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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2012-03-11

Published March 11, 2012

  • I left my shutter open for 30 seconds in the wilderness at 10.30pm, under a full moon : Amazing shot. With a sufficiently long exposure, it looks like midday — no colour correction applied. (via fp)
    (tags: via:fp pictures photos night colour landscapes long-exposure photography)

  • Occursions : ‘Our goal is to create the world’s fastest extendable, non-transactional time series database for big data (you know, for kids)! Log file indexing is our initial focus. For example append only ASCII files produced by libraries like Log4J, or containing FIX messages or JSON objects. Occursions was built by a small team sick of creating hacks to remotely copy and/or grep through tons of large log files. We use it to index around a terabyte of new log data per day. Occursions asynchronously tails log files and indexes the individual lines in each log file as each line is written to disk so you don’t even have to wait for a second after an event happens to search for it. Occursions uses custom disk backed data structures to create and search its indexes so it is very efficient at using CPU, memory and disk.’
    (tags: logs search tsd big-data log4j via:proggit)

Links for 2012-03-10

Published March 10, 2012

Links for 2012-03-09

Published March 9, 2012

  • Welcome, Apple! : ‘The desktop version of iPhoto, and indeed all of Apple’s iOS apps until now, use Google Maps. The new iPhoto for iOS, however, uses Apple’s own map tiles – made from OpenStreetMap data (outside the US).’
    (tags: apple ios maps openstreetmap osm free iphoto)

  • Apple Map Tiles : I actually really quite like these, particularly how they render parks. Good for leisure use, maybe not so hot for navigation. cute
    (tags: apple gis mapping maps)

Links for 2012-03-07

Published March 7, 2012

Links for 2012-03-06

Published March 6, 2012

  • FOI docs regarding lobbying of Sean Sherlock on the copyright SI : Truly amazing outcome from Mark Tighe’s FOI request regarding lobbying on the copyright SI. It turns out that (a) IRMA want all Irish ISPs to enact “3 strikes”, and view the SI as a way to force this; but (b) Eircom are of the opinion that “3 strikes” is now illegal and unenforceable under EU and Irish law. Despite knowing this, Sherlock then went ahead and signed the SI into law *anyway*, just to avoid the hassle of IRMA’s members bringing the government to court. Which they did anyway, regardless. What an utter shambles
    (tags: sopaireland sean-sherlock irma emi copyright ireland law eircom lobbying foi)

Links for 2012-03-04

Published March 4, 2012

Links for 2012-03-03

Published March 3, 2012

Links for 2012-03-02

Published March 2, 2012

Links for 2012-02-29

Published February 29, 2012

Links for 2012-02-27

Published February 27, 2012

  • On The Record » The hue and cry over buying and selling tickets : ‘If you really think that all 14,500 tickets for a hot show at Dublin’s O2 like, let’s say, One Direction will go on sale to the general public, you probably also still believe in the tooth fairy. While 10 per cent of the tickets are usually held back for O2’s priority customers, there will always still be far less than the remaining 13,000 tickets available on Ticketmaster’s system when the show purportedly goes on sale. How else do you think tickets for those One Direction Dublin shows in March 2013 can on sale minutes after they are sold out on the supposed primary ticket-selling site, on a secondary site like Viagogo at a hugely inflated premium? Do you really think people queued overnight for those tickets to go “nah, not bothered, have to wash my hair that night” five minutes after getting them in their hands about a show 13 months away? Perhaps we need a Dispatches-type expose over here to lift a few rocks and show the type of fat, avaricious worms wiggling around underneath feasting like parasites on the wallets and credit cards of Irish music fans.’
    (tags: secondary-sales touts tickets gigs ireland music dispatches)

Links for 2012-02-26

Published February 26, 2012

  • Zombie Gnomes Bye Bye Birdie by ChrisandJanesPlace on Etsy : ‘This is a sorry sight indeed. A poor helpless Lawn Flamingo has been taken down by zombie gnomes: Nose-less Ned, Greedy Gary, and Bartolomeu.It seems like an unlikely kill until Bartolomeu broke the elegant beasts leg and brought it crashing to the ground. Where they pounced upon their helpless victim and began their feast. So we say “Bye Bye Birdie, I’m going to miss you so, Bye Bye Birdie, Why’d you have to go?”‘ — bloody hell
    (tags: etsy regretsy funny odd flamingo zombies gnomes)

  • twitter/jvmgcprof – GitHub : ‘gcprof is a simple utility for profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM […] Profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM. The gcprof command runs a java command under profiling. Allocation and collection statistics are printed periodically. If -n or -no are provided, statistics are also reported in terms of the given application metric. Total allocation, allocation rate, and a survival histogram is given. The intended use for this tool is twofold: (1) monitor and test garbage allocation and GC behavior, and (2) inform GC tuning.’
    (tags: gc java performance twitter jvm tools)

  • YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music – Slashdot : ‘So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish’s exclusive intellectual property.”‘ Major problems with how YouTube is now policing IP infringement, it seems
    (tags: birdsong absurd google fail youtube rumblefish copyfight)

Links for 2012-02-24

Published February 24, 2012

  • BBC News – Sentinel project research reveals UK GPS jammer use : GPS jamming was this commonplace? I had no idea. ‘”We believe there’s between 50 and 450 occurrences in the UK every day,” said Charles Curry of Chronos Technology, the company leading the project, though he stressed that they were still analysing the data.’ […] “Most of them are used by people who don’t want their vehicles to be tracked.” (via Tim Bunce)
    (tags: via:timbunce jamming gps uk location chronos)

  • Library Closure of Type .nu : Alan Toner on library.nu’s shutdown. ‘The case of library.nu is significant because the demand for the works offered there demonstrates that filesharing is not just about pop music, porn and cams of action movies, but also those forms and sources of knowledge whose acquisition are ritually celebrated within ‘enlightenment’ culture. Many of those whose works were offered derive income not from royalties, but from related activities such as teaching and research. Such people were themselves an important component library.nu’ user base. Some have other means to access the same materials, others, especially those in countries with weaker education infrastructures and more emaciated library budgets, do not. Outside of formal education, the millions of online autodidacts may be denied access to material, seriously impinging on their lives and possibilities. When one considers the cost of text books and more especially scholarly articles, that is no hyperbole, and applies not only to the global south but the post-industrial north as well, awash in its dreams of knowledge economies and human capital.’
    (tags: alan-toner library.nu ebooks education filesharing copyright piracy)

Links for 2012-02-23

Published February 23, 2012

  • Canadian Universities Agree To Ridiculous Copyright Agreement That Says Emailing Hyperlinks Is Equal To Photocopying | Techdirt : ‘The agreement reached last month with the licensing agency includes provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and surveillance of academic staff email.’ wow, incredibly bad terms
    (tags: copyright canada hyperlinks copyfight techdirt licensing academia)

  • EFF Wins Protection for Time Zone Database : ‘The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a ‘covenant not to sue’ going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions. Software engineers around the world depend on the time zone database to make sure that time-stamps for email and other files work correctly no matter where you are. However, last September, Astrolabe filed a lawsuit against Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert – the researchers who coordinated the database’s development for decades – because the database includes information from an atlas in which Astrolabe claimed to own copyright. But facts – like what time the sun rises – are not copyrightable. EFF, along with co-counsel Adam Kessel and Olivia Nguyen at the Boston office of Fish & Richardson P.C, promptly signed on to defend Olson and Eggert and protect this essential tool. In January, EFF advised Astrolabe that Olson and Eggert would move for sanctions if Astrolabe did not withdraw its complaint. Today’s dismissal followed.’
    (tags: copyright eff timezones via:fanf time unix olson)

Links for 2012-02-22

Published February 22, 2012

Links for 2012-02-16

Published February 16, 2012

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