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Beautiful d3.js dataviz of wind patterns and forecasts, projected against a vector Earth map
(tags: earth map visualization weather javascript d3.js dataviz wind forecasts maps)
Justin's Linklog Posts
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Good description of Etsy’s take on continuous deployment, committing directly to trunk, hidden with feature-flags, from Rafe Colburn
(tags: continuous-deployment coding agile deployment devops etsy rafe-colburn)
Dogs like to excrete in alignment with the Earth’s magnetic field
Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm magnetic field conditions.
(tags: dogs poo excrement shit magnetic-field earth zoology papers)
Paul Graham and the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker
Under Graham’s influence, Mark [Zuckerberg], like many in Silicon Valley, subscribes to the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker ideal, making self-started teenage hackers Facebook’s most desired recruiting targets, not even so much for their coding ability as their ability to serve as the faces of hacking culture. “Culture fit”, in this sense, is one’s ability to conform to the Valley’s boyish hacker fantasy, which is easier, obviously, the closer you are to a teenage boy. Like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s role of existing to serve the male film protagonist’s personal growth, the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker’s job is to embody the dream hacker role while growing the VC’s portfolio. This is why the dream hacker never ages, never visibly develops interests beyond hardware and code, and doesn’t question why nearly all the other people receiving funding look like him. Like the actress playing the pixie dream girl, the pixie dream boy isn’t being paid to question the role for which he has been cast. In this way, for all his supposed “disruptiveness”, the hacker pixie actually does exactly what he is told: to embody, while he can, the ideal hacker, until he is no longer young, mono-focused, and boyish-seeming enough to qualify for the role (at that point, vested equity may allow him to retire). And like in Hollywood, VCs will have already recruited newer, younger ones to play him.
(tags: hackers manic-pixie-dream-girl culture-fit silicon-valley mark-zuckerberg paul-graham y-combinator vc work investment technology recruitment facebook ageism equality sexism)
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Flapjack aims to be a flexible notification system that handles: Alert routing (determining who should receive alerts based on interest, time of day, scheduled maintenance, etc); Alert summarisation (with per-user, per media summary thresholds); Your standard operational tasks (setting scheduled maintenance, acknowledgements, etc). Flapjack sits downstream of your check execution engine (like Nagios, Sensu, Icinga, or cron), processing events to determine if a problem has been detected, who should know about the problem, and how they should be told.
(tags: flapjack notification alerts ops nagios paging sensu)
We need your help to keep working for European digital rights in 2014
Grim. DRI are facing a 5-figure legal bill from the music industry – they need your donations to avoid shutdown
(tags: donations dri funding amicus-curiae law ireland digital-rights-ireland emi irma)
Replicant: Replicated State Machines Made Easy
The next time you reach for ZooKeeper, ask yourself whether it provides the primitive you really need. If ZooKeeper’s filesystem and znode abstractions truly meet your needs, great. But the odds are, you’ll be better off writing your application as a replicated state machine.
(tags: zookeeper paxos replicant replication consensus state-machines distcomp)
Dublin Cycle Planner needs a health warning – Irish Cycle
An extensive catalogue of shitty routing. Poor…
It’s expected that any new mapping and routing systems will have errors which will need to be ironed out but the level of issues with the NTA Cycle Planner is far beyond what you’d expect in a light and quiet beta launch. It’s beyond acceptable for a public PR launch directing people to a route planner with no clear warnings. It looks like a rush job which allows junior minister Alan Kelly to get his name in another press release before the end of the year.
Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil
The pupil of the eye in a photograph of a face can be mined for hidden information, such as reflected faces of the photographer and bystanders, according to research led by Dr. Rob Jenkins, of the Department of Psychology at the University of York and published in PLOS ONE (open access).
(via Waxy)(tags: via:waxy future zoom-and-enhance privacy photography eyes photos)
Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet – Taylor Clark – The Atlantic
“It was an out-and-out hijacking,” LeFevre told me. “They counterfeited our product, they pirated our Web site, and they basically directed all of their customer service to us.” At the peak of Willms’s sales, LeFevre says, dazzlesmile was receiving 1,000 calls a day from customers trying to cancel orders for a product it didn’t even sell. When irate consumers made the name dazzlesmile synonymous with online scamming, LeFevre’s sales effectively dropped to zero. Dazzlesmile sued Willms in November 2009; he later paid a settlement.
(tags: scams hijacking ads affiliate one-wierd-trick health dieting crime)
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An exhaustive list from the UK’s Open Rights Group
Netflix: Your Linux AMI: optimization and performance [slides]
a fantastic bunch of low-level kernel tweaks and tunables which Netflix have found useful in production to maximise productivity of their fleet. Interesting use of SCHED_BATCH process scheduler class for batch processes, in particular. Also, great docs on their experience with perf and SystemTap. Perf really looks like a tool I need to get to grips with…
(tags: netflix aws tuning ami perf systemtap tunables sched_batch batch hadoop optimization performance)
creepypasta, Slenderman, and Lovecraft
our use of networked computers is daily coloured by fear of infection and corruption, of predators and those who would assume our identity, of viruses and data-sucking catastrophes. What if something dark is able to breach that all-important final firewall, the gap between the central processing unit and the person sitting at the keyboard? What if it already has? That would be ‘a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard’, without a doubt — but the unplumbed space haunted by demons and chaos is the network, not the cosmos. In using the internet to creep ourselves out recreationally, we begin to understand the real ways in which it haunts our fears.
(via etienneshrdlu)(tags: via:etienneshrdlu literature stories horror slenderman something-awful creepypasta copypasta lovecraft)
BitCoin exchange CoinBase uses MongoDB as their ‘primary datastore’
‘Coinbase uses MongoDB for their primary datastore for their web app, api requests, etc.’
(tags: coinbase mongodb reliability hn via:aphyr ops banking bitcoin)
Alex Payne — Bitcoin, Magical Thinking, and Political Ideology
Working in technology has an element of pioneering, and with new frontiers come those would prefer to leave civilization behind. But in a time of growing inequality, we need technology that preserves and renews the civilization we already have. The first step in this direction is for technologists to engage with the experiences and struggles of those outside their industry and community. There’s a big, wide, increasingly poor world out there, and it doesn’t need 99% of what Silicon Valley is selling. I’ve enjoyed the thought experiment of Bitcoin as much as the next nerd, but it’s time to dispense with the opportunism and adolescent fantasies of a crypto-powered stateless future and return to the work of building technology and social services that meaningfully and accountably improve our collective quality of life.
(tags: bitcoin business economics silicon-valley tech alex-payne writing libertarianism futurism crypto civilization frontier community)
MP Claire Perry tells UK that worrying about filter overblocking is a “load of cock”
the bottom line appears to be “think of the children” — in other words, any degree of overblocking is acceptable as long as children cannot access porn:
The debate and letter confuse legal, illegal and potentially harmful content, all of which require very different tactics to deal with. Without a greater commitment to evidence and rational debate, poor policy outcomes will be the likely result. There’s a pattern, much the same as the Digital Economy Act, or the Snooper’s Charter. Start with moral panic; dismiss evidence; legislate; and finally, watch the policy unravel, either delivering unintended harms, even to children in this case, or simply failing altogether.
See https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2013/talktalk-wordpress for a well-written exploration of a case of overblocking and its fallout. Talk Talk, one UK ISP, has filters which incorrectly dealt with IWF data and blocked WordPress.com’s admin interface, resulting in all blogs there become unusable for their owners for over a week, with seemingly nobody able to diagnose and fix the problem competently.(tags: filtering overblocking uk politics think-of-the-children porn cam claire-perry open-rights-group false-positives talk-talk networking internet wordpress)
stereopsis : graphics : radix tricks
some nice super-optimized Radix Sort code which handles floating point values. See also http://codercorner.com/RadixSortRevisited.htm for more info on the histogramming/counter concept
(tags: sorting programming coding algorithms radix-sort optimization floating-point)
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ie. “i18n”, “a11y” etc.
According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym [..] was “S12n”, the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found Jan’s name unpronounceable often referred to him verbally as “S12n”. The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture.[1]
(tags: numbers names etymology numeronyms history dec i18n a11y l10n s12n)
On undoing, fixing, or removing commits in git
Choose-your-own-adventure style. “Oh dear. This is going to get complicated.” (via Tom)
(tags: via:tom cyoa git fixing revert source-control coding)
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this is excellent!
The British Library has uploaded one million public domain scans from 17th-19th century books to Flickr! They’re embarking on an ambitious programme to crowdsource novel uses and navigation tools for the huge corpus. Already, the manifest of image descriptions is available through Github. This is a remarkable, public spirited, archival project, and the British Library is to be loudly applauded for it!
(tags: british-library libraries public-domain art graphics images history 19th-century 17th-century 18th-century books crowdsourcing via:boingboing github)
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Fantastic long-form blog post by Jay Kreps on this key concept. great stuff
(tags: coding databases log network kafka jay-kreps linkedin architecture storage)
Difference Engine: Obituary for software patents
The Economist reckons we’re finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel where the patent troll shakedown is concerned:
If the use of state consumer-protection laws to ward off frivolous patent suits were to catch on, it could give the trolls serious pause for thought—especially if their mass mailings of threatening letters to businesses were met by dozens of law suits from attorneys general demanding their presence in state courts across the land. One way or another, things are beginning to look ominous for those who would exploit the inadequacies of America’s patent system.
(tags: the-economist patents swpats trolls us east-texas law)
Load Balancer Testing with a Honeypot Daemon
nice post on writing BDD unit tests for infrastructure, in this case specifically a load balancer (via Devops Weekly)
(tags: load-balancers ops devops sysadmin testing unit-tests networking honeypot infrastructure bdd)
Karlin Lillington on DRI’s looming victory in the European Court of Justice
If the full European Court of Justice (ECJ) accepts the opinion of its advocate general in a final ruling due early next year – and it almost always does – it will prove a huge vindication of Ireland’s small privacy advocacy group, Digital Rights Ireland (DRI). Its case against Irish retention laws, which began in 2006, forms the basis of this broader David v Goliath challenge and initial opinion. The advocate general’s advice largely upholds the key concerns put forward by DRI against Ireland’s laws. Withholding so much data about every citizen, including children, in case someone commits a future crime, is too intrusive into private life, and could allow authorities to create a “faithful and exhaustive map of a large portion of a person’s [private] conduct”. Retained data is so comprehensive that they could easily reveal private identities, which are supposed to remain anonymous. And the data, entrusted to third parties, is at too much risk of fraudulent or malicious use. Cruz Villalón argues that there must be far greater oversight to the retention process, and controls on access to data, and that citizens should have the right to be notified after the fact if their data has been scrutinised. The Irish Government had repeatedly waved off such concerns from Digital Rights Ireland in the past.
(tags: dri rights ireland internet surveillance data-retention privacy eu ecj law)
Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s A Robot
Florida’s spammers strike again – pushing the boundaries of intrusive direct sales and marketing
(tags: florida ai spam direct-marketing bots sales health-insurance)
DigitalOcean’s guide to using Docker on their hosts
must give this a spin
(tags: lxc docker digital-ocean hosting ops)
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Our children should be free to choose to study what really excites them, not subtly steered away from certain subjects because teachers believe in and propagate the stereotypes. Last year the IOP published a report “It’s Different for Girls” which demonstrated that essentially half of state coeducational schools did not see a single girl progress to A-level physics. By contrast, the likelihood of girls progressing from single sex schools were two and a half times greater.
Amen to this.(tags: sexism schools teaching uk phyics girls children bias stereotypes)
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‘SBE is an OSI layer 6 representation for encoding and decoding application messages in binary format for low-latency applications.’ Licensed under ASL2, C++ and Java supported.
(tags: sbe encoding codecs persistence binary low-latency open-source java c++ serialization)
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‘like inetd, but for WebSockets’ — ‘a small command line tool that will wrap an existing command line interface program, and allow it to be accessed via a WebSocket. It provides a quick mechanism for allowing web-applications to interact with existing command line tools.’ Awesome idea. BSD-licensed. (Via Mike Loukides)
(tags: websockets cli server tools unix inetd web http open-source)
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a metric storage daemon, exposing both a carbon listener and a simple web service. Its aim is to become a simple, scalable and drop-in replacement for graphite’s backend.
Pretty alpha for now, but definitely worth keeping an eye on to potentially replace our burgeoning Carbon fleet…(tags: graphite carbon cassandra storage metrics ops graphs service-metrics)
Twitter tech talk video: “Profiling Java In Production”
In this talk Kaushik Srenevasan describes a new, low overhead, full-stack tool (based on the Linux perf profiler and infrastructure built into the Hotspot JVM) we’ve built at Twitter to solve the problem of dynamically profiling and tracing the behavior of applications (including managed runtimes) in production.
Looks very interesting. Haven’t watched it yet though(tags: twitter tech-talks video presentations java jvm profiling testing monitoring service-metrics performance production hotspot perf)
Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming
[MMOGs], the [NSA] analyst wrote, “are an opportunity!”. According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a “deconfliction” group was required to ensure they weren’t spying on, or interfering with, each other.
(tags: spies spying games mmog online surveillance absurd east-germany funny warcraft)
Ryan Lizza: Why Won’t Obama Rein in the N.S.A.? : The New Yorker
Fantastic wrap-up of the story so far on the pervasive global surveillance story.
The history of the intelligence community, though, reveals a willingness to violate the spirit and the letter of the law, even with oversight. What’s more, the benefits of the domestic-surveillance programs remain unclear. Wyden contends that the N.S.A. could find other ways to get the information it says it needs. Even Olsen, when pressed, suggested that the N.S.A. could make do without the bulk-collection program. “In some cases, it’s a bit of an insurance policy,” he told me. “It’s a way to do what we otherwise could do, but do it a little bit more quickly.” In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. Feinstein maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.
(tags: nsa gchq surveillance spying privacy dianne-feinstein new-yorker journalism long-reads us-politics probable-cause)
Same Old Stories From Sean Sherlock
Sherlock’s record is spotty at best when it comes to engagement. Setting aside the 80,680 people who were ignored by the minister, he was hostile and counter productive to debate from the beginning, going so far as to threaten to pull out of a public debate because a campaigner against the [‘Irish SOPA’] SI would be in attendance. His habit of blocking people online who publicly ask him tough yet legitimate questions has earned him the nickname “Sherblock”.
(tags: sean-sherlock sherblock labour ireland politics blocking filtering internet freedom copyright emi music law piracy debate twitter)
Smart Metering in the UK is FCUKED
Most utilities don’t want smart metering. In fact they seem to have used the wrong dictionary. It is difficult to find anything smart about the UK deployment, until you realise that the utilities use smart in the sense of “it hurts”. They consider they have a perfectly adequate business model which has no need for new technology. In many Government meetings, their reluctant support seems to be a veneer for the hope that it will all end in disaster, letting them go back to the world they know, of inflated bills and demands for money with menaces. […] Even when smart meters are deployed, there is no evidence that any utility will use the resulting data to transform their business, rather than persecute the consumer. At a recent US conference a senior executive for a US utility which had deployed smart meters, stated that their main benefit was “to give them more evidence to blame the customer”. That’s a good description of the attitude displayed by our utilities.
(tags: smart-metering energy utilities uk services metering consumer)
Kelly “kellabyte” Sommers on Redis’ “relaxed CP” approach to the CAP theorem
Similar to ACID properties, if you partially provide properties it means the user has to _still_ consider in their application that the property doesn’t exist, because sometimes it doesn’t. In you’re fsync example, if fsync is relaxed and there are no replicas, you cannot consider the database durable, just like you can’t consider Redis a CP system. It can’t be counted on for guarantees to be delivered. This is why I say these systems are hard for users to reason about. Systems that partially offer guarantees require in-depth knowledge of the nuances to properly use the tool. Systems that explicitly make the trade-offs in the designs are easier to reason about because it is more obvious and _predictable_.
(tags: kellabyte redis cp ap cap-theorem consistency outages reliability ops database storage distcomp)
Building a Balanced Universe – EVE Community
Good blog post about EVE’s algorithm to load-balance a 3D map of star systems
(tags: eve eve-online algorithms 3d space load-balancing sharding games)
Virtual Clock – Testing Patterns Encyclopedia
a nice pattern for unit tests which need deterministic time behaviour. Trying to think up a really nice API for this….
(tags: testing unit-tests time virtual-clock real-time coding)
We’re sending out the wrong signals in bid to lure the big data bucks – Independent.ie
Simon McGarr on Ireland’s looming data-protection train-crash.
Last week, during the debate of his proposals to increase fees for making a Freedom of Information request, Brendan Howlin was asked how one of his amendments would affect citizens looking for data from the State’s electronic databases. His reply was to cheerfully admit he didn’t even understand the question. “I have no idea what an SQL code is. Does anyone know what an SQL code is?” Unlike the minister, it probably isn’t your job to know that SQL is the computer language that underpins the data industry. The amendment he had originally proposed would have effectively allowed civil servants to pretend that their computer files were made of paper when deciding whether a request was reasonable. His answer showed how the Government could have proposed such an absurd idea in the first place. Like it or not – fair or not – these are not the signals a country that wanted to build a long-term data industry would choose to send out. They are the sort of signals that Ireland used to send out about Financial Regulation. I think it’s agreed, that approach didn’t work out so well.
(tags: foi ireland brendan-howlin technology illiteracy sql civil-service government data-protection privacy regulation dpa)
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good blog post writing up the ‘flock -n -c’ trick to ensure single-concurrent-process locking for cron jobs
What an RAF pilot can teach us about being safe on the road
Good article on road safety and visual perception, for both cyclists and drivers.
(tags: vision driving cycling tips cognitive-psychology safety hi-viz)
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a modern HTTP benchmarking tool capable of generating significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. It combines a multithreaded design with scalable event notification systems such as epoll and kqueue. An optional LuaJIT script can perform HTTP request generation, response processing, and custom reporting.
Written in C, ASL2 licensed.(tags: wrk benchmarking http performance testing lua load-testing load-generation)
Removing DRM Boosts Music Sales by 10%
Based on a working paper from University of Toronto researcher Laurina Zhang
Comparing album sales of four major labels before and after the removal of DRM reveals that digital music revenue increases by 10% when restrictions are removed. The effect goes up to 30% for long tail content, while top-selling albums show no significant jump. The findings suggest that dropping technical restrictions can benefit both artists and the major labels.
more details: http://inside.rotman.utoronto.ca/laurinazhang/files/2013/11/laurina_zhang_jmp_nov4.pdf , “Intellectual Property Strategy and the Long Tail: Evidence from the Recorded Music Industry”, Laurina Zhang, November 4, 2013(tags: ip copyright drm mp3 music laurina-zhang research long-tail albums rights-management piracy)
100 Years of Breed “Improvement” | Science of Dogs
The English bulldog has come to symbolize all that is wrong with the dog fancy and not without good reason; they suffer from almost every possible disease. A 2004 survey by the Kennel Club found that they die at the median age of 6.25 years (n=180). There really is no such thing as a healthy bulldog. The bulldog’s monstrous proportions makes them virtually incapable of mating or birthing without medical intervention.
(via Bryan)(tags: dogs eugenics breeding horror science genetics traits animals pets bulldog pedigree)
SkyJack – autonomous drone hacking
Samy Kamkar strikes again. ‘Using a Parrot AR.Drone 2, a Raspberry Pi, a USB battery, an Alfa AWUS036H wireless transmitter, aircrack-ng, node-ar-drone, node.js, and my SkyJack software, I developed a drone that flies around, seeks the wireless signal of any other drone in the area, forcefully disconnects the wireless connection of the true owner of the target drone, then authenticates with the target drone pretending to be its owner, then feeds commands to it and all other possessed zombie drones at my will.’
(tags: drones amazon hacking security samy-kamkar aircrack node raspberry-pi airborne-zombies)
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Good article about emergent behaviour from networked malware: ‘The metabot, therefore, is viral. You get followed because of who follows you. This tendency explains the strange geographical cluster among San Diego high school students. Perhaps one of those kids was being followed by a really popular account (like @Interscope records, perhaps, which follows hundreds of thousands of people), and through that link, the bot stumbled into this little circle of San Diego teens. All of this activity would have remained under the radar, of course, all part of the silent non-human web. Except something went awry. For some reason, Olivia got stuck in a weird loop, and the metabot kept spawning spambots that chose to follow her over and over, relentlessly. Maybe once the metabot reached the San Diego kids, a bug kicked in. Instead of negative feedback keeping her (and everyone else) from being followed too often, we got runaway positive feedback. The bots followed her because other bots followed her. And on and on. Which is, perhaps a kind of reasoning that we can understand: It’s the core logic of fame and celebrity itself. Attention flows to Snooki because attention flowed to Snooki. Attention flows to Olivia because attention flowed to Olivia. Olivia and her friends weren’t wrong when they thought she’d become suddenly famous. Her audience just wasn’t human.’
(tags: socialnetworking spam twitter bots fame alexis-madrigal)
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> reorg Ok, you reorganize all zero of your direct reports. Way to stay out of trouble, Hoss. Perhaps you’d like to coin an acronym?
(tags: amazon amazork via:jrauser sev2s reorgs work zachary-mason games interactive-fiction zork text-adventures)
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y’know, for kids. now that would improve the slightly boring, functional helmet my middle kid wears…
(tags: helmets helmet-covers tail-wags safety cycling skating kids)
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Wow, I didn’t know about this. Great idea.
Need a flexible format to record, export, and analyze network performance data? Well, that’s exactly what the HTTP Archive format (HAR) is designed to do! Even better, did you know that Chrome DevTools supports it? In this episode we’ll take a deep dive into the format (as you’ll see, its very simple), and explore the many different ways it can help you capture and analyze your sites performance. Join Ilya Grigorik and Peter Lubbers to find out how to capture HAR network traces in Chrome, visualize the data via an online tool, share the reports with your clients and coworkers, automate the logging and capture of HAR data for your build scripts, and even adapt it to server-side analysis use cases
(tags: capturing logging performance http debugging trace capture har archives protocols recording)
flood.io » Convert HAR to a JMeter JMX plan file
this is absolutely fantastic. Thanks flood.io!
(tags: har http archive jmeter jmx recording testing debugging captures conversion)
Who Is Watching the Watch Lists? – NYTimes.com
it might seem that current efforts to identify and track potential terrorists would be approached with caution. Yet the federal government’s main terrorist watch list has grown to at least 700,000 people, with little scrutiny over how the determinations are made or the impact on those marked with the terrorist label. “If you’ve done the paperwork correctly, then you can effectively enter someone onto the watch list,” said Anya Bernstein, an associate professor at the SUNY Buffalo Law School and author of “The Hidden Costs of Terrorist Watch Lists,” published by the Buffalo Law Review in May. “There’s no indication that agencies undertake any kind of regular retrospective review to assess how good they are at predicting the conduct they’re targeting.”
(tags: terrorism watchlists blacklists filtering safety air-travel government security dhs travel)
[JavaSpecialists 215] – StampedLock Idioms
a demo of Doug Lea’s latest concurrent data structure in Java 8
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lulz. (via John Handelaar)
(tags: funny little-johnny-tables companies registry uk plc)
Docker all the things at Atlassian: automation and wiring
A nice worked-through Docker example
(tags: docker infrastructure devops ops deployment lxc containers linux)
This Flaw In Facebook Lets You Create As Many Fake Likes As You Want – Business Insider
Really stupid — Facebook infers a “like” for a site when you send a reference to a URL on that site. Obviously broken behaviour. (via http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/21/facebook-is-recycling-your-likes-to-promote-stories-youve-never-seen-to-all-your-friends/ )
(tags: facebook advertising bad-data social-graph duh)
Jury: Newegg infringes Spangenberg patent, must pay $2.3 million | Ars Technica
Newegg, an online retailer that has made a name for itself fighting the non-practicing patent holders sometimes called “patent trolls,” sits on the losing end of a lawsuit tonight. An eight-person jury came back shortly after 7:00pm and found that the company infringed all four asserted claims of a patent owned by TQP Development, a company owned by patent enforcement expert Erich Spangenberg.
“patent enforcement expert”. That’s one way to put it. This is insanity.(tags: tech swpats patents newegg tqp crypto whitfield-diffie)
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pretty strong argument. However, I think shlibs still have an advantage in that their pages are easier to share…
(tags: shared-libraries unix linux linker deployment)
Newegg trial: Crypto legend takes the stand, goes for knockout patent punch | Ars Technica
“We’ve heard a good bit in this courtroom about public key encryption,” said Albright. “Are you familiar with that? “Yes, I am,” said Diffie, in what surely qualified as the biggest understatement of the trial. “And how is it that you’re familiar with public key encryption?” “I invented it.”
(via burritojustice)(tags: crypto tech security patents swpats pki whitfield-diffie history east-texas newegg patent-trolls)
SAMOA, an open source platform for mining big data streams
Yahoo!’s streaming machine learning platform, built on Storm, implementing:
As a library, SAMOA contains state-of-the-art implementations of algorithms for distributed machine learning on streams. The first alpha release allows classification and clustering. For classification, we implemented a Vertical Hoeffding Tree (VHT), a distributed streaming version of decision trees tailored for sparse data (e.g., text). For clustering, we included a distributed algorithm based on CluStream. The library also includes meta-algorithms such as bagging.
(tags: storm streaming big-data realtime samoa yahoo machine-learning ml decision-trees clustering bagging classification)
Spam-Friendly Registrar ‘Dynamic Dolphin’ Shuttered
yay (via Tony Finch)
(tags: dynamic-dolphin registrars dns spam scott-richter anti-spam brian-krebs)
Photographer wins $1.2 million from companies that took pictures off Twitter | Reuters
The jury found that Agence France-Presse and Getty Images willfully violated the Copyright Act when they used photos Daniel Morel took in his native Haiti after the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people, Morel’s lawyer, Joseph Baio, said
(tags: copyright twitter facebook social-media via:niall-harbison law getty-images afp daniel-morel haiti photography)
Failure Friday: How We Ensure PagerDuty is Always Reliable
Basically, they run the kind of exercise which Jesse Robbins invented at Amazon — “Game Days”. Scarily, they do these on a Friday — living dangerously!
(tags: game-days testing failure devops chaos-monkey ops exercises)
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beautiful German boardgame, suitable for playing with kids — an adult moves a tealight candle around the board, while kids take turns moving gnomes around in the shadows behind tall “trees”. recommended by JK
‘No basis in law’ : Gardai probe Ballyphehane group after raid
Freemen wackiness in Cork.
The house of one member of the group was raided by gardaí last week, but it is not thought that any arrests were made, according to an eyewitness. Gardaí broke down the front door of the house. The group, which appears to be part of the Freemen of the Land movement, which does not recognise the State, has attempted to hold ‘trials’ in Ballyphehane Community Centre. It attempted to summon HSE staff, gardaí, social workers, solicitors and others to appear to be tried by a self-selected jury earlier this month. The group handed out documents purporting to be a summons to HSE staff and garda stations, demanding that named people attend a trial by ‘éire court’ on Tuesday 5 November at 9am “to stand trial for their acts of terrorism against mothers, their offspring and others in our community”, according to the group’s literature. This week the group has begun posting about UCC, saying the college is “a private for profit corporation, and a business partner of and partly owned by Pfizers and Bank of Ireland”. The group suggest that UCC bases its “authority” on Maritime Law. UCC has yet to respond to the group’s allegations.
(tags: freemen crazy cork politics ireland hse gardai ucc law)
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I’m trying to avoid doing this in order to avoid more power consumption and unpopular hardware in the house — but if necessary, this is a good up-to-date homebuild design
Asynchronous logging versus Memory Mapped Files
Interesting article around using mmap’d files from Java using RandomAccessFile.getChannel().map(), which allows them to be accessed directly as a ByteBuffer. together with Atomic variable lazySet() operations, this provides pretty excellent performance results on low-latency writes to disk. See also: http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.ie/2012/12/atomiclazyset-is-performance-win-for.html
(tags: atomic lazyset putordered jmm java synchronization randomaccessfile bytebuffers performance optimization memory disk queues)
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a realtime processing engine, built on a persistent queue and a set of workers. ‘The main goal is data availability and persistency. We created grape for those who cannot afford losing data’. It does this by allowing infinite expansion of the pending queue in Elliptics, their Dynamo-like horizontally-scaled storage backend.
(tags: kafka queue queueing storage realtime fault-tolerance grape cep event-processing)
How To Run a 5 Whys (With Humans, Not Robots)
‘remember, there is no axe murderer. probably’
(tags: process management howto post-mortems five-whys 5-whys investigation)
The New Threat: Targeted Internet Traffic Misdirection
MITM attacks via BGP route hijacking now relatively commonplace on the internet, with 60 cases observed so far this year by Renesys
(tags: bgp mitm internet security routing attacks hijacking)
Software Detection of Currency
Steven J. Murdoch presents some interesting results indicating that the EURion constellation may have been obsoleted:
Recent printers, scanners and image manipulation software identify images of currency, will not process the image and display an error message linking to www.rulesforuse.org. The detection algorithm is not disclosed, however it is possible to test sample images as to whether they are identified as currency. This webpage shows an initial analysis of the algorithm’s properties, based on results from the automated generation and testing of images. […] Initially it was thought that the “Eurion constellation” was used to identify banknotes in the newly deployed software based system, since this has been confirmed to be the technique used by colour photocopiers, and was both necessary and sufficient to prevent an item being duplicated using the photocopier tested. However further investigation showed that the detection performed by software is different from the system used in colour photocopiers, and the Eurion constellation is neither necessary nor sufficent, and in fact it probably is not even a factor.
(tags: eurion algorithms photoshop security currency money euro copying obscurity reversing)
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a simple-to-use, extensible, text-based data workflow tool that organizes command execution around data and its dependencies. Data processing steps are defined along with their inputs and outputs and Drake automatically resolves their dependencies. […] Drake is similar to GNU Make, but designed especially for data workflow management. It has HDFS [and S3] support, allows multiple inputs and outputs, and includes a host of features designed to help you bring sanity to your otherwise chaotic data processing workflows.
Via Nelson. Looks interesting, although I’d like to see more features around retries, single-executor locking, parallelism, alerting/metrics, and unattended cron-like operation — those are always the hard part when I wind up coding up a data pump.(tags: make data data-pump drake via:nelson pipelines workflow)
AK at re:Invent 2013: Getting Maximum Performance from Redshift
good Redshift tips
(tags: redshift aws amazon performance scaling s3 rdbms sql ops analytics)
Tintin And The Copyright Sharks – Falkvinge on Infopolicy
A rather sordid tale of IP acquisition and exploitation, from the sounds of it
(tags: tintin moulinsart belgium history herge ip copyright royalties rick-falkvinge)
IPSO representative trivialising impact of the Loyaltybuild data breach
A very worrying quote from Una Dillon of the Irish Payment Services Organisation in regard to the Loyaltybuild incident:
“I wouldn’t be overly concerned if one of my cards was caught up in this,” Dillon says. “Even in the worst-case scenario – one in which my card was used fraudulently – my card provider will refund me everything that is taken”.
This reflects a deep lack of understanding of (a) how identity fraud works, and (b) how card-fraud refunds in Ireland appear to work. (a): Direct misuse of credit card data is not always the result. Fraudsters may prefer to instead obtain separate credit through identity theft, ie. using other personal identifying data. (b): Visa debit cards have no credit limit — your bank account can be cleared out in its entirety, and refunds can take a long time. For instance, http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=174482 describes several cases, including one customer who waited 21 days for a refund. All in all it’s trivialising a major risk for consumers. As I understand it, a separate statement from IPSO recommended that all customers of Loyaltybuild schemes need to monitor their bank accounts daily to keep an eye out for fraud, which is pretty absurd. Not impressive at all.(tags: loyaltybuild ipso money cards credit-cards visa debit-cards payment fraud identity-theft ireland)
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There is really astonishingly little value in looking at someone’s GitHub projects out of context. For a start, GitHub has no way of customising your profile page, and what is shown by default is the projects with the most stars, and the projects you’ve recently pushed to. That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable. You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and how many days it is since you had a day off. So really, your GitHub profile displays two things: how ‘influential’ you are, and how easily you can be coerced into constantly working. It’s honestly about as relevant to a decent hiring decision as your Klout score.
(tags: cv github open-source hiring career meritocracy work via:apyhr)
An Empirical Evaluation of TCP Performance in Online Games
In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of TCP in of ShenZhou Online, a commercial, mid-sized MMORPG. Our study indicates that, though TCP is full-fledged and robust, simply transmitting game data over TCP could cause unexpected performance problems. This is due to the following distinctive characteristics of game traffic: 1) tiny packets, 2) low packet rate, 3) application-limited traffic generation, and 4) bi-directional traffic. We have shown that because TCP was originally designed for unidirectional and network-limited bulk data transfers, it cannot adapt well to MMORPG traffic. In particular, the window-based congestion control mechanism and the fast retransmit algorithm for loss recovery are ineffective. This suggests that the selective acknowledgement option should be enabled whenever TCP is used, as it significantly enhances the loss recovery process. Furthermore, TCP is overkill, as not every game packet needs to be transmitted reliably and processed in an orderly manner. We have also shown that the degraded network performance did impact users’ willingness to continue a game. Finally, a number of design guidelines have been proposed by exploiting the unique characteristics of game traffic.
via Nelson(tags: tcp games udp protocols networking internet mmos retransmit mmorpgs)
Column: The Loyaltybuild breach shows it’s time to take data protection seriously
What is afoot here is a rerun of the Celtic Tiger era “light touch regulation” of financial services. Ireland has again made a Faustian pact whereby we lure employers here on the understanding that they will not subject to too-stringent a regulatory system. As the Loyaltybuild breach has shown, this is a bargain that will probably end badly. And as with the financial services boom, it is making the Germans nervous. Perhaps we will listen to them this time.
(tags: fergal-crehan loyaltybuild celtic-tiger ireland dpa regulation data-protection privacy credit-cards)
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Looks very alpha, but one to watch.
A JVM Implementation of the Raft Consensus Protocol
(tags: via:sbtourist raft jvm java consensus distributed-computing)
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‘ A persistent key-value store for fast storage environments’, ie. BerkeleyDB/LevelDB competitor, from Facebook.
RocksDB builds on LevelDB to be scalable to run on servers with many CPU cores, to efficiently use fast storage, to support IO-bound, in-memory and write-once workloads, and to be flexible to allow for innovation. We benchmarked LevelDB and found that it was unsuitable for our server workloads. Thebenchmark results look awesome at first sight, but we quickly realized that those results were for a database whose size was smaller than the size of RAM on the test machine – where the entire database could fit in the OS page cache. When we performed the same benchmarks on a database that was at least 5 times larger than main memory, the performance results were dismal. By contrast, we’ve published the RocksDB benchmark results for server side workloads on Flash. We also measured the performance of LevelDB on these server-workload benchmarks and found that RocksDB solidly outperforms LevelDB for these IO bound workloads. We found that LevelDB’s single-threaded compaction process was insufficient to drive server workloads. We saw frequent write-stalls with LevelDB that caused 99-percentile latency to be tremendously large. We found that mmap-ing a file into the OS cache introduced performance bottlenecks for reads. We could not make LevelDB consume all the IOs offered by the underlying Flash storage.
Lots of good discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6736900 too.(tags: flash ssd rocksdb databases storage nosql facebook bdb disk key-value-stores lsm leveldb)
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Colm McCarthaigh has open sourced Infima, ‘a library for managing service-level fault isolation using Amazon Route 53’.
Infima provides a Lattice container framework that allows you to categorize each endpoint along one or more fault-isolation dimensions such as availability-zone, software implementation, underlying datastore or any other common point of dependency endpoints may share. Infima also introduces a new ShuffleShard sharding type that can exponentially increase the endpoint-level isolation between customer/object access patterns or any other identifier you choose to shard on. Both Infima Lattices and ShuffleShards can also be automatically expressed in Route 53 DNS failover configurations using AnswerSet and RubberTree.
(tags: infima colmmacc dns route-53 fault-tolerance failover multi-az sharding service-discovery)
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The LatencyUtils package includes useful utilities for tracking latencies. Especially in common in-process recording scenarios, which can exhibit significant coordinated omission sensitivity without proper handling.
(tags: gil-tene metrics java measurement coordinated-omission latency speed service-metrics open-source)
High Performance Browser Networking
slides from Ilya Grigorik’s tutorial on the topic at O’Reilly’s Velocity conference. lots of good data and tips for internet protocol optimization
(tags: slides presentations ilya-grigorik performance http https tcp tutorials networking internet)
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tl;dr: ‘a lot to like’.
The grand design and originality thus of ‘Modernising Copyright’ thus is the injection of targeted flexibility into the legal framework – this is no mere echo of the Hargreaves Report in the UK, which backed away from Fair Use out of fear at the uncertainty it would necessarily entail. If the Report’s authors have their way, contested uses in Ireland will first be examined to see if they fit the exceptions spelled out in the EUCD, or checked against the innovation exception if they are derivative works/adaptations. Only if they have fallen at those two fences, will the fair use test be their last chance saloon.
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‘It can’t just be Big Data, it has to be Fast Data: Reactor 1.0 goes GA’:
Reactor provides the necessary abstractions to build high-throughput, low-latency–what we now call “fast data”–applications that absolutely must work with thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of concurrent requests per second. Modern JVM applications must be built on a solid foundation of asynchronous and reactive components that efficiently manage the execution of a very large number of tasks on a very small number of system threads. Reactor is specifically designed to help you build these kinds of applications without getting in your way or forcing you to work within an opinionated pattern.
Featuring the LMAX Disruptor ringbuffer, the JavaChronicle fast persistent message-passing queue, Groovy closures, and Netty 4.0. This looks very handy indeed….(tags: disruptor reactive-programming reactor async libraries java jvm frameworks spring netty fast-data)
Backblaze Blog » How long do disk drives last?
According to Backblaze’s data, 80% of drives last 4 years, and the median lifespan is projected to be 6 years
(tags: backblaze storage disk ops mtbf hardware failure lifespan)
Heirloom Chemistry Set by John Farrell Kuhns — Kickstarter
This is a beauty. I wonder if they can ship to Ireland?
To tell our story for this Kickstarter project, we really have to start in Christmas of 1959. Like many young scientists of the time, I received a Gilbert Chemistry set. This chemistry set provided me hours of great fun and learning as well as laying the foundation for my future as a research chemist. As I became an adult I wanted to share these types of experiences with my daughter, my nephews and nieces, and friends. But soon I became aware real chemistry sets were no longer available. Without real chemistry sets and opportunities for students to learn and explore, where would our future chemists come from? So …. I set out on a mission.
(tags: chemistry science chemistry-sets education play kickstarter)
Philippe Flajolet’s contribution to streaming algorithms [preso]
Nice deck covering HyperLogLog and its origins, plus a slide at the end covering the Flajolet/Wegman Adaptive Sampling algorithm (“how do you count the number of elements which appear only once in stream using constant size memory?”)
(tags: algorithms sketching hyperloglog flajolet wegman adaptive-sampling sampling presentations slides)
3 Tacos or 4 Flautas Per Order Make a Healthy Diet in Greatest Scientific Study Ever
“In reality, [tacos and flautas] aren’t bad meals,” the report argues. “The error that many of us Mexicans [Gustavo note: and gabachos] commit is including these types of dishes in our regular diet without an appropriate balance of them and falling into excessively eating them; accompanied by a lack of physical activity, it creates bad eating habits.” The good docs go on to note that people can eat tacos and flautas without negatively affecting their health, but “the key resides in controlling the quantity and frequency of eating these types of meals.” They also make the point that overall, tacos and flautas have less grease than doughnuts, french fries and even some health bars, although they didn’t specify which brands in the latter. In a subsequent blog post, the scientists go on to describe flautas as an “energy food” due to their composition, and conclude by recommending that a healthy diet can include three tacos al pastor or four flautas per order, “controlling the frequency of intake.” So have at it, boyos, but in moderation. And I can already hear the skeptics: What about tacos de chicharrones? Why not focus on carne asada? Did they take into consideration chiles de mordida? Did they factor in horchata? And whither the burrito variable?
Jeff Dean – Taming Latency Variability and Scaling Deep Learning [talk]
‘what Jeff Dean and team have been up to at Google’. Reducing request latency in a network SOA architecture using backup requests, etc., via Ilya Grigorik
(tags: youtube talks google low-latency soa architecture distcomp jeff-dean networking)
error-prone – Catch common Java mistakes as compile-time errors
It’s common for even the best programmers to make simple mistakes. And commonly, a refactoring which seems safe can leave behind code which will never do what’s intended. We’re used to getting help from the compiler, but it doesn’t do much beyond static type checking. Using error-prone to augment the compiler’s static analysis, you can catch more mistakes before they cost you time, or end up as bugs in production. We use error-prone in Google’s Java build system to eliminate classes of serious bugs from entering our code, and we’ve open-sourced it, so you can too!
Where your “full Irish” really comes from
This is really disappointing; many meats labelled as “Irish” are anything but. The only trustworthy mark is the Bord Bia “Origin Ireland” stamp — I’ll be avoiding any products without this in future.
Under European labelling law, country of origin is mandatory for beef, fish, olive oil, honey and fresh fruit and vegetables. Next month the EU will make it law to specify country of origin for the meat of pigs, chicken, sheep and goats, with a lead-in time of anywhere up to three years for food companies to comply. The pork rule, however, will only apply to fresh pork and not to processed meat, so consumers still won’t get a country-of-origin label on rashers, sausages or ham. In the meantime, the Bord Bia Origin-Ireland stamp is a guarantee that your Irish breakfast ingredients are indeed Irish.
(tags: bord-bia labelling eu country-of-origin meat pork food quality)
Killing Freedom of Information in Ireland
TheStory.ie will, in all likelihood, cease all FOI requests. And we will not seek funding from the public to support an immoral, cynical, unjustified and probably illegal FOI fee regime. We will not pay for information that the public already pays for. We will not support a system that perpetuates an outrageous infringement of citizen rights. The legislation was gutted in 2003 and it is being gutted again. More generally the number of requests from journalists from all news organisations in Ireland will fall as a result of these amendments, and the resulting efforts to shine a light on the administration of the State will certainly deteriorate. And secrecy will prevail.