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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2011-08-24

Published August 24, 2011

Links for 2011-08-23

Published August 23, 2011

Links for 2011-08-15

Published August 15, 2011

  • Building with Legos : Netflix tech blog on how they deploy their services. Notably, they avoid the Puppet/Chef approach, citing these reasons: ‘One is that it eliminates a number of dependencies in the production environment: a master control server, package repository and client scripts on the servers, network permissions to talk to all of these. Another is that it guarantees that what we test in the test environment is the EXACT same thing that is deployed in production; there is very little chance of configuration or other creep/bit rot. Finally, it means that there is no way for people to change or install things in the production environment (this may seem like a really harsh restriction, but if you can build a new AMI fast enough it doesn’t really make a difference).’
    (tags: devops cloud aws netflix puppet chef deployment)

  • Bog body found in Co Laois could be that of sacrificed king : ‘All of the other bog bodies were found on significant boundaries. The idea is that because the goddess is the land, by inserting bodies and other items relating to their inauguration as king along the boundaries, it gives form to the goddess.’ things were pretty damn gory back then
    (tags: ireland history laois bog-bodies bog human-sacrifice)

Links for 2011-07-30

Published July 30, 2011

Links for 2011-07-26

Published July 26, 2011

Links for 2011-07-22

Published July 22, 2011

  • Why we should expel the Vatican’s Ambassador, the Papal Nuncio : ‘In 2011, we have a new Government, who have stopped making excuses for the Vatican State. The Facebook campaign now has over 5,000 members, who continue to send emails and letters to their TDs and to the Minister for Foreign Affairs expressing the clear message that we want action. Enda Kenny said yesterday that the Vatican downplayed the rape and torture of Irish children to to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. We should expel the Vatican’s Papal Nuncio and send the message that they have destroyed the very things they prized the most.’
    (tags: vatican papal-nuncio religion catholicism politics diplomacy ireland child-abuse cloyne-report)

Links for 2011-07-20

Published July 20, 2011

Links for 2011-07-19

Published July 19, 2011

Links for 2011-06-28

Published June 28, 2011

Links for 2011-06-24

Published June 24, 2011

Links for 2011-06-19

Published June 19, 2011

  • Hacker News | Ooops. : brilliant thread of epic “OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE” stories
    (tags: fail ouch oops via:hn via:waxy computers software rm-rf)

  • 64yourself : Damn. my 2006 hack http://taint.org/c64ize/ reinvented, although with a lot more panache :(
    (tags: c64 images retro commodore-64 commodore)

  • _Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming_ : Gunnar Kreitz’ paper on its innards! ‘Spotify is a music streaming service offering lowlatency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks. Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol. In this paper, we give an overview of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide measurements of service performance and user behavior. The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and has been available in six European countries since October 2008. Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming with good results. In particular, 8.8% of music data played comes from Spotify’s servers while the median playback latency is only 265 ms (including cached tracks). We also discuss the user access patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the access patterns as they reach the server.’
    (tags: spotify via:waxy streaming p2p music architecture papers networking)

Links for 2011-06-14

Published June 14, 2011

Links for 2011-06-12

Published June 12, 2011

  • Redditor explains why Apple power cables break frequently : “As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple’s products. And when I say “the most powerful”, I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it’s pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I’m sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn’t like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.”
    (tags: apple cables design industrial-design power-cables funny)

  • France To Launch a National Patent Troll : ‘The operation, called “France Brevets” will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of […] shaking down companies for money.’ I think the word is: incroyable
    (tags: france fail omgwtfbbq patent-trolls swpats patents government innovation software europe)

  • The first Irish case on defamation via autocomplete : Google Instant has picked up people searching for ‘Ballymascanlon hotel receivership’ and is now offering this as an autocomplete option — cue defamation lawsuit. Defamation via machine learning
    (tags: machine-learning defamation google google-instant search ballymascanlon hotels autocomplete law-enforcement)

Links for 2011-06-11

Published June 11, 2011

  • Data Protection Commissioner investigating Eircom’s “three strikes” system : Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn’t been updated for DST. ‘this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management – i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime – for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.’ As TJ explains, this could have very serious results
    (tags: dpc ireland eircom fail time dst daylight-savings three-strikes filesharing piracy)

Links for 2011-06-10

Published June 10, 2011

  • Hipster Ipsum : ‘Adipisicing do Tumblr fugiat vinyl Pitchfork. Organic tempor laboris, esse Tumblr irure eu nostrud. Dolor Cosby sweater mustache qui consequat incididunt. McSweeney’s ullamco occaecat Wes Anderson. Minim aute lomo, duis ea proident enim Carles. Eiusmod culpa photo booth ex. Pariatur incididunt minim qui, dolor Pitchfork wayfarers mollit vinyl fixie.’ (via boogah)
    (tags: via:boogah hipster lorem-ipsum filler text markov-chains funny humour)

  • Apple rips off student’s rejected iPhone app : ‘Wi-Fi Sync’ was rejected from the App Store last May — and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! ‘Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers’ kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”’
    (tags: apple walled-garden protectionism iphone wifi syncing apps ip rip-offs)

  • Why Ryanair The Cookie Monster is just an urban myth : “If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
    (tags: ryanair pricing airlines travel web shopping urban-myths)

Links for 2011-06-07

Published June 7, 2011

Links for 2011-06-01

Published June 1, 2011

Links for 2011-05-23

Published May 23, 2011

Links for 2011-05-18

Published May 18, 2011

Links for 2011-05-13

Published May 13, 2011

Links for 2011-05-04

Published May 4, 2011

Links for 2011-04-29

Published April 29, 2011

  • Online censorship now bordering on the ridiculous in Turkey – Reporters Without Borders : ‘access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. … The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.’ Incredible (via Danny)
    (tags: via:mala repression internet turkey censorship filtering false-positives)

Links for 2011-04-27

Published April 27, 2011

Links for 2011-04-25

Published April 25, 2011