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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2009-08-27

Published August 27, 2009

Links for 2009-08-25

Published August 25, 2009

Links for 2009-08-21

Published August 21, 2009

Links for 2009-08-13

Published August 13, 2009

Links for 2009-08-11

Published August 11, 2009

Links for 2009-08-09

Published August 9, 2009

Links for 2009-08-06

Published August 6, 2009

Links for 2009-08-01

Published August 1, 2009

Links for 2009-07-31

Published July 31, 2009

Links for 2009-07-23

Published July 23, 2009

Embedded software development

Published July 23, 2009

Found in an Ivan Krstic post about Sugar and the OLPC:

In truth, the XO ships a pretty shitty operating system, and this fact has very little to do with Sugar the GUI. It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken closed-source firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix. […]

We had an embedded controller that blocks keyboard events and stops machine suspend, and to which we — after a long battle — received the source, under strict NDA, only to find a jungle of nested if statements, twelve levels deep, and no code history. (The company that wrote the code doesn’t use version control, see. They put dates into code comments when they make changes, and the developers mail each other zip files with new versions.)

Haha. Been there, done that. Sometimes it’s great not to have to work with custom hardware anymore…

Links for 2009-07-22

Published July 22, 2009

Links for 2009-07-21

Published July 21, 2009

YA link-blog aggregator

Published July 20, 2009

Alex Payne writing about "Fever", a new link-blog aggregator app:

Fever’s proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs.

Fever is commercial software, costing $30. Alternatively, I’ve been doing something very similar for the past few years using SpicyLinks, which is free (if a great deal less pretty on the UI end).

It’s nice to see the idea getting some polish, though. ;)

Alex does raise an interesting point towards the end:

Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I’d love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs — and, indeed, linking outside one’s own site — just aren’t as prevalent in those communities.

True.

Links for 2009-07-17

Published July 17, 2009

Links for 2009-07-16

Published July 16, 2009

Links for 2009-07-15

Published July 15, 2009

Eircom’s “DDOS”, or not

Published July 15, 2009

I woke up this morning to hear speculation on RTE Radio as to how Eircom’s DDOS woes were possibly being caused by the Russian mob, of all things. This absurd speculation is not helped by lines in statements like this:

‘The company blamed the problems on "an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic" directed at its website, which affected the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for its customers.’

I’m speculating, too, but it seems a lot more likely to me that this isn’t just a DDOS, and someone — possibly just a lone Irish teenager — is running an attempted DNS cache-poisoning attack. Here’s why.

Last week, there were two features of the attack in reports: DDOS levels of traffic and incorrect pages coming up for some popular websites. To operate a Kaminsky DNS cache-poisoning attack requires buckets of packets — easily perceivable as DDOS levels. This level of traffic would be the first noticeable symptom on Eircom’s network management consoles, so it’d be easy to jump to the conclusion that a simple DDOS attack was the root cause.

This week, there’s just the DDOS levels of traffic. No cache poisoning effects have been reported. This would be consistent with Eircom’s engineers getting the finger out over the weekend, and upgrading the NSes to a non-vulnerable version. ;)

Once the attacker(s) realise this, they’ll probably stop the attack.

It’s not even a good attack for a bad guy to make, by the way. Given the timing, right after major press about a North Korean DDOS on US servers. it’s extremely high-profile, and made the news in several national newspapers (albeit in rather inept fashion). If someone wanted to make money from an attack, a massive-scale packet flood indistinguishable from a DDOS against the nation’s largest ISP is not exactly a subtle way to do it.

In the meantime, apparently OpenDNS have really seen the effects, with mass switchover of Eircom’s customers to the OpenDNS resolvers. Probably just as well…

Links for 2009-07-14

Published July 14, 2009

Links for 2009-07-12

Published July 12, 2009

I’m a Dermotologist!

Published July 11, 2009

Found here:

On Wednesday 20 May 2009, speaking at a parliamentary Justice Committee debating his new blasphemy law, Dermot Ahern joked that people were making blasphemous comments about him, and he compared his own purity to that of the baby Jesus.

So we have a Justice Minister joking about himself being blasphemed, at a parliamentary Justice Committee discussing his own blasphemy law, that could make his own jokes illegal.

In honour of this Ministerial revelation, we have founded the Church of Dermotology. We believe God sent Dermot Ahern to save Ireland from rational thinking. Our sacred symbol is the Star of Dermot.

Our sacred beliefs are quite similar to those of other religions.

  • We believe ice cream wafers are literally the body of Dermot Ahern.
  • We believe Dermot Ahern created the universe on Wed 20 may 2009.
  • We’re sometimes not sure whether Dermot Ahern really exists.
  • We believe it is blasphemous to publish an image of Dermot Ahern.
  • We refuse to gather sticks on the Sabbath, which is Wednesday.
  • We wear magic underpants that protect us from fire and bullets.
  • We are outraged whenever anybody insults our sacred beliefs.
  • We fervently support Dermot Ahern’s proposed blasphemy law.
  • If it is passed, we will be regularly outraged, and will take test cases.

Like Scientologists, Dermotologists offer a free personality test. Question one: are you vulnerable? Question two: have you money? If you answer yes to either of these questions, you’re in.

After you join, check out the campaign against the Irish blasphemy law at blasphemy.ie.

Health and Safety

Published July 10, 2009

A while back a friend of mine mailed us all with this classic of overweening health-and-safety bureaucrats gone wild:

The company are now installing wallpaper on our PCs with their 5 golden safety rules:

  1. Always hold the handrail

  2. Always reverse park

  3. Assess Risks

  4. Accept Challenges

  5. Wear PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] gear

We also have to drink from metal cups with plastic lids on them.

The thing that really got me was #2 — ‘always reverse park’. Apparently, someone decided that reversing into the parking space was safer than going in head-first, and to such a significant degree that it was worth mandating it across a medium-sized company. On the other hand, another friend noted:

The college i went to [in the US] would ticket you if you backed into a parking space — they said it was a "fire hazard".

so we’ve got "fire hazard" in one direction and "unsafe" in the other. Parse that.

Another friend was told that she couldn’t bring her folding bike in the lift because "what would happen if the president was in the lift going to the board room?". She says "I could not work out the health and safety implications."

What health and safety insanity have you encountered recently?

Links for 2009-07-09

Published July 9, 2009

Links for 2009-07-08

Published July 8, 2009

Gravatar Fail

Published July 8, 2009

Hey Gravatar. When you auto-generate an avatar image, like you did with the one to right, could you do me a favour and omit the bits that look like swastikas? kthxbai!