Web: a while back, I posted some musings about a web service to help authenticate users as members of a private group, similarly to how TypeKey authenticates users in general.
Category: Uncategorized
Hardware: I’ve been needing a decent backup solution, since I’ve got 60GB of crud on my hard disk that isn’t being rsynced offsite yet. So I bought myself a nifty DVD writer from woot.com a week ago, supporting DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD-R, and a spindle of 20 DVD+Rs from Target. Little did I realise the world of pain I was entering.
Linux: the MythTV hacking continues (infrequently). Here’s the latest — a way to play music from my laptop, with sound output via the Mythbox.
Web: i caught sight of (8 June 2005, Interconnected), on the geographical insularity of the dot-com boom. A good read:
Web: I link-blogged this, but it’s generated some email already, so it deserves a proper posting.
Linux: Linux sound is
still a mess. Due to the ever-changing ‘sound server of the week’
system used to decide how an app should output sound, it’s perfectly
possible to have 3 apps on your desktop happily making noise at the same
time, while another app complains about requiring exclusive access to
/dev/dsp — or worse, hangs silently while it attempts to grab
an exclusive lock on the device.
Patents: in a recent discussion about games and patents, it emerged that these common elements are patented:
Life: seeing as yesterday was World No Tobacco Day, it’s worth noting that I gave up smoking last Thursday.
Net: Fergus Cassidy reports that ‘bandwidth-starved TDs and Senators’ in the Oireachtas will be taking a shortcut around Ireland’s woeful consumer broadband situation, especially in terms of deployment outside of the main urban areas.
Security: the use of backscatter x-ray scanners has hit the US press now that the TSA are taking an interest.
Apache: It seems I’ve been elected as a member of the Apache Software Foundation! That’s a nice surprise ;)
Security: Adam Shostack has been tracking the immense volume of recent bank disclosures of compromised customer data. Bruce Schneier has also commented, and an interesting question arose in his posting’s comments — why are there seemingly no similar problems with European banks?
Hardware: Slashdot: Nokia’s Linux Handheld. It’s to be called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, and runs on an open source development platform called Maemo.
Clothing: I love Threadless. Unfortunately, they don’t have an RSS feed for new T-shirts. So I wrote a quick scraper:
Here’s a preview of what the feed looks like:
Weblogs: there’s been a few attempts to mine ‘trend’ data from del.icio.us:
Mr. Justice Bradley, discussing US patent law in 1882:
Computing: mentioned in a Slashdot thread about green server farms — a page extolling the OpenVPS virtual-server software’s environmental benefits:
Spam: About this time last year, German neo-nazis launched a massive worldwide spam run with the aid of the Sober.H worm.
Dublin: Sorry to the non-Dublin readership, I’m sure you all are getting quite bored of this by now. But anyway…
TV: I’ve taken a little time to throw up my PVR build log.
UNIX: a quick recap of a good tip combo picked up from ILUG recently. To paraphrase Conor Wynne’s original question:
UNIX: another useful tip. Bash supports a wide variety of command line editing tricks; you have the usual GUIish editing (backspace, insert new characters, delete, blah blah) through the GNU Readline library, and in addition to that you have the traditional csh-style history expansion (like ‘!!’ to refer to the previous command typed).
Ireland: Worth watching for european software-patent watchers, Forfás, Ireland’s ‘national policy advisory board on enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation’ are running a series of monthly seminars on ‘Intellectual Property’ in association with Licensing Executives Society Britain and Ireland.
Patents: It seems the Irish Software Association has a new chairperson, namely Bernadette Cullinane. Whether this has anything to do with Cathal Friel’s ‘out of line’ statements, who knows…
Privacy: after reading Adam Shostack’s weblog posting about private/anonymous blogging, I’ve been driven to think about that, and would up writing up a case study of Cogair, which was an influential anonymously-published proto-weblog in Ireland in the ’90s.
TV: here’s a quick update on my PVR box progress. I have a very extensive /etc/LOG which I should probably just publish as-is, really, rather than trying to make it legible ;)
Malware: spotted on NANOG — Six PCs caused BigPond problems:
Spam: Matthew Wilson at Boomer Consulting has been having a field day — it looks like some smart google hacking has thrown up some doozies of places that should have fixed this by now:
Open Source: on the 18th March the Irish Times published a commercial supplement for Microsoft. Naturally, given that it was paid advertising, there were lots of MS plugs — but in the mix there was also a couple of more worrying articles: one by Tom Kitt, government ‘Minister for the Information Society’, noting
Health: On a lighter note, I’ve been getting through my last two weeks mail and RSS data, and came across this beauty.
Using sound as a dead man’s switch
Software: a nifty trick in this Slashdot comment: