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)
Justin's Linklog Posts
Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript – What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 – Popular Mechanics : The (comp.)risks of overautomation strike again. “When trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land — the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted?”
(tags: aviation crash flight flying autopilot stalls warnings alarms ui af447 risks automation)spark : sparklines in your terminal window. Simply give it a comma or space-separated list of data values, and it’ll generate an ANSI-graphics sparkline chart. Brilliant! (via mjd)
(tags: via:mjdominus sparklines charts graphs bash shell terminal cli ansi)
Script used by Instagram to duplicate the paged-in VM pages to another host : as seen in their “Instagram Engineering” post
(tags: vmtouch vm linux unix tools instagram)vmtouch – the Virtual Memory Toucher : ‘vmtouch is a tool for learning about and controlling the file system cache of unix and unix-like systems. It is BSD licensed.’
(tags: vmtouch vm linux unix fs filesystems instagram)Scott Andreas – Garbage, Garbage Everywhere [slides] : ‘GC Strategies for Event Processing Systems on the JVM’
(tags: gc java jvm event-streams event-processing tuning slides presentations scott-andreas performance)Large file management with git-annex : ‘uses Git to manage files that are larger than Git can easily handle—without checking them into the repository. But git-annex provides ways to track those files using much of the same infrastructure as Git, so that moving or deleting those files can all be tracked in much the same way as committed files. In addition, git-annex allows for branches and distributed clones of its trees.’ I may investigate using this to sync my MP3s instead of SVN
(tags: git git-annex version-control)
collectSPACE : ‘The Source for Space History and Artifacts’ — and just in time for xmas too!
(tags: space spaaace memorabilia collecting gomi tat artifacts ebay science xmas)
747s using VLANs to secure in-flight access to engine management systems : ‘I was contracted to test the systems on a Boeing 747. They had added a new video system that ran over IP. They segregated this from the control systems using layer 2 VLANs. We managed to break the VLANs and access other systems and with source routing could access the Engine management systems.’ (via Risks)
(tags: scary aviation flight security boeing 747 via:risks)LINX Public Affairs » Scarlet wins in European Court : ‘The Court judgement therefore goes well beyond saying what a court may decide, by means of an injunction: it also sets out the limits of Member States’ powers to legislate to draft ISPs as copyright police. It will be a crucial precedent in future arguments about the Digital Economy Act, in the UK, HADOPI in France, various blocking requirements in Italy, and numerous other schemes across the EU. As victories for ISPs in the copyright wars go, this one was comprehensive. It will be seen as a landmark ruling for years to come.’ woot
(tags: linx scarlet isps hadopi eu privacy filtering copyright irma filesharing)
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)
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)
Determining response times with tcprstat : ‘Tcprstat is a free, open-source TCP analysis tool that watches network traffic and computes the delay between requests and responses. From this it derives response-time statistics and prints them out.’ Computes percentiles, too
(tags: tcp tcprstat tcp-ip networking measurement statistics performance instrumentation linux unix tools cli)
DTrace and Erlang : from Basho, via istvan. DTrace is becoming more compelling as a deep instrumentation/monitoring API — I didn’t realise disabled DTrace probes were virtually 0-overhead (a “2 NOOP instruction placeholder”, apparently), that’s nifty. Wonder if they’ve fixed the licensing mess, though
(tags: dtrace monitoring instrumentation debugging tracing unix erlang via:istvan)
Benchmarking Cassandra Scalability on AWS – Over a million writes per second : NetFlix’ benchmarks — impressively detailed. ’48, 96, 144 and 288 instances’, across 3 EC2 AZs in us-east, successfully scaling linearly
(tags: ec2 aws cassandra scaling benchmarks netflix performance)
Inside the mind of the octopus : “Researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.”
(tags: octopus animals biology consciousness neuroscience science)Dark Sky – Weather Prediction, Reinvented by Adam Grossman & Jack Turner — Kickstarter : Yes! short-term weather prediction and dataviz. I’ve been vaguely considering ideas along these lines recently, but these guys have gone much further. US residents, fund it — I really hope this gets made and makes it to Ireland…
(tags: crowdfunding weather apps cool dataviz visualization)Studded Bicycle Tires : Thinking of the winter commute again. This page has a load of fantastic info on winter tyres
(tags: ice winter tires tyres cycling shopping commute)
Linux SS Utility To Investigate Sockets / Network Connections : ‘When amount of sockets is enough large, netstat or even plain cat /proc/net/tcp/ cause nothing but pains and curses. In linux-2.4 the desease [sic] became worse: even if amount of sockets is small reading /proc/net/tcp/ is slow enough. This utility presents a new approach, which is supposed to scale well.’ via scanlan
(tags: via:scanlan ss linux sockets networking tools cli)
Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages : HBase and Haystack; all data LZO-compressed; very interesting approach to testing — they ‘shadow the real production workload into the test cluster to test before going into production’. This catches a ‘high percentage’ of issues before production. nice
(tags: testing shadowing haystack hbase facebook scalability lzo messaging sms via:james-hamilton)
Avoiding Full GCs in HBase with MemStore-Local Allocation Buffers : Fascinating. Evading the Java GC by reimplementing a slab allocator, basically
(tags: memory allocation java gc jvm hbase memstore via:dehora slab-allocator)How to beat the CAP theorem : Nathan “Storm” Marz on building a dual realtime/batch stack. This lines up with something I’ve been building in work, so I’m happy ;)
(tags: nathan-marz realtime batch hadoop storm big-data cap)
peak6/scala-ssh-shell – GitHub : ‘Backdoor that gives you a scala shell over ssh on your jvm. The shell is not sandboxed, anyone access the shell can touch anything in the jvm and do anything the jvm can do including modifying and deleting files, etc.’ nifty!
(tags: scala ssh repl interactive debugging coding jvm java)Anrealage pixelled shop : ‘Experimental japanese designer Kunihiko Morinaga has been inspired by pixel for his latest FW 2011 collection of his brand Anrealage. The best part is that this pixelled style has been applied also to his brand showroom in Harajuku, Tokyo.’ Love the rug
(tags: anrealage pixelation pixel-art via:mlkshk rugs shops tokyo kunihiko-morinaga)
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)
Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet : ‘Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives.’ hmm, not quite sure how that air gap is supposed to work
(tags: air-gap security drones viruses firewalls)
Bayes’ theorem ruled inadmissible in UK law courts : Bayes’ theorem, and ‘similar statistical analysis’, ruled inadmissible in UK law courts (via Tony Finch)
(tags: uk law guardian via:fanf bayes maths statistics legal)
Amazon hiring embedded OS developers : hey, I know a few of those! ‘I need more help on a project I’m driving at Amazon where we continue to make big changes in our datacenter network to improve customer experience and drive down costs while, at the same time, deploying more gear into production each day than all of Amazon.com used back in 2000. It’s an exciting time and we have big changes happening in networking. If you enjoy and have experience in operating systems, networking protocol stacks, or embedded systems and you would like to work on one of the biggest networks in the world, [get in touch].’ — James Hamilton
(tags: james-hamilton aws jobs amazon networking embedded)
feedback loop n-gram analyzer : ‘a simple parser of ARF compliant FBL complaints, which normalizes the email complaints and generates a 6-tuple n-gram version of the message. These n-grams are stored in a Redis database, keyed by the file in which they can be found. An inverse index also exists that allow you to find all messages containing a particular n-gram word.’
(tags: anti-spam spam fbl feedback filtering n-grams similarity hashing redis searching)
Lovelace’s Leap : a great observation from jgc. ‘Lovelace realized that even though a computer was, at its heart, a mathematical machine, it wasn’t restricted to doing mathematics. She realized that a computer could be used to process other types of ‘information’ by having numbers represent anything else. She realized that a computer could handle text, or music, or practically anything. That’s Lovelace’s Leap.’
(tags: jgc history ada-lovelace computing software information code babbage)Rectangular subdivisions of the world : ‘Eric Fischer, who continues his string of mapping fun and doesn’t even do it for his day job, maps the world in binary subdivisions. Each bounding box contains an equal number of geotagged tweets.’ via Nelson
(tags: maps mapping bounding-boxes world earth geodata geotagging twitter)
Hikaru Dorodango : ‘Hikaru dorodango are balls of mud, molded by hand into perfect spheres, dried, and polished to an unbelievable luster. The process is simple, but the result makes it seem like alchemy. A traditional pastime among the children of Japan, the exact origin of hikaru dorodango is unknown.’
(tags: mud dirt dorodango japan art howto sculpture hands craft play children)
Storm : ‘The past decade has seen a revolution in data processing. MapReduce, Hadoop, and related technologies have made it possible to store and process data at scales previously unthinkable. Unfortunately, these data processing technologies are not realtime systems, nor are they meant to be. There’s no hack that will turn Hadoop into a realtime system; realtime data processing has a fundamentally different set of requirements than batch processing. However, realtime data processing at massive scale is becoming more and more of a requirement for businesses. The lack of a “Hadoop of realtime” has become the biggest hole in the data processing ecosystem. Storm fills that hole.’
(tags: data scaling twitter realtime scalability storm queueing)Storm: distributed and fault-tolerant realtime computation : intro slideshow to this really nifty-looking distcomp platform
(tags: distcomp distributed realtime storm slides twitter)Hacker News thread on Storm : lots of good questions and answers in here
(tags: twitter storm distcomp distributed)
Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years : “This is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,” writes Khatib. “These results indicate the potential for integrating video games [like FoldIt] into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”
(tags: foldit gaming games science biology aids viruses protease protein-folding proteins vr)
Black Hat: Insulin pumps can be hacked : “Everything has an embedded processor and computer in it,” he said. “Every time you hide behind [security by] obscurity, it is going to fail.” Brad Smith, a researcher and Black Hat conference staffer who also is a registered nurse, said the medical field largely looks the other way when it comes to securing patient devices. “I lecture at all the medical conferences,” he said during the press conference. “They just hide it. Pay attention to what [Radcliffe] is saying. His life is in this pump.” (via Risks Digest)
(tags: via:risks insulin pump medicine security hacking health wireless)A few git tips you didn’t know about : ‘git checkout -t’ alone is worth the bookmark
(tags: git tips coding unix reference tricks via:proggit)
Conor O’Neill on his freesat/DTT system : ‘Our replacement for Sky TV cost €99. Ariva 120. No monthly fees!’ — sounds very intriguing, that’s a good price point
(tags: digital fta satellite television dtt sky upc ireland)Golomb-coded sets : ‘a probabilistic data structure conceptually similar to a Bloom filter, but with a more compact in-memory representation, and a slower query time.’ could come in handy
(tags: gcs bloom-filters probabilistic data-structures memory algorithms)
The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit) : contains a surprisingly-large number which I haven’t read
(tags: scifi fiction books science-fiction)
Dutch grepping Facebook for welfare fraud : ‘The [Dutch] councils are working with a specialist Amsterdam research firm, using the type of computer software previously deployed only in counterterrorism, monitoring [LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter] traffic for keywords and cross-referencing any suspicious information with digital lists of social welfare recipients. Among the giveaway terms, apparently, are “holiday” and “new car”. If the automated software finds a match between one of these terms and a person claiming social welfare payments, the information is passed on to investigators to gather real-life evidence.’ With a 30% false positive rate, apparently — let’s hope those investigations aren’t too intrusive!
(tags: grep dutch holland via:tjmcintyre privacy facebook twitter linkedin welfare dole fraud false-positives searching)
The Monkeysphere Project : OpenPGP’s web of trust extending further. ‘Everyone who has used a web browser has been interrupted by the “Are you sure you want to connect?” warning message, which occurs when the browser finds the site’s certificate unacceptable. But web browser vendors (e.g. Microsoft or Mozilla) should not be responsible for determining whom (or what) the user trusts to certify the authenticity of a website, or the identity of another user online. The user herself should have the final say, and designation of trust should be done on the basis of human interaction. The Monkeysphere project aims to make that possibility a reality.’
(tags: via:filippo gpg pki security software ssh ssl web)Convergence : ‘Convergence is a secure replacement for the Certificate Authority System. Rather than employing a traditionally hard-coded list of immutable CAs, Convergence allows you to configure a dynamic set of Notaries which use network perspective to validate your communication. Convergence allows you to choose who you want to trust, rather than having someone else’s decision forced on you. You can revise your trust decisions at any time, so that you’re not locked in to trusting anyone for longer than you want.’
(tags: ssl tls trust security https web via:filippo firefox plugins pki)
Dave Neary on The Cost of Going it Alone : ‘I’m going to talk about the costs associated with modifying and maintaining free software “out of tree” – that is, when you don’t work with the developers of the software to have your changes integrated. But I’m also going to talk about the costs of working with upstream projects. It can be easy for us to forget that working upstream takes time and money – and we ignore that to our peril. It’s in our interests as free software developers to make it as cost-effective as possible for people to work with us. Hopefully, if you’re a commercial developer, you’ll come away from this article with a better idea of when it’s worthwhile to work upstream, and when it isn’t. And if you’re a community developer, perhaps this will give you some ideas about how to make it easier for people to work with you.’
(tags: dave-neary gnome open-source maintainers upstream forking)
Google App Engine Price Hike Stuns Developers – – Platform as a Service – Informationweek : ‘Now that Google has begun offering App Engine users a way to calculate the new rate and compare it with the old rate, developers are realizing their bills will rise, by a factor of 10 or 100 or more in some cases, when the pricing change takes effect in a few months.’ – ouch
(tags: google gae appengine costs pricing paas)
Through speed of traffic on San Francisco area streets vs. popularity with Flickr and Twitter users : “slower streets” generate more photos/tweets than “faster streets”, with a peak around 9 mph
(tags: data san-francisco photos flickr twitter speed driving)
Microsoft’s new IE “Ribbon” debunked : ‘nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right? Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.’ (via Nelson)
(tags: design hci microsoft ui statistics user-hostile ribbon windows)
The Daily Mail’s frequent copyright abuse finally catches up with them : This is how you do it — bravo to Alice Taylor, who got them fair and square as they did their usual trick of lifting copyrighted content without permission
(tags: copyright journalism photography daily-mail via:torrentfreak)Real-World Scala: Dependency Injection (DI) : I think I prefer the structural-typing approach, TBH
(tags: scala patterns programming oo coding dependency-injection)
Bog Body: Committing to Open Source : Oisin Hurley on viable strategies for a commercial software company to handle participation in open source. Shame I’ve never found anywhere to viably put these into action, but they sound accurate
(tags: open-source oisin-hurley oss corporate work)