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Links for 2009-07-08

Gravatar Fail

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

Links for 2009-07-06

Open source ‘full text’ bookmarklet and feed filter

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is:

fivefilters.org: Create Full-Text Feeds

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

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

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

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

Links for 2009-07-03

Links for 2009-07-02

Links for 2009-07-01

User script: add my delicious search results to Google

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

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

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

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

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

Screenshot:

Enjoy!

Links for 2009-06-30

Links for 2009-06-28

Still using perl 5.6.x?

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

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

Links for 2009-06-24

Links for 2009-06-23

Links for 2009-06-22

IBM Ad Execs Who Should Be Fired

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

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

Jaw-dropping. That would be this Galway?

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

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

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

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

Links for 2009-06-18

Links for 2009-06-13

Links for 2009-06-11

Links for 2009-06-10

Links for 2009-06-06

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

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

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

Links for 2009-06-04

Mae’s OK!

Well, that was a really scary few days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pics on Flickr!

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

Links for 2009-05-31

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

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

Links for 2009-05-30

Links for 2009-05-28

Michael Woods saying “the Brits made us do it”

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

Links for 2009-05-24

Links for 2009-05-21

Links for 2009-05-20

Links for 2009-05-19

Links for 2009-05-18

New EC2 Features

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

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

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

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

Links for 2009-05-12

Links for 2009-05-11

Spirit of Ireland

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

Links for 2009-05-06

Links for 2009-05-01

Irish Examiner innumeracy

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

Links for 2009-04-29

Links for 2009-04-25

Links for 2009-04-24

Links for 2009-04-22

Links for 2009-04-21

Links for 2009-04-20

Links for 2009-04-17

Reminder: Irish computing history talk next Monday

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

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

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

Big table desking

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

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

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

Links for 2009-04-08

Links for 2009-04-07

Links for 2009-04-06

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

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

URL shortening services: my experience

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

“Report Says Deal”

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

Links for 2009-04-01

Links for 2009-03-30

OSSBarCamp this weekend

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

Links for 2009-03-24

Links for 2009-03-23