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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2012-02-12

Published February 12, 2012

  • Turbocharging Solr Index Replication with BitTorrent : Etsy now replicating their multi-GB search index across the search farm using BitTorrent. Why not Multicast? ‘multicast rsync caused an epic failure for our network, killing the entire site for several minutes. The multicast traffic saturated the CPU on our core switches causing all of Etsy to be unreachable.’ fun!
    (tags: etsy multicast sev1 bittorrent search solr rsync scaling outages)

  • Apache Kafka : ‘Kafka provides a publish-subscribe solution that can handle all activity stream data and processing on a consumer-scale web site. This kind of activity (page views, searches, and other user actions) are a key ingredient in many of the social feature on the modern web. This data is typically handled by “logging” and ad hoc log aggregation solutions due to the throughput requirements. This kind of ad hoc solution is a viable solution to providing logging data to an offline analysis system like Hadoop, but is very limiting for building real-time processing. Kafka aims to unify offline and online processing by providing a mechanism for parallel load into Hadoop as well as the ability to partition real-time consumption over a cluster of machines.’ neat
    (tags: kafka linkedin apache distributed messaging pubsub queue incubator scaling)

Links for 2012-02-07

Published February 7, 2012

  • lrzip : ‘Lrzip uses an extended version of rzip which does a first pass long distance redundancy reduction. The lrzip modifications make it scale according to memory size. […] The unique feature of lrzip is that it tries to make the most of the available ram in your system at all times for maximum benefit. It does this by default, choosing the largest sized window possible without running out of memory.’
    (tags: zip compression via:dakami gzip bzip2 archiving benchmarks)

Links for 2012-02-04

Published February 4, 2012

  • _Intellectual property rights and innovation: Evidence from the human genome_ (PDF) : ‘Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private rm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera’s gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort. Across a range of empirical specications, I nd evidence that Celera’s IP led to reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera’s short-term IP had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.’ (via Tony Finch)
    (tags: via:fanf genetics ip copyright open-source celera patents papers pdf)

Links for 2012-02-03

Published February 3, 2012

Links for 2012-01-22

Published January 22, 2012

  • Why should we stop online piracy? – opinion – 19 January 2012 – New Scientist : ‘There’s no evidence that the US is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.’ Good description of ‘dead weight loss’ and the consumer pressure on the industry that illegal competition poses
    (tags: piracy new-scientist slate sopa filesharing dead-weight-loss economics music movies)

  • Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers – Forbes : ‘The data simply doesn’t suggest that piracy is causing any serious economic harm to the US economy or the entertainment industry. Heavy-handed approaches to preventing piracy are wrong-headed and reveal a dangerous level of short-term thinking on the part of both lawmakers and industry leaders. Worse, the impetus to crack down on piracy is based largely on industry data that wildly inflates the problem.’
    (tags: piracy forbes filesharing politics sopa economics law)

  • Adrian Weckler confims that “Ireland’s SOPA” will be vague and open-ended : ‘The clear implication from [Adrian’s] interview with Sean Sherlock is that the proposed measures will be lacking in any real detail, leaving it entirely up to the judges as to what types of blocking might emerge. (Possibly going beyond web blocking to also target hosting and other services.) This ambiguity — as well as jeopardising fundamental rights — will create intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland.’ — this is much, much worse than I thought, particularly given the level of technical knowledge among Ireland’s judges (if Mr. Justice Charleton’s performance in EMI v. UPC is anything to go by).
    (tags: sopa ireland law filesharing piracy internet filtering blocking)

Links for 2012-01-17

Published January 17, 2012

Links for 2012-01-07

Published January 7, 2012

  • Skeuomorph : word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : ‘A skeuomorph /?skju??m?rf/ skew-?-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines’
    (tags: words language history objects ornament design wikipedia)

Links for 2012-01-04

Published January 4, 2012

Links for 2011-12-17

Published December 17, 2011

Links for 2011-12-15

Published December 15, 2011

  • French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak : ‘According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.’ I love this. The data is, of course, filled with potential inaccuracies — and that’s the point
    (tags: bittorrent surveillance downloading internet privacy france hadopi)

  • SiliconRepublic story on CoderDojo : ‘it’s both incredible and poignant that a voluntary movement that was born in Ireland during the summer is about to go international. Coder Dojo, the brainchild of 19-year-old entrepreneur and programmer James Whelton from Cork and tech entrepreneur Bill Liao, began as a Saturday morning club for kids to teach each other software programming. It has grown into a national movement up and down Ireland, a place where kids and their parents can go and learn to write software code in a friendly environment. The first UK Coder Dojo was held in London only last week and other countries in Europe are clamouring to get the initiative started there, too.’ Good on them!
    (tags: coderdojo programming coding kids children teaching education tech ireland)

Links for 2011-12-08

Published December 8, 2011

Links for 2011-12-04

Published December 4, 2011

Links for 2011-11-26

Published November 26, 2011

Links for 2011-11-23

Published November 23, 2011

  • How does LMAX’s disruptor pattern work? – Stack Overflow : LMAX’s “Disruptor” concurrent-server pattern, claiming to be a higher-throughput, lower-latency, and lock-free alternative to the SEDA pattern using a massive ring buffer. Good discussion here at SO. (via Filippo)
    (tags: via:filippo servers seda queueing concurrency disruptor patterns latency trading performance ring-buffers)

  • Scrapheap Transhumanism : Lepht Anonym and the ‘Grinders’. crazy stuff — low-end DIY cybernetic augmentation. ‘The implants sit in various places under my skin: middle fingertips of my left hand, back of the right hand, right forearm — tiny magnets, five or six millimeters across, coated in gold and then in silicon to isolate the delicate metal from the destructive environment of your body. They’re something of an investment at about thirty euros apiece, and hard to get hold of, but worth pursuing. When implanted, they become technological sensory organs. There’s an entire world of electromagnetic radiation out there, invisible to most. Our cities are saturated with it. A radio, for instance, gives off a field that’s bigger than the device itself. So do power supplies and wires in the walls. The implants pick up on the fields, and because they’re magnets, they fizz with gentle electricity, telling you this hard drive is currently active, that one is turned off, there’s the main line in the wall. Holding a mobile phone, you can feel the signals it sends and receives. You know it’s ringing before it starts to play any sounds, and when you answer it, you stick the touchscreen stylus to the back of your hand to hold it, then to your finger to type.’
    (tags: diy augmentation cybernetics transhumanism lepht-anonym grinders biohacking cyberpunk medicine)

  • Apache considered harmful : ouch
    (tags: git asf apache via:hn github programming)

Links for 2011-11-15

Published November 15, 2011

  • the legend of St. Columba, patron saint of copyright infringers : ‘At this point IPKat team member Jeremy dons his old academic hat and excitedly draws attention to some research he did on the St Columba case.  The goodly saint was given access to a psalter that was in the possession of Abbot Finian in around the year 560.  A psalter is a book of psalms — definitely public domain stuff, having been compiled during the reign of King David, who is generally reckoned to have died around 970 years before the common era.  Even on a life + 70 year basis, copyright would have expired around getting on for 1,500 years before Columba came on to the scene.  Having illicitly copied the psalter he refused to deliver it up to King Dermot of Tara, who famously said “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy” — not “to every cow its calf, to every author his work”.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, Columba refused to hand it over, fled the country for the safety of England (like the founder of Wikileaks), converted the Picts to Christianity, settled in Iona and became a saint.  You can read this all in “St Columba the Copyright Infringer” [1985] 12 European Intellectual Property Review 350-353.’ (via Eoin O’Dell). Someone fill in the misquoting High Court judges….
    (tags: st-columba books via:cearta ireland law history filesharing copyright)

  • eclim (eclipse + vim) : ‘Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, Vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, Eclipse, provides many great tools for development in various languages. Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both still leave something to be desired. Vim lacks native Java support and many of the advanced features available in Eclipse. Eclipse, on the other hand, still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to Vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text. That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write an IDE in Vim or a Vim editor in Eclipse, eclim provides an Eclipse plug-in that exposes Eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of Vim plug-ins that communicate with Eclipse over that interface. This functionality can be leveraged in three primary ways, as illustrated below.’
    (tags: eclipse java programming software vim editors refactoring)

Links for 2011-11-02

Published November 2, 2011

Links for 2011-10-22

Published October 22, 2011

Links for 2011-10-11

Published October 11, 2011

Links for 2011-10-09

Published October 9, 2011

  • the etymology of the anatomical term “Thagomizer” : ‘The term was coined by Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side comic strip, in which a group of cavemen in a faux-modern lecture hall are taught by their caveman professor that the spikes were named “after the late Thag Simmons”. The term was picked up initially by Ken Carpenter, a palaeontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993. Thagomizer has since been adopted as an informal anatomical term, and is used by the Smithsonian Institution, the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, the book The Complete Dinosaur and the BBC documentary series Planet Dinosaur.’ (via John Looney)
    (tags: via:john-looney thagomizer the-far-side comics til dinosaurs funny)