Linux: If you use Fedora Core 1, here’s a yum stanza to download and install Subversion.
Justin's Linklog Posts
Software: Nelson Minar: Primitive Debugging. Nelson quotes Kernighan, ‘The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements’, and assents from a viewpoint a quarter of a century later. Strange but true; I find this also. Why is that?
Ireland: So, Sarah Carey got called up to testify at the Moriarty Tribunal, since she was involved with ESAT. In the process she notes that she ‘was slightly freaked out when the Chairman, in the process of reprimanding me for leaking information, made reference to my media activities AND my website! So are they reading my blog?’
Spam: Andrew ‘tridge’ Tridgell’s junkcode directory really does contain some useful snippets, like he said. Here’s spamsum, a checksum algorithm for hashing spam text:
Web: Google Labs has a nifty toy called Google Sets; name a few items, and it’ll tell you what other items have been seen in conjunction with it.
Open Source: Edd Dumbill on the Planets. It seems the latest thing for open source development communities is to syndicate their weblogs together on one site, viz. PlanetGnome, Planet Debian, Monologue, and PlanetApache.
Politics: G2: Tales of Tel Aviv.
Sport:
Observer: Football, blood and war: an insane article about the
crossover between Serbian nationalist paramilitaries and football
hooliganism:
Spam: The new hash-busting, Bayes-avoiding, spam evasion trick: inserting random dictionary words into the middle of another word. Like so:
Tech: Great. More on the ‘prevention of banknote scanning’ thread; Ed Felten notes that the European Central Bank is
Security: Chennai businessman ‘transformed’ into Al-Qaeda suspect (The Hindu):
Spam: OK, I just noticed that I have a few hits for the SpamAssassin rule HTTP_ENTITIES_HOST in my corpus. This searches for obfuscated hostnames in the URL links in mail messages, and is generally a very reliable sign of spam — because who would want to hide a hostname apart from spammers?
Tech: PDF file: how do photocopiers decide not to photocopy modern banknotes? ‘a geometric pattern … of five 1 mm large circles’. Fascinating stuff from Markus Kuhn, as usual! (via HackThePlanet)
Games: Anti-Monopoly: ‘A professor and a freelance writer are determined to set history straight on the origin and theft of a favorite American pastime’.
Spam: So, next Friday I’ll be in Cambridge, MA for the Spam Conference 2004, a one-day extravaganza of probabilistic classifiers, spam-bashing, and hopefully, some socializing too.
Funny: The staff of O2 Retail, Kennedy Road, Navan have set them up the foneblog, it appears, and are messing about… Why not give ’em a call? Looks like their number is +353 46 21803!
Funny: Getting Even With Nicorettes (NYTimes): a very funny article about giving up smoking by taking up a full-time nicotine gum habit.
GNU: Let’s all be very nice and friendly for our latest convert to the GPL club, Microsoft. Hi, MS!
Games: The DEGENATRON Archive and Gaming Page — amazing. The Degenatron is the games console advertised, and occasionally featuring in radio phone-ins as to the violent behaviour of ‘kids these days’ and the like, on the in-game radio stations in GTA:VC. This faked ‘homage’ page is perfect; right down to the animated rainbow horizontal-rule divider.
Tech: ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center. Great panel weblog, with some of the big names in the research field, dealing with several security issues quite nicely.
Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’
Tolkien: The Encyclopedia of Arda — great for settling those insanely geeky Lord of The Rings arguments, of which there have been loads recently. ;)
Free Software: Ciaran O’Riordan has just announced the launch of IFSO, the Irish Free Software Organisation:
Vacation: We’re back. Well, technically, my body is back, but the silver thread is reeling in somewhere over Greenland. So I’m pre-classifying my mail and looking for urgent stuff with my eyes glazing over instead of doing anything more useful.
Code: OOP over the top: a hilarious dissection of some of the most monstrous ‘how to rewrite OO-style’ I have ever seen — take a 15-line if/elseif/else clause and rewrite as a thoroughly over-engineered unmaintainable 7-class, 15-method disaster, using the Singleton and Factory patterns. The rewrite in the original article is intended seriously, as far as I can tell.
Innovation: Maciej posts a fantastic look back on the Wright Brothers from an interesting angle — their patent-related antics.
Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.
Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.
Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.
‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)
Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.
Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.
A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!
Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.
Security: Bruce Schneier points out some interesting angles on the official report into the US power blackout of Aug 14th:
Ireland: Apparently, the Internet Society of Ireland (ISOC) has set up its first Chapter working group to establish a consensus on best principles for governing the .IE registry.
Ireland: Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!
ADORABLE KITTENS TALK ABOUT POLITICS
Funny: Best commentary I’ve read all week: ADORABLE KITTENS TALK ABOUT POLITICS: