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Category: Uncategorized

Links for 2009-11-08

Published November 8, 2009

Links for 2009-11-03

Published November 3, 2009

Links for 2009-10-30

Published October 30, 2009

Links for 2009-10-23

Published October 23, 2009

Links for 2009-10-22

Published October 22, 2009

Links for 2009-10-21

Published October 21, 2009

Links for 2009-10-19

Published October 19, 2009

Links for 2009-10-02

Published October 2, 2009

Lest we forget

Published October 2, 2009

Regarding Google Wave's similarity to Lotus Notes, which is a meme I've heard from several angles -- David Jones hits the nail on the head:

Well, I used Notes from 1994 to 1999. It did have a database backend for e-mail and a rich collaborative editing model. But it didn't have realtime shared editing, or instant annotation.

And it was shit. No-one in their right minds would have wanted the future of the web to have been Notes. Even though, and I completely agree, it did things that the web is now only just getting round to.

+1 to that!

Links for 2009-09-30

Published September 30, 2009

Links for 2009-09-29

Published September 29, 2009

Links for 2009-09-11

Published September 11, 2009

n+30 Days

Published September 2, 2009

Colm's "n+1" post reminded me that I'd forgotten to write about this.

On July 27th, I started at Amazon, in a new Dublin-based software dev team working on infrastructure automation. It's now (just over) a month later, and I'm enjoying it immensely.

Needless to say, this company does some very interesting web-scale technology, and getting to look inside the AWS sausage factory is really enjoyable, believe it or not ;)

(I should also post a pic of my glorious screen real-estate. The hardware is a massive improvement over the previous gig, thankfully.)

Unfortunately, however, this has coincided with a lack of free time to blog and keep up with interweb-based leisure pursuits, including SpamAssassin. Really though, this is more due to looking after two wonderful little girls under 2 years of age, rather than the job -- but still, I need to remedy my neglect of this site...

In SpamAssassin news: we've been putting out some alpha releases of 3.3.0, and are planning to do a mass-check for score-generation in the next couple of days. Hopefully we can drive 3.3.0 to a GA release in a few weeks.

Also -- we're still looking for more people in the Amazon team, and hiring aggressively. If you're looking for an interesting software dev role in Dublin, get in touch!

PS: it was Bea's second birthday last weekend. Check out the awesome Very Hungry Caterpillar cupcake cake made by the missus for the occasion:

Links for 2009-09-02

Published September 2, 2009

Links for 2009-09-01

Published September 1, 2009

Links for 2009-08-27

Published August 27, 2009

Links for 2009-08-25

Published August 25, 2009

Links for 2009-08-21

Published August 21, 2009

Links for 2009-08-13

Published August 13, 2009

Links for 2009-08-11

Published August 11, 2009

Links for 2009-08-09

Published August 9, 2009

Links for 2009-08-06

Published August 6, 2009

Links for 2009-08-01

Published August 1, 2009

Links for 2009-07-31

Published July 31, 2009

Links for 2009-07-23

Published July 23, 2009

Embedded software development

Published July 23, 2009

Found in an Ivan Krstic post about Sugar and the OLPC:

In truth, the XO ships a pretty shitty operating system, and this fact has very little to do with Sugar the GUI. It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken closed-source firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix. [...]

We had an embedded controller that blocks keyboard events and stops machine suspend, and to which we -- after a long battle -- received the source, under strict NDA, only to find a jungle of nested if statements, twelve levels deep, and no code history. (The company that wrote the code doesn't use version control, see. They put dates into code comments when they make changes, and the developers mail each other zip files with new versions.)

Haha. Been there, done that. Sometimes it's great not to have to work with custom hardware anymore...

Links for 2009-07-22

Published July 22, 2009

Links for 2009-07-21

Published July 21, 2009

YA link-blog aggregator

Published July 20, 2009

Alex Payne writing about "Fever", a new link-blog aggregator app:

Fever's proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs.

Fever is commercial software, costing $30. Alternatively, I've been doing something very similar for the past few years using SpicyLinks, which is free (if a great deal less pretty on the UI end).

It's nice to see the idea getting some polish, though. ;)

Alex does raise an interesting point towards the end:

Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I'd love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs -- and, indeed, linking outside one's own site -- just aren't as prevalent in those communities.

True.

Links for 2009-07-17

Published July 17, 2009

Links for 2009-07-16

Published July 16, 2009

Links for 2009-07-15

Published July 15, 2009

Eircom’s “DDOS”, or not

Published July 15, 2009

I woke up this morning to hear speculation on RTE Radio as to how Eircom's DDOS woes were possibly being caused by the Russian mob, of all things. This absurd speculation is not helped by lines in statements like this:

'The company blamed the problems on "an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic" directed at its website, which affected the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for its customers.'

I'm speculating, too, but it seems a lot more likely to me that this isn't just a DDOS, and someone -- possibly just a lone Irish teenager -- is running an attempted DNS cache-poisoning attack. Here's why.

Last week, there were two features of the attack in reports: DDOS levels of traffic and incorrect pages coming up for some popular websites. To operate a Kaminsky DNS cache-poisoning attack requires buckets of packets -- easily perceivable as DDOS levels. This level of traffic would be the first noticeable symptom on Eircom's network management consoles, so it'd be easy to jump to the conclusion that a simple DDOS attack was the root cause.

This week, there's just the DDOS levels of traffic. No cache poisoning effects have been reported. This would be consistent with Eircom's engineers getting the finger out over the weekend, and upgrading the NSes to a non-vulnerable version. ;)

Once the attacker(s) realise this, they'll probably stop the attack.

It's not even a good attack for a bad guy to make, by the way. Given the timing, right after major press about a North Korean DDOS on US servers. it's extremely high-profile, and made the news in several national newspapers (albeit in rather inept fashion). If someone wanted to make money from an attack, a massive-scale packet flood indistinguishable from a DDOS against the nation's largest ISP is not exactly a subtle way to do it.

In the meantime, apparently OpenDNS have really seen the effects, with mass switchover of Eircom's customers to the OpenDNS resolvers. Probably just as well...

Links for 2009-07-14

Published July 14, 2009

Links for 2009-07-12

Published July 12, 2009

I’m a Dermotologist!

Published July 11, 2009

Found here:

On Wednesday 20 May 2009, speaking at a parliamentary Justice Committee debating his new blasphemy law, Dermot Ahern joked that people were making blasphemous comments about him, and he compared his own purity to that of the baby Jesus.

So we have a Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary Justice Committee discussing his own blasphemy law, that could make his own jokes illegal.

In honour of this Ministerial revelation, we have founded the Church of Dermotology. We believe God sent Dermot Ahern to save Ireland from rational thinking. Our sacred symbol is the Star of Dermot.

Our sacred beliefs are quite similar to those of other religions.

  • We believe ice cream wafers are literally the body of Dermot Ahern.
  • We believe Dermot Ahern created the universe on Wed 20 may 2009.
  • We’re sometimes not sure whether Dermot Ahern really exists.
  • We believe it is blasphemous to publish an image of Dermot Ahern.
  • We refuse to gather sticks on the Sabbath, which is Wednesday.
  • We wear magic underpants that protect us from fire and bullets.
  • We are outraged whenever anybody insults our sacred beliefs.
  • We fervently support Dermot Ahern’s proposed blasphemy law.
  • If it is passed, we will be regularly outraged, and will take test cases.

Like Scientologists, Dermotologists offer a free personality test. Question one: are you vulnerable? Question two: have you money? If you answer yes to either of these questions, you’re in.

After you join, check out the campaign against the Irish blasphemy law at blasphemy.ie.

Health and Safety

Published July 10, 2009

A while back a friend of mine mailed us all with this classic of overweening health-and-safety bureaucrats gone wild:

The company are now installing wallpaper on our PCs with their 5 golden safety rules:

  1. Always hold the handrail

  2. Always reverse park

  3. Assess Risks

  4. Accept Challenges

  5. Wear PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] gear

We also have to drink from metal cups with plastic lids on them.

The thing that really got me was #2 -- 'always reverse park'. Apparently, someone decided that reversing into the parking space was safer than going in head-first, and to such a significant degree that it was worth mandating it across a medium-sized company. On the other hand, another friend noted:

The college i went to [in the US] would ticket you if you backed into a parking space -- they said it was a "fire hazard".

so we've got "fire hazard" in one direction and "unsafe" in the other. Parse that.

Another friend was told that she couldn't bring her folding bike in the lift because "what would happen if the president was in the lift going to the board room?". She says "I could not work out the health and safety implications."

What health and safety insanity have you encountered recently?

Links for 2009-07-09

Published July 9, 2009

Links for 2009-07-08

Published July 8, 2009

Gravatar Fail

Published July 8, 2009

Hey Gravatar. When you auto-generate an avatar image, like you did with the one to right, could you do me a favour and omit the bits that look like swastikas? kthxbai!

Links for 2009-07-06

Published July 6, 2009

Open source ‘full text’ bookmarklet and feed filter

Published July 6, 2009

Last year, I blogged about Full-Text RSS, a utility to convert those useless "partial-text" RSS/Atom feeds into the real, full-story-inline deal.

The only downside is that the author felt it necessary to withhold the source, saying:

Still, I wouldn't want to offer a feature that middlemen can resell at the expense of bloggers. So while I do want to open this up, I don't want to make things easy for the unscrupulous.

However, recently Keyvan Minoukadeh from the Five Filters project got in touch to say:

I recently created a similar service (along with a bookmarklet for it). [...] It’s a free software (open source) project so code is also available.

Here it is:

fivefilters.org: Create Full-Text Feeds

I've tried it out and it works great, and the source is indeed downloadable under the AGPL.

Five Filters -- its overarching project -- looks interesting, too:

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky describe the media as businesses which sell a product (readers) to other businesses (advertisers). In their propaganda model of the media they point to five 'filters' which determine what we read in the newspapers and see on the television. These filters produce a very narrow view of the world that is in line with government policy and business interests.

In this project we try to encourage readers to explore the world of non-corporate online news, websites which avoid the five filters of the propaganda model. We also try to make these sources of news more accessible by allowing users to print the stories found on these alternative news sites in the format of a newspaper.

Links for 2009-07-03

Published July 3, 2009

Links for 2009-07-02

Published July 2, 2009

Links for 2009-07-01

Published July 1, 2009

User script: add my delicious search results to Google

Published July 1, 2009

For years now, I've been collecting bookmarks at delicious.com/jm -- nearly 7000 of them by now. I've been scrupulous about tagging and describing each one, so they're eminently searchable, too. I've frequently found this to be a very useful personal reference resource.

I was quite pleased to come across the Delicious Search Results on Google Greasemonkey userscript, accordingly. It intercepts Google searches, adding Delicious tag-search results at the top of the search page, and works pretty well. Unfortunately though, that searches all of delicious, not specifically my own bookmarks.

So here's a quick hack fix to do just that:

my_delicious_search_results.user.js - My Delicious Search Results on Google

Shows tag-search results from my Delicious account on Google search pages, with links to more extensive Delicious searches. Use 'User Script Commands' -> 'Set Delicious Username' to specify your username.

Screenshot:

Enjoy!

Links for 2009-06-30

Published June 30, 2009

Links for 2009-06-28

Published June 28, 2009

Still using perl 5.6.x?

Published June 25, 2009

For the upcoming release of Apache SpamAssassin, we're considering dropping support for perl 5.6.x interpreters. Perl 5.6.0 is 9 years old, and the most recent maintainance release, 5.6.2, dates back to November 2003. The current 5.x release branch is 5.10, so we're still sticking with a "support the release branch before the current one" policy this way.

If you're still using one of the 5.6.x versions, or know of a (relatively recent) distro that does, please reply to highlight this....

Links for 2009-06-24

Published June 24, 2009

Links for 2009-06-23

Published June 23, 2009

Links for 2009-06-22

Published June 22, 2009

IBM Ad Execs Who Should Be Fired

Published June 21, 2009

Watching television last night, I couldn't fail to take notice of this new IBM ad:

'For the first time in history, more people live in cities than anywhere else, which means cities have to get smarter.' [...] 'Paris has smart healthcare; smart traffic systems in Brisbane keep traffic moving; Galway has smart water'.

Jaw-dropping. That would be this Galway?

A major water crisis has left scores of people ill and tens of thousands at risk from contamination in a west of Ireland city. Galway's water supply has been hit by an outbreak of the parasite cryptosporidium, with up to 170 people now confirmed to have been affected by a serious stomach bug as a result. Tests found that the city's water supply contained nearly 60 times the safe limit of cryptosporidium pollution. Residents have already been unable to drink or use water for food preparation for weeks.

Residents in parts of Co. Galway have been hit by a new outbreak of the cryptosporidium parasite.Tests on the Roundstone Public Water Scheme showed trace elements of the parasite, as did water schemes for Inishnee and Errisbeg.

Council engineers in Galway have begun work on providing safe drinking water for up to 1,000 householders [...] where supplies have been contaminated by lead. The residents have been advised not to drink tap water until further notice.

Apparently the IBM ad is referring to something to do with tides and aquaculture in Galway Bay, rather than the worst sequence of water-quality disasters in Ireland for several decades. But really -- someone at IBM's marketing department should have done a little more research first before using that line...

Links for 2009-06-18

Published June 18, 2009

Links for 2009-06-13

Published June 13, 2009

Links for 2009-06-11

Published June 11, 2009

Links for 2009-06-10

Published June 10, 2009

Links for 2009-06-06

Published June 6, 2009

  • the Pearson correlation coefficient : a statistical measure to calculate "nearness" of items for collaborative filtering, a la "people who bought this also bought this". wonder if this would make a good Bayes p-value combiner in SpamAssassin
    (tags: algorithms statistics via:fergal ruby recommendations correlation nearness collaborative-filtering)

  • Home taping didn’t kill music - Bad Science : 'SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful. [..] Like I said: as far as I’m concerned, every [dodgy figure] from the [music] industry is false, until proven otherwise.'
    (tags: science journalism p2p mp3 music copyright piracy pr statistics figures spin bullshit)

  • Backing Up Flickr : using "flickrtouchr", a handy script by colmmacc
    (tags: flickr backup tips howto python small-world)

Links for 2009-06-04

Published June 4, 2009

Mae’s OK!

Published June 3, 2009

Well, that was a really scary few days.

On Monday, the lovely C was nearly 2 weeks overdue, and was scheduled to come into the Rotunda for induction the next morning; then contractions started on Monday afternoon. We were happy, as avoiding induction was good news for a natural birth, allowing the process to be run through the excellent Domino scheme, etc.

So we went in, arriving at the Rotunda ER for 3.45 or so. They put on the CTG to monitor the baby's heartbeats, and the first 3 contractions were strong, but everything seemed OK. The next one, however, the baby's heart rate dropped dramatically -- to a very low 40bpm; I called the ER nurses, they ran in, put C on oxygen, and that seemed to help, returning the rate to normal -- but on the next contraction the baby's heart rate dropped even further. Once that happened, the shit hit the fan. In seconds C was on a trolley heading for surgery. It was clear this was serious trouble.

I was left standing outside the theatre while she was operated on -- as an emergency Caesarean section there was no time for luxuries like hapless husbands stumbling around the background. Probably just as well. The midwives and surgical staff kept me as well informed as was possible, though.

After a terrifying 10 minutes, the prognosis improved a little. Initially they were worried that the baby had put pressure on the cord, but this was discounted -- in fact the baby had emptied its bowels of meconium in the womb, which irritated it enough to cause enough distress and cause its heart rate to crash. After 10 minutes, the baby was out (and was a girl!), and C was going to be OK at least. however the baby was at quite a lot of risk from aspiration of meconium and possible brain damage due to reduced oxygen in the womb. holy shit. :(

The baby had indeed aspirated some meconium, causing a collapsed lung. Over the next couple of days in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, the little mite had surgery to introduce a chest tube into her pleura to re-inflate the lung, and was treated with a variety of treatments to deal with meconium in her stomach.

The best bit was this afternoon when we got news that the results of her cranial ultrasound were in -- all clear, no brain damage. Then C got to feed her and hold her -- and she latched on like some kind of milk-seeking missile. what a little trooper.

Anyway, with any luck, 2 or 3 days from now they'll both be able to come home in one piece.

We were lucky btw -- if we hadn't been in the ER at the time, it was very unlikely that the prognosis would have been anywhere near as good. And I have to give credit to the Rotunda staff, they did a great job.

pics on Flickr!

Update, 7 June: C was released from hospital yesterday, and Mae got the all-clear this morning. We're now all back home, healthy and in one piece. Now we can just get on with the usual second-child excitement-slash-drama! phew!

Links for 2009-05-31

Published May 31, 2009

  • Hibernation Tool for Mac OS : OSX doesn't suspend-to-disk by default, which isn't good if you want to reduce power consumption of an unused MacBook Pro. this AppleScript provides a nice Mac-ish UI for the commandline NVRAM pokery required to fix this
    (tags: macos power suspend-to-disk sleep hibernate mbp macbook-pro nvram)

  • spamstery.com : 'The Last Social Game You Will Ever Play'. 'Want in? Sorry. You can't. We're in beta, so we are way too cool for you. If you'd like us to throw you a frickin' bone when we're ready to consider your application, follow @spamstery on Twitter and we'll see what we can do. (No promises, though. God, you're a dork.)'
    (tags: twitter elitism funny satire spam sns)

Links for 2009-05-30

Published May 30, 2009