Justin's Linklog Posts

Musopen raises $40,000 to set classical music “free” : open-source classical music: now very well-funded. awesome!
(tags: musopen classical music copyright funding opensource free)

P2P investigations now illegal in Switzerland : ‘The country’s Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can’t go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.’
(tags: p2p privacy ip-addresses pii logistep switzerland piracy)

Forking is a Feature – Anil Dash : thought-provoking piece about GitHub-style forking applied to other disciplines; Tumblr, Dribbble, Forrst being cases where it’s happening now
(tags: community development forking github git opensource tumblr dribbble forrst wikipedia)

Ubuntu’s cron package silently ignores files : Ubuntu have hack-patched Vixie Cron to silently ignore cron files which contain a “.”. omgwtf
(tags: omgwtfbbq broken ubuntu patching quality bugs software stupid packaging)

Game On : exhibition billing itself as “the world’s biggest celebration of games”, arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. ‘Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.’ tix are EUR10
(tags: games gaming exhibitions dublin)

Your Country, Your Call, You’re Doomed : Bock on the predictably-crap biz-waffle results from the YCYC “get Ireland back on track” competition. ‘If we don’t take this seriously, we’re doomed to repeat the current economic disaster over and over again, each generation with its own Bertie Ahern, its own Seanie Fitzpatrick, its own Fingers Fingleton, and all the other assorted, integrity-free panhandlers and parasites who have soiled the reputation of this country and sold us down the Swanee for their own, ignorant, self-serving enrichment. Forget about Eamon Ryan’s smart economy. Let’s put all our effort into creating the Honest Economy.’
(tags: ycyc waffle business ireland vision-lock integrity bock-the-robber economy)

Hit The Road: Public Transport Directions for Dublin : ‘a public-transport route-planning service for Dublin city, which shows you how to get from A to B using buses, Luas or DART services. The original version was built during the first Startup Weekend Dublin in May 2010.’ Pretty good; although in my tests it wasn’t able to find the optimal route, it always came up with something that made a good starting point
(tags: routes dublin public-transport buses hit-the-road)

o2 Broadband Dongle Working on Ubuntu 10.04 : the Huawei E1752 dongle does that horrible thing where it defaults to acting as a USB storage device containing the Windows drivers, instead of acting as a 3G modem by default. usb_modeswitch should be in the Ubuntu base install to deal with this crap
(tags: usb broadband o2 hauwei e1752 ubuntu dongle)

Twitter’s misuse of OAuth : Twitter seem to be attempting to control misbehaving clients, by using the “consumer key” pair as a secret key for app developers. This is proving impossible for FOSS clients to work with, and is trivially hacked to allow third-party app impersonation. Bad idea, Twitter
(tags: twitter fail oauth standards open-source gwibber security)

Boxee Blog » How Boxee Sees the Apple TV : go Boxee! open TV is the way to go
(tags: boxee apple tv set-top)

“if slalom” : a great name for a common “code smell” of too much indentation, calling for merciless usage of Extract Method (via Aman)
(tags: via:akohli code-smells refactoring if-slalom programming funny if-else indentation)

/~colmmacc/ » Prime and Proper : algorithm to perform set membership tests on enumerated sets quickly and memory-efficiently, using multiplication by primes. Nice trick
(tags: hacks colmmacc prime-numbers set-membership bloom-filters bignums algorithms programming)

_Fast Cache for Your Text: Accelerating Exact Pattern Matching with Feed-Forward Bloom Filters_ [PDF] : intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick — or possibly re2c, as used in “sa-compile”. On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn’t perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
(tags: bloom-filters grep filtering spamassassin sa-compile text-matching caches aho-corasick)

SuperTweet.Net : free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
(tags: via:pixelbeat api oauth proxy twitter web http curl supertweet)

Eirgrid System Demand : ‘The system demand displayed here represents the electricity production required to meet [Irish] national electricity consumption, including system losses, but net of generators’ requirements. It includes power imported via the interconnector and an estimate of the power produced by wind generators, but excludes some non-centrally monitored generation (i.e. small scale CHP).’ via Juan Flynn
(tags: via:juanflynn eirgrid national-grid ireland power charts statistics)

Dave Grady on “the conference call” : painfully accurate sketch about the crappy conference call UI. “hi, who just joined?”
(tags: hi-who-just-joined conference-calls phone funny ui dave-grady comedy sketches)

Life without a CA | The Tor Blog : do you trust the default set of root CAs in modern web browsers? sounds like we probably shouldn’t
(tags: ca certificates https encryption firefox ssl trust privacy web root-cas)

Topfloor – Free Residential Lease/Letting Agreement Download : GFDL-licensed legal boilerplate agreement for the Irish market. Nice one — although did I see a commercial company charging for what appears to be a derivative work of this document? is that a breach of the license terms?
(tags: gfdl gnu topfloor letting leases legal documents ireland)

tcpcrypt : opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though
(tags: cryptography encryption tcp security internet tcpcrypt opportunistic)

Inchicore family home ready for take-off : from the Irish Times property section: ‘There’s a guy in Inchicore with an aircraft simulator in his shed. Not one of those fancy computer games, this is the real thing – a decommissioned 747 simulator, cockpit and all.’ Unfortunately, the sim doesn’t come with the house
(tags: houses flight-simulators gaming inchicore dublin irish-times property)

Fried Androids? :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It : scary stuff. East Texas patent-troll court has ruled that EchoStar must remotely disable customers’ DVRs due to patent infringement, which they are (thankfully) refusing to do and are now held in contempt for $200M — the blog suggests this could happen due to the Google-Oracle suit, to Android phones
(tags: google via:tieguy law east-texas dvr remote-disabling internet oracle swpats)

Introduction to parallel & distributed algorithms : really interesting parallel algorithm concepts. I’d seen parallel merge sort before from the map-reduce world, but some others are new to me and worth thinking about (via Hacker News)
(tags: via:hackernews algorithms distributed parallel map-reduce merge-sort sorting)

image soak : an “endless page” of images culled from newsfeeds. Very good for video games and art, particularly. definitely a new addition to my daily list (via Andre)
(tags: via:torrez news images feed sources art)

Mario Kart graffiti in Portland bike lanes : very funny. ‘Wait, does this mean that those cyclists that wiped out a few blocks back are going to catch up to me right before I get to my destination, even though I didn’t crash once?’ (commenter on Kotaku)
(tags: cycling portland videogames gaming mario-kart graffiti)

U2 Manager Blames ‘Free’ And Anonymous Internet Bloggers For Industry Troubles | Techdirt : great Mike Masnick post responding to the latest woe-is-me missive from U2’s asshat-in-residence Paul McGuinness (via Jim Carroll)
(tags: via:jimcarroll u2 mp3blogs paul-mcguinness mike-masnick techdirt music mp3 downloading filesharing piracy blogging)

RTÉ News: CAO website blocked by malicious attack : is the CAO (Ireland’s Central Applications Office, for university admissions) being DDOS’d? sounds like it
(tags: cao ddos security ireland)

jwz – What different sorting algorithms sound like : in the style of BBC Radiophonics Workshop, with copious flange — my favourite is heap sort. this is brilliant (via jwz)
(tags: via:jwz sound music sorting algorithms)

Books of Adam : stories drawn by a guy I vaguely know online. really funny!
(tags: blog comic funny fp)

100 ways to spend the Anglo €25,000,000,000 : ‘just how much is €25 billion that [Ireland’s taxpayers] have to borrow for [failed bank] Anglo?’ some great answers, including: start our own space program with 20 space shuttles; build 6 LHCs or 2 ITER fusion reactors; scrap fares on all public transport for 33 years; buy 2 of Asia’s largest banks; buy Steve Jobs himself; detach the People’s Republic of Cork by building a ten-metre-wide moat; buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie
(tags: money omgwtfbbq insane argh funny nama anglo sean-fitzpatrick ireland)

[osol-discuss] OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express : ‘Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC and x64. We have more than twice the application base of AIX and HP-UX combined.’ Well, that about sums it up. Enterprisey!
(tags: enterprisey open-source closed-source oracle solaris opensolaris hp-ux history)

Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents : ‘Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.’ no shit, Sherlock
(tags: ip patents techcrunch startups swpats via:brian-caulfield software)

Spam King Leo Kuvayev Jailed on Child Sex Charges — Krebs on Security : ‘A man known as one of the world’s top purveyors of junk e-mail has been imprisoned in Russia for allegedly molesting [more than *50*] underage girls from a Moscow orphanage, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.’ lovely
(tags: spam russia jail crime moscow leo-kuvayev)

La Brea Starter And Rustic Bread Recipe : another variation of the Nancy Silverton recipe, and a loaf recipe to go with it
(tags: recipes food bread baking sourdough la-brea-bakery)

Nancy Silverton’s La Brea Bakery sourdough starter recipe : lots of recommendations, but looks like hard work; grown from natural grape yeast
(tags: sourdough starter la-brea-bakery baking food recipes)

On The Record » Guest post – 500 Words of Summer – Mumblin’ Deaf Ro : Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats
(tags: mumblin-deaf-ro statistics music irma music-industry piracy filesharing)

Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza : wow, fantastic review — real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA’s latest videogame
(tags: crime games japan videogames yakuza sega)

Man Lives In Futuristic Sci-Fi World Where All His Interactions Take Place In Cyberspace | The Onion : ‘In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.’ brilliant pisstake of mid-’90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)
(tags: the-onion funny future futurism humour internet sf via:walter journalism cyberpunk 1990s cyberspace)

Irish Hackerspaces Week : hackerspaces in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast, running events all next week (08-14 – 08-22)
(tags: hackerspace hacking ireland conferences events)

John Graham-Cumming: Shut up and ship : on “Haystack”, a vaporous censorship-evading product aimed at Iran’s internet surveillance, which as of yet is a site soliciting donations and a lot of press, and not a lot of techie details
(tags: haystack privacy censorship filtering surveillance jgc crypto open-source)

Cache on Delivery : Mind-boggling presentation; a load of sites are exposing memcacheds to the public internet, with no auth, and full of juicy data (samples included). iptables is hard
(tags: memcached security hacks exploits)

Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images : surprise! ‘The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.’
(tags: airport dhs fail privacy security surveillance tsa big-brother x-ray)

Zed Shaw debunking some poll/epoll myths : “benchmarks disprove common wisdom” shocker
(tags: epoll io linux networking performance scalability mongrel2 zedshaw poll)

Why Jailbreak? – The Unofficial Apple Weblog : some good Cydia app tips. also glad to see piracy didn’t appear ’til page 3
(tags: cydia jailbreak iphone apps)

Kaprekar’s constant : ‘6174 .. is notable for the following property: Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits. (Leading zeros are allowed.); Arrange the digits in ascending and then in descending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary; Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number; Go back to step 2. The process will reach 6174 in at most 7 iterations’
(tags: 6174 constants cool maths mathematics numbers kaprekar wow)

Keyboard shortcuts for positioning windows in Mac OS X : from Tony Finch. great stuff, I used to use shortcuts like this all the time on my Linux desktops to avoid rodentage
(tags: mouse keyboard navigation windows shortcuts scripting ui automator)

Draft Functional Spec of Hadopi “securisation” software : Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking “workarounds” (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?
(tags: hadopi piracy filtering snooping big-brother 1984 via:adulau vpn tor blocklists)

XOR patent killed Commodore-Amiga : ‘Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn’t allow any CD-32’s into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32’s that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end’
(tags: cd32 commodore computers history ip patents software swpats xor amiga)

Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O [PDF] : classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
(tags: java async io jvm linux performance scalability threading threads server nio paul-tyma mailinator)

autojump : interesting idea; extend “cd” to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to “jump” to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
(tags: autojump cli bash command-line navigation terminal shell directory cd)

Mac OS X command-line tricks : not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I’m stuck using the missus’ laptop ;)
(tags: apple bash cli osx mac sysadmin shell tricks command-line)

Schneier on Security: Internet Worm Targets SCADA : ‘Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.’
(tags: wow malware worms passwords security schneier policies defaults)

Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution : from last week’s CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
(tags: spam anti-spam ceas conference papers research spamassassin adversarial-classification evolution arms-race via:jd)

JotNot for iPhone : another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
(tags: apps document evernote iphone jotnot scanner scan photos dropbox google-docs)

DocScanner : document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it’ll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
(tags: android apps evernote iphone mobile ocr pdf document scanner scan)

What are the lesser known but cool data structures ? – Stack Overflow : some gems here
(tags: data-structures algorithms cs data geek programming)

Computer History Museum: MacPaint and QuickDraw source code : wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
(tags: via:jgc apple code history mac source bill-atkinson macpaint pascal quickdraw graphics)

Technology to track trad : TunePal — “Shazam for trad”. play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it’ll link to the tune’s name, history, discography, and where it’s been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
(tags: trad irish via:klillington music recognition machine-learning)

Brick, A Literary Journal: Issue 85: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock : ‘The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society’: among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
(tags: france paris underground toread ux catacombs marquis writing)

NeoRouter : establish an overlay, encrypted private “virtual LAN” for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
(tags: firewall hamachi network openwrt remote router security vpn desktop-sharing neorouter tomato)

How do I do silicone sealant neatly? : so that’s how it’s done. now to retry my DIY botch job
(tags: silicone sealant diy home howto)

GNU coreutils sort(1) now uses all available CPUs : using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
(tags: via:pixelbeat sort coreutils gnu multicore parallelism)

REPLs suck, I want something block oriented : good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn’t a usable approach for block-oriented languages
(tags: languages repl programming ruby hacking coding block-oriented)

Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail : first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws — for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
(tags: dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet)

xboxdrv : ‘a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.’
(tags: drivers xbox360 controllers remote linux ubuntu xboxdrv joystick input)

moreutils : ‘a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.’ these are really, really nifty (via popey)
(tags: via:popey unix cli command-line linux moreutils sponge pee ts vipe zrun perl for:pixelbeat)

Ubuntu One Time Passwords/Single Use Passwords HOWTO : I should do this on my hosts
(tags: ssh server security opie otp skey one-time-passwords ubuntu linux sshd)

FlexGet : torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
(tags: bittorrent automation boxee linux python rss torrents tv flexget)

Interpolation search : neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
(tags: algorithms programming search via:jzawodny)

Overclocking SSL : techie details from Adam Langley on how Google’s been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
(tags: certificates encryption google https latency speed ssl tcp tls web performance)

Cory Doctorow’s working environment : hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
(tags: cory-doctorow geek howto lifehacks ubuntu productivity tips tools)

O2.ie blocking popular image-hosting sites imgur.com, imageshack.com : apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
(tags: iwf fail blocking filtering o2 ireland imgur imageshack censorship fps)

Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right : ‘every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.’
(tags: broadband finland legal rights law human-rights three-strikes)

new gastropub opening in Stoneybatter : there goes the neighbourhood! ‘L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.’ Sign me up
(tags: gastropubs stoneybattery dublin d7 food drink)

Date::Manip Error in Ubuntu 10.04 : “XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly” — caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
(tags: date-manip xmltv breakage mythtv ubuntu lucid 10.04)

Misco.ie : another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
(tags: shopping components hardware ireland)

Signature-based AV is failing : on average across the AV industry, 40% block rates just after 0-hour of a new malware sample, rising to 60% after 5 days. sounds like the AV industry is losing, if this chart is valid. (via Terry Zink)
(tags: via:tzink malware av fail accuracy detection false-negatives scanners viruses)

Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs [PDF] : sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
(tags: sort merge hash join databases performance cpu simd multicore)