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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2009-04-08

Published April 8, 2009

Links for 2009-04-07

Published April 7, 2009

Links for 2009-04-06

Published April 6, 2009

“you are, in fact, in the message queue business”

Published April 6, 2009

Oh man, this Twitter Ruby-vs-Scala language spat is hilarious; talk about handbags at dawn. I loved this exchange in the comments to this post in particular:

BJ Clark:

I’m mostly surprised that a guy who wrote the book on Scala comes out and says that Scala is better than everything else and someone actually listened and took him seriously. He has a vested interest in saying that Scala is the next big thing and I’ve yet to see any evidence that Kestrel is better (at anything) than RabbitMQ.

And frankly, I still get fail whales at Twitter on a daily basis, so, what exactly are they so proud about over there?

Steve Jenson:

Kestrel pages queues to disk: if you get more messages than you have memory, it’s fine. If RabbitMQ gets more messages than memory, it crashes. We talked to them extensively about this problem and they’re going to address it. We were hoping we’d be able to use RabbitMQ or another message queue. We didn’t want to be in the message queue business. At this point, given that we know the code and it’s performance inside and out, it makes sense to continue using and developing it.

BJ Clark:

I don’t feel like arguing with you but your logic isn’t clear to me. It would make sense that if you don’t want to be in the message queue business, you’d submit patches against an established message queue to make it work in your situation instead of writing your own message queue, twice. This is overlooking the fact that twitter is basically a massive message queue and you are, in fact, in the message queue business.

Zing!

Links for 2009-04-05

Published April 5, 2009

URL shortening services: my experience

Published April 5, 2009

A good post from Joshua Schachter about URL shortening services.

For what it’s worth, I ran into the <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508132″>unwanted-interstitial risk. At one stage, before I’d bothered registering jmason.org, sitescooper.taint.org or my other domains, I used a URL-shortening service to provide a memorable, short URL for an open-source application I wrote — http://zap.to/snarfnews/.

At some point a few years down the line, the forwarding process started accreting ads; eventually they became soft-porn in content, and I was forced to apologise to users for the forwarding I could no longer control!

By now, 10 years down the line, it seems to hijack the page entirely, returning a page in Cyrillic I can’t even read :( (apparently it’s a page of Flash games; thanks, Alexandr Ciornii, for the interpretation!)

Anyway, lesson learned.

Links for 2009-04-03

Published April 3, 2009

“Report Says Deal”

Published April 3, 2009

Twitter has this "Trending Topics" sidebar now, which lists the following topics:

Trending Topics

  • TGIF
  • National Cleavage
  • G20
  • Easter
  • #grammarsongs
  • France
  • #rp09
  • French
  • Grand National
  • Report Says Deal

Now, I’m not going to go into the topic of National Cleavage right now. ‘Report Says Deal’ is intriguing because it makes no sense, until you click through to see:

Real-time results for “Report Says Deal”

  1. Too_cool_normal dlloydsecret Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb half a minute ago from twitterfeed    
  2. Orig_8102_003_normal dlloydthemlmpro Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://bit.ly/Wt1Wb 1 minute ago from twitterfeed    
  3. Ad-tech-paul2_normal techupdates [PCWrld] Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works http://tinyurl.com/c63ont 3 minutes ago from twitterfeed    
  4. Orkut_normal icidade Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works. http://is.gd/quu9 4 minutes ago from TweetDeck    
  5. Img00315_normal chrisgraves Retweeting @CinWomenBlogger: Retweeting @ays: Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works – PC World http://bitly.com/LhT4 6 minutes ago from twhirl

So I’d say that Twitter’s "Trending Topics" uses N-grams of between 1 and 3 "words" for topic identification. In this case, rather than "Report Says Deal", a better topic string would be something like:

Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works – PC World

or even:

Google to Buy Twitter? Report Says Deal is in the Works – PC World http://bitly.com/LhT4

Funnily enough this is exactly the issue I ran into while developing this algorithm. The trick at this point is to apply a variant of the BLAST pattern-discovery algorithm, expanding the patterns sideways while they still match the same subsets of the corpus until they’re maximal.

Twitter folks, if you can read Perl, "assemble_regexps()" in seek-phrases-in-log in SpamAssassin SVN does this pretty nicely, and reasonably efficiently, and is licensed under the ASL 2.0. ;)

Links for 2009-04-02

Published April 2, 2009

Links for 2009-04-01

Published April 1, 2009

Links for 2009-03-30

Published March 30, 2009

OSSBarCamp this weekend

Published March 26, 2009

It’s two days until OSSBarCamp, a free open-source-focussed Bar Camp unconference at Kevin Street DIT, this Saturday. I’m looking forward to it — although unfortunately I missed the boat on giving a talk. (Unlike the traditional Bar Camp model, this is using a pre-booked talk system.)

Particularly if you’re working with open source in Ireland, you should come along!

I have high hopes for John Looney’s discussion of cloud computing and how it interacts with open source. Let’s hope he’s not too Google-biased in his definition of "cloud computing". ;)

Also of interest — Fintan Boyle’s "An Introduction To Developing With Flex". To be honest, I hadn’t even realised that Adobe Flex was now open source. cool.

Links for 2009-03-25

Published March 25, 2009

Links for 2009-03-24

Published March 24, 2009

Links for 2009-03-23

Published March 23, 2009

Talk: Early days of Computing in Ireland

Published March 23, 2009

On Monday April 20th, the Heritage Society of Engineers Ireland, in association with The Irish Computer Society, and the ICT and Electronic and Electrical Divisions of Engineers Ireland, will be hosting an evening lecture: ‘Reminiscences of Early days of Computing in Ireland’:

In 1957 the Irish Sugar Company installed the first stored program computer in Ireland. Other large organisations slowly followed suit.

Gordon Clarke will discuss how the early computers enhanced the electro-mechanical systems that had developed over the previous 60 years. He will talk about their specifications, a few of the first applications and tell the story of the very early years of designing and developing computer based systems.

All Welcome. Admission Free. No booking required. This event will be web-cast

For Details: www.engineersireland.ie, or Con Kehely: (01) 6860113 (con.kehely /at/ dublincity.ie)

Location: Engineers Ireland, 22 Clyde Road D4

Sounds great! Thanks to Frank Duignan on the ILUG list for forwarding the notice.

Links for 2009-03-20

Published March 20, 2009

4chan Memes, circa 1889

Published March 20, 2009

In the comments to this unremarkable story about 4chan’s Boxxy fad, I came across this gem from CSClark:

I don’t know why I didn’t think to see if this sort of phenomenon was covered in Extraordinary Popular Delusions… Of course, it is.

Walk where we will, we cannot help hearing from every side a phrase repeated with delight, and received with laughter, by men with hard hands and dirty faces, by saucy butcher lads and errand-boys, by loose women, by hackney coachmen, cabriolet-drivers, and idle fellows who loiter at the corners of streets. Not one utters this phrase without producing a laugh from all within hearing. It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question; in short, it is the favourite slang phrase of the day, a phrase that, while its brief season of popularity lasts, throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour, and gives them reason to laugh as well as their more fortunate fellows in a higher stage of society.

Wherein we also learn that the FAIL of the day was Quoz:

When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip, and an impatient shrug of his shoulders. The universal monosyllable conveyed all his meaning, and not only told his opponent that he lied, but that he erred egregiously if he thought that any one was such a nincompoop as to believe him.

I’m also sure I’ve read of a fad – Greek, Roman, 18th century, something like that – where a group of young (aristocratic?) men who would suddenly grab a common woman and proclaim her Helen and make her their queen and swear to die for her and so on. And the tearing down of such idols could be seen, if you were wont to be pretentious like me, as part of Frazer’s Golden Bough’s Sacrificial King idea, although I’m not sure script kiddies care if the crops grow. (One other problem with that is that Frazer was romancing; but so are the more literal memecists, so yah!)

Since then however, it appears that "quoz" has entirely flipped meaning, according to UrbanDictionary:

slang for quality, a cockney term for something good. usually accompanied with a hand action of slaping ur index finger against the stationary thumb and middle finger. ‘thats quoz man! propa quoz.’ finger slappy hand thingy

Links for 2009-03-19

Published March 19, 2009

Links for 2009-03-18

Published March 18, 2009

“Fundamentally flawed”

Published March 18, 2009

Killer presentation — "RPC And Its Offspring: Convenient, Yet Fundamentally Flawed" from Steve Vinoski, who presented it at QCon London last week. It’s full of reminders of the mid-90’s, hacking away on CORBA technology — Steve was one of the key players at Iona while I was there.

But never mind where we’ve been; let me hit you with the summary slide to show where Steve’s going:

  • RPC is a convenient but flawed accident of history

    • 1980s research focused on monoliths of programming languages, distributed applications, and operating systems
    • each computer vendor of the time owned their own full stack, from language to hardware and network, and you used what they gave you
    • imperative languages won back then simply because of their superior performance at that time

  • It’s almost 2010, folks — we can do WAY better

    • pull your head from the imperative language sand and learn functional programming
    • the world is many-core and highly distributed, and the old ways aren’t going to keep working much longer

Awesome ;)

Links for 2009-03-16

Published March 16, 2009

A plug for Kiva.org

Published March 14, 2009

I just made a loan using Kiva.org to a weaver in Nepal and a group of Vietnamese broom makers.

You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent — and you get updates letting you know how the entrepreneur is going.

The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back – and Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

Kiva’s microfinancing seems like a nice way of helping the developing world, and I’ve heard good things about it. Here’s hoping it works out well for my two recipients!

Links for 2009-03-13

Published March 13, 2009

Links for 2009-03-12

Published March 12, 2009

Links for 2009-03-11

Published March 11, 2009

Google Reader productivity hack: change your Home

Published March 11, 2009

So, if you use Google Reader, read your news with the "All items" page, and are subscribed to hundreds of feeds, it can be pretty overwhelming. I’ve found a better way to deal with this.

Select a ‘most important’ subset of feeds. For each of those, click through to the feed details page, hit the "Feed Settings…" menu, and select "Change folders…". Put the feed into a new "top" folder (creating it if necessary).

Now go to "Settings" -> "Preferences" and check out the "Start page" preference. By default, it’s set to "Home"; change it to "Folders and Tags: top".

Hey presto — now, when you load Google Reader, it’ll come up with your "top" items. You can get through those quickly enough, and get on to other more important tasks. When you’re bored and need something to read, though, just hit "Navigation" -> "All items" (or even just type ‘ga’), and every other feed is now there for your delectation. Sweet!

Links for 2009-03-10

Published March 10, 2009

Links for 2009-03-05

Published March 5, 2009

Ready for the blackout?

Published March 4, 2009

Reminder — Ireland’s Blackout Week starts tomorrow:

Take part in Blackout Week

  1. To demonstrate your feelings about [IRMA’s censorship demands], you can make your avatar black on any websites you have a presence on.
  2. This is inspired by Creative Freedom New Zealand’s blackout campaign.
  3. From Black Thursday on the 5th of March, for one week, set your picture on sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, MSN, etc black to raise awareness for Blackout Ireland.
  4. On that Thursday we encourage you to express yourself publicly about this issue, whether by blog posts, letters to newspapers or any form of communication you can think of.

Links for 2009-03-03

Published March 3, 2009

  • Locale : ‘Locale allows you to create Situations, which specify Conditions under which your Settings should change; e.g. your “At Work” situation might notice when your location condition is “1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,” and trigger your ringer to vibrate.’ in essence, rule-based AI for your phone. want it! and the phone too while I’m at it!
    (tags: want android phone apps google location mapping)

Using VC to track system config changes by mail

Published March 3, 2009

Here’s a great idea from a thread on the SpamAssassin users list, from Roger Marquis:

Karsten Bräckelmann [questioning the utility of a mechanism to dump the entire contents of the SpamAssassin configuration database]:

‘postconf’ without the handy -n switch dumps about 500 lines. The equivalent dump for SA including the rules is about 6000 lines. And that’s a plain dump, without following and unfolding meta rules or anything.

Whether 6K or 60K would not necessarily make a difference to how I would like to use an SA ‘postconf -n’ equivalent. That use is change management. The intent is not in the full report itself but in its deltas.

As full time mail/systems admins we get invaluable data from tripwire/integrit, ‘postconf -n’, dconf, ‘rpm -qa’, ‘dpkg -l *’, ‘pkg_info -a’, … whose output is checked in to RCS daily. This provides a nice configuration snapshot and historical record but its real usefulness comes from rcsdiff piped into a daily report. These are (usually) relatively concise, and IMO, absolutely essential for monitoring production Unix/Linux systems.

I like it! I think I’d check it into a git repo, though. The concept of applying VC smarts to traditional sysadmin tasks is definitely a meme on the way up — see also etckeeper.

Links for 2009-03-02

Published March 2, 2009

Links for 2009-02-27

Published February 27, 2009