Eircom blames DNS outage on ‘irregular’ traffic volumes : a better quote than the IT article. "This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers." Hmm. an irregular volume caused by a DNS cache poisoning attack, maybe? (via Chris)
(tags: via:chris security dns eircom hacks)Dublin's long-awaited wheel deal on track for September roll-out - The Irish Times : 'There is an undisguised and frank expression of relief in Michael Sands’s voice when asked what Dublin City Council will do in the event of theft or damage to the city’s 450 bikes. “JC Decaux is responsible for that. Our deal with them is that the city must have 450 bikes fit for use at all times.” We’ll see over time who got the better half of the deal.'
(tags: jc-decaux dublin bikes cycling commute dublinbikes rental)Suspected hacker attack on Eircom internet service - The Irish Times : the _only_ press coverage so far of Eircom's DNS subversion. '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.' uh, how does that wind up redirecting popular sites to porn ads exactly?
(tags: eircom ads exploits hacking dns isps press rte irish-times)
Category: Uncategorized
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!
Groovy creator on Scala : so that's James Gosling, JRuby's Charles Nutter and Groovy's James Strachan all giving Scala big thumbs up. really have to learn this language
(tags: scala jvm languages coding groovy programming)
User Scripts ?(Chromium Developer Documentation)? : must try this out and see if it's usable in Chromium on Linux yet
(tags: greasemonkey userscripts chromium todo google javascript chrome)Possible DNS Hack at Ireland's Largest ISP - Legit links redirected to ads : 'Rik Ferguson, solutions architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, also reported about the issues. "So far there are very few details on the nature of the problem over at Eircom, but it is certainly clear that many Eircom subscribers are being redirected to bogus websites and rumours abound that Eircom’s DNS has been compromised," the researcher wrote on his blog. He suggests that affected users switch to using OpenDNS.'
(tags: eircom security dns redirections hacking isps)
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.
Inside Postini's anti-spam systems : lots of detail
(tags: spam google postini anti-spam)Get Your API Right : 8 key gotchas when implementing RESTful web APIs. great advice
(tags: apis http web rest patterns architecture webdev web-services)
LZO compression : 'focussed on decompression speed' ... 'On modern architectures, decompression is very fast; in non-trivial cases able to exceed the speed of a straight memory-to-memory copy due to the reduced memory-reads.'
(tags: lzo compression speed memory lossless)Analyzing Apache logs with Pig : great demo and walkthrough from Cloudera
(tags: hadoop howto pig analytics cloudera apache hdfs mapreduce)
The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later : interesting CACM article updating Gray and Putzolu's "Five-Minute Rule" for RAM and disks (which postulated that a 1KB record accessed more frequently than once every 5 mins should be stored in RAM, rather than on disk). modern price/performance indicates that this still holds, once 256KB records are used. The article also suggests that a new tier of persistent flash storage should be considered, adding a new set of 5-minute-rule transitions for 2KB records migrating from RAM to flash
(tags: performance disk caching ram flash storage 5-minute-rule jim-gray memory acm)Spice burgers back on the menu due to popular demand - The Irish Times : 'The humble spice burger, one of Ireland’s few original contributions to world cuisine, has been saved.' YAY
(tags: spice-burgers ireland cuisine food yum saved chippers phew)
Filtering Companies Can’t Be Sued By Blacklisted Firms, Court Rules : 'The [Communications Decency Act] treats security software makers the same as internet service providers when they block material they find objectionable, granting them so-called “good Samaritan” immunity from civil lawsuits. Like an ISP, such companies provide an “interactive computer service” because they pull updates from a central server, the San Francisco-based appeals court said.'
(tags: us-law legal blacklists blocklists cda filtering spam zango kaspersky)
UPC's response to IRMA's legal summons demanding a "three strikes" system : 'UPC has made its position clear from the outset -- it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided under existing legislation. There is no basis under Irish law requiring ISPs to control, access or block the internet content its users download. In addition, the rights holders' proposal gives rise to serious concerns for data privacy and consumer contract law.' go UPC!
(tags: upc isps ireland law legal irma music mp3 downloading piracy three-strikes privacy)Gmail Access Methods and Login URLs : you can access an Atom feed of your inbox via https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ - I had no idea!
(tags: gmail urls api google atom feeds mail mobile url login)
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!
MythTV support in Boxee : native support built-in -- awesome! must try this out
(tags: mythtv boxee linux pvr mythfrontend)Introducing The Computer of 2010 : hilariously off-base predictions from Forbes ASAP back in 2000. pretty much everything is wrong, except for the available disk capacity of 1TB (via Tony)
(tags: history computing prediction funny 2010 forbes frogdesign fail pc future via:fanf)Bids for the SORBS blocklist over AU$1.2m : 'Ms Sullivan said the highest "legitimate" offer was about $1.2million. Others were for much more but from unscrupulous quarters.'
(tags: sorbs blocklists filtering anti-spam auctions bids)
Evan Weaver's qcon presentation on Twitter's backend : even more techie details, good tips on JVM profiling/monitoring tools and background on their switch from Ruby to Scala
(tags: scaling twitter java rails distributed memcached queueing evan-weaver scala ruby performance profiling jvm gc)
Twitter, an Evolving Architecture : good info on Twitter's current architecture. lots of memcached
(tags: memcached twitter ruby java scalability queue architecture caching performance web)The Toaster Project : Artist attempting to build a toaster from scratch -- 'beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.' fascinating
(tags: art hardware technology economics build diy consumption capitalism crafts toaster manufacturing mass-production)Agilo : web-based tool to aid Scrum development processes, Apache-licensed, in Python
(tags: python scrum agile management development via:joshua agilo project-management)
John Graham-Cumming: The Scacco/Beber analysis of the Iranian election is bogus : 'the article in the Washington Post that supposedly gives statistical evidence for vote fraud just won't die in the blogosphere and just got a boost [..] by Tim O'Reilly. The trouble is the analysis is bogus.'
(tags: jgc statistics lies-damn-lies washington-post scacco-beber iran politics elections chi-square blogs errors)
Steven Wells Says Goodbye : legendary music journo, dead of cancer :(
(tags: steven-wells via:rosco music journalism death philadelphia cancer)Fauvist paintings of scenes from video games : Megaton and Republic of Dave from Fallout 3, NYC from GTA4, the canal barn from Half-Life 2 ep 2 (iirc) featuring the G-Man, and more. I love these so much -- genius work by spingo
(tags: games art culture painting fallout-3 gta4)
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....
Brian Krebs on the Ralsky guilty verdict : good quote from Richard Cox of Spamhaus: "This has been a long time coming. Ralsky has been identified as one of the key drivers of [..] development in the spam world [...] among the first to commission mass-mailing Trojans to help develop spam botnets."'
(tags: alan-ralsky stock-spam busts prosecutions guilty spam law spamhaus botnets)Facebook stolen-account scam : a mate had his FB credentials stolen and the account used to attempt to scam his social group. Sample chat: 'so where should I send the money?' 'you can have it sent to my name and my present location [...] Do you know any western union outlet nearest to you?'
(tags: western-union scams facebook security phishing 419 social-networking)
Patch-oriented development made sane with git-svn : a great HOWTO
(tags: git-svn patches patch diff collaboration jira asf bug-tracking bugzilla)Federal Bureau of Investigation - The Detroit Division: Department of Justice Press Release : Alan Ralsky pleads guilty in a stock-spam case, facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under CAN-SPAM, wire fraud, and money laundering laws
(tags: alan-ralsky spam cases law stock-spam can-spam fbi)
Imminent closure of SORBS. - news.admin.net-abuse.email : 'SORBS is officially "For Sale" should anyone wish to purchase it as a going concern, but failing that and failing to find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia SORBS will be shutting down permanently in 28 days, on 20th July 2009 at 12 noon. '
(tags: sorbs filtering dnsbls anti-spam)paper taco trucks from Goopymart : print out and fold!
(tags: taco-trucks cute goopy tacos food)how to get Gwibber to load more of your Twitter feed : an undocumented registry^Wgconf tweak. hopefully this'll be fixed more cleanly soon. Gwibber's a great twitter/FB updates client!
(tags: gwibber apps linux twitter facebook updates bugs hacks undocumented)
The same friend who was victim to the BoI user-data leak last year has also fallen victim to the Bord Gais leak! how's that for luck. Here's the letter he received:
At least they make much more convincing worried noises.
Dublinbikes map : the 40 rent-a-bike depots around Dublin, from the Mater to the Grand Canal. coverage outside the city centre is pretty weak :(
(tags: bikes dublin rental dublinbikes jc-decaux awaycity)
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?
- April 2007: Irish city crippled by water emergency:
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.
- Apr 2008: new cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway:
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.
- Sep 2008: Residents told not to drink tap water:
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...
Grantlee : 'a string template engine based on the Django template system and written in Qt'
(tags: templates qt django c++ coding libraries)'Chippers' nationwide mourn loss of spice burger company : NOOOOOO! also, wtf Enterprise Ireland: 'the firm closed after an appeal to Enterprise Ireland for emergency funding was rejected. “They didn’t want to know,” said an internal company source.'
(tags: enterprise-ireland ireland spice-burgers food epicurean yum nooooo chips)
PageRank sculpting : interesting details in the implementation of PageRank and how it "flows"
(tags: page-rank google seo nofollow pagerank web search)Hacker cracks TinyURL rival, redirects millions of Twitter users : oh dear. Cligs - ever heard of it?
(tags: tinyurl cligs url-shortening via:joshua web security risks twitter urls)
Buggy 'smart meters' open door to power-grid botnet : brilliant. 'The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.' Even worse: IOActive's demo worm 'exploits an automatic update feature in the meter that runs on peer-to-peer technology that doesn't use code signing or other measures to make sure the update is authorized.' omgwtfbbq
(tags: security smart-meters home technology stupid code-signing updates upgrades p2p power ioactive)
Google I/O - The Myth of the Genius Programmer : 'A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.'
(tags: talks google video collaboration culture genius presentation googleio coding slides ego)
Delicious Search Results on Google : a Greasemonkey userscript that enhances Google searches with del.icio.us hits for the same search. works quite well
(tags: greasemonkey delicious scripts extension firefox google)Matthew Garrett on the Palm Pre : sounds like a lovely Linux system under the hood; glibc, upstart, ipkg, dbus. if only it did GSM/3G...
(tags: phones mobile palm palm-pre linux)Boxing above your weight : Chris Horn with advice for Irish tech startups from his experience with IONA. lots of IONA history here
(tags: iona irish technology business history startups advice chris-horn)Real-world cloud computing : experiences of startups who've worked with "cloud" hosting platforms. all these comments match my experience. also notable: 'No one mentioned Google App Engine' doh!
(tags: startups ec2 aws amazon scaling cloud-computing rightscale gae horizontal-scaling)
Saving iPhone applications inside data URLs : a truly grody hack to work around iPhone brokenness. wtf is wrong with saving HTML pages to local flash for offline use? does it not "just work" or something?
(tags: data-uri hacks iphone web html javascript apple workarounds gross)
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)
Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong! : very funny, and a fantastic illustration of common applied-crypto pitfalls
(tags: authentication crypto 2009 encryption humour cookies security coding aes cbc sso)SHA-1 collision attacks now 2^52 complexity : 'Authored by researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, their work reveals a collision attack on SHA-1 with a complexity of 2^52 operations (the previous fastest known SHA-1 collision attack had required 2^63 operations). This is a significant improvement in finding SHA-1 collisions.' 'the attacks affect collision resistance, not pre-image or second pre-image resistance. [...] the researchers are able to generate two unique messages that hash to the same digest value.'
(tags: sha-1 security collisions collision-resistance hashing complexity attacks danger)How I Hacked Hacker News : crappy pRNG seeding; used the same source "random" stream for both security-sensitive purposes (login cookies) and non-sensitive user-visible data (in HTML page source); and no HMAC usage at all. oh dear. good example of how not to do it
(tags: prng random cookies lisp arc ycombinator hackernews dfranke security exploits)NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream : log-structured fs; instant "free" checkpoint snapshots, fast crash recovery, superfast benchmarks, in upcoming Linux kernels. sounds awesome (via JZawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny linux storage ssd filesystems backups snapshots crash-recovery fsck checkpointing nilfs)more on Google Wave and spam : 'Lars Rasmussen responded that [the spam problem] hasn't been given much thought yet [jm: !!!], since it is a closed developer's preview for now, but also mentioned that most likely Wave would use a whitelist option, where you'd have to add a friend/coworker before they could send/invite you to Waves.' ie, the IM style
(tags: im email messaging google wave anti-spam spam chat)Google Wave spam discussion : looks like the plan is for third parties to provide anti-spam services/bots to despam your Wave inbox, plus a little economic handwaving
(tags: google wave messaging wikis anti-spam spam email)
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.
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!
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)
Template Based Spam : good intro to the systems used in today's botnets, from Marshal8e6's TRACElabs
(tags: anti-spam templates templating marshal8e6 research pushdo asprox spam)How SQLite Is Tested : wow, extensive. I'm impressed! good example of how to solidly test a C/C++ library
(tags: sqlite testing c c++ coding coverage quality database sql)True things my assistant has said : guy writing down all the stupid things his assistant says. “I forced myself to have a concussion last night in the furnace room.”
(tags: funny omgwtfbbq assistant)
MMO logging to AWS : an interesting AWS use-case; S3, EC2, Elastic Hadoop, and browser-based POST to S3 to offload work of MMO-level logging
(tags: logging distributed mmogs games coding internet)Everything you always wanted to know about female ejaculation (but were afraid to ask) - New Scientist: scientific fact!
(tags: sex biology sexuality orgasm women female)
Issue 7254: Initial Greasemonkey support : Is this why Greasemonkey is moribund in Firefox -- the dev is employed by Google and working on Chromium?
(tags: greasemonkey chrome google open-source chromium web browsers)Google: Expect 18 Android Phones by Year’s End : 'Mr. Rubin said that, in general, carriers will be slower in the United States to introduce Android phones than in Europe.' so seeing as you still can't buy a G1 in Ireland, that would mean never?
(tags: google android g1 phones tech)Woods gives preview of the conservative fightback : 'The infamous deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse [...] was at its most septic over the weekend. Michael Woods [...] gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.'
(tags: religion ireland politics catholicism scandal abuse child-abuse ryan-report michael-woods)
If you were listening to the Marian Finucane show on RTE Radio 1 last Saturday afternoon, you might have heard the mind-boggling stuff coming out of Michael Woods, the Fianna Fail former Education Minister with a "strong Catholic faith" who brokered the controversial backroom deal back in 2003 which allowed the Catholic Church and its institutions to evade prosecution on child abuse.
Here's a great thread on Politics.ie where quite a few folks boggle at the incredible things he said.
Thanks to Podcasting Ireland, I was able to track down and cut out this segment, so here is a recording of Michael Woods coming up with the pathetic excuse of how the British forced the Christian Brothers to abuse children:
Michael Woods - the brits made us do it.mp3 (951KB)
The last refuge of a cornered FFer -- blame the British. Absolutely incredible. It has to be heard to be believed. What century is this again?
Update: according to Mary Raftery in the Irish Times, this is a preview of the religious right's tactics:
'It Is easy to discount former government minister and senior Fianna Fáil member Michael Woods. A former minister, he is no longer a prominent figure. He has, however, left a festering sore behind him which continues to weep poison every now and then. The infamous church-State deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse, under which the religious orders pay a mere 10 per cent of the compensation bill, was at its most septic over the weekend.
Woods, the main architect of the deal, defended it on the television news and gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.'
We marched in the streets about this stuff. It's like the 90's never happened.
See The Failure of Fianna Fail : a handy Firefox extension to FF-proof your web browsing experience, "They Live"-style
(tags: firefox fianna-fail biffo ireland politics lecraic via:jkeyes extensions)Doctor Jesus : heh. I have a similar cheesy thrift-shop painting at home
(tags: doctor-jesus funny cheesy tat thrift-shop moba art bad-art kitsch religion)
Google Map Parameters : reverse-engineered list of query parameters accepted in Google Maps URLs. great reference!
(tags: maps google hacks reverse-engineering api gmaps reference parameters cgi url)_Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective_ : Google paper on the construction and operation of Chubby, their distributed fault-tolerant database built using the Paxos consensus algorithm
(tags: google algorithms research databases chubby distcomp cs paxos fault-tolerance scalability papers toread)OpenDHT mothballed, halting Adeona : PhDware strikes again: 'OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos.'
(tags: opendht adeona phdware software coding open-source dht security)redbot : 'RED checks HTTP resources to see how they use HTTP, makes suggestions, and finds common protocol mistakes.' source available
(tags: http testing protocol conformance compression encoding web validators)Irish Craft Brewer - Brewing: How do I Start? : something to bookmark for my copious free time (yeah right)
(tags: brewing toread toget beer hobbies)bashreduce : interesting hack -- apply Map-Reduce idioms to UNIX command lines across multiple machines or cores (via jzawodny, who's obviously looking at a lot of command line stuff recently ;)
(tags: via:jzawodny algorithms hack last.fm shell cli bash commandline bashreduce distcomp mapreduce networking unix)GNU 'xargs' as a parallel process-pool driver : I had no idea it could do this, using its "-P" switch. cool (via jzawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny xargs parallel forking worker-pool process-pool parallelism multicore unix gnu)
Catholic Church in Ireland : a Mulley-driven link campaign I can totally support; anyone researching the church's status here needs the context of the abuse committed by its members over the past 100 years. see http://www.mulley.net/2009/05/23/catholic-church-in-ireland/ for more background
(tags: catholicism church religion ireland abuse atrocities google googlebombing horror)mirandaupnptool : 'Python-based Universal Plug-N-Play client application designed to discover, query and interact with UPNP devices, particularly Internet Gateway Devices (aka, routers). It can be used to audit UPNP-enabled devices on a network for possible vulnerabilities.' looks also useful for non-security-related UPNP twiddling, too
(tags: upnp firewalls firewal-traversal routers home security auditing)
Your morning commute identifies you uniquely : 'analyzing data from the U.S. Census [shows] that for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations -- to a block level -- identifies them uniquely.' are location-based services fundamentally incompatible with privacy
(tags: privacy location security fireeagle via:schneier commute where census)over 500k ops/sec from memcached with an UltraSPARC T2 : test load used 90% gets and 10% sets. sub-millisecond response times
(tags: sun solaris via:adriancockroft memcached scalability benchmarks performance)Sriracha comes from the US : I had no idea my favourite condiment wasn't Thai or Vietnamese in origin. there you go
(tags: sriracha food condiments yum thailand vietnam hot-sauce)AWS Import/Export : send a USB/eSATA storage device to Amazon and they'll bulk load data to S3 (or, in future, vice versa), for $80 + $2.49 per hour of transfer time. 'If loading your data over the Internet would take a week or more, you should consider using AWS Import/Export.' aka, sneakernet now a supported interface
(tags: amazon aws import export data-portability s3)
Amazon.com: Canon CanoScan 8800F Color Film/Negative/Photo Scanner : recommended, apparently. I have a stack of negs at home I've been meaning to scan
(tags: negatives photos scanning hardware canon images toget wishlist)Gearman now does persistent queues : yay
(tags: gearman persistent disk queueing perl drizzle mysql libmemcached)Magnet now have a customer forum on Boards.ie : best Irish ISP, by far (via Mulley)
(tags: via:mulley magnet ireland isps customer-service boards.ie)
Bug #375272 in Ubunet: “Server software is closed source” : 'The Ubuntu One server software is closed source. This is 2009. I thought we learnt this lesson with Launchpad.' oh dear....
(tags: ubuntu canonical proprietary open-source ubuntu-one web2.0)Tweeting Too Hard : 'Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.' bash.org for Twitter (via @colmbrophy)
(tags: funny twitter microblogging ego tweeting via:colmbrophy wankers)Hudson EC2 plugin : 'This plugin enables Hudson to automatically provision new instances on EC2, based on the system demand. That is, if Hudson notices that your system is overloaded, it will provision new slaves on EC2, and when those instances go unused for a certain time period, it will shut them down. You can run all your slaves on EC2 if you want, or you can maintain your local build cluster and use EC2 as a reserve capacity.' awesome
(tags: hudson ec2 ci continuous-integration build aws elastic)Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail : Ted Dziuba with teh funny: 'For someone like me, Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness.'
(tags: wolfram-alpha funny ted-dziuba search maths fail reviews)
James Hamilton, 'On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services', LISA '07 (PDF) : James Hamilton, now at Amazon, then at MSN, gives a canonical list of best practices for large-scale operations-friendly server deployments, 'accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live.' a lot of good advice here (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf sysadmin lisa deployment server-farms servers testing debugging monitoring logging operations configuration)spiritofireland.org technical forum : plenty of spirited (ho ho) discussion of the proposed massive wind-power project and its viability
(tags: power wind-power spirit-of-ireland forum discussion ireland green)resty : short bash wrappers for curl to ease debugging REST APIs. looks nice, but I'm not impressed at it's stomping on the venerable lwp GET/PUT/POST commands :(
(tags: lwp rest curl http debugging shell bash cli)Artificial Owl : "The most fascinating abandoned man-made creations, and their story & location". my new favourite photoblog, and great name too (via JWZ)
(tags: via:jwz blogs history photography travel photos architecture decay)
This is nifty. Monitor EC2 instances and load balancers; CPU, data transfer rates, disk usage, disk activity, HTTP/TCP request counts/latency, "healthy/unhealthy" instances (see below). This data is both exposed via web service APIs, but also usable as input for their new "Auto Scaling" elastic scaling feature. Ideal for someone to write a Nagios plugin for. Also, I'm looking forward to some kick-ass sysadmin dataviz for this.
Elastically scale out (or in) your grid of EC2 instances, based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. An officially-supported form of a myriad of third-party apps. I expect to hear of people accidentally spending a fortune due to accidental misuse of this ;)
Load balance across multiple EC2 instances, report metrics to Cloudwatch such as requests/second and request latency, and -- most usefully of all in my opinion -- shift traffic away from EC2 instances that fail to respond to a "health-check" HTTP GET with a 200, or fail to accept a TCP connection.
In other words, this provides a way to do decent HA on EC2, which is something that's been much needed for a long time, and is quite tricky to set up using Linux-HA. I've done the latter, and found it full of potential reliability pitfalls; I found that Elastic IP addresses were not useful for quickly failing over to backup servers; in some cases, I found it taking about 5 minutes to fail over :( The only (relatively) snappy way to implement it was to set up a dynamic DNS record with a short TTL, point to it using a CNAME, and use "ddclient" to switch it when failing over. And even that could leave sites down for as long as it takes the DNS client to time out the existing cached CNAME.
Elastic Load Balancing supports HTTP or generic TCP connections. Unfortunately, it doesn't support "real" termination of HTTPS connections, which is unfortunate. (You can terminate them as generic TCP connections, though.)
More details on the RightScale blog, at the AWS dev blog, and Werner Vogel's blog.
Ross Anderson elected as Royal Society Fellow : and about time too! (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf science royal-society frs ross-anderson security)Software AG's Chief Strategerizer on "Enterprise" : 'In the context of software, the word “Enterprise” has now officially come to mean software that sucks.' uh, yep. and this is new? (via wmf)
(tags: via:wmf funny enterprise enterprisey software-ag sap software sales)Fianna Fail's talking points memo for election canvassers : 'A lot of [FF] canvassers are finding it tough on the doorstep.' 'be seen to highlight their points in a notebook', 'ask to record their name and email address so you can get back to them', 'when you show interest, they will be inclined to soften their [anti-FF] views'. also: show interest in kids, local sports team -- what a cliche! possibly fake, though
(tags: fianna-fail politics ireland canvassing elections talking-points scans)
In the current run-up to the local elections here in Ireland, it's pretty obvious that Fianna Fail, the ruling party who've screwed the economy with mismanagement and rampant cronyism, are in line for a massive drubbing. So much so, in fact, that their own candidates are attempting to hide their party affiliations.
Check out this poster for candidate Kenneth O'Flynn (son of FF TD Noel O'Flynn):
what logo, you ask? Look closer:
Compare that to what FF posters used to look like, 2 years ago:
Meath FF councillor Nick Killian has removed the logo from his leaflet's front page entirely, too.
Thanks to martinoc for the Bertie's Team poster, and Ivor in the comments of this post at On The Record for the photos of Kenny's posters. There's gold in those comments...
'eco-bling' : 'some expensive technologies such as photo-voltaic cells, which take energy from sunshine, can take up to 50 years to pay for themselves in saved energy costs. However, photo-voltaic cells often have a useful life of just 20 years, making them effectively “eco-bling”.'
(tags: eco-bling bling green technology solar-panels wind-turbines housing)
'Scaling Apache 2.x > 20000 Concurrent Downloads' : An Apachecon presentation from ColmMacC -- still has a good bit of useful advice!
(tags: colmmacc apache presentations c10k scalability httpd linux)Software Problems with a Breath Alcohol Detector : oh dear. crappy proprietary code ahoy -- in a breathalyzer
(tags: breathalyzers breath alcohol law source-code code-reviews security)Dmitry Orlov speaking in Dublin : uber-pessimist author of 'Reinventing Collapse', speaking on June 9th
(tags: talks dublin orlov collapse society economics russia ussr us-politics)
NYTimes Map/Reduce Toolkit : a super-simple MR wrapper in Ruby, wrapping Hadoop, inspired by Sawzall
(tags: hadoop ruby mapreduce nytimes distcomp sawzall dsls)Cision PR spam problems : I've been having the same problem myself, and it seems they've scraped my address and added it to their db in contravention of EU law. just sent an opt-out, it had better work
(tags: pr cision spam uk privacy)John Graham-Cumming: Why I wrote The Geek Atlas : sounds great! Mind you I prefer the original title, "128 Geeky Places To See Before You Die"
(tags: geek science jgc books reading tourism toget)Flare : 'distributed, and persistent key-value storage compatible with memcached', GPL'd, also featuring persistent storage, data replication, dynamic partitioning, failover, etc.
(tags: flare storage k-v-stores scalability memcached distributed tokyocabinet cache database)Hadoop Sorts a Petabyte in 16.25 Hours and a Terabyte in 62 Seconds : now that's scale
(tags: hadoop benchmarks yahoo mapreduce sorting hdfs)
hahaha. a lovely Google AI "doh" moment:
Needless to say, "Angry GAA Fans" is not a recurring section on the Irish Examiner's site...
Ubuntu One : "store, sync and share". looks an awful lot like Canonical have just reinvented a linux-only version of Dropbox for some reason :( here's hoping it's open source at least, right?
(tags: dropbox canonical ubuntu linux sync online-backup filesharing)Merkle trees : hashes utilitizing a tree structure, as used for efficient delta reconciliation in Amazon's Dynamo, in next-gen hash algorithm MD6, and Sun's ZFS filesystem. see also Tiger tree hashing, used in Gnutella and DC p2p algos
(tags: gnutella merkle-trees hash-trees hashing hashes algorithms data-structures crypto security zfs)MD6 : next-gen hash function, allowing immense parallel computation of hashes using a Merkle-tree-like structure. funnily enough, in use right now by the Conficker worm! (via Richi)
(tags: via:richi merkle-trees hashing hash-trees md6 algorithms coding hash crypto security conficker)blasphemy.ie : A blog from Atheist Ireland as part of their campaign against the proposed new anti-blasphemy law, to replace the unenforceable old law
(tags: blasphemy free-speech ireland atheism humanism laws legal constitution absurd wtf)Attack vectors deja vu : get memory to contain malicious code, then make process dump core; naive directory search then reads your core file, attempts to interpret it, and runs malicious commands. This is one reason why SpamAssassin looks for specific file extensions when dir-searching for configs
(tags: configuration filenames exploits security core logrotate cron)
Spirit of Ireland looks very nifty.
It's extremely simple -- a group of Irish 'entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, architects and legal and financial experts' are calling for Ireland to achieve energy independence and become a net exporter of green energy within five years, by building a number of wind farms on our western seaboard, buffering the generated energy in water reservoirs using pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
This kind of massive-scale public-works engineering project has a strong historical precedent in Ireland -- Ardnacrusha, opened in 1929, was the largest hydroelectric station in the world for a time. Given that Turlough Hill is a pumped-storage facility, it can even be beautiful ;)
We can certainly do it, given sufficient government vision. I'd love to see it happen. Great stuff!
- the Spirit of Ireland site
- John of Dublin's blog post
- comment by Prof. Ray Kinsella in the Irish Times
- Irish Independent
- Eddie Hobbs
(image credit: CC-licensed image from Ganders on Flickr. thanks!)
mod_memcache_block : 'a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code', ie. rate limiting across a server farm built on memcached
(tags: memcached rate-limiting antispam security apache server-farms horizontal-scaling)
Automatic Continuous Integration for Grails projects on Google Code : crawling all Google-Code-hosted projects tagged with Grails and automatically hosting C-I instances for them using Hudson. wow
(tags: grails google-code continuous-integration testing web hosting open-source hudson)
HOWTO prep for migration off of SHA-1 in OpenPGP : now that both MD5 and SHA-1 are heading towards obsolescence, Debian are readying the long-term actions needed to take care of this. we'll need to do this in the ASF too. Is this like Y2K and C10K? SHA1K?
(tags: sha1k md5 sha1 signatures signing crypto debian open-source releases processes long-term gpg web-of-trust)'Churnalism’ : neologism for recycled PR and wire copy masquerading as journalism; new study claims that it makes up the majority of UK newspaper home news coverage
(tags: uk via:fanf neologisms churnalism journalism news newspapers old-media)
TechWire: Ode to Declan Ganley : 'I am the very model of a modern major Europhobe' a la Gilbert and Sullivan. excellent stuff!
(tags: libertas declan-ganley europe eu europhobes politics ireland dodgy gilbert-and-sullivan funny)Using ZooKeeper to tame system test for large-scale services : good demo of ZooKeeper
(tags: apache zookeeper yahoo hadoop networking distributed-locking locking configuration distcomp testing)How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street : 'Catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses -- the fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.'
(tags: coding capitalism work politics history programming banking money economics recession crash 2009 finance subprime mortgages complexity wallstreet securities cmo cdo)http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/FLORA/MooseX-MultiMethods-0.02/t/game.t : Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard implemented using MooseX::MultiMethods (Moose multi-method dispatch). class! (via Marcus Ramberg)
(tags: moose perl modern-perl rps rock-paper-scissors-spock-lizard funny geeky tests dispatch coding)
How to Store/Load Wii Games via USB Hard Drive : nifty! uses the Wii Homebrew Channel (ie the Twilight Hack savefile hack). apparently quite doable
(tags: wii hacks homebrew twilight-hack games backup)
review of the MySQL Tokutek storage engine : 'fractal tree indexes' instead of B-trees. new to me
(tags: fractal-tree-indexes b-trees fractals algorithms data-structures mysql performance tokutek tokudb databases)
Haystack design notes : pretty exhaustive walkthrough of Facebook's new photo storage backend, running on XFS. nice setup for a very specific use-case
(tags: storage scaling netapp facebook scalability images nfs haystack)Party Cat : "I just feel lately your PARTIES have not been up to PAR." "...ty"
(tags: party-cat parties comics funny via:fp cats)
REST worst practices : good advice on things to avoid in providing a REST API from a Django app
(tags: rest django web http webdev web-services antipatterns best-practices)Consistent hashing vs order-preserving partitioning in distributed databases : 'An order-preserving partitioner, where keys are distributed to nodes in their natural order, has huge advantages over consistent hashing, particularly the ability to do range queries across the keys in the system'
(tags: consistent-hashing order-preserving-partitioning partitioning sharding distcomp networking distributed databases k-v-stores cassandra)How to use JetS3t with Eucalyptus : wow, impressive i14y; also Eucalyptus now includes an S3-like service
(tags: ec2 eucalyptus jets3t s3 storage open-source java)Psych Ward episode 2 : vote for my mate Luke's latest TV programme. it's great
(tags: rte psychward voting tv luke)
Here's a great example of numerical illiteracy spotted by my mate Tom:
some classic reporting in the Irish Examiner today...
"Department staff clocked up 20,000 sick days in the three years" is the headline. Closer examination of the article reveals there are 5,000 people in the department. Do the maths (which the paper doesn't - I wonder why) and that's a SHOCKING 1.3 sick days a year.
Even better is this quote: "Department of Agriculture staff clocked up 3,095 uncertified sick days last year - 653 of these on a Monday"
So that would be about a fifth of the sick days being taken on one of the five working days in the week. DISGRACE!
Let's hear it for old media's commitment to quality journalism!
Dear Fellow Rubyists « Dyepot, Teapot : good follow-up post regarding the shitstorm that erupted in the Ruby community after a talk entitled "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star" (with content about like you'd imagine). to be honest, I can't understand why the Rubyists are being so obtuse about this teenager-level stupidity
(tags: community conferences porn sex culture couchdb opensource)Eucalyptus devs forming commercial company : Eucalyptus Systems to provide "commercial support, integration, and development services for Eucalyptus users while continuing to develop the core code base under an open source license." hopefully they won't do a Xen and kill the goose
(tags: eucalyptus ec2 linux ubuntu xen opensource cloud-computing)
Kanban : a new agile software-dev methodology. hmm
(tags: software work agile kanban process)Home Office 'colluded with Phorm' : holy shit. 'In an e-mail dated 22 January 2008, a Home Office official wrote again to Phorm and said: "I should be grateful if you would review the attached document, and let me know what you think." In January 2008 the Home Office thanks Phorm for comments and changes to its draft paper, which show the company making deletions and changes to the document.'
(tags: phorm uk home-office politics interception advertising dpi networking internet web isps regulation)
lots more details on the "marblecake" 4chan Time poll-stuffing : including an attempted poisoning of Recaptcha, which the author claims it was immune to, and a final manual-CAPTCHA data-entry process towards the end
(tags: recaptcha captchas moot time 4chan via:waxy security web poll 2009 anonymous)
The full story behind Little Edvin Tables : 'As the names are so similar, searches for our company in the official Norwegian registry of just-about-anything (Brønnøysundregistrene) often resulted in potential customers looking up the wrong company. To prevent this confusion we recently changed the name of the old (non-LLC) company, and figured we'd use the opportunity for some harmless - or so we thought - fun.'
(tags: little-bobby-tables sql injection xss via:mikkohypponen norway sysedata security)"Carne Asada is not a crime" tee-shirts : WANT
(tags: carne-asada food mexican fashion tshirts tacos trucks taco-trucks la california)Tesco brand in Ireland "almost exclusively" associated with a Paddy Tax rip-off : 'Consumers, media and government associate Tesco Ireland almost exclusively with price differentials between Northern Ireland and Ireland.' Talk about a massive PR fail!
(tags: pr fail disaster tesco paddy-tax rip-off-ireland rip-offs surveys northern-ireland ireland)great neologism: meatcloud : ie. server-deployment sysadmin teams. 'If you want to participate in this ‘as a Service’ brave new world, and your plan to bring up new servers involves a meatcloud ssh'ing their little hearts out, you might as well give up now'
(tags: sysadmin meatcloud funny puppet agile neologism infrastructure words saas cloud-computing ec2 deployment)
Ending BioShock : a much better ending than the real one
(tags: bioshock gaming videogames narrative plot)Little Bobby Tables' Norwegian cousin : "Navn/foretaksnavn: ';UPDATE TAXRATE SET RATE = 0 WHERE NAME = 'EDVIN SYSE' " -- ahahaha!
(tags: lol sql haxx0ring xkcd funny security via:simonw norway little-bobby-tables xss escaping)OAuth Session Fixation Attack : the reason why Twitter, Y! (and others) shut down their OAuth services recently; a massive hole in the OAuth authorization protocol. this will be tricky to fix
(tags: oauth security twitter flickr holes yahoo google)Top Tips : some of the worst "top tip" sidebars collected from lowbrow UK mags. even shittier than the made-up Viz ones
(tags: top-tips viz funny advice idiotic omgwtf)
Performance comparison: key/value stores for language model counts : useful benchmarks, and another plug for Tokyo Cabinet; over 4x as fast as writes to an on-disk BerkeleyDB via its Python bindings
(tags: tokyo-cabinet benchmarks db storage berkeley-db k-v-stores)
John Handelaar goes public with KildareStreet.com : TheyWorkForYou ported to the Irish Oireachtas -- yay John!
(tags: politics ireland oireachtas john-handelaar kildarestreet)Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System : awesome black-box analysis of what it takes to evade the Content-ID system deployed by YouTube to block use of copyrighted music in third-party videos, using Audible Magic's acoustic fingerprinting. easy workaround: skip the first 30 seconds of the track or resample by 5%
(tags: via:ninnx drm hacking youtube audio analysis content fingerprint identification watermarking algorithm)RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady on the Oracle/Sun acquisition : great analysis, particularly where it affects ZFS and their open-source products
(tags: redmonk analysis mergers m&a sun oracle via:segphault)'The Emergency' now blogging : brilliant Irish political satire
(tags: the-emergency comedy funny ireland politics satire blogs)
Abaca's radical anti-spam tech wins at Yahoo! : claimed 99.997% catch rate, FP rate of 1 in a million, supposedly. sounds like a major leap forward if true. wonder how it works...
(tags: abaca anti-spam via:richi yahoo)Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music : great stat (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf filesharing p2p mp3 piracy copyright piratebay downloads file-sharing)RTMPE : 'Encrypted Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMPE or RTMPTE) is a proprietary protocol created by Macromedia used for streaming video and DRM.' apparently used by RTE's streaming video
(tags: rte drm security rtmp rtmpe macromedia flash video streaming)Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores : great investigation from Leonard Lin; Tokyo Tyrant gets a strong thumbs-up. also: 'based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is.' ha!
(tags: scaling storage distcomp k-v-stores tokyocabinet tokyotyrant voldemort mysql databases cassandra)Schooner Appliance for Memcached : you really know you've made it as open-source infrastructure when third parties are building custom off-the-shelf hardware platforms for your code. crazy stuff, though; isn't half of the idea of memcached that you can run it on COTS hardware?
(tags: appliances memcached hardware caching web)pubsubhubbub : aka. PSHB. 'open, web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol. Includes a [python] open source reference implementation', from a mainly-Google-based team incl Brad Fitzpatrick. note: server-to-server only; there's no NAT or COMET support
(tags: pshb web gae webhooks syndication xmpp pubsub pubsubhubbub google http atom feeds)
Mike Cardwell attempts to opt out of Phorm interception : I did just the same thing myself last week
(tags: phorm interception http privacy dpi advertising bt webwise org)RTÉ 'gets it wrong' with new music downloads which don't work on iPods : 'Launched recently at a cost of €230,000, listeners can buy tracks heard on the station'. the tracks are DRM-laden WMA files, so don't work on iPods or any other MP3 player. sounds like the record labels browbeat RTE on this one, resulting in just another useless DRM store that nobody will use. great way to spend my license fee :(
(tags: rte waste fail mp3 wma music 2fm via:unarocks)recording what's playing on PulseAudio : every sink (output) also provides a built-in "monitor" source. This script records the currently-playing audio to WAV
(tags: linux audio recording pulseaudio stream drm sox wav)Collectl : _very_ comprehensive Linux system monitoring tool; looks nifty! 'Collectl tries to do it all. You can choose to monitor any of a broad set of subsystems which currently include buddyinfo, cpu, disk, inodes, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, processes, quadrics, slabs, sockets and tcp.'
(tags: collectl linux tools sar processes disk cpu io monitoring sysadmin network)Cooliris For Linux : 'a browser extension that leverages the GPU to allow users to visually navigate photos, videos, games, and news stories from their favorite sites on a full screen 3D wall'. sounds nifty, must give this a try
(tags: cooliris linux 3d vizualisation photos firefox)JG Ballard dead : of cancer at the age of 78. one less genius alive
(tags: jg-ballard ballard dystopia sf fiction future literature authors)
fantastic LED "faceless" watch : 'Part of apertures of metal band became digital display screen. Metal band and digital figures mingle together in proportion naturally. Without the face of "timepiece", it displays figures only when needed but also quite vague existence, "time"'
(tags: led designer watches want wishlist design cool nifty)Metric counts its iTunes success - Los Angeles Times : '"Talking gross numbers that come directly to the band, we have made more money already than we have on the last record in four years," said [Metric]'s co-manager. "Without any intermediary, we're making 77 cents on the dollar for every record we sell" on iTunes. Under a label deal [...] Metric would have earned closer to 22 cents.'
(tags: metric bands music music-industry future itunes mp3 itms)
Don't forget -- next Monday, the Heritage Society of Engineers Ireland, in association with The Irish Computer Society, and the ICT and Electronic and Electrical Divisions of Engineers Ireland, will be hosting an evening lecture entitled "Reminiscences of Early days of Computing in Ireland", by Gordon Clarke (M.A., CEng., F.B.C.S., C.I.T.P., F.I.C.S). Sounds like it'll be great. More details.
Update: it starts at 8pm; useful info! Also, the event's flyer can be found on this page, which notes:
For those new to using our webcast facility, please see www.engineersireland.ie/webcast for information on how to set-up and access our webcasts. To view the event, please log onto the url below: https://engineersireland.webex.com/engineersireland/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=841959965 The password: computer
Chino Otsuka: "Imagine Finding Me" : the artist's childhood photos, digitally manipulated to feature the artist as an adult alongside. fantastic (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy art chino-otsuka photography photoshop history memories self-portraits)Echo vision: The man who sees with sound : amazing first-person report of echolocation in humans: the author calls it "FlashSonar", and teaches other blind people how to use it
(tags: echolocation via:eoin flashsonar sonar new-scientist blind acoustics echo perception neuroscience)notes on "A Canticle for Leibowitz" : reading notes for the 50-year-old Hugo-Award-winning SF classic, dealing with theology, science, and Cold War terror of a nuclear armageddon
(tags: theology science nuclear-war cold-war 1950s science-fiction reading books a-canticle-for-leibowitz religion)
A while back, I linkblogged about "iotop", a
very useful top-like UNIX utility to show which processes are initiating the
most I/O bandwidth.
Teodor Milkov left a comment which is well worth noting, though:
Definitely iotop is a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately it's still hard to tell who's wasting most disk IO in too many situations.
Suppose you have two processes - dd and mysqld.
dd is doing massive linear IO and its throughput is 10MB/s. Let's say dd reads from a slow USB drive and it's limited to 10MB/s because of the slow reads from the USB.
At the same time MySQL is doing a lot of very small but random IO. A modern SATA 7200 rpm disk drive is only capable of about 90 IO operations per second (IOPS).
So ultimately most of the disk time would be occupied by the mysqld. Still iotop would show dd as the bigger IO user.
He goes into more detail on his blog. Fundamentally, iotop works based on what the Linux kernel offers for per-process I/O accounting, which is I/O bandwidth per second, not I/O operations per second. Most contemporary storage in desktops and low-end server equipment is IOPS-bound ('A modern 7200 rpm SATA drive is only capable of about 90 IOPS'). Good point! Here's hoping a future change to the Linux per-process I/O API allows measurement of IOPS as well...
Under the Covers of Google App Engine Datastore : via James Hamilton. some details on BigTable
(tags: bigtable google appengine notes implementation storage)French National Assembly reject HADOPI law : 'On Friday the French National Assembly rejected the HADOPI law, which would impose the toughest “three strikes” copyright enforcement law in the world on French Internet users.' phew
(tags: hadopi sarkozy france censorship privacy law eu)UPC block out D-Boxes : Irish cable-TV company UPC have rolled out Nagravision 2 encryption, finally breaking the dodgy "D-Box" decoder boxes sold on a massive scale throughout Ireland for several years now. can't see it staying hacked for long though. NTL's comment: http://url.ie/1g0q
(tags: nagravision tv cable-tv encryption security ireland upc ntl d-box)hatful of hollow - Visualising Sorting Algorithms : another dataviz of sorting algorithms, avoiding animation and instead coming up with a nice line-based viz. interesting, but wtf no merge sort ;)
(tags: via:simonw sorting algorithms visualization dataviz cairo coding python)Bank of Ireland Credit Card Security: FAIL : if BoI need to verify a transaction out-of-band, they send an SMS to the cardholder asking them to call an unpublished number which diverts to a UK number before demanding all their card details; exactly the modus operandi of a phish. wtf are they thinking?
(tags: omgwtfbbq banking boi ireland credit-cards verification security sms via:mulley)
We have an extremely open-plan layout in work -- no partitions, just long benches of keyboards and monitors. It looks a bit like this, but with less designer furniture and more Office Depot:
Aman pointed out that this is a new trend in workplace design, which Workalicious calls "Big Table Desking":
I'm still not sure what to make of the frequent instances of Big Table Desking. While this kind of workstation arrangement is no doubt a new trend, the no-privacy work place is a throwback to the 1950s office pool, a line up of identical desks classroom style. Is it the peer to peer seating position that overcomes this? How would it? By building community? As opposed the pilot and passenger 747, catholic church model of everybody facing "forward". Does the Big Table Desk break down this heirarchy by facing people towards one another, sharing a big desk instead of staking out territory? Is the big table desk a microcosm, a representation of a healthy organizational structure?
No comment ;)
It seems to be popular with designers, presumably due to their collaborative working needs.
Mind you, it also looks a bit like a Taylorist workplace layout from 1904, of which Wired says:
American engineer Frederick Taylor was obsessed with efficiency and oversight and is credited as one of the first people to actually design an office space. Taylor crowded workers together in a completely open environment while bosses looked on from private offices, much like on a factory floor.
So, after spending an hour or two attempting to figure out where the hell UPC had moved Channel 4 to, I eventually found out that it was now being broadcast on 543 Mhz. I also found out that this wasn't part of the standard list of A1 to A30 channels in the "pal-ireland" range. :(
Thankfully, I then found this Frequency to MythTV channel converter page; here's the correct values to use on the MythWeb channels page:
- Freqid = 30
- Finetune = -4
TopatoCo: Time Traveler Essentials Shirt : 'Go back in time wearing this and you'll invent heavier-than-air flight! YOU'LL discover penicillin. YOU'LL be the first to isolate aluminum. Did you know aluminum used to be more valuable than gold? YOU'RE GONNA BE RICH.'
(tags: funny history science design clothing t-shirts awesome topato)
EU to require internet filtering? : essentially mandating IWF-style (ie. half-assed and broken) filtering in all EU countries, I would imagine
(tags: iwf eu europe filtering censorship privacy isps ireland ec)Sorting Algorithm Animations : very nice visualizations of insertion, selection, bubble, shell, merge, heap, quick and quick3 sorts
(tags: javascript algorithms coding visualization sorting demo via:reddit)blekko's ambient cluster health visualization : nice, custom sysadmin dataviz, via Rich Skrenta
(tags: sysadmin data monitoring visualization dataviz operations charts nagios)The reality behind Area 51 : A top-secret 1960's spy plane project called OXCART. 'The shape of OXCART was unprecedented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, "UFO".' but then -- isn't that what they'd _want_ you to think? ;)
(tags: area51 ufo debunking fortean cold-war spy-planes oxcart u-2 nevada history)
SpamAssassin benchmarked on LLVM : similar to Google's "Unladen Swallow" port of Python. results aren't stellar -- yet -- but there's plenty of room -- and possible contracts
(tags: via:matt unladen-swallow google llvm perl porting benchmarks spamassassin speed optimization)
Scheduled Tasks With Cron on Google App Engine : much needed. 'The App Engine Cron Service allows you to configure regularly scheduled tasks that operate at defined times or regular intervals.'
(tags: cron async python google appengine gae background)aws : comprehensive all-in-one perl script giving easy command-line access to Amazon EC2 and S3; very nicely packaged -- installs with a single "curl" command! brilliant
(tags: via:mattb ec2 s3 aws perl scripts command-line)
downsides of the Akamai IP Application Accelerator : certainly not all roses. (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf akamai networking tcp-ip private-networks routing)Facebook lose a RAID group : on one of their legacy NetApps? hmm
(tags: netapp facebook raid raid5 backup storage data-loss hard-disks)Facebook's Haystack photo storage backend : ditching NetApp and Akamai, rolling their own massive-blob storage cloud
(tags: storage scaling facebook web http scalability photos infrastructure distributed haystack cdn cloud netapp)The Game Industry - Push cx : 'Looking in, it’s clear that the [computer] game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does.' +1; a lot of people, including myself, have also come to that conclusion, over the years
(tags: games coding work business management game-industry ea igda quality-of-life crunch-mode mismanagement scheduling)
Message Queue evaluation notes from Second Life : fantastic research notes; they've identified a lot of niggles and problems with the existing queueing systems out there
(tags: messaging scalability queueing rabbitmq mq amqp jms queue secondlife via:proggit)Full data export from discogs.com : awesome! full artist/album/track data for decades of dance music releases, released to the public domain
(tags: discogs music dance-music public-domain open-data data tracklistings)comment from RabbitMQ dev regarding the Twitter/Scala/Kestrel drama : 'Writing messaging systems that work under any combination of flows, on any number of machines, and in multiple different reliability scenarios ... is a more interesting problem. Page-to-disk is a way to make RabbitMQ better and address more scenarios.'
(tags: rabbitmq disk persistence queueing messaging async twitter scala kestrel)
Oh man, this Twitter Ruby-vs-Scala language spat is hilarious; talk about handbags at dawn. I loved this exchange in the comments to this post in particular:
I'm mostly surprised that a guy who wrote the book on Scala comes out and says that Scala is better than everything else and someone actually listened and took him seriously. He has a vested interest in saying that Scala is the next big thing and I've yet to see any evidence that Kestrel is better (at anything) than RabbitMQ.
And frankly, I still get fail whales at Twitter on a daily basis, so, what exactly are they so proud about over there?
Kestrel pages queues to disk: if you get more messages than you have memory, it's fine. If RabbitMQ gets more messages than memory, it crashes. We talked to them extensively about this problem and they're going to address it. We were hoping we'd be able to use RabbitMQ or another message queue. We didn't want to be in the message queue business. At this point, given that we know the code and it's performance inside and out, it makes sense to continue using and developing it.
I don't feel like arguing with you but your logic isn't clear to me. It would make sense that if you don't want to be in the message queue business, you'd submit patches against an established message queue to make it work in your situation instead of writing your own message queue, twice. This is overlooking the fact that twitter is basically a massive message queue and you are, in fact, in the message queue business.
Zing!
Amazon Removes Delivery Restrictions To Ireland : great news! we can buy electronics on Amazon again
(tags: amazon ireland delivery via:mneylon shopping e-commerce electronics)Watch out Broughton! Street View fans plan to descend on 'privacy' village for photo fest : 'it has raised the ire of Internet users, who are now campaigning for Street View enthusiasts from across the UK to descend on the village to snap their own perfectly legal photographs.' ha!
(tags: privacy google street-view broughton yokels)
A good post from Joshua Schachter about URL shortening services.
For what it's worth, I ran into the unwanted-interstitial risk. At one stage, before I'd bothered registering jmason.org, sitescooper.taint.org or my other domains, I used a URL-shortening service to provide a memorable, short URL for an open-source application I wrote -- http://zap.to/snarfnews/.
At some point a few years down the line, the forwarding process started accreting ads; eventually they became soft-porn in content, and I was forced to apologise to users for the forwarding I could no longer control!
By now, 10 years down the line, it seems to hijack the page entirely, returning a page in Cyrillic I can't even read :( (apparently it's a page of Flash games; thanks, Alexandr Ciornii, for the interpretation!)
Anyway, lesson learned.
Damien Katz: Moving To California : another developer moves! a lot of people doing it recently, which worries me; will there be any top expertise left outside of the Bay Area at this rate? we need diversity
(tags: diversity bay-area california living work)Angry villagers run Google Street View out of town : fetch the pitchforks! Street View bin worryin' my sheep! Buckinghamshire yokels fear change
(tags: funny privacy uk google street-view buckinghamshire yokels crime paranoia)COBOL ON COGS : 'COBOL ON COGS SUPPORTS STANDARD TERMINALS (VT100 AND IBM 3200) IN THE MOST USEFUL SCREEN CONFIGURATIONS SUCH AS 80X20 AND 40X16' (via Nishad)
(tags: via:nishad funny web coding ruby rails retro webdev cobol)
Twitter has this "Trending Topics" sidebar now, which lists the following topics:
Trending Topics
- TGIF
- National Cleavage
- G20
- Easter
- #grammarsongs
- France
- #rp09
- French
- Grand National
- Report Says Deal
Now, I'm not going to go into the topic of National Cleavage right now. 'Report Says Deal' is intriguing because it makes no sense, until you click through to see:
Real-time results for "Report Says Deal"
- dlloydsecret Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb
- dlloydthemlmpro Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb
- techupdates [PCWrld] Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://tinyurl.com/c63ont
- icidade Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works. http://is.gd/quu9
- chrisgraves Retweeting @CinWomenBlogger: Retweeting @ays: Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works - PC World http://bitly.com/LhT4
So I'd say that Twitter's "Trending Topics" uses N-grams of between 1 and 3 "words" for topic identification. In this case, rather than "Report Says Deal", a better topic string would be something like:
Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works - PC World
or even:
Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works - PC World http://bitly.com/LhT4
Funnily enough this is exactly the issue I ran into while developing this algorithm. The trick at this point is to apply a variant of the BLAST pattern-discovery algorithm, expanding the patterns sideways while they still match the same subsets of the corpus until they're maximal.
Twitter folks, if you can read Perl, "assemble_regexps()" in seek-phrases-in-log in SpamAssassin SVN does this pretty nicely, and reasonably efficiently, and is licensed under the ASL 2.0. ;)
Warren Ellis » The Conclusion Of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (Condensed Version) : hahaha, spot on
(tags: bob-dylan bsg funny religion deus-ex-machina warren-ellis via:fp)Easy AI with Python - PyCon 2009 : 'several basic AI techniques implemented with short, open-source Python code recipes ... For each technique, learn the basic operating principle, discuss an approach using Python, and review a worked out-example. We'll cover database mining using neural nets, automated categorization with a naive Bayesian classifier, solving popular puzzles with depth-first and breath-first [sic] searches, solving more complex puzzles with constraint propagation, and playing a popular game using a probing search strategy.' video: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947373/
(tags: python problem-solving games puzzles ai search constraint-propagation depth-first breadth-first)Amazon Elastic MapReduce : excellent! run Hadoop jobs on EC2, with data hosted on S3. essentially, AWS have integrated a Hadoop dashboard to provide a great web-based and command-line UI
(tags: hadoop mapreduce scalability ec2 s3 aws amazon)Arthur Kade meets Angelina Jolie : best blog ever. Narcissistic meathead 'actor/model' type waxes lyrical on how Angelina Jolie is '“mother hot”, rather than “stripper hot”': 'I would probably rate her an 8.5-9 on my looks scale. I am not that sure that I would even feel the need to come up and initiate a conversation with her if I met her out somewhere.' 'I couldn’t really say that she would stick out for me if I saw her at a hot club like 1Oak or Rosebar.' The entire blog is solid gold idiocy; I'd swear it was fake, but apparently not
(tags: wtf funny arthur-kade blogs narcissism angelina-jolie via:gerry stripper-hot beauty)Google uncloaks once-secret server : GOOG's servers include built-in 12V batteries (and of course lots of velcro). video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgRWURIxgbU (via wmf)
(tags: via:wmf google hardware servers infrastructure batteries electricity energy data-center efficiency pue)
Wrong Tomorrow - pundits vs. time : great idea from Maciej Ceglowski
(tags: pundits windbags bullshit journalism trends futurism future prediction experts wrongtomorrow forecasting futurology predictions)Stable URLs in Mailman mailing list archives : hooray. I requested this ages ago, it's now being implemented
(tags: archival mailing-lists web uris mailman urls addressing permanence mail discussion)Not-so-open Cloud Manifesto rains on interoperability parade : 'The controversy surrounding the Open Cloud Manifesto demonstrates the risk of trying to build interoperability behind closed doors and through exclusionary practices. Such environments are not conducive to building consensus, which is one of the key ingredients of successful standards.'
(tags: collaboration cloud-computing sun open-source open standards politics vendors)Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps : more on IMVU's continuous-deployment concept. interesting that they halt SVN commits on CI build failure, that seems extreme
(tags: imvu deployment software coding sysadmin testing automation build ci process agile continuousdeployment)faceboards.ie : Boards.ie a la Facebook, for April 1. thing is, I think I prefer this UI
(tags: boards.ie community ireland facebook web forums)
The Snooping Dragon : awesome, if terrifying research from Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson on Chinese cyber-surveillance of the Tibetan movement. 'we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They used social phishing to install rootkits on a number of machines and then downloaded sensitive data. People in Tibet may have died as a result.'
(tags: phishing social-phishing dalai-lama security surveillance privacy law china ross-anderson research papers windows microsoft)
German Police Raid Homes of Wikileaks.de Domain Owner : "what the Australian government's secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist has to do with Germany is a mystery. This case is a prime example of multiple governments collaborating in support of censorship." worrying.
(tags: censorship germany legal police wikileaks brbfbi privacy)Fast polling using C, memcached, nginx and libevent : well-written worked-through example of a classic memcached-backed libevent front-end caching system
(tags: http memcached caching optimization scalability plurk libevent nginx polling c)"The Powers That Be Want Action Taken" : 'Gardai were in the [Today FM] offices yesterday looking for email communications between the team and the artist. According to D’Arcy the team were told [..] that “the powers that be want action takenâ€." ffs! how's about taking action against the fraudsters who've bankrupted our country instead? appalling diversionary tactics
(tags: diversions gardai picturegate brian-cowan art pranks today-fm ray-darcy censorship)AWS Toolkit for Eclipse : 'Eclipse extensions automatically configure remote debugger connections for diagnosing problems and debugging software run in the cloud' -- ie. you can set a breakpoint on code running remotely, at EC2. that's pretty awesome (via Steve Loughran)
(tags: via:steveloughran aws ec2 programming java plugins development eclipse cloudcomputing tomcat)Ask a Flowchart: Which Blowhard Am I? : YES
(tags: blowhards funny internet web2.0 magazines wired flowcharts dave-winer)Zooko laid off by AllMyData.com : looks like AllMyData are facing a money crunch ("focussed on keeping costs down"). hopefully this isn't bad news for Tahoe, the fault-tolerant open-source distributed filesystem -- or indeed for Zooko himself
(tags: allmydata zooko money tahoe filesystems storage fault-tolerance funding open-source distributed scalability)RTE Apologise to Brian Cowen for Nudie Pics Report : the national broadcaster apologises, on air, for a news story covering the 'paintings of an Taoiseach in the nude' prank. wtf!
(tags: rte television freedom-of-speech censorship satire wtf apologies soft weakness)
Australian ISP abandons blocking : “We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship,†iiNet managing director Michael Malone said. “It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as ‘unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes.â€
(tags: australia freedom censorship iinet blocking filtering acma)Akamai have developed a parallel internet : and, most surprising of all, it _works_. holy crap. (thanks Antoin!)
(tags: ip-application-accelerator akamai internet routing speed network networking ip latency joelonsoftware copilot via:antoin)Guerilla artist hangs nude Cowen paintings : some prankster put up rather disturbing paintings of Ireland's taoiseach in the National Gallery and Royal Hibernian Academy. "'It's reasonably well painted. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen,' conceded James O'Halloran of Adam's Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers."
(tags: painting pranks ireland galleries brian-cowan politics funny)
New Zealand Halts Internet Copyright Law Changes : excellent. good result from their blackout, then
(tags: new-zealand copyright p2p technology freedom politics internet copyfight blackouts protests)Jungle Disk/Cloud Files scalability woes : Rackspace had to firefight over the weekend to deal with scaling issues with JungleDisk users backing up to their Mosso Cloud Files service. now fixed with a JungleDisk upgrade (2.60c): http://blog.jungledisk.com/2009/03/23/jungle-disk-260c-released-cloud-files-access-restored/
(tags: jungledisk ouch mosso cloud-files scaling online-backup backup caching s3 storage)Puppets, chefs, and community competition : open source intra-project poaching between the Puppet and Chef deployment automation projects
(tags: lwn puppet chef open-source poaching staff contributors developers coding)Creator of Cyc reviews Wolfram Alpha : the hand-curation of its source knowledge base sounds incredibly labour-intensive (and expensive)
(tags: cyc wolfram wolframalpha ai search data ontology semantic-web via:yoz)interview with a 419er : 'i know my God will forgive because i pray to him to replenish the pockets of my clients [read: victims] with double of whatever they loss'
(tags: security spam chat scam 419 fraud chat-log religion via:waxy)