Skip to content

Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2009-06-24

Published June 24, 2009

Links for 2009-06-23

Published June 23, 2009

Links for 2009-06-22

Published June 22, 2009

IBM Ad Execs Who Should Be Fired

Published June 21, 2009

Watching television last night, I couldn’t fail to take notice of this new IBM ad:

‘For the first time in history, more people live in cities than anywhere else, which means cities have to get smarter.’ […] ‘Paris has smart healthcare; smart traffic systems in Brisbane keep traffic moving; Galway has smart water’.

Jaw-dropping. That would be this Galway?

A major water crisis has left scores of people ill and tens of thousands at risk from contamination in a west of Ireland city. Galway’s water supply has been hit by an outbreak of the parasite cryptosporidium, with up to 170 people now confirmed to have been affected by a serious stomach bug as a result. Tests found that the city’s water supply contained nearly 60 times the safe limit of cryptosporidium pollution. Residents have already been unable to drink or use water for food preparation for weeks.

Residents in parts of Co. Galway have been hit by a new outbreak of the cryptosporidium parasite.Tests on the Roundstone Public Water Scheme showed trace elements of the parasite, as did water schemes for Inishnee and Errisbeg.

Council engineers in Galway have begun work on providing safe drinking water for up to 1,000 householders […] where supplies have been contaminated by lead. The residents have been advised not to drink tap water until further notice.

Apparently the IBM ad is referring to something to do with tides and aquaculture in Galway Bay, rather than the worst sequence of water-quality disasters in Ireland for several decades. But really — someone at IBM’s marketing department should have done a little more research first before using that line…

Links for 2009-06-18

Published June 18, 2009

Links for 2009-06-13

Published June 13, 2009

Links for 2009-06-11

Published June 11, 2009

Links for 2009-06-10

Published June 10, 2009

Links for 2009-06-06

Published June 6, 2009

  • the Pearson correlation coefficient : a statistical measure to calculate “nearness” of items for collaborative filtering, a la “people who bought this also bought this”. wonder if this would make a good Bayes p-value combiner in SpamAssassin
    (tags: algorithms statistics via:fergal ruby recommendations correlation nearness collaborative-filtering)

  • Home taping didn’t kill music – Bad Science : ‘SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful. [..] Like I said: as far as I’m concerned, every [dodgy figure] from the [music] industry is false, until proven otherwise.’
    (tags: science journalism p2p mp3 music copyright piracy pr statistics figures spin bullshit)

  • Backing Up Flickr : using “flickrtouchr”, a handy script by colmmacc
    (tags: flickr backup tips howto python small-world)

Links for 2009-06-04

Published June 4, 2009

Mae’s OK!

Published June 3, 2009

Well, that was a really scary few days.

On Monday, the lovely C was nearly 2 weeks overdue, and was scheduled to come into the Rotunda for induction the next morning; then contractions started on Monday afternoon. We were happy, as avoiding induction was good news for a natural birth, allowing the process to be run through the excellent Domino scheme, etc.

So we went in, arriving at the Rotunda ER for 3.45 or so. They put on the CTG to monitor the baby’s heartbeats, and the first 3 contractions were strong, but everything seemed OK. The next one, however, the baby’s heart rate dropped dramatically — to a very low 40bpm; I called the ER nurses, they ran in, put C on oxygen, and that seemed to help, returning the rate to normal — but on the next contraction the baby’s heart rate dropped even further. Once that happened, the shit hit the fan. In seconds C was on a trolley heading for surgery. It was clear this was serious trouble.

I was left standing outside the theatre while she was operated on — as an emergency Caesarean section there was no time for luxuries like hapless husbands stumbling around the background. Probably just as well. The midwives and surgical staff kept me as well informed as was possible, though.

After a terrifying 10 minutes, the prognosis improved a little. Initially they were worried that the baby had put pressure on the cord, but this was discounted — in fact the baby had emptied its bowels of meconium in the womb, which irritated it enough to cause enough distress and cause its heart rate to crash. After 10 minutes, the baby was out (and was a girl!), and C was going to be OK at least. however the baby was at quite a lot of risk from aspiration of meconium and possible brain damage due to reduced oxygen in the womb. holy shit. :(

The baby had indeed aspirated some meconium, causing a collapsed lung. Over the next couple of days in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, the little mite had surgery to introduce a chest tube into her pleura to re-inflate the lung, and was treated with a variety of treatments to deal with meconium in her stomach.

The best bit was this afternoon when we got news that the results of her cranial ultrasound were in — all clear, no brain damage. Then C got to feed her and hold her — and she latched on like some kind of milk-seeking missile. what a little trooper.

Anyway, with any luck, 2 or 3 days from now they’ll both be able to come home in one piece.

We were lucky btw — if we hadn’t been in the ER at the time, it was very unlikely that the prognosis would have been anywhere near as good. And I have to give credit to the Rotunda staff, they did a great job.

pics on Flickr!

Update, 7 June: C was released from hospital yesterday, and Mae got the all-clear this morning. We’re now all back home, healthy and in one piece. Now we can just get on with the usual second-child excitement-slash-drama! phew!

Links for 2009-05-31

Published May 31, 2009

  • Hibernation Tool for Mac OS : OSX doesn’t suspend-to-disk by default, which isn’t good if you want to reduce power consumption of an unused MacBook Pro. this AppleScript provides a nice Mac-ish UI for the commandline NVRAM pokery required to fix this
    (tags: macos power suspend-to-disk sleep hibernate mbp macbook-pro nvram)

  • spamstery.com : ‘The Last Social Game You Will Ever Play’. ‘Want in? Sorry. You can’t. We’re in beta, so we are way too cool for you. If you’d like us to throw you a frickin’ bone when we’re ready to consider your application, follow @spamstery on Twitter and we’ll see what we can do. (No promises, though. God, you’re a dork.)’
    (tags: twitter elitism funny satire spam sns)

Links for 2009-05-30

Published May 30, 2009

Links for 2009-05-28

Published May 28, 2009

Michael Woods saying “the Brits made us do it”

Published May 27, 2009

If you were listening to the Marian Finucane show on RTE Radio 1 last Saturday afternoon, you might have heard the mind-boggling stuff coming out of Michael Woods, the Fianna Fail former Education Minister with a "strong Catholic faith" who brokered the controversial backroom deal back in 2003 which allowed the Catholic Church and its institutions to evade prosecution on child abuse.

Here’s a great thread on Politics.ie where quite a few folks boggle at the incredible things he said.

Thanks to Podcasting Ireland, I was able to track down and cut out this segment, so here is a recording of Michael Woods coming up with the pathetic excuse of how the British forced the Christian Brothers to abuse children:

Michael Woods – the brits made us do it.mp3 (951KB)

The last refuge of a cornered FFer — blame the British. Absolutely incredible. It has to be heard to be believed. What century is this again?

Update: according to Mary Raftery in the Irish Times, this is a preview of the religious right’s tactics:

‘It Is easy to discount former government minister and senior Fianna Fáil member Michael Woods. A former minister, he is no longer a prominent figure. He has, however, left a festering sore behind him which continues to weep poison every now and then. The infamous church-State deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse, under which the religious orders pay a mere 10 per cent of the compensation bill, was at its most septic over the weekend.

Woods, the main architect of the deal, defended it on the television news and gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.’

We marched in the streets about this stuff. It’s like the 90’s never happened.

Links for 2009-05-25

Published May 25, 2009

Links for 2009-05-24

Published May 24, 2009

Links for 2009-05-21

Published May 21, 2009

Links for 2009-05-20

Published May 20, 2009

Links for 2009-05-19

Published May 19, 2009

Links for 2009-05-18

Published May 18, 2009

New EC2 Features

Published May 18, 2009

Amazon Cloudwatch:

This is nifty. Monitor EC2 instances and load balancers; CPU, data transfer rates, disk usage, disk activity, HTTP/TCP request counts/latency, "healthy/unhealthy" instances (see below). This data is both exposed via web service APIs, but also usable as input for their new "Auto Scaling" elastic scaling feature. Ideal for someone to write a Nagios plugin for. Also, I’m looking forward to some kick-ass sysadmin dataviz for this.

Auto-Scaling:

Elastically scale out (or in) your grid of EC2 instances, based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. An officially-supported form of a myriad of third-party apps. I expect to hear of people accidentally spending a fortune due to accidental misuse of this ;)

Elastic Load Balancing:

Load balance across multiple EC2 instances, report metrics to Cloudwatch such as requests/second and request latency, and — most usefully of all in my opinion — shift traffic away from EC2 instances that fail to respond to a "health-check" HTTP GET with a 200, or fail to accept a TCP connection.

In other words, this provides a way to do decent HA on EC2, which is something that’s been much needed for a long time, and is quite tricky to set up using Linux-HA. I’ve done the latter, and found it full of potential reliability pitfalls; I found that Elastic IP addresses were not useful for quickly failing over to backup servers; in some cases, I found it taking about 5 minutes to fail over :( The only (relatively) snappy way to implement it was to set up a dynamic DNS record with a short TTL, point to it using a CNAME, and use "ddclient" to switch it when failing over. And even that could leave sites down for as long as it takes the DNS client to time out the existing cached CNAME.

Elastic Load Balancing supports HTTP or generic TCP connections. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support "real" termination of HTTPS connections, which is unfortunate. (You can terminate them as generic TCP connections, though.)

More details on the RightScale blog, at the AWS dev blog, and Werner Vogel’s blog.

Links for 2009-05-15

Published May 15, 2009

The Pay-No-Attention-To-Our-Tiny-Logo Party

Published May 15, 2009

In the current run-up to the local elections here in Ireland, it’s pretty obvious that Fianna Fail, the ruling party who’ve screwed the economy with mismanagement and rampant cronyism, are in line for a massive drubbing. So much so, in fact, that their own candidates are attempting to hide their party affiliations.

Check out this poster for candidate Kenneth O’Flynn (son of FF TD Noel O’Flynn):

what logo, you ask? Look closer:

Compare that to what FF posters used to look like, 2 years ago:

Meath FF councillor Nick Killian has removed the logo from his leaflet’s front page entirely, too.

Thanks to martinoc for the Bertie’s Team poster, and Ivor in the comments of this post at On The Record for the photos of Kenny’s posters. There’s gold in those comments…

Spoon’s Rhubodka Recipe

Published May 15, 2009

Today on Twitter, the perennial rhubarb topic — ie. what to do with all this rhubarb — came up. Here’s a recipe I picked up from a man called spoon which may help:

I’ve mentioned this before, but just in case…. Rhumember kids:

  • 1 empty 2 litre bottle
  • 4 or 5 sticks of pink rhubarb
  • 110g caster sugar
  • 1 litre of vodka

Cut the rhubarb into inch chunks and put them into the empty bottle until it is not empty any more and you have run out of rhubarb.

Add the sugar

Add the Vodka

Shake vigorously

Leave to stand in a dark corner for maybe 4 weeks or until you can’t wait any longer. You should certainly wait until all the sugar has gone. The longer you leave it the more Rhubarby goodness will be pulled out by the sugar.

Strain all the rhubarb out.

CONGRATULATION. YOU HAVE UNLOCKED RHUBODKA.

DRINK THE RHUBODKA

It sounds awful, but instead of being that, it is fucking awesome.

I have a bottle of this stewing away on top of my kitchen cabinet. It should be ready just in time to toast the arrival of child #2 ;)

PS: "rhubodka" is a googlewhack!

Links for 2009-05-13

Published May 13, 2009

Links for 2009-05-12

Published May 12, 2009

Links for 2009-05-11

Published May 11, 2009

Spirit of Ireland

Published May 11, 2009

Spirit of Ireland looks very nifty.

It’s extremely simple — a group of Irish ‘entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, architects and legal and financial experts’ are calling for Ireland to achieve energy independence and become a net exporter of green energy within five years, by building a number of wind farms on our western seaboard, buffering the generated energy in water reservoirs using pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

This kind of massive-scale public-works engineering project has a strong historical precedent in Ireland — Ardnacrusha, opened in 1929, was the largest hydroelectric station in the world for a time. Given that Turlough Hill is a pumped-storage facility, it can even be beautiful ;)

We can certainly do it, given sufficient government vision. I’d love to see it happen. Great stuff!

(image credit: CC-licensed image from Ganders on Flickr. thanks!)