intro to RabbitMQ and py-amqplib : nice and concise, with real-world deployment data. I wish this had been around when I was evaluating AMQP systems in PutPlace
(tags: python mq erlang amqp rabbitmq messaging queue introduction py-amqplib)
Category: Uncategorized
TechWire: How to approach a newspaper interview : really great advice for tech-section interviewees from Adrian Weckler
(tags: advice interviews newspapers journalism adrian-weckler tips pr)best reddit comments thread ever : re ‘X# – XML oriented programming language; the foundation of an open source Enterprise Mashup Server, CRM and Groupware Suite’ — ‘When you do a mashup, you’re supposed to get your peanut butter in my chocolate, not lodge your fork in my goddamned eye socket’
(tags: mashups funny xsharp omgwtfbbq xml java hilarity reddit via:damienkatz)xpra : ‘screen for remote X apps.’ sounds better-maintained and more usable than xmove or NX, to boot (via adulau)
(tags: via:adulau unix x11 desktop gui vnc ssh screen windows xpra)Solvent : ‘a Firefox extension that helps you write screen scrapers for [semweb scraping platform] Piggy Bank.’ Nice idea — hook directly into the browser to specify scraping rules.
(tags: web firefox javascript scraping programming extensions xpath rdf browser semweb solvent)I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle : great article by @mat on the benefits — and dangers — of pervasive geotagging
(tags: geotagging location mapping privacy twitter iphone mobile wired gps mobile-computing mat-honan via:waxy)
Google AppEngine abuse : possibly the first AppEngine site run by spammers — a fake storefront, reportedly
(tags: google appengine abuse web spam scams)TweetBackup : free Twitter backup site; nicely done. runs daily; doesn’t need your Twitter password; and exports to text and HTML
(tags: twitter backup tweets web microblogging)Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores : exhaustive, with great comments from many of the implementors
(tags: storage databases sca scalability memcached architecture aws performance simpledb couchdb dht voldemort scalaris hypertable hbase dynamo)Green party says sorry for e-mail gaffe – Times Online : wow, the “communications manager” for the Green Party is an unrepentant asshat. ‘some bloggers have developed their own set of rules about how they should be approached and the e-mail in question fell foul of these rules.’ Nice non-apology there! Entirely wrong — Unsolicited Bulk Email is spam, even if you’re a politician
(tags: politics ireland spam email greens ube)Irish Torrents : ‘Torrents of RTE, TV3, TG4 content’. a great collection of Irish TV programmes — unclear how well they’re seeded, or their rip quality, though
(tags: irish torrents bittorrent tv television ireland rte tv3 tg4)
I’ve switched my home broadband from Eircom’s 3Mbps all-in-one package to Magnet’s 10Mbps LLU package. It’s about a tenner a month cheaper, and significantly faster of course.
The modem arrived last Friday, about 2 weeks after ordering; that night, when I went to check my mail, I noticed that the DSL had gone down, and indeed so had the phone. I was dreading a weekend without the interwebs, it being 9pm on Friday night — but lo, when I plugged in the Magnet router, it all came up perfectly first time!
Great instructions too. Extremely readable and quite comprehensible for a reasonably non-techie person, I’d reckon. So far, they’ve provided great service, too.
I’m not actually getting the full 10Mbps, unfortunately; it’s RADSL, and I’m only getting 5Mbps when I test it. Just as well I didn’t pay the extra tenner to get their 24Mbps package. Still, that’s a hell of a lot faster than the sub-1Mbps speeds I’ve been getting from Eircom.
It’s hard to notice an effective difference when browsing though, as that kind of traffic is dominated by latency effects rather than throughput.
I haven’t even tried their "PCTV" digital TV system; it seems a bit pointless really, I have a networked PVR already, and anyway I doubt they support Linux.
One thing that’s wierd; when my wife attempts to view video on news.bbc.co.uk on her Mac running Firefox, it stalls with the spinny "loading video" image, and the status line claims that it’s downloading from "ad.doubleclick.net". This worked fine (of course) on Eircom. If I switch to my user account and use Firefox there, it works fine, too — possible difference being that I’m using AdBlock Plus and she’s not. Something to do with the number of simultaneous TCP connections to multiple hosts, maybe? Very odd anyway. It’d be nice to get some time to sit down with tcpdump and figure this one out… any suggestions?
Amazon.com: Your Associate Website Browsing Settings : ‘We keep a record of your visits to Amazon Associate web pages that have Amazon.com content links on them. Among other things, we use this information to better personalize your web experience and improve our Amazon services.’ uh, *no*
(tags: amazon for:jkeyes opt-out ads advertising privacy personalization)Irish e-tailers’ returns policy : Article by Adrian Weckler — Komplett’s returns policy sounds pretty good in particular. and ~50% of complaints at the European Consumer Centre are relating to delivery problems — that’s shocking :(
(tags: delivery couriers shopping adrian-weckler komplett elara sbp returns retailers consumer)Capistrano: From the Beginning : wow, the Rails community have really reinvented a lot of wheels ;)
(tags: capistrano rails deploy sysadmin ruby management)Why Google Employees Quit : massive leak of gripe mails from ex-Googlers about why they left the company
(tags: google techcrunch staff employment satisfaction workplace myths recession jobs management culture hr)A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story Of A Kiva.org Loan : ‘I decided it would be great to try and follow one [Kiva.org microloan] through the system from start to finish, for the benefit of my colleagues who I coaxed into making a loan, and for myself, and for anyone else who is interested.’
(tags: kiva loans microloans charity money video towatch)
Popular Chinese Filtering Circumvention Tools DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix Sell User Data : well, that’s a business model I suppose
(tags: privacy anonymity china security surveillance filtering censorship gpass gfw firephoenix database circumvention internet proxies)
UK ISPs blocking archive.org : due to another overbroad IWF block
(tags: iwf censorship isps uk archive.org the-register)behind the ‘interview with an adware author’ story : paperghost strongly doubting that Matt Knox was quite so squeaky-clean as his recent interview would suggest
(tags: paperghost security malware adware blackhat nasty interviews)HDFS Reliability : short paper from Tom White with post-mortems of some common failures of HDFS in the field, and some best practices to avoid them
(tags: best-practices hadoop hdfs dfs cloud-computing reliability software storage java tom-white bugs)Ross Anderson’s anti-botnet idea : ‘if you complain to abuse@ somebody or other dot com, and more than three hours after that, you get more phish or spam from the same infected machine, then you should have a legal right to claim €10 from them. No need to prove malice, no need to prove actual damage, just “here’s the bill”. A similar scheme has largely sorted out late flights, cancellations and overbookings among cheap airlines in Europe, because now you get €250 [if] EasyJet or Ryanair bump you off the flight to Barcelona.’
(tags: anti-spam ross-anderson via:derek botnets security isps abuse)Dual Pricing.IE : exposing the rip-off pricing of products sold in both Ireland and the UK, with much more expensive prices in .ie. Boots Sanex deodorant is the current worst offender, at UKP0.99 vs EUR2.99
(tags: ireland shopping comparison via:mulley uk pounds euro rip-off consumer)Spam Botnets to Watch in 2009 – Research – SecureWorks : interesting to note that spam rates from botnets unaffected by the McColo shutdown went up during that time, indicating that the spammers are simply renting botnet time and their spam is relatively portable to other engines
(tags: anti-spam botnets secureworks 2009)
Check out what happens when you visit https://www.google.ie/ :
Clicking through Firefox’s ridiculous hoops gets me these dialogs:
Good work, Google and Firefox respectively!
Project Voldemort : ASL-licensed DHT from LinkedIn
(tags: dht apache hashtable voldemort linkedin java storage networking cloud scalability)Twitter leaked visitor usernames to third-party sites via Google Analytics : excellent research by Des Traynor. oops! the hole has since been patched
(tags: twitter privacy analytics tracking google des-traynor exploits vulnerabilities json javascript security)How to Brew – By John Palmer : book on home brewing, recommended by Glynn Foster
(tags: beer homebrew brewing hobbies project diy book toreadf)How to sync Google Calendar with KOrganizer : using GCalDaemon — this works very nicely. it’d be nicer if it was built into KOrganizer, but hey
(tags: gcaldaemon google google-calendar scheduling calendar kde korganizer howto apps pim)Interview with an Adware Author : great interview. ‘In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?’ ‘Um, run UNIX.’
(tags: adware windows blackhat bho malware viruses spyware vista xp)
Xarvester, the new Srizbi? : the evidence looks pretty convincing
(tags: srizbi xarvester marshal botnets anti-spam)Supervisor : ‘a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.’ looks quite sensible, BSD licensed, Python, works on Linux, Solaris, OSX and FreeBSD (via Conall)
(tags: via:conall supervisor daemon monitoring daemontools sysadmin management deployment service init unix linux)
A coworker today, returning from a couple of weeks holiday, bemoaned the quantities of spam he had to wade through. I mentioned a hack I often used in this situation, which was to discard the spam and download the 2 weeks of supposed-nonspam as a huge mbox, and rescan it all with spamassassin — since the intervening 2 weeks gave us plenty of time for the URLs to be blacklisted by URIBLs and IPs to be listed by DNSBLs, this generally results in better spamfilter accuracy, at least in terms of reducing false negatives (the "missed spam"). In other words, it gets rid of most of the remaining spam nicely.
Chatting about this, it occurred to us that it’d be easy enough to generalize this hack into something more widely useful by hooking up the Mail::IMAPClient CPAN module with Mail::SpamAssassin, and in fact, it’d be pretty likely that someone else would already have done so.
Sure enough, a search threw up this node on perlmonks.org, containing a script which did pretty much all that. Here’s a minor freshening: download
reassassinate – run SpamAssassin on an IMAP mailbox, then reupload
Usage: ./reassassinate –user jmason –host mail.example.com –inbox INBOX –junkfolder INBOX.crap
Runs SpamAssassin over all mail messages in an IMAP mailbox, skipping ones it’s processed before. It then reuploads the rewritten messages to two locations depending on whether they are spam or not; nonspam messages are simply re-saved to the original mailbox, spam messages are sent to the mailbox specified in "–junkfolder".
This is especially handy if some time passed since the mails were originally delivered, allowing more of the message contents of spam mails to be blacklisted by third-party DNSBLs and URIBLs in the meantime.
Prerequisites:
- Mail::IMAPClient
- Mail::SpamAssassin
Neil Fraser: Writing: Differential Synchronization : Impressive N-way sync algorithm for syncing text. ‘Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.’
(tags: research networking sync diff patch synchronization neil-fraser google development editing collaboration algorithms differential-synchronization)
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Elements of Spam : ‘(Excerpts courtesy of William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, and Generouss Q. Factotum.)’
(tags: funny spam writing parody english mcsweeneys usage grammar spelling humour)A Warning About the Real Cost of Microformats : Gordon Luk: ‘I’m done with microformats. From now on, i’m either building separate developer tools and relationship, or i’m not’
(tags: html microformats web semweb gordon-luk xhtml)AWS Console : a nice AJAXy web-based GUI for EC2. awesome! Even a commandline weenie like myself can see how useful this is
(tags: ec2 aws amazon web gui ajax)
Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL using Gearman : A talk by Eric Day and Brian Aker at the upcoming MySQL Conference in April: ‘[Gearman] development is now active again with an optimized rewrite in C, along with features such as persistent message queues, queue replication, improved statistics, and advanced job monitoring. For MySQL, there is also a new user defined function to run Gearman jobs, as well as the possibility to write your own aggregate UDFs using Gearman. This gives you the ability to run functions in separate processes, separate servers, and in other languages. The Gearman framework gives you a robust interface to also run these functions reliably in the “cloudâ€. This session will introduce these concepts and give examples of sample applications.’ Persistent queues (at last)? Gearman integration directly in the DB? excellent!
(tags: gearman queueing mysql databases brian-aker mapreduce sql conferences talks papers)
Twitter hack actually due to dictionary attack : see also http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/professed-twitt.html . So, some more Twitter antipatterns: 1. user account with admin privileges, instead of role account; 2. admin account without two-factor auth; 3. no rate limits or other dictionary-attack defenses
(tags: twitter security webdev lessons antipatterns dictionary-attack accounts authorization authentication role-accounts two-factor-authentication rate-limiting via:simonw)Google’s Browser Security Handbook : by lcamtuf, a GOOG employee these days. comprehensive. ‘provide[s] web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers’
(tags: security web google http browsers javascript html reference lcamtuf via:aecolley webdev)Wiggle.co.uk : another option for online bike sales, tipped by Boards.ie denizens. no free shipping here though
(tags: shopping bikes uk cycling)how to install from .ISO in vmware server 2.0 : omg this is utterly idiotic. not impressed
(tags: vmware-server vmware iso installation ui confusing broken)BikeToWork – boards.ie Wiki : a good collection of additional factoids about the govt bike-to-work scheme
(tags: ireland cycling cycle-to-work bikes boards commuting tax)Rechargeable Battery Review AAA NiMH : same again, for AAA batteries this time (via IRR)
(tags: aaa batteries rechargeable via:irregulars recharging nimh electronics reviews testing)The Great Battery Shootout : rechargeable batteries put to the test (a few years ago at least). quick summary: Panasonic shite, Energizer 2300 good (via IRR)
(tags: via:irregulars batteries recharging rechargeable aaa aa electronics testing reviews nimh charger power)The cycle to work scheme : Green Party site on the new Cycle-to-Work scheme, whereby the govt will provide a tax exemption if your employer buys you a bike up to EUR1000 in value
(tags: greens green cycling work hr cycle-to-work tax commuting)
Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US : I came across this a while back and have been looking for it again for a while. Good document on what happened in the former USSR after its society collapsed — pretty funny too. A bit heavy-handed in its criticism of the US though (via Bruce Sterling)
(tags: politics history usa government society russia ussr economy collapse sustainability orlov futurism america world)Moviestar.ie now fulfilled by Screenclick.com : Irish DVDs-by-mail market consolidation
(tags: screenclick moviestar.ie dvd film tv ireland business mergers)LINX Public Affairs – Cinema ratings and web sites : Good commentary on the absurdity of the UK govt’s attempts to impose age-rating certs on websites. ‘From a regulatory point of view, at least part of the Internet is more like a pub, football crowd or playground than it is like a TV programme.’
(tags: linx ratings censorship uk politics filtering web andy-burnham free-speech)
shouting at a disk can increase latency : funny anecdote. bookmarked mainly because of the nice SmokePing-like chart they’re using to chart I/O latency stats… wonder if I can apply similar dataviz for spamassassin’s rule-QA…
(tags: rule-qa spamassassin dataviz infoviz latency smokeping graphs charts storage audio shouting disks solaris funny)
Want to rent a house in Stoneybatter? : I’m letting out our house in the ‘batter; 2 bedrooms, 15 mins from town, cosy, great neighbourhood. A little bit of heaven in Dublin 7
(tags: stoneybatter ads housing rental dublin-7 d7 kirwan-st neighbourhood daft)
Want to rent a house in Stoneybatter? : I’m letting out our house in the ‘batter; 2 bedrooms, 15 mins from town, cosy, great neighbourhood. A little bit of heaven in Dublin 7
(tags: stoneybatter ads housing rental dublin-7 d7 kirwan-st neighbourhood daft)
The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3 : in-depth exploration of the C=64, right down to the I/O bus, in a 64-minute presentation
(tags: hardware c=64 commodore-64 retrocomputing programming talks assembly 6502 6510 commodore via:vvatsa)Mozilla bug finds MITM attack in the wild : annoying Firefox “blah.foo.org uses an invalid security certificate” warnings cause user to open a bug at the Moz bugzilla, whereupon it is discovered that they are being haxx0red
(tags: mitm security firefox mozilla usability pki ssl man-in-the-middle)
The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3 : in-depth exploration of the C=64, right down to the I/O bus, in a 64-minute presentation
(tags: hardware c=64 commodore-64 retrocomputing programming talks assembly 6502 6510 commodore via:vvatsa)Mozilla bug finds MITM attack in the wild : annoying Firefox “blah.foo.org uses an invalid security certificate” warnings cause user to open a bug at the Moz bugzilla, whereupon it is discovered that they are being haxx0red
(tags: mitm security firefox mozilla usability pki ssl man-in-the-middle)
major SSL/TLS cert vendor issued certificates without any verification whatsoever : ‘Five minutes later I was in the possession of a legitimate certificate issued to mozilla.com – no questions asked – no verification checks done – no control validation – no subscriber agreement presented, nothing.’ uh, massive FAIL
(tags: fail ssl tls security encryption comodo)np237: The session non-manager : GNOME’s current “stable” release, appearing in FC10 and Ubuntu 8.10, contains absolutely no session management, at all. wtf
(tags: ubuntu fedora gnome releases software wtf session-management x11)
“Holy Fucking Shit I Was Just In A Plane Crash!” : twittering a pretty scary aviation incident, no less
(tags: news twitter microblogging planes crash aviation web)Hasbro has dropped their idiotic Scrabulous lawsuit : hopefully someone in there finally figured out that the massive resurgence of Scrabble’s popularity was due entirely to the Scrabulous team’s homage. I’m still never playing it again though: worse than crack
(tags: scrabble scrabulous cluetrain copyright hasbro games facebook law)More coverage of the spam fine increase : ‘Mobile-phone users must now “opt in†for a company to contact them. “If you don’t agree to be contacted, then it is an offence to contact you,†[asst DPC] Delaney said. “Opt in†agreements can now only last a year. “Within that period a company must contact you to request that you extend this “‘opt in’ phase,†he said.’
(tags: opt-in anti-spam spam ireland dpc data-protection sms texting law)max fines for Irish spammers increase to EUR250k or 10% of turnover : good news. the Data Protection Commissioner: ‘Increasingly, in this period of economic downturn, my Office is receiving complaints about businesses making unsolicited contact with their past customers for marketing purposes. In many cases, such contact is unlawful and, if carried out by telephone, text message or email it may be a criminal offence. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for non-compliance and I will have no hesitation in applying the full force of the new regulations to offenders.”
(tags: data-protection ireland law anti-spam sms texting spam dpc)Solid State Disks – time to give up that iron oxide habit : legendary Sun performance guy Adrian Cockcroft sez: ‘spinning rust is dead, and a large number of basic assumptions […] are now wrong. In 2009 SSD’s will be faster for read, faster for write, faster for sequential and much much faster for random access, more reliable, more durable, lower power, higher capacity, than discs. […] SAN’s are now a complete waste of time. There is so much reliable I/O performance available in a single drive, that it makes much more sense to put SSD’s in the systems and access them directly. Accessing an SSD over a SAN adds a huge latency and cost overhead. It makes much more sense to use node-to-node replication for critical data.’
(tags: disks storage san ssd performance io future planning)
The story of ORCH5 : via Ian. ‘a one second pre-set sample supplied with the Fairlight synthesiser, and people from hip hoppers to Kate Bush used it all over the place. David Vorhaus (himself an electronic music pioneer in the 1960s) recorded what became ORCH5 in the late 1970s. The sound is the transitional bit of Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird, the moment when the full orchestra come in and do their stuff.’
(tags: fairlight sounds music audio orch5 sample david-vorhaus igor-stravinsky afrika-bambaataa planet-rock hip-hop via:ian)Newgrange Winter Solstice live stream : actually, it was live this morning at 8:58am. Missed it :( Still, the archived stream of the sun entering the burial chamber at Newgrange on the winter solstice is viewable here — and one to bookmark for next year…
(tags: newgrange ireland archaeology solstice history heritage events winter)
Using ATA Over Ethernet On Debian Etch : fantastic tip (via Jeremy). see also http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149
(tags: ata-over-ethernet ata ethernet aoe san iscsi server linux storage filesystems howto disks debian sysadmin)the new BBC Test Card for HD TV : fascinating in-depth analysis of how to actually _use_ the test card — and yes, Carole and her clown doll still stars (via Yoz)
(tags: via:yoz uk tv bbc geek hdtv tutorial testcard hd television nostalgia)
database schema migration : Alias muses on massive Oracle db migration algorithms. looking forward to seeing the full db migration system when/if it eventually hits CPAN
(tags: perl databases migration activerecordmigration sql schemas oracle)AWS signature version 1 is insecure : Amazon have just rolled out version 2 to avoid this bug, which uses HMAC-SHA256 instead of HMAC-SHA1. they’re also now deprecating use of HTTP instead of HTTPS, since the attack requires that the attacker sniff a valid request to reuse its signature
(tags: aws amazon sdb ec2 sqs security holes web-services authentication replay-attacks attacks hmac)
Apparently, I’ve just won a 3 broadband dongle. Sweet! Thanks Pat!
Now I need to recycle a mobile phone through the Jack and Jill Foundation to balance out the karma ;)
Ubuntu on Amazon Web Services : Canonical are issuing official Ubuntu Server AMIs. very good idea; make Ubuntu Server the virtualization platform of choice
(tags: ubuntu virtualization aws ec2 amis ubuntu-server)Archie In… A Different Class! : “Archie” does Pulp’s “Common People”. incredible
(tags: archie pulp funny music)cpan2dist – The CPANPLUS distribution creator : generate RPMs, DEBs etc. from CPAN packages; apparently takes over from the deprecated (but excellent) cpan2rpm
(tags: cpan rpm deb debian perl packaging distribution software red-hat mandriva)
Some people, when facing a problem, think “I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have HORDES OF CUTE PEOPLE WANTING TO SLEEP WITH THEM
Hey lazyweb! Long time, no write.
I’m wondering what setup people use to deal with the following situation. Upstairs, I have an Ubuntu 8.04 server with 71GB of MP3s. Downstairs, I have a stereo system. In between the two is a wireless network. How can I listen to the music downstairs, without simply copying the lot (or subsets thereof) onto a local disk on some appliance down there?
Currently, I’m using a VNC client on a Nokia 770 to control a JuK window on the server. This works great, believe it or not! KDE 3 can be coaxed into providing a fantastic UI for a small touchscreen. This then uses Pulseaudio to transmit the sound output using the ESD protocol over TCP to the ESD server on the N770, and the N770 plays back the sound.
Until a few months ago, this worked great. However, something (either hardware changes, network topology changes, or an upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 on the server) has resulted in effective bitrates between the server and the N770 dropping frequently — hence the audio drops out or changes pitch, rendering it unlistenable :(
I’ve tried using UPNP servers (specifically mediatomb, ushare, and Twonkymedia), with the built-in Media Streamer app on the N770. All fail. MP3s cut off near the end, M3U playlists aren’t supported, and sometimes Media Streamer just locks up. In addition it’s pretty messy trying to get the UPNP servers to notice changes to the MP3 collection.
I’ve also tried using Squeezecenter (nee Slimserver), but the MP3 stream playback support on the N770 is pretty atrocious; there are audible decoding artifacts.
So — anyone got a suggestion? Even something involving iTunes might be helpful — as long as it can at least preserve the Linux server. I’m unlikely to host the full MP3 collection on anything else…
Scaling memcached at Facebook : bit late bookmarking this; awesome speedups though
(tags: facebook memcached udp scalability performance memory scaling)
Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference! : hilarious account of Loic Le Meur’s latest car-crash of a conference, LeWeb ’08
(tags: rant leweb loiclemeur paulcarr leweb08 web2.0 conferences paris guardian web funny)Rent or Own: Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation Comparison for Hadoop Clusters : Rapleaf do the computations on using EC2 vs “grow your own”. waaay cheaper to do the latter for their use-case. also interesting to see lots of Hadoop fans in the comments
(tags: ec2 rapleaf hadoop clustering colo hosting server-farms scalability)Richard Clayton on the IWF/Wikipedia fiasco : ‘The bottom line is that these blocking systems are fragile, easy to evade (even unintentionally), and little more than a fig leaf to save the IWF’s blushes in being so ineffective at getting child abuse image websites removed in a timely manner.’ +1
(tags: iwf richard-clayton filtering wikipedia isps uk blocklists)lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library : contains a 20-line Python script to diff two HTML pages. nice!
(tags: python scraping web http xml css lxml beautiful-soup html)
On Why Auto-Scaling in the Cloud Rocks : asshat on the ORA blog posted something about how he didn’t like auto-scaling server infrastructure, seemingly because he hadn’t seen an implementation he liked. Debunked by SmugMug
(tags: ec2 scaling auto-scaling scalability cloud-computing aws automation)Amazon EC2 Now Available in Europe : Euro-hosted EC2 nodes. woo! wonder if they’re in the Digital Depot…
(tags: aws ec2 amazon hosting ireland europe)LINX on the IWF/Wikipedia fiasco : good wrap-up. hilariously, traffic to the blocked page “increased by more than 200 times normal” [levels], after the block was imposed, due to the press their screw-up received. also the image was still available elsewhere, including Amazon. oops! nice work IWF
(tags: iwf fiasco wikipedia filtering squid proxy blocklists http)
Higher-Order Perl : the entire text of MJD’s functional-programming-in-perl bible! awesome. (I have no less than two copies of the dead-tree version.)
(tags: higher-order-programming perl programming books reference manual free mjd)np237: RubyGem is from Mars, apt-get is from Earth : on the crapness of Ruby and Python distribution mechanisms for server deployment. ‘Developers are reinventing the wheel, engine and transmission. Which is not that bad per se, but by not looking at existing solutions for the problem of making a car move, they are inventing a square wheel, a steam-powered engine and a superconductor-powered magnetic transmission.’
(tags: ruby python perl languages distribution install rpm deb apt unix)Flickr: Documenting Dublin’s cycle lanes : a group dedicated to Dublin City Council’s ineptitude where bike lanes are concerned
(tags: flickr groups photos dublin planning dcc cycling bikes bike-lanes roads road-safety)surround.vim : nifty Vim plugin for working with “surrounding” text entities — quotes, XML tags, parens etc.
(tags: vim plugins text-editing editors)
Wikipedia:Administrators’ noticeboard/2008 IWF action : WP commentary on the repercussions of the IWF censorship
(tags: iwf wikipedia censorship http proxies transparent-proxies cleanfeed uk)IWF blocked Wikipedia; Wikipedia blocks UK ISPs : ouch. IWF decided an image on WP (specifically a “Scorpions” album cover) was illegal. Due to bugs in the “Cleanfeed” implementation, this caused a block of WP’s editing infrastructure for ~95% of UK ISP users. fiasco
(tags: wikipedia wikimedia cleanfeed iwf blocklists uk filtering proxies http censorship fiasco incompetent duh)Install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on a T61p – ThinkWiki : lots and lots of gotchas :( avoid Ubuntu 8.10 on a T61p! I’m finding it buggy as hell
(tags: ubuntu 8.10 intrepid-ibex thinkpad lenovo t61p linux bugs)
How I learnt to love Perl : a great paean to Moose, Test::Class, Devel::DProf, and other good features in modern perl programming
(tags: perl programming via:reddit moose oop objects dprof)Dogs in Elk : another interwebs classic thread. “I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring.”
(tags: dogs-in-elk dogs funny humour elk food wildlife carrion snoring carcass)Microsoft offers free access to CPAN developers : 6 VMs running different versions of Windows, in order to ensure CPAN modules run OK on ‘doze. this is awesome, and UNIX vendors should be doing the same
(tags: perl microsoft windows cpan testing porting strawberry-perl xp vista)Python Makes Me Nervous – Ted Dziuba : both points are pretty valid, I’ve been hurt by them before
(tags: python duck-typing exceptions coding reliability ted-dziuba software)
KDE3.5 for Ubuntu Intrepid : the Kubuntu team went with the half-baked and broken usability nightmare that is KDE 4 for the latest Ubuntu release. here’s packages to revert back to the working KDE 3.5.1. I hope they work :(
(tags: kubuntu ubuntu kde desktops linux packaging deb kde4 usability repositories)
Unlocking iPhone 3Gs — the Vietnamese way : hardware hacking, Bunnie-style. hard. core (via Danny)
(tags: via:malaclyps hardware hacking iphone mobile apple vietnam unlocking)
Social Media Backlash Against Cheaters and Fleshmongers : Ian Kallen on spam-battling at Technorati, Ning, Digg, YT: ‘It seems to be an accepted truism that social media oft demonstrates, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites. Yep, I’ve talked to folks from Six Apart, WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter and elsewhere. We’re all feeling the pains of success. Over the past month at Technorati, we’ve purged about 80% of the porn that was active in the search index. Sure, we’re not spam free yet but the index is getting a lot cleaner.’
(tags: anti-spam web technorati ning digg youtube ian-kallen)Mathematica on Amazon EC2 : legendary maths app can now spawn EC2 servers to perform heavyweight calculations in parallel. Very clever move! (via Waxy)
(tags: ec2 aws mathematica cloud-computing elastic maths via:waxy)