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Links for 2009-05-28

Published May 28, 2009

Michael Woods saying “the Brits made us do it”

Published May 28, 2009

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.

Links for 2009-05-25

Published May 25, 2009

Links for 2009-05-24

Published May 24, 2009

Links for 2009-05-21

Published May 21, 2009

Links for 2009-05-20

Published May 20, 2009

Links for 2009-05-19

Published May 19, 2009

Links for 2009-05-18

Published May 18, 2009

New EC2 Features

Published May 18, 2009

Amazon Cloudwatch:

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.

Auto-Scaling:

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 ;)

Elastic Load Balancing:

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.

Links for 2009-05-15

Published May 15, 2009

The Pay-No-Attention-To-Our-Tiny-Logo Party

Published May 15, 2009

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...

Spoon’s Rhubodka Recipe

Published May 15, 2009

Today on Twitter, the perennial rhubarb topic -- ie. what to do with all this rhubarb -- came up. Here's a recipe I picked up from a man called spoon which may help:

I've mentioned this before, but just in case.... Rhumember kids:

  • 1 empty 2 litre bottle
  • 4 or 5 sticks of pink rhubarb
  • 110g caster sugar
  • 1 litre of vodka

Cut the rhubarb into inch chunks and put them into the empty bottle until it is not empty any more and you have run out of rhubarb.

Add the sugar

Add the Vodka

Shake vigorously

Leave to stand in a dark corner for maybe 4 weeks or until you can't wait any longer. You should certainly wait until all the sugar has gone. The longer you leave it the more Rhubarby goodness will be pulled out by the sugar.

Strain all the rhubarb out.

CONGRATULATION. YOU HAVE UNLOCKED RHUBODKA.

DRINK THE RHUBODKA

It sounds awful, but instead of being that, it is fucking awesome.

I have a bottle of this stewing away on top of my kitchen cabinet. It should be ready just in time to toast the arrival of child #2 ;)

PS: "rhubodka" is a googlewhack!

Links for 2009-05-13

Published May 13, 2009

Links for 2009-05-12

Published May 12, 2009

Links for 2009-05-11

Published May 11, 2009

Spirit of Ireland

Published May 11, 2009

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!

(image credit: CC-licensed image from Ganders on Flickr. thanks!)

Links for 2009-05-07

Published May 7, 2009

Links for 2009-05-06

Published May 6, 2009

Links for 2009-05-01

Published May 1, 2009

Irish Examiner innumeracy

Published May 1, 2009

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!

Links for 2009-04-30

Published April 30, 2009

Links for 2009-04-29

Published April 29, 2009

Links for 2009-04-25

Published April 25, 2009

Links for 2009-04-24

Published April 24, 2009

Links for 2009-04-22

Published April 22, 2009

Links for 2009-04-21

Published April 21, 2009

Links for 2009-04-20

Published April 20, 2009

Links for 2009-04-17

Published April 17, 2009

Reminder: Irish computing history talk next Monday

Published April 17, 2009

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

Links for 2009-04-16

Published April 16, 2009

Linux per-process I/O performance: measuring the wrong thing

Published April 15, 2009

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...

Links for 2009-04-14

Published April 14, 2009

Big table desking

Published April 14, 2009

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.

YouBloom plug

Published April 14, 2009

Last week I got a very nice mail looking to plug a new music site:

'I'm not sure if this would interest you at all but wanted to pass on the link to a new website called YouBloom.

It's a new social networking and e-commerce website set up with independent artists in mind - to help them to make make real money (unlike MySpace etc which just make money from the artists)! It was set up by Irish Musician Phil Harrington and is backed by Sir Bob Geldof.

Admittedly I am involved with the website. I have been helping bring artists on site for the last few months, since I was introduced to the concept by a friend, but would love for you to take a look at the site anyway - even if it turns out to be of no interest to you.'

I normally wouldn't post these, but I'm a sucker for flattery ;) and the poster had taken the time to read my blog a little. It also looks like the site allows bands to offer free MP3 downloads of their tunes, which IMO is a key factor for bands trying to get promotion.

UPC.ie’s new Channel 4 frequency for MythTV

Published April 12, 2009

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

Links for 2009-04-10

Published April 10, 2009

Links for 2009-04-08

Published April 8, 2009

Links for 2009-04-07

Published April 7, 2009

Links for 2009-04-06

Published April 6, 2009

“you are, in fact, in the message queue business”

Published April 6, 2009

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:

BJ Clark:

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?

Steve Jenson:

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.

BJ Clark:

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!

Links for 2009-04-05

Published April 5, 2009

URL shortening services: my experience

Published April 5, 2009

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.

Links for 2009-04-03

Published April 3, 2009

“Report Says Deal”

Published April 3, 2009

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"

  1. Too_cool_normal dlloydsecret Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb half a minute ago from twitterfeed    
  2. Orig_8102_003_normal dlloydthemlmpro Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb 1 minute ago from twitterfeed    
  3. Ad-tech-paul2_normal techupdates [PCWrld] Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://tinyurl.com/c63ont 3 minutes ago from twitterfeed    
  4. Orkut_normal icidade Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works. http://is.gd/quu9 4 minutes ago from TweetDeck    
  5. Img00315_normal chrisgraves Retweeting @CinWomenBlogger: Retweeting @ays: Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works - PC World http://bitly.com/LhT4 6 minutes ago from twhirl

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. ;)

Links for 2009-04-02

Published April 2, 2009

Links for 2009-04-01

Published April 1, 2009

Links for 2009-03-30

Published March 30, 2009

OSSBarCamp this weekend

Published March 26, 2009

It's two days until OSSBarCamp, a free open-source-focussed Bar Camp unconference at Kevin Street DIT, this Saturday. I'm looking forward to it -- although unfortunately I missed the boat on giving a talk. (Unlike the traditional Bar Camp model, this is using a pre-booked talk system.)

Particularly if you're working with open source in Ireland, you should come along!

I have high hopes for John Looney's discussion of cloud computing and how it interacts with open source. Let's hope he's not too Google-biased in his definition of "cloud computing". ;)

Also of interest -- Fintan Boyle's "An Introduction To Developing With Flex". To be honest, I hadn't even realised that Adobe Flex was now open source. cool.

Links for 2009-03-25

Published March 25, 2009

Links for 2009-03-24

Published March 24, 2009

Links for 2009-03-23

Published March 23, 2009

Talk: Early days of Computing in Ireland

Published March 23, 2009

On Monday April 20th, 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: 'Reminiscences of Early days of Computing in Ireland':

In 1957 the Irish Sugar Company installed the first stored program computer in Ireland. Other large organisations slowly followed suit.

Gordon Clarke will discuss how the early computers enhanced the electro-mechanical systems that had developed over the previous 60 years. He will talk about their specifications, a few of the first applications and tell the story of the very early years of designing and developing computer based systems.

All Welcome. Admission Free. No booking required. This event will be web-cast

For Details: www.engineersireland.ie, or Con Kehely: (01) 6860113 (con.kehely /at/ dublincity.ie)

Location: Engineers Ireland, 22 Clyde Road D4

Sounds great! Thanks to Frank Duignan on the ILUG list for forwarding the notice.

Links for 2009-03-20

Published March 20, 2009

4chan Memes, circa 1889

Published March 20, 2009

In the comments to this unremarkable story about 4chan's Boxxy fad, I came across this gem from CSClark:

I don't know why I didn't think to see if this sort of phenomenon was covered in Extraordinary Popular Delusions... Of course, it is.

Walk where we will, we cannot help hearing from every side a phrase repeated with delight, and received with laughter, by men with hard hands and dirty faces, by saucy butcher lads and errand-boys, by loose women, by hackney coachmen, cabriolet-drivers, and idle fellows who loiter at the corners of streets. Not one utters this phrase without producing a laugh from all within hearing. It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question; in short, it is the favourite slang phrase of the day, a phrase that, while its brief season of popularity lasts, throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour, and gives them reason to laugh as well as their more fortunate fellows in a higher stage of society.

Wherein we also learn that the FAIL of the day was Quoz:

When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip, and an impatient shrug of his shoulders. The universal monosyllable conveyed all his meaning, and not only told his opponent that he lied, but that he erred egregiously if he thought that any one was such a nincompoop as to believe him.

I'm also sure I've read of a fad - Greek, Roman, 18th century, something like that - where a group of young (aristocratic?) men who would suddenly grab a common woman and proclaim her Helen and make her their queen and swear to die for her and so on. And the tearing down of such idols could be seen, if you were wont to be pretentious like me, as part of Frazer's Golden Bough's Sacrificial King idea, although I'm not sure script kiddies care if the crops grow. (One other problem with that is that Frazer was romancing; but so are the more literal memecists, so yah!)

Since then however, it appears that "quoz" has entirely flipped meaning, according to UrbanDictionary:

slang for quality, a cockney term for something good. usually accompanied with a hand action of slaping ur index finger against the stationary thumb and middle finger. 'thats quoz man! propa quoz.' finger slappy hand thingy

Links for 2009-03-19

Published March 19, 2009

Links for 2009-03-18

Published March 18, 2009

“Fundamentally flawed”

Published March 18, 2009

Killer presentation -- "RPC And Its Offspring: Convenient, Yet Fundamentally Flawed" from Steve Vinoski, who presented it at QCon London last week. It's full of reminders of the mid-90's, hacking away on CORBA technology -- Steve was one of the key players at Iona while I was there.

But never mind where we've been; let me hit you with the summary slide to show where Steve's going:

  • RPC is a convenient but flawed accident of history

    • 1980s research focused on monoliths of programming languages, distributed applications, and operating systems
    • each computer vendor of the time owned their own full stack, from language to hardware and network, and you used what they gave you
    • imperative languages won back then simply because of their superior performance at that time

  • It’s almost 2010, folks — we can do WAY better

    • pull your head from the imperative language sand and learn functional programming
    • the world is many-core and highly distributed, and the old ways aren’t going to keep working much longer

Awesome ;)

Links for 2009-03-16

Published March 16, 2009

A plug for Kiva.org

Published March 14, 2009

I just made a loan using Kiva.org to a weaver in Nepal and a group of Vietnamese broom makers.

You can go to Kiva's website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent -- and you get updates letting you know how the entrepreneur is going.

The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back - and Kiva's loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

Kiva's microfinancing seems like a nice way of helping the developing world, and I've heard good things about it. Here's hoping it works out well for my two recipients!

Links for 2009-03-13

Published March 13, 2009

Links for 2009-03-12

Published March 12, 2009

Links for 2009-03-11

Published March 11, 2009

Google Reader productivity hack: change your Home

Published March 11, 2009

So, if you use Google Reader, read your news with the "All items" page, and are subscribed to hundreds of feeds, it can be pretty overwhelming. I've found a better way to deal with this.

Select a 'most important' subset of feeds. For each of those, click through to the feed details page, hit the "Feed Settings..." menu, and select "Change folders...". Put the feed into a new "top" folder (creating it if necessary).

Now go to "Settings" -> "Preferences" and check out the "Start page" preference. By default, it's set to "Home"; change it to "Folders and Tags: top".

Hey presto -- now, when you load Google Reader, it'll come up with your "top" items. You can get through those quickly enough, and get on to other more important tasks. When you're bored and need something to read, though, just hit "Navigation" -> "All items" (or even just type 'ga'), and every other feed is now there for your delectation. Sweet!

Links for 2009-03-10

Published March 10, 2009

Links for 2009-03-05

Published March 5, 2009

Ready for the blackout?

Published March 4, 2009

Reminder -- Ireland's Blackout Week starts tomorrow:

Take part in Blackout Week

  1. To demonstrate your feelings about [IRMA's censorship demands], you can make your avatar black on any websites you have a presence on.
  2. This is inspired by Creative Freedom New Zealand's blackout campaign.
  3. From Black Thursday on the 5th of March, for one week, set your picture on sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, MSN, etc black to raise awareness for Blackout Ireland.
  4. On that Thursday we encourage you to express yourself publicly about this issue, whether by blog posts, letters to newspapers or any form of communication you can think of.

Links for 2009-03-03

Published March 3, 2009

  • Locale : 'Locale allows you to create Situations, which specify Conditions under which your Settings should change; e.g. your "At Work" situation might notice when your location condition is "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway," and trigger your ringer to vibrate.' in essence, rule-based AI for your phone. want it! and the phone too while I'm at it!
    (tags: want android phone apps google location mapping)

Using VC to track system config changes by mail

Published March 3, 2009

Here's a great idea from a thread on the SpamAssassin users list, from Roger Marquis:

Karsten Bräckelmann [questioning the utility of a mechanism to dump the entire contents of the SpamAssassin configuration database]:

'postconf' without the handy -n switch dumps about 500 lines. The equivalent dump for SA including the rules is about 6000 lines. And that's a plain dump, without following and unfolding meta rules or anything.

Whether 6K or 60K would not necessarily make a difference to how I would like to use an SA 'postconf -n' equivalent. That use is change management. The intent is not in the full report itself but in its deltas.

As full time mail/systems admins we get invaluable data from tripwire/integrit, 'postconf -n', dconf, 'rpm -qa', 'dpkg -l *', 'pkg_info -a', ... whose output is checked in to RCS daily. This provides a nice configuration snapshot and historical record but its real usefulness comes from rcsdiff piped into a daily report. These are (usually) relatively concise, and IMO, absolutely essential for monitoring production Unix/Linux systems.

I like it! I think I'd check it into a git repo, though. The concept of applying VC smarts to traditional sysadmin tasks is definitely a meme on the way up -- see also etckeeper.

Links for 2009-03-02

Published March 2, 2009

Links for 2009-02-27

Published February 27, 2009

Blackout Ireland – a response to IRMA’s censorship demands

Published February 27, 2009

As Adrian noted last week, IRMA are demanding that Eircom block the Pirate Bay -- first on a list of websites they don't like -- on pain of being sued. On top of that, they intend for the other Irish ISPs to follow suit -- here's a key line from the letter they sent to Blacknight MD Michele Neylon:

in the event of a positive response to this letter it is proposed to make practical arrangements with Blacknight of a like nature to those made with eircom.

If that comes to pass, this will be an appalling situation for Irish internet users, and we need to act to ensure it doesn't happen. Digital Rights Ireland:

The net effect of this scheme, if it is allowed to go into effect, will be to impose an internet death penalty on two groups. On users, who will be cut off on the allegation of a private body, with no court involvement, and on websites, which could be blocked to Irish users based on a court hearing where only one side is heard.

Pace Mulley:

So first they’ll start with the Pirate Bay. Then comes Mininova, IsoHunt, then comes YouTube (they have dodgy stuff, right?), how long before we have Boards.ie because someone quoted a newspaper article or a section of a book?

Digital Rights Ireland have posted an excellent document detailing the following plan of action for Irish internet users concerned about this:

  • Contact your ISP and let them know that this is a key issue for you, as their customer.

  • Join up with your fellow netizens. Subscribe to the Blackout Ireland blog. Follow the #blackoutirl hashtag on Twitter. Join the Blackout Ireland Facebook group. It looks likely that there'll be a week-long blackout campaign starting next Thursday, March 5th.

  • Contact politicians. This is likely to cause irreparable damage to the Irish internet, so our pols should be very worried. See the DRI post for details on getting in touch with Minister for Communications Eamonn Ryan.

New Zealand is running their own blackout campaign right now, so that may help our planning.

International readers -- make no mistake, you're next. IRMA in this case is acting as the local delegate of IFPI, which stated in 2007 that this was one of the 3 technical options for ISPs to control piracy:

Here's some other interesting coverage:

Fantastic interview with BitBuzz CEO Alex French:

If ISPs, including Eircom, agree not to oppose blocking access to The Pirate Bay and other similar websites, is this not an agreement to web censorship? “I don’t think there is any other way to interpret it,” said French.

“They are essentially agreeing to censor certain websites at the behest of the recording industry, without these websites ever having necessarily shown to be illegal in the Republic of Ireland. I would have a huge concern over what other websites may be blocked and what other industries will pile in now that the precedent has been set.”

Some sample letters:

And further discussion -- here's a massive boards.ie discussion thread, now closed in favour of this newer thread.

Update: here's the letter I sent to the Minister, if you're curious or need inspiration.

Links for 2009-02-26

Published February 26, 2009

Links for 2009-02-25

Published February 25, 2009

Ubuntu to bundle Eucalyptus

Published February 25, 2009

Introducing Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10:

What if you want to build an EC2-style cloud of your own? Of all the trees in the wood, a Koala's favourite leaf is Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware. It's no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty - during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs.

A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat, and waking up when there's work to be done. No need to drink at the energy fountain when there's nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will help take the edge off the bear market.

AWESOME -- exactly where the Linux server needs to go. Eucalyptus is the future of server farms. Really looking forward to this...

Links for 2009-02-24

Published February 24, 2009

Blimey, I won

Published February 24, 2009

Somehow or other, I seem to have won the 2009 Irish Blog Award for Best Technology Blog/Blogger! To be honest, for the last year I haven't been spending as much time on the blog as before, due mainly to a rather compelling distraction, so I'm doubly grateful for winning.

Unfortunately, I was out of the country, at Nishad and Janet's wedding, so missed my chance to get up on stage and thank my fellow bloggers in person -- but I asked John to do so instead. Seems he in turn got stage fright and delegated to his missus, who picked up the trophy. Thanks Fiona! That's probably just as well, since I'm pretty incoherent in that kind of situation myself.

Cheers to my fellow nominees, Eoghan, Robin, Michele and Pat. One of you guys should totally have won ;)

And last of all -- cheers to BitBuzz for sponsoring the category, and Mulley for the whole bash. I definitely have to turn up next year!

Now I need to put more time in this year to really earn that award...

Links for 2009-02-16

Published February 16, 2009