Ubuntu have hack-patched Vixie Cron to silently ignore cron files which contain a ".". omgwtf
(tags: omgwtfbbq broken ubuntu patching quality bugs software stupid packaging)

Game On : exhibition billing itself as "the world's biggest celebration of games", arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. 'Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.' tix are EUR10
(tags: games gaming exhibitions dublin)

Your Country, Your Call, You’re Doomed : Bock on the predictably-crap biz-waffle results from the YCYC "get Ireland back on track" competition. 'If we don’t take this seriously, we’re doomed to repeat the current economic disaster over and over again, each generation with its own Bertie Ahern, its own Seanie Fitzpatrick, its own Fingers Fingleton, and all the other assorted, integrity-free panhandlers and parasites who have soiled the reputation of this country and sold us down the Swanee for their own, ignorant, self-serving enrichment. Forget about Eamon Ryan’s smart economy. Let’s put all our effort into creating the Honest Economy.'
(tags: ycyc waffle business ireland vision-lock integrity bock-the-robber economy)

Hit The Road: Public Transport Directions for Dublin : 'a public-transport route-planning service for Dublin city, which shows you how to get from A to B using buses, Luas or DART services. The original version was built during the first Startup Weekend Dublin in May 2010.' Pretty good; although in my tests it wasn't able to find the optimal route, it always came up with something that made a good starting point
(tags: routes dublin public-transport buses hit-the-road)

o2 Broadband Dongle Working on Ubuntu 10.04 : the Huawei E1752 dongle does that horrible thing where it defaults to acting as a USB storage device containing the Windows drivers, instead of acting as a 3G modem by default. usb_modeswitch should be in the Ubuntu base install to deal with this crap
(tags: usb broadband o2 hauwei e1752 ubuntu dongle)

Twitter's misuse of OAuth : Twitter seem to be attempting to control misbehaving clients, by using the "consumer key" pair as a secret key for app developers. This is proving impossible for FOSS clients to work with, and is trivially hacked to allow third-party app impersonation. Bad idea, Twitter
(tags: twitter fail oauth standards open-source gwibber security)

Boxee Blog » How Boxee Sees the Apple TV : go Boxee! open TV is the way to go
(tags: boxee apple tv set-top)

"if slalom" : a great name for a common "code smell" of too much indentation, calling for merciless usage of Extract Method (via Aman)
(tags: via:akohli code-smells refactoring if-slalom programming funny if-else indentation)

/~colmmacc/ » Prime and Proper : algorithm to perform set membership tests on enumerated sets quickly and memory-efficiently, using multiplication by primes. Nice trick
(tags: hacks colmmacc prime-numbers set-membership bloom-filters bignums algorithms programming)

_Fast Cache for Your Text: Accelerating Exact Pattern Matching with Feed-Forward Bloom Filters_ [PDF] : intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick -- or possibly re2c, as used in "sa-compile". On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn't perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
(tags: bloom-filters grep filtering spamassassin sa-compile text-matching caches aho-corasick)

SuperTweet.Net : free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
(tags: via:pixelbeat api oauth proxy twitter web http curl supertweet)

Eirgrid System Demand : 'The system demand displayed here represents the electricity production required to meet [Irish] national electricity consumption, including system losses, but net of generators' requirements. It includes power imported via the interconnector and an estimate of the power produced by wind generators, but excludes some non-centrally monitored generation (i.e. small scale CHP).' via Juan Flynn
(tags: via:juanflynn eirgrid national-grid ireland power charts statistics)

Dave Grady on "the conference call" : painfully accurate sketch about the crappy conference call UI. "hi, who just joined?"
(tags: hi-who-just-joined conference-calls phone funny ui dave-grady comedy sketches)

Life without a CA | The Tor Blog : do you trust the default set of root CAs in modern web browsers? sounds like we probably shouldn't
(tags: ca certificates https encryption firefox ssl trust privacy web root-cas)

Topfloor - Free Residential Lease/Letting Agreement Download : GFDL-licensed legal boilerplate agreement for the Irish market. Nice one -- although did I see a commercial company charging for what appears to be a derivative work of this document? is that a breach of the license terms?
(tags: gfdl gnu topfloor letting leases legal documents ireland)

tcpcrypt : opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though
(tags: cryptography encryption tcp security internet tcpcrypt opportunistic)

Inchicore family home ready for take-off : from the Irish Times property section: 'There’s a guy in Inchicore with an aircraft simulator in his shed. Not one of those fancy computer games, this is the real thing – a decommissioned 747 simulator, cockpit and all.' Unfortunately, the sim doesn't come with the house
(tags: houses flight-simulators gaming inchicore dublin irish-times property)

Fried Androids? :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It : scary stuff. East Texas patent-troll court has ruled that EchoStar must remotely disable customers' DVRs due to patent infringement, which they are (thankfully) refusing to do and are now held in contempt for $200M -- the blog suggests this could happen due to the Google-Oracle suit, to Android phones
(tags: google via:tieguy law east-texas dvr remote-disabling internet oracle swpats)

Introduction to parallel & distributed algorithms : really interesting parallel algorithm concepts. I'd seen parallel merge sort before from the map-reduce world, but some others are new to me and worth thinking about (via Hacker News)
(tags: via:hackernews algorithms distributed parallel map-reduce merge-sort sorting)

image soak : an "endless page" of images culled from newsfeeds. Very good for video games and art, particularly. definitely a new addition to my daily list (via Andre)
(tags: via:torrez news images feed sources art)

Mario Kart graffiti in Portland bike lanes : very funny. 'Wait, does this mean that those cyclists that wiped out a few blocks back are going to catch up to me right before I get to my destination, even though I didn't crash once?' (commenter on Kotaku)
(tags: cycling portland videogames gaming mario-kart graffiti)

U2 Manager Blames 'Free' And Anonymous Internet Bloggers For Industry Troubles | Techdirt : great Mike Masnick post responding to the latest woe-is-me missive from U2's asshat-in-residence Paul McGuinness (via Jim Carroll)
(tags: via:jimcarroll u2 mp3blogs paul-mcguinness mike-masnick techdirt music mp3 downloading filesharing piracy blogging)

RTÉ News: CAO website blocked by malicious attack : is the CAO (Ireland's Central Applications Office, for university admissions) being DDOS'd? sounds like it
(tags: cao ddos security ireland)

jwz - What different sorting algorithms sound like : in the style of BBC Radiophonics Workshop, with copious flange -- my favourite is heap sort. this is brilliant (via jwz)
(tags: via:jwz sound music sorting algorithms)

Books of Adam : stories drawn by a guy I vaguely know online. really funny!
(tags: blog comic funny fp)

100 ways to spend the Anglo €25,000,000,000 : 'just how much is €25 billion that [Ireland's taxpayers] have to borrow for [failed bank] Anglo?' some great answers, including: start our own space program with 20 space shuttles; build 6 LHCs or 2 ITER fusion reactors; scrap fares on all public transport for 33 years; buy 2 of Asia's largest banks; buy Steve Jobs himself; detach the People's Republic of Cork by building a ten-metre-wide moat; buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie
(tags: money omgwtfbbq insane argh funny nama anglo sean-fitzpatrick ireland)

[osol-discuss] OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express : 'Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC and x64. We have more than twice the application base of AIX and HP-UX combined.' Well, that about sums it up. Enterprisey!
(tags: enterprisey open-source closed-source oracle solaris opensolaris hp-ux history)

Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents : 'Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.' no shit, Sherlock
(tags: ip patents techcrunch startups swpats via:brian-caulfield software)

Spam King Leo Kuvayev Jailed on Child Sex Charges — Krebs on Security : 'A man known as one of the world’s top purveyors of junk e-mail has been imprisoned in Russia for allegedly molesting [more than *50*] underage girls from a Moscow orphanage, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.' lovely
(tags: spam russia jail crime moscow leo-kuvayev)

La Brea Starter And Rustic Bread Recipe : another variation of the Nancy Silverton recipe, and a loaf recipe to go with it
(tags: recipes food bread baking sourdough la-brea-bakery)

Nancy Silverton's La Brea Bakery sourdough starter recipe : lots of recommendations, but looks like hard work; grown from natural grape yeast
(tags: sourdough starter la-brea-bakery baking food recipes)

On The Record » Guest post – 500 Words of Summer – Mumblin’ Deaf Ro : Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats
(tags: mumblin-deaf-ro statistics music irma music-industry piracy filesharing)

Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza : wow, fantastic review -- real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA's latest videogame
(tags: crime games japan videogames yakuza sega)

Man Lives In Futuristic Sci-Fi World Where All His Interactions Take Place In Cyberspace | The Onion : 'In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.' brilliant pisstake of mid-'90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)
(tags: the-onion funny future futurism humour internet sf via:walter journalism cyberpunk 1990s cyberspace)

Irish Hackerspaces Week : hackerspaces in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast, running events all next week (08-14 - 08-22)
(tags: hackerspace hacking ireland conferences events)

John Graham-Cumming: Shut up and ship : on "Haystack", a vaporous censorship-evading product aimed at Iran's internet surveillance, which as of yet is a site soliciting donations and a lot of press, and not a lot of techie details
(tags: haystack privacy censorship filtering surveillance jgc crypto open-source)

Cache on Delivery : Mind-boggling presentation; a load of sites are exposing memcacheds to the public internet, with no auth, and full of juicy data (samples included). iptables is hard
(tags: memcached security hacks exploits)

Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images : surprise! 'The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.'
(tags: airport dhs fail privacy security surveillance tsa big-brother x-ray)

Zed Shaw debunking some poll/epoll myths : "benchmarks disprove common wisdom" shocker
(tags: epoll io linux networking performance scalability mongrel2 zedshaw poll)

Why Jailbreak? - The Unofficial Apple Weblog : some good Cydia app tips. also glad to see piracy didn't appear 'til page 3
(tags: cydia jailbreak iphone apps)

Kaprekar's constant : '6174 .. is notable for the following property: Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits. (Leading zeros are allowed.); Arrange the digits in ascending and then in descending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary; Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number; Go back to step 2. The process will reach 6174 in at most 7 iterations'
(tags: 6174 constants cool maths mathematics numbers kaprekar wow)

Keyboard shortcuts for positioning windows in Mac OS X : from Tony Finch. great stuff, I used to use shortcuts like this all the time on my Linux desktops to avoid rodentage
(tags: mouse keyboard navigation windows shortcuts scripting ui automator)

Draft Functional Spec of Hadopi "securisation" software : Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking "workarounds" (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?
(tags: hadopi piracy filtering snooping big-brother 1984 via:adulau vpn tor blocklists)

XOR patent killed Commodore-Amiga : 'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'
(tags: cd32 commodore computers history ip patents software swpats xor amiga)

Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O [PDF] : classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
(tags: java async io jvm linux performance scalability threading threads server nio paul-tyma mailinator)

autojump : interesting idea; extend "cd" to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to "jump" to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
(tags: autojump cli bash command-line navigation terminal shell directory cd)

Mac OS X command-line tricks : not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I'm stuck using the missus' laptop ;)
(tags: apple bash cli osx mac sysadmin shell tricks command-line)

Schneier on Security: Internet Worm Targets SCADA : 'Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.'
(tags: wow malware worms passwords security schneier policies defaults)

Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution : from last week's CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
(tags: spam anti-spam ceas conference papers research spamassassin adversarial-classification evolution arms-race via:jd)

JotNot for iPhone : another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
(tags: apps document evernote iphone jotnot scanner scan photos dropbox google-docs)

DocScanner : document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it'll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
(tags: android apps evernote iphone mobile ocr pdf document scanner scan)

What are the lesser known but cool data structures ? - Stack Overflow : some gems here
(tags: data-structures algorithms cs data geek programming)

Computer History Museum: MacPaint and QuickDraw source code : wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
(tags: via:jgc apple code history mac source bill-atkinson macpaint pascal quickdraw graphics)

Technology to track trad : TunePal -- "Shazam for trad". play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it'll link to the tune's name, history, discography, and where it's been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
(tags: trad irish via:klillington music recognition machine-learning)

Brick, A Literary Journal: Issue 85: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock : 'The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society': among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
(tags: france paris underground toread ux catacombs marquis writing)

NeoRouter : establish an overlay, encrypted private "virtual LAN" for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
(tags: firewall hamachi network openwrt remote router security vpn desktop-sharing neorouter tomato)

How do I do silicone sealant neatly? : so that's how it's done. now to retry my DIY botch job
(tags: silicone sealant diy home howto)

GNU coreutils sort(1) now uses all available CPUs : using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
(tags: via:pixelbeat sort coreutils gnu multicore parallelism)

REPLs suck, I want something block oriented : good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn't a usable approach for block-oriented languages
(tags: languages repl programming ruby hacking coding block-oriented)

Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail : first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws -- for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
(tags: dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet)

xboxdrv : 'a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.'
(tags: drivers xbox360 controllers remote linux ubuntu xboxdrv joystick input)

moreutils : 'a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.' these are really, really nifty (via popey)
(tags: via:popey unix cli command-line linux moreutils sponge pee ts vipe zrun perl for:pixelbeat)

Ubuntu One Time Passwords/Single Use Passwords HOWTO : I should do this on my hosts
(tags: ssh server security opie otp skey one-time-passwords ubuntu linux sshd)

FlexGet : torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
(tags: bittorrent automation boxee linux python rss torrents tv flexget)

Interpolation search : neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
(tags: algorithms programming search via:jzawodny)

Overclocking SSL : techie details from Adam Langley on how Google's been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
(tags: certificates encryption google https latency speed ssl tcp tls web performance)

Cory Doctorow's working environment : hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
(tags: cory-doctorow geek howto lifehacks ubuntu productivity tips tools)

O2.ie blocking popular image-hosting sites imgur.com, imageshack.com : apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
(tags: iwf fail blocking filtering o2 ireland imgur imageshack censorship fps)

Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right : 'every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.'
(tags: broadband finland legal rights law human-rights three-strikes)

new gastropub opening in Stoneybatter : there goes the neighbourhood! 'L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.' Sign me up
(tags: gastropubs stoneybattery dublin d7 food drink)

Date::Manip Error in Ubuntu 10.04 : "XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly" -- caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
(tags: date-manip xmltv breakage mythtv ubuntu lucid 10.04)

Misco.ie : another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
(tags: shopping components hardware ireland)

Signature-based AV is failing : on average across the AV industry, 40% block rates just after 0-hour of a new malware sample, rising to 60% after 5 days. sounds like the AV industry is losing, if this chart is valid. (via Terry Zink)
(tags: via:tzink malware av fail accuracy detection false-negatives scanners viruses)

Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs [PDF] : sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
(tags: sort merge hash join databases performance cpu simd multicore)

Network Advertising Initiative: Opt-Out of Behavioural Advertising : 'developed for the express purpose of allowing consumers to "opt out" of the behavioral advertising delivered by our member companies' -- opt out of the top 50 or so ad programs with a couple of clicks, via Jordan Sissel. great stuff
(tags: ads advertising browser cookies via:jordansissel google marketing opt-out privacy tracking web behavioral)

Monitor anything and get free notifications on your iPhone - amix.dk : using notifo.com, which has an app in the App Store allowing anyone to send push notifications via their web site. I can see lots of uses for this, not least to evade SMS fees ;)
(tags: notification push sms iphone notifo)

Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market "flash crash?" : wonderful; our world's economies are now more networked than ever, and vulnerable to the attacks which that enables. Have we learned nothing from the last few years?
(tags: networking internet ddos stock-markets security)

John Graham-Cumming: What's wrong with Flash Cookies? : Macromedia created a "parallel" cookie infrastructure, which is not cleared/controlled by browser cookie controls. Heinous! I had no idea. Checking mine, it was full of ad-tracking crap
(tags: cookies flash privacy crapware ads)

All slides/notes from the first 2 days of Velocity 2010 : PDFs, docs, links
(tags: slides scalability velocity conferences scaling pdf)

Introduction to Unity Launcher « Canonical Design : The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too
(tags: canonical ui unity linux gnome desktop design)

The Deus Ex 3 demonstration, blow-by-blow : PC Gamer : big thumbs-up for 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution'. I'm looking forward to it
(tags: deus-x games xbox previews)

We’re Back… so long MongoDB! · Blue74 : MongoDB war story -- records going missing, eek
(tags: mongodb mysql nosql rant stability beta)

Hadoop and the fight against shape-shifting spam : Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale
(tags: hadoop yahoo anti-spam filtering)

Petit: Log Analysis : log analyzer; removes common strings and patterns from log files, identifying outliers and hapaxen as "interesting". also does charting of frequencies etc.
(tags: logs logging analysis loganalysis syslog tools)

self-replicating configuration in Conway's Game Of Life created : The "spaceship" configuration replicates in 33699586 generations, using 2 construction arms and a volley of gliders circulating between them
(tags: via:newscientist game-of-life life cellular-automata gliders self-replicating)

UPC file-sharing court action begins - The Irish Times : it's with Mr Justice Peter Charleton again -- the Colmcille-misquoting judge from the Eircom case. here's hoping the Data Protection Commissioner gets off their arse and does their job this time around
(tags: upc ireland law filesharing irma copyright)

SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder : good idea -- generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)
(tags: via:omgubuntu avi mplayer conversion divx encoding howto rip xvid video mencoder)

build a Yagi-Uda wifi booster from styrofoam and copper wire : nifty link from Heise; works for 802.11b and 11g. Unfortunately I think my own wifi issues are to do with dying AP hardware
(tags: wifi 802.11g 802.11b wireless yagi antennas diy hacking hardware)

MapReduce as a way to cope with high-latency memory : interesting thoughts from Kragen
(tags: kragen thoughts random mapreduce memory speed latency)

O2 iPhone Customers - Get out of contract! - boards.ie : wow, O2 Ireland seem to have dropped the ball something rotten here. customers taking advantage of this in droves to escape the heinous 18-month lock-in
(tags: o2 ireland loophole contract law)

Designing an Integrated Map for a Visionary Public Transport System for Dublin : excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)
(tags: via:antoin bus travel dublin ireland rapid-transit public-transport design usability maps mapping)

Chatroulette Working On Genital Recognition Algorithm : just *male* genitalia, mind. I dread to think of what the training corpus looks like
(tags: chatroulette algorithms machine-learning genitalia nsfw slashdot)

Balsamiq Mockups : create wireframe mock-ups quickly, via Confluence/JIRA/desktop/fogbugz plugins (via Joe)
(tags: via:jdrumgoole wireframes mockups ui web usability balsamiq layout prototype)

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1900 Hybrid TV (1179) - dabs.com : Back looking at these again, as Padraig noted the SundTek drivers are closed source; at least pvrusb2 is OSS
(tags: hauppauge drivers hardware linux tv tuners os)

SEO Is Mostly Quack Science : 'There is no hypothesis being tested here. It's just graphs, and misleading graphs at that. The sad part is, SEOMoz is as close as the SEO industry comes to real science. They may be presenting specious results in hopes of looking like they know what they're talking about, but at least they are collecting some sort of data. Everything else in the field is either anecdotal hocus-pocus or a decree from Matt Cutts. When you hire an SEO consultant, what you are really paying for is domain experience in the not-failing-at-web-design field.'
(tags: seo ted-dziuba rants science seomoz quality correlation statistics google)

gitPAN : CPAN and BackPAN, as a set of git repositories; essentially a read-only view of all CPAN releases, ever. good plan; I like the way git is useful as a kind of general-purpose distributed archive system
(tags: git gitpan cpan backpan perl releases archives history version-control)

SundTek MythTV analog setup : 'Analog TV is working again with MythTV which comes with the final Ubuntu 10.04 release' -- MythTV support is officially tested by SundTek support staff! I think we have a clear winner
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)

Sundtek MediaTV Pro (TV Cards) - Ubuntu Linux Hardware Compatibility List : 'I can recommend that USB device, I never had a device which has such an easy installation under linux.'
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)

SundTek Media TV Pro Linux install docs : official, and pretty voluminous. looks good
(tags: sundtek tv usb hardware linux mythtv)

Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1900 Hybrid Analogue and Digital USB TV Tuner : seems to be a safe option for MythTV analog TV and DVB-T support on this side of the pond
(tags: tv hauppauge linux mythtv ireland tuner)

pvrusb2 Linux drivers for the Hauppauge product line : Jesus Christ Hauppauge. get a clue already, why are you making it so hard for Linux users to buy your bloody hardware?!
(tags: htpc linux pvr mythtv usb hauppauge pvrusb2 drivers hardware)

Today's Guardian : Phil Gyford reworks the Grauniad's website using their open content API. I really like the navigation and just-the-text nature, but I still feel a need to know what other articles are "nearby", which this doesn't quite provide. Still, excellent work
(tags: phil-gyford news newspapers gu guardian design usability reading readability webdesign)

Emoji Symbols in Unicode: PILE OF POO : "unchi" / "unchimaaku", a little Emoji icon of a dog turd. unfortunately still in "proposed" status, not yet a Unicode point, boo
(tags: poo funny emoji unicode unchi shit)

practical Linux commands quick-ref sheet : from Padraig Brady. lots of nice one-liners I wasn't familiar with
(tags: padraig-brady bash cli linux reference sysadmin tips commands)

Point Village Market : a new outdoor weekend market for Dublin, at the O2 on the north quays. good farmer's market selection, and plans to do free-for-all stalls for random members of the public to sell "yard sale" type stuff, a la the Dublin Flea Market
(tags: the-point o2 ireland dublin markets farmers-markets shopping via:sboyle)

Petrodvorets Watch Factory's black list : vendors of fake Raketas -- pretty much all of the current eBay auctions are on this list :(
(tags: fakes raketa watches ebay)

Russian watch RAKETA 24 hour white dial. Polar design. on eBay : 24-hour analog CCCP-era Raketa watches. want. almost definitely fake going by the price, but still very nifty (via adampsyche)
(tags: russia raketa watches analog want 24-hour via:adampsyche)

Amazon.com: Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player : $99, 10-watt, fanless device to stream HD1080p video, in pretty much any format, from a network server to your TV. crazy. quite competitive with the Acer Aspire Revo; downside: less open
(tags: tv wd wd-tv-live hdtv hd video set-top-box home)

WebM : open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I'd guess
(tags: codec foss google open-source patents audio video vp8 webm standards mozilla open web)

How Etsy deploy their site : pretty basic
(tags: etsy infrastructure ops sysadmin continuousintegration deployinator deployment)

GitHub scheduled maintainance due to Redis upgrade : good comments on the processes useful for large-scale Redis upgrades
(tags: upgrades redis spof nosql databases github deployment)

Mea Culpa : 'Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.' Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt
(tags: via:janl coding programming software philosophy languages lisp elitism)

Ca'n Quiros, Soller, Spain : many atrocious TripAdvisor reviews of this kip which ripped us off heavily last week. looking forward to adding my $.02. roll on data roaming limits so I can check TA via 3G before we sit down ;)
(tags: restaurants food soller spain rip-offs scams dodgy tripadvisor)

iPhone 3GS GPS suddenly stops working? here's the fix : via a forum on MacRumors -- blow away the locationd cache. Worked perfectly for me after my GPS crapped out halfway through my holidays :( Requires that the phone be jailbroken first
(tags: iphone gps software 3gs reliability bugs macrumors jailbreaking locationd)

SoundCloud Developers Manifesto : 'We recognize that only through your apps and hacks, can SoundCloud fully realize its potential as the audio platform.'
(tags: apps hacks soundcloud mp3 music hosting files json rest oauth apis http)

Good volcanic-ash links : European air traffic control Twitter feed and NOC site, via Boards.ie. The thread itself is a good reference, too
(tags: volcano ash vaac twitter boards.ie threads travel air holidays)

2-day volcanic ash forecasts over Europe : using SNAP, the Norwegian Meterological Institute's nuclear-fallout modelling system. Very useful, much niftier than the UK version, and much more *publicly available* than the Irish version
(tags: europe volcano norway yr.no met.no weather ash snap modelling forecasts)

The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City « Viceland Games : interview with the guy behind the "Magnasanti" video. [Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi] 'presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar - depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society - with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.' WHOA
(tags: whoa mental architecture culture gaming society video simcity urban vice)

New programming jargon you coined? - Stack Overflow : some nice coding neologisms here. aside from "Refuctoring" (see other link), I like "The Duck" (a sacrificial feature, used to distract cut-crazy bosses from useful features) and "Stringly Typed" (an implementation that needlessly relies on strings when programmer and refactor friendly options are available)
(tags: coding funny slang neologisms jargon stack-overflow the-duck stringly-typed)

Refuctoring : 'the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself' (via Mozai)
(tags: funny refuctoring via:Mozai coding tests tdd programming software)

UK Met Office: Volcanic Ash Cloud Maps : updated 4 times daily, maps of Europe indicating coverage of the ash cloud. I'm going to be F5'ing this constantly over the next week as I'm supposed to be flying on Sunday :(
(tags: airports hazards iceland travel maps weather volcanic-ash ash forecast europe met-office holidays ash-cloud)

The result of the IMRO & music blogger meeting | Nialler9 Music Blog : upshot: IMRO will think about it and get back to Nialler et al; in the meantime, everyone operates as before. one to keep an eye on, even if you're not Irish; this will play out overseas soon too. Good call getting Simon McGarr along
(tags: music mp3 shakedown imro nialler9 ip)

EU must break down national copyright barriers, says EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes : "There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material. The problem is that it's illegal [...] We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed." "While the internet is borderless, Europe’s online markets are not. It is often easier to buy something from a US website than online from the country next-door in Europe. Often you cannot buy it at all within Europe."
(tags: copyright piracy neelie-kroes quotes eu ec music ip)

Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites : 'Falling victim to a [phish] isn’t just a matter of not being wise to the ways of the world: it’s a matter of being caught out in a moment of distraction and of unlikely circumstance.' +1, that matches with the personal phishing stories I've heard from others
(tags: phishing cory-doctorow security anti-phishing scams distraction twitter)

Dutch forum thread on splitting analog signals from a UPC Thomson DCI-6221 DVR : I'm trying to figure out how I can rebuild a MythTV box with new UPC equipment. this claims that you can split the cable before it enters the Cisco cablemodem, and get analog TV off the basic cable that way. hmm
(tags: analog tv upc mythtv dci6221 mediabox cable-tv)

the world’s largest DVR : SnapStream's 100TB rack which records 50 analog TV channels simultaneously
(tags: snapstream video tv storage hardware analog television)

Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks — PNAS : 'we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (E. coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. ... both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. ... These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.' (via adulau)
(tags: via:adulau papers toread genetics genome call-graph linux kernel e-coli operating-systems transcriptional-regulatory-network)

A fast, fuzzy, full-text index using Redis : quite easy, using a Metaphone sound-like indexing scheme to provide the fuzz
(tags: metaphone sounds-like indexing python redis search full-text fuzzy)

Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit : yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less
(tags: ip law legal novell linux open-source patents redhat swpats uspto acacia-technologies)

article on the IMRO-vs-blogs LOEL spat : by an ex-Hot-Press staffer. interesting: Hot Press 'also publish MQ, the IMRO members’ periodical.' well, that would explain a lot
(tags: hot-press ireland music mp3 loel imro shakedown)

Indie music mogul: The net's great for us : Martin Mills of Beggar's Banquet. thought-provoking interview, and he nails it on this: "People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You've got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You'll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links." That EXACTLY described my situation a few years back
(tags: martin-mills beggars-banquet music record-labels xl mp3 filesharing)

Facebook | Save Irish Music Blogs From IMRO! : join this group to add your voice
(tags: facebook imro shakedown blogs ireland music mp3)

the torture garden: On Hot Press and My Place In The Real Economy : it seems Hot Press have come up with some Paul-McGuinness-esque pro-IMRO one-sided turdery masquerading as journalism. shock me
(tags: imro shakedown hot-press tat journalism ireland dublin)

Two bands pull out of IMRO show in blog protest : fair play to The Cast Of Cheers and Mia Sparrow, cancelling their show in response to IMRO's actions
(tags: imro shakedown bands music ireland the-cast-of-cheers the-richter-collective)

Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA : incredible. Almost every single modern camera capable of recording video now requires that you obtain a license from MPEG-LA to use recorded footage for commercial purposes. These clauses are currently not enforced, but could be. Horrifying (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf patents mpeg2 codec compression consumer-rights copyright legal law mpeg h264 mpegla codecs)

Make your own sourdough | Life and style | The Guardian : more recipes. This one looks like a good guide to creating a starter culture, something I've been meaning to do for a while
(tags: sourdough bread recipes food guardian)

Thomasina Miers' simple Mexican recipes | Life and style | The Observer : some pretty good "ports" of Mexican recipes to ingredients available over here, must try these
(tags: mexican food guardian recipes tortas tlayudas ceviche tacos burritos)

Stephen Walter's The Island : truly amazing artwork, as featured in the BBC4 documentary 'Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art' last week. 'The Island satirises the London-centric view of the English capital and its commuter towns as independent from the rest of the country. The artist, a Londoner with a love of his native city, offers up a huge range of local and personal information in words and symbols. Walter speaks in the dialect of today, focusing on what he deems interesting or mundane.'
(tags: maps stephen-walter cool detail the-island london)

ScamNailer - Anti-Phishing Filter : a generated set of SpamAssassin rules containing known-phisher addresses
(tags: scams phishing spear-phishing spamassassin rules anti-phishing)

Endangered sites in Britain and Ireland to see before they die : including Roundstone Bog, burned to a crisp last week :(
(tags: roundstone bogs ireland connemara tourism endangered)

Irish music blogs under attack over royalties | Music | guardian.co.uk : 'If IMRO goes ahead with its plan, targeting music blogs around the world, there will soon be legions of frustrated bloggers. And it will be much worse if other regional publishers follow suit.'
(tags: imro ireland guardian news blogs music mp3 shakedown)

Vending Spree : 'I am going to consume and review every item in my office vending machine and there is nothing you can do to stop me.'
(tags: vending-machines funny blogs food daily)

Why We’re Siding With The Bloggers and Why IMRO’s LOEL Blog License Won’t Work : good post from online music marketing site Amp.ie
(tags: music mp3 blogging blogs ireland imro shakedown loel)

On The Record » “This music blogger IMRO licence thing” : Jim Carroll's blog post on the IMRO mp3blog shakedown. Comment thread has some good stuff from Irish music heads
(tags: imro mp3 blogs music ireland jim-carroll shakedown)

IMRO propose massive increase in indie cinema fees : what are they up to? '1 per cent levy on the gross box-office takings of every cinema in the country ... Smaller cinema operators who attended a meeting ... said the proposal amounted in some cases to a five to sevenfold increase on their existing royalties payments.'
(tags: imro wtf cinema movies ireland shakedown)

Nialler9's getting the IMRO shakedown : Irish music blogs apparently need to pay a minimum of EUR150/year to the collection agency for "making copyrighted music available online" -- and they intend to ask _all_ sites who offer music, Irish or not, to pay this fee (!)
(tags: imro shakedown nialler9 ireland music mp3 blogs blogging)

Mix Tape Amnesty : ha! 'The amnesty was created in an effort to finally rid the country of illegally taped music. Although technology has evolved, the law on this issue has remained unchanged and these mix-tapes still constitute a threat to artist royalties.' Remember: home taping is killing music
(tags: mixtapes funny history ireland virals music mp3 filesharing)

"Child pornography is great", according to one EU music-business lobbyist : it's the perfect 'gateway' to allow anti-filesharing filtering of the internet. 'Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.' Via TJ McIntyre
(tags: via:tjmcintyre ifpi filesharing child-porn filtering internet johan-schluter anti-piracy-group sweden denmark eu)

How to setup your Wii to act as a media server : SMB setup details
(tags: smb files wii video mplayer networking)

MPlayer CE - WiiBrew : 'a homebrew media player for the Nintendo Wii. It was initially created as a fork of Team Twiizers' port of MPlayer, combining elements of MPlayerWii, GeeXboX and other great homebrew contributions.' recommended by conoro
(tags: via:conoro mplayer video wii homebrew movies)

Evernote export script : this promises to make Evernote a good deal more usable for me, if it works
(tags: evernote export data silos documents storage)

Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned [PDF] : good set of slides from Dropbox. traditional marketing and AdWords failed utterly; word-of-mouth (and a great product) was how they've succeeded
(tags: business dropbox lessons marketing pr presentation startup viral)

spamtune.pl : 'a Perl script that generates an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet which loads up SpamAssassin configuration and known spam and ham messages. Once loaded, you can tweak individual SpamAssassin scores in the spreadsheet itself and see their effect on spam/ham classification in real-time. The script also shows you the number of false positives and negatives for a set of scores in real-time.' by Raj Mathur
(tags: spamtune spamassassin rules scores optimization tweaking openoffice)

GameStation now legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to unnoticed T&C tweak : "By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non- transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamestation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."
(tags: funny eula terms-and-conditions legal clickwrap via:risks gamestation shopping)

Nick Clegg - Conservapedia : Conservapedia gold. "His father was half-English, half-Russian. His mother was dutch. He speaks English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish. His wife is Roman Catholic. Aged sixteen, Clegg was arrested in Germany and charged with arson. He and his friends destroyed a priceless collection of rare cacti while he was drunk."
(tags: nick-clegg funny conservapedia wingnuts right-wing teabaggers lib-dems uk politics)

Rhizome | Soviet Sci-Fi Animation in the 1980's : Soviet animators' cartoons based on classic sci-fi
(tags: movie scifi video russia via:boingboing)

NoSQL at Twitter (NoSQL EU 2010) [PDF] : specifically, Hadoop and Pig for log/metrics analytics, Cassandra going forward; great preso, lots of detail and code examples. also, impressive number-crunching going on at Twitter
(tags: twitter analytics cassandra databases hadoop pdf logs metrics number-crunching nosql pig presentation slides scribe)

RFID "zapper" constructed from disposable camera : also, an RFID "jammer" to block reads of RFID chips within range. related: the Israeli govt is considering voting cards with RFID chips, apparently
(tags: rfid via:risks security hardware rf radio jamming israel)

computing a rank by combining user rankings with a Dirichlet distribution : interesting
(tags: ranking algorithms recommendations datamining dirichlet scoring rank)

Kohsuke "Hudson" Kawaguchi leaving Sun : and starting a new company around Hudson
(tags: hudson ci sun oracle acquisitions startups build)

GetitKeepit.com : free e-bill aggregation/archival service from an Irish company, for Irish users (right now at least). looks very useful
(tags: bills aggregator ireland webapps via:jdrumgoole archiving)

Major labels go bragh? Irish judge allows 3 strikes : 'The justice refers to legal alternatives to illicit downloading, such as "an I-player system," when he's writing about the BBC's well-known iPlayer catch-up service [which is not available here]. He refers numerous times in the order to "DetectNet," a company which can find P2P infringers, when he really means DtecNet. A strong grasp of the technical details won't be found in this ruling'
(tags: ars-technica ireland dtecnet legal law three-strikes eircom filesharing)

Lonely Planet offers free iPhone guides to stranded travelers : free (excellent) city guide apps for Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Istanbul, London, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna until April 22nd; normally $10-$15!
(tags: lonely-planet free iphone apps travel europe cities)

A Clatter of the Law: 'Graduated Response' now de facto law in Ireland : excellent post on the 'three strikes' judgement
(tags: law ireland eircom mp3 filesharing copyright)

Digital Rights Ireland blog post on the secret internet-filtering plans : 'it becomes clear that for some time now the Department of Justice has been proposing the introduction of internet blocking in Ireland – and has been doing this under the radar, without any public consultation or legislative approval. Indeed, it is clear from the list that the Department is not planning on introducing legislation but instead intends to introduce this new form of censorship without any legal basis, based on the now discredited Norwegian and Danish models.' This is very bad news indeed
(tags: ireland censorship filtering internet great-firewall dri politics freedom)

Irish Dept of Justice secretly plotting a China-style "Great Firewall" : according to DRI's TJ McIntyre via Karlin Lillington. “Blocking involves censorship taken on no legal basis. There is no judge, no jury and no right to be heard if you are blocked,” says McIntyre. “The chances are it also will be used in unaccountable ways by unaccountable organisations.”
(tags: blocking censorship government internet ireland dri filtering great-firewall)

ClamAV and The Case of The Missing Mail - Return Path Blog : version 0.94.x got end-of-lifed a year after the release of .95, to fix a bug that would increase bandwidth consumption on their mirrors. To mandate upgrades, the devs sent a kill-switch trigger to .94 installations in the field. chaos ensues, unsurprisingly
(tags: clamav filtering mail ouch upgrades end-of-life support open-source sourcefire return-path)

BlueRunner: Email in the Cloud with Cassandra [PDF] : interesting prez from some IBM researchers on using Cassandra as a mail store, via Jeremy
(tags: via:jzawodny mail cassandra database data ibm nosql performance presentation pdf)

N7 Armour Stripe Hoody : too nerdy? it seems possible
(tags: n7 armour mass-effect geek clothing games)

Authentic Carnitas and Three Pounds of Lard : fatty pork deep fried in lard. oh yeah. thanks Ben!
(tags: via:ben pork carnitas mexican recipes food yum lard)

Boojum Fresh Mexican Food : new lunch spot serving Mexican food in Dublin. hopefully good, haven't tried it yet, menu looks promising though
(tags: mexican food dublin ireland lunch meals)

Mirror Man of Los Angeles : whoa, amazing street performer outfit
(tags: street-art performance mirrors via:lcbo photos)

Every Time Zone : "Never warp your brain with time zone math again." Quite a useful javascript TZ conversion tool, although it could be more intuitive still
(tags: conversion javascript reference timezones time international)

Compu b - 10% off all Apple products this Saturday : new Apple reseller on Dublin's Grafton Street, sounds like a good deal
(tags: apple ireland shopping via:adrianweckler)

avatraxiom: Improving Web Security: Six Ways the Apache.org JIRA Attack Could Have Been Prevented by Better Code : by a Bugzilla developer. ;)
(tags: asf apache bugzilla jira xss security hacks)

Internet Security is a failure : ASF's Paul Querna: 'Security on the Internet sucks, and it is only getting worse. The problem is systemic, with security researchers and developers not producing viable ways for the average user to live on the Internet in a secure fashion without excessive paranoia.'
(tags: asf authentication infrastructure tls internet security)

Radisson Blu Galway – I’d avoid for events « Damien Mulley : Damien shares his atrocious experiences with a Galway hotel, and (naturally) commenters from the hotel's IP address range pile on what looks like astroturf in the comments
(tags: comments astroturf radisson galway hotels funny events customer-service cluetrain)

Gizzard, a framework for creating distributed datastores : from Twitter. looks interesting
(tags: twitter gizzard database nosql storage sharding scalability scala replication)

"Crosaire" dead : the legendary compiler of the 'Irish Times' cryptic crosswords died on Saturday in Harare, Zimbabwe, aged 92
(tags: irish-times history crosswords puzzles cryptic crosaire)

City of Portland develops iPhone app to report city infrastructure problems : ie. take a pic of a pothole and it'll be reported up to the appropriate office quickly and without hassle. wow. are you watching, Dublin?
(tags: portland cool iphone apps potholes infrastructure city)

BenQ W600 projector : 600 euros all-in for an entry-level DLP home cinema projector capable of 720p HD. tempted, but stil a bit pricey
(tags: shopping tv video projectors home cinema dlp hdtv)

Grooveshark Mobile for iPhone : nifty, an official app for this music-streaming site -- although for jailbroken iPhones only
(tags: jailbreaking iphone music grooveshark streaming mp3 apps)

Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong : from David Welton. what, the lack of support for GNOME UI standards was *deliberate*? bad choice if so
(tags: gnome david-welton languages via:fanf scripting gui tk tcl)

Gmail APIs and Tools: IMAP and SMTP using OAuth : 'The Gmail IMAP and SMTP servers have been extended to support authorization via the industry-standard OAuth protocol.' pretty cool, support third parties sending outbound as you, or filtering your inbound gmail
(tags: gmail mail oauth smtp imap api)

creators of AMQP ditching it for ZeroMQ : 'While iMatix was the original designer of AMQP and has invested hugely in that protocol, we believe it is fundamentally flawed, and unfixable. It is too complex and the barriers to participation are massive. We do not believe that it's in the best interest of our customers and users to invest further in AMQP. Specifically, iMatix will be stepping out of the AMQP workgroup and will not be supporting AMQP/1.0 when that emerges, if it ever emerges.' wow, massive downvote there
(tags: queueing amqp zeromq imatix mq protocols openamq via:janl)

BBC News - How spam filters dictated Canadian magazine's fate : the Canadian mag "The Beaver" is changing its name due to broken filters' false positives. Bennett Haselton reckons that there's no incentive to fix FPs, which as Henry Stern notes isn't the case
(tags: anti-spam false-positives beaver canadia canada bbc)

TLS-encrypted spam : the Rustock botnet is now attempting TLS encryption of spam delivery sessions
(tags: tls rustock botnets anti-spam mailchannels ssl encryption)

Pictures from the Irish Blog Awards 2010 : I like the "blogging is dead" funereal theme ;)
(tags: blogging ireland iba blog-awards coffin)

pwnat - NAT to NAT client-server communication : 'a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a NAT, without any 3rd party'. nifty, by Samy "MySpace worm" Kamkar
(tags: samy-kamkar apps firewall ip nat networking pwnat stun traversal tcp sysadmin tunneling udp)

Bulgaria: Bulgarian City Struggles as Councilors Play Farmville on Facebook - Novinite.com - Sofia News Agency : 'The troubled councilor, Dimitar Kerin, has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants. He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.'
(tags: farmville funny slackers bulgaria plovdiv games facebook)

Pivotal Tracker : hmm, nice-looking Scrum tool
(tags: scrum collaboration dev management project-management tools agile)