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Category: Uncategorized

MS Patents sudo(8)

Patents: The varchars.com scraped RSS feeds now include new patent grants and applications by certain companies! Interesting, although given that most developers are advised not to look, not advisable ;)

RFID Security

Security: It looks like the security people are starting to take a look at RFID, and it’s not pretty.

Spamusement rocks!

Spam: oh man, Spamusement started off well, and has just been getting better and better; * HEATH WARNING * had me laughing out loud, and the idea of linking the entries since August 8 as a series is genius.

Announcing IPC::DirQueue

Perl: So, I wrote a new CPAN module recently — IPC::DirQueue. It implements a nifty design pattern for slightly larger systems, ones where multiple processes, possibly on multiple machines, must collaborate to deal with incoming task submissions. To quote the POD:

CEAS Roundup

Spam: So, CEAS was great fun, and very educational:

BEST SONG EVER — identified!

Funny: Some of the taint.org readership (that’s you, Nishad) may be familiar with BEST SONG EVER.mp3 — it’s an insane, 10-minute workout: one guy ranting at a high pitch in some east-asian language at an incredible speed over some cheesy Casio, hardly taking a breath, punctuated by bizarre 7-Zark-7-style ribbits and squawks. By the end of it, he’s nearly hoarse. It is incredibly bizarre. Turkopop has nothing on this.

Shared, Collaborative Calendaring

Web: Worth noting for the various sites in Ireland and the UK that I’ve heard of recently, who have been looking for ways to do shared, collaborative calendaring of upcoming public events: upcoming.org is your man.

Microsoft 0wnz ‘http’

Web: Back in 2002, it occurred to someone to check the Google search results for ‘http’, to figure out what the most popular sites were.

Announcing a new script

Web: Minor software announcement — after some time using HTMLThumbnail, album, and even WebMake to build photo galleries, I finally got peeved enough, and gave in to the temptation of ‘not invented here’. ;)

The ‘humans are 99.84% accurate’ figure

Spam: ‘The spam-classifying accuracy of a human being is 99.84%’. This statement has passed into SlashDot lore as the gospel truth, so time for some debunking.

Cormack and Lynam’s study on supervised spam detection

Spam: or, ‘SlashDot spam drama’. So, a few days ago, I forwarded a link to a paper I’d been sent — it’s a great paper, and I’m not just saying that because SpamAssassin did well — it really tests some of the popular open-source spam filters comprehensively, and correctly. (The authors have 24 years of information retrieval research between them.)

WINW

Net: WINW Is Not WASTE: ‘WINW is a small worlds networking utility. It was inspired by WASTE … (WINW) has diverged from its original mission to create a clean-room WASTE clone. Today, the WINW feature set is different from that of WASTE, and its protocol is incompatible with WASTE’s protocol. However, WINW and WASTE achieve similar goals: they allow people who trust each other to communicate securely.’