Justin's Linklog Posts

How Google/Firefox Geolocation API works : I didn’t realise Firefox’s geolocation used wifi triangulation, too
(tags: wifi google linux firefox mapping geolocation triangulation)

Highcharts: JavaScript Charts that don’t suck : good HN thread on better charting tools in JS
(tags: javascript charts graphs js dataviz hacker-news)

Charlie’s Diary: The myth of the starship : Charlie Stross’ thoughts on the true viability of interstellar travel. This was about the most thought-provoking bit of ‘Accelerando’ for me alright
(tags: beans ships travel interstellar space ai downloading)

Church ‘lied without lying’ – The Irish Times – Thu, Nov 26, 2009 : you have got to be kidding. Father Ted meets the Inquisition
(tags: church catholicism ireland pathetic child-abuse appalling)

Meeting Notes 2009 11 24 – Noisebridge : notes curated by Danny O’Brien: ‘I have volunteered to take the meetynge notes in the style of a 17th century essayist.’
(tags: meetings hilarity 17th-century ye-olde-wiki minutes via:3ze)

All Android Phones : so many! Saw a Hero last night, it looked pretty swish — although not quite as pretty as the iPhone ;)
(tags: phones android htc hero os g1 mobile tech shopping)

explicitly running author tests from a CPAN module : we do something similar in SA
(tags: perl tests testing)

Node.js : I’m late to the party, but this sounds lovely
(tags: javascript server http web comet closures node.js event)

nginx_http_push_module – Comet For The People : looks great
(tags: nginx ajax webdev server comet scalability)

“Source Code Optimisation”, Felix von Leitner, Linux Kongress 2009 [PDF] : Good presentation on C compiler optimization, via Cal Henderson. ‘People often write less readable code because they think it will produce faster code. Unfortunately, in most cases, the code will not be faster.’ I particularly like ‘Fancy-Schmancy Algorithms’: ‘If you have 10-100 elements, use a list, not a red-black tree; Fancy data structures help on paper, but rarely in reality. (More space overhead in the data structure, less L2 cache left for actual data.)’
(tags: via:iamcal compilers c c++ optimization coding assembly speed for:colmmacc)

Me and Belle de Jour – ‘Could it be Brooke?’ : LinkMachineGo knew the true identity of Belle du Jour way back when — and set a Google trap to ensnare snooping journos. nice work
(tags: belle-du-jour google blogging blogs via:waxy privacy googlewhack identity daily-mail journalism)

JSON Format : ‘your online JSON Formatter’. useful. via JKeyes
(tags: via:jkeyes json formatting tools useful format debugging)

Summary of all the MIT Introduction to Algorithms lectures : good reviews and notes from Peteris Krumins
(tags: algorithms mit programming coding lectures)

MacRumors iPhone Blog: Undercover 1.5 Adds Push Notification Tool to iPhone Theft Recovery App : very clever. ‘You can make the messages as enticing as you want – say, by having them pretend to be a notification from your bank account. If the crook chooses to view the push notification, Undercover will launch, [..] loading any Website of your choosing, such as the aforementioned bank’s. While the thief is distracted, Undercover will be happy to save the device’s GPS coordinates and IP address to Orbicule’s Website.’
(tags: iphone theft crime push-notifications undercover)

Boingo Wireless – AVOID : argh. wish I’d seen this page before I signed up for a month’s access while travelling — they’ve now charged my credit card again, over a week after I requested the account’s cancellation :(
(tags: boingo avoid customer-service customer-hostile scams wifi travel)

HTC Hero is on Meteor : according to Fergal, at half of the price of O2’s iPhone “deal”
(tags: htc hero o2 iphone android phones mobile ireland meteor)

SSL trick certificate published : ioerror published the ‘\00’ wild-card SSL cert for any domain (for affected SSL client libs at least)
(tags: ssl tls security nul ioerror bugs exploits)

Google employees now discouraged from using Python for new projects : ‘You have to balance Python’s strengths with its weaknesses: your engineers may be more productive using Python, but if they have to work around more platform-level performance/scaling limitations as volume increases, do you come out ahead? etc.’
(tags: google performance scalability python unladen-swallow languages via:preddit)

Damn Cool Algorithms: Spatial indexing : quadtrees, Hilbert curves, and geohashing, as seen in Google’s new Closure library. useful for multidimensional addressing in general
(tags: algorithms mapping gis indexing quadtree datastructures spatial geometry)

Mint Studio Multi-Room Wireless Speaker : $130 speakers; outputs from computer via USB, transmits to wireless receiver, which also has an iPod dock and a line-in. exactly what I’m after! (thanks Jason for the tip)
(tags: via:jcosper music sound mp3 home wireless speakers)

IT Law in Ireland: Irish law on hacking tools / dual-use software : specifically, a port of dessid to the iPhone, recently causing headlines
(tags: dessid eircom hacking dual-use software distribution law ireland tools security)

Introducing Resque – GitHub : github’s take on a good, distributed queueing system in Ruby
(tags: ruby github queueing ipc resque)

SBSettings : good overview of this jailbreak app
(tags: iphone jailbreak hack software apple sbsettings unlock)

Why would I want to jailbreak an iPhone 3GS? : Ask MeFi thread, mostly recommending tethering and SBSettings
(tags: sbsettings jailbreaking askmefi metafilter iphone apple)

Subversion Submitted to Become a Project at The Apache Software Foundation : woot!
(tags: svn subversion asf apache open-source incubator)

Spiritual search turns into a stampede as impatient lose faith in double visionaries – The Irish Times – Mon, Nov 02, 2009 : hilarious article on the BVM-witnessing hysterics in Knock. ‘if you looked hard enough, you could indeed discern a face in the play of light and shadows. When I squinted a certain way, I thought I could make out Bruce Forsyth.’
(tags: mayo religion hysteria funny bruce-forsyth bvm fortean)

Structural Regular Expressions : ‘The current UNIX text processing tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line. There is a simple notation that can describe the `shape’ of files when the typical array-of-lines picture is inadequate. That notation is regular expressions. Using regular expressions to describe the structure in addition to the contents of files has interesting applications, and yields elegant methods for dealing with some problems the current tools handle clumsily. When operations using these expressions are composed, the result is reminiscent of shell pipelines.’ Paper by Rob Pike, via adulau. intriguing
(tags: sregex via:adulau regexp rob-pike regex library text structural parsing)

sregex – Structural Regular Expressions : ‘The sregex module implements Structural Regular Expressions.’ Python, Apache-licensed
(tags: sregex python via:adulau regexp robpike regex library text structural parsing)

The Rise and Fall of the Hobbyist Game Programmer : great article on the 80’s one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)
(tags: 1980s games history programming nostalgia geek gaming hobbies coding 6502 c=64)

Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook : lots of gory details on FB’s innards via Dare Obasanjo
(tags: facebook scaling scalability erlang caching architecture multifeed)

Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap : sweet. HDMI out, MythTV streaming, and silent for $300
(tags: mythtv hdmi tv diy linux media-center nettop htpc xbmc hardware)

MullingarHeifer.com : ‘Become a virtual beef farmer. Control your personal food chain.’ also deliver prime beef. mmmm
(tags: meat beef mullingar heifers cows food eating shopping ireland)

Ubuntu 9.10 Technical Overview : lots of new features, and a switch of default IM client
(tags: ubuntu 9.10 linux release-notes releases)

The Best Way to Cook a Thick Steak : 30 minutes over medium heat, cooked in its own fat. whoa, I want to try this
(tags: food delicious cooking eating meat recipe steak beef howto recipes)

MAAWG notes drop in spam levels : ‘MAAWG [..] says that spam and malicious emails dropped to 89 percent in the second quarter from 90.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.’
(tags: spam anti-spam maawg press-releases isps internet abuse)

Common Errors Causing DKIM Verification Failures : informative, from Cisco (via BoxOfMeat)
(tags: dkim errors typos cisco domainkeys via:boxofmeat)

IAMA person who sends “spam” email for a living : Reddit mass-interview of a spammer. apparently he’s working on IPv6 support
(tags: reddit spam anti-spam interviews ipv6 iama spammers)

Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks : massive fail. ‘By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to […] dump the router’s configuration file […which] included the administrative login and password in cleartext.’
(tags: smc8014 doh privacy internet security fail time-warner via:reddit pathetic javascript)

Cybercrime Organizations Turn to ‘Mafia-Style’ Structure : good research coming out of McAfee — lots of Eastern European, Russian, and ex-USSR-country cybercrime businesses nowadays, apparently
(tags: spam scams scareware russia eastern-europe ukraine romania credit-cards antivirus mcafee security phishing)

XZ Utils : 15% smaller than bzip, 30% smaller than gzip, and now shipped with Fedora and Ubuntu. uses LZMA2
(tags: xz xzdec gzip bzip compression lzma via:wmf unix compress)

Why I like Redis : Simon Willison plugs Redis as a good datastore for quick-hack scripts with requirements for lots of fast, local data storage — the kind of thing I’d often use a DB_File for
(tags: python storage databases schemaless nosql redis simon-willison data-store)

Unicorn at GitHub : new Ruby HTTP server, using a preforked process pool based on select(). Github like it because of failure-recovery problems with Ruby threading bugs in Mongrel. The preforking algo used is extremely rudimentary — the kind of thing we used in SpamAssassin before I implemented Apache-style preforking in 3.0
(tags: web ruby rails github nginx httpd server mongrel unicorn rubyonrails preforking unix fork select process-pool)

Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC : another serialization format, binary, no IDL, no code generation, from GitHub
(tags: github bert erlang ruby rpc protocol thrift serialization networking)

Jailbreaking the 3GS iPhone with PwnageTool and OS 3.1.2 : a good guide
(tags: iphone howto jailbreaking pwnagetool 3gs)

Red Faction Guerilla Tales: Fully Destructible Integrity : Tom Francis gives “Red Faction: Guerilla” a truly massive plug based on its pervasive freeform environment destructability. I’m sold!
(tags: gaming games xbox360 red-faction red-faction-guerilla to-get want tom-francis)

pigz : ‘A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines’, by Mark Adler, no less
(tags: adler pigz gzip compression performance concurrency shell parallel multicore zip software)

Charlie Brooker interview re Gameswipe : to read, yoz gives it the thumbs up
(tags: uk games gaming via:yoz interviews charlie-brooker tv gameswipe)

Track down your stolen laptop – Prey : hmm, a nifty app that takes pics of the desktop, activates the webcam etc. and uploads to a central server if you activate a ‘my laptop has been stolen’ bit
(tags: prey theft laptop osx linux windows tracking recovery crime lojack)

DDOS mystery involving Linux and mod_ssl : connections to brutus.apache.org, “GET / HTTP/1.1”, massive HTTPS DDOS. no idea what’s going on
(tags: apache asf ddos https httpd mod_ssl)

O2 Ireland blocking sites listed in the UK IWF list : supposedly should only list child porn sites, but sounds like it’s got frequent false positives on file upload/download services nowadays
(tags: fps o2 blocking ireland contract false-positives iwf uk law)

YouTube – “charlie brooker’s gameswipe” ibbstersthecrapgamer : all 6 parts of the first episode, via Waxy. will watch this at some future point when I have free time again!
(tags: towatch youtube bbc gameswipe charlie-brooker comedy)

The Duct Tape Programmer – Joel on Software : ‘He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.’
(tags: duct-tape jwz funny joel-spolsky hacking coding overengineering architecture-astronauts)

Ag Tweet: Paying Customers : pay EUR3 per month to receive Twitter @replies to your SMS mobile in Ireland — a good niche
(tags: twitter agtweet ireland mobiles sms text revenue)

Dubs On Wheels : ‘Where can I find an available DublinBike?’ — another DublinBikes mashup. hopefully JC Decaux won’t C&D this one
(tags: mashups useful web dublin dublinbikes jc-decaux bikes cycling commute)

details of the Markdown Javascript-escaping hole : as used to exploit Reddit and create a comment worm
(tags: hacks security reddit javascript md5 escaping html)

Excellent animated treemap dataviz : “How the Giants of Finance Shrank, Then Grew, Under The Financial Crisis”. but the data is less interesting than the excellent dataviz technique used to display it
(tags: data dataviz visualization economy animation nyt infographic infographics treemap design flash banking nytimes bailout)

Apps.ie : Irish-made iPhone apps. there’s a surprising number of ’em
(tags: iphone ireland irish apps mobile)

Nelson Minar plugs a new way to write web apps : Every HTML page is static — the dynamic parts are entirely DOM-injected from server-delivered JSON by client-side Javascript. No dynamic data is delivered in HTML. I’m thinking about this, and it does seem to bring a lot of positives. hmm
(tags: dom javascript json web-apps web nelson-minar ajax)

Please don’t hesitate to contact me – a rant about Powwow Water : brilliant encounter between an inept UK water-cooler supplier, the cluetrain, and the Streisand effect
(tags: funny law streisand-effect legal-threats prfail pr powwow water uk water-coolers blogging ethics fail)

The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s web server : more on the new async HTTP server from FriendFeed/Facebook, in Python. looks lovely
(tags: async http epoll python comet long-poll facebook scaling scalability web friendfeed tornado opensource)

Tornado Web Server : ‘an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google’s webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking (epoll) infrastructure.’
(tags: epoll open-source python http scalability facebook scaling web)

Embeddable Google Document Viewer : ‘Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don’t have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.’ sweet!
(tags: google google-docs javascript iframe content pdf adobe html web documentation embedding powerpoint ppt viewer embed embedded)

Chris de Burgh sees red – The Irish Times – Fri, Sep 11, 2009 : awesome vitriol from the big-in-the-80’s Irish balladeer
(tags: music journalism humour irishtimes funny chris-de-bergh)

Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” – UK Prime Minister : woot, nice work jgc!
(tags: jgc apologies uk england justice government computing history wwii codebreaking science turing gay rights apology alan-turing)

TechCrunch falls for Facebook fakie : FB add a (working!) “Fax This Photo” feature, only visible to TechCrunch IP ranges — and TC fall for it, pushing an unverified story to live, after waiting only 24 minutes for a verification. nice one FB
(tags: facebook fax dead-media funny pranks punkd techcrunch pr humor)

why “anonymized” data really isn’t : ‘Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: “data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”‘
(tags: security internet politics privacy medicine anonymity datamining anonymous data)

Creative Ireland take on Coir’s “No To Lisbon” posters : photoshop phun galore. “Foreign Toilets: VOTE NO” (via Shane Hegarty)
(tags: via:shanehegarty photoshop lisbon coir funny ireland)

Irish alternative to poor FedEx : Brendan plugs Wells Cargo, good international couriers if you’re sending from .ie
(tags: wells-cargo plugs couriers transport shipping ireland)

100 Examples of Japanese Municipal Flags : a lot more awesome than the title would suggest (via TTT)
(tags: via:ttt design japan logos flags graphic-design graphics)

Postfix – (almost) a satellite system : how to keep a small number of user accounts (ie. root) delivering locally while the rest are delivered to a smarthost
(tags: postfix sysadmin unix mail mta smtp)

Ben Collins-Sussman: The True Path : Ben C-S rejigs the legendary “ed, man! !man ed” net.humor for a new age of DVCSes
(tags: dvcs ed git funny humour zealotry unix)

TCD researchers first to find genes unique to humans : go Aoife! “This is the first ever discovery of novel human-specific protein coding genes,” said Dr McLysaght. “They are found in humans and nowhere else.”
(tags: science genetics research biology evolution tcd sfi genome junk-dna)