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Justin's Linklog Posts

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

Blackout Ireland – a response to IRMA’s censorship demands

Published February 27, 2009

As Adrian noted last week, IRMA are demanding that Eircom block the Pirate Bay — first on a list of websites they don’t like — on pain of being sued. On top of that, they intend for the other Irish ISPs to follow suit — here’s a key line from the letter they sent to Blacknight MD Michele Neylon:

in the event of a positive response to this letter it is proposed to make practical arrangements with Blacknight of a like nature to those made with eircom.

If that comes to pass, this will be an appalling situation for Irish internet users, and we need to act to ensure it doesn’t happen. Digital Rights Ireland:

The net effect of this scheme, if it is allowed to go into effect, will be to impose an internet death penalty on two groups. On users, who will be cut off on the allegation of a private body, with no court involvement, and on websites, which could be blocked to Irish users based on a court hearing where only one side is heard.

Pace Mulley:

So first they’ll start with the Pirate Bay. Then comes Mininova, IsoHunt, then comes YouTube (they have dodgy stuff, right?), how long before we have Boards.ie because someone quoted a newspaper article or a section of a book?

Digital Rights Ireland have posted an excellent document detailing the following plan of action for Irish internet users concerned about this:

  • Contact your ISP and let them know that this is a key issue for you, as their customer.

  • Join up with your fellow netizens. Subscribe to the Blackout Ireland blog. Follow the #blackoutirl hashtag on Twitter. Join the Blackout Ireland Facebook group. It looks likely that there’ll be a week-long blackout campaign starting next Thursday, March 5th.

  • Contact politicians. This is likely to cause irreparable damage to the Irish internet, so our pols should be very worried. See the DRI post for details on getting in touch with Minister for Communications Eamonn Ryan.

New Zealand is running their own blackout campaign right now, so that may help our planning.

International readers — make no mistake, you’re next. IRMA in this case is acting as the local delegate of IFPI, which stated in 2007 that this was one of the 3 technical options for ISPs to control piracy:

Here’s some other interesting coverage:

Fantastic interview with BitBuzz CEO Alex French:

If ISPs, including Eircom, agree not to oppose blocking access to The Pirate Bay and other similar websites, is this not an agreement to web censorship? “I don’t think there is any other way to interpret it,” said French.

“They are essentially agreeing to censor certain websites at the behest of the recording industry, without these websites ever having necessarily shown to be illegal in the Republic of Ireland. I would have a huge concern over what other websites may be blocked and what other industries will pile in now that the precedent has been set.”

Some sample letters:

And further discussion — here’s a massive boards.ie discussion thread, now closed in favour of this newer thread.

Update: here’s the letter I sent to the Minister, if you’re curious or need inspiration.

Links for 2009-02-26

Published February 26, 2009

Links for 2009-02-25

Published February 25, 2009

Ubuntu to bundle Eucalyptus

Published February 25, 2009

Introducing Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10:

What if you want to build an EC2-style cloud of your own? Of all the trees in the wood, a Koala’s favourite leaf is Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware. It’s no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty

  • during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs.

A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat, and waking up when there’s work to be done. No need to drink at the energy fountain when there’s nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will help take the edge off the bear market.

AWESOME — exactly where the Linux server needs to go. Eucalyptus is the future of server farms. Really looking forward to this…

Links for 2009-02-24

Published February 24, 2009

Blimey, I won

Published February 24, 2009

Somehow or other, I seem to have won the 2009 Irish Blog Award for Best Technology Blog/Blogger! To be honest, for the last year I haven’t been spending as much time on the blog as before, due mainly to a rather compelling distraction, so I’m doubly grateful for winning.

Unfortunately, I was out of the country, at Nishad and Janet’s wedding, so missed my chance to get up on stage and thank my fellow bloggers in person — but I asked John to do so instead. Seems he in turn got stage fright and delegated to his missus, who picked up the trophy. Thanks Fiona! That’s probably just as well, since I’m pretty incoherent in that kind of situation myself.

Cheers to my fellow nominees, Eoghan, Robin, Michele and Pat. One of you guys should totally have won ;)

And last of all — cheers to BitBuzz for sponsoring the category, and Mulley for the whole bash. I definitely have to turn up next year!

Now I need to put more time in this year to really earn that award…

Links for 2009-02-16

Published February 16, 2009

Plenty of money for Dublin’s bikes

Published February 16, 2009

So it seems that JC Decaux have been complaining about the costs of running the Velib scheme in Paris:

Since the scheme’s launch, nearly all the original bicycles have been replaced at a cost of 400 euros each.

Of course, this won’t be a problem in Dublin. Going by Newstalk’s estimates of how much the advertising space provided to JC Decaux for free, in exchange for the (as yet nonexistent) 450 bikes would have cost, each bike comes at a public cost of 111,000 Euros. That should cover a lot of "velib extreme".

(OK, that may be overestimating it. The Irish Times puts a more sober figure of EUR 1m per year; that works out as EUR 2,000 per bike per year. Still should cover a few broken bikes.)

A quick reminder:

ParisDublin
20,000 bikes450 promised
~1,600 billboards~120 installed
~12.5 bikes per billboard~3.8 bikes per billboard
10km range (from 15e to 19e arondissement)4km range (from the Mater Hospital to the Grand Canal)

And, of course, there’s no sign of the bikes here yet… assuming they ever arrive. Heck of a job, Dublin City Council.

BTW, here’s the rate card for advertising on the "Metropole" ad platforms, if you’re curious, via the charmingly-titled Go Ask Me Bollix.

Links for 2009-02-13

Published February 13, 2009

Fixing the Gmail Tasks window bug

Published February 13, 2009

Hey Gmail users! If you’re using Tasks, there’s a slightly annoying bug in Gmail right now — you may see the "Use this link to open Tasks" tip window appear every time you access the inbox page.

Several other people have reported it, and apparently the Google guys are ‘working to resolve it’ at the moment. In the meantime, though, here’s a way to work around the issue without losing Tasks (you will, unfortunately, lose the offline-gmail functionality, though). Simply disable Offline Gmail (Settings -> Offline -> "Disable Offline Gmail for this computer"), and the bug no longer manifests itself.

You can allow Gmail to keep the stored mail on your computer if you like, which will be handy for when the bug is fixed and Offline can be re-enabled — hopefully sooner rather than later.