Snapshot taken at Wed Feb 8 03:12:10 2012
The hypothesis, from Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist at 2AI Labs in Boise, Idaho, and his colleagues goes against the common belief that fingers turn prune-like simply because they absorb water. Changizi thinks that the wrinkles act like rain treads on tyres. They create channels that allow water to drain away as we press our fingertips on to wet surfaces. This allows the fingers to make greater contact with a wet surface, giving them a better grip.'
... on Sat Jul 2 18:14:43 2011comme il faut
... on Mon Apr 25 09:14:34 2011seriously Apple, WTF were you thinking?
... on Wed Apr 20 15:08:56 2011a mate of mine, scanning Irish cultural artifacts from Ireland in the '70s and '80s. fanzines!
... on Tue Apr 19 08:56:45 2011'Virgin and NTL [in the UK] blocked [del.icio.us] for years' due to a false positive -- joshua
... on Mon Apr 18 22:40:01 2011the Joyce estate playing their usual role. 'are we now nearing a point where copyright law can result in the retraction of a life form?' (via John Looney)
... on Mon Apr 18 15:41:56 2011'it might be in your interest if you have a tracker mortgage and are unable to get a better rate of interest on the €5,000 that you are being tempted to repay PTSB. You can get up to 4.2% from PTSB deposit accounts, 9.7% from 10-year Irish sovereign bonds, 9% from residential property. Yet PTSB is prepared to give you less than a measly 2% over a five year period on your €5,000 repayment.'
... on Mon Apr 18 10:23:01 2011'Once again, Warner is the fly in the ointment, the same company that praises Spotify one day, renews their licenses for the rest of the world and then the next day doesn’t want to license them in the US.'
... on Fri Apr 15 10:15:55 2011'Storing 50,000 2.5KB items in a traditional hash set requires over 125MB, but if you're willing to accept a 1-in-10,000 false positive rate on lookups, [this] bloom filter requires under 500KB' - interesting variation on the basic concept. Java, Apache-licensed
... on Wed Apr 13 23:20:49 2011interesting discussion
... on Wed Apr 13 21:45:40 2011'a transparent TCP and UDP proxy. It can be used to get at those hard to intercept network streams, assess those tricky mobile web applications, or maybe just pull a prank on your friend.' basically, cause wifi clients to associate with an Ubuntu host, then sniff their packets
... on Wed Apr 13 21:34:43 2011'Ireland’s tech scene continues to expand in spite of the woeful state of the rest of the economy with a plethora of accelerator programs, seed funds and events like Founders and the IBM smartcamp global finals happening there in the last year or two. '
... on Wed Apr 13 12:14:13 2011'allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads.' actively maintained, Windows and UNIX
... on Mon Apr 11 11:59:13 2011“As the banks’ losses deepen and Dublin’s credibility withers, now is an apt time to rethink the foundations of the European Union’s Irish-rescue strategy, one that is now effectively premised on sinking one country so that tough political choices may be avoided in another.” ouch
... on Wed Apr 6 22:00:35 2011lots of good "Up In The Air"-style tips
... on Wed Apr 6 13:28:46 2011a nice memorial from the Wooters
... on Tue Apr 5 22:27:18 2011hmm, interesting to see what develops here -- reminds me of "Cogair", the original Irish anonymous-whistleblower site from the '90s
... on Tue Apr 5 20:43:40 2011oooh nice! Might go for one of these for my XBMC box. only thing is, I quite like the feature of being able to lock the remote from the kids, when the "remote" is an iPhone...
... on Tue Apr 5 14:19:52 2011pretty good thumbs-up account
... on Mon Apr 4 20:27:30 2011'Maria Martin-Prat, who was formerly employed as Director of Legal Policy and Regulatory Affairs at IFPI, has now been selected to lead the EU unit that deals with copyright and enforcement issues.'
... on Sun Apr 3 22:10:19 2011still a disaster, and the new government are proving disappointing. Pimco CEO says fail: '"The creditors most of the creditors so far have not gone through any burden sharing, it is remarkable; it is inadvisable; but it is a political decision that has been taken. It surprises me. What they are hoping for is by maintaining the credits intact, that they creditors they are going to rush back in with new money. What they haven't read is the history of debt crisis and the history of debt crises is very simple. Whenever you have a debt overhang, whenever you have this big cloud of debt no new creditor will come in in a big way."'
... on Sun Apr 3 21:38:37 2011'an application packaging format, a server configuration library, a cloud server management tool, a persistence management tool, and a tool to manage the application with respect to all these services over time.' interesting, possibly too Pythonic
... on Sun Apr 3 20:01:32 2011Jeff Atwood pimps the latest HTPC SBC with onboard GPU, to support 1080p painlessly. comments are good too (via Nelson)
... on Thu Mar 31 21:59:04 2011massively detailed critique of Google's corporate culture -- lots of internals exposed
... on Wed Mar 30 20:48:49 2011'Internet blocking is ineffective. The current proposal lacks sufficient checks and balances, and may even require ISPs and telcos to break other laws to comply. It will inevitably result in innocents being tarred as offenders. Data Protection principles (such as “Adequate, Relevant, and Not Excessive” are being blatantly ignored to implement an ineffective solution. Far better is to shut down the shop by removing the images at source and invest time, energy, and resources into a more transparent effort to manage this issue.' well said
... on Tue Mar 29 15:54:51 2011'Last year we revealed that the Department of Justice was working on secret plans to introduce internet filtering in Ireland. Now, despite a complete lack of any legislation, public consultation or democratic discussion, these plans have moved to the implementation stage.' wtf, this is just appalling lack of oversight
... on Tue Mar 29 12:28:18 2011Scribe logs events, "ptail" (parallel tail presumably) tails logs from Scribe stores, Puma batch-aggregates, writes to HBase. Java and Thrift on the backend, PHP in front
... on Mon Mar 28 21:11:31 2011some notes from Blackberry's slow circle round the toilet, as it's hammered by iPhones and Androids. also: I can't believe QNX is still alive
... on Mon Mar 28 09:10:31 2011still fantastic advice, even after 4 years. I think it's time for a re-read
... on Sun Mar 27 22:47:53 2011'platform for event-driven, scalable, and fault-tolerant architectures on the JVM' .. Actor-based, 'let-it-crash', Apache-licensed, Java and Scala APIs, remote Actors, transactional memory -- looks quite nice
... on Sun Mar 27 22:20:47 2011lots of patterns to write safe node.js code. Pretty daunting, to be honest
... on Sun Mar 27 22:01:20 2011data retention in Germany revealed via FOI: 'in a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.'
... on Sat Mar 26 22:06:05 2011handy -- a patch to rsync(1) which will not disturb the buffer cache, so that large file transfers and backups will not interfere with what's been cached previously
... on Fri Mar 25 10:46:41 2011'an alternative Linux-based firmware for powering Broadcom-based ethernet routers. It is a modification of the famous Tomato firmware, with additional built-in support for USB port, wireless-N mode support, support for several newer router models, and various enhancements. Tomato USB supports many Broadcom-based routers from Asus, Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear and other manufacturers.' Looks good -- I've been a Tomato fan for many years -- and jzawodny-approved
... on Thu Mar 24 13:05:41 2011*excellent* Irish pale ale, brewed by ex-co-worker Grainne and her partner Tim, now on sale in my favourite pub. yay!
... on Thu Mar 24 00:30:58 2011OCSP doesn't work -- the browser vendors have failed to implement it safely
... on Thu Mar 24 00:26:47 2011pointing the finger at the Iranian state; various login URLs for GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and something called "global trustee" (wtf)
... on Wed Mar 23 23:16:53 2011'On a single core of a Core i7 processorin 64-bit mode, it compresses at about 250 MB/sec or more and decompresses atabout 500 MB/sec or more. (These numbers are for the slowest inputs in ourbenchmark suite; others are much faster.) In our tests, Snappy usuallyis faster than algorithms in the same class (e.g. LZO, LZF, FastLZ, QuickLZ,etc.) while achieving comparable compression ratios.' Apache-licensed, from Google
... on Wed Mar 23 23:13:30 2011'If I had to make a bet, I'd wager that an attacker was able to issue high value [SSL] certificates, probably by compromising [the USERTRUST SSL certificate authority] in some manner, this was discovered sometime before the revocation date, each certificate was revoked, the vendors notified, the patches were written, and binary builds kicked off - end users are probably still updating and thus many people are vulnerable to the failure that is the CRL and OCSP method for revocation.' It seems addons.mozilla.org was one of the bogus certs acquired. Major ouch. Thanks to EFF/Tor et al for investigating this -- SSL cert revocation is a shambles
... on Wed Mar 23 11:46:21 2011good tips from a forum thread on MacRumors -- quite a few new ones I hadn't tried before
... on Sun Mar 20 23:11:18 2011a $4.99 Cydia-installed tweak for jailbroken iPhones -- turn off the 3G radio entirely, switching down to the much more economical 2G radio, when the device is locked or on wifi. This really should be a built-in feature of iOS
... on Sun Mar 20 22:51:50 2011Cory Doctorow got an MRI of his femur in prep for a surgical procedure -- and his wife used it to make a 3D-printed titanium keyring! awesome. I want to do this with MY SKULL
... on Tue Mar 15 15:22:02 2011'a lava-like molten mixture of portions of nuclear reactor core, formed during a nuclear meltdown'
... on Tue Mar 15 13:45:55 2011a very hairy hack to perform a block-level rsync-like "send just the changes" algorithm between two very large files (think /dev/sda block devices). Crazy, but it'd work alright!
... on Mon Mar 14 21:21:42 2011'some first thoughts on how the just-published coalition agreement (Fine Gael and Labour) in Ireland proposes to deal with issues of interest to cyberlaw and media law.'
... on Mon Mar 14 14:50:20 2011'I would like to call it "B.E.S.T. Scanner" so people kind of get stuck calling it "the best scanner". We can figure out what BEST means later.' omgwtf. Is this guy 12 years old?
... on Mon Mar 14 13:34:16 2011What's going on inside the Fukushima nuclear reactor, and how it is hoped meltdown can be averted
... on Sat Mar 12 22:46:51 2011good article by Karlin Lillington on the attempted sneaking-through of an SI to 'deal with' filesharing. agreed on all counts
... on Fri Mar 11 15:30:11 2011wow, the *entire games industry* (basically) comes out to praise Old Man Murray -- the influential satire site. I'd forgotten about their Time-To-Crate game rating system (which I still apply)
... on Mon Mar 7 11:21:52 2011'Because it’s easy for a kid to find a site that isn’t blocked – or to “borrow” mum or dad’s credit card – it’s of no serious concern to the intrepid kid. It does suck if they want to find out how not to get AIDS though. So, we’re stuck with a situation that’s expensive for MNOs, embarrassing and annoying for consenting adults, and trivial for a child to bypass.'
... on Thu Mar 3 18:32:33 2011more idiotic deletionism from Wikipedia. when will someone fork WP with a saner community?
... on Thu Mar 3 13:46:25 2011So much win in one article. (a) the Bengali equivalent of "craic" is, roughly, "phatiphati"; (b) "In Irish pubs, amid the tiddly-doo music, this is a craic"; (c) wtf Gadaffi references; (d) shared post-colonialist glee
... on Thu Mar 3 12:35:23 2011O2 UK have just instituted a mandatory block for all "18+" content, which is only removed once the customer pays a UKP1 fee via credit card (which is immediately refunded). Twitter is *full* of angry UK O2 users right now
... on Thu Mar 3 11:18:25 2011Adrian Weckler with a plea for the incoming govt regarding the attempt to rush through '3 Strikes' by the outgoing one: 'Such a law will have absolutely no effect on the practice of illegal filesharing. None. Zero. It hasn't worked in France. It hasn't worked in Britain. And it certainly won't work in Ireland. On the other hand, it may well send a signal to huge, jobs-creating digital IT companies that Ireland is a place that tries to legislate away personal digital freedoms.'
... on Wed Mar 2 15:59:21 2011wish more "piracy = theft" people would think about this viewpoint. mind you, fwiw, I buy my games, and have paid for Minecraft ;)
... on Wed Mar 2 13:05:19 2011doh (via Graham Cluley)
... on Tue Mar 1 18:01:05 2011Warren's Android app to track DublinBike availability: 'Use BikeDroid to locate the nearest free bike or stand to you. Get real-time status of all bike stands displayed on a map of your city.'
... on Mon Feb 28 16:33:13 2011in Twitter, obvs. This is incredibly handy, and very poorly-documented
... on Mon Feb 28 16:23:42 2011FG 63 seats, Labour 51, SF 23, Greens 10, Ind 11, FF 2. interesting to see SF's strong showing among emigrants -- something for electoral reformers to think about ;)
... on Mon Feb 28 11:35:18 2011'if you Liked a story on a website by pressing the Like button, you’re not only sharing the content on your wall but you’re also automatically subscribing and giving permission for future newsfeed updates to site owners. This happens every time and anywhere you Like something.' ugh, spammy, Facebook
... on Mon Feb 28 00:19:47 2011fascinating look inside serious Redis operations
... on Sun Feb 27 23:31:09 2011'an [unofficial] mobile web application that the public can use to find 'Dublin Bikes' stations and information about bike availability'
... on Fri Feb 25 12:10:21 2011anti-bandwidth-cap arguments from a Canadian campaign
... on Tue Feb 22 21:28:18 2011incredlble -- way ahead of his time on this one
... on Mon Feb 21 16:25:29 2011cool geeky photo tricks, via Nishad
... on Fri Feb 18 21:15:09 2011Sane suggestions for good HTTP APIs
... on Wed Feb 16 18:01:59 2011Brilliant! "find out which political parties are compatible with you." The app asks a few questions, you furnish survey-style responses, and it figures out which party is closest in published policy. It works quite well, determining that my optimum is Labour (correct)
... on Wed Feb 16 17:07:39 2011the story of Ramnicu Valcea -- Romania's Silicon Valley of phishing
... on Wed Feb 16 16:20:30 2011DHS/ICE domain seizures suffer a serious false positive problem, resulting in the seizure and shutting down of 84,000 subdomains of a free DNS provider, replacing them with a banner accusing the site of trafficking in child porn. whoops!
... on Wed Feb 16 15:14:12 2011'Haaretz reports [on a] video that was played at a party organized for General Gabi Ashkenazi's last day on the job. The video contained references to the successes he achieved during his stint as chief of staff, [including] the Stuxnet worm attack on Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and and the nuclear reactor at Bushehr.'
... on Wed Feb 16 12:06:20 2011good article on the history of MSG and the "umami" flavour from the Guardian (via Reddit)
... on Tue Feb 15 21:58:43 2011A symbolic online vote for Ireland's emigrants, courtesy of Joe "ICTE" McCarthy -- the site is now open, and 'will remain open for one week until 12:00 GMT on Tuesday 22nd. Only those living outside Ireland will able to cast a ballot.'
... on Tue Feb 15 21:57:08 2011Loved this great neologism: 'as with any small organization's politics, people with way more time (and insanity) to invest in trivial issues will always out-penis more casual people just trying to make a positive contribution.'
... on Tue Feb 15 21:33:33 2011Jesus H. Christ, this is incredibly nonsensical. Green Party candidate Eamonn Ryan proposes replacing the TV license fee with an internet tax -- 'some small charge on the volume of data.' WTF
... on Tue Feb 15 20:35:48 2011the $99 set-top box now can run XBMC without having to be re-tethered anytime you needed to power it off
... on Mon Feb 14 00:02:40 2011Great comments -- the Burrows-Wheeler Transform is crazy stuff
... on Sun Feb 13 23:50:12 2011'offenders must be identified by their IP address. In his judgement, Birss cast doubt on the accuracy with which this link could be made, due to the problem of unauthorised users gaining access to a unsecured networks.' wow, the judgement that keeps on giving
... on Sun Feb 13 22:09:47 2011on a zoomable map; not all stops/routes are covered yet, UI needs work for mobile devices, and hopefully there's an open API -- but still useful already (via Oliver Nash). Sample single-stop result page: http://dublin.acisconnect.com/Popup_Content/WebDisplay/WebDisplay.aspx?StopRef=01279
... on Sat Feb 12 22:21:33 2011from a former SixApart PM. I'd put my money on "unambiguously free" (ie. OSS) which in turn drives the developer ecosystem, myself
... on Thu Feb 10 20:49:55 2011This is the future of code review. Commit directly from your git checkout to the Gerrit code-review system; change is immediately web-visible and enters the review workflow; at the same time, Jenkins checks out the proposed change and runs the test suite; once it's approved, it automatically gets checked in. Brilliant!
... on Thu Feb 10 14:09:47 2011'like Wasabi's truant ginger cousin with a rap sheet' says Morgan Jones. I'll go for some of that
... on Wed Feb 9 22:18:45 2011Alan Taylor moves his iconic blog of photojournalism from the Boston Globe to The Atlantic
... on Wed Feb 9 22:07:25 2011'When demonstrating FareBot, many people are surprised to learn that much of the data on their ORCA card is not encrypted or protected. This fact is published by ORCA, but is not commonly known and may be of concern to some people who would rather not broadcast where they’ve been to anyone who can brush against the outside of their wallet. Transit agencies across the board should do a better job explaining to riders how the cards work and what the privacy implications are.' (via Boing Boing)
... on Wed Feb 9 15:50:42 2011great UI for a little Dublin oral-history site -- just a GMaps mashup with links to YouTube, but it works very well
... on Wed Feb 9 15:47:28 2011wow. the WinAmp guys were right -- 'on a European level, Spotify is the second single largest source of revenue for record labels. This means that 2010 saw dramatic increase in its usage as well as payouts to record labels and artists themselves.' this via an IFPI report
... on Wed Feb 9 11:16:01 2011'With the price of bread running into billions a loaf the German people [...] had to get used to counting in thousands of billions. This, according to some German physicians, brought on a new nervous disease known as "zero stroke," or "cipher stroke" [...] The persons afflicted with the malady are perfectly normal, except "for a desire to write endless rows of ciphers and engage in computations more involved than the most difficult problems in logarithms."' (via Joe Drumgoole)
... on Wed Feb 9 10:47:52 2011jesus. Not only do they coin the cramp-inducing neologism "twolicy", they then have the temerity to suggest that people should "donate" their Facebook status so that FG can spam their social group. awful
... on Tue Feb 8 17:29:37 2011how the Daily Mail (UK) works, via b3ta. mind-boggling misuse of one woman's comments to concoct a story, according to this
... on Mon Feb 7 13:56:45 2011simple, basic demo of a git post-receive hook to auto-check-out every rev committed to a git repository
... on Mon Feb 7 10:48:42 2011'Preconditions, postconditions, and invariants are added as Java boolean expressions inside annotations.' nice
... on Sat Feb 5 22:24:27 2011Python, Nginx, Tornado for COMET stuff, MySQL as a data store, memcached, Thrift, haproxy, AWS, Pylons. fantastic, very detailed post (via Nelson)
... on Sat Feb 5 21:50:36 2011regardless of the source of the funding, be it external EU grants with no HEA/exchequer input. pretty stupid stuff (via Brian Lucey)
... on Fri Feb 4 23:11:34 2011'Notch’s luck was that he came across the idea of doing a first-person fortress building game. His alignment was that the game that he wanted to make was culturally connected to [he PC gamer] tribe. While the game may appear ugly, and its purchase process etc seem naive to many a gaming professional, all of those decisions that Notch made along the road to releasing his game were from the point of view of a particular perspective of what games are, what matters and what were the things that he could trust the tribe to figure out for themselves.'
... on Fri Feb 4 13:46:19 2011quietly passed into law on the 26th Jan. DRI say 'the Bill requires telecommunications companies, internet service providers, and the like, to retain data about communications (though not the content of the communications); phone and mobile traffic data have to be retained for 2 years; internet communications have to be retained for one year … This will impose significant costs on those obliged to retain and secure the data, and those costs will be passed on to their already hard-pressed customers. And it is likely to drive international telecommunications and internet companies to European states which have introduced far less demanding regimes.'
... on Thu Feb 3 21:31:11 2011good wiki tracking spam operations, their current campaigns, who's doing it etc.
... on Thu Feb 3 11:16:14 2011Visa's atrociously-designed "security" program is now being used by criminals to process their credit-card payments, allegedly
... on Thu Feb 3 11:14:10 2011'As the [pump and dump] scheme played out from January 2005 through December 2007, Berger allegedly led the sale of about 30 million shares of stock, generating approximately $30 million for co-conspirators and more than $600,000 in commission for himself.'
... on Wed Feb 2 21:44:49 2011PDF of the 15-page Vanity Fair article -- from interviews I've read in advance, this seems pretty good
... on Wed Feb 2 14:55:23 2011Fantastic comparative number crunching on the JC Decaux Dublin Bikes scheme, compared to their other European cities (Brussels, Lyons, Paris, Seville), times of day, busiest stations, rainfall, etc.
... on Wed Feb 2 14:49:48 2011'The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.'
... on Wed Feb 2 11:19:50 2011from Malcolm Hutty, Head of Public Affairs at LINX (UK ISP organisation). insightful and a good summary of the state of the art in ISP-hosted filtering/blocking solutions. The final few slides are especially useful
... on Tue Feb 1 22:06:27 2011laaaame, Microsoft
... on Tue Feb 1 16:13:56 2011ie. the same value as the PHP bug. 'Konstantin [Pressier] reported this problem to Oracle three weeks ago, but is still waiting for a reply.' good job, Oracle!
... on Tue Feb 1 10:56:44 2011A Dublin mystery solved! those white plaster statues that covered Dublin, appearing in almost every council house window, explained
... on Mon Jan 31 21:18:54 2011'See or post leaflets shoved through your door by parties and candidates across the land. RSS feeds and email alerts available by constituency. Add new leaflets through a web form or by email.'
... on Mon Jan 31 10:24:26 2011fast work from new FF leader Micheal Martin: 'None of those who complained consented to their details being used to contact them in this way and none could establish how Fianna Fáil obtained their addresses.'
... on Sun Jan 30 23:05:23 2011just about right (via Waxy)
... on Sun Jan 30 23:01:57 2011having worked on a product which was tangentially a Dropbox competitor, this is fascinating. they have good tech and great smarts, and of course a great foundation in S3
... on Fri Jan 28 20:13:00 2011good inside account of the "wo0dh3ad" hack
... on Wed Jan 26 22:03:25 2011Any teeth though?
... on Mon Jan 24 10:30:28 2011incredible insider account of Cowen's final ineptitudes as FF leader. Beyond GUBU
... on Mon Jan 24 09:52:34 2011interesting post from Nate Lawson -- he suggests that Stuxnet could have been much better in payload obfuscation, had the authors studied the state of the art in malware implementation. I'm not convinced, however; as Halvar Flake suggests, KISS applies
... on Wed Jan 19 21:56:11 2011modern web-scraping tech, using Ruby and Nokogiri
... on Wed Jan 19 21:16:09 2011"Google Image 'People' = Ethnic Diversity". bwahahahaha
... on Mon Jan 17 14:56:29 2011a nifty gdb hack; essentially dup()s a couple of files in /tmp in place of fd 1 and 2, then uses the bashism "detach" to nohup the running process
... on Mon Jan 17 13:32:01 2011'Any TCP session you initiate to one of the proxied IP addresses [specified on the command line] will be captured by sshuttle and sent over an ssh session to the remote copy of sshuttle, which will then regenerate the connection on that end, and funnel the data back and forth through ssh. Fun, right? A poor man's instant VPN, and you don't even have to have admin access on the server.'
... on Mon Jan 17 11:00:33 2011A counter-argument: "so, redo, from a conceptual point of view, has a really good and simple approach (very djb-y), and I'm sure it's an excellent tool for new projects, but for existing projects that already use make in a non-recursive fashion, it would a maintenance PITA. And that's why I conclude that redo in its current conceptual state will never be the Git of build systems. make is still more flexible, and even though it has its flaws, it's still good enough for most people, and also a de-facto standard."
... on Mon Jan 17 10:57:33 2011jgc provides a good demonstration of how a general-purpose programming language tends to make a crappy DSL -- specifically Rakefiles
... on Mon Jan 17 10:56:27 2011YA make-replacement build system. the thread is better than the linked article, btw
... on Mon Jan 17 10:53:26 2011some amazing details of Stuxnet's apparent background. 'By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.'
... on Sun Jan 16 22:14:44 2011slightly disturbing extreme close-up shots of the human eye
... on Sat Jan 15 21:34:16 2011jobs fair this weekend in Dublin, in The Mansion House -- if you're interested in talking to someone about working for Amazon, come along! (plug plug)
... on Fri Jan 14 14:50:39 2011hmm, I never knew about oom_adj, useful (via Peter Blair)
... on Thu Jan 13 23:30:37 2011cool web-based, wikipedia-driven game from Jim Blackler; test your movie knowledge
... on Thu Jan 13 17:17:46 2011all signs point to 'they didn't.' also, interesting comment in the Reddit thread: 'From a source close to the situation; the forms [on the FG site] were not being sanitised [against SQL injection attacks] at all.' incredibly amateurish, if true
... on Wed Jan 12 23:34:33 2011some great gags and stories. Plus an excellent recipe for tamales in "today you, tomorrow me" (via waxy)
... on Wed Jan 12 22:52:33 2011some interesting /proc tricks. I like the 'phantom progress bar'
... on Tue Jan 11 21:28:45 2011'we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.'
... on Tue Jan 11 21:24:23 2011renaming to "Jenkins" due to Oracle asshattery
... on Tue Jan 11 16:22:30 2011really quite good advice -- all except for "take the whole lane", which in my experience aggravates drivers and causes road rage and risky behaviour. avoid
... on Fri Jan 7 14:18:31 2011Another TV file-renaming script. looks a little fragile/hacky at a glance though
... on Fri Jan 7 13:41:17 2011organise downloaded TV shows into the directory format Boxee (and by extension, XBMC) wants; some votes for Sickbeard here
... on Fri Jan 7 13:39:06 2011'Greater access to information on the workings of government empower the public in making informed decisions on the direction they want the country to take. Open Government and media reforms can make this a reality. The key inspiration for Reset Ireland comes from projects such as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative along with various other projects promoting openness, transparency and accountability in Government around the world.'
... on Fri Jan 7 12:40:16 2011'Free open source self-hosted log management and exception tracking', loggly-style. Basically, a nifty web data-mining UI on your syslogs (via adulau)
... on Thu Jan 6 23:24:48 2011'GOATS just stand around during this phase and stare at each other, rolling their eyes frequently at howlers (such as using serialization to SOAP for storage, or databases as RPC mechanisms). It is often useful for GOATS — or anybody, really — to take notes for the monthly BACKSTABBING drill.'
... on Wed Jan 5 14:41:13 2011injects JS onto Google, Facebook, Yahoo! non-encrypted login pages to submit the typed username and password against nonexistent http URLs, e.g. 'http://www.google.com/wo0dh3ad', presumably so that DPI logging can collect them. apparently the HTTPS login pages are blocked to force use of HTTP
... on Wed Jan 5 11:08:19 2011wow, incredible bug
... on Tue Jan 4 22:02:28 2011hooray, and about time too
... on Tue Jan 4 18:09:17 2011good article from Gabriella Coleman in The Atlantic
... on Tue Jan 4 15:59:54 2011my mate Sush is looking to fund 'a documentary set in India during the World Cup of Cricket in 2011 about Indian cricket fans and their personal stories.' Looks great -- might blog about this a bit more...
... on Fri Dec 31 16:23:41 2010from one of GitHub's designers, good tips on how the URL UI needs to work these days
... on Fri Dec 31 14:02:35 2010great preso on the PS3 hack from the fail0verflow team. love the LaTeX "science bit". Sony's epic fail: non-random "random" key data
... on Fri Dec 31 11:44:19 2010truly horrifically awesome hackery from ASR
... on Thu Dec 30 23:31:31 2010At least one of the sites seized by DHS was an mp3 blog which posted authorised, promotional mp3s, sent from record label VPs and artists -- ie. none of the supposedly "infringing" files, actually were infringing. (via Tony Finch)
... on Wed Dec 29 15:27:02 2010The entire front page is full of amazing (some NSFW) stories from b3ta's long-running question-of-the-week thing
... on Sat Dec 25 00:38:53 2010good round-up on this FF quango fiasco
... on Wed Dec 22 12:01:08 2010duplicate (fake) news sites created, possibly to put out fake stories; also interesting that international HTTPS was blocked.
... on Mon Dec 20 10:30:27 2010via @PinboardIN -- great, great idea. translates entire Delicious Networks, too, which would have saved me a bit of bother had I known about it a few days ago
... on Mon Dec 20 00:06:09 2010a paean to Schwalbe Marathon Winter tires. sniff, if Wiggle.co.uk had their act together I'd have mine by now :(
... on Thu Dec 16 22:42:18 2010via Tony: a DIY snow/ice tire for bikes, using zipties. Unfortunately incompatible with rim brakes, otherwise I'd be doing this! (my damn ice tires are back-ordered at wiggle.co.uk until Jan 2011.)
... on Thu Dec 16 22:20:28 2010'to help citizens access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Irish Government and public sector authorities; to improve access to the Irish Government data and to establish an innovative platform that can demonstrate to government how and why they should share data'
... on Thu Dec 16 13:52:55 2010“While we appreciate your offer to shut down the website to stop future infringement, we notice that your website is still operation. And without further information from you, our only means to assess the potential damages is the observation that your website had 22,256 unique visitors in July 2010. Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale. This damage calculation exceeds $3.2 million per month in lost revenue.”
... on Thu Dec 16 12:22:11 2010according to this, the US Dept of Homeland Security is "seizing" domains through a back-channel to Verisign, since they directly control the .com TLD's nameservers. Expect to see dodgy sites start using non-US TLDs, names in multiple TLDs a la Pirate Bay, and eventually IPs instead of DNS records
... on Thu Dec 16 12:19:50 2010'It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company
... on Wed Dec 15 00:48:26 2010wow, sign me up ;)
... on Tue Dec 14 16:52:57 2010nifty data-mined map of cross-border friendships on Facebook
... on Tue Dec 14 14:42:36 2010'We are proud to announce the free and open-source Accentuate.us, a new method of input for over 100 languages that uses statistical reasoning so that users can type effortlessly in plain ASCII while ultimately producing accurate text. This allows Vietnamese users, for example, to simply type “Moi nguoi deu co quyen tu do ngon luan va bay to quan diem,” which will be automatically corrected to “Mọi người đều có quyền tự do ngôn luận và bầy tỏ quan điểm” after Accentuation. To date, we support four clients: Mozilla Firefox, Perl, Python, and Vim, with more to be added shortly.' cool
... on Mon Dec 13 13:53:04 2010'Publishers would have people believe that MAME and the emulation scene is the root of all evil, that it promotes piracy and ultimately hurts the poor, starving developers slaving away on the game. Not only is this claim patently false, it ignores the fact that many developers use things like MAME, mod chips, and homebrew development utilities to help us overcome the day-to-day frustrations caused by the people behind the real problems in our industry.'
... on Mon Dec 13 11:22:07 2010'We’d like you to nominate the longlist of best music of 2010 on www.digitalsocketawards.com. From this, 26 blogger judges from towns and cities all over Ireland will each score their top choices to reach a shortlist of three finalists in each category. The winners will be announced on 3 February 2011 at a live event in Dublin’s Grand Social.'
... on Mon Dec 13 11:10:44 2010I never really understood how useful a good metrics infrastructure could be for operational visibility until I joined Amazon. Here's a good demo of Etsy's metrics system (via Netlson)
... on Fri Dec 10 21:44:15 2010fantastic collection of Google Street View gems
... on Fri Dec 10 21:10:07 2010click a "Flattr" button on content-creator websites, pay a monthly $5 fee, and the content creators get a share of your $5. Very interesting, and seems well thought out -- think I may sign up when I see some content I like
... on Fri Dec 10 13:52:53 2010'
... on Thu Dec 9 21:14:27 20101000 notifications a month, and 'Eircom is guaranteeing that it will never hand subscribers’ personal details to the music industry and will never monitor their online activities. They will, however, take the word of the music industry and their monitors on face value and presume it is accurate as a matter of course.'
... on Thu Dec 9 15:10:30 2010'the [large] buffers are confusing TCP’s RTT estimator; the delay caused by the buffers is many times the actual RTT on the path.' [..] 'by inserting big buffers into the network, we have violated the design presumption of all Internet congestion avoiding protocols: that the network will drop packets in a timely fashion.' QoS traffic shaping avoids this -- hooray for Tomato firmware
... on Tue Dec 7 23:54:29 2010Thunderbird's calendar can now integrate properly with MS Exchange 2007 and above via OWA. (via adulau)
... on Tue Dec 7 23:40:08 2010Pair-programming with another SAMBA developer over the course of a year, using a SIP server and a VNC-shared desktop. very positive review indeed
... on Mon Dec 6 23:12:25 2010a French campaign to "bring down the banks" by engineering a massive consumer bank run, tomorrow, Dec 7th. I can see this happening in Ireland if we don't get an election soon
... on Mon Dec 6 12:34:27 2010according to Guido Fawkes (who was an ex-bond trader), and seemingly the same list David Norris attempted to read into the Senate record before being ruled out of order. The vampire squid makes an appearance
... on Sun Dec 5 23:44:09 2010'This is not capitalism, it is not European diplomacy; it is a stitch-up.' Adding another voice in favour of default -- starting to look like the only sane option given the crappy ECB deal :(
... on Fri Dec 3 14:02:24 2010'€57 Weekly. Deceptively spacious open plan unfurnished studio in one of Dublin's top locations.
... on Fri Dec 3 11:48:11 2010great round-up of "live" information sources while Dublin's big freeze continues
... on Thu Dec 2 22:39:31 2010huh. Test-driven development is slower than traditional write-first-test-at-the-end development, but it results in less bugs. Grokcode theorise that its big win is amortising the cost of testing throughout the product iteration, hence reducing the temptation to skip testing when the crunch phase happens
... on Thu Dec 2 17:00:53 2010Leo on the current political situation in Ireland. I'm mostly in agreement
... on Thu Dec 2 15:46:23 2010brilliant execution. wish they'd ever apologise in reality
... on Wed Dec 1 22:25:13 2010'The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year. This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable.'
... on Wed Dec 1 11:21:11 2010Pretty good explanation, actually
... on Wed Dec 1 11:15:27 2010'a (python) library and a tool to clusterize similar files using fuzzy hashing techniques. This project is inspired by the well known tool ssdeep.' Via Nelson
... on Tue Nov 30 23:29:17 2010Dagestan knows how to party. 'The main activity of the day was eating and drinking -- starting from 4 p.m., about eight hours worth, all told -- punctuated, when all were laden with food and sodden with drink, with a bout of jet skiing in the Caspian'
... on Tue Nov 30 11:38:23 2010bank runs appear to be a hot topic at the moment
... on Fri Nov 26 14:58:42 2010'UNLESS CHANGES are made to Ireland’s legal and regulatory framework in areas like copyright and defamation, digital businesses will be discouraged from locating operations here, say legal experts and businesses.'
... on Fri Nov 26 11:44:12 2010extensive details on the innards of Netflix' move to AWS, from the legendary Adrian Cockcroft
... on Tue Nov 23 23:46:54 2010extract the non-boilerplate part of a web page
... on Tue Nov 23 22:23:54 2010true -- very difficult to hire good staff in Ireland right now
... on Tue Nov 23 22:07:30 2010a Grumman engineer, working with artist Frosty Myers, hid a tiny ceramic plate of modern art on one leg of the Apollo 12 moon lander -- including a crude penis drawn by Andy Warhol
... on Tue Nov 23 10:12:25 2010holy crap, I had no idea there was even a VIC-20 emulation demoscene, let alone that the standard was so high. this is amazing work, considering the platform (via Donncha)
... on Sun Nov 21 20:44:58 2010'Following complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), Davenport Lyons now stands accused of deliberately ignoring concerns over the standard of its evidence. It matched IP addresses captured from movie and videogame BitTorrent swarms with customer records obtained from ISPs by court order. David Gore and Brian Miller, two Davenport Lyons partners, will face disciplinary proceedings in March.'
... on Fri Nov 19 16:52:47 2010first, eh? not sure about that. still, good going for Irish startup JLizard, logging in the cloud seems to be hot
... on Wed Nov 17 12:25:36 2010continuous-integration system was accidentally run against the production db. result: the entire production database got wiped. ouuuuch
... on Tue Nov 16 21:27:57 2010open-source app to manage events and logs; collect logs, parse them, store, search, with web UI
... on Tue Nov 16 21:10:38 2010'Logging as a Service' - a cloud-based logging service
... on Tue Nov 16 21:09:42 2010quite a bit of open datasets from Fingal County Council. wow (via John Handelaar)
... on Tue Nov 16 15:39:58 2010'Using Boxee to play local files? having issues? Here's what were going to do about it.' It's amazing to see this level of responsiveness from an appliance vendor!
... on Tue Nov 16 11:41:10 2010the real deal -- a photo of Ireland, at night, from the ISS. I always assumed those patches of light were exagerrated for effect, but they're genuine!
... on Mon Nov 15 11:31:58 2010'steps towards the glory of REST'. 3 steps, namely: "Level 0: the swamp of POX", "Level 1: Resources", "Level 2: HTTP verbs", and "Level 3: hypermedia controls". +1
... on Mon Nov 15 10:25:22 2010the comments explain a lot about the horrifically one-side Seanad debate on filesharing and 3-strikes for Ireland -- a lot of links to Ireland's old guard in the music biz
... on Sun Nov 14 21:35:59 2010'The world's two largest poker sites, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, are battling to keep poker bots off their sites.' The anti-abuse arms race in poker hits the news
... on Fri Nov 12 23:30:14 2010this is not looking good -- the Seanad debate on the subject of filesharing and internet filtering in Ireland is going in the direction that IRMA have been lobbying for; only the Labour senator came up with something sensible, by at least reading an email he'd received into the record
... on Fri Nov 12 21:49:56 2010already fixed in Froyo, but still -- interesting write-up from Sophos. good to see Google have chosen to separate all apps into individual uids, too
... on Fri Nov 12 21:19:02 2010or 'Shī Shì shí shī shǐ', in Hanyu Pinyin -- 'a famous example of constrained writing by Yuen Ren Chao which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin.'
... on Thu Nov 11 20:18:08 2010'a group for community-based discussion around Open Data in Ireland'
... on Wed Nov 10 15:50:52 2010more good Bloom Filter tips. he says: 'I take a slightly different tack, starting with a target population in mind which determines the size of the filter. Also there's a minor error regarding performance in the corte.si post. You only need to calculate two hash functions, and use a linear combination of them to index the Bloom filter. This simplifies the coding a lot, and if hash calculation dominates filter indexing, it's also a lot faster.'
... on Tue Nov 9 10:15:00 2010good to know (via Jeremy)
... on Tue Nov 9 00:08:21 2010pay as you go car-sharing and short-term car rental in Dublin
... on Fri Nov 5 21:10:57 2010wait a sec, I know someone whose likeness appears in the National Wax Museum?!
... on Fri Nov 5 21:08:08 2010hmm, must try this out
... on Thu Nov 4 21:46:19 2010lots of people complaining about this on Twitter -- seems the clock changes, but the alarms do not! Internationali[sz]ation Is Hard
... on Tue Nov 2 10:27:31 2010"in e-mail from Microsoft employees, you may find a stray J [...] The J started out its life as a smiley-face. The WingDings font puts a smiley face where the letter J goes. [...] As the message travels from machine to machine, the font formatting may get lost or mangled, resulting in the letter J appearing when a smiley face was intended." aha! mystery solved. Amazon is full of mysterious "J"s in emails, and now I know why
... on Mon Nov 1 21:32:36 2010discovered a previously-unknown optimal build strategy for the Zerg race -- how cool is that
... on Mon Nov 1 21:25:42 2010this is not going to help my addiction
... on Fri Oct 29 13:32:08 2010MySQL/PostgreSQL admin helper tools -- check replication status, archive, analyse logs, find deadlocks
... on Thu Oct 28 13:48:16 2010open-source speech recognition for Linux and Windows. must give this a go! (Via Alexander Seewald)
... on Thu Oct 21 08:46:00 2010another concurrency shell command; interesting approach to dashboarding the results, with the "mdm.screen" utility provided
... on Tue Oct 19 20:12:17 2010by Ole Tange. pretty extensive, if inscrutable (via Tony Finch)
... on Tue Oct 19 20:10:05 2010'Alebrijes are brightly colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical creatures'. ah, I was wondering what they were -- I thought there was one, extremely prolific, artist
... on Mon Oct 18 21:01:36 2010tipped as the next generation of hackable router; 128MB RAM, 533MHz CPU, supports 802.11N and 1000Base-T, and runs Tomato firmware. pity I just bought another WRT54GL a couple of months back
... on Mon Oct 18 20:22:04 2010'Client software, such as browsers and emailers, faces a difficult transition from the version of international domain names approved in 2003 (IDNA2003), to the revision approved in 2010 (IDNA2008). The specification in this document provides a mechanism that minimizes the impact of this transition for client software, allowing client software to access domains that are valid under either system.' wow, this is hairy stuff
... on Mon Oct 18 14:30:13 2010does exactly what it says on the tin
... on Mon Oct 18 09:02:39 2010finalist for a RealEx Web Award, free next-day delivery and returns throughout Ireland, and some excellent prices here. hmm
... on Sun Oct 17 21:07:50 2010wraps strace(1) to summarise and aggregate I/O ops performed by a Linux process. looks pretty nifty (via Jeremy Zawodny)
... on Sat Oct 16 11:09:45 2010good data on a reasonably-priced 1080p setup. I'm struggling through this right now, particularly on attempting to reuse an old laptop which can't play 720p output reliably, let alone 1080p. But EUR799 for a new Mac Mini seems steep
... on Fri Oct 15 09:58:11 2010'The two men worked out how the computerized system would react to certain trading patterns – allowing them to influence the price of low-volume stocks.' Yet another risk of automated traders
... on Thu Oct 14 21:51:38 2010Kiwi lawyer on the EMI v UPC case, lots of good commentary (via Eoin O'Dell)
... on Thu Oct 14 11:04:22 2010used by UPC for deep packet inspection, according to the EMI v UPC judgement
... on Thu Oct 14 10:44:15 2010including PILE OF POO, at codepoint 1F4A9:
... on Wed Oct 13 20:48:02 2010Rossa McMahon rounds up some highlights from Mr. Justice Charleton's judgement on the UPC case; good post
... on Wed Oct 13 12:41:52 2010'There is a perception that the big five record companies, all international companies, have been ripping off the consumer for many years. I do not want to be seen as an apologist for the music industry [jm: oh really], but at the lower level I can give a specific example to highlight the impact of illegal downloading on Aslan, an Irish band. [... blah blah...] Why must we wait for a High Court judgment to be made before we introduce relevant legislation? This is not the first time it has happened in the copyright sector.' -- wait, the what? It's a SECTOR now?!! wtf (via Charles Julienne)
... on Wed Oct 13 08:53:12 2010A high-performance compressor optimized for binary data -- 'designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than a traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch via memcpy()' (via Bill de hOra)
... on Tue Oct 12 14:03:09 2010Michele quotes Mr Justice Charleton's judgement: 'It is not surprising that the legislative response laid down in our country in the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, at a time when this problem was not perceived to be as threatening to the creative and retail economy as it has become in 2010, has made no proper provision for the blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications intent on breaching copyright. In failing to provide legislative provisions for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft, Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law.' Blocking, diverting and interrupting IP traffic? _wonderful_
... on Mon Oct 11 21:40:00 2010IRMA's comment: "we reserve the right to seek compensation for the past and continuing losses from the State." You have GOT to be joking. As TJ McIntyre put it: IRMA wants taxpayers to pay for Bono's losses
... on Mon Oct 11 14:56:45 2010UPC Ireland: “Our whole premise and defence focused on the 'mere conduit' principle, which provides that an internet service provider cannot be held liable for content transmitted across its network, and today’s decision supports the principle that ISPs are not liable for the actions of internet subscribers.” woot! Now to the High Court, I guess
... on Mon Oct 11 13:30:29 2010photos of the current state-of-the-art in ATM skimmers via Brian Krebs
... on Sun Oct 10 21:51:58 2010This car has everything (via Box Of Meat)
... on Sun Oct 10 21:18:24 2010MongoDB was set up to write to RAM if possible, omitting immediate writes to disk -- but then the db size exceeded RAM size, the disk was hit, imposing a massive slowdown and creating a huge backlog immediately, bringing the site down (via Nelson)
... on Sat Oct 9 22:39:48 2010drat, my old Dell laptop I'm using as a Boxee platform (which can't keep up with 720p) doesn't have a mini-PCIe slot either :(
... on Sat Oct 9 20:45:45 2010'At NAMAland we like to look on the bright side. OK, the downside of NAMA is that it's costing you €54 billion -- the upside is that you now own some of the best (and worst) properties in Dublin. So grab your phone, put on your tophat and enjoy your new role as a property tycoon with our augmented reality tour of NAMAland. Remember, we-are-where-we-are, there's no point playing the blame game, we were all living beyond our means and it was like that when we got here...' Excellent! a Layar Augmented Reality layer for Layar which lets you see properties in Dublin owned by NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency
... on Fri Oct 8 16:55:17 2010'a web service of some sort (or any other way) to pull a current time zone settings for a (US) city. For the parts of the country that don't follow the Daylight Saving Time and basically jump timezones when everyone else is switching summer/winter time... I don't fancy creating own database of the places that don't follow DST. Is there a way to pull this data on demand?' earthtools.org seems the closest thing
... on Thu Oct 7 10:39:11 2010'we've built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you've ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. If you want a copy of the information you've put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download.' excellent
... on Thu Oct 7 09:03:12 20102 *other* govt departments (nice try) wondered about buying them, for utterly random purposes for which they're totally unfit. Total cost of the e-voting fiasco is now EUR54.6 million. Another fine Fianna Fail mess
... on Wed Oct 6 11:34:07 2010Urban Dead is still around?
... on Wed Oct 6 10:18:26 2010'as the computers of the high-frequency traders traded contracts back and forth, a “hot potato” effect was created, the report said, as contracts changed hands 27,000 times in 14 seconds, but with eventually only 200 actually being bought or sold.' upshot: horrifically complex distributed feedback loops now directly impact our economies -- great :(
... on Mon Oct 4 11:32:46 2010DNSWL will charge for subscriptions to "heavy" users and anti-spam vendors
... on Mon Oct 4 09:06:18 2010quite a busy news aggregator, it turns out -- 1,960 registered readers and a lot of traffic at this stage. worth bookmarking
... on Fri Oct 1 12:41:40 2010very interesting; modern multicore x86 architectures use a NUMA memory architecture, which can cause a dip into swap, even when there appears to be plenty of free RAM available
... on Wed Sep 29 15:48:24 2010'Off-the-cuff bravado aimed at [4chan] has led to what must already rank as one of the worst ever data leaks, by the anti-filesharing solicitors ACS:Law' [...] 'the law firm is faced with the threat of a fine by the [UK] Information Commissioner, who is keen to use new powers that raise the maximum penalty to £500,000.'
... on Tue Sep 28 14:54:02 2010extensive. the NSFW words that Google Instant won't search for (via Waxy)
... on Mon Sep 27 16:49:42 2010'A set of programs for creating, manipulating, and outputing a stream of Records, or hashes. Inspired by Monad.' looks very powerful
... on Mon Sep 27 09:14:39 2010exactly what it says on the tin
... on Sun Sep 26 20:48:19 20101. made him take an effective pay cut; 2. removed decision authority on Java; 3. he felt Oracle was "ethically challenged". also: 'he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java'; “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” he doesn't pull any punches. oh dear, this is all adding up...
... on Thu Sep 23 10:35:04 2010Linux distros ship ancient Python interpreters, hence it's impossible to rely on recent language features because they won't be there, making it useless to write code in Python. We have similar problems in perl-land, but it's easy enough to get by without the latest-and-greatest; maybe Python is different in that regard? ... or is it Zed?
... on Wed Sep 22 12:47:05 2010'It makes my head spin to think that the CPU from the first real computer I used, the Apple II, is now simulateable at the mask level as a browser plug-in. Nothing to install, and it’s Open-licensed. How far we have come…a little more than a decade ago, completing a project like this would have resulted in a couple PhDs being awarded, or regarded as trade secret by some big EDA vendor. This is just unreal…but very cool!'
... on Sun Sep 19 22:04:58 2010'working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip. This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.' Awesome
... on Sun Sep 19 21:51:56 2010'adapted for Windows by JAM Software' -- cool! Thanks Daniel
... on Fri Sep 17 10:37:49 2010Rock, Paper, Shotgun review the current lo-fi sandbox indie-game hit
... on Thu Sep 16 20:13:48 2010this is fantastic -- a (physical) puzzle, which must be brought to a specific location on the planet to be opened
... on Thu Sep 16 10:41:23 2010JGC on the Haystack mess. bad journalism by The Guardian, Newsweek and the Beeb, basically, single-sourcing articles without any corroborating backup from domain experts
... on Wed Sep 15 10:49:31 2010ouch - master key for HDMI now available, if true (via tony finch)
... on Tue Sep 14 23:21:10 2010open-source classical music: now very well-funded. awesome!
... on Tue Sep 14 11:15:43 2010rather than force users of their official Android client to upgrade come the OAuthpocalypse, like everyone else has had to, they added a custom basic-auth backdoor: append "?source=twitterandroid" to the URLs. hilarity. apparently this also works for all other clients, too
... on Mon Sep 13 22:41:03 2010some interesting tips; even handy for a seasoned vimmer like myself. I like the idea of remapping ";" to ":" to save 2 keystrokes
... on Mon Sep 13 22:36:39 2010'The country's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can't go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.'
... on Mon Sep 13 13:57:34 2010thought-provoking piece about GitHub-style forking applied to other disciplines; Tumblr, Dribbble, Forrst being cases where it's happening now
... on Mon Sep 13 09:04:05 2010Ubuntu have hack-patched Vixie Cron to silently ignore cron files which contain a ".". omgwtf
... on Wed Sep 8 09:18:47 2010exhibition billing itself as "the world's biggest celebration of games", arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. 'Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.' tix are EUR10
... on Tue Sep 7 09:06:34 2010Bock on the predictably-crap biz-waffle results from the YCYC "get Ireland back on track" competition. 'If we don’t take this seriously, we’re doomed to repeat the current economic disaster over and over again, each generation with its own Bertie Ahern, its own Seanie Fitzpatrick, its own Fingers Fingleton, and all the other assorted, integrity-free panhandlers and parasites who have soiled the reputation of this country and sold us down the Swanee for their own, ignorant, self-serving enrichment. Forget about Eamon Ryan’s smart economy. Let’s put all our effort into creating the Honest Economy.'
... on Tue Sep 7 08:49:15 2010'a public-transport route-planning service for Dublin city, which shows you how to get from A to B using buses, Luas or DART services. The original version was built during the first Startup Weekend Dublin in May 2010.' Pretty good; although in my tests it wasn't able to find the optimal route, it always came up with something that made a good starting point
... on Mon Sep 6 10:21:45 2010the Huawei E1752 dongle does that horrible thing where it defaults to acting as a USB storage device containing the Windows drivers, instead of acting as a 3G modem by default. usb_modeswitch should be in the Ubuntu base install to deal with this crap
... on Mon Sep 6 09:09:15 2010Twitter seem to be attempting to control misbehaving clients, by using the "consumer key" pair as a secret key for app developers. This is proving impossible for FOSS clients to work with, and is trivially hacked to allow third-party app impersonation. Bad idea, Twitter
... on Thu Sep 2 20:13:46 2010go Boxee! open TV is the way to go
... on Thu Sep 2 19:10:05 2010a great name for a common "code smell" of too much indentation, calling for merciless usage of Extract Method (via Aman)
... on Thu Sep 2 14:29:54 2010algorithm to perform set membership tests on enumerated sets quickly and memory-efficiently, using multiplication by primes. Nice trick
... on Thu Sep 2 13:03:44 2010intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick -- or possibly re2c, as used in "sa-compile". On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn't perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating
... on Wed Sep 1 21:57:40 2010free Twitter proxy for access to the Twitter API without requiring OAuth, perfect for stupid read-only stuff like my filter-tweets script (via Padraig)
... on Wed Sep 1 13:25:15 2010'The system demand displayed here represents the electricity production required to meet [Irish] national electricity consumption, including system losses, but net of generators' requirements. It includes power imported via the interconnector and an estimate of the power produced by wind generators, but excludes some non-centrally monitored generation (i.e. small scale CHP).' via Juan Flynn
... on Mon Aug 30 11:39:16 2010painfully accurate sketch about the crappy conference call UI. "hi, who just joined?"
... on Mon Aug 30 10:04:13 2010do you trust the default set of root CAs in modern web browsers? sounds like we probably shouldn't
... on Fri Aug 27 20:58:40 2010GFDL-licensed legal boilerplate agreement for the Irish market. Nice one -- although did I see a commercial company charging for what appears to be a derivative work of this document? is that a breach of the license terms?
... on Fri Aug 27 10:22:26 2010opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though
... on Thu Aug 26 13:23:05 2010from the Irish Times property section: 'There’s a guy in Inchicore with an aircraft simulator in his shed. Not one of those fancy computer games, this is the real thing – a decommissioned 747 simulator, cockpit and all.' Unfortunately, the sim doesn't come with the house
... on Thu Aug 26 13:19:20 2010scary stuff. East Texas patent-troll court has ruled that EchoStar must remotely disable customers' DVRs due to patent infringement, which they are (thankfully) refusing to do and are now held in contempt for $200M -- the blog suggests this could happen due to the Google-Oracle suit, to Android phones
... on Thu Aug 26 10:33:38 2010really interesting parallel algorithm concepts. I'd seen parallel merge sort before from the map-reduce world, but some others are new to me and worth thinking about (via Hacker News)
... on Tue Aug 24 20:15:31 2010an "endless page" of images culled from newsfeeds. Very good for video games and art, particularly. definitely a new addition to my daily list (via Andre)
... on Tue Aug 24 12:37:23 2010very funny. 'Wait, does this mean that those cyclists that wiped out a few blocks back are going to catch up to me right before I get to my destination, even though I didn't crash once?' (commenter on Kotaku)
... on Tue Aug 24 12:28:56 2010great Mike Masnick post responding to the latest woe-is-me missive from U2's asshat-in-residence Paul McGuinness (via Jim Carroll)
... on Mon Aug 23 11:26:40 2010is the CAO (Ireland's Central Applications Office, for university admissions) being DDOS'd? sounds like it
... on Mon Aug 23 11:17:23 2010in the style of BBC Radiophonics Workshop, with copious flange -- my favourite is heap sort. this is brilliant (via jwz)
... on Thu Aug 19 09:30:21 2010stories drawn by a guy I vaguely know online. really funny!
... on Tue Aug 17 13:44:18 2010'just how much is €25 billion that [Ireland's taxpayers] have to borrow for [failed bank] Anglo?' some great answers, including: start our own space program with 20 space shuttles; build 6 LHCs or 2 ITER fusion reactors; scrap fares on all public transport for 33 years; buy 2 of Asia's largest banks; buy Steve Jobs himself; detach the People's Republic of Cork by building a ten-metre-wide moat; buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie
... on Tue Aug 17 09:53:08 2010'Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading
... on Fri Aug 13 21:01:55 2010'Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.' no shit, Sherlock
... on Thu Aug 12 12:42:14 2010'A man known as one of the world’s top purveyors of junk e-mail has been imprisoned in Russia for allegedly molesting [more than *50*] underage girls from a Moscow orphanage, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.' lovely
... on Thu Aug 12 10:20:04 2010another variation of the Nancy Silverton recipe, and a loaf recipe to go with it
... on Wed Aug 11 22:01:22 2010lots of recommendations, but looks like hard work; grown from natural grape yeast
... on Wed Aug 11 22:00:21 2010Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats
... on Wed Aug 11 12:39:03 2010wow, fantastic review -- real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA's latest videogame
... on Tue Aug 10 20:08:47 2010'In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.' brilliant pisstake of mid-'90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)
... on Tue Aug 10 10:51:27 2010hackerspaces in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast, running events all next week (08-14 - 08-22)
... on Tue Aug 10 10:03:22 2010on "Haystack", a vaporous censorship-evading product aimed at Iran's internet surveillance, which as of yet is a site soliciting donations and a lot of press, and not a lot of techie details
... on Mon Aug 9 11:38:20 2010Mind-boggling presentation; a load of sites are exposing memcacheds to the public internet, with no auth, and full of juicy data (samples included). iptables is hard
... on Thu Aug 5 20:53:49 2010surprise! 'The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.'
... on Thu Aug 5 10:23:12 2010"benchmarks disprove common wisdom" shocker
... on Wed Aug 4 15:44:14 2010some good Cydia app tips. also glad to see piracy didn't appear 'til page 3
... on Tue Aug 3 20:42:42 2010'6174 .. is notable for the following property: Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits. (Leading zeros are allowed.); Arrange the digits in ascending and then in descending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary; Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number; Go back to step 2. The process will reach 6174 in at most 7 iterations'
... on Mon Aug 2 21:07:29 2010from Tony Finch. great stuff, I used to use shortcuts like this all the time on my Linux desktops to avoid rodentage
... on Fri Jul 30 12:54:24 2010Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking "workarounds" (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?
... on Fri Jul 30 10:35:47 2010'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'
... on Mon Jul 26 16:06:01 2010classic presentation from Paul Tyma of Mailinator regarding the java.nio (event-driven, non-threaded) vs java.io (threaded) model of server concurrency, backing up the scalability of threads on modern JVMs
... on Mon Jul 26 14:10:30 2010interesting idea; extend "cd" to track which directories you cd to most frequently, then add a command to "jump" to the most-frequently used one which matches a substring you specify
... on Mon Jul 26 10:04:20 2010not quite up to par with modern Ubuntu, but still a few interesting ones here for when I'm stuck using the missus' laptop ;)
... on Mon Jul 26 09:58:29 2010'Stuxnet is a new Internet worm that specifically targets Siemens WinCC SCADA systems: used to control production at industrial plants such as oil rigs, refineries, electronics production, and so on. The worm seems to uploads plant info (schematics and production information) to an external website. Moreover, owners of these SCADA systems cannot change the default password because it would cause the software to break down.'
... on Fri Jul 23 19:45:48 2010from last week's CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)
... on Fri Jul 23 14:50:36 2010another scanner. take a photo, fix contrast, geometry, shadows etc. then upload to Evernote, Dropbox, and/or Google Docs. EUR1.59 for this one
... on Fri Jul 23 11:36:52 2010document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it'll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though
... on Fri Jul 23 11:31:29 2010some gems here
... on Thu Jul 22 22:05:01 2010wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)
... on Tue Jul 20 11:54:10 2010AWS-based service to resize images, encode video files, extract thumbnails, and store to S3, for use by third-party web apps. Transcoding-as-a-service
... on Mon Jul 19 22:23:08 2010TunePal -- "Shazam for trad". play it a live traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Old Time American, Canadian or Appalachian trad tune on the iPhone, and it'll link to the tune's name, history, discography, and where it's been played, based on melodic similarity with a 93% accuracy
... on Fri Jul 16 11:18:05 2010'The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society': among the Parisian catacomb-dwellers and subterranean explorers. fascinating
... on Thu Jul 15 10:45:18 2010establish an overlay, encrypted private "virtual LAN" for a small set of machines. like Hamachi, except it supports Macs, Linux, and a range of WRT54G firmware; can run off a USB stick
... on Thu Jul 15 10:16:52 2010so that's how it's done. now to retry my DIY botch job
... on Wed Jul 14 13:24:22 2010using a parallel merge sort. great place to apply multicore code. very nice speedups: almost 4 times faster than single-core sort on a 8-core Xeon (via Padraig Brady)
... on Wed Jul 14 13:19:53 2010good opinion piece; I agree, REPL isn't a usable approach for block-oriented languages
... on Wed Jul 14 09:23:27 2010first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws -- for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)
... on Tue Jul 13 16:21:17 2010'a driver for Xbox and Xbox360 gamepads. It works by reading the raw data from the controller with the userspace library libusb and then passes the interpreted data to the kernel via uinput. This allows xboxdrv to provide regular joystick and event devices, which makes it compatible with all Linux software.'
... on Fri Jul 9 10:59:56 2010'a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.' these are really, really nifty (via popey)
... on Wed Jul 7 10:48:49 2010I should do this on my hosts
... on Tue Jul 6 16:15:29 2010torrent automation from RSS feeds; will work nicely with Transmission
... on Tue Jul 6 10:56:10 2010neat search algo, via Jeremy Zawodny; can be more efficient than binary search (O(log log n)), for indexed, ordered arrays, at the cost of more computation per iteration
... on Mon Jul 5 13:07:47 2010techie details from Adam Langley on how Google's been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware
... on Mon Jul 5 12:50:29 2010hardware and software, specifically, and an Ubuntu/Thinkpad user. some good tips here, and well-written, naturally
... on Mon Jul 5 12:45:04 2010apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs
... on Fri Jul 2 10:47:22 2010'every Finnish citizen now has a guaranteed legal right to a least a 1Mbps broadband connection, putting it on the same footing as other legal rights in the country such as healthcare and education.'
... on Thu Jul 1 13:02:45 2010there goes the neighbourhood! 'L Mulligan Grocer, at 18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, is a collaboration between whiskey expert Michael Foggarty, craft beer specialist Colin Hession, and award-winning food blogger Seáneen Sullivan, who have been working day and night to get the premises ready for a planned opening next Thursday. Bar food, including their take on the “toasted special”, made with Gubbeen cheese and smoked rare-breed ham, will be served from the outset, with full lunch and dinner menus available from the middle of next month. See lmullingangrocer.com.' Sign me up
... on Thu Jul 1 09:01:37 2010"XMLTV requires a Date::Manip timezone of +0000 to work properly" -- caused by incompatibility between Date::Manip version 6.00 and XMLTV
... on Wed Jun 30 20:34:49 2010another PC component vendor in Ireland, recently came up on ILUG
... on Wed Jun 30 10:12:44 2010on average across the AV industry, 40% block rates just after 0-hour of a new malware sample, rising to 60% after 5 days. sounds like the AV industry is losing, if this chart is valid. (via Terry Zink)
... on Tue Jun 29 13:09:37 2010sort-and-merge is likely to be faster on future SIMD-capable multicore CPUs RSN
... on Tue Jun 29 10:25:07 2010'developed for the express purpose of allowing consumers to "opt out" of the behavioral advertising delivered by our member companies' -- opt out of the top 50 or so ad programs with a couple of clicks, via Jordan Sissel. great stuff
... on Mon Jun 28 10:08:51 2010using notifo.com, which has an app in the App Store allowing anyone to send push notifications via their web site. I can see lots of uses for this, not least to evade SMS fees ;)
... on Sun Jun 27 09:34:02 2010wonderful; our world's economies are now more networked than ever, and vulnerable to the attacks which that enables. Have we learned nothing from the last few years?
... on Sat Jun 26 14:04:39 2010Macromedia created a "parallel" cookie infrastructure, which is not cleared/controlled by browser cookie controls. Heinous! I had no idea. Checking mine, it was full of ad-tracking crap
... on Fri Jun 25 12:45:18 2010PDFs, docs, links
... on Thu Jun 24 14:56:45 2010The new netbook-oriented launcher/dock UI for Ubuntu. Nice! Great to see this kind of open design process, too
... on Thu Jun 24 10:21:55 2010big thumbs-up for 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution'. I'm looking forward to it
... on Wed Jun 23 20:20:58 2010MongoDB war story -- records going missing, eek
... on Wed Jun 23 20:03:19 2010Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale
... on Wed Jun 23 16:06:32 2010log analyzer; removes common strings and patterns from log files, identifying outliers and hapaxen as "interesting". also does charting of frequencies etc.
... on Wed Jun 23 12:42:19 2010The "spaceship" configuration replicates in 33699586 generations, using 2 construction arms and a volley of gliders circulating between them
... on Wed Jun 23 12:38:10 2010it's with Mr Justice Peter Charleton again -- the Colmcille-misquoting judge from the Eircom case. here's hoping the Data Protection Commissioner gets off their arse and does their job this time around
... on Tue Jun 22 09:16:00 2010good idea -- generate a mencoder command-line using a friendlier Javascript single-page UI (via OMGUbuntu)
... on Mon Jun 21 14:02:00 2010nifty link from Heise; works for 802.11b and 11g. Unfortunately I think my own wifi issues are to do with dying AP hardware
... on Mon Jun 21 12:42:08 2010interesting thoughts from Kragen
... on Mon Jun 21 11:21:46 2010'What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here's what I'd do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70's, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.' Beautifully done
... on Sun Jun 20 23:11:02 2010wow, O2 Ireland seem to have dropped the ball something rotten here. customers taking advantage of this in droves to escape the heinous 18-month lock-in
... on Thu Jun 17 14:20:38 2010excellent work at creating a usable public transport map, and proposing a small, consolidated set of Bus Rapid Transit routes (via Antoin)
... on Thu Jun 17 11:28:37 2010just *male* genitalia, mind. I dread to think of what the training corpus looks like
... on Wed Jun 16 08:49:51 2010create wireframe mock-ups quickly, via Confluence/JIRA/desktop/fogbugz plugins (via Joe)
... on Tue Jun 15 10:23:29 2010Back looking at these again, as Padraig noted the SundTek drivers are closed source; at least pvrusb2 is OSS
... on Mon Jun 14 13:30:57 2010'There is no hypothesis being tested here. It's just graphs, and misleading graphs at that. The sad part is, SEOMoz is as close as the SEO industry comes to real science. They may be presenting specious results in hopes of looking like they know what they're talking about, but at least they are collecting some sort of data. Everything else in the field is either anecdotal hocus-pocus or a decree from Matt Cutts. When you hire an SEO consultant, what you are really paying for is domain experience in the not-failing-at-web-design field.'
... on Mon Jun 14 09:18:26 2010CPAN and BackPAN, as a set of git repositories; essentially a read-only view of all CPAN releases, ever. good plan; I like the way git is useful as a kind of general-purpose distributed archive system
... on Fri Jun 11 10:05:33 2010'Analog TV is working again with MythTV which comes with the final Ubuntu 10.04 release' -- MythTV support is officially tested by SundTek support staff! I think we have a clear winner
... on Fri Jun 11 09:44:42 2010'I can recommend that USB device, I never had a device which has such an easy installation under linux.'
... on Fri Jun 11 09:42:54 2010official, and pretty voluminous. looks good
... on Fri Jun 11 09:42:31 2010seems to be a safe option for MythTV analog TV and DVB-T support on this side of the pond
... on Thu Jun 10 14:54:23 2010Jesus Christ Hauppauge. get a clue already, why are you making it so hard for Linux users to buy your bloody hardware?!
... on Thu Jun 10 13:23:55 2010Phil Gyford reworks the Grauniad's website using their open content API. I really like the navigation and just-the-text nature, but I still feel a need to know what other articles are "nearby", which this doesn't quite provide. Still, excellent work
... on Thu Jun 10 09:31:07 2010"unchi" / "unchimaaku", a little Emoji icon of a dog turd. unfortunately still in "proposed" status, not yet a Unicode point, boo
... on Thu Jun 3 15:14:38 2010from Padraig Brady. lots of nice one-liners I wasn't familiar with
... on Thu Jun 3 14:21:34 2010a new outdoor weekend market for Dublin, at the O2 on the north quays. good farmer's market selection, and plans to do free-for-all stalls for random members of the public to sell "yard sale" type stuff, a la the Dublin Flea Market
... on Thu Jun 3 13:18:57 2010vendors of fake Raketas -- pretty much all of the current eBay auctions are on this list :(
... on Tue Jun 1 21:13:42 201024-hour analog CCCP-era Raketa watches. want. almost definitely fake going by the price, but still very nifty (via adampsyche)
... on Tue Jun 1 21:10:00 2010suggests using the OSMTrack app, start driving, upload and that's it
... on Mon May 31 23:03:25 2010$99, 10-watt, fanless device to stream HD1080p video, in pretty much any format, from a network server to your TV. crazy. quite competitive with the Acer Aspire Revo; downside: less open
... on Mon May 31 15:37:33 2010open audio/video for the web, from Google; VP8 video codec, Ogg for audio, and a subset of Matroska as the container format. still a patents minefield, though, I'd guess
... on Mon May 31 15:13:27 2010pretty basic
... on Mon May 31 10:04:56 2010wow, this sounds good. a lot of 100% reviews and a 95% overall
... on Sun May 30 22:28:30 2010good comments on the processes useful for large-scale Redis upgrades
... on Fri May 28 21:58:07 2010'Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.' Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt
... on Fri May 28 15:32:12 2010many atrocious TripAdvisor reviews of this kip which ripped us off heavily last week. looking forward to adding my $.02. roll on data roaming limits so I can check TA via 3G before we sit down ;)
... on Fri May 28 15:02:39 2010via a forum on MacRumors -- blow away the locationd cache. Worked perfectly for me after my GPS crapped out halfway through my holidays :( Requires that the phone be jailbroken first
... on Thu May 27 19:43:38 2010'We recognize that only through your apps and hacks, can SoundCloud fully realize its potential as the audio platform.'
... on Thu May 13 14:59:27 2010European air traffic control Twitter feed and NOC site, via Boards.ie. The thread itself is a good reference, too
... on Thu May 13 11:05:47 2010using SNAP, the Norwegian Meterological Institute's nuclear-fallout modelling system. Very useful, much niftier than the UK version, and much more *publicly available* than the Irish version
... on Thu May 13 10:46:01 2010interview with the guy behind the "Magnasanti" video. [Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi] 'presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar - depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society - with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.' WHOA
... on Tue May 11 12:40:29 2010some nice coding neologisms here. aside from "Refuctoring" (see other link), I like "The Duck" (a sacrificial feature, used to distract cut-crazy bosses from useful features) and "Stringly Typed" (an implementation that needlessly relies on strings when programmer and refactor friendly options are available)
... on Mon May 10 12:44:00 2010'the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself' (via Mozai)
... on Mon May 10 12:36:09 2010updated 4 times daily, maps of Europe indicating coverage of the ash cloud. I'm going to be F5'ing this constantly over the next week as I'm supposed to be flying on Sunday :(
... on Sun May 9 11:33:17 2010upshot: IMRO will think about it and get back to Nialler et al; in the meantime, everyone operates as before. one to keep an eye on, even if you're not Irish; this will play out overseas soon too. Good call getting Simon McGarr along
... on Fri May 7 16:07:28 2010"There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material. The problem is that it's illegal [...] We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed." "While the internet is borderless, Europe’s online markets are not. It is often easier to buy something from a US website than online from the country next-door in Europe. Often you cannot buy it at all within Europe."
... on Fri May 7 12:45:53 2010'Falling victim to a [phish] isn’t just a matter of not being wise to the ways of the world: it’s a matter of being caught out in a moment of distraction and of unlikely circumstance.' +1, that matches with the personal phishing stories I've heard from others
... on Fri May 7 10:48:05 2010I'm trying to figure out how I can rebuild a MythTV box with new UPC equipment. this claims that you can split the cable before it enters the Cisco cablemodem, and get analog TV off the basic cable that way. hmm
... on Thu May 6 11:08:39 2010SnapStream's 100TB rack which records 50 analog TV channels simultaneously
... on Thu May 6 10:59:48 2010'we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (E. coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. ... both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. ... These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.' (via adulau)
... on Thu May 6 10:00:34 2010quite easy, using a Metaphone sound-like indexing scheme to provide the fuzz
... on Wed May 5 17:08:53 2010yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less
... on Wed May 5 16:23:36 2010by an ex-Hot-Press staffer. interesting: Hot Press 'also publish MQ, the IMRO members’ periodical.' well, that would explain a lot
... on Wed May 5 13:56:48 2010Martin Mills of Beggar's Banquet. thought-provoking interview, and he nails it on this: "People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You've got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You'll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links." That EXACTLY described my situation a few years back
... on Wed May 5 13:27:02 2010join this group to add your voice
... on Sun May 2 21:35:18 2010it seems Hot Press have come up with some Paul-McGuinness-esque pro-IMRO one-sided turdery masquerading as journalism. shock me
... on Sun May 2 21:35:17 2010fair play to The Cast Of Cheers and Mia Sparrow, cancelling their show in response to IMRO's actions
... on Sun May 2 21:22:14 2010incredible. Almost every single modern camera capable of recording video now requires that you obtain a license from MPEG-LA to use recorded footage for commercial purposes. These clauses are currently not enforced, but could be. Horrifying (via Tony Finch)
... on Sun May 2 21:06:00 2010more recipes. This one looks like a good guide to creating a starter culture, something I've been meaning to do for a while
... on Fri Apr 30 16:34:22 2010some pretty good "ports" of Mexican recipes to ingredients available over here, must try these
... on Fri Apr 30 16:32:29 2010truly amazing artwork, as featured in the BBC4 documentary 'Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art' last week. 'The Island satirises the London-centric view of the English capital and its commuter towns as independent from the rest of the country. The artist, a Londoner with a love of his native city, offers up a huge range of local and personal information in words and symbols. Walter speaks in the dialect of today, focusing on what he deems interesting or mundane.'
... on Fri Apr 30 15:42:01 2010a generated set of SpamAssassin rules containing known-phisher addresses
... on Thu Apr 29 14:27:26 2010including Roundstone Bog, burned to a crisp last week :(
... on Thu Apr 29 13:55:14 2010'If IMRO goes ahead with its plan, targeting music blogs around the world, there will soon be legions of frustrated bloggers. And it will be much worse if other regional publishers follow suit.'
... on Thu Apr 29 13:31:20 2010'I am going to consume and review every item in my office vending machine and there is nothing you can do to stop me.'
... on Thu Apr 29 13:23:46 2010good post from online music marketing site Amp.ie
... on Thu Apr 29 10:04:17 2010Jim Carroll's blog post on the IMRO mp3blog shakedown. Comment thread has some good stuff from Irish music heads
... on Thu Apr 29 10:02:04 2010what are they up to? '1 per cent levy on the gross box-office takings of every cinema in the country ... Smaller cinema operators who attended a meeting ... said the proposal amounted in some cases to a five to sevenfold increase on their existing royalties payments.'
... on Thu Apr 29 09:51:57 2010Irish music blogs apparently need to pay a minimum of EUR150/year to the collection agency for "making copyrighted music available online" -- and they intend to ask _all_ sites who offer music, Irish or not, to pay this fee (!)
... on Thu Apr 29 09:46:18 2010ha! 'The amnesty was created in an effort to finally rid the country of illegally taped music. Although technology has evolved, the law on this issue has remained unchanged and these mix-tapes still constitute a threat to artist royalties.' Remember: home taping is killing music
... on Wed Apr 28 10:20:53 2010it's the perfect 'gateway' to allow anti-filesharing filtering of the internet. 'Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.' Via TJ McIntyre
... on Tue Apr 27 15:59:56 2010SMB setup details
... on Mon Apr 26 21:10:28 2010'a homebrew media player for the Nintendo Wii. It was initially created as a fork of Team Twiizers' port of MPlayer, combining elements of MPlayerWii, GeeXboX and other great homebrew contributions.' recommended by conoro
... on Mon Apr 26 21:07:47 2010this promises to make Evernote a good deal more usable for me, if it works (edit: it certainly does! result)
... on Mon Apr 26 20:55:16 2010good set of slides from Dropbox. traditional marketing and AdWords failed utterly; word-of-mouth (and a great product) was how they've succeeded
... on Mon Apr 26 14:03:34 2010'a Perl script that generates an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet which loads up SpamAssassin configuration and known spam and ham messages. Once loaded, you can tweak individual SpamAssassin scores in the spreadsheet itself and see their effect on spam/ham classification in real-time. The script also shows you the number of false positives and negatives for a set of scores in real-time.' by Raj Mathur
"By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non- transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamestation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."
... on Mon Apr 26 12:58:35 2010'This clip is raw from Camera E-8 on the launch umbilical tower/mobile launch program of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. This is an HD transfer from the 16mm original. The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time.'
... on Sat Apr 24 22:12:24 2010woo, interesting stuff on the Wii homebrew scene! MPlayer CE is apparently quite promising
... on Fri Apr 23 22:55:32 2010Conservapedia gold. "His father was half-English, half-Russian. His mother was dutch. He speaks English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish. His wife is Roman Catholic. Aged sixteen, Clegg was arrested in Germany and charged with arson. He and his friends destroyed a priceless collection of rare cacti while he was drunk."
... on Fri Apr 23 10:44:32 2010Soviet animators' cartoons based on classic sci-fi
... on Thu Apr 22 14:31:12 2010specifically, Hadoop and Pig for log/metrics analytics, Cassandra going forward; great preso, lots of detail and code examples. also, impressive number-crunching going on at Twitter
... on Thu Apr 22 10:33:14 2010also, an RFID "jammer" to block reads of RFID chips within range. related: the Israeli govt is considering voting cards with RFID chips, apparently
... on Wed Apr 21 14:54:04 2010interesting
... on Wed Apr 21 13:25:24 2010and starting a new company around Hudson
... on Wed Apr 21 12:56:24 2010free e-bill aggregation/archival service from an Irish company, for Irish users (right now at least). looks very useful
... on Wed Apr 21 10:54:29 2010'The justice refers to legal alternatives to illicit downloading, such as "an I-player system," when he's writing about the BBC's well-known iPlayer catch-up service [which is not available here]. He refers numerous times in the order to "DetectNet," a company which can find P2P infringers, when he really means DtecNet. A strong grasp of the technical details won't be found in this ruling'
... on Tue Apr 20 20:06:32 2010free (excellent) city guide apps for Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Istanbul, London, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna until April 22nd; normally $10-$15!
... on Tue Apr 20 09:14:27 2010excellent post on the 'three strikes' judgement
... on Mon Apr 19 15:38:26 2010'it becomes clear that for some time now the Department of Justice has been proposing the introduction of internet blocking in Ireland – and has been doing this under the radar, without any public consultation or legislative approval. Indeed, it is clear from the list that the Department is not planning on introducing legislation but instead intends to introduce this new form of censorship without any legal basis, based on the now discredited Norwegian and Danish models.' This is very bad news indeed
... on Fri Apr 16 15:39:47 2010according to DRI's TJ McIntyre via Karlin Lillington. “Blocking involves censorship taken on no legal basis. There is no judge, no jury and no right to be heard if you are blocked,” says McIntyre. “The chances are it also will be used in unaccountable ways by unaccountable organisations.”
... on Fri Apr 16 13:43:03 2010version 0.94.x got end-of-lifed a year after the release of .95, to fix a bug that would increase bandwidth consumption on their mirrors. To mandate upgrades, the devs sent a kill-switch trigger to .94 installations in the field. chaos ensues, unsurprisingly
... on Fri Apr 16 13:38:01 2010interesting prez from some IBM researchers on using Cassandra as a mail store, via Jeremy
... on Thu Apr 15 11:14:59 2010too nerdy? it seems possible
... on Thu Apr 15 11:10:11 2010fatty pork deep fried in lard. oh yeah. thanks Ben!
... on Wed Apr 14 21:02:59 2010new lunch spot serving Mexican food in Dublin. hopefully good, haven't tried it yet, menu looks promising though
... on Wed Apr 14 16:04:41 2010whoa, amazing street performer outfit
... on Wed Apr 14 15:51:12 2010"Never warp your brain with time zone math again." Quite a useful javascript TZ conversion tool, although it could be more intuitive still
... on Wed Apr 14 10:22:45 2010new Apple reseller on Dublin's Grafton Street, sounds like a good deal
... on Wed Apr 14 10:09:09 2010by a Bugzilla developer. ;)
... on Tue Apr 13 17:05:28 2010ASF's Paul Querna: 'Security on the Internet sucks, and it is only getting worse. The problem is systemic, with security researchers and developers not producing viable ways for the average user to live on the Internet in a secure fashion without excessive paranoia.'
... on Mon Apr 12 13:50:21 2010Damien shares his atrocious experiences with a Galway hotel, and (naturally) commenters from the hotel's IP address range pile on what looks like astroturf in the comments
... on Fri Apr 9 10:11:02 2010from Twitter. looks interesting
... on Thu Apr 8 11:18:28 2010good info from Google's "Seti" project
... on Wed Apr 7 22:27:16 2010the legendary compiler of the 'Irish Times' cryptic crosswords died on Saturday in Harare, Zimbabwe, aged 92
... on Wed Apr 7 10:21:11 2010ie. take a pic of a pothole and it'll be reported up to the appropriate office quickly and without hassle. wow. are you watching, Dublin?
... on Mon Apr 5 21:34:56 2010600 euros all-in for an entry-level DLP home cinema projector capable of 720p HD. tempted, but stil a bit pricey
... on Mon Apr 5 21:28:51 2010nifty, an official app for this music-streaming site -- although for jailbroken iPhones only
... on Fri Apr 2 16:41:23 2010from David Welton. what, the lack of support for GNOME UI standards was *deliberate*? bad choice if so
... on Wed Mar 31 17:10:30 2010'The Gmail IMAP and SMTP servers have been extended to support authorization via the industry-standard OAuth protocol.' pretty cool, support third parties sending outbound as you, or filtering your inbound gmail
... on Wed Mar 31 16:35:08 2010'While iMatix was the original designer of AMQP and has invested hugely in that protocol, we believe it is fundamentally flawed, and unfixable. It is too complex and the barriers to participation are massive. We do not believe that it's in the best interest of our customers and users to invest further in AMQP. Specifically, iMatix will be stepping out of the AMQP workgroup and will not be supporting AMQP/1.0 when that emerges, if it ever emerges.' wow, massive downvote there
... on Wed Mar 31 11:01:16 2010the Canadian mag "The Beaver" is changing its name due to broken filters' false positives. Bennett Haselton reckons that there's no incentive to fix FPs, which as Henry Stern notes isn't the case
... on Tue Mar 30 15:34:39 2010the Rustock botnet is now attempting TLS encryption of spam delivery sessions
... on Tue Mar 30 10:31:48 2010I like the "blogging is dead" funereal theme ;)
... on Mon Mar 29 11:33:22 2010'a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a NAT, without any 3rd party'. nifty, by Samy "MySpace worm" Kamkar
... on Sun Mar 28 20:45:22 2010'The troubled councilor, Dimitar Kerin, has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants. He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.'
... on Fri Mar 26 15:08:05 2010hmm, nice-looking Scrum tool
... on Fri Mar 26 12:17:37 2010'John Laker, 25, allegedly copped an eyeful of Jo Margetson, 29, when the latter "entered the X-ray machine by mistake". She was "horrified" as Laker "pressed a button to take a revealing photo" and remarked [on the size of her breasts].' as Conrad says, "who didn't see this coming?" Wonder how many other "revealing photos" are on that hard drive
... on Thu Mar 25 11:07:22 2010this year's open-source BarCamp, in Dublin, April 17th. no way I'll be able to get a talk together (again) but hopefully I can attend ;)
... on Tue Mar 23 14:23:09 2010hacky, but I'm very tempted -- GV looks nifty and there's no indication they're bothering to roll it out on this side of the pond
... on Tue Mar 23 13:00:48 2010wow, incredible irony
... on Mon Mar 22 17:49:47 2010GDC post-mortem; Facebook takes over the games industry. 'the three primary designers of the Civilization franchise (Sid [Meier], Brian, and myself [Soren Johnson]) are all now making social/online games.' -- wow
... on Sun Mar 21 22:42:30 2010new bike shop in Dublin, comes strongly recommended by waider
... on Fri Mar 19 11:18:07 2010one for the to-get queue
... on Thu Mar 18 22:01:16 2010worth it for #10: 'Capture video of a linux desktop': '$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg'
... on Thu Mar 18 13:58:27 2010'The finest corporate photography - from their extranets, to you' (via Adrian Weckler)
... on Thu Mar 18 11:59:31 2010dealing with the biggest problem with St. Patrick's Day
... on Wed Mar 17 23:48:37 2010"Yeah, we used Buildbot until recently, then I switched us to Hudson and my life got a lot better" -- heh ;)
... on Tue Mar 16 23:35:55 2010a Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge Nat Labs -- check out that amazing skin! I've never seen a skinned datacenter before
... on Tue Mar 16 23:23:38 2010'“It’s free to advertise,” Ned explained. “And we have a lot of things we don’t need.” So each week, they advertised for sale in Loot something from their apartment. This was their social life. Some weeks – the good weeks – they had three or four people who came to see what they were selling.'
... on Tue Mar 16 11:59:44 2010GFS, warts and all
... on Mon Mar 15 23:30:21 2010Russ Cox' C++ lib to provide safer, guaranteed-linear-time, non-exponential regexps, at the cost of dropping support for backreferences and generalized zero-width assertions. actually looks quite useful, unlike most "I've fixed regexps" claims ;)
... on Mon Mar 15 12:09:20 2010quick! where's my towel?!
... on Fri Mar 12 18:31:39 2010Nespresso-compatible capsules -- fill up with your own freshly-ground coffee and use in any Nespresso machine
... on Thu Mar 11 14:30:08 2010Boards thread with good advice regarding wall fixings for drylined walls
... on Thu Mar 11 11:11:08 2010new nomenclature for "{" and "}". This I can get behind
... on Wed Mar 10 16:58:35 2010'What'd I say?' 'MONORAIL!' 'What's it called?' 'MONORAIL!' 'That's right, Monorail!' 'Any questions?'
... on Wed Mar 10 00:19:20 2010Damian Beresford's experience installing his own home alarm. pretty cheap, sounds quite easy too
... on Mon Mar 8 22:52:11 2010extremely detailed; power outage in the primary DC resulted in a degraded fleet, and on-calls didn't have up-to-date on-call docs to respond correctly
... on Mon Mar 8 22:31:01 2010fantastic article about Mass Effect's political allegory. I'm slightly disappointed that Mass Effect 2 didn't live up to ME1's quality, IMO
... on Mon Mar 8 14:24:22 2010Assassin's Creed 2 players unable to play the game for no less than 10 hours due to failure of their DRM servers. nice work Ubisoft
... on Sun Mar 7 21:02:05 2010using ssh, screen and emacs
... on Sat Mar 6 21:46:49 2010Dublin's Science Gallery is proving to be a massive success. good news. just wish I could visit more often!
... on Fri Mar 5 12:13:49 2010the "45-hour workweek vs 80-hour vacation" one is a bureaucratic classic
... on Thu Mar 4 17:37:41 2010mind-boggling work decoding Portal-2-related ARG content by Portal fans. as one jwz commenter put it: 'Seriously, if aliens ever contact us, the internet will have it worked out and replied to in about three hours fast.' Also, people are confused by the concept of modems and BBSes; I feel old
... on Wed Mar 3 11:00:51 2010XBox style achievements for Python's 'nose' unit testing framework, eg. 'Major Letdown: all tests in a suite of at least 100 pass except the last.' genius!
... on Mon Mar 1 21:51:34 2010a clever HTTP session-management trick (via Tony Finch)
... on Mon Mar 1 16:35:38 2010Lovecraftian ads for chocolate. 'There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel hell-planet. The delectable Caramel Chew may be one such portal.'
... on Mon Mar 1 16:24:39 2010DBL announcement. working on the SpamAssassin support for 3.3.1...
... on Mon Mar 1 11:45:18 2010someone has gone to the trouble of translating the 'Hang Seng Bank' phish to Gaeilge. I would surmise that some phisher has a table of CCTLD-to-language mappings and is pasting their text into Google Translate before spamming their .ie address list. If only they knew how few people can read it!
... on Wed Feb 24 14:22:07 2010EPIC BURRITO THREAD demonstrating the true power of Google Buzz
... on Mon Feb 22 22:30:26 2010bloody hell, where did these all come from?! wow
... on Mon Feb 22 11:53:29 20102 suits in the US, one vs Comerica, one vs PlainsCapital
... on Sun Feb 21 23:10:21 2010wow, you can search a time period for everyone who bookmarked pages on a specific site (via Britta)
... on Fri Feb 19 14:37:46 2010'presentation about how the Python GIL actually works and why it's even worse than most people even imagine.' A good chunk btw could be rephrased as 'pthreads is worse than most people even imagine'. pretty awful data, though
... on Fri Feb 19 11:55:55 2010John Levine gets DNS*Ls standardized, at last. we should really check SpamAssassin to see if it's compliant, I guess ;)
... on Thu Feb 18 21:59:06 2010nifty; Apache-licensed distributed, RESTful, JSON-over-HTTP, schemaless search server with multi-tenancy
... on Fri Feb 12 21:24:08 2010Ross Anderson's lab demo an attack on TV whereby any Chip-and-PIN debit card can be used in conjunction with a MITM device, with a PIN of "0000", verified online, and producing a receipt saying "PIN Verified". thoroughly hosed
... on Fri Feb 12 12:27:18 2010well done O2, you've made it insanely complicated and marginally useless
... on Thu Feb 11 13:45:30 2010great post on the hazards of programming in an async framework, and how damn hard it is. good comments thread too (via jzawodny)
... on Wed Feb 10 14:45:36 2010wow. fascinating results from social-network cluster analysis of Facebook, splitting up the entire USA into 7 clusters
... on Mon Feb 8 15:25:42 2010fascinating note from Bernie Goldbach: 'MORE THAN 20 YEARS ago, I worked with message traffic and the work told me the importance of verifying source material.'
... on Sun Feb 7 22:32:00 2010MS internal politics routinely torpedoed cool new projects. surprise, surprise. 'Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed [ClearType] made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The VP for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.'
... on Fri Feb 5 10:41:42 2010Dublin City Council is offering the ability to public consultation via a Boards forum. cool
... on Thu Feb 4 16:06:46 2010'for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up.'
... on Wed Feb 3 12:45:03 2010good scaling advice from Linden Labs' Ian Wilkes (who doesn't seem to have a blog, sadly)
... on Wed Feb 3 12:33:37 2010explaining Lift's code-free "display only" templating system. I like it. Very similar concept to WebMake's "scraped templates": http://webmake.taint.org/doc/scraping.html , nearly 10 years old now!
... on Tue Feb 2 15:48:34 2010hmm. may be one for the TODO list
... on Tue Feb 2 13:48:16 2010'this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.'
... on Tue Feb 2 13:41:58 2010a custom pastebin for spam messages. cool
... on Mon Feb 1 15:08:13 2010'This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence. This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.'
... on Sun Jan 31 23:55:42 2010interesting Django/Pythonic approach, based on concepts from AppEngine
... on Fri Jan 29 23:27:40 2010Ugh, very bad idea indeed. A backchannel for spammers/phishers/attackers from the mail reader is something we definitely do not want to provide. This is why we chose to cut URLs at the registrar boundary for URIBL lookups in SpamAssassin
... on Thu Jan 28 12:30:58 2010great article about Dublin Bus' shortcomings, featuring an interview with Antoin! Very interesting to hear about the upcoming GPS-based accurate bus timetabling service to be visible via their website, that'll be fantastic
... on Thu Jan 28 12:28:16 2010good walk-through by Nate Lawson
... on Wed Jan 27 13:30:54 2010LWN follows up on the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX fiasco. 'It would appear that what SpamAssassin needs is some dedicated maintenance talent which is not dependent on evening hours put in by developers committed to other projects.' I wish
... on Wed Jan 27 12:30:48 2010wow. my new shopping list. also: now do one for Ireland ;)
... on Tue Jan 26 21:49:47 2010w00t!
... on Tue Jan 26 16:34:43 2010the LACKRack -- IKEA's "LACK" side tables have exactly 19 inches of space, perfect for rackmounted hardware with a little hacking
... on Tue Jan 26 10:01:41 2010reverse-engineering the output of spam templates. paper isn't published yet, but sounds very interesting, particularly since it overlaps with the SpamAssassin SOUGHT ruleset's methodology, a little, it sounds like. looking forward to reading it
... on Tue Jan 26 00:11:18 2010possibly the best article written yet about the iTablet
... on Mon Jan 25 22:31:44 2010this is the plan for tomorrow -- looks good!
... on Sat Jan 23 22:54:01 2010'This is a totally devastating blow to everyone'
... on Fri Jan 22 22:25:32 2010aka, lung cancer develops after 50 pack-years of smoking. sobering thought
... on Fri Jan 22 17:47:14 2010exactly what it says on the tin
... on Fri Jan 22 17:17:12 2010C10K microbenchmarking fun in Javascript (via:simonw)
... on Thu Jan 21 16:26:02 2010'Of course you have to appreciate the irony – the agency in charge of enforcing France’s new anti-piracy legislation using a pirated proprietary font in its very own logo.' hoho! hoist by their own petard
... on Thu Jan 21 14:03:54 2010whoa. really looking forward to this, Mass Effect was one of the best games I've ever played
... on Thu Jan 21 12:14:08 2010holy shit. This is absolutely amazing, a first-person account of auto-appendectomy (via infovore)
... on Wed Jan 20 17:33:49 2010Google reckons that the English translation of "Amhran na bhFiann" -- the Irish national anthem -- is "Save The Queen". ie. part of the *English* national anthem. the perils of machine learning (via Adam Maguire)
... on Wed Jan 20 16:07:21 2010nice work, Aussies! this is very stupid indeed (via Waxy)
... on Tue Jan 19 15:38:13 2010so, it seems the wireless ISPs don't have sufficient IPv4 space for their customers, and are filtering access to the internet via NAT; unfortunate side effect is that this breaks data retention as defined in the UK. wonder if the same applies here?
... on Thu Jan 14 15:53:16 2010Reddit thread from answers from a "doctor" at a dodgy online prescription-drugs store, supposedly not a spamvertized one though
... on Thu Jan 14 14:25:24 2010Russ Garrett with another set of near-realtime desktop weather imagery (cf. http://taint.org/xplanet/ )
... on Tue Jan 12 20:59:02 2010no sync or automated backup yet, so more like sendspace than dropbox, limited usefulness
... on Tue Jan 12 18:13:29 2010a GSM femtocell for the home -- USB-driven, the size of a pack of cards, $40. this won't last long
... on Tue Jan 12 11:44:31 2010chains -- for your shoes. basically crampon overshoes, to deal with ice and snow, EUR45
... on Tue Jan 12 11:40:04 2010live weather-station data from across Ireland, overlaid on a Google Map, using amateur and professional stations. fascinating
... on Mon Jan 11 14:02:33 2010phisher creates a banking app for Android phones which relays the authorization details to another site, possible because of insufficient app vetting (via Mulley)
... on Mon Jan 11 11:35:17 2010another day, another broken boiler
... on Sat Jan 9 22:01:08 2010nicely done; Lebowski a la Shakespeare (via Waxy)
... on Fri Jan 8 12:10:26 2010good thread, despite a lot of patronising asshattery
... on Thu Jan 7 11:22:11 2010'I think that ‘first wave’ of Irish blogging was over a long time ago, probably around the time Blogorrah hit the dirt, but in spite of time and an increase of participants and bigger audience there seems to be no real drive to improve content. People will always read something good – online or offline – and until that something good (hopefully in plural) starts to emerge and while good bloggers log off indefinitely, Irish blogging, for what it’s worth, is in a state of disarray.'
... on Wed Jan 6 14:33:11 2010in protest against the Fianna Fail religious right's ludicrous new blasphemy law
... on Fri Jan 1 21:56:45 2010Dr. Neal Krawetz brings the science on detecting Photoshop retouching
... on Tue Dec 29 14:50:51 2009"Justin Mason likes this"
... on Tue Dec 29 14:47:51 2009'free, open, developer-generated APIs for a wide variety of websites. Parselets.com is a place to create and share them. [..] Check out [..] ways to use parselets from our web service, Ruby, Python, C/C++, or the *nix command-line.'
... on Wed Dec 23 16:55:59 2009+1
... on Sat Dec 19 00:00:30 2009a very nice interactive editor in Flash, supporting lots of the usual perlish stuff. via Joe
... on Fri Dec 18 21:00:52 2009metrics, monitoring, instrumentation, fault tolerance, load mitigation called out as other factors by Allspaw
... on Thu Dec 17 22:40:50 2009hmm, not too tricky
... on Thu Dec 17 19:35:25 2009mmmm, thanks Katyusha! looks good
... on Wed Dec 16 23:16:16 2009filed under "about time I did another DVD backup"
... on Wed Dec 16 15:04:52 2009'Lsyncd uses rsync to synchronize local directories with a remote machine running rsyncd. Lsyncd watches multiple directories trees through inotify. The first step after adding the watches is to rsync all directories with the remote host, and then sync single file by collecting the inotify events. So lsyncd is a light-weight live mirror solution that should be easy to install and use while blending well with your system.' (via adulau)
... on Tue Dec 15 23:08:14 2009how the Great Firewall of Oz breaks so much more than the web browser
... on Tue Dec 15 21:45:01 2009'a Java framework made by Web developers. Discover a clean alternative to bloated enterprise Java stacks. Play focuses on developer productivity and targets RESTful architectures.'
... on Tue Dec 15 16:38:51 2009discussion thread on the cons of using Turing-complete general-purpose programming languages in places where it's not necessary, such as configuration files
... on Tue Dec 15 11:05:33 2009'Being majime (too serious) is not cool in Japan; likewise it is important for voyeurs of Japanese culture to recognize that most everything pop-culture-y that is exported to the West comes at us with a wink. If you're all up in arms about it, then maybe the joke is on you.'
... on Mon Dec 14 21:13:28 2009linked by Nelson; will return to this once i've gotten into the game
... on Sat Dec 12 21:46:57 2009'an open source JavaScript library that produces produces interactive, zoomable charts of time series. It is designed to display dense data sets and enable users to explore and interpret them.' quite pretty
... on Thu Dec 10 23:17:31 2009very new, but heading in the right direction (although the idea of using a browser action is probably not correct). This is the last hold-up for me to switch
... on Thu Dec 10 22:30:41 2009wow. that _is_ easy; wonder if it'd be nearly as easy to write an extension as it is nowadays to write userscripts in Firefox
... on Wed Dec 9 22:05:26 2009from Nelson. looks like it's becoming a viable browser, maybe I'll give it a go
... on Wed Dec 9 21:27:19 2009'Ask a craft brewer which other brewers he most admires, and he’s likely to mention Sierra Nevada. The Chico, California, brewery is considered to be sacred ground, and its beers expertly crafted. “When you die as a brewer, you go to Chico,” says Matthew Brynildson, brewmaster of Firestone Walker in Southern California.' paging Ben
... on Wed Dec 9 11:49:55 2009great line: 'In the future perhaps every artist will be famous for 15 comments'
... on Mon Dec 7 23:26:01 2009Flickr don't use branches. mental
... on Fri Dec 4 21:27:31 2009MeFi commenter ftw
... on Thu Dec 3 22:58:06 2009I didn't realise Firefox's geolocation used wifi triangulation, too
... on Wed Dec 2 11:05:50 2009good HN thread on better charting tools in JS
... on Wed Dec 2 10:39:20 2009Charlie Stross' thoughts on the true viability of interstellar travel. This was about the most thought-provoking bit of 'Accelerando' for me alright
... on Sun Nov 29 21:15:05 2009you have got to be kidding. Father Ted meets the Inquisition
... on Thu Nov 26 18:45:57 2009notes curated by Danny O'Brien: 'I have volunteered to take the meetynge notes in the style of a 17th century essayist.'
... on Wed Nov 25 21:17:56 2009so many! Saw a Hero last night, it looked pretty swish -- although not quite as pretty as the iPhone ;)
... on Wed Nov 25 21:15:18 2009we do something similar in SA
... on Wed Nov 25 09:34:48 2009A good guide to installation on Jaunty. I'm trying out sup. It does a really good job of bringing the GMail experience to the commandline, so far so good; now to see if I can switch my work email over!
... on Wed Nov 25 00:01:25 2009I'm late to the party, but this sounds lovely
... on Mon Nov 23 21:28:05 2009looks great
... on Wed Nov 18 22:37:50 2009Good 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.)'
... on Tue Nov 17 15:34:43 2009LinkMachineGo knew the true identity of Belle du Jour way back when -- and set a Google trap to ensnare snooping journos. nice work
... on Tue Nov 17 15:03:56 2009'your online JSON Formatter'. useful. via JKeyes
... on Sun Nov 15 21:03:46 2009good reviews and notes from Peteris Krumins
... on Sun Nov 15 21:02:17 2009very 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.'
... on Sat Nov 14 22:24:33 2009argh. 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 :(
... on Sat Nov 14 12:34:48 2009according to Fergal, at half of the price of O2's iPhone "deal"
... on Thu Nov 12 22:45:07 2009ioerror published the '\00' wild-card SSL cert for any domain (for affected SSL client libs at least)
... on Thu Nov 12 21:56:41 2009'You have to balance
... on Tue Nov 10 22:11:06 2009quadtrees, Hilbert curves, and geohashing, as seen in Google's new Closure library. useful for multidimensional addressing in general
... on Mon Nov 9 19:27:40 2009$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)
... on Sun Nov 8 21:06:43 2009specifically, a port of dessid to the iPhone, recently causing headlines
... on Sun Nov 8 20:56:41 2009'shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose. Flogr is powered by PHP, MySQL (optional), and Flickr.' excellent! via yoz
... on Fri Nov 6 00:31:06 2009quite a few excellent teeshirts, along with tea-related items -- and again they have a great kids' range. based in Northern Ireland! (via Ruth)
... on Thu Nov 5 23:15:04 2009Dublin shop selling fairly-traded and cool kids clothes and accessories; they also do stalls at various local markets now and again. think Mae and Bea have a few of their goods already ;)
... on Thu Nov 5 23:10:53 2009github's take on a good, distributed queueing system in Ruby
... on Thu Nov 5 22:22:53 2009'A variable-length format for positive integers is defined where the high-order bit of each byte indicates whether more bytes remain to be read. The low-order seven bits are appended as increasingly more significant bits in the resulting integer value. Thus values from zero to 127 may be stored in a single byte, values from 128 to 16,383 may be stored in two bytes, and so on.' UTF8-ish compression, used in Avro
... on Wed Nov 4 23:16:01 2009good overview of this jailbreak app
... on Wed Nov 4 22:17:19 2009Ask MeFi thread, mostly recommending tethering and SBSettings
... on Wed Nov 4 22:07:33 2009woot!
... on Wed Nov 4 17:56:42 2009hilarious 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.'
... on Tue Nov 3 13:34:08 2009'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
... on Tue Nov 3 12:17:36 2009'The sregex module implements Structural Regular Expressions.' Python, Apache-licensed
... on Tue Nov 3 12:16:43 2009great article on the 80's one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)
... on Tue Nov 3 11:45:22 2009'I grew up in a college town, and one Halloween our doorbell rang and we opened the door expecting to see trickortreaters-- but what was in front of our open door--was another door! Like, a full-on wooden door, that had a sign that said "Please knock." So we did, and the door swung open to reveal a bunch of college dudes dressed as really old grandmothers, curlers in their hair, etc, who proceeded to coo over our "costumes" and tell us we were "such cute trick or treaters!" One even pinched my cheek. Then THEY gave US candy, closed their door, picked it up and walked to the next house.'
... on Tue Nov 3 00:46:57 2009this is incredible. Looking at this reminds me so much of hacking in the old TCD comp labs
... on Sat Oct 31 22:07:54 2009why HMAC is more secure than secret-suffix and secret-prefix keyed hashing. good to know
... on Fri Oct 30 22:23:02 2009lots of gory details on FB's innards via Dare Obasanjo
... on Fri Oct 30 15:46:46 2009sweet. HDMI out, MythTV streaming, and silent for $300
... on Fri Oct 30 15:45:16 2009'Become a virtual beef farmer. Control your personal food chain.' also deliver prime beef. mmmm
... on Fri Oct 30 12:27:53 2009lots of new features, and a switch of default IM client
... on Thu Oct 29 14:31:35 200930 minutes over medium heat, cooked in its own fat. whoa, I want to try this
... on Thu Oct 29 12:06:03 2009'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.'
... on Wed Oct 28 17:41:44 2009Google resync to the latest kernel every 17 months or so -- not bad, actually
... on Wed Oct 28 00:01:22 2009informative, from Cisco (via BoxOfMeat)
... on Tue Oct 27 21:26:58 2009Reddit mass-interview of a spammer. apparently he's working on IPv6 support
... on Tue Oct 27 13:03:19 2009massive 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.'
... on Fri Oct 23 20:35:12 2009good research coming out of McAfee -- lots of Eastern European, Russian, and ex-USSR-country cybercrime businesses nowadays, apparently
... on Fri Oct 23 13:25:10 200915% smaller than bzip, 30% smaller than gzip, and now shipped with Fedora and Ubuntu. uses LZMA2
... on Fri Oct 23 09:03:09 2009Simon 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
... on Thu Oct 22 14:21:35 2009new 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
... on Thu Oct 22 11:12:38 2009another serialization format, binary, no IDL, no code generation, from GitHub
... on Thu Oct 22 11:04:20 2009a good guide
... on Wed Oct 21 21:35:14 2009Tom Francis gives "Red Faction: Guerilla" a truly massive plug based on its pervasive freeform environment destructability. I'm sold!
... on Wed Oct 21 10:27:47 2009'A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines', by Mark Adler, no less
... on Wed Oct 21 10:09:18 2009to read, yoz gives it the thumbs up
... on Tue Oct 20 11:41:18 2009oh, nifty, an augmented reality property app in Dublin
... on Mon Oct 19 23:24:48 2009hmm, 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
... on Mon Oct 19 22:00:59 2009connections to brutus.apache.org, "GET / HTTP/1.1", massive HTTPS DDOS. no idea what's going on
... on Mon Oct 19 15:09:38 2009supposedly should only list child porn sites, but sounds like it's got frequent false positives on file upload/download services nowadays
... on Fri Oct 2 13:28:09 2009all 6 parts of the first episode, via Waxy. will watch this at some future point when I have free time again!
... on Fri Oct 2 11:09:05 2009'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.'
... on Wed Sep 30 15:39:53 2009pay EUR3 per month to receive Twitter @replies to your SMS mobile in Ireland -- a good niche
... on Tue Sep 29 12:40:24 2009'Where can I find an available DublinBike?' -- another DublinBikes mashup. hopefully JC Decaux won't C&D this one
... on Tue Sep 29 11:07:52 2009as used to exploit Reddit and create a comment worm
... on Tue Sep 29 10:27:14 2009"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
... on Tue Sep 22 18:12:10 2009Irish-made iPhone apps. there's a surprising number of 'em
... on Sun Sep 20 17:16:00 2009Every 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
... on Sat Sep 19 16:40:56 2009(via Pierce) Kim Stanley Robinson on today's British SF "golden age". I have a lot of reading to catch up on
... on Fri Sep 18 23:47:57 2009brilliant encounter between an inept UK water-cooler supplier, the cluetrain, and the Streisand effect
... on Fri Sep 18 17:12:37 2009a slightly cheaper option
... on Fri Sep 18 03:25:02 2009Mark Bregman: “I don’t let my IT department near my laptop.”
... on Thu Sep 17 23:19:02 2009it's not sufficiently evenly-distributed, apparently. Also: got linked from Hack The Planet!
... on Wed Sep 16 04:10:41 2009interesting concept, designing a typeface only for use on LCDs (via Waxy)
... on Wed Sep 16 04:08:50 2009more on the new async HTTP server from FriendFeed/Facebook, in Python. looks lovely
... on Fri Sep 11 16:45:11 2009'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.'
... on Fri Sep 11 11:06:09 2009'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!
... on Fri Sep 11 11:02:07 2009awesome vitriol from the big-in-the-80's Irish balladeer
... on Fri Sep 11 10:50:18 2009woot, nice work jgc!
... on Fri Sep 11 08:56:50 2009FB 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
... on Fri Sep 11 08:50:03 2009'Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: "data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."'
... on Tue Sep 8 20:48:19 2009photoshop phun galore. "Foreign Toilets: VOTE NO" (via Shane Hegarty)
... on Mon Sep 7 13:23:33 2009Brendan plugs Wells Cargo, good international couriers if you're sending from .ie
... on Mon Sep 7 10:13:10 2009a lot more awesome than the title would suggest (via TTT)
... on Fri Sep 4 16:45:39 2009how to keep a small number of user accounts (ie. root) delivering locally while the rest are delivered to a smarthost
... on Fri Sep 4 11:08:20 2009Ben C-S rejigs the legendary "ed, man! !man ed" net.humor for a new age of DVCSes
... on Wed Sep 2 20:50:55 2009go 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.”
... on Wed Sep 2 09:28:21 2009get a glowing rabbit to semaphore latest C-I build status
... on Tue Sep 1 20:54:33 2009interesting idea from Joe -- track your cloud-hosting spend in real-time
... on Tue Sep 1 20:34:26 2009'SoftReferences are the cheap, crappy caching mechanism [...] perfect for when you'd like your cache to be cleared at random times and in random order.'
... on Tue Sep 1 17:06:24 2009Satire site The Emergency on pro-life paramilitary nutter group Coir's new scaremongering campaign: "A German Will Be In Charge Of The SKY Remote IN YOUR LIVING ROOM!!!! Unless you vote NO!" -- a pretty accurate rendition of their posters
... on Tue Sep 1 09:00:18 2009wow, looks absolutely excellent! nice work (via Mulley)
... on Fri Aug 28 16:09:26 2009yay! Let's see if this shows up at http://pinboard.in/u:jm ;)
... on Thu Aug 27 17:03:22 2009now available. sadly, no support for Bugzilla, which is what we use in SpamAssassin (srsly), so I won't be trying it out just yet, but still -- cool
... on Thu Aug 27 16:32:02 2009it really is. Yet another one-page intro to git, but a good one
... on Thu Aug 27 13:39:24 2009UPC: "bring it on", essentially
... on Wed Aug 26 10:27:10 2009what it's like to have your photo used for stock images
... on Tue Aug 25 21:48:13 2009course notes from a 4-day MIT course on tech interviewing (via Hacker News)
... on Tue Aug 25 21:12:53 2009injects via gdb. pretty cool, if it works; one comment notes that they couldn't use it on a Rails app
... on Tue Aug 25 13:46:08 2009flipping amazing stop-motion LEGO animation paying homage to classic C=64 and NES gaming, featuring International Karate, Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, and Pac-Man from swedish duo Rymdreglage (via Conor)
... on Mon Aug 24 20:42:50 2009including one place that includes an open farm. result
... on Fri Aug 21 13:08:15 2009'an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool. It's a pastebin that executes code for you. You paste your code, and codepad runs it and gives you a short URL you can use to share it.' supports C, C++, D, Haskell, Lua, OCaml, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and Tcl code; isolated by a geordi-based supervisor, in turn running inside a firewalled virt, in turn running inside a firewalled dom0. nice work!
... on Fri Aug 21 12:51:51 2009another weather forecasting service which may be more reliable than Met Eireann, this time from yr.no, the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. if only Met Eireann spent our taxes on something of this quality (via Stephen Mulcahy)
... on Wed Aug 19 13:13:51 2009Seems to work nicely. Not quite as cleanly integrated as It's All Text! for Firefox, but getting there
... on Tue Aug 18 10:06:10 2009so Met Eireann's crappy weather forecasts are actually just what they give out "for free"; if you pay extra, they have more accurate forecasts. what a scam for a govt department! Handily though, they are mandated by law to give out decent forecasts to pilots -- which are available online
... on Mon Aug 17 21:11:30 2009next in a long line of one-to-many communication systems used by bad guys
... on Fri Aug 14 16:42:20 2009the new rental-bike system for Dublin from JC Decaux and Dublin City Council. woeful coverage, and eye-wateringly expensive; don't keep a bike out overnight or it'll cost you EUR30!!
... on Fri Aug 14 11:37:52 2009lovely run-through of the computer-vision algorithms this iPhone app uses (via Waxy)
... on Thu Aug 13 11:43:47 2009features mainly posts from NAMA-sceptic economist Karl Whelan
... on Thu Aug 13 11:39:31 2009'What we now know is that the banks have been actively working to keep development properties off the market, so that their true values are kept out of the public domain. However, to work through our current problems, these property assets are going to have to be dealt with – either sold at a reasonable price or else demolished or returned to agricultural usage.' oh dear
... on Thu Aug 13 11:38:43 2009promises to be frequently updated if/when anything might happen. certainly better advice for Irish sufferers than the useless PR spooge put out by the HSE -- as usual
... on Thu Aug 13 10:12:26 2009'I work for a for-profit company that is willing to sponsor projects in exactly the way described in this article. We are looking for (a) control, (b) stability, and (c) a development model that is cheaper than doing it ourselves. If such cooperatives existed we would be interested in them. I'm sure we are not alone, because this is how all for-profit businesses tend to think. The cooperative is a viable model because of the way it reinforces and maximizes member interests.'
... on Tue Aug 11 23:43:17 2009hilarious response to mind-boggling US healthcare talking-point derpitude: 'People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.' fantastic
... on Tue Aug 11 10:05:41 2009'Facing customer complaints - one customer has waited three weeks for their new iPhone - O2 firmly pinned the blame on Apple, "There has been unprecedented demand for the new iPhone 3GS since it went on sale in June, not just in Ireland but around the world. We continue to work with Apple to ensure frequent deliveries of stock into Ireland,” an O2 spokesman said.'
... on Mon Aug 10 22:12:21 2009a Reddit-friendly 8-point list of new idioms for Java code in a more functional style. not sure about a couple of these, but another couple get my +1
... on Mon Aug 10 13:29:30 2009nice GMail userscript to remove the ads
... on Mon Aug 10 10:47:05 2009The Beeb definitely takes it too far with this one; the song isn't clearly about 419 at all
... on Sun Aug 9 13:01:32 2009the Washington Post on the Yahoozee thing
... on Sun Aug 9 12:58:22 2009bit of controversy about Colin Powell dancing (!) to a song that promotes the "Yahoo boys", 419 scammers -- but it doesn't sound like that's the case, going by this post
... on Sun Aug 9 12:57:56 2009from Julian "MailScanner" Field (via the SA users list)
... on Fri Aug 7 09:06:23 2009'Britons will choose to cut back on almost anything other than food before economising on electronic communications services. Crucially, we will even cut spending on their mobile phone and TV package before foregoing Internet access'
... on Thu Aug 6 21:09:23 2009'We will turn Dublin’s tallest building into a giant public canvas—and we want you to play with it. Our simple tools allow you to animate your thoughts and broadcast them on the city skyline.' open from Aug 24 until Sep 24
... on Thu Aug 6 14:39:07 2009'The platform API remains fundamentally broken and gives users no way to prevent applications from accessing their photos. Facebook would be best served by fixing this instead of dismissing users’ concern for privacy as “misleading rumors.”'
... on Wed Aug 5 22:35:38 2009great blog post on the YAGNI principle. +1
... on Tue Aug 4 16:31:12 2009YA set of "I got mine after queueing from 7.30am" posts. wtf Apple, this is a shambles
... on Sat Aug 1 12:21:00 2009wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status
... on Sat Aug 1 10:31:58 2009'[Joe] Stewart said the sophistication and stealth of this malware strain has become so bad that it's time for Windows users to start thinking of doing their banking and other sensitive transactions on a dedicated system that is not used for everyday Web surfing.' it's that bad
... on Sat Aug 1 10:21:06 2009actually quite a good breakdown of software eng skill progression
... on Fri Jul 31 09:18:50 2009'File-based, rather than tuple-based processing'; based around UNIX command-line toolset; good UNIXish UI; lots of caching of intermediate results; low setup overhead -- although it does require a shared POSIX filesystem, e.g. NFS, for synchronization
... on Fri Jul 31 09:14:40 2009wow. can we (and by "we" I mean "the people in my del network") not just move en masse to Pinboard? ;)
... on Fri Jul 31 09:09:41 2009"Life would be easier if you could mark people as spam"
... on Fri Jul 31 08:02:33 2009lots of commercial and open-source-friendly-licensed icon sets, including the old reliable FamFamFam and Pinvoke icons
... on Thu Jul 30 21:02:39 2009how to upgrade from 20GB to 120GB. this looks frankly terrifying (via Rod)
... on Thu Jul 30 11:50:17 2009'Screams of "Of course, yes, I too can see the phone," were also heard at this time.'
... on Wed Jul 29 20:26:32 2009massive shortages of iPhones in Ireland; this forum thread is apparently the most reliable way to determine if you'll be able to get your hands on one (via Keith)
... on Tue Jul 28 13:51:32 2009good wrap-up from Anil Dash on "the new push"
... on Fri Jul 24 15:48:47 2009lots of stuff about one of Boards' best topics, handily arranged by company (via Eoin)
... on Fri Jul 24 12:32:36 2009what is the law, and how to make a complaint against an Irish company, via Donncha
... on Thu Jul 23 11:50:25 2009good and cheap; good reviews; supported by Linux HID force-feedback joystick library; EUR58 at Play.com
... on Thu Jul 23 09:30:15 2009an alternative way to get pedal controls working; use a racing-game steering-wheel controller, instead, since they're cheaper
... on Thu Jul 23 09:29:03 2009good call. but as one commenter notes: why isn't there an "unsubscribe from this list" button in the normal UI? now if I want to use this as a quick-unsub mechanism for mail I know is ham, I'm _forced_ to use "mark as spam" to get this shortcut, which doesn't make much sense
... on Thu Jul 23 09:07:08 2009'A UK firm that turns mobile messages into text faces questions over its privacy standards, technology and finances following a BBC investigation' .. 'claims to the BBC suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines.' 'The fact that messages appear to have been read by workers outside of the European Union raises questions about the firm's data protection policy.'
... on Thu Jul 23 09:03:44 2009'an online service that enables you to look up the configuration of any public SSL web server. The configuration of known public SSL web servers will be periodically inspected and the results recorded. This service relies on the SSL Server Rating guide for the assessment'
... on Wed Jul 22 20:34:25 2009a story of how a bug in Apollo 11's Lunar Module control software, intended to work around a deficiency of the engine hardware, barely avoided mission-endangering results
... on Wed Jul 22 13:40:52 2009recommended by JB. 3 switches, USB, $120. Linux support seems tricky; requires running Windows apps to reprogram the pedal's firmware. ugh
... on Wed Jul 22 11:52:16 2009comes with dictation transcription software and headphones, USB, UKP93.15. there's a blog post indicating that it's Linux-compatible, emulating a generic USB keyboard
... on Wed Jul 22 11:49:05 2009from Kinesis Ergo, claims to do mouse or keyboard actions, $129, USB. Linux support unclear
... on Wed Jul 22 11:46:55 2009great Singularity contemplation from Kevin Kelly: 'to be useful, artificial intelligences have to be embodied in the world, and that world will often set their pace of innovations. Thinkism is not enough. Without conducting experiments, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results. It cannot think its way to solving the world's problems. There won't be instant discoveries the minute, hour, day or year a smarter-than-human AI appears. The rate of discovery will hopefully be significantly accelerated. Even better, a super AI will ask questions no human would ask. But, to take one example, it will require many generations of experiments on living organisms, not even to mention humans, before such a difficult achievement as immortality is gained.'
... on Wed Jul 22 11:12:41 2009according to this, a retired cop has set up a company called Lucid Intelligence with 'the records of four million Britons, and 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans', and plans to 'charge members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached.' How is this legal under Data Protection law? wtf
... on Wed Jul 22 08:56:42 2009hooray, a decent review site for Dublin at last
... on Tue Jul 21 15:49:40 2009well-written, and it's good to see version control listed right at the top of the list. But quite dead; interesting for historical reasons only at this stage
... on Tue Jul 21 12:13:05 2009'View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way', supporting postfix/spamd/clamd logs among loads of others. very cool if a little silly
... on Tue Jul 21 09:28:15 2009Canonical _finally_ open source (under the AGPL) their bug tracker/project hosting platform. yay! here's hoping it's reasonably easy to deploy. maybe it would be viable for the ASF... hmm
... on Tue Jul 21 08:59:49 2009good on them, spilling the beans at last! '“We haven’t seen any further attempts at cache poisoning since last week,” the spokesman added.'
... on Fri Jul 17 22:40:26 2009turns out most of the McColo-based spammers were sending easy-to-block output
... on Fri Jul 17 20:33:52 2009'founded in late 2007 by a small group of individuals with a common interest in brewing, but, whose experience extended to tasting only. Word of the idea spread rapidly, and such was the interest that by December of that year eight brewing teams had been formed.' next meetup is 15th Aug 2009
... on Fri Jul 17 13:40:14 2009wow, software archaeology. looks like the 3.1 release (which I worked on) still has its HTML release docs online
... on Fri Jul 17 13:22:05 2009'Between January 2004 until September 2005, [Ralsky accomplice David S] Patton developed and marketing his illegal bulk mailing tools via a firm called Lightspeed Marketing. Nexus was designed to falsify the headers of spam messages while Proxy Scanner was designed to channel junk mail through compromised zombie proxies, typically PCs in either homes or businesses infected with [trojans].'
... on Thu Jul 16 15:31:23 2009"The Magazine For People Who Try To Have Conversations About Science News". oh god, this is my life
... on Thu Jul 16 14:04:06 2009"Someday, in the comfort of your home, you'll be able to shop and bank electronically, read instantly updated newswires, analyze the performance of a stock that interests you, send electronic mail across the country, then play Bridge with three strangers in LA, Chicago and Dallas." just not with CI$. oops
... on Thu Jul 16 12:20:34 2009'The last few C64DTV PAL units are available for sale at £100 GBP Plus shipping. There are no more units available anywhere in the world as production ceased in 2005 and due to complicated licensing issues, it's unlikey that the unit will ever re-enter production.'
... on Wed Jul 15 11:38:49 2009apparently the bassist went online, googled their new covers album, and totted up all the counts of search results -- including the fake ones from scam/ad sites
... on Wed Jul 15 11:09:03 2009'Matthias Merx, the firm's managing director, told heise online that following a voltage drop, something happened in D-Trust's "Trustcenter" that does occasionally occur. "The [hardware security module] independently deleted the data [including the root CA private key] because it suspected an attack."'
... on Tue Jul 14 16:10:11 2009Zed Shaw on OSS licensing and today's software industry: 'I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Good. Because I have a solution to that too.'
... on Tue Jul 14 10:40:55 2009whoa, nifty. 'Retrieving items from various levels of memory and cache make up a dominant factor of running time, so for speed it is crucial to minimize these costs. The main idea of cache-oblivious algorithms is to achieve optimal use of caches on all levels of a memory hierarchy without knowledge of their size.'
... on Mon Jul 13 14:40:56 2009brilliant (via Waxy)
... on Sun Jul 12 20:39:59 2009as predicted: 'Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, Chris Paget's scanner downloaded to his laptop the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.'
... on Sun Jul 12 20:37:47 2009good point from Jason O'Mahoney. 'let’s pass this law anyway, but instead of a €25,000 fine, make it a €25 fine. The constitution is satisfied, and the fine is so nominal as to be useless, which is what the Greens say is the effective outcome of the law anyway.' +1
... on Thu Jul 9 20:22:13 2009extremely detailed postmortem of the recent GFS outage -- a poorly-written MapReduce client issued repeated "query of death" messages, causing server-side stack overflows
... on Thu Jul 9 16:56:35 2009'Count Me Out is a campaign seeking to lessen the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland. Our primary focus is to reduce the number of "members" of the church by encouraging people to formally defect.''
... on Thu Jul 9 12:08:01 2009'Wouldn't the take-up rate on spam improve with a more personal approach, like going around door-to-door?' 'I happen to be the cousin of the President of Nigeria' -- brilliant
... on Wed Jul 8 22:35:46 2009'Your family photos are accompanied by text ads for skin care and diet plans.' 'Changes your icons daily, forcing you to look up which obscure scientific figure is having a birthday.'
... on Wed Jul 8 22:31:22 2009a better quote than the IT article. "This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers." Hmm. an irregular volume caused by a DNS cache poisoning attack, maybe? (via Chris)
... on Wed Jul 8 20:22:17 2009'There is an undisguised and frank expression of relief in Michael Sands’s voice when asked what Dublin City Council will do in the event of theft or damage to the city’s 450 bikes. “JC Decaux is responsible for that. Our deal with them is that the city must have 450 bikes fit for use at all times.” We’ll see over time who got the better half of the deal.'
... on Wed Jul 8 13:27:43 2009the _only_ press coverage so far of Eircom's DNS subversion. '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.' uh, how does that wind up redirecting popular sites to porn ads exactly?
... on Wed Jul 8 08:56:34 2009so that's James Gosling, JRuby's Charles Nutter and Groovy's James Strachan all giving Scala big thumbs up. really have to learn this language
... on Tue Jul 7 09:21:28 2009must try this out and see if it's usable in Chromium on Linux yet
... on Mon Jul 6 10:15:53 2009'Rik Ferguson, solutions architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, also reported about the issues. "So far there are very few details on the nature of the problem over at Eircom, but it is certainly clear that many Eircom subscribers are being redirected to bogus websites and rumours abound that Eircom’s DNS has been compromised," the researcher wrote on his blog. He suggests that affected users switch to using OpenDNS.'
... on Mon Jul 6 10:11:33 2009lots of detail
... on Sun Jul 5 21:42:24 20098 key gotchas when implementing RESTful web APIs. great advice
... on Sun Jul 5 08:00:03 2009'focussed on decompression speed' ... 'On modern architectures, decompression is very fast; in non-trivial cases able to exceed the speed of a straight memory-to-memory copy due to the reduced memory-reads.'
... on Sat Jul 4 21:08:28 2009great demo and walkthrough from Cloudera
... on Sat Jul 4 21:06:27 2009interesting CACM article updating Gray and Putzolu's "Five-Minute Rule" for RAM and disks (which postulated that a 1KB record accessed more frequently than once every 5 mins should be stored in RAM, rather than on disk). modern price/performance indicates that this still holds, once 256KB records are used. The article also suggests that a new tier of persistent flash storage should be considered, adding a new set of 5-minute-rule transitions for 2KB records migrating from RAM to flash
... on Fri Jul 3 11:13:50 2009'The humble spice burger, one of Ireland’s few original contributions to world cuisine, has been saved.' YAY
... on Fri Jul 3 08:57:18 2009'The [Communications Decency Act] treats security software makers the same as internet service providers when they block material they find objectionable, granting them so-called “good Samaritan” immunity from civil lawsuits. Like an ISP, such companies provide an “interactive computer service” because they pull updates from a central server, the San Francisco-based appeals court said.'
... on Thu Jul 2 09:16:57 2009'UPC has made its position clear from the outset -- it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided under existing legislation. There is no basis under Irish law requiring ISPs to control, access or block the internet content its users download. In addition, the rights holders' proposal gives rise to serious concerns for data privacy and consumer contract law.' go UPC!
... on Wed Jul 1 10:40:51 2009you can access an Atom feed of your inbox via https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ - I had no idea!
... on Wed Jul 1 08:46:24 2009native support built-in -- awesome! must try this out
... on Tue Jun 30 20:04:12 2009hilariously off-base predictions from Forbes ASAP back in 2000. pretty much everything is wrong, except for the available disk capacity of 1TB (via Tony)
... on Tue Jun 30 14:00:24 2009'Ms Sullivan said the highest "legitimate" offer was about $1.2million. Others were for much more but from unscrupulous quarters.'
... on Tue Jun 30 09:32:12 2009using gitosis. looks quite usable (via Tony)
... on Mon Jun 29 22:32:03 2009even more techie details, good tips on JVM profiling/monitoring tools and background on their switch from Ruby to Scala
... on Mon Jun 29 15:00:07 2009good info on Twitter's current architecture. lots of memcached
... on Sun Jun 28 20:16:28 2009Artist attempting to build a toaster from scratch -- 'beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.' fascinating
... on Sun Jun 28 13:04:52 2009web-based tool to aid Scrum development processes, Apache-licensed, in Python
... on Sun Jun 28 12:39:01 2009'the article in the Washington Post that supposedly gives statistical evidence for vote fraud just won't die in the blogosphere and just got a boost [..] by Tim O'Reilly. The trouble is the analysis is bogus.'
... on Fri Jun 26 08:35:46 2009legendary music journo, dead of cancer :(
... on Thu Jun 25 17:10:24 2009Megaton and Republic of Dave from Fallout 3, NYC from GTA4, the canal barn from Half-Life 2 ep 2 (iirc) featuring the G-Man, and more. I love these so much -- genius work by spingo
... on Thu Jun 25 09:00:03 2009good quote from Richard Cox of Spamhaus: "This has been a long time coming. Ralsky has been identified as one of the key drivers of [..] development in the spam world [...] among the first to commission mass-mailing Trojans to help develop spam botnets."'
... on Wed Jun 24 13:20:58 2009a mate had his FB credentials stolen and the account used to attempt to scam his social group. Sample chat: 'so where should I send the money?' 'you can have it sent to my name and my present location [...] Do you know any western union outlet nearest to you?'
... on Wed Jun 24 09:11:22 2009a great HOWTO
... on Tue Jun 23 22:00:27 2009Alan Ralsky pleads guilty in a stock-spam case, facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under CAN-SPAM, wire fraud, and money laundering laws
... on Tue Jun 23 12:44:49 2009'SORBS is officially "For Sale" should anyone
... on Mon Jun 22 14:30:56 2009print out and fold!
... on Mon Jun 22 14:27:06 2009an undocumented registry^Wgconf tweak. hopefully this'll be fixed more cleanly soon. Gwibber's a great twitter/FB updates client!
... on Mon Jun 22 09:46:07 2009the 40 rent-a-bike depots around Dublin, from the Mater to the Grand Canal. coverage outside the city centre is pretty weak :(
... on Sun Jun 21 13:43:52 2009'a string template engine based on the Django template system and written in Qt'
... on Thu Jun 18 14:33:46 2009NOOOOOO! also, wtf Enterprise Ireland: 'the firm closed after an appeal to Enterprise Ireland for emergency funding was rejected. “They didn’t want to know,” said an internal company source.'
... on Thu Jun 18 10:22:27 2009interesting details in the implementation of PageRank and how it "flows"
... on Wed Jun 17 16:12:38 2009oh dear. Cligs - ever heard of it?
... on Wed Jun 17 10:26:22 2009brilliant. 'The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.' Even worse: IOActive's demo worm 'exploits an automatic update feature in the meter that runs on peer-to-peer technology that doesn't use code signing or other measures to make sure the update is authorized.' omgwtfbbq
... on Sat Jun 13 15:00:19 2009'A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.'
... on Thu Jun 11 20:44:15 2009a Greasemonkey userscript that enhances Google searches with del.icio.us hits for the same search. works quite well
... on Wed Jun 10 21:58:16 2009sounds like a lovely Linux system under the hood; glibc, upstart, ipkg, dbus. if only it did GSM/3G...
... on Wed Jun 10 20:14:41 2009Chris Horn with advice for Irish tech startups from his experience with IONA. lots of IONA history here
... on Wed Jun 10 20:08:40 2009experiences of startups who've worked with "cloud" hosting platforms. all these comments match my experience. also notable: 'No one mentioned Google App Engine' doh!
... on Wed Jun 10 14:04:37 2009a great YouTube Downfall dub to commemorate Libertas' passing from the EU political scene ;)
... on Mon Jun 8 23:13:48 2009a truly grody hack to work around iPhone brokenness. wtf is wrong with saving HTML pages to local flash for offline use? does it not "just work" or something?
... on Sun Jun 7 14:27:35 2009a 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
... on Sat Jun 6 21:28:37 2009'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.'
... on Sat Jun 6 12:38:46 2009using "flickrtouchr", a handy script by colmmacc
... on Sat Jun 6 12:15:25 2009looks awesome. AC1 was one of the best games I played last year, really looking forward to this
... on Thu Jun 4 22:43:43 2009I'd forgotten how this works. good reminder
... on Thu Jun 4 22:22:27 2009very funny, and a fantastic illustration of common applied-crypto pitfalls
... on Thu Jun 4 16:59:39 2009'Authored by researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, their work reveals a collision attack on SHA-1 with a complexity of 2^52 operations (the previous fastest known SHA-1 collision attack had required 2^63 operations). This is a significant improvement in finding SHA-1 collisions.' 'the attacks affect collision resistance, not pre-image or second pre-image resistance. [...] the researchers are able to generate two unique messages that hash to the same digest value.'
... on Thu Jun 4 16:31:16 2009crappy pRNG seeding; used the same source "random" stream for both security-sensitive purposes (login cookies) and non-sensitive user-visible data (in HTML page source); and no HMAC usage at all. oh dear. good example of how not to do it
... on Thu Jun 4 15:31:12 2009log-structured fs; instant "free" checkpoint snapshots, fast crash recovery, superfast benchmarks, in upcoming Linux kernels. sounds awesome (via JZawodny)
... on Thu Jun 4 15:19:20 2009'Lars Rasmussen responded that [the spam problem] hasn't been given much thought yet [jm: !!!], since it is a closed developer's preview for now, but also mentioned that most likely Wave would use a whitelist option, where you'd have to add a friend/coworker before they could send/invite you to Waves.' ie, the IM style
... on Thu Jun 4 11:01:05 2009looks like the plan is for third parties to provide anti-spam services/bots to despam your Wave inbox, plus a little economic handwaving
... on Thu Jun 4 10:56:07 2009OSX 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
... on Sun May 31 10:46:11 2009'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.)'
... on Sun May 31 10:14:00 2009good intro to the systems used in today's botnets, from Marshal8e6's TRACElabs
... on Sat May 30 19:58:47 2009wow, extensive. I'm impressed! good example of how to solidly test a C/C++ library (via jzawodny)
... on Sat May 30 19:56:52 2009guy writing down all the stupid things his assistant says. “I forced myself to have a concussion last night in the furnace room.”
... on Sat May 30 19:47:16 2009an interesting AWS use-case; S3, EC2, Elastic Hadoop, and browser-based POST to S3 to offload work of MMO-level logging
... on Fri May 29 13:36:46 2009scientific fact!
... on Fri May 29 13:18:01 2009Is this why Greasemonkey is moribund in Firefox -- the dev is employed by Google and working on Chromium?
... on Thu May 28 09:05:41 2009'Mr. Rubin said that, in general, carriers will be slower in the United States to introduce Android phones than in Europe.' so seeing as you still can't buy a G1 in Ireland, that would mean never?
... on Thu May 28 09:01:13 2009'The infamous deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse [...] was at its most septic over the weekend. Michael Woods [...] 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.'
... on Thu May 28 07:54:06 2009amazing -- watching the text slowly update on the screen is very evocative; brings me right back to dialing into TCD on a 2400 baud modem
... on Wed May 27 22:18:07 2009a handy Firefox extension to FF-proof your web browsing experience, "They Live"-style
... on Tue May 26 14:32:40 2009heh. I have a similar cheesy thrift-shop painting at home
... on Tue May 26 09:28:02 2009reverse-engineered list of query parameters accepted in Google Maps URLs. great reference!
... on Mon May 25 14:40:36 2009Google paper on the construction and operation of Chubby, their distributed fault-tolerant database built using the Paxos consensus algorithm
... on Mon May 25 13:53:09 2009PhDware strikes again: 'OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos.'
... on Mon May 25 13:41:57 2009'RED checks HTTP resources to see how they use HTTP, makes suggestions, and finds common protocol mistakes.' source available
... on Mon May 25 11:37:32 2009something to bookmark for my copious free time (yeah right)
... on Mon May 25 10:44:48 2009interesting hack -- apply Map-Reduce idioms to UNIX command lines across multiple machines or cores (via jzawodny, who's obviously looking at a lot of command line stuff recently ;)
... on Mon May 25 09:14:12 2009I had no idea it could do this, using its "-P" switch. cool (via jzawodny)
... on Mon May 25 09:09:17 2009a Mulley-driven link campaign I can totally support; anyone researching the church's status here needs the context of the abuse committed by its members over the past 100 years. see http://www.mulley.net/2009/05/23/catholic-church-in-ireland/ for more background
... on Sun May 24 16:20:26 2009'Python-based Universal Plug-N-Play client application designed to discover, query and interact with UPNP devices, particularly Internet Gateway Devices (aka, routers). It can be used to audit UPNP-enabled devices on a network for possible vulnerabilities.' looks also useful for non-security-related UPNP twiddling, too
... on Sun May 24 15:44:16 2009'analyzing data from the U.S. Census [shows] that for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations -- to a block level -- identifies them uniquely.' are location-based services fundamentally incompatible with privacy
... on Thu May 21 12:05:32 2009test load used 90% gets and 10% sets. sub-millisecond response times
... on Thu May 21 09:16:04 2009I had no idea my favourite condiment wasn't Thai or Vietnamese in origin. there you go
... on Thu May 21 09:01:57 2009send a USB/eSATA storage device to Amazon and they'll bulk load data to S3 (or, in future, vice versa), for $80 + $2.49 per hour of transfer time. 'If loading your data over the Internet would take a week or more, you should consider using AWS Import/Export.' aka, sneakernet now a supported interface
... on Thu May 21 08:51:29 2009recommended, apparently. I have a stack of negs at home I've been meaning to scan
... on Wed May 20 16:15:43 2009yay
... on Wed May 20 14:01:05 2009best Irish ISP, by far (via Mulley)
... on Wed May 20 09:14:22 2009'The Ubuntu One server software is closed source. This is 2009. I thought we learnt this lesson with Launchpad.' oh dear....
... on Tue May 19 14:58:43 2009'Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.' bash.org for Twitter (via @colmbrophy)
... on Tue May 19 14:46:33 2009'This plugin enables Hudson to automatically provision new instances on EC2, based on the system demand. That is, if Hudson notices that your system is overloaded, it will provision new slaves on EC2, and when those instances go unused for a certain time period, it will shut them down. You can run all your slaves on EC2 if you want, or you can maintain your local build cluster and use EC2 as a reserve capacity.' awesome
... on Tue May 19 14:12:03 2009Ted Dziuba with teh funny: 'For someone like me, Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness.'
... on Tue May 19 12:10:19 2009James Hamilton, now at Amazon, then at MSN, gives a canonical list of best practices for large-scale operations-friendly server deployments, 'accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live.' a lot of good advice here (via Tony Finch)
... on Mon May 18 15:42:56 2009plenty of spirited (ho ho) discussion of the proposed massive wind-power project and its viability
... on Mon May 18 12:38:29 2009short bash wrappers for curl to ease debugging REST APIs. looks nice, but I'm not impressed at it's stomping on the venerable lwp GET/PUT/POST commands :(
... on Mon May 18 12:21:27 2009"The most fascinating abandoned man-made creations, and their story & location". my new favourite photoblog, and great name too (via JWZ)
... on Mon May 18 09:38:59 2009and about time too! (via Tony Finch)
... on Fri May 15 16:23:58 2009'In the context of software, the word “Enterprise” has now officially come to mean software that sucks.' uh, yep. and this is new? (via wmf)
... on Fri May 15 09:54:52 2009'A lot of [FF] canvassers are finding it tough on the doorstep.' 'be seen to highlight their points in a notebook', 'ask to record their name and email address so you can get back to them', 'when you show interest, they will be inclined to soften their [anti-FF] views'. also: show interest in kids, local sports team -- what a cliche! possibly fake, though
... on Fri May 15 09:05:26 2009'some expensive technologies such as photo-voltaic cells, which take energy from sunshine, can take up to 50 years to pay for themselves in saved energy costs. However, photo-voltaic cells often have a useful life of just 20 years, making them effectively “eco-bling”.'
... on Thu May 14 20:24:30 2009An Apachecon presentation from ColmMacC -- still has a good bit of useful advice!
... on Wed May 13 20:48:34 2009oh dear. crappy proprietary code ahoy -- in a breathalyzer
... on Wed May 13 20:19:04 2009uber-pessimist author of 'Reinventing Collapse', speaking on June 9th
... on Wed May 13 20:10:17 2009a super-simple MR wrapper in Ruby, wrapping Hadoop, inspired by Sawzall
... on Tue May 12 16:58:01 2009I've been having the same problem myself, and it seems they've scraped my address and added it to their db in contravention of EU law. just sent an opt-out, it had better work
... on Tue May 12 16:46:41 2009sounds great! Mind you I prefer the original title, "128 Geeky Places To See Before You Die"
... on Tue May 12 10:01:44 2009'distributed, and persistent key-value storage compatible with memcached', GPL'd, also featuring persistent storage, data replication, dynamic partitioning, failover, etc.
... on Tue May 12 09:31:36 2009now that's scale
... on Tue May 12 09:14:18 2009"store, sync and share". looks an awful lot like Canonical have just reinvented a linux-only version of Dropbox for some reason :( here's hoping it's open source at least, right?
... on Mon May 11 16:48:49 2009hashes utilitizing a tree structure, as used for efficient delta reconciliation in Amazon's Dynamo, in next-gen hash algorithm MD6, and Sun's ZFS filesystem. see also Tiger tree hashing, used in Gnutella and DC p2p algos
... on Mon May 11 13:10:39 2009next-gen hash function, allowing immense parallel computation of hashes using a Merkle-tree-like structure. funnily enough, in use right now by the Conficker worm! (via Richi)
... on Mon May 11 13:07:40 2009A blog from Atheist Ireland as part of their campaign against the proposed new anti-blasphemy law, to replace the unenforceable old law
... on Mon May 11 10:46:45 2009get memory to contain malicious code, then make process dump core; naive directory search then reads your core file, attempts to interpret it, and runs malicious commands. This is one reason why SpamAssassin looks for specific file extensions when dir-searching for configs
... on Mon May 11 09:17:24 2009'a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code', ie. rate limiting across a server farm built on memcached
... on Sun May 10 09:06:12 2009crawling all Google-Code-hosted projects tagged with Grails and automatically hosting C-I instances for them using Hudson. wow
... on Sat May 9 18:39:59 2009good intro
... on Fri May 8 09:23:33 2009now that both MD5 and SHA-1 are heading towards obsolescence, Debian are readying the long-term actions needed to take care of this. we'll need to do this in the ASF too. Is this like Y2K and C10K? SHA1K?
... on Thu May 7 18:53:01 2009neologism for recycled PR and wire copy masquerading as journalism; new study claims that it makes up the majority of UK newspaper home news coverage
... on Thu May 7 12:17:44 2009'I am the very model of a modern major Europhobe' a la Gilbert and Sullivan. excellent stuff!
... on Wed May 6 16:37:01 2009good demo of ZooKeeper
... on Wed May 6 16:04:17 2009'Catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses -- the fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.'
... on Wed May 6 09:20:10 2009Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard implemented using MooseX::MultiMethods (Moose multi-method dispatch). class! (via Marcus Ramberg)
... on Wed May 6 08:43:36 2009nifty! uses the Wii Homebrew Channel (ie the Twilight Hack savefile hack). apparently quite doable
... on Mon May 4 14:11:10 2009'fractal tree indexes' instead of B-trees. new to me
... on Sun May 3 20:12:15 2009pretty exhaustive walkthrough of Facebook's new photo storage backend, running on XFS. nice setup for a very specific use-case
... on Sat May 2 15:48:54 2009"I just feel lately your PARTIES have not been up to PAR." "...ty"
... on Sat May 2 15:31:46 2009good advice on things to avoid in providing a REST API from a Django app
... on Fri May 1 20:15:10 2009'An order-preserving partitioner, where keys are distributed to nodes in their natural order, has huge advantages over consistent hashing, particularly the ability to do range queries across the keys in the system'
... on Fri May 1 19:50:06 2009wow, impressive i14y; also Eucalyptus now includes an S3-like service
... on Fri May 1 19:45:43 2009vote for my mate Luke's latest TV programme. it's great
... on Fri May 1 19:16:00 2009good follow-up post regarding the shitstorm that erupted in the Ruby community after a talk entitled "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star" (with content about like you'd imagine). to be honest, I can't understand why the Rubyists are being so obtuse about this teenager-level stupidity
... on Thu Apr 30 20:50:34 2009Eucalyptus Systems to provide "commercial support, integration, and development services for Eucalyptus users while continuing to develop the core code base under an open source license." hopefully they won't do a Xen and kill the goose
... on Thu Apr 30 20:39:48 2009'Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern proposes to insert a new section into the Defamation Bill, stating: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.”' wtf?! what decade is this? attempting to capture the "80-year-olds who think it's 1979" voting sector?
... on Wed Apr 29 23:01:06 2009a new agile software-dev methodology. hmm
... on Wed Apr 29 08:37:37 2009holy shit. 'In an e-mail dated 22 January 2008, a Home Office official wrote again to Phorm and said: "I should be grateful if you would review the attached document, and let me know what you think." In January 2008 the Home Office thanks Phorm for comments and changes to its draft paper, which show the company making deletions and changes to the document.'
... on Wed Apr 29 08:01:47 2009including an attempted poisoning of Recaptcha, which the author claims it was immune to, and a final manual-CAPTCHA data-entry process towards the end
... on Tue Apr 28 15:55:05 2009'a collection of high-performance C transformations (base64, URL escaping, number-to-string conversion, hex, ASCII upper/lowercasing)', BSD-licensed and tested. heh. I remember writing a modp_b64_encode() years ago ;) (via Tony Finch)
... on Sun Apr 26 22:29:03 2009one teaspoon of salt; eight teaspoons of sugar; one litre water
... on Sun Apr 26 22:21:38 2009'As the names are so similar, searches for our company in the official Norwegian registry of just-about-anything (Brønnøysundregistrene) often resulted in potential customers looking up the wrong company. To prevent this confusion we recently changed the name of the old (non-LLC) company, and figured we'd use the opportunity for some harmless - or so we thought - fun.'
... on Sat Apr 25 19:20:17 2009WANT
... on Sat Apr 25 19:14:24 2009'Consumers, media and government associate Tesco Ireland almost exclusively with price differentials between Northern Ireland and Ireland.' Talk about a massive PR fail!
... on Sat Apr 25 13:54:18 2009ie. server-deployment sysadmin teams. 'If you want to participate in this ‘as a Service’ brave new world, and your plan to bring up new servers involves a meatcloud ssh'ing their little hearts out, you might as well give up now'
... on Sat Apr 25 13:46:42 2009a much better ending than the real one
... on Fri Apr 24 19:22:19 2009"Navn/foretaksnavn: ';UPDATE TAXRATE SET RATE = 0 WHERE
... on Fri Apr 24 13:27:15 2009the reason why Twitter, Y! (and others) shut down their OAuth services recently; a massive hole in the OAuth authorization protocol. this will be tricky to fix
... on Fri Apr 24 09:25:19 2009some of the worst "top tip" sidebars collected from lowbrow UK mags. even shittier than the made-up Viz ones
... on Fri Apr 24 09:13:24 2009useful benchmarks, and another plug for Tokyo Cabinet; over 4x as fast as writes to an on-disk BerkeleyDB via its Python bindings
... on Thu Apr 23 10:33:40 2009TheyWorkForYou ported to the Irish Oireachtas -- yay John!
... on Wed Apr 22 19:39:41 2009awesome black-box analysis of what it takes to evade the Content-ID system deployed by YouTube to block use of copyrighted music in third-party videos, using Audible Magic's acoustic fingerprinting. easy workaround: skip the first 30 seconds of the track or resample by 5%
... on Wed Apr 22 12:31:34 2009great analysis, particularly where it affects ZFS and their open-source products
... on Wed Apr 22 10:10:20 2009brilliant Irish political satire
... on Wed Apr 22 09:56:05 2009claimed 99.997% catch rate, FP rate of 1 in a million, supposedly. sounds like a major leap forward if true. wonder how it works...
... on Tue Apr 21 20:59:43 2009great stat (via Tony Finch)
... on Tue Apr 21 20:53:53 2009'Encrypted Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMPE or RTMPTE) is a proprietary protocol created by Macromedia used for streaming video and DRM.' apparently used by RTE's streaming video
... on Tue Apr 21 20:22:53 2009great investigation from Leonard Lin; Tokyo Tyrant gets a strong thumbs-up. also: 'based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is.' ha!
... on Tue Apr 21 09:06:02 2009you really know you've made it as open-source infrastructure when third parties are building custom off-the-shelf hardware platforms for your code. crazy stuff, though; isn't half of the idea of memcached that you can run it on COTS hardware?
... on Tue Apr 21 08:43:13 2009aka. PSHB. 'open, web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol. Includes a [python] open source reference implementation', from a mainly-Google-based team incl Brad Fitzpatrick. note: server-to-server only; there's no NAT or COMET support
... on Tue Apr 21 08:40:35 2009I did just the same thing myself last week
... on Mon Apr 20 16:03:03 2009'Launched recently at a cost of €230,000, listeners can buy tracks heard on the station'. the tracks are DRM-laden WMA files, so don't work on iPods or any other MP3 player. sounds like the record labels browbeat RTE on this one, resulting in just another useless DRM store that nobody will use. great way to spend my license fee :(
... on Mon Apr 20 09:34:56 2009every sink (output) also provides a built-in "monitor" source. This script records the currently-playing audio to WAV
... on Mon Apr 20 09:14:44 2009_very_ comprehensive Linux system monitoring tool; looks nifty! 'Collectl tries to do it all. You can choose to monitor any of a broad set of subsystems which currently include buddyinfo, cpu, disk, inodes, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, processes, quadrics, slabs, sockets and tcp.'
... on Mon Apr 20 09:05:00 2009'a browser extension that leverages the GPU to allow users to visually navigate photos, videos, games, and news stories from their favorite sites on a full screen 3D wall'. sounds nifty, must give this a try
... on Mon Apr 20 08:53:13 2009of cancer at the age of 78. one less genius alive
... on Mon Apr 20 08:40:19 2009'Part of apertures of metal band became digital display screen. Metal band and digital figures mingle together in proportion naturally. Without the face of "timepiece", it displays figures only when needed but also quite vague existence, "time"'
... on Fri Apr 17 15:14:54 2009'"Talking gross numbers that come directly to the band, we have made more money already than we have on the last record in four years," said [Metric]'s co-manager. "Without any intermediary, we're making 77 cents on the dollar for every record we sell" on iTunes. Under a label deal [...] Metric would have earned closer to 22 cents.'
... on Fri Apr 17 08:41:43 2009the artist's childhood photos, digitally manipulated to feature the artist as an adult alongside. fantastic (via Waxy)
... on Thu Apr 16 19:13:57 2009amazing first-person report of echolocation in humans: the author calls it "FlashSonar", and teaches other blind people how to use it
... on Thu Apr 16 14:38:10 2009reading notes for the 50-year-old Hugo-Award-winning SF classic, dealing with theology, science, and Cold War terror of a nuclear armageddon
... on Thu Apr 16 09:07:59 2009'you may request specifically that your website is not scanned by Webwise. To request that your website not be scanned by Webwise, please email: website-exclusion{at}webwise.com'
... on Wed Apr 15 15:40:00 2009Amazon have opted-out of Phorm tampering for all of their domains, after prompting by ORG, along with LiveJournal, mySociety and Netmums
... on Wed Apr 15 15:36:25 2009interesting reflections on teleworking and its practicality. 'Respect [between local and remote workers] comes from knowledge and the question is: does your culture support a constant and consistent flow of knowledge to and from the remote worker?'
... on Wed Apr 15 13:53:37 2009free open-source project Git hosting, apparently itself AGPL-licensed (as opposed to the closed-source but prettier GitHub)
... on Wed Apr 15 10:29:23 2009'I am going to tweet 3 new songs this week. I can't be bothered with all this trying to sell you music. It wastes valuable time'. swiftly followed by 'I'm gonna be in so much trouble'
... on Wed Apr 15 09:50:11 2009according to these benchmarks the java.nio implementation of epoll()-based async I/O is 25% slower (albeit more C10K-scalable of course) than the blocking thread-per-fd model of java.io, on an NPTL Linux JVM. good to know
... on Wed Apr 15 09:06:40 2009via James Hamilton. some details on BigTable
... on Tue Apr 14 13:56:21 2009'On Friday the French National Assembly rejected the HADOPI law, which would impose the toughest “three strikes” copyright enforcement law in the world on French Internet users.' phew
... on Tue Apr 14 09:57:56 2009Irish cable-TV company UPC have rolled out Nagravision 2 encryption, finally breaking the dodgy "D-Box" decoder boxes sold on a massive scale throughout Ireland for several years now. can't see it staying hacked for long though. NTL's comment: http://url.ie/1g0q
... on Tue Apr 14 09:56:25 2009another dataviz of sorting algorithms, avoiding animation and instead coming up with a nice line-based viz. interesting, but wtf no merge sort ;)
... on Tue Apr 14 08:42:38 2009if BoI need to verify a transaction out-of-band, they send an SMS to the cardholder asking them to call an unpublished number which diverts to a UK number before demanding all their card details; exactly the modus operandi of a phish. wtf are they thinking?
... on Tue Apr 14 08:39:49 2009'Go back in time wearing this and you'll invent heavier-than-air flight! YOU'LL discover penicillin. YOU'LL be the first to isolate aluminum. Did you know aluminum used to be more valuable than gold? YOU'RE GONNA BE RICH.'
... on Sun Apr 12 20:45:01 2009essentially mandating IWF-style (ie. half-assed and broken) filtering in all EU countries, I would imagine
... on Fri Apr 10 20:38:58 2009very nice visualizations of insertion, selection, bubble, shell, merge, heap, quick and quick3 sorts
... on Fri Apr 10 16:23:17 2009nice, custom sysadmin dataviz, via Rich Skrenta
... on Fri Apr 10 09:18:13 2009A top-secret 1960's spy plane project called OXCART. 'The shape of OXCART was unprecedented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, "UFO".' but then -- isn't that what they'd _want_ you to think? ;)
... on Fri Apr 10 08:58:07 2009similar to Google's "Unladen Swallow" port of Python. results aren't stellar -- yet -- but there's plenty of room -- and possible contracts
... on Thu Apr 9 19:50:22 2009much needed. 'The App Engine Cron Service allows you to configure regularly scheduled tasks that operate at defined times or regular intervals.'
... on Wed Apr 8 12:09:45 2009comprehensive all-in-one perl script giving easy command-line access to Amazon EC2 and S3; very nicely packaged -- installs with a single "curl" command! brilliant
... on Wed Apr 8 11:41:43 2009certainly not all roses. (via Tony Finch)
... on Tue Apr 7 16:47:38 2009on one of their legacy NetApps? hmm
... on Tue Apr 7 16:39:03 2009ditching NetApp and Akamai, rolling their own massive-blob storage cloud
... on Tue Apr 7 16:37:28 2009'Looking in, it’s clear that the [computer] game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does.' +1; a lot of people, including myself, have also come to that conclusion, over the years
... on Tue Apr 7 08:38:26 2009fantastic research notes; they've identified a lot of niggles and problems with the existing queueing systems out there
... on Mon Apr 6 16:14:52 2009awesome! full artist/album/track data for decades of dance music releases, released to the public domain
... on Mon Apr 6 13:56:22 2009'Writing messaging systems that work under any combination of flows, on any number of machines, and in multiple different reliability scenarios ... is a more interesting problem. Page-to-disk is a way to make RabbitMQ better and address more scenarios.'
... on Mon Apr 6 11:48:58 2009great news! we can buy electronics on Amazon again
... on Sun Apr 5 21:55:27 2009'it has raised the ire of Internet users, who are now campaigning for Street View enthusiasts from across the UK to descend on the village to snap their own perfectly legal photographs.' ha!
... on Sun Apr 5 21:54:35 2009another developer moves! a lot of people doing it recently, which worries me; will there be any top expertise left outside of the Bay Area at this rate? we need diversity
... on Fri Apr 3 15:43:39 2009fetch the pitchforks! Street View bin worryin' my sheep! Buckinghamshire yokels fear change
... on Fri Apr 3 09:04:19 2009'COBOL ON COGS SUPPORTS STANDARD TERMINALS (VT100 AND IBM 3200) IN THE MOST USEFUL SCREEN CONFIGURATIONS SUCH AS 80X20 AND 40X16' (via Nishad)
... on Fri Apr 3 08:45:45 2009hahaha, spot on
... on Thu Apr 2 16:35:52 2009'several basic AI techniques implemented with short, open-source Python code recipes ... For each technique, learn the basic operating principle, discuss an approach using Python, and review a worked out-example. We'll cover database mining using neural nets, automated categorization with a naive Bayesian classifier, solving popular puzzles with depth-first and breath-first [sic] searches, solving more complex puzzles with constraint propagation, and playing a popular game using a probing search strategy.' video: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947373/
... on Thu Apr 2 12:29:52 2009excellent! run Hadoop jobs on EC2, with data hosted on S3. essentially, AWS have integrated a Hadoop dashboard to provide a great web-based and command-line UI
... on Thu Apr 2 09:04:51 2009best blog ever. Narcissistic meathead 'actor/model' type waxes lyrical on how Angelina Jolie is '“mother hot”, rather than “stripper hot”': 'I would probably rate her an 8.5-9 on my looks scale. I am not that sure that I would even feel the need to come up and initiate a conversation with her if I met her out somewhere.' 'I couldn’t really say that she would stick out for me if I saw her at a hot club like 1Oak or Rosebar.' The entire blog is solid gold idiocy; I'd swear it was fake, but apparently not
... on Thu Apr 2 08:58:03 2009GOOG's servers include built-in 12V batteries (and of course lots of velcro). video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgRWURIxgbU (via wmf)
... on Thu Apr 2 08:47:07 2009great idea from Maciej Ceglowski
... on Wed Apr 1 21:29:11 2009hooray. I requested this ages ago, it's now being implemented
... on Wed Apr 1 18:39:20 2009'The controversy surrounding the Open Cloud Manifesto demonstrates the risk of trying to build interoperability behind closed doors and through exclusionary practices. Such environments are not conducive to building consensus, which is one of the key ingredients of successful standards.'
... on Wed Apr 1 09:23:26 2009more on IMVU's continuous-deployment concept. interesting that they halt SVN commits on CI build failure, that seems extreme
... on Wed Apr 1 09:15:14 2009Boards.ie a la Facebook, for April 1. thing is, I think I prefer this UI
... on Wed Apr 1 08:33:03 2009awesome, if terrifying research from Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson on Chinese cyber-surveillance of the Tibetan movement. 'we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They used social phishing to install rootkits on a number of machines and then downloaded sensitive data. People in Tibet may have died as a result.'
... on Mon Mar 30 09:36:37 2009ie. 'the moderation technique of hiding the activity of troublemakers and trolls from everyone but the troll themselves' (via waxy)
... on Thu Mar 26 19:34:20 2009'a collection of read-only Git mirrors of Apache codebases' -- including SpamAssassin. must give this a go
... on Thu Mar 26 13:53:45 2009excellent. long may it continue
... on Thu Mar 26 12:24:56 2009'Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and I [Fernando Pereira] argue that we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.'
... on Thu Mar 26 10:19:34 2009a "Sun Modular Datacenter", ie. Sun's datacenter-in-a-shipping-container, with 63 Sun Fire x4500s running Solaris 10 with ZFS
... on Thu Mar 26 10:10:46 2009"what the Australian government's secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist has to do with Germany is a mystery. This case is a prime example of multiple governments collaborating in support of censorship." worrying.
... on Wed Mar 25 20:18:55 2009well-written worked-through example of a classic memcached-backed libevent front-end caching system
... on Wed Mar 25 19:59:10 2009'Gardai were in the [Today FM] offices yesterday looking for email communications between the team and the artist. According to D’Arcy the team were told [..] that “the powers that be want action taken”." ffs! how's about taking action against the fraudsters who've bankrupted our country instead? appalling diversionary tactics
... on Wed Mar 25 11:13:52 2009'Eclipse extensions automatically configure remote debugger connections for diagnosing problems and debugging software run in the cloud' -- ie. you can set a breakpoint on code running remotely, at EC2. that's pretty awesome (via Steve Loughran)
... on Wed Mar 25 10:15:13 2009YES
... on Wed Mar 25 09:54:33 2009looks like AllMyData are facing a money crunch ("focussed on keeping costs down"). hopefully this isn't bad news for Tahoe, the fault-tolerant open-source distributed filesystem -- or indeed for Zooko himself
... on Wed Mar 25 09:45:25 2009the national broadcaster apologises, on air, for a news story covering the 'paintings of an Taoiseach in the nude' prank. wtf!
... on Wed Mar 25 09:31:31 2009“We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship,” iiNet managing director Michael Malone said. “It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as ‘unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes.”
... on Tue Mar 24 13:45:18 2009and, most surprising of all, it _works_. holy crap. (thanks Antoin!)
... on Tue Mar 24 12:09:48 2009some prankster put up rather disturbing paintings of Ireland's taoiseach in the National Gallery and Royal Hibernian Academy. "'It's reasonably well painted. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen,' conceded James O'Halloran of Adam's Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers."
... on Tue Mar 24 09:52:03 2009excellent. good result from their blackout, then
... on Mon Mar 23 17:22:41 2009Rackspace had to firefight over the weekend to deal with scaling issues with JungleDisk users backing up to their Mosso Cloud Files service. now fixed with a JungleDisk upgrade (2.60c): http://blog.jungledisk.com/2009/03/23/jungle-disk-260c-released-cloud-files-access-restored/
... on Mon Mar 23 11:39:56 2009open source intra-project poaching between the Puppet and Chef deployment automation projects
... on Mon Mar 23 09:54:38 2009the hand-curation of its source knowledge base sounds incredibly labour-intensive (and expensive)
... on Mon Mar 23 09:39:53 2009'i know my God will forgive because i pray to him to replenish the pockets of my clients [read: victims] with double of whatever they loss'
... on Mon Mar 23 09:35:41 2009"Virtual servers for MIT". bit like a homegrown EC2, using software they wrote called Invirt ( http://invirt.mit.edu/ ). wonder why they didn't use Eucalyptus (via wmf)
... on Sun Mar 22 21:02:28 2009watching TV with Twitter-as-commentary in the background. this sounds a lot like an old idea of Danny O'Brien's, funnily enough!
... on Sat Mar 21 22:19:10 2009the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers of Clay County,KY were all arrested and indicted for 'changing the votes at the voting machine', and showing others how to do it, over the course of 2002-2006; they'd send the voters away at the confirmation screen, then go back and change their votes
... on Fri Mar 20 14:14:23 2009"the easiest way to manage the cloud". supports EC2 and slicehost servers, provides metrics, graphing, and basic monitoring. looks very nice! (via JK)
... on Thu Mar 19 16:35:04 2009SSDs lose performance noticeably after an initial honeymoon period, once their block map starts to contain previously-allocated blocks. benchmarks for this factor will be critical in SSD measurement
... on Thu Mar 19 10:28:39 2009cool. looking forward to this settling down so I can play with it
... on Wed Mar 18 17:16:11 2009'treat such data as a potential risk, that is a suspicious source of malware.' 'mainly targeted at people who are using ClamAV to filter web traffic.' (via fanf)
... on Wed Mar 18 09:59:15 2009good writeup of the current state of play
... on Wed Mar 18 09:43:53 2009htop (top with a fancy UI), iftop (top for IPs on the network) and iotop (top for per-process I/O statistics). hadn't heard of htop or iotop, so this is useful. all are "apt-get"able on 8.10. (update: Craig reminded me of "atop" -- another great util, with excellent historical process monitoring ability)
... on Wed Mar 18 09:30:33 2009very interesting! lowest price is $0.015/hr, ie. $10/month; quite a lot cheaper than the EC2 option. no equivalent to S3 though
... on Mon Mar 16 21:19:05 2009vote for my mate Luke's film: "Psych Ward". it's great!
... on Mon Mar 16 20:59:37 2009impressive libevent-based Python async-I/O framework. looks like it hides async code's complexity nicely (via SimonW)
... on Mon Mar 16 15:16:44 2009epic LWN thread on this ext4 misfeature. I'm ambivalent: it's perfectly POSIXly-compliant for ext4 to do this, but it _will_ cause data loss for me. I'll be using 'nodelalloc' if this is still in a released version
... on Mon Mar 16 09:53:33 2009neato LVM hack
... on Sun Mar 15 12:34:13 2009doesn't sound great. this site reckons it'd take 21 years to break even on your investment if you chose external wall insulation
... on Sun Mar 15 10:45:02 2009'What it does not say is that Irish ISPs will fight any attempt by the music industry to coerce them into blocking websites of Irma's choice. It could have said this. But it deliberately didn't. Because ISPs will not rule this course of action out.'
... on Sat Mar 14 15:44:07 2009a new alternative scoring plugin -- learn mail classification (ham or spam) based on an SVM applied to the SpamAssassin rules hit, instead of the static "additive scores with 5-point threshold" model. very nifty!
... on Fri Mar 13 15:32:41 2009Graham Cluley of Sophos weighs in
... on Fri Mar 13 09:57:31 2009upcoming Beeb program demonstrates the use of a 22000-node botnet to send spam and DDOS-attack a host, and one lawyer asserts that their programme-makers' actions were illegal
... on Fri Mar 13 09:56:08 2009'Erlangst (n): The fear that (subject) is not smart enough to program in, or even comprehend, the Erlang programming language.'
... on Thu Mar 12 13:16:06 2009'designed to provide a home for all information that an entrepreneur might find useful when starting a company in Ireland.'. Good idea Joe!
... on Thu Mar 12 12:44:25 2009bulk-buy EC2 instance-hours in advance; either 1 year for $325 or 3 years for $500. great news, much more competitive now against a dedicated colo server
... on Thu Mar 12 11:04:52 2009something worth checking if you admin an SSL site; "Session ID Length" == 0 is the tell-tale
... on Wed Mar 11 20:47:38 2009'Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford [.. notes that] students [..] prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.'
... on Wed Mar 11 20:45:23 2009'Building an exabyte data center is feasible. All it takes is money - $400 million with all the goodies - and power. Time to readjust the mental model of storage possibility. Other than the NSA’s acres of disk at Fort Meade though, I’m not aware of any exabyte data centers.'
... on Wed Mar 11 12:45:33 2009a little helper app for Ubuntu. cute (via Danny)
... on Tue Mar 10 20:50:38 2009powered by a wind generator and some solar panels, to be exact, in the remote northwest of Scotland (plenty of wind there!)
... on Tue Mar 10 20:47:16 2009nice contextual hack
... on Tue Mar 10 20:31:48 2009pen-pushing on the polar frontier
... on Tue Mar 10 10:27:00 2009'a fingerprint of an audio, video or image file that is mathematically based on the audio or visual content contained within. Unlike cryptographic hash functions which rely on the avalanche effect of small changes in input leading to drastic changes in the output, perceptual hashes are "close" to one another if the inputs are visually or auditorily similar.'
... on Tue Mar 10 09:29:12 2009'"Asking an ISP to control and assess what internet users can and cannot download is just as wrong as asking the post office to open and read letters and decide what should and should not be delivered," said Telenor.'
... on Mon Mar 9 13:06:02 2009go Lance ;)
... on Fri Mar 6 12:08:57 2009'not one of the kids in this photo has their eyes on the President and his wife (woah, that felt good to type), but on the tiny LCD screen on the back of their camera.' I've noticed similar scenes at gigs recently fwiw
... on Fri Mar 6 11:52:45 2009application of the BLAST pattern-discovery algorithm to malware. interesting, I should take a look to see if I can steal any bits for my "BLAST applied to anti-spam" code ;) (via adulau)
... on Fri Mar 6 08:53:52 2009very nifty-looking code-review tool. supports R-T-C and C-T-R, lots of subscription/notification options, real-time web-based inline chat, open data store, and custom script triggers (via Henning on ASF members list)
... on Thu Mar 5 09:43:16 2009Mark Risher and Jay Pujara @Y! Mail talk about their use of Hadoop's Pig and Streaming products in anti-spam number-crunching
... on Thu Mar 5 09:00:27 2009the ruby-oauth gem now has 27 forks on github. ffs
... on Thu Mar 5 08:42:35 2009Debian bug #247734. Some Debian guy decided to "fix" perceived inelegances in his laptop's hostname stuff by making up a new 127/8 address, unfortunately breaking lots of stuff down the line. wonderful. This got into Ubuntu how?
... on Wed Mar 4 22:35:45 2009like sparkling water? here's how to make it yourself, on the cheap; mantid and usagi swear by it
... on Wed Mar 4 18:11:24 2009'deployment strategy for Capistrano which combines rsync with a remote cache, allowing fast deployments from Subversion repositories behind firewalls.' Shame -- deploying direct from VC is a brilliant idea. We should be moving to git to permit this, instead
... on Wed Mar 4 14:01:26 2009'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!
... on Tue Mar 3 09:40:38 2009built on Tokyo Tyrant, performance comparable to memcached, scale by adding nodes, supports hot backup/restore, used in production by Plurk.com, mixi.jp and scribd.com. interesting
... on Mon Mar 2 13:32:09 2009actually a very good list. some interesting papers here I hadn't heard of, particularly _ An Experimental Evaluation of The Assumption of Independence in Multi-Version Programming_ (1986)
... on Mon Mar 2 11:41:55 2009good post on various approaches to code optimization of a particularly common C idiom -- strlen(). I'd never seen the glibc "add to unsigned long to detect zeroes" trick before -- very nifty!
... on Mon Mar 2 10:20:36 2009hmm. a lot of PR spooge, but not a very good deal; Airtricity are 8.4% cheaper per kWh and 11% cheaper than ESB. (UPDATE: I was wrong! Airtricity are quoting their prices ex-VAT, annoyingly. Bord Gais are indeed cheaper)
... on Sun Mar 1 17:06:33 2009Bruce Sterling says, "buy a good bed". great stuff
... on Fri Feb 27 21:16:31 2009Irish and UK Xbox Live users can now download movies. unfortunately, they only offer 30 of them! FAIL
... on Fri Feb 27 13:54:30 2009what a hack! basically using MySQL as a replicated, highly-scalable storage engine and ignoring many of the RDBMS features to avoid schema change locks
... on Fri Feb 27 10:20:59 2009open source Spotify client; its developers reversed the Spotify closed protocol. however, it's just blocked users with 'Free' accounts, which renders it useless; hopefully someone will fork and fix this soon
... on Thu Feb 26 13:40:43 2009'a package containing customizeable network front-ends for mail servers': SMTP, QMQP, QMTP, POP3. a bit like qpsmtpd written in C. JL has apparently written a SpamAssassin plugin for it
... on Thu Feb 26 13:16:01 2009web-based code review tool for Git-based projects. very nice
... on Thu Feb 26 12:20:34 2009heh. quite a nice technical response; 'such sweet revenge would take the form of blocking access to the websites of EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner and IRMA, among others. Their approach: you piss on our turf, we'll piss on yours.'
... on Thu Feb 26 11:46:41 2009"Web 3.0 is going to be about filtering Web 2.0". nice
... on Thu Feb 26 09:46:27 2009entitled 'let's ensure that we have an uncensored Internet for Ireland'
... on Wed Feb 25 17:35:34 2009in full, as a 3-page PDF scan
... on Wed Feb 25 16:50:16 2009wow, this is really blowing up. great stuff ;)
... on Wed Feb 25 15:51:49 2009they simply intercepted DNS requests for their zones, returning 127.0.0.1. using OpenDNS evades that
... on Wed Feb 25 13:27:31 2009two scientists, Prof. Susan Greenfield and Dr. Aric Sigman, promulgating the worst kinds of fake science. disappointing
... on Wed Feb 25 10:56:25 2009the use of artificially-induced video compression artifacts for artistic effect, as seen in Chairlift's "Evident Utensil" and Kanye's "Welcome to Heartbreak" videos
... on Wed Feb 25 10:34:01 2009'CharConversionException: You have been trying to incinerate something noncombustible. It is also possible that you have tried turning yourself into a fish, but that's rare.'
... on Wed Feb 25 10:16:12 2009good scaling rules-of-thumb
... on Tue Feb 24 23:44:18 2009"It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again". hilarious! dicks
... on Tue Feb 24 17:52:35 2009IRMA will provide Irish ISPs with a list of alleged file-sharing sites, and will take legal action if those sites are not blocked. Eircom at least are allegedly legally required to comply. need to look into this a bit more, but this sounds incredibly serious at first glance
... on Tue Feb 24 17:18:31 2009'Message Partners released into the public domain the world’s most extensive offensive language list for use with a spam filter. This offensive word list includes hundreds of thousands of permutations of sexually explicit language.'
... on Tue Feb 24 16:01:22 2009'a place to explore, get gritty, tinker, experiment, and test out ideas for Facebook Platform', 5 March, Digital Exchange
... on Tue Feb 24 15:04:57 2009bookmarking, in case I ever have to fly Ryanair in future (hopefully not)
... on Tue Feb 24 12:39:14 2009'We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this. If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things'
... on Tue Feb 24 12:33:59 2009really need to get off my arse and get writing
... on Tue Feb 24 12:11:46 2009presentation by GAE's Ryan Barrett
... on Tue Feb 17 10:33:12 2009it included parts of an old perl module, breaking anyone who uses CPAN. nice work, Apple
... on Tue Feb 17 10:10:40 2009recommended by katyusha and mrn!
... on Mon Feb 16 17:51:28 2009more cheery stuff from Dmitry Orlov, this time in much greater depth than the "Collapse Gap" slides
... on Mon Feb 16 14:13:26 2009Django community's take on Capistrano. looks really complex, configured by writing a load of Python. ugh
... on Mon Feb 16 11:02:45 2009using nginx, Apache 2, Django, memcached, mod_wsgi and PostgreSQL. interesting to see virtualenv in use; in Perl-land, ExtUtils::MakeMaker takes care of this for us nicely using "perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=...". also, deploying directly from a "git push"
... on Mon Feb 16 11:00:20 2009the correct way to produce a sort index given a set of [ positive_ratings, negative_ratings ] pairs; apparently it's the lower bound of the Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter. great, this may work well for SA's rule-QA system too
... on Fri Feb 13 16:26:53 2009'Free Software and related commentary from the Nordic region.' I wonder if there's room for one of these for the Isles, ie. UK and .ie? although mind you planetilug probably takes care of the .ie part already
... on Fri Feb 13 16:22:30 2009Steve Loughran with a little bad news on yesterday's post. 'CI is like a chainsaw: very powerful, can achieve great things, but if handled badly you can cut your own legs off and that hurts.'
... on Fri Feb 13 15:15:07 2009also: 'The Traffic department also recommends that all cycle lanes be inspected annually. Several collisions occurred when cyclists were forced to move out of the lane to avoid potholes or sunken gullies.'
... on Thu Feb 12 12:26:27 2009an absurd situation, and unlikely to improve. I'm surprised eBay or Amazon Ireland aren't kicking up a fuss about this
... on Wed Feb 11 17:08:34 2009nialler9 says: ‘I would have posted an MP3 but IRMA asked me to take down some major label related tunes last week'
... on Wed Feb 11 10:38:16 2009'2030 Vision is [..] the Strategic Transport Plan being developed by the Dublin Transportation Office for the Greater Dublin Area. It will be at the heart of all transport planning in the region from 2010 until 2030. [..] We wish to consult you in the development of the new transport strategy.' Give your $.02 here, online
... on Wed Feb 11 10:22:52 2009big thumbs up from Artur, jzawodny and others for CouchDB. interesting thread of comments from people using it for "real-world" stuff
... on Wed Feb 11 09:58:18 2009An interesting, and counter-intuitive, demo of road safety statistics from Colm
... on Wed Feb 11 09:21:59 2009press "Help" then the yellow button. very useful for when it loses BBC4, which it's just done _again_
... on Mon Feb 9 22:43:34 2009extremely detailed, lots of useful tips here (via mattb)
... on Mon Feb 9 21:29:15 2009paper on "transactional flash" -- transactions implemented at the filesystem level using useful properties of SSD storage. nice research
... on Mon Feb 9 13:27:06 2009an interview with @blaine after his relocation to Antrim. not a great article, really. in fairness, he's obvs never had to relocate from Europe to the US; I've done it, and it's as much of a bureaucratic minefield in my experience
... on Mon Feb 9 09:44:22 2009'More likely there's something wrong with the whole design of network systems based on message queues, and we need to start developing alternatives.' blimey! sounds like an atrocious implementation, or possibly AMQP itself; I've had great results with many (non-AMQP-based) queue systems
... on Fri Feb 6 10:51:26 2009interview with MS UK's Head Of Mobile attempting, and failing, to justify their DRM policy. Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service - and they're locked to my phone - what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'
... on Thu Feb 5 17:35:31 2009also applies to laptops. they truly are the most customer-hostile company in the world
... on Thu Feb 5 10:59:18 2009he resigned due to the botched MySQL 5.1 release, and slowness in Sun's actions to 'fix our community and development problems'. regardless, he says they're parting on good terms. His new company, Monty Program Ab, will be run by http://zak.greant.com/hacking-business-models -- cool
... on Thu Feb 5 10:26:12 2009why was an important piece of internet infrastructure gambling on stocks? oh dear
... on Wed Feb 4 13:40:44 2009well-defined semantics for callbacks over HTTP, as seen in Google Code, Amazon Checkout, PayPal's IPN and more
... on Wed Feb 4 12:05:02 2009bookmarking this a bit late, but going by the Google Code site it seems to be taking off quite nicely, and heading for the Apache Incubator
... on Tue Feb 3 17:14:59 2009RAII syntactic sugar. I like
... on Tue Feb 3 15:27:51 2009'The record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements in place with all other ISPs in Ireland.'
... on Tue Feb 3 11:49:28 2009'Airtricity has not taken legal action against any bloggers in relation to information posted about this incident.' well, that's good of them! wtf
... on Tue Feb 3 10:26:16 2009safethread is a nice patch for Python 3000 implementing a new approach to concurrency in the Python internals. I like the "branching-as-children" approach to threading, using variable scope to enforce the thread lifecycle
... on Tue Feb 3 09:51:52 2009leave it broken. hmm!
... on Sun Feb 1 22:33:46 2009particularly for Java; reportedly a few of the open-source Bloom filter impls use poor choices of hash algorithm
... on Fri Jan 30 10:06:04 2009'The last thing we need is to deploy a system designed to burn all available cycles, consuming electricity and generating [CO2...] in order to produce small amounts of bitbux to get emails or spams through.' Good point
... on Fri Jan 30 09:53:42 2009Good going for Caelen, Dave and the lads, especially given the current economic situation!
... on Thu Jan 29 23:35:03 2009it didn't work out so well for him. I have to concur to some degree; in my experience, GSOC mentoring is hard work
... on Thu Jan 29 14:37:31 2009new PlanetLab/Google collaboration with various web-based tools to measure your internet connection -- including a handy test to see if your ISP slows down BitTorrent
... on Thu Jan 29 10:50:16 2009Mike Arrington finds himself victimised by crazies -- 'I write about technology startups and news. In any sane world that shouldn’t make me someone who has to deal with death threats and being spat on. It shouldn’t require me to absorb more verbal abuse than a human being can realistically deal with.' holy crap
... on Wed Jan 28 12:21:37 2009via "I Hardly Know Her", a sister site to muxtape.com. great UI for viewing a set of Flickr photos
... on Wed Jan 28 10:57:19 2009'Unit Testing for PostgreSQL'. application of the perl-style TAP unit test protocol for testing an SQL database, good idea
... on Wed Jan 28 09:49:33 2009fair dues to Bebo for pulling the wool over the eyes of the ad agencies, if this account is true. suckers!
... on Wed Jan 28 09:45:25 2009+1, I've basically done this, too (apart from my JuK-based music system). good thread of comments, too; everyone pretty much agrees that KDE made a mess of the KDE4 release :(
... on Mon Jan 26 13:10:49 2009omg this is brilliant -- a Greasemonkey user-script containing a neural network, *in Javascript*, to solve MegaUpload's CAPTCHAs in your browser. this may be the coolest userscript ever
... on Fri Jan 23 21:51:33 2009The Times got pranked by an anonymous Irishman
... on Fri Jan 23 21:03:12 2009is Google losing its knack? Twitter/Facebook more popular than Google during the inauguration; Hulu provide a better search experience than YouTube (although not so much for non-USians). interesting theory
... on Fri Jan 23 09:51:14 2009nice and concise, with real-world deployment data. I wish this had been around when I was evaluating AMQP systems in PutPlace
... on Thu Jan 22 11:17:44 2009really great advice for tech-section interviewees from Adrian Weckler
... on Wed Jan 21 20:08:51 2009re 'X# - XML oriented programming language; the foundation of an open source Enterprise Mashup Server, CRM and Groupware Suite' -- 'When you do a mashup, you're supposed to get your peanut butter in my chocolate, not lodge your fork in my goddamned eye socket'
... on Wed Jan 21 17:45:02 2009'screen for remote X apps.' sounds better-maintained and more usable than xmove or NX, to boot (via adulau)
... on Wed Jan 21 10:09:39 2009'a Firefox extension that helps you write screen scrapers for [semweb scraping platform] Piggy Bank.' Nice idea -- hook directly into the browser to specify scraping rules.
... on Wed Jan 21 10:05:59 2009great article by @mat on the benefits -- and dangers -- of pervasive geotagging
... on Wed Jan 21 09:55:38 2009possibly the first AppEngine site run by spammers -- a fake storefront, reportedly
... on Tue Jan 20 15:41:05 2009free Twitter backup site; nicely done. runs daily; doesn't need your Twitter password; and exports to text and HTML
... on Tue Jan 20 15:13:15 2009exhaustive, with great comments from many of the implementors
... on Tue Jan 20 11:20:46 2009wow, the "communications manager" for the Green Party is an unrepentant asshat. 'some bloggers have developed their own set of rules about how they should be approached and the e-mail in question fell foul of these rules.' Nice non-apology there! Entirely wrong -- Unsolicited Bulk Email is spam, even if you're a politician
... on Tue Jan 20 10:18:38 2009'Torrents of RTE, TV3, TG4 content'. a great collection of Irish TV programmes -- unclear how well they're seeded, or their rip quality, though
... on Tue Jan 20 10:09:11 2009'We keep a record of your visits to Amazon Associate web pages that have Amazon.com content links on them. Among other things, we use this information to better personalize your web experience and improve our Amazon services.' uh, *no*
... on Mon Jan 19 15:24:35 2009Article by Adrian Weckler -- Komplett's returns policy sounds pretty good in particular. and ~50% of complaints at the European Consumer Centre are relating to delivery problems -- that's shocking :(
... on Mon Jan 19 15:05:07 2009wow, the Rails community have really reinvented a lot of wheels ;)
... on Mon Jan 19 14:39:18 2009massive leak of gripe mails from ex-Googlers about why they left the company
... on Mon Jan 19 10:07:52 2009'I decided it would be great to try and follow one [Kiva.org microloan] through the system from start to finish, for the benefit of my colleagues who I coaxed into making a loan, and for myself, and for anyone else who is interested.'
... on Mon Jan 19 10:01:21 2009well, that's a business model I suppose
... on Fri Jan 16 09:59:04 2009due to another overbroad IWF block
... on Thu Jan 15 16:58:57 2009paperghost strongly doubting that Matt Knox was quite so squeaky-clean as his recent interview would suggest
... on Thu Jan 15 15:04:17 2009short paper from Tom White with post-mortems of some common failures of HDFS in the field, and some best practices to avoid them
... on Thu Jan 15 13:53:34 2009'if you complain to abuse@ somebody or other dot com, and more than three hours after that, you get more phish or spam from the same infected machine, then you should have a legal right to claim €10 from them. No need to prove malice, no need to prove actual damage, just "here's the bill". A similar scheme has largely sorted out late flights, cancellations and overbookings among cheap airlines in Europe, because now you get €250 [if] EasyJet or Ryanair bump you off the flight to Barcelona.'
... on Thu Jan 15 12:16:07 2009exposing the rip-off pricing of products sold in both Ireland and the UK, with much more expensive prices in .ie. Boots Sanex deodorant is the current worst offender, at UKP0.99 vs EUR2.99
... on Thu Jan 15 11:06:41 2009interesting to note that spam rates from botnets unaffected by the McColo shutdown went up during that time, indicating that the spammers are simply renting botnet time and their spam is relatively portable to other engines
... on Thu Jan 15 08:19:59 2009ASL-licensed DHT from LinkedIn
... on Wed Jan 14 22:09:30 2009excellent research by Des Traynor. oops! the hole has since been patched
... on Wed Jan 14 15:14:43 2009book on home brewing, recommended by Glynn Foster
... on Wed Jan 14 13:34:11 2009using GCalDaemon -- this works very nicely. it'd be nicer if it was built into KOrganizer, but hey
... on Wed Jan 14 12:20:56 2009great interview. 'In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?' 'Um, run UNIX.'
... on Wed Jan 14 10:48:19 2009the evidence looks pretty convincing
... on Tue Jan 13 22:55:39 2009'a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.' looks quite sensible, BSD licensed, Python, works on Linux, Solaris, OSX and FreeBSD (via Conall)
... on Tue Jan 13 14:26:38 2009Impressive N-way sync algorithm for syncing text. 'Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.'
... on Mon Jan 12 12:48:02 2009'(Excerpts courtesy of William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, and Generouss Q. Factotum.)'
... on Fri Jan 9 16:45:57 2009Gordon Luk: 'I’m done with microformats. From now on, i’m either building separate developer tools and relationship, or i’m not'
... on Fri Jan 9 11:16:54 2009a nice AJAXy web-based GUI for EC2. awesome! Even a commandline weenie like myself can see how useful this is
... on Fri Jan 9 09:43:12 2009A talk by Eric Day and Brian Aker at the upcoming MySQL Conference in April: '[Gearman] development is now active again with an optimized rewrite in C, along with features such as persistent message queues, queue replication, improved statistics, and advanced job monitoring. For MySQL, there is also a new user defined function to run Gearman jobs, as well as the possibility to write your own aggregate UDFs using Gearman. This gives you the ability to run functions in separate processes, separate servers, and in other languages. The Gearman framework gives you a robust interface to also run these functions reliably in the “cloud”. This session will introduce these concepts and give examples of sample applications.' Persistent queues (at last)? Gearman integration directly in the DB? excellent!
... on Thu Jan 8 10:15:20 2009nice implementation of rate limiting for a modern web app
... on Wed Jan 7 23:50:52 2009see also http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/professed-twitt.html . So, some more Twitter antipatterns: 1. user account with admin privileges, instead of role account; 2. admin account without two-factor auth; 3. no rate limits or other dictionary-attack defenses
... on Wed Jan 7 13:11:31 2009by lcamtuf, a GOOG employee these days. comprehensive. 'provide[s] web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers'
... on Wed Jan 7 12:57:53 2009another option for online bike sales, tipped by Boards.ie denizens. no free shipping here though
... on Wed Jan 7 12:41:36 2009omg this is utterly idiotic. not impressed
... on Wed Jan 7 12:35:58 2009a good collection of additional factoids about the govt bike-to-work scheme
... on Wed Jan 7 11:59:26 2009same again, for AAA batteries this time (via IRR)
... on Wed Jan 7 11:30:15 2009rechargeable batteries put to the test (a few years ago at least). quick summary: Panasonic shite, Energizer 2300 good (via IRR)
... on Wed Jan 7 11:28:20 2009Green Party site on the new Cycle-to-Work scheme, whereby the govt will provide a tax exemption if your employer buys you a bike up to EUR1000 in value
... on Wed Jan 7 10:29:33 2009I came across this a while back and have been looking for it again for a while. Good document on what happened in the former USSR after its society collapsed -- pretty funny too. A bit heavy-handed in its criticism of the US though (via Bruce Sterling)
... on Tue Jan 6 20:36:56 2009Irish DVDs-by-mail market consolidation
... on Tue Jan 6 16:58:14 2009Good commentary on the absurdity of the UK govt's attempts to impose age-rating certs on websites. 'From a regulatory point of view, at least part of the Internet is more like a pub, football crowd or playground than it is like a TV programme.'
... on Tue Jan 6 09:56:06 2009funny anecdote. bookmarked mainly because of the nice SmokePing-like chart they're using to chart I/O latency stats... wonder if I can apply similar dataviz for spamassassin's rule-QA...
... on Mon Jan 5 10:11:07 2009right now, it's $0.80/GB/year, apparently
... on Sun Jan 4 23:31:00 2009I'm letting out our house in the 'batter; 2 bedrooms, 15 mins from town, cosy, great neighbourhood. A little bit of heaven in Dublin 7
... on Sat Jan 3 10:00:44 2009in-depth exploration of the C=64, right down to the I/O bus, in a 64-minute presentation
... on Fri Jan 2 13:25:17 2009annoying Firefox "blah.foo.org uses an invalid security certificate" warnings cause user to open a bug at the Moz bugzilla, whereupon it is discovered that they are being haxx0red
... on Fri Jan 2 11:48:53 2009this is why Confluence refuses to display HTML attachments; it's an anti-XSS-attack feature. Bugzilla also fixed it last year it seems. very annoying though; a better fix would be to have a "trusted users" set who can attach inline HTML attachments IMO
... on Wed Dec 31 12:29:07 2008good post focussing on the "autoincrement considered harmful" aspect of the MD5 CA-cert attack
... on Wed Dec 31 11:02:28 2008interesting thought on patterns to provide read permission in a social network, via Torrez' post on the same subject at http://notes.torrez.org/2008/12/defining-relationship-permisssions-and-more.html . I like this: 'The best permission structure, I think, was done by Vimeo -- permission by group, or by individual, or by password.'
... on Wed Dec 31 10:45:11 2008bookmarking for a few years down the line. Scratch looks cute
... on Wed Dec 31 10:37:36 2008awesome use of a chosen-plaintext attack, given two carefully-constructed CSRs. bad week for PKI, MD5 is now officially dead, and YA good example of "autoincrement considered harmful"
... on Tue Dec 30 16:31:50 2008WANT (via ConorO)
... on Tue Dec 30 10:15:15 2008'We ate 10 fuckin terabytes yesterday in uploads. Not bad.' -- now taking bets on how long this lasts before some Y! functionary forces it to be Bowdlerised
... on Tue Dec 30 10:11:08 2008Torrents of your favourite TV programmes, de-duped and available as RSS feeds (via Jeremy)
... on Mon Dec 29 20:43:21 20080.6% of malware files reported to MS, ~135000 files, had valid PKI code signatures
... on Mon Dec 29 10:22:46 2008Mozilla bug chasing up the Comodo failure-to-verify incident. Apparently, Comodo outsourced cert issuance to third-party resellers, and then expected _them_ to perform validation instead of doing so in-house. looks like Comodo's SSL CA certification with mozilla is now in doubt
... on Mon Dec 29 10:15:29 2008'Five minutes later I was in the possession of a legitimate certificate issued to mozilla.com - no questions asked - no verification checks done - no control validation - no subscriber agreement presented, nothing.' uh, massive FAIL
... on Sun Dec 28 15:15:20 2008GNOME's current "stable" release, appearing in FC10 and Ubuntu 8.10, contains absolutely no session management, at all. wtf
... on Sun Dec 28 14:50:03 2008twittering a pretty scary aviation incident, no less
... on Mon Dec 22 17:29:27 2008hopefully someone in there finally figured out that the massive resurgence of Scrabble's popularity was due entirely to the Scrabulous team's homage. I'm still never playing it again though: worse than crack
... on Mon Dec 22 15:27:46 2008'Mobile-phone users must now “opt in” for a company to contact them. “If you don’t agree to be contacted, then it is an offence to contact you,” [asst DPC] Delaney said. “Opt in” agreements can now only last a year. “Within that period a company must contact you to request that you extend this “‘opt in’ phase,” he said.'
... on Mon Dec 22 12:44:33 2008good news. the Data Protection Commissioner: 'Increasingly, in this period of economic downturn, my Office is receiving complaints about businesses making unsolicited contact with their past customers for marketing purposes. In many cases, such contact is unlawful and, if carried out by telephone, text message or email it may be a criminal offence. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for non-compliance and I will have no hesitation in applying the full force of the new regulations to offenders."
... on Mon Dec 22 12:43:10 2008legendary Sun performance guy Adrian Cockcroft sez: 'spinning rust is dead, and a large number of basic assumptions [...] are now wrong. In 2009 SSD's will be faster for read, faster for write, faster for sequential and much much faster for random access, more reliable, more durable, lower power, higher capacity, than discs. [...] SAN's are now a complete waste of time. There is so much reliable I/O performance available in a single drive, that it makes much more sense to put SSD's in the systems and access them directly. Accessing an SSD over a SAN adds a huge latency and cost overhead. It makes much more sense to use node-to-node replication for critical data.'
... on Mon Dec 22 10:10:24 2008via Ian. 'a one second pre-set sample supplied with the Fairlight synthesiser, and people from hip hoppers to Kate Bush used it all over the place. David Vorhaus (himself an electronic music pioneer in the 1960s) recorded what became ORCH5 in the late 1970s. The sound is the transitional bit of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird, the moment when the full orchestra come in and do their stuff.'
... on Sun Dec 21 20:25:02 2008actually, it was live this morning at 8:58am. Missed it :( Still, the archived stream of the sun entering the burial chamber at Newgrange on the winter solstice is viewable here -- and one to bookmark for next year...
... on Sun Dec 21 11:49:07 2008fantastic tip (via Jeremy). see also http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149
... on Fri Dec 19 10:38:50 2008fascinating in-depth analysis of how to actually _use_ the test card -- and yes, Carole and her clown doll still stars (via Yoz)
... on Fri Dec 19 10:32:14 2008Alias muses on massive Oracle db migration algorithms. looking forward to seeing the full db migration system when/if it eventually hits CPAN
... on Thu Dec 18 22:28:21 2008Amazon have just rolled out version 2 to avoid this bug, which uses HMAC-SHA256 instead of HMAC-SHA1. they're also now deprecating use of HTTP instead of HTTPS, since the attack requires that the attacker sniff a valid request to reuse its signature
... on Thu Dec 18 10:35:13 2008Canonical are issuing official Ubuntu Server AMIs. very good idea; make Ubuntu Server the virtualization platform of choice
... on Wed Dec 17 22:05:31 2008"Archie" does Pulp's "Common People". incredible
... on Wed Dec 17 21:15:51 2008generate RPMs, DEBs etc. from CPAN packages; apparently takes over from the deprecated (but excellent) cpan2rpm
... on Wed Dec 17 09:30:07 2008bit late bookmarking this; awesome speedups though
... on Mon Dec 15 22:00:10 2008hilarious account of Loic Le Meur's latest car-crash of a conference, LeWeb '08
... on Thu Dec 11 15:13:50 2008Rapleaf do the computations on using EC2 vs "grow your own". waaay cheaper to do the latter for their use-case. also interesting to see lots of Hadoop fans in the comments
... on Thu Dec 11 10:43:59 2008'The bottom line is that these blocking systems are fragile, easy to evade (even unintentionally), and little more than a fig leaf to save the IWF’s blushes in being so ineffective at getting child abuse image websites removed in a timely manner.' +1
... on Thu Dec 11 10:13:37 2008contains a 20-line Python script to diff two HTML pages. nice!
... on Thu Dec 11 10:08:45 2008asshat on the ORA blog posted something about how he didn't like auto-scaling server infrastructure, seemingly because he hadn't seen an implementation he liked. Debunked by SmugMug
... on Wed Dec 10 14:59:10 2008Euro-hosted EC2 nodes. woo! wonder if they're in the Digital Depot...
... on Wed Dec 10 11:12:56 2008good wrap-up. hilariously, traffic to the blocked page "increased by more than 200 times normal" [levels], after the block was imposed, due to the press their screw-up received. also the image was still available elsewhere, including Amazon. oops! nice work IWF
... on Wed Dec 10 11:05:57 2008the entire text of MJD's functional-programming-in-perl bible! awesome. (I have no less than two copies of the dead-tree version.)
... on Tue Dec 9 20:33:14 2008on the crapness of Ruby and Python distribution mechanisms for server deployment. 'Developers are reinventing the wheel, engine and transmission. Which is not that bad per se, but by not looking at existing solutions for the problem of making a car move, they are inventing a square wheel, a steam-powered engine and a superconductor-powered magnetic transmission.'
... on Tue Dec 9 17:01:49 2008a group dedicated to Dublin City Council's ineptitude where bike lanes are concerned
... on Tue Dec 9 10:12:27 2008nifty Vim plugin for working with "surrounding" text entities -- quotes, XML tags, parens etc.
... on Tue Dec 9 09:47:28 2008WP commentary on the repercussions of the IWF censorship
... on Mon Dec 8 11:11:00 2008ouch. IWF decided an image on WP (specifically a "Scorpions" album cover) was illegal. Due to bugs in the "Cleanfeed" implementation, this caused a block of WP's editing infrastructure for ~95% of UK ISP users. fiasco
... on Mon Dec 8 11:09:07 2008lots and lots of gotchas :( avoid Ubuntu 8.10 on a T61p! I'm finding it buggy as hell
... on Mon Dec 8 10:32:47 2008a great paean to Moose, Test::Class, Devel::DProf, and other good features in modern perl programming
... on Sun Dec 7 21:48:00 2008another interwebs classic thread. "I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring."
... on Sun Dec 7 21:07:12 20086 VMs running different versions of Windows, in order to ensure CPAN modules run OK on 'doze. this is awesome, and UNIX vendors should be doing the same
... on Sun Dec 7 15:49:21 2008both points are pretty valid, I've been hurt by them before
... on Sun Dec 7 14:46:28 2008the Kubuntu team went with the half-baked and broken usability nightmare that is KDE 4 for the latest Ubuntu release. here's packages to revert back to the working KDE 3.5.1. I hope they work :(
... on Sat Dec 6 11:58:59 2008new Irish computer bits shop, recommended by Damo
... on Fri Dec 5 13:57:21 2008hardware hacking, Bunnie-style. hard. core (via Danny)
... on Thu Dec 4 10:37:12 2008Ian Kallen on spam-battling at Technorati, Ning, Digg, YT: 'It seems to be an accepted truism that social media oft demonstrates, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites. Yep, I've talked to folks from Six Apart, Wordpress, Tumblr, Twitter and elsewhere. We're all feeling the pains of success. Over the past month at Technorati, we've purged about 80% of the porn that was active in the search index. Sure, we're not spam free yet but the index is getting a lot cleaner.'
... on Wed Dec 3 10:40:24 2008legendary maths app can now spawn EC2 servers to perform heavyweight calculations in parallel. Very clever move! (via Waxy)
... on Wed Dec 3 10:36:50 2008improve garden drainage using these lob worms, available to order online. my mate Eoin recommends 'em
... on Tue Dec 2 21:22:57 2008There's an interesting side effect of forum spam -- it engenders more spam by ensuring that site appears in Google search results for the spam keyword, which is what _other_ spammers use to find target sites (via Waxy)
... on Mon Dec 1 20:30:26 2008Twitter from Bradley Horowitz: “as currently implemented, you're only mucking with your own results. You can only game yourself... ;-)”
... on Fri Nov 28 00:30:24 2008wow, sounds amazing. as Tim Bray said, SSDs are going to be very cool very soon. this one claims 170MB/s writes, 250MB/s reads, seeks 2 orders of magnitude faster than HD, many years of write/erase cycles, and power consumption of 0.06W idle/2.4W active
... on Thu Nov 27 16:43:07 2008classic "so bad it's brilliant" YT
... on Wed Nov 26 12:32:47 2008"Starting yesterday, the amount of spam coming to our traps has gone up 3 times (a 200% increase)." Other sources saying similar
... on Wed Nov 26 11:44:23 2008'Attackers sent customized e-mails encouraging web domain owners to visit [phish sites ...] Once attackers gained the user credentials, they were free to modify the affected accounts as they desired. In this case, the attacker set up mail filters specifically designed to forward messages from web domain providers.'
... on Wed Nov 26 10:38:46 2008Small software company (run by ex-ORA Rael Dornfest) is bought out; immediately gives 2 weeks notice of shutdown of their webapp products. Cue massive trainwreck as users freak out. Release the code as open source! It can't be worse than it is now...
... on Wed Nov 26 10:34:07 2008answer: no. ;) IMO there's useful applications of EC2-like elastic hosting services that don't require a fully-elastic horizontal scaling app
... on Tue Nov 25 11:10:56 2008Registers > Cache > DRAM > DHT (ie memcached) > SSD > Disk > Tape
... on Mon Nov 24 17:23:20 2008EUR72.08 for grinder and 2 bags of beans from Dublin-based Java Republic's online shop. good xmas pressie methinks ;)
... on Mon Nov 24 12:20:04 2008excellent
... on Sun Nov 23 23:44:25 2008whoa, network+remote CPU cache = faster than local disk. brain hurts (via Jeremy)
... on Sun Nov 23 23:27:36 2008wow, so cool. A serif typeface from '"La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami", an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus, published in 1567.' Plus ca change... (via waxy)
... on Fri Nov 21 11:02:28 2008'A mercifully brief guide to British culture and slang', aimed primarily at the USAnian. Now with book, just in time for xmas!
... on Fri Nov 21 10:54:33 2008oh thank god for that; scripty, scrapey access to O2.ie's web-SMS system without having to use their now-broken website. yay for Mackers
... on Thu Nov 20 19:46:10 2008under audit by the IRS; it receives 88% of its revenues from one source, Google. 'While the Foundation did not automatically qualify as a public charity with public support at 33% of total support, it believes that it qualifies as a public charity under the facts and circumstances test with public support over 10%.'
... on Thu Nov 20 14:41:02 2008great article, with lots of good facts and figures. Best bit: 'if you noticed a steep decline in spam in your inbox as a result of the McColo disconnection, this is an indication that you need better spam filters.' heh
... on Thu Nov 20 11:36:52 2008about time! This has been necessary for ages. It will, of course, eat McAfee/Symantec/et al's lunch on a huge scale; I guess that was probably the issue
... on Wed Nov 19 14:27:16 2008Walter's Twitter profile pic editing tool; enter your username and use the Pixenate image-editing tools to hack at your profile pic, then re-upload -- all from the browser. great demo of Pixenate
... on Wed Nov 19 12:08:11 2008ahead of the Irish Times & Myhome.ie and the Irish Independent sites, just short of RTE.ie. Web forums are certainly mainstream in Ireland now
... on Wed Nov 19 11:45:21 2008Amazon's new CDN enhancement to S3; 17c per GB (plus an initial 10c/GB "origin fetch" charge), vs 10c/GB with basic S3. no upfront setup required, beyond S3 itself. Uses HTTP cache-control headers. nice! looking forward to playing with this
... on Tue Nov 18 11:05:23 2008woo, new Google-Maps-style UI for the OSI maps. not great resolution or Google-style eye candy, but it has pretty good mapping of structures (via IIU list)
... on Tue Nov 18 10:15:29 2008if you want to add image editing for user-contributed images to your webapp, this is the way to do it -- low-cost, on-demand, zero-setup! nice one Walter, this is a great idea
... on Mon Nov 17 15:21:17 2008assuming these numbers mesh with Google Analytics, taint.org is just behind moviestar.ie and ahead of redfm.ie
... on Mon Nov 17 11:53:16 2008MRI scan, pasted onto a block of wooden bricks. want
... on Fri Nov 14 15:57:00 2008generates nice DOT graphs of the Python memory arena, looks like a good memory-leak diagnosis tool
... on Fri Nov 14 15:13:13 2008now on general release. another S3 shortcoming rectified
... on Fri Nov 14 11:42:08 2008New stable release of perl 5.8.x. Useful new bundled script: "perlthanks -- a variant of perlbug, but for sending non-bug-reports [to the] authors and maintainers of Perl. Getting nothing but bug reports can become a bit demoralising." aww! we love you p5p!
... on Thu Nov 13 15:12:54 2008yay! "hopefully late December"
... on Thu Nov 13 12:02:35 2008book mashup of "Where The Wild Things Are" and Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". yeah, pretty sure I _won't_ be buying this for Bea (via Alex)
... on Thu Nov 13 11:22:11 2008article by the author of "Liar's Poker" on the sub-prime crash -- chock full of insane details about just how stupid and greedy the Wall Street bankers are. lock 'em up!
... on Thu Nov 13 11:15:02 20081,425,440,000 users (via fanf)
... on Tue Nov 11 14:59:18 2008draft PDF of tips for advanced S3 users
... on Tue Nov 11 14:33:58 2008announcing the Irish Reporting & Information Security Service (IRISS). excellent news!
... on Mon Nov 10 16:32:56 2008"We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome."
... on Mon Nov 10 16:31:43 2008ever wonder, "what if lawyers did blinged-up flyers with 8 fonts and lensflare effects"? wonder no longer. "Toll Free: 1-888-88NOTME"
... on Mon Nov 10 14:13:46 2008at one point; that worked out as 900 million spams per day, resulting in just 72 sales each day
... on Fri Nov 7 20:51:50 2008"looking for free-to-air digital TV in Ireland". campaigning blog
... on Fri Nov 7 12:52:00 2008seriously: yay ;)
... on Thu Nov 6 11:53:54 2008sadly turning out to be spot on the money
... on Wed Nov 5 17:38:00 2008Britain's largest music download sites come up with something useful -- an official tick-mark to indicate that a file is DRM-free
... on Wed Nov 5 13:58:08 2008clowns. Also, the deputy Data Protection Commissioner gets a massive FAIL: 'While the loss of the data was a concern he said the likelihood of a fraud was "relatively remote".' Since the likelihood of me crashing my car driving at high speed is similarly "relatively remote", I'll ignore speed limits, then
... on Tue Nov 4 16:05:04 2008under new EU legislation, due to come into force next year, it will be illegal for businesses to "falsely represent oneself as a consumer" by, for example, writing a fake review of their own service
... on Tue Nov 4 12:06:00 2008'XMPP is causing us pain and eating cycles' ... 'too many scattered implementations, leaving it in the "immature" bucket.' it seems Jabber.org and Google are throttling Gnip traffic
... on Tue Nov 4 10:45:40 2008'Enhanced Message-ID as Email Watermark'. basically similar to how SpamAssassin's VBounce ruleset detects bounces by spotting mailserver fingerprints in the Received: header, but using the Message-ID: header instead
... on Tue Nov 4 10:37:23 2008ha! This actually happened to *me* when I was a kid, believe it or not (although with only 1 spider, not 2)
... on Mon Nov 3 17:39:03 2008even by midnight GMT, we should have some interesting results
... on Mon Nov 3 14:15:29 2008discover a Tor user's real IP address using Java or Flash, both of which apparently do not enforce proxy usage correctly from the browser
... on Sun Nov 2 12:22:26 2008well-researched post on how checking account security is non-existent in US banking
... on Fri Oct 31 11:36:04 2008US banks have an absurd policy of not authenticating check transactions, and this is now being actively exploited by fraudsters. As a result, Knuth will no longer mail reward checks to people who discover errors in his books :( (via adulau)
... on Fri Oct 31 11:33:35 2008one Russian spammer appears to be earning over $5M/year by hawking fake antivirus apps via spam to gullible victims
... on Thu Oct 30 17:20:11 2008Wonder if Democrats in the Congress are using GPG? sounds like they should be. incredible (via b1ff.org)
... on Thu Oct 30 11:14:15 2008A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript. awesome. unplayably slow in FF3, but I have high hopes for the new JS interpreter in FF3.1. open-source, too, with a public SVN repository!
... on Thu Oct 30 11:03:03 2008Mark Pilgrim's favourite Linux apps. I might need to try gPhoto again -- I also gave up on having a "photo library" as too confining for my needs. other good recommendations there too
... on Wed Oct 29 22:37:04 2008'With the money that’s been paid back so far, including one loan in full, I was able to lend $25 each to two women in Peru to purchase animals. Which means I’ve been able to make $150 worth of loans, even though I’d only “invested” $100. Put another way: my $100 has done $150 worth of good in the world. This makes me really happy. '
... on Wed Oct 29 11:39:58 2008great blog post from Cal @ Flickr about their system-monitoring graphing backend, using custom RRDTool daemon and UDP notifications. very nice indeed
... on Wed Oct 29 10:55:05 2008bananas. Members of an Irish web forum are lobbying the EC to intervene in the Irish govt's planned bailout of the construction industry through (more!) cheap home loans. I wish them luck
... on Wed Oct 29 09:56:39 2008makes good money sense: 'the Sutton-based cyclist will save themselves EUR2,329 over the course of three years while the person living in Goatstown will find themselves with an extra EUR2,611 at the end of year three, enough to pay for a couple of holidays to the Caribbean.'
... on Mon Oct 27 21:16:01 2008'SpamAssassin [is] now available from the main repository providing a supported solution for spam detection'. you've got to be kidding! Canonical took this long to get this supported?! wtf
... on Mon Oct 27 21:11:25 2008there's already a CPAN module to access CloudFiles, thanks to Leon "Net::Amazon::S3" Brocard
... on Fri Oct 24 16:10:56 2008'86% of UK broadband users still don’t understand the usage limits on their service and nearly one million have reached or exceeded their ISPs limit in the last year alone. [..] 6.2m people believe they have an "unlimited" service with no restrictions [..] just 22% of the major broadband providers are transparent and advertise the true limits of their packages' (via /.)
... on Fri Oct 24 15:21:50 2008another Cthulhu-influenced game, tipped by Andrew -- Gamecube, so could probably pick it up on eBay and play it on the Wii
... on Thu Oct 23 19:48:43 2008'Owners wishing to sell or rent residential property will have to pay an estimated fee of €300-€500 to comply with new building regulations from next year'. why? is it expected that renters will refuse houses that are inefficient? not impressed, strikes me as typical Irish Green Party half-baked tokenism
... on Thu Oct 23 16:02:43 2008the French president fell for a phish, providing the auth details for his bank account. possibly untrue; there seem to be a lot of differing reports
... on Thu Oct 23 11:13:32 2008sustainable sushi: avoid Oz/Japan-farmed yellowtail tuna, farmed salmon, octopus, and unagi (NOOO!)
... on Thu Oct 23 10:08:43 2008wow, they must be feeling flush. Slicehost: EC2-like Xen hosting, JungleDisk: S3-backed online backup. JungleDisk is to be transitioned off S3 onto Rackspace's own "CloudFS" storage cloud (via Michele)
... on Thu Oct 23 08:43:38 2008this hurts my head. very impressive (via Waxy)
... on Wed Oct 22 22:06:23 2008'SDK is lovely. Great command-line tools' ... 'near-perfect emulator' ... 'using a production T-Mobile G1'. sounds fun
... on Tue Oct 21 10:10:29 2008its EU publishers have delayed digital release until sometime next year, when the physical-media version is ready, by which time the release PR will have evaporated. idiotic
... on Tue Oct 21 08:57:17 2008you can buy uranium ore on Amazon, it seems. review hilarity ensues
... on Mon Oct 20 21:18:33 2008"everyday carry" -- ie. microoptimization of your keychain. this is excellent, and a whole new way to waste time and money on gadgets (via Russell Davies)
... on Mon Oct 20 11:13:15 2008turning a Leatherman Micro into a combo multi-tool keyholder. nifty
... on Sat Oct 18 20:45:59 2008be notified when someone unfollows you, along with the last tweet you sent before they dropped you. "was it something I said?" brilliant!
... on Fri Oct 17 12:58:00 2008from Jan 2009, visitors from many countries including Ireland need to register at https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov before travelling to the US
... on Fri Oct 17 11:37:12 2008Opera 9.60 now issues a warning if you connect to an SSL site which has an RSA/DH public key shorter than 900 bits in length
... on Fri Oct 17 09:50:15 2008avoid coredumps due to pycurl's use of a non-thread-safe signal
... on Thu Oct 16 20:05:36 2008aka CrackFeed
... on Thu Oct 16 13:49:35 200888/100: 'step into a third-person sci-fi survival horror experience that delivers psychological thrills and gruesome action. Set in the cold blackness of deep space, the atmosphere is soaked with a feeling of tension, dread and sheer terror.' sounds right up my street
... on Thu Oct 16 13:28:12 2008wiki tracking a few of the major botnet spammers
... on Thu Oct 16 11:42:24 2008wow, these spammers were responsible for the VPXL, Canadian Pharmacy, *and* Hoodia spam runs. sounds like virtually _all_ the pharma spam for the past few years! massive result for the FTC
... on Thu Oct 16 11:24:52 2008fix for that FP register corruption bug in UML
... on Wed Oct 15 08:55:37 2008manifests as occasional NaN values in running processes (via Mark Martinec)
... on Wed Oct 15 08:54:40 2008'The world is treating us like we’re dead. Bank accounts frozen. No business without cash payments in advance. No currency can be bought. [..] Imports have stopped because of closed currency markets and diapers, flour, sugar and other necessities are selling out in the shops.'
... on Tue Oct 14 19:32:43 2008a linux boot CD to perform recovery and repair on malware-infested Windows setups; features 4 different virus scanners with online updates. essential for dealing with Windows-loving relatives
... on Tue Oct 14 09:39:53 2008so the McCain campaign are letting racist psychoceramics lend a hand? nice
... on Tue Oct 14 09:24:14 2008'DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month.' omg that's awesome
... on Tue Oct 14 09:18:12 2008a more reliable way to inhibit sleepy-Macbook syndrome than InsomniaX (via Conall)
... on Mon Oct 13 15:09:10 2008the JC Decaux scam continues. the bikes have been delayed again -- until next summer -- and the 40 sites don't even extend to Stoneybatter or all the way to the Royal Canal. ripoff
... on Sun Oct 12 20:44:40 2008nice hack
... on Fri Oct 10 16:48:33 2008good list from Russell Coker. Gandi's product is amazingly cheap at EUR6 for super-low-end nodes (UPDATE: that's because the page is wrong! in reality it's EUR10+VAT)
... on Fri Oct 10 12:06:52 2008'A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.' amazingly vicious hatchet-job on John McCain from _Rolling Stone_
... on Fri Oct 10 11:35:57 2008MessageLabs indicates a 'significant drop' in spam/botnet activity, due to loss of C&C networks located at Atrivo
... on Fri Oct 10 11:15:54 2008'Spam originating from the Storm botnet suddenly dried up in mid-September. Since that time we have not detected a single Storm spam in our traps.'
... on Fri Oct 10 10:44:27 2008handy; load initial test data into the database from JSON files. must start using these
... on Fri Oct 10 10:18:20 2008it's true, the "clickstream" companies are getting away with almost the same shit that Phorm, NebuAd et al are being pilloried for. use HTTPS where you can
... on Thu Oct 9 13:33:59 2008explore the innards of a gigantic tunnel-boring machine in plan projection, using an astonishingly good Flash visualization. brilliant, in a very German-engineering way
... on Thu Oct 9 10:09:53 2008the insane bacchanalia of Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas, who built a massive hookers-and-coke-filled dungeon under his Laguna Hills mansion, and spiked his customers with Es. great article from Vanity Fair (via My Pepys)
... on Thu Oct 9 09:03:34 2008hope this works out well for Matt and the guys
... on Wed Oct 8 21:03:56 2008great rant opposing Symantec CEO's wittering about how online privacy is a lost cause
... on Wed Oct 8 20:08:05 2008'Full Rsync layer to Amazon S3 storage'. preserves file perms, symlinks, partial files. commercial, charged at 5 cents per hour of rsync time used
... on Wed Oct 8 10:49:19 2008in 2006, T-Mobile lost data on 17m customers, but noted that they could find no evidence of misuse or compromise, so made no public announcement -- until last weekend, when _Der Spiegel_ discovered this data for sale online. so much for keeping it quiet. another argument for compulsory breach disclosure
... on Wed Oct 8 10:37:09 2008'a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X that is meant to look better and integrate more seamlessly with the Mac than the older Carbon port of Vim' (thanks MinHee Hong!)
... on Wed Oct 8 08:34:51 2008looks like a web-based version of good old Filemaker
... on Tue Oct 7 13:51:53 2008skip to the comment thread, it's fantastic. I used to know lots of this stuff (via Donncha)
... on Tue Oct 7 13:29:59 2008the 'Motion Picture Licensing Company' sent a letter to 2,500 Irish playschools, demanding a fee of EUR3 per child to cover license fees for the kids watching DVDs. However, it seems they themselves hadn't registered as required by law, so were acting illegally in issuing demands... oh the irony
... on Tue Oct 7 10:25:53 2008routing around the Irish couriers and An Post's brokenness by allowing customers to pick up their items directly. a shame this is necessary
... on Tue Oct 7 08:51:18 2008scary stuff. amazing how accurate some of the Pripyat sets in Call of Duty 4 were
... on Mon Oct 6 14:20:19 2008'The attack is brilliant in its elegance. They essentially jam the receiver. A bright pulse of laser light is sent and it blinds the receiver, which allows the eavesdropper, Eve, to decode the same photons that Alice and Bob are decoding, and thus get their key.' doh
... on Mon Oct 6 13:16:28 2008this is actually quite a nifty idea; extending a simple "crappy parking" complaint blog with datamining opportunities, by tagging with street names, districts, license plate numbers etc. and letting the blog engine (and Google) take care of the rest
... on Mon Oct 6 11:32:28 2008including anti-spam product Ciphertrust. wonder how this will affect their various AS product ranges (via Herkemer)
... on Sat Oct 4 18:28:51 2008'Google's handing of quotas is a major step backwards to the days of "this user has used too much bandwidth" errors. Probably acceptable if you're hosting pictures of Little Timmy and Sally Jo's Summer Camp Adventure on Geocities, not so acceptable if you're hosting your next big web app on what you thought was Google's infinitely-scalable Cloud solution.' +1
... on Fri Oct 3 22:39:35 2008diffed. the explicit statement that there is no length limit to mail headers is potentially tricky
... on Fri Oct 3 09:10:08 2008pretty much the EFF party line, I think: "every man for himself". also talks about net neutrality
... on Thu Oct 2 11:04:33 2008an e-Passport for "Elvis Aaron Presley", no less, happily scanned by an Amsterdam passport security station. hahahaha!
... on Thu Oct 2 10:43:44 2008'Dublin will be the centre for Facebook’s international operations and will provide a range of online technical, sales and operations support to Facebook’s users and customers across EMEA region.' good news
... on Thu Oct 2 09:43:53 2008The newest rev to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (via fanf)
... on Thu Oct 2 08:56:19 2008the newest rev to the Internet Message Format for email (via fanf)
... on Thu Oct 2 08:55:27 2008wow, who the hell are these people? totally forgotten
... on Wed Oct 1 11:11:19 2008bookmarking for more crufting of the OSX laptop
... on Wed Oct 1 10:28:13 2008a definition of a "Free Service", an open-source form of SaaS. uses the Affero GPL
... on Wed Oct 1 10:24:42 2008hacker group THC release an RFID-passport cloning/modification tool, noting that e-Passports are fundamentally insecure due to their trust of self-signed certificates. Also raises the Smart-IED attack danger: 'A Smart-IED waits until a specific person passes by before detonating or let's say until there are more than 10 americans in the room.'
... on Wed Oct 1 10:09:14 2008a few bits and bobs required to get this excellent (though ugly) UNIX mail reader app working on MacOS
... on Mon Sep 29 15:26:29 2008fixes this ExMH dependency to build on OSX
... on Mon Sep 29 15:24:27 2008"The funny thing about Facebook is that you're there with your colleagues and your friends [...] and the next thing you know, you've forgotten that your status update is all about how hung over you are."
... on Mon Sep 29 11:25:35 2008last Friday, but worth celebrating. on 26 September 1983, a little-known Russian military officer averted global nuclear war, by disobeying procedures and correctly identifying a missile-launch report as a false positive. phew!
... on Mon Sep 29 10:06:44 2008police-run anti-child-porn blocklist accidentally lists w3.org. Oops
... on Sun Sep 28 22:52:47 2008tick another item off my switch to-do list
... on Sun Sep 28 10:23:57 2008Bruno 9Li -- cool Brazilian psychedelic, high-contrast art
... on Sat Sep 27 19:39:58 2008'Neuros has a new technology to superimpose text from a dedicated chat room in real time on a TV set, allowing a sort of 'crowd narration' for events or shows.' 'crowd heckling' more like; this is a great idea that Danny O'Brien talked about a few years back
... on Fri Sep 26 15:54:06 2008'As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. Some people out there in our nation don’t have maps.' it's like Frances McDormand in Fargo, channeling Dan Quayle
... on Fri Sep 26 10:37:03 2008for 2 hours, all instances of the letter "t" in the cisco.com home page's HTML were missing, resulting in a broken page and lots of "Abou Cisco" and "Regiser" links
... on Thu Sep 25 11:22:58 2008Brian "Krow" Aker: 'Google's AppEngine is much closer to [...] "Digitial Sharecropping" [...] S3 and EC2 have little tie in to them. You can end up with a physical addiction to the services but the mental addiction to a framework does not exist. S3 is just storage and EC2 for most is just a hosted Linux image.' +1!
... on Wed Sep 24 15:22:14 2008hooray, great news for Irish beer drinkers sick of Guinness
... on Wed Sep 24 13:09:41 2008's set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X' which sit in the menubar
... on Tue Sep 23 14:35:41 2008essential know-how for UNIX refugees, including how to get your F1-F12 back
... on Mon Sep 22 22:43:25 2008starting to think we may be running into this on our build machine; annoying. bookmarking for future reference
... on Mon Sep 22 15:14:40 2008hahaha. WP deletion gnomes argued that Deletionpedia should not have an entry due to non-notability, just 24 minutes after that entry was created
... on Mon Sep 22 11:11:07 2008the ISP's AS (AS27595) is now offline, due apparently to coordinated lobbying of its upstreams
... on Mon Sep 22 09:54:26 2008built on top of Google App Engine. interesting hack!
... on Sun Sep 21 19:29:48 2008EUR120 to get a fantastic-looking 40"x30" print
... on Sat Sep 20 11:57:09 2008'Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).' (via Gary Stock)
... on Fri Sep 19 14:38:30 2008'the findings and recommendations of the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property'. Very anti-Bayh-Dole and the "old IP" patent-everything regime as it pertains to biotech. great stuff (via Techdirt)
... on Fri Sep 19 10:42:31 2008over allegations that they do not contribute enough development effort to the Linux ecosystem; in all major components, they push a truly miniscule amount of patch code upstream
... on Fri Sep 19 09:14:54 2008swan song for Iona Technologies. as an ex-Ionian, all I can say is +1; great place to work in the '90s
... on Thu Sep 18 15:25:27 2008'an archive of about 63,556 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia.'
... on Thu Sep 18 13:09:48 2008Yahoo!'s password recovery feature is pretty trivial to defeat: 'seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)'
... on Thu Sep 18 10:15:21 2008more on the OS X FFM mess
... on Wed Sep 17 14:24:50 2008if I'm to consider using OS X, this needs to work; I'm a FFM zealot
... on Wed Sep 17 13:39:33 2008incredible. the GDocs spreadsheet supports getting a remote URL, extraction using XPath, and RSS output, making it a pretty credible scraping platform
... on Tue Sep 16 11:24:11 2008'Your monthly account statement is available anytime; just log in to your account at https://SECURE.UNINITIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM/au/HISTORY.' doh
... on Tue Sep 16 11:21:54 2008wow. I dodged a bullet when I bought my work Thinkpad T61p last year; since then they've accumulated a truly atrocious customer service reputation. avoid
... on Tue Sep 16 08:45:15 2008Groklaw goes into the detail of how and why the Virginia anti-spam law could be overturned. Ugh. I strongly believe that spam = UBE, not UCE, and political spam is still spam, so this is particularly disappointing for me
... on Mon Sep 15 16:23:59 2008ugh. quite a lot of voodoo here, need to investigate to see if any of these improve performance on our little build farm vmware server
... on Mon Sep 15 15:57:20 2008tour operator/airline went bust, leaving its customers well in the lurch. Those who booked flights directly on their website, using a debit card, have lost their money. Most travel insurance doesn't cover airline collapse. Moral: use a credit card
... on Mon Sep 15 10:25:28 2008SA plugin to add the proprietary Commtouch filter to an existing SpamAssassin system; nifty
... on Sat Sep 13 17:41:55 2008argh! IMO the judge has confused misleading forged headers with anonymous speech
... on Fri Sep 12 20:26:25 2008Joe has a good point: 'you hereby grant all other Dropbox users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder.' wtf
... on Fri Sep 12 15:25:29 2008namely the Windows Template Library, now distributed under the (OSI-approved) Microsoft Public License. strange days (via reddit)
... on Fri Sep 12 14:00:45 2008'an Irish consortium has emerged as the buyer of the island of England in The World development, a man-made scheme off the coast of Dubai.' hahaha!
... on Fri Sep 12 10:21:44 2008the majority of university technology transfer offices have never made money, according to this. mind-boggling
... on Thu Sep 11 17:50:49 2008'The easiest way to create Virtual Tunnels over TCP/IP networks
... on Thu Sep 11 15:09:25 2008good advice to those of us running systems built on perl. Every interpreted language needs a document like this
... on Thu Sep 11 11:30:01 2008they look well-maintained
... on Wed Sep 10 15:58:38 2008using some nasty pivot_root hackery
... on Wed Sep 10 14:35:52 2008IPC::DirQueue used in the field as part of a cache-invalidation system for a NZ radio station
... on Wed Sep 10 10:38:59 2008good tips (via Jeremy)
... on Mon Sep 8 11:30:48 2008and a pony! (via fergusb)
... on Mon Sep 8 08:52:08 2008'Clients are allowed 70 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request. This is enough to make just over one request per minute, per hour, which should meet the needs of most applications.' Fingers crossed this can be lifted for twit.ie
... on Fri Sep 5 11:47:54 2008select a BBC radio show, get an RSS feed of "Audio on Demand" RealAMRadio files as they are posted. ("radio4" works as the station ID for that station)
... on Fri Sep 5 11:12:25 2008good round-up of how those "work at home" scam spams work
... on Fri Sep 5 09:46:56 2008by creating one-off security groups to hold the metadata. hack, will be deprecated by AWS in a future release, but hey it works right now
... on Thu Sep 4 11:32:27 2008oh dear, someone really screwed up there
... on Wed Sep 3 20:59:54 2008pure Onion genius
... on Wed Sep 3 14:16:32 2008moral: don't try hosting anything useful on Google App Engine until it's ready -- which it decidedly isn't yet
... on Wed Sep 3 14:12:36 2008retrogaming fans find source for 1983 game cartridge, then original developer appears with commentary. hooray for internets!
... on Tue Sep 2 08:30:09 2008recorded at Google Video. I'd never seen this until now, but it's still got some interesting revelations; for example, I didn't realise that pill spammers were selling outright-illegal drugs as well as adulterated prescription ones
... on Mon Sep 1 22:11:54 2008for $28. woo
... on Mon Sep 1 21:08:06 2008great tees on this US site
... on Mon Sep 1 09:44:48 2008allegations that Irish newspapers have copied content from blogs. There's been a lot of cases of this recently. good round-up from Cian Ginty
... on Sun Aug 31 10:54:01 2008quite a few case-control studies consistently demonstrating the protective effects of bicycle helmet use on shared roadways
... on Fri Aug 29 11:24:19 2008he claimed that he made net $336k per year from spamming in 2004
... on Fri Aug 29 09:54:03 2008what a mess! there are no less than 8 tag operators and a bewildering array of prices and penalties. typical
... on Thu Aug 28 13:52:49 2008worrying stats for Amazon EBS data throughput, dropping from 160 MB/s to a rather paltry 42.4 MB/s
... on Thu Aug 28 10:53:52 2008Sam Masiello of MXLogic works out that phishers may be netting a 7300% profit margin; this is why spam's not going away. mind you he does this by believing Gartner figures, which is never a good idea
... on Thu Aug 28 10:46:13 2008ugh. we need a reminder of the Boulder Pledge. Mind you, Marshal have put out what appear to be inaccurate figures in the past regarding the Rustock botnet, so apply a pinch of salt
... on Thu Aug 21 13:24:58 2008achieves 70MB/s on an m1.small instance; 'performance exceeds what we’ve seen for filesystems striped across the four local drives of x-large instances'. pretty good for a network filesystem, although not great compared to fast local SATA disks. also: snapshots are incremental and perform nicely compared to local S3 copy-and-upload
... on Thu Aug 21 10:50:59 2008'Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances.' -- can even snapshot to S3
... on Thu Aug 21 09:14:10 20081969 album by David Vorhaus and Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop: 'one of the freakiest, most frightening, far out and forward thinking albums you may ever get to hear'
... on Wed Aug 20 21:20:36 2008hooray! Flymake, on-the-fly compilation & error checking, for VIM. bit kludgy though, would be better if it integrated with vim 7.1's "compiler" support
... on Wed Aug 20 13:55:24 2008.5 - 1.5% of visitors to Warner music sites are now coming from games consoles and smartphones. bad news for Flash sites (via Torrez)
... on Tue Aug 19 10:40:14 2008'Writes to the /dev/full device will fail with an ENOSPC error. This can be used to test how a program handles disk-full errors.' - that's nifty. I can't believe I'm still finding useful new UNIX features after 18 years
... on Tue Aug 19 09:06:20 2008some great performance art from Irish artist Joan Healy; the installation appears to be a kiosk with a screen, and a touch pad. The pad itself is supposed to have a warm, soft, fleshy feel that 'adds to the bond between people and machines'. However -- in reality, it's the artist's back; she's inside the kiosk, Mechanical Turk-style. Super-creepy
... on Mon Aug 18 10:17:13 2008cool details on how TDS captures the news networks' TV output every day; they use TiVos, not MythTV. what they have works well enough, and that's good enough for them (via Waxy)
... on Mon Aug 18 09:57:30 2008fascinating! They really did a good job improving the UI, early revs were quite uninspiring
... on Fri Aug 15 15:40:13 2008waterproof socks and gloves -- come recommended by Dublin's cycle-couriers to avoid wet feet in all this bloody rain. lots and lots of good testimonials
... on Fri Aug 15 15:08:52 2008Adam Shostack tells the truth re Firefox 3's stupid self-signed cert bug. 'imposing yet another security tax, based on a static analysis of attackers and some certificate authority pixie dust, isn't going to help things for very long.'
... on Thu Aug 14 16:02:24 2008a new plugin, subject of a paper at this year's CEAS conference it looks like
... on Thu Aug 14 14:58:23 2008interesting, I haven't received the mail, and it claims to still be sending updates to my Irish mobile (update: I'm not actually *getting* any updates, though)
... on Thu Aug 14 13:39:41 2008'the conditions of the Artistic License are "enforceable copyright conditions."' hooray (via Nat Friedman)
... on Wed Aug 13 19:53:12 2008'The writer is accidentally correct - we were told that it had to be in PHP to get ops support.' Incredibly stupid mistake by Y!; I'm thankful we in Deersoft fended off the same potential disaster
... on Wed Aug 13 13:47:49 2008a fantastic prez by 3 MIT students working under Ron Rivest, successfully hacking the Boston subway system's stored-value magstripe cards and MIFARE Classic RFID cards; really fantastic walkthrough of the process. I'm glad to see that my smartcard work on other systems a few years back would have defeated many of these attacks ;)
... on Wed Aug 13 10:47:15 2008shocking -- the malware distributed by the Storm "CNN headlines" campaign, which has been ongoing for weeks, remains undetected by F-Prot, F-Secure, McAfee, Panda, Symantec and Trend, along with 16 other antivirus products. reactive AV simply doesn't work anymore
... on Wed Aug 13 10:31:11 2008avoiding the annoying "REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!" warning, using "ssh-keygen -R hostname"
... on Wed Aug 13 10:19:20 2008JC Decaux' "free" bikes are now delayed another 6 months -- to next spring. in the meantime, the ads are up all over Dublin. what a rip-off
... on Tue Aug 12 21:20:02 2008that's the two main legit-email whitelisting reputation dbs merged into one
... on Tue Aug 12 14:03:56 2008this just happened to Simon Willison, pretending to offer to cancel extremely expensive insurance, but with a "cancellation fee". great demo of why consecutive assigned numbering schemes are bad for security
... on Tue Aug 12 13:41:45 2008+1
... on Tue Aug 12 09:12:36 2008ah, the hazards of monkey-patching core classes illustrated perfectly; a Ruby point-release upgrade broke Rails (via chromatic)
... on Mon Aug 11 16:25:13 2008'The software my employer uses for booking holidays has recently been "upgraded" and we now need to specify an absence reason.' there are several hundred reasons, including 'Abortion', 'Stroke', 'Warts', 'Dementia', 'Rectal Problems', 'Manic Depression' and, um, 'Wax'. best of all, this is for booking time off in advance...
... on Mon Aug 11 10:05:13 2008'a console-based email client for people with a lot of email [..] The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere.' Looks like they've nicked a few ideas from GMail, too (via Luis)
... on Mon Aug 11 08:50:37 2008there appears to be a lack of published research suggesting that bike helmets help avoid serious injury and death -- in fact, research seems to suggest the _opposite_.
... on Sun Aug 10 20:38:44 2008'SIGIR 2008 paper, "SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections"'. may be useful, although we've pretty much stopped deduping in SpamAssassin nowadays
... on Sun Aug 10 20:04:31 2008'Using the streaming system you can develop working hadoop jobs with extremely limited knowldge of Java. [..] Hadoop basically becomes a system for making pipes from shell-scripting work (with some fudging) on a cluster.'
... on Sun Aug 10 20:02:12 2008'Tablemate at benihana confided how he subscribes to Obama's mailing list and marks it all as spam to train Gmail. Urge to kill rising.' - Kevin Fox on Twitter
... on Sun Aug 10 11:17:26 2008'large numbers of [adulterated Prohibition-era alcohol, Jamaican Ginger Extract] users began to lose use of their hands and feet. Some victims could walk, but they had no control over the muscles which would normally have enabled them to point their toes upward. Therefore, they would raise their feet high with the toes flopping downward, which would touch the pavement first followed by their heels. The toe first, heel second pattern made a distinctive “tap-click, tap-click" sound as they walked. This very peculiar gait became known as the jake walk and those afflicted were said to have jake leg'
... on Sun Aug 10 09:27:12 2008great guide to Dan's most recent discovery. it really is quite nasty (via Jeremy)
... on Sat Aug 9 21:11:45 2008great article countering overuse of mock objects in testing, arguing that system tests are actually much more useful: 'it’s better to test the real thing than mock objects.' IMO, +1; I've run into situations in the past where mocking leaves bugs in "real-world" non-mocked usage (via KP)
... on Fri Aug 8 09:57:31 2008notable mainly because Schneier calls MIFARE Classic's crypto 'terrible' and 'kindergarten cryptography'. 'Anyone with any security experience would be embarrassed to put his name to the design.' ZING
... on Thu Aug 7 12:45:13 2008e.g. "upload files to S3 in lexically-sorted order", apparently it's faster. who knew!? (Sorry Joshua, gave you a bad tip y'day in that case)
... on Thu Aug 7 11:12:12 2008fascinating Joe Stewart post-mortem of a server run by a Russian malware group targeting online banking; one apparent Miami-based victim was defrauded of $90k, and it appears that the group would have had access to a combined $2.5m in all victims' accounts
... on Thu Aug 7 09:42:19 2008aha! This is the root cause of the crippling Firefox 3/VIM slowness; Ubuntu and Debian use a crappy ext3 option which sacrifices speed for correctness, by effectively turning every fsync() into a sync(). Here's how to disable it
... on Thu Aug 7 09:12:18 2008A long-running annoying commenter on Sarah Carey's blog may have been a complex, team-driven troll operation! 'The Crewser Artistic Spoof which has haunted your site and a few others for the last 18 months or so has been terminated as planned on July 31st last.' Not sure I believe this
... on Wed Aug 6 19:03:48 2008must-read post from Chris. If you run a colo box, you should think about offsetting the ~2 tonnes of CO2 output it generates per year
... on Wed Aug 6 11:32:41 2008good set of details on MrN's new ZFS-based home disk server
... on Wed Aug 6 11:01:12 2008an "eyewitness account" with allegations about the SF network admin in question -- no documentation, passwords kept to himself instead of shared with his team, the entire network maintained by 1 person, never took holidays, bad tempered and stubborn -- sounds like a recipe for classic BOFH disaster
... on Tue Aug 5 15:47:49 2008cool, hyper-detailed hand-drawn tiling patterns
... on Tue Aug 5 15:31:05 2008running the test suite results in "ERROR: Can't open/parse the config file clamav.conf"; looks like File::Scan::ClamAV is now unmaintained :(
... on Tue Aug 5 11:06:34 2008'this bio-inspired spam detection algorithm, based on the cross-regulation modeal of T-cell dynamics, is equally as competitive [sic] as state-of-the-art spam binary classifiers and provides a deeper understanding of the behaviour of T-cell cross-regulation systems.'
... on Tue Aug 5 09:11:25 2008'Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment [in a particle accelerator] when an accident occurred due to failed safety mechanisms.' [...] 'The left half of Bugorski's face started peeling off, showing the path that the proton beam (moving near the speed of light) had burned through parts of his face, his bone, and brain tissue underneath. [...] Bugorski survived and even completed his Ph.D. [...] He is able to function perfectly well, save the fact that he has occasional petit mal seizures and very occasional grand mal seizures.' (via mrneutron)
... on Sat Aug 2 23:26:56 2008holy crap, those /b/tards are fucked up
... on Sat Aug 2 20:41:45 2008I have to say, the Digital Hub is actually a great place to work; it's well worth duplicating, if such a thing is possible
... on Fri Aug 1 21:48:59 2008"Possibly, he is pining for the fee-ords"
... on Fri Aug 1 13:45:34 2008Good news. About time, too ;)
... on Fri Aug 1 11:31:18 2008'A grounded, semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution', in perl, by the developers of SVK and RT. looks great!
... on Thu Jul 31 23:20:10 2008yay! I've been waiting for this for yonks
... on Thu Jul 31 20:45:22 2008massive ~50GB RDF/XML dump, for open crunching, to generate interesting "SIOC Semantic Web" apps
... on Thu Jul 31 11:50:34 2008how to get mail delivered successfully to Comcast, the usual stuff
... on Thu Jul 31 11:48:23 2008'The reason that e-mail is uniquely useful is that you can exchange mail with people you don't already know. The reason that spam exists is that you can exchange mail with people you don't already know.' +1
... on Thu Jul 31 11:20:31 2008'what was initially hailed as "free bikes" has become one of the biggest planning controversies to hit Dublin in years.' No shit. 70% of sites are on the Northside, rather than the richer Southside; and each bike will cost over EUR300k in ad revenue!
... on Thu Jul 31 09:58:46 2008detailing this analyst's hilariously wrong pro-SCO, anti-Apple/Linux predictions over the years. John Gruber: 'the only way it would be worthwhile for reporters to [quote him] would be if they were willing to describe him as "almost always utterly wrong"'
... on Thu Jul 31 09:05:18 2008'eagerness, fearsomeness, a gnat, a horsefly, a beetle, a bluebottle, and (with the addition of a fada) a rear end, a reserve or backup, a corner, and an arse. The one thing it isn't, according to the four dictionaries I just checked, is knowledge.'
... on Wed Jul 30 13:12:35 2008Marketing company buys list of addresses, 85% of the 100k addresses bounce, marketer gets booted by ISP for spamming, marketer issues complaining press release. Let's say it again: opt-in permission can't be sold, and address list vendors are spammers
... on Wed Jul 23 09:51:27 2008Zed recommends Newsbeuter. must take a look
... on Tue Jul 22 14:30:34 2008having worked on a project to do just this, believe me, this is doomed. DOOMED
... on Tue Jul 22 14:25:21 2008'compute cycles in the cloud for scientific communities .. allows you to provision customized compute nodes .. that you have full control over using a leasing model based on the Amazon's EC2 service.' Wonder if they'd like to give SA some time ;)
... on Tue Jul 22 10:15:23 2008the JBoss/Tomcat install leaks the "secret" URLs through it's default status page. this is the 3rd helping of FAIL for O2's web team; 2 previous occasions in the last year exposed customer data through "secret" URL manipulation
... on Mon Jul 21 18:44:35 2008"a 'dock-like' (cough) navigator bar for the Linux desktop" (via Danny, again!)
... on Mon Jul 21 10:55:21 2008'user-space bandwidth shaper', ie. like nice(1) for network bandwidth (via Danny)
... on Mon Jul 21 10:24:13 2008'Based on case studies, this document identifies some of the factors influencing success and failure of protocol designs.' (via spicylinks)
... on Mon Jul 21 10:22:45 20087 very interesting points
... on Sat Jul 19 20:00:21 2008there's even some indexed by Google
... on Fri Jul 18 08:58:38 2008smart, tech-savvy candidate running for State Representative of Kansas, vs a religious-right wingnut Intelligent Design-supporter; looks like he's actually in with a chance of winning! he's a really cool guy, I hope this works out
... on Wed Jul 16 16:22:25 2008'Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM.' +1
... on Wed Jul 16 11:05:51 2008awesome! can't wait to try this out on SpamAssassin. thanks Tim!
... on Wed Jul 16 10:34:43 2008Jay Rayner on the democratization of criticism: 'From that point on I concluded I could no longer view the blogosphere as source material or even mere displacement activity. Now it was the competition.'
... on Wed Jul 16 10:16:39 2008a '46-metre tal sculpture of a human figure'. Great stuff
... on Tue Jul 15 22:01:32 2008ok, this stuff is really cool. nice API, similar to a distributed fs with change monitoring, and capable of solid distributed locking. looks very nice!
... on Tue Jul 15 13:34:14 2008'a service for coordinating processes of distributed apps'. Combines 'wait-free aspects of group messaging and shared registers with an eventing mechanism similar to those of locking services to provide a simple, yet powerful coordination service.' hmm!
... on Tue Jul 15 13:17:06 2008um, sounds pretty awful. 'things would randomly fail' due to the various limits and flakiness -- great
... on Tue Jul 15 13:11:49 2008I always lose this URL. distance measurement and calorie counter for walking trips, unfortunately can't do elevation outside the US though
... on Tue Jul 15 08:34:26 2008fantastic 18" x 24" retro-computing 5-color screen print from Threadless
... on Mon Jul 14 16:21:04 2008the answer is pretty much "stick with the CDNs", if speedy response times are what you're after
... on Mon Jul 14 10:05:56 2008I had no idea it took this kind of work -- incredible reverse-engineering, including microscopic analysis of the traces on the ROM chip. The dedication of this is amazing, great gaming archaeology by the MAME guys (via Nelson)
... on Mon Jul 14 09:18:15 2008Cal Henderson's latest slides. great stuff, lots of good patterns like Permission URLs, reverse proxy cache invalidation through URL modification, etc.
... on Fri Jul 11 13:26:04 2008pretty esoteric high-end setup, lots and lots of sharding and memcaching
... on Fri Jul 11 13:12:59 2008the avoidance of Dan's DNS security hole relies on source-port randomization, but NAT will rewrite the source ports. Some NATs generate the ports in a non-random order, hence *un*fixing the bug. oh dear. (via Chris)
... on Fri Jul 11 09:27:48 2008ooer missus (via Kenneth)
... on Thu Jul 10 19:02:06 2008no mention of what it does with mail from
good guide to diagnosing I/O bottlenecks on modern Linuxes using -d and -x
... on Wed Jul 9 13:43:01 2008the bug appears to affect client-side resolvers, which can be cache-poisoned by malicious DNS servers using predictable TXIDs in DNS responses. current fix is to randomize ports when making queries? I think. more: http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/800113
... on Wed Jul 9 10:42:17 2008paraphrased: "enough linkblogging! new content please!"
... on Wed Jul 9 10:26:55 2008new cinema listings site for Ireland. nice web2.0-ish layout, but missing lots of stuff you'd expect nowadays: search-by-reviews, feeds, Upcoming.org-style social features, etc. (in fact, they'd almost be better off just using Upcoming.org IMO ;)
... on Wed Jul 9 09:45:14 2008by the Dutch team behind the crack of the Dutch travel card, based on the same MIFARE system as London's Oyster cards. paper coming in October
... on Tue Jul 8 20:15:57 2008'a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler', defined with an IDL-style language. see also Thrift and http://teddziuba.com/2008/07/build-google-protocol-buffers.html
... on Tue Jul 8 09:42:16 2008'Four resourceful humans test the tolerance levels of four human resource managers by constantly failing to show up for work after being offered a job. The aim… To see who can hold onto their job the longest without ever working a day.' truly hilarious
... on Mon Jul 7 14:44:38 2008as usual, a description of what you _shouldn't_ be doing, provides a great illustration of what you _should_ be doing ;) (via Vinoski)
... on Mon Jul 7 10:48:49 2008'The way things are going, I half-expect to hear a quiet electric "peep" noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumland Security.'
... on Mon Jul 7 10:44:16 2008I'm quoted!, arguing that the death of invention in the modern age is greatly exaggerated: 'the next Wikipedia could easily come from one teenager's laptop in their back bedroom in Kildare [...] the barriers to [invention] are lower than ever.'
... on Mon Jul 7 10:38:13 2008Ryanair vs Bravofly, Bravofly scraping Ryanair's site allegedly in contravention of their T&Cs
... on Mon Jul 7 08:53:05 2008aha. this explains a long-running issue I've had on my Thinkpad at home
... on Sun Jul 6 11:05:55 2008fix is to use the kernel from Intrepid Ibex, for now
... on Sun Jul 6 10:52:52 2008[the Viacom/Youtube privacy disaster demonstrates] 'what's wrong with trusting corporations with your data: if the corporation says "I'm not going to be evil," and the government says "oh yes you are," it's pretty much _the end of the conversation_.'
... on Fri Jul 4 18:05:14 2008'a new text markup format. Its syntax is a blend of Donald Knuth's TEX and various wiki markup.' has a formal grammar, rather than an ad-hoc parser (guilty). quite nice, although would have been better if it didn't reinvent so many wheels (via adulau)
... on Fri Jul 4 11:26:37 2008'a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service', written in C with libevent, lots of client libs for different languages. Nice lifecycle model. The queues are not persistent yet, though, unfortunately
... on Thu Jul 3 12:32:00 2008910-node cluster sorting 1TB of data in 209 seconds, using Hadoop and HDFS. I wish we had a Hadoop cluster to do SpamAssassin mass-checks on ;)
... on Thu Jul 3 12:03:01 2008some third-party app developers get access to it, some don't. one dev says: 'It’s frustrating to just get locked out after spending so much time making stuff for Twitter users'
... on Thu Jul 3 09:59:43 2008alt microblogging platform with a few key wins over Twitter & Jaiku: stability (so far!), open, decentralized, and Affero-licensed OSS. I'm "jm" on it, but not writing there -- yet. but looking forward to an API so I can add it to twit.ie
... on Thu Jul 3 09:53:46 2008Bebo need to do some anti-abuse work
... on Wed Jul 2 09:55:22 2008'a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. .. detection and annotation of potential problems based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex web 2.0 environments', by lcamtuf
... on Wed Jul 2 09:51:20 2008oh dear. they _really_ need to get proactive on this before the shit really hits the fan, this is not going well
... on Tue Jul 1 19:03:23 2008interesting, I would have thought they'd be in a good position to just do something like what the SpamAssassin vbounce ruleset does
... on Tue Jul 1 13:19:13 2008awesome; NAT-tunneling without any prior config, even if both ends are behind NAT. written by the author of the MySpace worm, Samy Kamkar
... on Tue Jul 1 11:14:17 2008Amazon really need to sort out some effective anti-abuse policies for EC2 soon, before things go pear-shaped
... on Tue Jul 1 08:43:34 2008using a Bayes classifier trained on intra-packet intervals and packet length. nifty! (via /.)
... on Mon Jun 30 13:10:54 2008in other words, Comcast's Sandvine appliances use the same technique as Audible Magic. Wonder if this works; I was under the impression that one would have to block RSTs on both ends of the connection, and many commenters agree
... on Mon Jun 30 10:07:35 2008a good guide to using Wireshark to diagnose this, as used by Audible Magic and Sandvine
... on Mon Jun 30 10:04:27 2008good interview with Irish Times MD, Maeve Donovan, on their removal of the paywall: 'it had become clear that there were not sufficient numbers of Irish Times readers prepared to pay for online content.' seems the example of the Grauniad was influential
... on Sun Jun 29 22:26:58 2008using a couple of mod_rewrite rules and a redirect to www.avg.com
... on Fri Jun 27 16:08:34 2008The SGAE agency will collect on sales of mobile phones (EUR 1.10), blank CDs (17c each), laser printers (EUR 10), scanners (EUR 9), CD recorders (3.40). I guess Spanish consumers have a license to download freely now, since they're already paying for it
... on Fri Jun 27 12:54:32 2008make the obtuse pg_locks table more useful. 'show any queries that are waiting on a lock, and the query that currently holds the lock on which those queries are waiting.' haven't tried it out yet
... on Fri Jun 27 11:11:57 2008intro to the EAM (Execute Around Method) closure-based resource-management pattern. I was wondering what this trick was called
... on Thu Jun 26 14:00:02 2008A film festival is putting this on? wtf, does not compute. good line up though. at Filmbase, Curved St, Temple Bar, 10am Friday 27th June
... on Thu Jun 26 11:36:33 2008'It's a common enough misconception, but Irish national newspapers have not and are not currently showing the large-scale declines in readership as seen in the UK and US. The market is reasonably stable.' interesting
... on Thu Jun 26 10:32:17 2008there goes my pocket money. I <3 the woot crew
... on Thu Jun 26 10:18:41 2008'one of my mentors told me that the chief responsibility of a CEO to his staff is to improve the CV of every staff member [..] I sincerely hope that each and every career immensely benefited as a result.' Certainly worked for me - thanks Chris!
... on Wed Jun 25 22:17:54 2008handy algorithm to take N randomly-selected samples from a passing stream of data; must use this on the SpamAssassin spamtraps
... on Wed Jun 25 15:22:29 2008yay, PutPlace on Windows is now in public beta
... on Wed Jun 25 09:19:18 2008I missed this at the time. great news
... on Wed Jun 25 08:38:57 2008A company called "TenFour Sweden" apparently sold a product called "TFS Gateway" that supported virus scans, prior to Trend's patent filing. Note that they're still looking for people who _used_ TFS Gateway in 1995
... on Tue Jun 24 10:16:44 2008this is becoming critical for use of git as a file-synchronization mechanism for my MP3 collection, for obvious reasons. looks like it should be possible with git 1.5.6
... on Mon Jun 23 20:37:20 2008lovely. would prefer the tee, but it's sold out for now
... on Mon Jun 23 16:12:51 2008Amazingly clear breakdown of my social groups -- great infoviz. Must try something like this for SpamAssassin spamtrap data (via Leonard)
... on Mon Jun 23 11:16:20 2008very good list of differences, and compelling downsides to cfengine. sounds like I need to give Puppet another chance after all
... on Mon Jun 23 09:39:14 2008it was a Hungarian sysadmin protesting a $227M investment in MS licences throughout the Hungarian state system as a massive waste of money: "I think there are much more useful free software solutions available, for no charge."
... on Mon Jun 23 09:24:54 2008Ubuntu Ireland LoCo team now has a drop-in centre on Saturdays between 11am-4pm at the Camara offices in the Digital Hub, on Thomas St in Dublin 8
... on Sat Jun 21 12:43:30 2008'Our programs have left the desktop and found their new home on the web. System administration issues loom large.' I agree with the thesis, but Puppet as a key component to fix this? it's just cfengine in Ruby, snore
... on Fri Jun 20 20:34:55 2008Boards user boasts of cheating in the Leaving Cert exams, is identified, and an epic thread unfolds. IRISH INTERNETS - SERIOUS BUSINESS
... on Wed Jun 18 16:26:29 2008an announcement-only Google Group for notifications about GAE downtime and outages. useful, considering they had a major datastore outage yesterday
... on Wed Jun 18 11:22:17 2008the 'Jura Internet Connection Kit' has a few security holes, it seems. 'Fun things you can do with a Jura coffee maker: Change the preset coffee settings; [..] Change the amount of water per cup (say 300ml for a short black) and make a puddle'
... on Wed Jun 18 11:00:48 2008to hold Django's trademarks and IP. that's a major step forward, congrats guys. although I'm sure there'd have been room at the ASF too ;)
... on Wed Jun 18 10:54:08 2008great sketch: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett at the pitch 'n' putt (NSFW)
... on Wed Jun 18 10:45:46 200870% of UK kids aged 18-24 download music illegally; 87% of all respondents have copied music CDs; 74% said they'd be interested in a working, DRM-free legal download service
... on Tue Jun 17 16:28:51 2008The Register says "maybe". mind you, that means absolutely feck all ;)
... on Mon Jun 16 20:01:17 2008sounds like this guy's work laptop was trojaned by a virus/malware, then used to host child porn, for which he was then prosecuted. what a nightmare scenario -- thankfully the forensics analyst figured it out
... on Mon Jun 16 19:48:04 2008ouch, he cites plenty of bad management at ORA. On the plus side, the end result, "High Performance MySQL", 2nd Ed, sounds like it came out well -- eventually! all in all though, it sounds like I dodged a bullet on that one, hard work
... on Mon Jun 16 10:54:47 2008'right now it feels like an ugly popularity contest. I can only assume that the A-listers of the Irish blogging world are lovely, lovely people because to be frank, some of them are shit-awful writers.' be sure to read the name-calling in the comments
... on Mon Jun 16 10:32:14 2008'As [a govt minister] attempted to speak, he was surrounded by Coir [ie. extreme-right-wing anti-abortion group Youth Defense] activists who screamed at him and sang "there's no Lisbon". When [Joan] Burton attempted to intervene, she was spat at.' lovely
... on Fri Jun 13 23:40:30 2008release management failure on this scale is pretty worrying in an open-source project; here's hoping the upcoming 1.0 actually happens
... on Fri Jun 13 11:00:51 2008classic Onion. 'Cheney reportedly makes reference to President Bush and the Iraq War, alludes to the 9/11 attacks 27 times, and warns eerily about Americans "making the wrong choice" in November.'
... on Thu Jun 12 16:00:12 2008"face value ticket reselling". no auctions, no additional fees, no bullshit demand-generation or touts buying up the lot -- just p2p buying and selling of gig tickets. looks like a good option
... on Thu Jun 12 11:55:33 2008due mainly to ridiculous bureaucratic worries about "treading on other people's toes", according to Richard Clayton and Tyler Moore. seems like an obvious and worryingly exploitable security hole
... on Wed Jun 11 15:32:32 2008'iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed.' looks a good deal cleaner than OzyManDNS, packages available for many distros
... on Wed Jun 11 09:47:07 2008hooray! One of the few Dublin satirical mags to be actually *funny* is now reopening as a NTK/Popbitch-style mailing list. better late than never!
... on Tue Jun 10 09:57:24 2008botnet spammers sending spam negative about Amazon's recent downtime, starting on Saturday, spotted by Sophos
... on Tue Jun 10 09:03:45 2008MP3 search engine that finds mp3s for pretty much everything I can think of; I think it's mp3-blog-driven. still up and working several weeks after I heard about it, to my surprise. Russian-hosted, of course
... on Mon Jun 9 22:40:07 2008'Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems', a clone of Amazon EC2 from the MAYHEM lab at UCSB (via wmf)
... on Mon Jun 9 21:00:03 2008good question, to be honest -- I've been wondering too. the preview looks fantastic from where I'm standing, but I guess I'm not seeing the numbers on the other end
... on Mon Jun 9 20:26:21 2008'Sinn Fein believe that the EU is too militaristic, and are concerned about the EU using weapons to achieve its political ends. I'll let that sentence just sit quietly there, as I leaf through the November 2007 edition of Black Pots and Kettles Monthly.'
... on Mon Jun 9 14:18:16 2008eBay's John McElligott seems to be kicking ass and taking names, much to the displeasure of government mandarins
... on Mon Jun 9 13:58:24 2008it seems spamming over Bluetooth is not currently illegal in Ireland because the spam is not transmitted over a 'publicly available electronic communications network'
... on Mon Jun 9 11:54:59 2008TypePad Anti-Spam, Akismet, Defensio and Mollom; commentary on their open-source/proprietary licensing stances, with follow-up from Anil and Matt Mullenweg in the comments
... on Thu Jun 5 21:00:40 2008incredible stories of RIPA abuse by local councils: offences like storing petrol without a licence, a search for a bogus faith healer, dog fouling were all deemed important enough to search private phone and email records. given access, it'll be abused
... on Thu Jun 5 19:11:01 2008replaced paid-for ads for Oxfam, Make Trade Fair and SOS Children's Villages with their own ads -- very unpleasant! also: 'communications regarding ad systems and info collection could lead to negative perception if not carefully handled'. no shit ;)
... on Thu Jun 5 16:05:45 2008MC put out a press release about our shared spamtrap setup; we're hosting our spamtrap front-end on Amazon EC2 and S3 nowadays! (must write up a blog post about that)
... on Thu Jun 5 12:02:50 2008social graph kept in-memory, taking 12GB of RAM; implemented in C++ instead of Java due to GC bugs. 2MB of RAM is used to cache per-user net views with an LRU cache. lots of async using JMS. slow DB row deletions are avoided in update delivery.
... on Thu Jun 5 11:57:47 2008Irish online store selling new and second-hand games, recommended by boards.ie denizens, with free shipping to Irish addresses and trade-ins (somehow)
... on Thu Jun 5 08:30:33 2008brilliant! probably best for non-desktop systems, though. my $400 Dell laptop acting as a home server now has 224MB of additional superfast swap ;)
... on Wed Jun 4 15:21:02 2008VM pool management using XMPP, used in their 'EngineYard' cloud computing platform. I'm sceptical of real-world usage of XMPP, however, since _every_ impl seems to have horrible i14y bugs...
... on Wed Jun 4 13:57:12 2008to read -- a bunch of Bloom Filter tricks. doesn't load here yet, but when bos and joshua both bookmark it you know it's going to be worth reading ;)
... on Wed Jun 4 11:32:14 2008kokogiak's amazing blog of top photos hot off the newswires. his selection is fantastic (via Waxy)
... on Wed Jun 4 10:06:33 2008'Multiple groups of nude participants will be photographed outdoors by Tunick as part of his series of installations that have previously taken place in cities around the world including New York, Amsterdam and Mexico City.'
... on Wed Jun 4 09:55:16 2008great detailed post about SmugMug's EC2 horizontal-scaling controller
... on Tue Jun 3 19:41:35 2008nice demo of sharding a counter to avoid locking overhead under heavy load
... on Tue Jun 3 10:27:55 2008I'm getting more hits from this Polish article about the Debian/OpenSSL security fiasco, than from many other sources
... on Sun Jun 1 19:08:04 2008"xdotool", command-line app to perform window management manipulation for X11, similar to sawfish-ui or Enlightenment's proprietary UIs, can now activate/warp to windows. must use this to reinstate the Pidgin feature I miss
... on Sun Jun 1 10:13:54 2008insanely complex, requiring hacks in about:config followed by pasting a line of raw Javascript into the address bar. wtf Firefox? (via:wwhyte)
... on Sun Jun 1 10:07:57 2008'when he’s hauled out of the swamp by somebody throwing a snake, it was too rubbery and long to be an anaconda. If it was a real anaconda, 2 or 3 people wouldn’t be able to hold it, I can tell you; I’ve tried, and they are enormously strong.' etc.
... on Fri May 30 15:32:53 2008Rev3 closed off access to their BitTorrent tracker, used to distribute legit files; MediaDefender, a supposedly legit company, launched a massive SYN flood in response, wiping out their network for a holiday weekend. incredible -- here's hoping Rev3 sue
... on Fri May 30 11:22:04 2008good news, Hudson is a fantastic app!
... on Fri May 30 09:35:12 2008'There will be a demonstration at the Barbican in London on July 16th 2008 (outside the BT AGM) protesting against the use of Deep Packet Inspection for the purpose of behavioural advertising (specifically Phorm).' good plan IMO
... on Fri May 30 09:21:43 2008hot espresso tip from Michele Neylon; EUR 173 for a nice-looking Gaggia machine for home use
... on Wed May 28 10:40:25 2008sounds great. But 'staying up to date with the most recent bug fixes' -- does this mean they'll blindly upgrade their hosted libs? If so, there will be version mismatches between the lib and the app using it: the classic 'dependency hell' mistake
... on Wed May 28 10:32:27 2008as expected, it now only finds muxtapes by their name. pretty useless -- clearly it's been blocked by Muxtape.com's developer
... on Wed May 28 09:51:26 2008a Greasemonkey script to killfile the noise. Must hack this to work for Reddit, too
... on Wed May 28 09:21:31 2008Joe tots up the free storage sites. Actually quite handy, and I'm not just saying that because he's my boss ;)
... on Wed May 28 08:17:40 2008handy code to get refcounts of all class objects in the Python arena
... on Tue May 27 16:27:33 2008a real shame, it was consistently a good read. He caps it off with a list of advice for other journo-bloggers
... on Tue May 27 13:42:56 2008Kevin Myers discovers Wikipedia, comedy gold ensues. 'Every misanthropic fantasist now has an uncontrolled forum for his or her bilious ravings, which are then given a wholly spurious "encyclopedic" status on Wikipedia' blah blah blah
... on Tue May 27 13:32:36 2008hahaha! extremist anti-Lisbon-Treaty posters extrapolated
... on Tue May 27 11:20:58 2008good blog post about where scalable web infrastructure appears to be going
... on Tue May 27 10:04:08 2008"Data centres consumed [..] 1% of the world's electricity in 2005. Globally, they are already responsible for more carbon-dioxide emissions per year than Argentina or the Netherlands'
... on Tue May 27 09:43:36 2008'What the fuck? We all need to check Subsection 2.4.8 on baby chipping. This is serious shit.'
... on Mon May 26 15:09:05 2008Adversarial classification and evasion in action (via Waxy). interesting to see yet another reinvention of hashbusting, and use of "free ringtones" sites to evade SMS-borne verification, ffs!
... on Mon May 26 14:50:40 2008scans of this anime's amazingly detailed background art 'based on graphic design of 50's and 60's Japan'
... on Mon May 26 13:47:37 2008PgBouncer sounds a lot nicer than the (poorly-documented) pgpool
... on Mon May 26 10:04:39 2008wow, shit hits fan (via Aehso)
... on Fri May 23 09:23:08 2008'When you build a system where you get points for the # of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas, [which] inherently favors people who waste their own time; your contest will produce winners which are actually losers.'
... on Thu May 22 11:44:38 2008looking at Gadi Evron's writeup of the Estonian "cyberwar" incident, he notes 'the Estonian CERT comes into focus a lot as their efforts ensured the attacks were dealt with as effectively as possible', and calls for an Irish equivalent
... on Thu May 22 11:29:29 2008a truly fantastic idea: back up database tables using 1-line-per-record uncompressed text format into a version-control system. Best of both worlds: fast db on the front-end, reliability, visibility and rollback of VC on the back-end, brilliant!
... on Thu May 22 10:50:23 2008'"Part of our motivation is to get our brand out in front of people, but also to give back to the open source community [..] They have provided us these tremendous back-end applications, such as MySQL and SpamAssassin' -- woo, nice to be namedropped!
... on Tue May 20 20:58:38 2008uh oh, another one bites the dust; venerable (and impressively still reliable) blocklist dsbl.org seems to have gone under
... on Tue May 20 15:56:26 2008'last night I attacked my mac with some blackboard paint, and this morning it's suddenly way more useful.' crazy, but cool
... on Tue May 20 14:16:01 2008all for phishing, targeting users of 'People's Bank, [...] Citibank, Capital One, and PayPal'
... on Tue May 20 14:15:03 2008$35 for 18" x 24" limited-edition prints of their tee designs
... on Tue May 20 14:08:50 2008quite a few dedicated spam registrars. Earth calling ICANN -- time to do something
... on Tue May 20 12:02:23 2008The Twilight Hack 'works by employing a lengthy name for [Link's horse, Epona], in order to facilitate a stack smash. This triggers when talking to the man next to you when you start the savegame, as he loads the name to use it in his dialog'. neat
... on Tue May 20 11:43:04 2008ExistenzE demo, runs as a Wii homebrew app. wonder how easy it is to get this running without bricking my Wii...
... on Tue May 20 11:33:49 2008pixel artist eBoy does his cool pixellated-map thing with Dublin. unfortunately, it's a Coke ad, but hey (via Jazz Biscuit)
... on Mon May 19 14:52:42 2008"l.root-servers.net" changed to a new IP address last November, but millions of hosts will still use the old addr, due to inertia. The addr has since been taken over, but is continuing to run unauthorized root DNS service from it. Question is, why?
... on Mon May 19 14:43:11 2008"How Debian bug #363516 was really fixed" -- ha!
... on Mon May 19 13:39:33 2008receivers on the walls of the shopping centres, installed by a company called Path Intelligence, allow tracking of IMEIs as the user travels around the local area; installed as a trial in 2 UK shopping centres already
... on Mon May 19 11:25:58 2008Annoying AWS bug-du-jour: their EC2 tools break the /etc/fstab resulting in a missing /dev/pts directory, therefore an inability to connect via SSH on reboot
... on Mon May 19 09:32:16 2008re twitter.com/towerbridge. ha!
... on Sun May 18 14:13:19 2008'Scripts that allow brute forcing of vulnerable keys (see this as rainbow tables for SSH keys) are in the wild'
... on Fri May 16 10:05:45 2008scary concept -- malware running on a network card, remotely-updated firmware, can relay packets between interfaces and possibly read host RAM
... on Fri May 16 09:35:16 2008Ireland's new Taoiseach sings a bizarre little Father Ted-esque song about getting swimming pools off them feckers in Dublin; as a comment says: 'Cowan - Cultural Learnings of Offaly for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Ireland'. we're screwed
... on Fri May 16 08:46:58 2008dammit, this is just the first part of a trilogy?! I feel bait-and-switched :( still, great game (warning: spoilers)
... on Thu May 15 23:12:44 2008looks pretty useful, a top tip from Fergal
... on Thu May 15 16:34:56 2008'we rolled our own subsystem for logging chat messages (in C++) as well as an epoll-driven web server (in Erlang) that holds online users' conversations in-memory and serves the long-polled HTTP requests. Both subsystems are clustered and partitioned'
... on Thu May 15 10:10:21 2008pregenerated SSH keys for the vulnerable keyspace; save a few hours of number crunching. 'It should be possible to try all 32767 keys of both DSA-1024 and RSA-2048 within a couple hours, but be careful of anti-brute-force scripts on the target server.'
... on Thu May 15 09:11:51 2008snarky response to Ben Laurie's indication that the Debian packagers sent their upstream query to the wrong address; it seems the address he reckons they should have sent it to is totally undocumented. now that's user-hostility
... on Wed May 14 15:52:43 2008follow-on from the Debian hole. 'All OpenSSH and X.509 keys generated on [Ubuntu Feisty, Gutsy, Hardy or etch] systems must be considered untrustworthy, regardless of the system on which they are used, even after the update has been applied.' arghghgh
... on Tue May 13 14:34:43 2008'[the pRNG in Debian's openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a result, cryptographic key material may be guessable.' oh dear
... on Tue May 13 14:33:41 2008'Using LVM + DRBD + NFS + Heartbeat + VTun To Gain Data Persistence, Redundancy, Automatic Fail-Over, and Read/Write Disk Access Across Multiple EC2 Nodes'. detailed! didn't realise the upcoming EC2 persistent storage feature will support DRBD, cool
... on Tue May 13 10:44:02 2008Fascinating, more from a cultural perspective than anything else -- 'the Chinese Internet control system is actually quite brilliant because it succeeds in making .. the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother.
... on Tue May 13 08:41:32 2008'we estimate that the Microsoft [CAPTCHA, as used on Hotmail, Windows Live and MSN] can be broken with an overall (segmentation and then recognition) success rate of more than 60%.' with avg runtime of 80ms per segmentation
... on Mon May 12 14:27:02 2008there are many issues with their testing methodology that mean it can't be extrapolated into an scalable, exploitable hole for spammers, any more than their current scripted acct signups already are
... on Mon May 12 10:41:46 2008great Steve Yegge article about what's coming down the pipe in terms of language optimisation
... on Mon May 12 10:26:25 2008phew! Dublin's own beer dodged a bullet. 'The [renovated] plant will serve the Irish and British markets and will be based [on Thomas St]. The company said this would ensure that every pint of Guinness sold in Ireland would be brewed here.'
... on Sat May 10 07:54:30 2008whoa, that came by surprise. I still have vouchers, dammit! ;) More seriously though, staff received hours notice that the shops would not be reopening...
... on Sat May 10 07:50:05 2008+1. I'd go further than that, though; I have _never_ had a good experience buying on eBay. also: 'the cool thing about eBay support is it will always answer your q; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password'
... on Fri May 9 16:07:33 2008very impressive data forensics! (via /.)
... on Thu May 8 11:16:35 2008hilarious. Damien was able to download the DPC's annual report before it's official release, due to their badly-designed website CMS. oh the irony
... on Thu May 8 10:26:57 2008'Our Performance Monitoring Network is a unique system that aims to provide statistical data on the performance of broadband providers in the UK' using free Linksys routers running custom code at volunteer sites
... on Wed May 7 15:44:30 2008'SUVs as an everyday commuter car is largely going away... sales of large SUVs plummeted 28% in the first quarter this year, while subcompact sales rose 32%, according to Autodata Corp.' Surprisingly not in the tackier parts of Dublin, bizarrely
... on Wed May 7 14:55:16 2008Great Jones St. in NYC, it seems. (via lozenge)
... on Wed May 7 13:57:16 2008not a great article. particularly annoying to see Dan Wallach, who should know better, making the fallacy that backscatter is an attempt by spammers to hide spam in error messages. at least Dmitry@Sophos says something clueful
... on Tue May 6 11:28:56 2008'Government officials planning food supplies said the tea situation would be "very serious" after a nuclear war.' classic
... on Tue May 6 10:51:41 2008previously AKA 'Strider' of the Fairlight group on the C=64 cracking scene
... on Tue May 6 07:55:46 2008Tim Bray: 'yet more evidence that the news aggregators are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.' +1; I don't read them for this reason
... on Fri May 2 19:58:32 2008notable: RapidShare at #18, Irish users are clearly well into the filesharing; and porn sites at #27 and #28! would be interesting to compare with other countries
... on Fri May 2 10:47:16 2008wow, the "Libertas" group campaigning against the current EU vote are really, _really_ dodgy characters. best reason to vote "yes" I've heard so far
... on Thu May 1 19:31:39 2008'abels big and small have told me that they're excited about Muxtape as a model for discovery and ultimately selling music, and I think that's extremely keen.' (via Nialler9)
... on Thu May 1 15:56:10 2008MSN Music is shutting down its DRM validation servers, leaving customers screwed if they have to move their legally-bought music to a new machine. The EFF is rightly kicking up a stink
... on Wed Apr 30 10:36:12 2008"Uninvited collaborations with nature: in the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread." brilliant art
... on Tue Apr 29 09:40:52 2008Irish Times allowed themselves to publish made-up house sale price figures from the estate agents -- despite knowing they were faked for months. 'The problem for you, as a newspaper, is that we can’t believe what’s printed in your newspaper.'
... on Tue Apr 29 09:17:37 2008'Orna Mulcahy, property editor of the newspaper, said the misreporting of prices was ‘‘endemic’’. ‘‘Reported prices were simply being plucked out of the air. Many were as much as 20 per cent off the mark. What was going on was fairly shocking'
... on Mon Apr 28 14:37:10 2008block the 'self-proclaimed "SEO experts" and "entrepreneurs" clogging up the Interwebs' -- and your Twitter contacts list, specifically -- using an nfollowers/nfollowing algorithm
... on Mon Apr 28 09:44:16 200830 years ago last Friday, the first spam ever was sent over the ARPANET
... on Sun Apr 27 22:22:54 2008'Dude, your app isn't having scalability problems because of the architecture. It's having scalability problems because you coded a ton of N^2 loops into it and you're too self-important to get peer reviews on your commits.' hahaha
... on Sun Apr 27 22:18:45 2008another Wordpress security bug! guys, get a decent audit, seriously
... on Fri Apr 25 23:26:28 2008interesting variant on the 419: 'just got an email claiming that as a victim of a 419 Nigerian scam, I’m eligible for repayment back from the scammers who have now been arrested.'
... on Fri Apr 25 14:24:00 2008an AJAX IRC client -- exceptionally good, UI is almost identical to xchat. I've been using it for several days now and it's great!
... on Fri Apr 25 10:43:27 2008bands 'cannot allow websites such as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, and downloadmusic.ie to use your music, unless you obtain permission from IMRO or unless IMRO collect royalties from these sites. [...] you have assigned control of many of the rights to IMRO.'
... on Wed Apr 23 10:26:22 2008'the surreal mistake happened because Ramazan sent a message and Emine's cellphone didn't have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter "ı" or closed i.'
... on Tue Apr 22 15:29:26 2008having used SDB, I'll say +1, esp to #1, #2 and #3
... on Tue Apr 22 12:38:58 2008great post from Rod, deservedly top of programming.reddit -- and an interesting-sounding book, interview or no interview ;)
... on Tue Apr 22 10:15:23 2008Comcast is the top BitTorrent-fiddling ISP, followed by Cogeco (via jzawodny)
... on Tue Apr 22 10:06:43 2008'The UK Home Secretary secretively signed a "special certificate" last year that gives foreign security agencies real-time access to traffic camera images and related data monitoring British motorists on highways throughout the UK.'
... on Tue Apr 22 10:03:11 2008Daev and company at blather.net have written a buke! looks great, must order a copy (and attend the launch party)
... on Mon Apr 21 13:27:44 2008the OOXML fiasco. unsurprisingly, bureaucrats go to do whatever they wanted -- come on, what did people expect from the ISO?
... on Mon Apr 21 09:30:20 2008"Bacon, ham, sausage, are full of nitrates and other things designed to prolong shelf-life, and the longer the shelf-life the greater the bacterial activity. All the patients who come to me with bowel trouble have high levels of these foods in their diets
... on Sun Apr 20 19:25:22 2008ridiculous bug in ISP domain-jacking setups discovered by Dan. great pic of him wearing a Threadless "I [heart] Color" tee, too ;)
... on Sun Apr 20 19:21:54 2008"I say bring it on, we need the spam entertainment. [...] Dans la viande a bon marche, il est poesie"
... on Fri Apr 18 14:24:10 2008"small ISPs such as RedMoon, Mesa Networks and MetroFi, but the paper also named one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., XO Communications, as an ad injector." XO claims that it must have been one of their resellers, though
... on Fri Apr 18 14:18:14 2008every story has commenting, archives going back to 2006, and inline links to New-Yorker-style topic index pages; brilliant! great work, definitely the best Irish newspaper site at the moment
... on Fri Apr 18 14:14:18 2008'[when] building relationships with ISPs, many of our customers and ISP contacts have been commenting that boxes of meat are always welcome.
... on Fri Apr 18 13:49:44 2008'This paper shows how an adversary can exploit statistical machine learning, as used in the SpamBayes spam filter, to render it useless--even if the adversary's access is limited to only 1% of the training messages.' uh oh
... on Fri Apr 18 10:59:23 2008"Blaming a technical error in their booking system in not good enough," said [National Consumer Agency CEO] Ann FitzGerald. "Aer Lingus formed a contract with the consumer at the stated fare and cannot simply walk away from their obligations." woo!
... on Thu Apr 17 15:31:34 2008PirateBay-hosted WordPress blogging platform with a strong anti-censorship stance -- 'As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.'
... on Thu Apr 17 10:05:34 2008Amazon are getting through the "top ten most requested AWS features" list with alacrity
... on Thu Apr 17 09:34:52 2008restores BBC3 and BBC4 when they (frequently) disappear, grr
... on Wed Apr 16 21:15:00 2008"I found you this nameless adventurer... but I eated it" (via waxy)
... on Wed Apr 16 19:46:59 2008incredible "street view" interface -- love that they've captured Chiang Mai, my favourite Thai city!
... on Wed Apr 16 09:54:21 2008scaling problems with using munin to do monitoring charts for more than 100 servers. cacti is reportedly not any better
... on Tue Apr 15 15:32:30 2008a snip at 500k (seriously!) Amazing stuff
... on Tue Apr 15 15:03:14 2008'distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. [..] very low per-node overheads and high concurrency.'
... on Tue Apr 15 14:09:14 2008according to Matt Mullenweg. good news
... on Tue Apr 15 13:32:45 2008'I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I'm tired of wasting my time.' +1
... on Tue Apr 15 09:40:05 2008use Hadoop with a "pipe and filters" model for defining horizontally-scaled distributed data processes. looks nicely UNIXy
... on Mon Apr 14 16:07:25 2008"They didn't pay me enough to go Colombia,'' he said. "I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate. They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do."
... on Mon Apr 14 11:00:48 2008he also says that Virgin Media are already 'doing deals to speed up traffic for certain media providers', ie. slow down traffic for everyone else, in the UK. wow, UK ISPs really are scummy
... on Mon Apr 14 10:27:27 2008'Tee hee! Boris had an affair! Arf! He used the word "picaninnies"! Yuk yuk! He's been caught agreeing to give the address of a reporter to a friend who wants him beaten up! Ho ho! Look at his funny blond hair! HA HA BORIS LOL!!!! WHAT A LEGERND!!!!!!'
... on Mon Apr 14 09:58:56 2008at last! I love that "snapshot to S3" is built-in, too, and is two-way
... on Mon Apr 14 09:31:30 2008some more details of AppEngine's technical limitations. still sounds like Ning to me
... on Mon Apr 14 09:02:01 2008grody hacks to try and get some useful Python modules working on AppEngine. ugh
... on Sun Apr 13 18:30:26 2008affecting all versions, including 2.5 and 2.3.3. argh (via Ian Kallen)
... on Sat Apr 12 23:55:41 2008A collaborative MP3 mix-tape for Fustar's "Dreadful Thoughts" story club project. great idea!
... on Sat Apr 12 19:07:24 2008seen in a phishing campaign targeting Mexican users -- an IMG tag invokes a HTTP request on the user's DSL router, reconfiguring it to user the attacker's DNS server, thereby redirecting internet banking. moral: always change default passwords
... on Sat Apr 12 15:09:43 2008"to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet, to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best." -- actually quoting Genghis Khan, no less!
... on Fri Apr 11 22:44:27 2008'[cybercrime] pays well [...] the difference in pay between being a security researcher and a security exploiter differs by a factor of 10'
... on Fri Apr 11 22:08:22 2008limited time periods, and 'customers will be able to avail of content from several Irish producers including Network Ireland Television, as well as Video International’s film library which includes films like The Little Shop of Horrors.' snore
... on Fri Apr 11 16:13:28 2008a truly encyclopedic article. Feck Java, this is probably what gave me tendonitis
... on Fri Apr 11 14:27:34 2008'I am also a user of these services. I see what happens when a company gets purchased. The service languishes. The team leaves. It often gets worse. even though I am happy to take the money, I am left wondering, frankly wishing, if there is a better way.'
... on Fri Apr 11 11:08:57 2008yay. 'European MEPs today voted decisively against "three strikes", the IFPI-promoted plan to create a class of digital outcasts, forbidden from accessing the Net if repeatedly accused by music companies of downloading infringing content.'
... on Fri Apr 11 11:06:23 2008SecureWorks v Damballa -- FITE! ;)
... on Fri Apr 11 11:00:49 2008cool! now to figure out some way to get my Wii to use a UK proxy ;)
... on Fri Apr 11 10:52:51 2008'a technical problem in one of our contributory feeds resulted in a number of invalid CBL listings [...] The feed was removed from operation as soon as we became aware of the issue and have purged all the IPs.'
... on Fri Apr 11 10:15:57 2008'During the last couple of weeks we have been experiencing some delays in receiving incoming post. This is due to a dispute in the local postal sorting office which has caused a backlog in our incoming mail'
... on Thu Apr 10 15:49:43 2008'Add Perl support'. show your love! (via marcus ramberg)
... on Thu Apr 10 10:22:33 2008Doug Cutting on AppEngine: +1
... on Wed Apr 9 22:30:46 2008I've played 70 of the top 101, not bad ;)
... on Wed Apr 9 20:13:48 2008UK bank customers are liable for phishing fraud losses if their computers aren't running up-to-date AV software, or they clicked on links in email
... on Wed Apr 9 15:28:22 2008yay, decent commentary. "don’t see this as much of a competitor to Amazon Web Services"; "Google have solved the database scaling problem... in theory"; "concerned by how much vendor lock-in there is... apps not portable at all". +1 to all 3
... on Wed Apr 9 14:35:57 2008fantastic, on-the-money summarisation of today's spam situation, thanks to Joe Stewart
... on Tue Apr 8 22:28:04 2008dealing with a common VCS annoyance - "the tangled working copy problem". interesting
... on Tue Apr 8 19:40:41 2008dive to 2000 feet in a 3-man submersible for $1000. a friend of mine just did this, sounds amazing!
... on Tue Apr 8 15:13:58 2008explains why Jaiku has been rotting on the vine for so long. wonder how they'll get around the "no syscalls" limitation - some separate web service implementing the hard stuff, like async queueing and SMS interfaces?
... on Tue Apr 8 10:53:55 2008is there a Wordpress worm? he thinks so, I'm not so sure
... on Tue Apr 8 09:52:29 2008Ian Kallen of Technorati suggests that WP should include some kind of auto-update, given its security woes, before it turns into Microsoft-like botnet growth media. +1
... on Tue Apr 8 09:42:38 2008The sandbox limitations on AppEngine-hosted code. it cannot: write to the filesystem, open a socket, spawn a process or thread, use signals. underwhelming, compared to EC2
... on Tue Apr 8 09:12:58 2008yay for Feargal Sharkey! good study on music copying, and recognition that suing won't help
... on Mon Apr 7 10:32:19 2008good thoughts on horizontal scaling of backend systems
... on Mon Apr 7 10:14:14 2008hundreds of EC2 nodes have been unreachable for the past hour, due to an Amazon network issue :(
... on Mon Apr 7 09:50:33 2008many thanks to Richard Clayton, this is great
... on Sun Apr 6 22:12:05 2008NebuAd track over 100k US customers, and has agreements with ISPs covering 10% of US broadband users; Front Porch also in the US; ISPs doing this include Embarq, Knology and Wide Open West
... on Sun Apr 6 22:09:26 20083-day mahout training courses for tourists, in Lampang, near Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. looks brilliant!
... on Sun Apr 6 18:54:09 2008'Any collective licensing solution should be voluntary for fans, artists, and ISPs alike. We don't have a compulsory "restaurant tax" for songwriters -- there's no reason to have a compulsory "Internet tax" for file sharing.'
... on Thu Apr 3 10:35:05 2008cat-and-mouse game plays out in the comments; he's now IP-banning people who use the userscript, it seems!
... on Wed Apr 2 22:04:46 2008'search muxtape.org for the songs you want to hear'
... on Wed Apr 2 22:02:56 2008'Leader/Chief required for successful nation. Good communication skills and infacta command of the English language useful. A good memory is essential.' (via francois)
... on Wed Apr 2 15:40:55 2008'Sausages can add to cancer risk, say experts' - NOOOOOOOOO
... on Wed Apr 2 10:45:39 2008scummy
... on Tue Apr 1 16:30:53 2008nifty new Linux command-line tool -- "renice" for disk I/O
... on Tue Apr 1 09:35:06 2008finally! gnome-vfs is deprecated in favour of a new gvfs component, and 'each GVFS mount is accessible via FUSE in a subdirectory of ~/.gvfs/.'
... on Mon Mar 31 16:24:50 2008create self-scaling server farms on EC2. may be too all-encompassing though; seems to require that you use their AMIs. written in PHP
... on Mon Mar 31 09:58:30 2008a detailed step-by-step process of how the CCC made 4,000 fake fingerprints of Germany's Secretary of the Interior
... on Mon Mar 31 09:28:59 2008a list of BitTorrent-hostile ISPs around the world, as detected by the Azureus "aznetmon" Network Status Monitor throttle-detection plugin
... on Mon Mar 31 09:20:44 2008namely, those of the German Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. brilliant, and hilarious hack!
... on Sun Mar 30 20:37:37 2008'the key sentence in the article: "If the news is that important, it will find me." [...] It's time for those in the newspaper business to stop thinking of readers as straight consumers [... and] get rid of paywalls.' are you listening, Irish Times?
... on Fri Mar 28 14:01:19 2008including a workable DNSBL shutdown procedure
... on Thu Mar 27 22:12:34 2008woot, GameFly for Ireland! games rental by mail, basically. EUR15 per month gives 1 game at a time; not quite as good as GameFly, of course, so there's room for competition
... on Thu Mar 27 16:59:18 2008hooray! great new features for Amazon EC2. Static IPs (at last!), better control over network locality within the EC2 grid, and new, up-to-date OS AMIs
... on Thu Mar 27 10:07:29 2008that's the Irish Revenue Online Service, supposedly Windows-only. apparently it works under Linux! (via Brendan)
... on Wed Mar 26 16:57:47 2008upload a batch of mp3s, get a mixtape-like UI in Flash. nice idea, execution doesn't work too well unfortunately (at least in Firefox on Linux)
... on Wed Mar 26 14:15:11 2008foot-long rulers, as PDF files
... on Wed Mar 26 14:11:29 2008'sharp uptick in the number of non-spam messages that failed to make it into inboxes. The reports coincide with a noticeable decline in the number of messages being funneled into junk mail folders'
... on Wed Mar 26 11:01:34 2008looks like Macy Gray's record company didn't pay the advertising fees in time to be used in the latest Apple promo material
... on Wed Mar 26 10:51:30 2008yay. good for them
... on Wed Mar 26 10:35:36 2008oh this is cool -- Tuftean sparkline graphs in 15 lines of python and no additional HTTP invocations (via adulau)
... on Tue Mar 25 15:30:40 2008+1
... on Sat Mar 22 13:20:42 2008a nice "up yours" to Tom Kitt, Ireland's Information Society minister, who recently complained about bloggers making his job harder by being informed
... on Sat Mar 22 13:04:28 2008way to tell if your ISP is using Phorm -- tell-tale requests to "dns.sysip.net". Google is full of threads on anti-spyware forums from UK users attempting to figure this out
... on Fri Mar 21 16:22:31 2008the FBI has begun arresting people who click on the wrong links; I'm dreading 4chan's resulting new, improved Rick-Roll
... on Fri Mar 21 10:02:03 2008rechargeable-battery geekery par excellence, and product recommendations
... on Thu Mar 20 12:39:21 2008debunking the GPS Ireland postcode proposal -- most important issue is that it's just a mapping of GPS coords, no real info on how to perform deliveries by road
... on Thu Mar 20 12:28:11 2008more on this story from last year, relevant in the light of today's Phorm furore in the UK; several US ISPs are selling the URLs you access to third-party ad companies. sounds like Compete and HitWise are big names in this field
... on Thu Mar 20 10:11:00 2008Slashdot comment on thread about these proxies: 'when I worked at the helpdesk of a small ISP, we were approached by [AdZilla] to see if we were interested in letting them test their ad-inserting transparent proxy server on our customers.'
... on Thu Mar 20 10:07:56 2008hahahahaha (via lcbo)
... on Wed Mar 19 21:42:50 2008'Pootle is a user-friendly web portal ... [which] allows online translation, work assignment, gives statistics and allows easy volunteer contribution.' great app to support super-easy localisation, and open-source too, unlike Canonical's Launchpad
... on Wed Mar 19 15:25:31 2008'The Court ruled that [anti-piracy organisation] BREIN's collection of IP addresses was not in line with Dutch data protection law, amongst others, because BREIN used a professional, American company for the collection.'
... on Wed Mar 19 10:16:16 2008'The Garante della Privacy says that the anti-piracy company breached the privacy of thousands of P2P users when it tracked and reported them to media companies. It has 14 days to cease and desist.'
... on Wed Mar 19 10:14:15 2008'Their programmers are mostly Saint Petersburg-based, home to the Russian Business Network' ... 'their servers are kept only in Saint Petersburg and China, so no ISP customer data is ever stored in the UK.' even dodgier. (thanks Danny!)
... on Wed Mar 19 00:01:59 2008kingdom of nouns-tastic! (via Rod)
... on Tue Mar 18 14:33:41 2008'We therefore consider that [...] third party scanning [...] involves unlawful interception; and it therefore cannot comply with either the first or the second of the data protection principles.'
... on Tue Mar 18 12:34:05 2008"I feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached. My ISP doesn't control [or] monitor which websites I go to."
... on Mon Mar 17 18:09:22 2008this error: 'Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/Scalar/Util.pm line 30.' is caused by a broken set of updated perl packages; fix here
... on Mon Mar 17 17:47:00 2008technical details on the Phorm implementation planned for the BT network. even more intrusive than previously thought, this is man-in-the-middle interception and rewriting of all HTTP traffic. incredibly bad idea!
... on Sat Mar 15 16:25:58 2008lots of links
... on Sat Mar 15 10:41:41 2008infected by the .asp worm going around
... on Sat Mar 15 10:14:50 2008"Phorm" being ad-serving tech which sniffs packets at an ISP, then uses that data to target ads. incredibly privacy-intrusive; I knew this was happening in the US but assumed that EU data privacy laws would guard us. keep an eye on Irish ISPs
... on Fri Mar 14 14:46:07 2008another Mifare crack. 'The attack uses bias in a random number generator to predict keys'
... on Fri Mar 14 14:41:09 2008interesting to see this outside of the usual Apachecon setup -- wonder if a SpamAssassin Summit would work?
... on Wed Mar 12 20:15:08 2008holy shit. massive, massive FAIL by Medtronic, esp. in their response: "we haven't heard of it happening before, so it's not a problem"
... on Wed Mar 12 17:44:55 2008bad news for openness and transparency in the world of software patenting
... on Wed Mar 12 13:04:36 2008network appliance installed at the ISP, sniffing all traffic and spoofing TCP RST packets for connections deemed dodgy. see the Richard Clayton blog post for Linux firewall rules to ignore these RST packets
... on Wed Mar 12 11:23:36 2008as used by the Great Firewall Of China -- and by Audible Magic's Copysense, apparently
... on Wed Mar 12 11:18:09 2008Corante on the anti-p2p appliance touted by IRMA/IFPI in the Eircom case
... on Wed Mar 12 11:13:57 2008London Internet Exchange public affairs site reports on the Eircom case
... on Tue Mar 11 15:02:39 2008the subscription-only paid wall model, as discarded by the Guardian and the NYTimes, hurts their online circulation -- well duh
... on Tue Mar 11 11:10:36 2008'Guardian Unlimited will break even for the first time this financial year, largely on pursuing a model of advertising revenue' vs the closed, subscription-only site access model used by the Irish Times
... on Tue Mar 11 11:01:13 2008the IFPI 2008 report was what the "big 4" Irish record companies suing Eircom are using for their PR
... on Mon Mar 10 23:40:11 200830% drop in sales which the IRMA assume is caused by downloads; they say that Eircom told them that it was "not in a position to run" anti-filesharing software
... on Mon Mar 10 16:51:12 2008pretty complex transcoding rig. They could have saved themselves so much hassle by embracing open source. Still, I'm sure RTE have nothing like this
... on Mon Mar 10 10:57:30 2008@mat's twittering got me curious. also: I just threw up a little in my mouth after reading this
... on Sun Mar 9 23:47:52 2008bookmarklet and User-Agent hack. now to find a UK proxy ;)
... on Sat Mar 8 19:21:49 2008a virtual data center; EC2 for multi-server infrastructures
... on Fri Mar 7 15:17:40 2008180 German police seized 68 moving boxes of computer equipment: 'primary offenses included MP3 / MP4 [patent] infringement, along with unregistered CD, DVD-R and DVD playback devices'. mental
... on Fri Mar 7 15:03:20 2008nifty hack; a web service to take an abbreviated RSS/Atom feed and regenerate a working, full-text feed in its place. Some wooly bullshit excuses about not open-sourcing the code, though
... on Fri Mar 7 10:50:55 2008Dealing with cache miss update stampedes with Gearman's "uniq" property. This allows multiple requests to be merged into 1 by the gearmand queue server, which then muxes out the result once it completes
... on Fri Mar 7 10:13:09 2008sounds very promising, written in OCaml. I didn't realise git outperformed rsync in transport efficiency?
... on Thu Mar 6 15:43:41 2008woo, sounds great
... on Thu Mar 6 13:51:18 2008my latest project. a “Microplanet” for Irish twitterers -- aggregation of the “stream of consciousness” that comes out of our local Twitter community
... on Thu Mar 6 12:36:39 2008cool! The NY Times are releasing internal IS products as open source. good on them
... on Thu Mar 6 10:06:13 2008Python lib to draw the currently-trendy "wavegraph" format, as used by that last.fm "what artists have I listened to over time" site
... on Wed Mar 5 20:10:11 2008FDIC report says "unknown unauthorized access to online banking has risen from 10 to 63% [of reported fraudulent transactions over $5000] in the past year"; also, Gartner say that 2.2% of the US consumer population have been defrauded via online banking!
... on Wed Mar 5 16:22:58 2008recipes for carne asada, salsa, and carnitas. I am so cooking these someday soon
... on Wed Mar 5 12:19:15 2008a 5-man farm in Romania, 55-person farm in Bangladesh, 20 in Vietnam; plenty in the comments. seems to be quite a competitive industry these days
... on Wed Mar 5 10:31:59 2008'Minister for Information Society in the department of the Taoiseach, Tom Kitt TD said that government cannot be swayed by obsessive bloggers, but must give equal voice to people who don’t have time to have narrowly focussed opinions.'
... on Wed Mar 5 10:01:26 2008If you agree that copyright term on sound recordings should not be extended past 50 years [in Europe], please sign this petition
... on Mon Mar 3 11:05:30 2008they consider it a massive success. 'using BitTorrent saves the license fee payers 95% of the distribution cost, and giving them download times of 3-5 minutes on a 30 minute TV show in full quality'. RTE take note...
... on Mon Mar 3 10:56:06 2008'"Christopherson told the team that he wanted them to work as hard on making sales as Chad had worked to breathe while he was being waterboarded," the suit alleges' (via My Pepys)
... on Mon Mar 3 10:46:55 2008"I'd say your Apple freaks will be queuing out the door when we launch" [...] "we won't accept unlocked [ie jailbroken] phones". terrible value, very customer-hostile. wankers, and a bad choice from Apple
... on Sat Mar 1 18:01:39 2008that sounds about right. However these guys were telling us that Mega-D was a massive threat a few weeks ago, whereas our spamtraps held only a tiny amount of their spam; so their data may not be too accurate
... on Fri Feb 29 16:59:24 2008in response to another blog post elsewhere claiming that it was; EC2 'small' instances are indeed comparable to a 1.7Ghz Xeon
... on Fri Feb 29 11:12:11 2008the iPhone tariffs in Ireland are absolutely shite, with a 1GB (!) data cap. utterly useless
... on Thu Feb 28 13:58:19 2008good data (and graph) from MC on SMTP greet-pause as an anti-spam tactic
... on Thu Feb 28 10:41:43 2008A wishlist UI for del.icio.us; simply bookmark using particular tag naming, and it'll display them as a wishlist. nifty
... on Thu Feb 28 09:38:48 2008good to see MS finally starting to grok the key aspects of the OSS model, in particular how it impacts product design and management (via Glynn Moody)
... on Wed Feb 27 20:13:29 2008cut any MP3 up into a ringtone using a nice AJAXy interface
... on Wed Feb 27 11:54:27 2008it appears that Google is allowing "nofollow" to affect search ranking for some keywords, judging by this spam
... on Wed Feb 27 11:21:07 2008though-provoking opinion piece from the LA Times
... on Wed Feb 27 11:16:31 2008'People who make buttumptions about their regex scripts, will be embarbutted when they repeat this mbuttive mistake.'
... on Wed Feb 27 10:26:55 2008more failures of basic chip-and-PIN terminal security. 'This attack can capture the card’s PIN because UK banks have opted to issue cheaper cards that do not use asymmetric cryptography to encrypt data between the card and [terminal].'
... on Wed Feb 27 10:00:33 2008'The idea of a Monopoly Pub Crawl - played in London, naturally - is to, in a single day, visit and drink at each of the 26 locations (22 properties and 4 stations) appearing on the UK version of the Monopoly Board. This is NOT as easy as it sounds.'
... on Tue Feb 26 14:34:26 2008interesting blog post from Rubyland. Injecting code into other classes is turning out to be problematic for stability -- well, duh, I would have thought...
... on Mon Feb 25 12:52:16 2008'an efficient compressed bitmap index technology' which claims to answer range
... on Mon Feb 25 10:43:44 2008pretty massive outage. Steven Bellovin: 'the whole world has been told how easy it is to take networks off the air. [...] I am worried about freelance attacks by hacktivists or simple mischief makers who have compromised ISP routers.'
... on Mon Feb 25 10:33:43 2008Mozilla initiative to list all 2LDs, 3LDs and 4LDs like "co.uk", "net.il", "vic.edu.au", etc. A little uncommented, browser-specific, and probably MPL-licensed
... on Mon Feb 25 09:48:33 2008Public annoyance via internet-connected jukebox selections. 'sticking on Dondestan, the 1991 avant-garde jazz-rock LP by ex-Soft Machine singer Robert Wyatt, is the perfect way to disrupt a busy Friday night in a high street pub'
... on Sun Feb 24 20:10:16 2008Bebo top in Ireland; a few I'd never heard of. Great research! (via waxy)
... on Sun Feb 24 19:41:30 2008pity their spam almost always scores 25-40 in SpamAssassin ;) (via: Steven Champeon)
... on Sat Feb 23 10:43:36 2008the BBC iPlayer will have a massive effect on UK ISPs, going by these figures. unsurprising, really
... on Fri Feb 22 17:18:08 2008'Linkedin, Xing, Facebook etc.[..] I ended up being questioned on the content of these profiles.' crazy stuff
... on Fri Feb 22 10:26:09 2008at least not for Irish tech journo Adrian Weckler. Apple Ireland really don't seem to have a clue
... on Fri Feb 22 10:05:17 2008low-overhead apt repositories for Ubuntu developers, hosted at launchpad.net
... on Fri Feb 22 09:53:31 2008an interesting technique I hadn't heard of -- mapping user data at address zero to exploit a NULL pointer dereference
... on Thu Feb 21 14:41:45 2008'anywhere from 25% to 30% of our customers with RAID will call us at some point in the first year to report a degraded RAID array or problem directly resulting from their RAID configuration.' bottom line: backups are better
... on Wed Feb 20 12:00:57 2008more good disk-failure data. A drive that develops one error is much more likely to develop a second; as size increases, failures do too; ditto for age; and some vendors are worse than others
... on Wed Feb 20 11:59:08 2008one word: wow
... on Tue Feb 19 17:49:48 2008'if I was seriously ill, I’m not sure if I would want to be treated in a private hospital.The level of care provided by the doctors in the public sector is as good, if not better, in many cases.'
... on Tue Feb 19 12:08:46 2008It 'dates back to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon', using a differential gear
... on Tue Feb 19 11:35:18 2008answer: use the Linux app JuK -- it's fantastic. I'd have commented, but mefi is too full of wankers to be worth joining
... on Tue Feb 19 10:52:04 2008Alex Payne on the importance of having side projects. ++1 to the lot, great post
... on Mon Feb 18 12:37:58 2008FriendFeed didn't even make it out of closed beta before Yahoo! nicked their idea
... on Mon Feb 18 10:52:16 2008he published an incomplete copy of the blacklist contents, and was blocked in response, despite some confusion about what the law actually dictates
... on Mon Feb 18 09:49:07 2008good explanation; also, they plan to create a "service health dashboard", presumably similar to http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
... on Sun Feb 17 23:10:01 2008started at around 1225 UTC today, back around 1520 UTC -- down for 2.5-3 hours
... on Fri Feb 15 15:48:32 2008Nathan Barleyesque son of Grauniad travel writer is ripped to shreds by hilariously hostile commenters
... on Fri Feb 15 11:39:29 2008crazy trick involving trapping SIGSEGV and placing memory so that an out-of-bounds write could allocate more. hacky! (via Tony Finch)
... on Fri Feb 15 11:15:08 2008a grand spot in D7, if you're looking
... on Thu Feb 14 12:23:46 2008'the enterprisocity of an application is directly proportionate to the number of constants defined'
... on Thu Feb 14 12:11:15 2008'This paper argues that [comparative studies of supervised classification] often fail to take into account important aspects of real problems, so that the apparent superiority of more sophisticated methods may be something of an illusion.' (via adulau)
... on Thu Feb 14 10:36:21 2008accepted for incubation. cool
... on Thu Feb 14 00:03:17 2008attempting to win "spot the ball" competitions using copy-move forgery detection algorithms
... on Wed Feb 13 17:15:38 2008competing to see who can disentangle a bunch of ethernet cables the quickest. 'LA-based web developer Matthew Howell [...] dubs his technique "fierce data cloud"'
... on Tue Feb 12 20:21:54 2008a spammer is signing up paid Y! accounts to use as a relay, according to Rob Mueller of FastMail.FM
... on Tue Feb 12 09:49:25 2008handouts for a good Python class (via adulau, whose bookmarks I'm cannibalizing)
... on Mon Feb 11 22:50:11 2008not so great with mixed reads and writes
... on Mon Feb 11 20:56:56 2008a version-control log for the Dublin property market, crazy! (via Mulley)
... on Mon Feb 11 10:17:48 2008'Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality.' uh, nope! I'm really getting sick of this idiotic Repub soundbite
... on Sun Feb 10 10:17:16 2008'Officer Garth Mason was on Market Street at 6:37 p.m. when he saw a car, operated by Landocalrissan Butler, 27, of Winnikee Avenue' -- operated by WHO?
... on Sat Feb 9 22:28:43 2008"The innocent have nothing to fear - so long as they have not annoyed anyone who knows a copper who can be persuaded to look up an address."
... on Fri Feb 8 20:13:39 2008fascinating real-world case of a bad router causing corruption in HTTP PUTs
... on Fri Feb 8 11:00:45 2008Storm was seeded from the earlier Bobax worm, according to research from the brilliantly-named botnet research company Damballa
... on Thu Feb 7 21:16:02 2008concludes that RSpec adds complexity and a COBOLish DSL for no particular benefit. I have to agree (via chromatic)
... on Thu Feb 7 11:52:14 2008a checklist of what make Erlang Erlangy. interesting stuff (via Vinoski)
... on Thu Feb 7 11:05:47 2008congrats to the CC guys!
... on Wed Feb 6 22:22:09 2008Jeff Atwood gets screwed by rip-off Xbox 360 DRM policies - a cautionary tale
... on Wed Feb 6 11:52:41 2008'[MySpace CTO] said that Google's "API includes a custom mechanism to extract social connections between friends on MySpace." This means that Google isn't just using profile info designed to be aggregated, but is already willing to extract data as needed'
... on Wed Feb 6 11:32:09 2008brilliant
... on Wed Feb 6 09:55:31 2008Anil Dash brings the science to bear on Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction"
... on Tue Feb 5 21:36:47 2008'the one reply I received from colleagues suggested that perhaps what they’re seeing [as the new Mega-D botnet] is actually a partition of Storm, hence the common characteristics.' not sure I agree
... on Tue Feb 5 13:11:16 2008'a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog'. ffs lads! at least there's a single-file patch fix
... on Tue Feb 5 09:29:28 2008a treadmill under your desk, so you walk -- and get lots of low-intensity exercise -- while you work. great idea!
... on Mon Feb 4 20:19:13 2008holy crap. and this wasn't even criminal, just amoral and unethical (with some Dell trademark infringement)
... on Mon Feb 4 10:19:51 2008'It's like tying the Titanic to the iceberg. It'd keep you from sinking just long enough to freeze to death.' (via Torrez)
... on Fri Feb 1 20:20:16 2008what today's 18-year-olds think. 'talking on the phone is like the MOST uncomfortable thing ever. I hate it. I just don't understand why you wouldn't text someone instead'; 'Air travel has always been routine transportation'; plenty more. fascinating
... on Fri Feb 1 17:38:09 2008bug of the day. when you attach a USB external disk, using Ubuntu gutsy and the VMWare Workstation 6.0.2, it fails to spot it. not impressed by current support for Linux hosts to be honest
... on Fri Feb 1 15:44:55 2008for reference; I always forget all the magic make-kpkg incantations
... on Fri Feb 1 12:45:46 2008A smoking-gun voice recording of spammers E360 flogging VPN access to their networks (among other services), in order to take advantage of their court judgement which supposedly will prohibit Spamhaus from listing them. I doubt this is legal
... on Fri Feb 1 10:52:56 2008very scummy. great investigation by waxy, though
... on Thu Jan 31 10:27:58 2008Hadoop, HDFS, Lucene and Solr used to number-crunch several hundred GBs of mail logs per day, extracting report data and allowing tech support to search
... on Wed Jan 30 14:58:08 2008Aristotle on Paul Graham's Arc language, and the rather astounding decision not to support Unicode because he didn't "want to spend even one day dealing with character sets"
... on Wed Jan 30 14:39:02 2008by Don Marti. I'm not sure, I think this has been corroborated before btw
... on Wed Jan 30 09:53:45 2008lookups against nonexistent names are redirected to Verizon hosts, breaking DNSBLs and URIBLs. Charter apparently is doing the same thing (via the SA users list)
... on Wed Jan 30 09:29:24 2008'90 percent of the $13 million collected by the BSA in 2006 came from small businesses. Since 1993 the group has collected an estimated $89 million in damages from businesses on behalf of its members, every penny of which it keeps.' (via /.)
... on Tue Jan 29 23:40:00 2008pv - 'a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a [UNIX] pipeline' (via Nelson)
... on Tue Jan 29 21:07:08 2008I'm quoted ;)
... on Tue Jan 29 16:28:31 2008Trend are attacking products that include the open-source AV product ClamAV, using an extremely obvious patent on virus scanning at the gateway. IMO, this is appalling
... on Tue Jan 29 16:12:16 2008at last! (via John L)
... on Tue Jan 29 15:43:26 2008very complicated; needs a lot more work
... on Tue Jan 29 15:10:46 2008the unwitting mule added an email address to her PayPal profile & forwarded a payment via -- guess who -- Western Union, which later turned out to be fraudulent (via Glynn Moody)
... on Mon Jan 28 16:20:58 2008duh, sharing a namespace of incr'd IDs for public and private data = fail. lessons for sharable URL design: use GUID hashes, change URL for data when it changes from public to private, allow users to hit a button to invalidate existing URLs if they leak
... on Mon Jan 28 11:43:03 2008fantastic Modest Proposal, via Rod. one for the next time the Irish retailers wheel out their "online shopping hurts Irish jobs" noise
... on Mon Jan 28 10:21:21 2008I hope this is good news for KDE
... on Mon Jan 28 09:41:35 2008sensor clips onto your incoming power cable, before it enters your home's power distribution panel, and a friendly wireless LED panel displays your power consumption. want!
... on Sun Jan 27 12:13:57 2008this'll be handy for the mother-in-law's laptop (via Rod)
... on Sat Jan 26 14:39:17 2008'Galushkevich was angry over his government's plans to move [a] statue, and launched the attack as a means of protesting. The fact that a single angry student was able to impact international relations between two countries is a startling development.'
... on Fri Jan 25 13:14:27 2008the Irish Times' Conor Pope has the details
... on Fri Jan 25 13:08:05 2008full details of how Eircom have neatly done an end-run around the broadband regulator -- *again*
... on Thu Jan 24 22:00:01 2008great post on LWN going into the gory details of a massive build system switch away from autotools and configure (yay! no more m4!)
... on Thu Jan 24 15:53:57 2008good round-up of the dev effort from Ars Technica; great to hear they've ditched the awfulness of autotools
... on Thu Jan 24 15:43:55 2008an interesting new method of NN training using largely-unlabelled data from Jeff Hinton of the U of Toronto
... on Wed Jan 23 10:26:12 2008wow, I'd never seen this variant of the Mandelbrot set. very cool
... on Tue Jan 22 22:18:18 2008a massive 10-day outage for Joyent's online storage products. ouch, not a particularly strong recommendation for their offerings, or for ZFS, the ultimate culprit
... on Tue Jan 22 20:35:58 200810 years ago, if you told me that root-compromised servers would be used simply as stepping stones to root desktop PCs, I'd have laughed at you, but here we are. mental
... on Tue Jan 22 16:32:13 2008short utility module to dump tracebacks of all currently-active threads in a Python interpreter, similar to Java's SIGQUIT handler. (if you're writing threaded code, you'll always need something like this, unfortunately)
... on Tue Jan 22 16:05:20 2008"is a global stock market crash on January 21, 2008 and January 22, 2008." interesting to see WP affecting stock prices this way
... on Tue Jan 22 12:24:12 2008multi-user conferencing, shared roster groups, and written in Erlang (trendy!) Might give this a try, since mu-conference and jabberd2 aren't working too well. (UPDATE: much better than jabberd2, works great)
... on Mon Jan 21 21:45:16 2008the new transit card system in Holland, OV-chipkaart, has been dramatically and thoroughly cracked by two separate teams (1 on the no-crypto Mifare Ultralight card, 1 on the with-crypto Mifare Classic). Ed F wraps up the details very nicely
... on Mon Jan 21 17:42:37 2008incomprehensible spam. 'We can offer available for charter flights, aircraft An-26B, for transportation by air of day-old chicks. Our price from Europe to Russia from 10000 per one charter flight.' w -- t -- f
... on Mon Jan 21 10:08:43 2008apparently the EU has mandated some bizarre and unimplementable law requiring data retention of email and IM data for 3 years, and Ireland is proposing to implement it within the month. wtf? how the fuck is this supposed to work?! idiots
... on Sat Jan 19 11:18:39 2008Userscripts submissions are not vetted. Unsurprisingly, some enterprising bad guy has taken to uploading modified Greasemonkey scripts which steal user cookies. duh. comments are good for Orkut cookie-stealing script technique details
... on Thu Jan 17 22:29:46 2008nifty Jira/Hudson hackery by the Hadoop guys -- automatic testing of contributed patches!
... on Thu Jan 17 17:41:08 2008woo, it's on in Dublin this year. 'the theme is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet.'
... on Thu Jan 17 15:45:45 2008'a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them.'
... on Wed Jan 16 10:38:54 2008bit of an epidemic, this. watch your GMail passwords!
... on Tue Jan 15 12:19:53 2008the top 5 cheapest hard drives by price/GB, updated hourly using figures from Newegg, plotted using Gnuplot. brilliant!
... on Tue Jan 15 10:19:18 2008Possibly the stupidest article I read yesterday. Anti-Facebook screed -- journo can't tell the difference between *using* a tool, and supporting the politics of the tool's creators. as Gibson said -- "the street will find its own uses for technology"
... on Tue Jan 15 10:17:03 2008'I have seen several of my vessels spontaneously contaminate with molds [..] Of most concern are the species of Aspergillus I have found [..] The water-soluble toxins of Aspergillus can be highly carcinogenic. Several species are known killers.' eek!
... on Mon Jan 14 20:12:35 2008amazing allegations from the ex-CTO of online-storage company Omnidrive in the comments: staff leaving en masse due to nonpayment of salaries, offices vacant, servers taken offline by suppliers, no board of directors (!), etc. major shitfest
... on Mon Jan 14 10:06:09 2008both MySQL and PHP tend to have little-known settings that can really help, so it's good to keep these in the toolbox for future reference
... on Sun Jan 13 21:28:40 2008uh oh, Facebook's killer app is in a spot of trouble (via Rod)
... on Sun Jan 13 21:00:03 2008explaining Behaviour-Driven Development; basically an overgrown testing DSL. not quite convinced
... on Sun Jan 13 13:22:53 2008Bruce Schneier on the etiquette of open wifi. well said!
... on Thu Jan 10 12:37:27 2008It's that awful "kudzu" crapware that Red Hat came up with, disabling networking for some bizarre reason; turning it off fixes the problem
... on Wed Jan 9 17:05:49 2008extremely basic; basically a straight conversion of the backup XML into 1.7MB of HTML. quite usable though; good for searching
... on Wed Jan 9 15:50:40 2008'the autism rate in children rose continuously during the 12-year study period from 1995 to 2007' despite the elimination of thimerosal in childhood vaccines in 2001. "no evidence of mercury poisoning in autism" (via Joe Haslam)
... on Wed Jan 9 13:59:35 2008a fake children's book to advertise MS Home Server; treading a fine line between scary and amusing
... on Wed Jan 9 10:58:32 2008great Steve Jobs quote, via Ken Meltsner
... on Wed Jan 9 10:00:00 2008'We are a group of musicians who have downloaded newly leaked albums by popular artists, quickly recorded many subtle overdubs over the work, and then re-leaked it to the internet. We have done this for about three years now.' nice idea, but no proof tho
... on Tue Jan 8 17:21:10 2008Ross Anderson's team via the Grauniad. "Now that banks completely control the reporting and prosecution of card fraud, they can cover up anything that's too embarrassing -- we'll probably only learn of a new modus operandi via police overseas."
... on Tue Jan 8 10:53:28 2008ie. a SCUBA diver's club in Muff, Co. Donegal. they sell tee shirts
... on Mon Jan 7 22:48:36 2008from "All you'll be able to do with [my bank details] is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing" to "someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account". oops!
... on Mon Jan 7 16:19:51 2008'a network traffic monitor for Linux that keeps a log of daily network traffic for the selected interface(s)' -- lots of nice (albeit console) graphs and historical data, perfect for my openwrt
... on Mon Jan 7 12:18:58 2008'The computer network in the Dreamliner's passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane's control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals.' EPIC FAIL
... on Sun Jan 6 10:57:12 2008wtf. sounds like the legal department is still running the show if they're coming out with gibberish like this
... on Sat Jan 5 19:30:44 2008Apple prices are roughly comparable to Dell nowadays -- however, both have a 15-17% markup in Ireland vs the US
... on Sat Jan 5 12:58:28 2008thanks Bryan, good to know!
... on Sat Jan 5 11:55:23 2008holy shit, a couple of my demos from back in 1989 survived! this page has links, must see if they still work
... on Fri Jan 4 20:10:10 2008edit the .vmx file by hand, and add a line to the file to indicate that you want to emulate a specific type of SCSI controller. absurd that users have to jump through these hoops, but there you go
... on Fri Jan 4 17:22:09 2008'a Drupal module that would pull in the RSS feed of my bookmarks from del.icio.us, store each bookmark as a Drupal node, store a cached version of each page and post it to Solr for searching.' good idea, I've been contemplating something more basic
... on Fri Jan 4 10:35:41 2008alleged pump-and-dump of Chinese penny stocks, spamming via botnet
... on Fri Jan 4 09:24:09 2008aka the rather unpleasant "winter vomiting bug". Everyone in my family caught this last week, in a wave of infection -- it's extremely easy to pass on, since it stays active for 48 hours after symptoms end
... on Thu Jan 3 17:41:10 2008modern "Content-Type:" headers are unparseable, and it doesn't send "Host:" header; CSS and are rendered. so pretty hard to browse with, all told
... on Thu Jan 3 10:32:05 2008noooooooooo
... on Thu Jan 3 10:22:17 2008wow, CouchDB will be an ASF project! w00t, nice one IBM
... on Wed Jan 2 22:31:12 2008Dave proposes a fix to 'address some of the issues we have with the calendar', _Genius_-style
... on Wed Jan 2 12:12:48 2008thanks Craig, 'probably a better way of doing things than binding directly to the inotify interface'
... on Wed Jan 2 12:01:02 2008Aristotle sez 'lets you check out from and push back to an SVN repo while working in a git repo on your own machine. The integration is incredibly slick. This means you can use git rather than SVK, which is a castle built on sand' -- agreed
... on Wed Jan 2 11:56:42 2008accusations that the GPL'd Linksys firmware is becoming proprietary. let's hope not :(
... on Wed Jan 2 11:06:16 2008most MythTV boxes in the UK and Ireland are dependent on this service for program-guide data, unfortunately; no fix planned until tomorrow at least
... on Tue Jan 1 19:11:57 2008Python wrapper for inotify
... on Tue Jan 1 16:57:46 2008Ars says 'Online storage services ... such as online backup, archiving, and replication will be accepted as a viable option.'
... on Mon Dec 31 11:47:45 2007yet another essential configuration item hidden within the bowels of GNOME's gconf-editor. idiotic. this makes it *easier* to use how?
... on Sun Dec 30 22:18:17 2007YouTube vid demonstrating an amazingly realistic 3-D VR technique
... on Sun Dec 30 19:45:53 2007excellent writeup. the SquirrelMail devs really did the wrong thing -- if someone has added code, chances are it is NOT innocuous
... on Sat Dec 29 20:21:03 2007'really fast lightweight queue written in Ruby that speaks memcached.' using memcached as the network protocol is an interesting idea, hmm
... on Sat Dec 29 12:10:56 2007scumbags now hacking people's email accounts in order to steal their domains. very nasty!
... on Fri Dec 28 14:43:06 2007nice monster-themed tees and hoodies (via Jason)
... on Fri Dec 28 14:19:58 2007nifty algorithm. ' if would be nice if, when a cache machine was added, it took its fair share of objects from all other cache machines; when a cache machine was removed, it would be nice if its objects were shared between the remaining machines'
... on Mon Dec 24 20:44:23 2007the 2lmc spool is no more. shame, it was a good line to a lot of interesting stuff happening in the UK net :(
... on Fri Dec 21 15:25:27 2007anyone interested? telecommuting = ok
... on Fri Dec 21 11:46:24 2007can't wait to read this, I love KSR (via BO'S)
... on Fri Dec 21 11:34:11 2007a new Amazon web service, allowing developers to resell parts of the AWS system on to their users
... on Wed Dec 19 12:21:32 2007omg -- tons of semi-legal Chinese gadgety crap at an extremely low price, with free worldwide shipping!
... on Tue Dec 18 15:41:15 2007UT researchers de-anonymize the Netflix dataset using IMDB vote data. 'It turns out that if you eliminate the top 100 movies everyone watches, our movie-watching habits are all pretty individual'
... on Tue Dec 18 13:31:08 2007'On December 18, 1987, Larry Wall released Perl 1 to the public. That means today is the end of Perl's 20th year.'
... on Tue Dec 18 12:52:58 2007Jorn invented weblogs, in the form of what would nowadays be called a link-log, like this one. Fantastic advice for link-blogging, especially #5 ('you can always improve on the author's own page title when describing a link')
... on Tue Dec 18 11:01:02 2007first clueful review from the blogosphere! I wish I could comment on this ;)
... on Mon Dec 17 20:28:36 2007forget the crap blogosphere noise, /. can still provide much more perceptive commentary about some topics
... on Sun Dec 16 11:26:03 2007some great work from this Arizona artist
... on Fri Dec 14 17:33:04 2007SimpleDB, Amazon's AWS database offering, is now public
... on Fri Dec 14 15:40:42 2007another FUSE-based S3 filesystem for EC2 nodes
... on Fri Dec 14 12:58:56 2007'Broadcasters aren’t posting their shows directly on PirateBay yet, but they are talking informally and giving copies of shows to a friend of a friend who is unaffiliated with the company to make a torrent.'
... on Fri Dec 14 12:40:58 2007'we got your contact information was found among the list of foreigner that have been scammed by Nigerian Fraudster. ... We are delegated by Central bank of Nigeria from the United Nations to pay 100 scam victims ... (US$1Million) compensation'
... on Wed Dec 12 15:46:35 2007due to massive abuse in spam, and "little effort at takedown". GooglePages URLs appearing in mail will trigger anti-spam systems, including SpamAssassin, until this is resolved. get it together, Google...
... on Wed Dec 12 11:45:09 2007courtesy of Yahoo!, with Squid patches: stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error
... on Wed Dec 12 10:17:13 2007where is Blogorrah when we need them? hilariously maudlin coverage. I like the comments on what the mourners were wearing, classy stuff
... on Tue Dec 11 10:54:13 2007'In the scene where Batty confronts Tyrell, the line, "I want more life, fucker" has been replaced with "I want more life, father”.' NOOOOOOO
... on Mon Dec 10 21:56:38 2007an excellent explanation of how Chinese translation software can take 3 innocent chinese characters in a grocery store and mangle them into "spread to fuck the fruit" (via Nishad)
... on Mon Dec 10 20:10:49 2007absurd obit for sub-Paris-Hilton lingerie model Katy French. John Waters is clearly smoking crack
... on Mon Dec 10 17:18:35 2007A Greasemonkey userscript, naturally. FB is really starting to piss me off with their crass attempts to monetize me
... on Mon Dec 10 16:17:57 2007throw some python up into a textbox, and they'll host it for free, with a basic web UI and a RESTish XML/JSON web API. bizarre -- I can't see how this won't run out of CPU steam pretty quickly... (via Gearoid)
... on Mon Dec 10 11:46:20 2007it's amazing how wankerish MeFi can be; this behaviour is why I've never signed up. mantid's followup is a moment of genius
... on Mon Dec 10 10:36:20 2007from Ben Laurie; 10 lines of httpd.conf to run a useful service. see also acme's result: http://use.perl.org/~acme/journal/35047
... on Fri Dec 7 16:23:42 2007brilliant -- create nice image graphs using a stateless CGI service
... on Thu Dec 6 20:03:06 2007leading the world in customer frustration
... on Thu Dec 6 15:22:11 2007see if you are better or worse off with the new Irish tax rules in 2008, from Damo Beresford
... on Thu Dec 6 10:19:32 2007the Flickr auth-frob model, standardized
... on Thu Dec 6 10:16:20 2007'The fact is that there is no way to prevent players in a social game from colluding to increase their effectiveness.
... on Wed Dec 5 17:38:47 2007kind of cool, but not for me -- it's insanely wasteful of electricity to have a general-purpose UNIX machine with a large hard disk powered on in every room. damn you John K, you've infected me with greenery
... on Wed Dec 5 12:14:56 2007*awesome* analysis of a typical spammer botnet, namely the 'Srizbi' trojan, part of the 'Reactor Mailer' spam software. this level of detail into the other side of spam is very rare, don't miss it
... on Tue Dec 4 23:34:40 2007colour me unsurprised. it really sounds like WP is run by a politburo these days
... on Tue Dec 4 10:58:08 2007Ubuntu bug of the week. This one breaks your system if you upgrade to gutsy and have LVM volumes, fun
... on Mon Dec 3 21:25:43 2007oh dear. It appears Facebook's "Beacon" web-bug sends purchase-tracking info to Facebook, regardless of whether you've opted out or not, or whether you're logged into FB or not. ffs
... on Mon Dec 3 14:56:44 2007screed excoriating the outsourcing of the Beeb's internet infrastructure to Siemens. (I have to note that the shittiest OS I have ever used was Siemen's "Sinix" SystemV variant -- insanely buggy. So I have some sympathy)
... on Mon Dec 3 12:20:02 2007good summary list of edit-distance algorithms (via Daily Chump)
... on Mon Dec 3 12:12:08 2007a good discussion of _His Dark Materials_' atheist/animist philosophy
... on Mon Dec 3 11:44:46 2007a good description of a RESTful system
... on Sun Dec 2 20:01:34 2007'the bottomline of our work is: MD5 should no longer be used as a hash function for software integrity or code signing purposes.' (via BO'S)
... on Sat Dec 1 21:03:24 2007get rid of that annoying Facebook advertising with the magic of Greasemonkey
... on Fri Nov 30 16:00:15 2007'Proprietary anti-spam solutions make the spam problem worse; they are digging us deeper into the hole that the Internet is already in.' He has a point; the proprietary vendors don't share info at all. But MAGY getting together wouldn't make a differenc
... on Thu Nov 29 16:04:02 2007a pretty good example of a well-worked-out runbook, this one for OSAF's Chandler
... on Thu Nov 29 13:15:18 2007'a routine compilation of the procedures and operations being made by the administrator or operator of the system. Typically, it will contain the procedures to begin, stop and supervise the system.' Good to know there's a name for these files ;)
... on Thu Nov 29 13:14:33 2007good writeup on .biz, SpamAssassin's BIZ_TLD rule, and the vicious circle that results
... on Thu Nov 29 11:05:31 2007fascinating stuff (via waxy)
... on Thu Nov 29 11:02:55 2007Wed Dec 12th, 6pm til late -- some talks, then "food + beer + python"
... on Tue Nov 27 19:31:48 2007online conversion of image, video and sound files; upload, choose format, download results
... on Tue Nov 27 17:24:22 2007'scalability using non-blocking io, while at the same time retaining high programmer usability by using coroutines to make the non-blocking io operations appear blocking at the source code level.' with insanely-scalable kqueue()/poll() support like Danga
... on Mon Nov 26 16:48:49 2007interesting (via Michele)
... on Mon Nov 26 16:07:11 2007aka "How Facebook Ruined Christmas". what an atrocious, user-hostile, bone-headed privacy invasion from FB (via Nelson)
... on Mon Nov 26 10:40:57 2007answer: Anil Dash
... on Fri Nov 23 16:20:07 2007using the Internet Archive and lulu.com
... on Fri Nov 23 12:35:27 2007Google Transit for Dublin busses. quite a bit clunkier and buggier though on Firefox unfortunately, but hopefully getting there (via Damien)
... on Fri Nov 23 11:02:31 2007wow, this is pretty nasty stuff. encrypted protocol ports blocked (presumably to force use of unencrypted variants); MITM attacks on SSL connections
... on Thu Nov 22 16:20:22 2007the Hamachi binary is packaged using upx, for some reason -- this breaks on Gutsy, so you need to unpack it first, then everything works fine
... on Thu Nov 22 12:32:10 2007a public-transit body using Cluetrain-driven PR methods; blogs and open comments! good on you, Antoin, amazing to see
... on Wed Nov 21 17:14:06 2007using a pretty basic Sys::Mmap and Storable implementation (via Perl Buzz)
... on Wed Nov 21 16:35:48 2007a UI tweak for liferea I just filed, with patch
... on Wed Nov 21 11:16:55 2007OpenStreetMap talk in the IFSC, tomorrow, 7pm; mapping weekend this w/e
... on Wed Nov 21 11:11:36 2007first I've heard of it -- *incredibly* badly communicated
... on Wed Nov 21 10:21:10 2007yay -- developer preview of the next Perl release, featuring Aho-Corasick fast parallel regexp matching
... on Mon Nov 19 10:38:11 2007Over half of LKML subscribers use gmail, wow
... on Fri Nov 16 13:46:35 2007Wow, good point. 'The whole point about cloud computing is that it has to be effectively infinite - the more people want, the more they get. You can't do that with software that requires some kind of licensing payment, unless it's flat-fee.'
... on Fri Nov 16 11:09:16 2007Amazon S3, EC2, and Hadoop ftw
... on Thu Nov 15 22:05:03 2007'A frank e-mail interview with Hushmail's CTO seems to indicate that government agencies can also order their way into individual accounts on Hushmail's ultra-secure web-based e-mail service, which relies on a browser-based Java encryption engine.'
... on Thu Nov 15 20:55:34 2007cheap glasses online; great for buying spares etc., run by ropadope
... on Thu Nov 15 14:10:53 2007a supercomputing-class data center, open to the academic community for systems software research. I wonder if they'd be open to letting us use it in Apache SpamAssassin -- we are currently trying to scale out our mass-check infrastructure...
... on Wed Nov 14 16:14:15 2007open-source version of Windows' Teredo IPv6 tunnelling agent. see also AICCU
... on Wed Nov 14 14:42:22 2007Maya's book!
... on Wed Nov 14 09:58:04 2007another spam forensics guy analyses the Ron Paul spam, posts his results, and gets called names by batshit-crazy Paul fans
... on Sun Nov 11 23:25:41 2007a new, highly-recommended continuous integration system, used by Apache Lucene and a few other ASF projects. one to try out
... on Sun Nov 11 22:05:59 2007connect to the AP; log in to Facebook; prove that you're a friend of the AP's owner to gain full access to the rest of the internet. awesome! also implies FB/OpenSoc could be used to implement my long-desired UserGroupWebService (via TomWSMF on FoRK)
... on Fri Nov 2 20:16:47 2007genius (via hardhat)
... on Fri Nov 2 19:02:25 2007'Not bad. I take it they don't offer basic statistics courses at the BBC.' hahahaha
... on Fri Nov 2 18:42:43 2007from John O'Shea. seems a little half-baked so far
... on Fri Nov 2 18:31:43 2007a fine collection of public-domain C snippets to perform various bit-twiddling operations (again, via simonw)
... on Fri Nov 2 15:43:55 2007a nasty web hack to enable cross-domain inter-frame Javascript communication, by piggybacking on the #anchor part of the page URL. gross (via Simon Willison)
... on Fri Nov 2 15:30:35 2007OpenSocial seems a bit underwhelming -- basically an open version of Facebook Apps and the newsfeed. zzz
... on Fri Nov 2 15:27:08 2007'At UAB, we are applying the principles of Data Mining and Grid Computing to establish the 'Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement' project. In this project, we invite collaboration to build a corpus of spam emails which will be analyzed and clustered.'
... on Thu Nov 1 17:53:14 2007James Lafferty, from Ennis, Eircom's "Information Age Town". they'd obviously forgotten to "inform" him about the 419 scam, then... apparently he travelled to Accra, was kidnapped on arrival and held to ransom
... on Thu Nov 1 14:45:44 2007ComReg can do some stuff well, this is one of them. great calculator to figure out what Irish mobile phone plan you should be on
... on Thu Nov 1 13:16:03 2007A cop 'may believe that [a terrorist threat] is a false alarm, but it's not in his interests to say so. If he's wrong, it'll cost his career; but if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates.'
... on Thu Nov 1 11:10:23 2007the trojan displays a stripping woman; in order to cause her to strip, users have to solve CAPTCHA puzzles -- which turn out to be for Yahoo! accounts
... on Wed Oct 31 18:11:15 2007*really* low-power operation for a Thinkpad x61
... on Wed Oct 31 16:55:06 2007a massive poster -- covers pretty much every technical aspect of the web, featuring the Towers of WS-Babel, Oxymoronic Intellectual Property, IP as nukes, the paved cowpaths of Microformats, the ruins of CORBA (represented as dolmens, Orbix fans) etc.
... on Wed Oct 31 15:07:35 2007it's true, WP is overly delete-happy, as evidenced by their refusal to have a WP page for OiNK until that site was busted. interesting to see if this gathers steam
... on Wed Oct 31 11:57:08 2007much nicer than TinyURL.com
... on Wed Oct 31 11:41:58 2007the canonical guide to how to do this, a la Joel. fantastic technique, I reckon
... on Tue Oct 30 20:56:16 2007turn a bitmap image into EPS/SVG vector art, from a team at Stanford. nifty!
... on Tue Oct 30 13:32:47 2007pretty simple stuff for a popular RoR site; good hardware recs though
... on Tue Oct 30 12:44:27 2007WHYYYYYYY don't woot! ship to Ireland? I miss my woots from davebug and co. :( 'This shirt tells the world: "My internal organs may not be pretty, but at least they make the trains run on time."'
... on Tue Oct 30 12:22:29 2007nice little bit of Google hacking there
... on Sun Oct 28 11:31:41 2007new FogBugz feature -- looks very cool for project management. good review here from Tobias diPasquale
... on Sat Oct 27 19:14:45 2007excellent recipe reviews (thanks Craig!)
... on Fri Oct 26 19:42:06 2007seems unwise. Also: I find it quite amusing that Wikipedia didn't deem OiNK notable enough for an article until *after* it was busted... WP's notability policy is such asshattery
... on Thu Oct 25 14:35:00 2007wow, this is significant -- 'Minister Eamon Ryan today announced that he would be making the bulk of the digital data held in the [Irish] Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources available.' The 'open data' message is getting through
... on Thu Oct 25 11:13:37 2007summary: blacklist the default driver, use (ugh) ndiswrapper
... on Thu Oct 25 10:11:33 2007Donncha O'Caoimh with some advice for sites using Adsense advertising -- basically, removing the spam from the ads you present to your readers. it's at least doubled my earnings, seriously good tip
... on Wed Oct 24 15:51:17 2007'More than anything else this year, music & software file-sharing site Oink changed the way I thought about the music industry & BitTorrent technology.' .. 'downloading an album from Oink [was] both faster and give you more information than iTunes.'
... on Tue Oct 23 21:14:15 2007the iPlayer is turning out to be a horrific piece of MS-DRM malware: 'the BBC management team who are responsible for the iPlayer are a checklist of senior employees from MS who were involved with Windows Media'. truly horrific; BBC are getting shafted
... on Tue Oct 23 13:09:45 2007'It is alleged that the site was operated by a 24-year-old man in the Middlesbrough area, who was arrested today. The site’s servers, based in Amsterdam, were seized in a series of raids last week.'
... on Tue Oct 23 12:43:37 2007they look pretty nifty
... on Mon Oct 22 22:42:58 2007'The audience is almost always going to be comprised of people just waiting for the right moment to get into backlash mode ... the industry built around it will always be unstable ... "This ain't a scene, this is a goddamn arms race."'
... on Mon Oct 22 16:19:30 2007anyone who bought "VigRX" can get a $10 refund, or an assortment of total crap -- an e-book, a password to a porn site, some discount coupons, and an email address. wtf
... on Sat Oct 20 19:25:44 2007operated by Antoin O'Lachtnain, no less! good luck with this, Antoin
... on Fri Oct 19 14:09:58 2007little kludgy, but familiar to people who've used the old affiliate system
... on Fri Oct 19 10:14:49 2007this is, again, Storm worm output -- EXTO.PK is one of their 'pump & dump' campaigns
... on Thu Oct 18 12:11:05 2007$2 an album! (until January, when it becomes 10% instead, but hey.) wow, this is really quite compelling. wonder if non-US associates are welcome. Either way, I can see lots of mp3blogs adding Amazon "buy" links
... on Wed Oct 17 17:31:04 2007that's a *public* API. I didn't realise they'd made this public, could be useful
... on Wed Oct 17 14:57:17 2007extra-large virtual machines; 7.5GB RAM and 15GB RAM, with additional CPU cores, for 4x and 8x the price
... on Tue Oct 16 12:15:00 2007Flickr in-jokes galore: 'Hi, I'm an admin for a group called 'We'd love to have your photo added to the group', and we'd love to have your photo added to the group.' (via Waxy)
... on Tue Oct 16 12:08:40 2007good article on the bitch-blog phenomenon (via Una)
... on Mon Oct 15 14:23:41 2007'Apparently the postman in my hometown was removing all the spam and advertising from people's post .. and dumping it in a bog outside the town. He'd been successfully un-spamming people for years before he was found out and fired.' (via Donncha)
... on Mon Oct 15 14:18:46 2007sounds like a pretty scummy situation, all told. Wonder if Russia will ever bust them?
... on Mon Oct 15 12:21:45 2007never mind that, though: Ireland has the lowest rate of deaths, at 1/47600, with Bosnia next at 1/29000. not bad!
... on Sun Oct 14 22:24:45 2007upcoming new version of del.icio.us -- looks great! I'm more excited about this than I really should be
... on Fri Oct 12 21:33:13 2007'in July one Microsoft executive [joins patent troll company Acacia Tech]; then as of October 1, there is the second, a patent guy. October 9, IP Innovation, a subsidiary, sues Red Hat. And Novell. So much for being Microsoft's little buddy.'
... on Fri Oct 12 16:59:10 2007'The work questions the combustion engine, celebrates bicycle efficiency and the striking design of the Lamborghini -- arguably one of the most iconic super cars of all time'. osm
... on Fri Oct 12 12:17:57 2007'Alexey Tolstokozhev .. a Russian spammer, murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head'. Not ROKSO-listed, though. update: no corroboration yet from any other source.... fishy
... on Thu Oct 11 11:39:10 2007a good, hand-classified collection of phishes; the most recent is '2279 messages from August 7, 2006 - August 7, 2007 (a year!), covering many many phish and targets. 20067215 bytes. Format: UNIX mbox.'
... on Thu Oct 11 11:18:33 2007in-depth report on the workings of the Storm botnet worm (via Spam Wars)
... on Thu Oct 11 11:17:04 2007insanity (via aehso)
... on Thu Oct 11 10:32:30 2007Dunno how I missed this at the time -- 'this decision makes it far easier to invalidate patents [in the US] based on obviousness. Thus, this is the most important patent case of the last 20 years, and perhaps since the passage of the 1952 Patent Act.'
... on Wed Oct 10 17:17:44 2007Passion Pictures suck -- their new Sony spot is pretty heavily "inspired" by a kozyndan piece
... on Wed Oct 10 11:17:37 2007lots of info on non-terrestrial TV reception in Ireland, alternatives to NTL and Sky, etc.
... on Wed Oct 10 10:57:13 2007"Did you really name your son "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" ?"
... on Wed Oct 10 10:20:36 2007good going! Wonder if they'll be moving to Mountain View, from Finland -- that's a big relocation
... on Tue Oct 9 16:30:41 2007list of donations, open source projects, and other support given by Barracuda to open source projects (including SpamAssassin and the ASF, thanks guys!)
... on Tue Oct 9 11:08:55 2007neat hack - a threadpool of SSH connections, emulating the xargs command line UI
... on Tue Oct 9 10:38:22 2007Tricky, technically -- but from a consumer's point of view, it makes a lot of sense
... on Tue Oct 9 10:04:41 2007'a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle (the "Service Commitment"). In the event Amazon S3 does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit'
... on Mon Oct 8 22:49:37 2007'In a previous life, I helped develop ESBs. I’ve written about them and I’ve promoted them. But somewhere along the way, I lost the religion.' wow, great post (via John O'Shea)
... on Mon Oct 8 13:26:58 2007I'd heard about this before -- an MMO for airline pilots and ATCs, where people spend (real) hours flying trans-Atlantic routes to build up their virtual miles, ATCs train to pass virtual certifications, and people build entire cockpits in their garage
... on Mon Oct 8 10:52:05 2007'there’s an inward-facing circle scattered around [SF]; they’re smart and experienced and money-hungry and very alert. But when the next big thing comes along [...] you won’t have to rely on the professional noticers to tell you' -- +1
... on Sat Oct 6 19:38:31 2007I wonder what this'll do to GStreamer development; an open source project without active key developers is a dead open source project (via Dave Neary)
... on Sat Oct 6 11:07:52 2007'Here’s why we are withdrawing it — IBM adopted a new policy a year ago to sharply reduce business method patent filings and instead stress significant technical content in its patents.' good news
... on Fri Oct 5 10:36:52 2007'Unfortunately that was about 3 in the afternoon and folks back East were already going home, so it took us some time to get hold of the right people in the General Service Administration to get this address reinstated.' omgwtflolz
... on Thu Oct 4 11:04:19 2007describing themselves as "utility computing on demand", offering a 99.95% uptime SLA, static IPs, and "if your server dies, it will come back automatically", whatever that means
... on Wed Oct 3 17:50:43 2007Barracuda have been doing some good things recently regarding open source
... on Wed Oct 3 14:17:07 2007Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's prez to YAPC::Europe 2007. looks fantastic!
... on Tue Oct 2 22:10:49 2007hilarious antics. 'take down what you have put up about me, remove my name and replace it with somebody else’s immediately… I will definitely be taking this forward'
... on Tue Oct 2 18:52:32 2007plugged by Marcus Ramberg, looks like it could be nice
... on Mon Oct 1 18:08:28 2007C++ implementation, 2 ex-NetApp developers, FUSE support
... on Mon Oct 1 11:26:29 2007simply type in the part of the SSID that appears after "eircom", hit enter, and it'll return the WEP key to use for that network. point-and-drool simplicity. oh dear
... on Mon Oct 1 10:10:03 2007Eircom's keys are simply a salted hash of part of the serial number, which they also helpfully broadcast as part of the SSID. they really should have used a pRNG for this. not clever at all! Nice reversing by Kevin Devine
... on Mon Oct 1 10:07:59 2007'AOL blocked the DNC and RNC repeatedly in election years for bad complaint rates and high bounce rates. .. these groups even told us that they bought “lists of likely voters” and emailed them. As such, complaint rates and bounces were off the charts.
... on Thu Sep 27 17:16:27 2007good archive of a very funny talk.bizarre poster from the early '90s
... on Tue Sep 25 21:01:34 2007wow. this may be the most fucked-up health-insurance story I've heard yet
... on Mon Sep 24 20:38:47 2007great examination of the birth of copyright at the hands of Colmcille in saints-and-scholars Ireland, by Ray Corrigan, presented at the Gikii conference in the UK last week (via Danny)
... on Mon Sep 24 10:46:32 2007'we have to accept that the media is run by flaky humanities graduates, who wear their ignorance of science like a badge of honour on their sleeves' [..] 'what you’re engaged in here is effectively a war on the public understanding of science'
... on Fri Sep 21 08:42:21 2007good Dublin pub collides with bin truck. doh!
... on Tue Sep 18 20:20:55 2007omg want
... on Tue Sep 18 20:15:26 2007oh dear -- Paypal/eBay with an insanely over-complex SPF record
... on Mon Sep 17 18:08:06 2007'These days, uPNP MediaServer is ubiquitous, DAAP is no more. Apple had the much better starting position, but they blew it, because of their childish locking-out of alternative implementations.'
... on Sat Sep 15 18:44:54 2007hardware accelerator board for PCRE content matching, similar to Sensory Networks' NodalCore coprocessor I think
... on Fri Sep 14 09:20:03 2007"Best of Open Source Software". 'Powerful, extensible, and effective, Spamassassin uses a trainable neural network engine to identify spam and minimize false positives, in addition to the classic techniques of blacklisting and Bayesian filtering.'
... on Wed Sep 12 11:24:34 2007'When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.'
... on Tue Sep 11 10:22:30 2007wtf fundies. 'Before becoming a Christian, I remember numerous instances of “traveling outside my body” during yoga relaxation periods. I wonder who – or what – checked in when I checked out?' hahaha
... on Sat Sep 8 23:37:17 2007broadly correct, but contains some surprising assertions; I've never heard of spammers hiring linguists. IMO the only way we can respond is through openness and open source; the bad guys cannot follow us there
... on Fri Sep 7 19:33:00 2007good round-up of interviews. "Cumulatively, [the Storm botnet] is sending billions of messages a day. It could be double digits in the billions, easily."
... on Fri Sep 7 17:37:51 2007at first I thought it was just a buzzword-bingo vapour product -- but no, this sounds _really_ cool, judging by these slides. A totally new database concept, GPLed, written in Erlang
... on Thu Sep 6 23:23:55 2007'Mike Culver, an Amazon Web Services Evangelist will give a talk on AWS including EC2 and S3.'
... on Thu Sep 6 10:40:25 2007I never knew this existed; nothing clever in this at all, just a really simple, basic UI that'll work _everywhere_. handy to have
... on Thu Sep 6 10:31:01 2007hahaha -- great correlation by EFFI (via Lars Wirzenius); countries preceived to be "very corrupt" by the Corruption Perceptions Index tended to vote favourably to MS' proposed standard
... on Wed Sep 5 15:12:38 2007sounds intriguing, uses Facebook as a backing SNS
... on Tue Sep 4 17:48:44 2007the Storm botnet has better hardware resources than the entire world's top 10 supercomputers, according to an analysis by Peter Gutmann
... on Mon Sep 3 22:55:32 2007with: the Irish Final of the World Cyber Games, a screening of "Tron", and a seminar. sounds interesting
... on Fri Aug 31 16:57:10 2007a good case-study of how software patents can affect an open source project. Note: they felt asking IBM for a patent license was too risky! Happily, it seems they've managed to rewrite code as non-infringing in this case.
... on Tue Aug 28 09:48:35 2007wtf! mugged right outside his house in Mountain View, nasty stuff
... on Tue Aug 28 09:11:53 2007lots and lots of Tetris scholarship. Also: '4th Law Of Robotics: a robot must never place the long skinny ones horizontally, unless it leads to a long skinny vertical hole so 4 rows can be cleared at once the next time a long skinny one comes around'
... on Mon Aug 27 15:02:31 2007'you've portrayed blacklisting issues as significant by returning blacklist results for certain DNSBLs, even though those lists [are] dead or severely broken.' -- well said
... on Sun Aug 26 23:07:05 2007awesome! a timing attack carried out in the field against HMAC-SHA1 (via nelson)
... on Fri Aug 24 17:44:28 2007'We, the Linux community, were incredibly lucky here [...] attacked by an opponent which was so inept [...] that we would have been hard-put to lose [...] The chances of there being another copyright-based attack of any note have dropped to almost zero.'
... on Fri Aug 24 17:03:42 2007classic Gartner "draw a straight line from here" bollocks. how do people still take them seriously?
... on Fri Aug 24 14:26:29 2007XenSource/Citrix think they should concentrate on Windows, in what appears to be a "killing the goose that lays the golden eggs" move. fork away
... on Fri Aug 24 11:25:26 2007a medieval Dublin church has a crypt containing several mummified bodies, and they're on public display again. of course, Daev Walsh has the details of opening hours, contact number etc. ;)
... on Fri Aug 24 10:47:47 2007taking the piss out of 37Signals, shooting fish in a barrel: 'sometimes you have to ask the wife where the dinner is .. what's holding it up? .. tough questions like that could shed light on a part of the "process" that's ripe for improvement.'
... on Thu Aug 23 10:17:47 2007it's not spam
... on Wed Aug 22 21:57:52 2007very cute wall decals from a mother-and-daughter design team; lots of really cute designs!
... on Wed Aug 22 14:45:55 2007preferential shipping rates for eBay Power Sellers. pity they couldn't be arsed actually *delivering* the parcels half the time, or supporting the post office nearer than 5km away. useless (via Damien)
... on Wed Aug 22 10:39:42 2007the scummy black-hat SEO spammer who defaced hundreds of DreamHost sites may have been tracked down - one Vadim Smelyansky, according to this post
... on Wed Aug 22 10:35:33 2007good tips I think. 1. it scales; 2. have a "kids' area"; 3. small-but-many sponsorship model; 4. good schwag; 5. 2 types of session length; 6. "demo camp" to weed out product demos.
... on Wed Aug 22 10:27:18 2007'While Sourcefire has promised to continue to distribute versions [...] that meet the parameters of the [GPL], the OEM licensing model will not necessarily adhere to all elements of the GPL, Jackson said. The arrangement fits the [Snort model].'
... on Mon Aug 20 18:37:07 2007They get better and better as the article progresses; I especially agree with numbers 12 and 13
... on Mon Aug 20 15:24:36 2007the perils of using p2p as your network infrastructure; Windows Update caused millions of their nodes to reboot simultaneously, and Skype's network was unable to recover (via Simon Willison)
... on Mon Aug 20 13:43:54 2007How to call various numbers -- third-party SIP providers, US 1-800 toll-free providers, UCI, etc. via the Gizmo Project VOIP app for the N770
... on Sun Aug 19 10:34:43 2007'Sourcefire now owns ClamAV project and related trademarks, as well as the source code copyrights held by the five principal members of the ClamAV team. ' They could make it proprietary, then, if they feel like it
... on Fri Aug 17 13:59:14 2007'BarCamp is a conference sort of thing that revolves around a Wiki. Basically you sign up to come pitch your useless startup to a bunch of other jerkoffs who are pitching their useless startups, and it doesn't stop until everyone gets a full release.'
... on Thu Aug 16 10:30:52 2007kind of a moot point, since they seem to be operating just fine at another URL anyway
... on Wed Aug 15 20:32:24 2007Linux grep will highlight the search term in the output. how handy, I had no idea
... on Wed Aug 15 15:44:40 2007streams using icecast. Rugose and hacky, probably doesn't work anymore, but worth bookmarking for possible future reference
... on Tue Aug 14 22:59:12 2007definitely the coolest thing I've done with my 770 yet. really nice, 770-optimized UI
... on Tue Aug 14 19:36:34 2007'The problem with "social media" sites is that they're like bars -- even if they become the next Studio 54, they will all, eventually, become the next Studio 54' -- Joe Gregorio (via Doug Pardee)
... on Tue Aug 14 09:47:39 2007looks like I'm going to be doing just this pretty soon. eek
... on Mon Aug 13 16:52:37 2007good old IBM. massive manual describing how to disassemble and field-repair a T4x laptop, in excruciating detail
... on Mon Aug 13 16:48:16 2007'When one considers that this pioneering work on text adventures was happening during a time span which includes Star Wars and the first Apple, it is not likely that any other similar time span has encompassed so many seminal events in geek culture.'
... on Mon Aug 13 10:07:33 2007rumblings of bad news at Blogorrah HQ. here's hoping it's not true
... on Sat Aug 11 11:52:35 2007including "boot your tablet from the MMC card", "install Xterm and root command-line access", "install sshd" -- all well presented and working
... on Fri Aug 10 12:53:23 2007great comment thread on Jim Carroll's blog about the ongoing fiasco. he puts the blame squarely at the canucks' feet for not accepting they're a stadium band for Irish fans
... on Fri Aug 10 11:38:40 2007Wikipedia article listing hex "magic numbers", such as 0xCAFEBABE and 0xDEADBEEF (thanks Craig)
... on Thu Aug 9 16:47:01 2007the magic number at the start of all OpenSolaris crash dumps. wonder if there's a site collecting these silly constants? (0xB0BD0BB5 featured heavily in my code)
... on Thu Aug 9 14:40:54 2007hooray! at last! It's still not perfect, with occasional errors, but better than Map24; I'd given up on Map24 due to bad directions, but GMaps has the draggable-route feature, which means their errors can be _fixed_. And the UI is much better anyway
... on Wed Aug 8 11:08:15 2007free festival in Smithfield Plaza, Dublin 7, Saturday after next. looks like fun!
... on Tue Aug 7 11:51:45 2007according to the head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre. omgwtfbbq. one wonders if he's ever _seen_ WoW -- sounds like the Aussies need to sack him and hire someone who can find their ass with both hands instead
... on Tue Aug 7 11:17:22 2007Life imitates Spinal Tap. 'Writing on his website, [David Coverdale] said the bear broke into a guest bedroom on Wednesday morning ... he ran at the animal with an air horn canister and scared him into the garden.'
... on Tue Aug 7 10:03:55 2007"parto de una vaca (birth of a calf)", 'posted by a 10-year-old child who is participating in the Villa Cardal trial in Uruguay'
... on Sat Aug 4 17:37:17 2007'Jeff Moss announced that they were changing the game; instead of Spot the Fed, they were going to play Spot the Undercover Reporter; "And there's one in here right now." Madigan, realizing she'd been had, jumped from her seat and bolted out the door'. ha
... on Sat Aug 4 12:18:49 2007DAAP/UPNP media player for the N770
... on Sat Aug 4 11:39:52 2007'If Perl is dead, then it is by far the most vital, active and useful deceased programming language I have ever come across.' +1! Also, I think we've managed to make perl the language spam filters are written in, too ;)
... on Fri Aug 3 18:28:19 2007possibly the best intro to practical use of Hadoop I've read so far
... on Fri Aug 3 13:06:23 2007crime pays, I guess
... on Fri Aug 3 11:42:10 2007A Polish soap, redubbed by Barry Murphy, Mario Rosenstock, and several other Irish comedians. I've missed this so far, but apparently it's brilliant -- looking forward to watching a few episodes later (via Nuggy)
... on Fri Aug 3 11:00:16 2007'strengthening these [Sequoia e-voting] systems will involve more than repairing a few programming errors. They need to be re-engineered from the ground up.'
... on Thu Aug 2 19:02:08 2007good article on the recent rise of the "album leak", via Nialler9
... on Thu Aug 2 17:11:18 200730 years in federal prison for running an illegal Internet pharmacy that sold about $24 million in prescription drugs
... on Thu Aug 2 15:15:22 2007'SpamAssassin plugin to score mail based on Google blocklists' -- sounds interesting as a potential anti-phish system, must check it out
... on Thu Aug 2 11:09:52 2007good review of the current state of the Netflix machine-learning challenge (via BO'S)
... on Wed Aug 1 16:05:26 2007Good article. wish I had this 5 years ago (via Luis)
... on Wed Aug 1 09:31:51 2007maliciously-formatted data in an e-passport's RFID tag can crash border passport scanning systems, with a possibility of being able to inject code. This right here is why sometimes too much data interchange can be a bad thing for security... brilliant
... on Wed Aug 1 09:27:20 2007'arguing that because the manufacturers of the [..] machine did not provide him with [source], that a conviction was made in the absence of full disclosure and therefore the constitutional rights of the accused person were not upheld' he's right IMO
... on Tue Jul 31 10:49:08 2007Jeremy Zawodny: 'I'm simply not going to bother with the hassle, trouble, expense, and complexity of desktop applications when an online substitute will do the job anymore. Life's too short already.' +1
... on Tue Jul 31 10:06:15 2007a (rather girly) social game, built around creation of collages from found images on the web
... on Tue Jul 31 09:59:04 2007nice one John (and nice one Nooked!)
... on Fri Jul 27 13:52:05 2007'attempting to take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands. Whether you're a web developer, sysadmin, or using Perl for scientific research or finance or just tracking your DVD collection, we'd love to hear about it.'
... on Fri Jul 27 11:12:30 2007wow, what a great idea. EUR29 for a year's use of a city-wide bike network
... on Fri Jul 27 10:13:08 2007CVE-2007-2926: 'all stable versions of BIND 9 to date are vulnerable, allowing "pharming" attacks on BIND-9-based caching nameservers'
... on Wed Jul 25 14:51:29 2007incredibly baroque watches with a steampunk aesthetic. not on sale outside Japan (yet)
... on Tue Jul 24 10:33:22 2007Speedup ~35x over CPU equivalent. Parallel search of suffix tree for exact matches of a set of query strings (via bos)
... on Sun Jul 22 14:53:35 2007demo of an LCARS theme for the Nokia 770. exhaustive! (via Damien)
... on Fri Jul 20 11:27:10 2007spam figures from a reformed bad guy. His commission on pharma was 50%; response rates tended to be "a fraction of 1%"; he made $480k in the last year of spamming (!)
... on Fri Jul 20 11:23:38 2007"Taking lighters away is security theater," [asst sec of TSA] Kip Hawley said. "It trivializes the security process." sanity, eventually; I never realised that this was imposed by Congress, instead of being TSA-driven; no wonder it doesn't work
... on Fri Jul 20 11:17:59 2007great laptops, esp running Linux! my T40 has served me well for 3 years, but is making funny noises nowadays...
... on Fri Jul 20 10:13:19 2007an old article from JGC about the importance of measuring spam filters using two numbers, and how it's hard to break that down into one. Still true
... on Thu Jul 19 11:23:51 2007now down to EUR 110 for buyers in Ireland -- very tempting!
... on Wed Jul 18 11:41:06 2007short paper from the Honeynet Project describing "fast-flux" nets, which proxy criminal HTTP and DNS hosting through 1000s of fast-moving bot nodes to avoid takedowns. The worst thing about this is how long it's taken to be discussed publicly :(
... on Wed Jul 18 11:14:03 2007The story fabricated support from a quoted "leading expert", in opposition to what she actually believes, and she's now threatening legal action; the other "leading expert" is an employee of Andrew Wakefield; & written by paper's "lifestyle columnist"
... on Wed Jul 18 10:06:43 2007'Rational analysis doesn’t hold sway with the pregnancy police. “Why take any risk?” they ask. The medical establishment and the culture at large have twisted logic around to the point where any risk, no matter how infinitesimal, is too much.' (thx
... on Tue Jul 17 13:50:14 2007Python, psyco, Apache, lighttpd, BigTable, memcached, sharding
... on Tue Jul 17 09:43:46 2007Europe's largest online bike store; decent-looking bikes and good prices. Most importantly, free shipping to Ireland via Parcelforce
... on Mon Jul 16 18:02:47 2007'The Irish [homicide] rate, 0.32 killings per 100,000 people, contrasted with that of Finland (1.96) and Scotland (1.75) which topped western Europe's violence blacklist. Malta, with a rate of 0.48, was almost as peaceful as Ireland.'
... on Mon Jul 16 17:01:57 2007some interesting looking papers this year
... on Mon Jul 16 15:48:05 2007Chris notes that at least one botnet is now retrying delivery when greylisted
... on Mon Jul 16 14:44:06 2007supports perl, ruby and python; uses a central daemon and communicates over TCP. looks like there hasn't been a release in a while
... on Mon Jul 16 11:18:15 2007call in to rant on talk radio -- Liberty City WKTT, an in-game radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV, that is. "It's time for you to do your part in the war on terror - by calling a radio station and ranting at the top of your lungs"
... on Sat Jul 14 18:52:23 2007I've been thinking of putting up wall-sized blackboards in our kitchen -- handy for notes, household to-do lists, etc. -- but this is a hell of a lot easier ;)
... on Thu Jul 12 18:23:30 2007good-looking multiplayer online Scrabble, played a la play-by-email -- but built entirely on the Facebook API, therefore with access to your friends and using Facebook messaging to inform them that it's their turns. Good demo of the platform, nifty too
... on Wed Jul 11 14:51:12 2007'writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book, but provides many of the same benefits .. for 20% of the effort .., you get 80% (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).'
... on Wed Jul 11 11:47:11 2007Toronto street artist gets green thumbs
... on Tue Jul 10 14:48:28 2007aha, that makes sense; Google wanted the policy-management / legal-disclaimer / archiving and all the other legal CYA crap that Postini do in their products, for Google Apps
... on Mon Jul 9 14:02:13 2007$625 mil, not sure I see how it's worth it for Google
... on Mon Jul 9 13:56:57 2007wide-ranging summary of the illegal wiretapping of over 100 Greek leaders' mobiles during the Athens Olympics, by hacking Vodafone's Ericsson AXE switch. very sophisticated; the code was patched in 29 separate addresses, and an AXE rootkit installed
... on Mon Jul 9 12:35:49 200710GB of data per month, with *no* additional charges for "occasional usage in excess of this". EUR 30 per month
... on Mon Jul 9 10:38:12 2007reverse-engineer templates, given a corpus of the template's output, using longest common substrings. must try this out; I've been meaning to do something like that for ages
... on Fri Jul 6 14:16:14 2007'found dead on Monday aged 44, a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.' omg best obit EVER
... on Fri Jul 6 11:16:11 2007This 'allows AWS developers to charge other EC2 users for the use of [machine images] they have created and shared. Sellers of AMIs set the price, and their customers then purchase and are billed through Amazon for their use of these AMIs. ' very clever!
... on Fri Jul 6 10:54:48 2007great prints from this artist; lots of 2-colour stark, wintery night landscapes. must buy one. lots of the good ones are out of print, unfortunately :(
... on Fri Jul 6 10:28:36 2007("print" formatted to skip pagination) Very biased towards recent games -- Legend of Zelda: Ocarina as best ever? that should be Tetris, followed by GTA:VC. Also no way should FFXII be in the top 50; it's a painful grind-fest. Still, great list
... on Wed Jul 4 11:15:37 2007apparently
... on Tue Jul 3 22:55:54 2007the latest creation from Dublin's Chinese population: 'the bizarre only-in-Ireland ‘breakfast noodles’, made with rashers, sausages and a fried egg.' yum!
... on Tue Jul 3 14:01:30 2007I've worked for a company like this, and had the mispleasure of dealing with similar HR staff
... on Tue Jul 3 10:48:19 2007watch as the iPhone is reversed. great stuff; it'd be cool to see a phone with an sshd running
... on Tue Jul 3 10:25:27 2007ssh'ed to another host, and you want to edit a file? type "bcvi nameoffile" on the remote host, and it'll cause the file to appear in a *local* Vim editor window; any time you write the file, Vim will scp it up to the remote end. works quite well
... on Mon Jul 2 16:08:18 2007'As thousands of Glaswegians queued, moaned and sneakily sipped Buckfast on a rainy Saturday afternoon, one man stood vigilant outside the airport terminal. Baggage supervisor, hero, smoker. John Smeaton.' hahaha
... on Mon Jul 2 12:25:23 2007uʍop-ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ noʎ ʇxǝʇ ǝɥʇ sdı1ɟ ɥɔıɥʍ ıbɔ ǝıʞɔınb ɐ ¡ʇuǝ11ǝɔxǝ
... on Mon Jul 2 10:31:11 2007now online, with a frequently-updated blog and the entirety of the Top 100 restaurant reviews available for free! Great job putting this up; I've subscribed
... on Sat Jun 30 19:09:30 2007much-quoted "first in line for the iPhone" guy is actually a professional line-sitter. One of those people for whom the phrase "get a life" was invented
... on Fri Jun 29 09:28:02 2007'Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.' (via tweeeee)
... on Thu Jun 28 10:08:48 2007interesting to see the EC2-specific additions to basic Ubuntu Feisty
... on Wed Jun 27 15:05:03 2007what Steve Yegge has been hacking on at Google. pretty insane, but a major plug for Javascript
... on Wed Jun 27 12:41:43 2007um, don't agree with this decision by the ClamAV guys: 'I have changed the meaning of Phishing.Email to "a Possibly Unwanted Phishing Email". It is for sure a suspicious email, that should be treated with caution.'
... on Tue Jun 26 16:47:39 2007FAIL
... on Tue Jun 26 11:14:03 2007whoa. this is amazing -- great demo of how social networking systems flood through social networks and cliques (via boing boing)
... on Mon Jun 25 11:28:53 2007all but 4 of the top 50 Google results for Sky Handling Partners are now about their massive customer-service fiasco. wtg Damien!
... on Sat Jun 23 10:33:54 2007'While William Terra cruise the lakes of Maine he enjoy listen to Wagner.'
... on Fri Jun 22 12:59:56 2007good tips
... on Thu Jun 21 12:15:28 2007they lose blogger's baggage; he complains; they fail to deal with the customer complaint; he writes a critical blog post; in response, it looks like they've impersonated him in order to enroll him in gay dating sites. omfg
... on Wed Jun 20 17:06:27 2007this year's crop of free showings in Meetinghouse Square; Lebowski and Tap!
... on Tue Jun 19 11:29:07 2007a bunch of Irish entrepreneurs are heading over to the valley at the start of December; who should they meet, and what should they visit? drop your $.02 of advice here...
... on Mon Jun 18 13:16:40 2007the essential freeware apps to freshen up and de-spyware your relatives' clogged-up Windows boxes, for when you're called upon to "fix my PC" (via Damien)
... on Mon Jun 18 11:21:53 2007middle-click on a "Submit" form button to cause the form results to appear in a new tab. so obvious! brilliant!
... on Thu Jun 14 18:07:19 2007optimizing in-memory data structures for CPU caches, important for optimization of CPU-bound C code given modern CPU vs bus speeds (via mjd). reminds me of Conrad's Mandelbrot generator which fit inside the ARM cache - what a hack!
... on Thu Jun 14 11:51:02 2007cool! Takes OCR'd text from image attachments, and feeds it as tokens to SA's Bayes subsystem
... on Thu Jun 14 10:47:37 2007Sarah P. Everett's doctoral thesis at Rice -- only 32% of the voters noticed that malicious changes had been made to their review screens during mock election testing, and in a follow-up test, 6% failed to complete their voting process at all. doomed
... on Thu Jun 14 10:45:36 2007where the future government is being decided. 'at the moment it's extremely likely it will pass' (via Damien)
... on Wed Jun 13 18:21:07 2007actually contains some hints I didn't know about
... on Wed Jun 13 15:55:45 2007They suggest the use of 2-channel authentication (out-of-band transaction confirmation, e.g. using an SMS confirmation message)
... on Wed Jun 13 14:45:29 2007Twenty Major on the impending Green-FF-PD coalition: 'when green zone land is rezoned to allow Fianna Fail’s builder friends to lash up houses and enormous shopping centres, the bribes must be presented in envelopes made from recycled paper.' ha!
... on Wed Jun 13 11:48:56 2007'an autograph manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci containing his observations on the nature and properties of water as well as other aspects of science and technology' -- coming to the Chester Beatty in Dublin from tomorrow until August 12
... on Tue Jun 12 12:51:20 2007concurrency: down with threads, up with shared-nothing and message queues. +1!
... on Tue Jun 12 11:19:56 2007'The ultimate Irish breakfast review site - dedicated to breakfasts in Dublin, Ireland, but also providing general information about breakfasts from Ireland and around the world.' endearingly earnest about this critical issue
... on Mon Jun 11 17:01:10 2007pppd scripts to use the Huawei E220 HSDPA modem under Linux
... on Mon Jun 11 15:39:43 2007an almost-working attack on APOP's use of MD5 hashes; HMAC would have avoided it
... on Mon Jun 11 14:50:22 2007win 100 euros for filling out the survey -- or 50 euros for linking to/sending the most visitors to the site (cough ;)
... on Mon Jun 11 10:12:47 2007good post. I would tend to agree with Matt's basic idea here. However, the most eye-opening aspect is news about Hitwise's model! It sounds like, for ISPs, customer privacy is pretty damn cheap if a $240m company can be built on these log sales :(
... on Mon Jun 11 09:59:34 2007where we were last night -- sun beating down, BYOB'ing at the side of Trinity's cricket pitch in the company of hundreds of others. just like the old days! (even down to the popped collars on the rugby types, some things never change)
... on Sat Jun 9 10:48:07 2007a company called JumpBox is setting up complex open source apps in standalone VM images. interesting model, this
... on Fri Jun 8 12:36:06 2007SANS note: 'this looks like the anti-spam tools are doing their job because spammers seem to be desperate when they launch DDoS attacks'
... on Fri Jun 8 09:01:20 2007an in-browser vi clone, written in pure javascript. bad license terms though
... on Thu Jun 7 13:00:52 2007'When researchers at Harvard [and MIT] studied the anti-fraud image system used by Bank of America, they found that 58 out of 60 users still logged on to a phony Web site that did not display the images that the users had selected.' we're doomed
... on Wed Jun 6 10:49:06 2007an awesome-looking open source code-review web app from VMWare; I may have to set this up for SpamAssassin/the ASF
... on Tue Jun 5 14:08:56 2007Vanessa Fox with the funny (via Zoran)
... on Fri Jun 1 14:00:57 2007because robots are the new kittens
... on Fri Jun 1 11:50:25 2007a good Google Maps mashup for Dublin buses; user-annotated bus routes are mapped out on a zoomable GMap. much better than the official maps, which are utterly worthless
... on Fri Jun 1 09:45:04 2007Code-based mashup creator -- sounds like Y! Pipes without the GUI crud. yay
... on Thu May 31 19:05:06 2007the anti-wifi psychoceramic roadshow rolls on. "we are surrounded by a soup of electromagnetic smog at all times. In effect, we live in an electro-dictatorship" lol!
... on Thu May 31 15:11:01 2007jgc's prez to the EU Spam Symposium this month. Very sobering analysis, well worth reading
... on Thu May 31 12:01:38 2007Fair Trade Laotian arabica coffee (yum), with 50 cents going towards Veterans for Peace, and 25 cents going towards Lee Thorn's Jhai Foundation
... on Thu May 31 09:36:27 2007Last.fm dev guy says: 'the openness of our platform and our approach to privacy won’t change.' Of course, that's not hard to say: they had already quietly decided to close bulk access to the scrobble data anyway :(
... on Wed May 30 16:15:55 2007how to ensure a direct debit is cancelled, with Irish banks, even with an inept payee. Authoritative thread
... on Wed May 30 11:14:16 2007a list of sites with active XSS bugs, ordered by Pagerank, including Symantec.com, apple.com, CNN, BBC, microsoft.com, Yahoo! and Google
... on Wed May 30 09:13:06 2007referencing a 1948 B. F. Skinner behaviourism study on pigeons that displayed similar superstitious actions! wow. Of course, in NetHack the superstitions are usually true (via qwghlm)
... on Tue May 29 14:22:52 2007the latest internet appliance concept: running Linux (of course), super-low-power, flash storage, uploads backup and storage to S3. Maybe the strong green angle here will give it legs where the other super-basic home web appliances (ie Webnote) failed
... on Tue May 29 10:23:59 2007due to a reduction in take-up of the MMR vaccine from 95% to 80.3% (via Tony Finch)
... on Fri May 25 21:29:54 2007'Xdmx is proxy X server that provides multi-head support for multiple displays attached to different machines (each of which is running a typical X server).' ooh, nifty (via Tony Finch)
... on Fri May 25 12:46:40 2007doing so may result in 'oily orange diarrhea, discharge, or leakage from the rectum that may smell of mineral oil. The discharge can stain clothing and occur without warning 30 minutes to 36 hours after consuming the fish.' uh, nein danke (via mrneutron)
... on Fri May 25 12:40:09 20073.6 Mbps HSDPA/UMTS mobile broadband, 20 euros per month, 10GB cap, 5 cents per MB above cap. upfront cost of 130 euros for the Huaxei E220 modem. No sign of a minimum contract period, either. That's a pretty great deal!
... on Fri May 25 11:08:25 2007POPFile class to instrument perl code and get HTML output indicating test coverage. simple but effective, it looks like
... on Fri May 25 10:09:21 2007command-line app to pinpoint settings that will reduce power consumption on a Linux laptop (via Craig)
... on Fri May 25 09:15:58 2007'Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing .. intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.'
... on Thu May 10 13:05:44 2007a snip at EUR 8m. Good to see I'm not the only one having difficulty flogging a gaff 'round here
... on Thu May 10 12:17:41 2007Flickr seems to have deployed some broken censorship filtering; apparently these settings will disable it
... on Wed May 9 21:40:35 2007'The indictment alleges that E‑Gold has been a highly favored method of payment by operators of investment scams, credit card and identity fraud, and sellers of online child pornography.'
... on Wed May 9 17:17:29 2007allows you to customise the font size on a per-website basis, then saves that setting for the next time you visit that site. This should be built into Firefox (via evan_tech)
... on Wed May 9 12:13:41 2007great follow-up, lots of good points raised succinctly
... on Tue May 8 17:01:48 2007good comments in the /. thread
... on Tue May 8 17:00:29 2007really, this is a pretty hard issue -- both sides have important points. I think we'll have to get to a situation where NAT is obsolete, but firewalling is still the default; there are now too many opportunities for bad guys to pwn your fridge otherwise
... on Tue May 8 16:59:44 2007the Oakland crime maps guy contemplates how to do efficient, open network index APIs
... on Tue May 8 11:25:44 2007this is interesting -- another web-mediated large-scale code-review app, to go alongside Guido van Rossum's Google one
... on Tue May 8 11:22:34 2007turns out it's a side-effect of a Windows XP misfeature -- once your XP laptop connects to an ad-hoc network with a certain SSID, it in turn will broadcast that SSID in future as *its own* ad-hoc net. hence: viral!
... on Tue May 8 09:44:58 2007I don't pay a BBC license fee, so I don't really have a right to complain, but this is a rip-off. the Beeb has emasculated its public-value offerings in order not to compete with markets in a "precarious state", like audiobooks and classical music
... on Tue May 8 09:09:34 2007thanks to Ed Felten for a great demo of how stupid this idea is
... on Tue May 8 08:58:10 2007Great-looking home theatre video projector, for only $499 + $75 shipping (that's EUR 430!); 800x480 res, 6000-hour lamp life, replacement lamps only $30, lots of useful inputs. no HDMI, but I haven't got any HDMI gear yet anyway ;)
... on Sun May 6 23:09:19 2007the T.J.Maxx credit-card-number theft was performed by WEP cracking, from a laptop in a car parked outside a store. good demo of why they should have used additional crypto
... on Sun May 6 13:00:12 2007courtesy of the Amazon Web Services blog, talking about their SQS queueing system
... on Sat May 5 11:16:10 2007the Linux manual pages set for the libc APIs is now a Google 20% project! that's fantastic, kudos to Google for this
... on Sat May 5 11:06:07 2007I never really had much time for VB in the past, but this is brilliant. "The problem with this money is -- It ain't credible that it was for the .. renovation of this house!" Awesome
... on Fri May 4 13:45:32 2007'basically it destroys an agents bonus if they log out to call customers and to be on the call longer than 4minutes so once you see 4 minutes on the call you try and fob the customer off in most cases as the bonus is too precious!!' argh
... on Fri May 4 13:25:48 2007wow, all of my modules are in one dist or another -- most in FreeBSD
... on Fri May 4 12:11:31 2007good list of things that the good guys need to be doing when sending bulk mail. interesting to note that they use the Contacts list as a whitelist, too
... on Fri May 4 11:34:36 2007I've been running into this error recently. this forum thread suggests that disabling CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION in my kernel config will work around the problem; however, it's from 3 years ago, and supposedly a patch was added in 2.6.10 to hack around it
... on Thu May 3 14:10:59 2007it seems Glastonbury hired a rather dodgy company to handle their ticket sales -- some quite spammy/user-hostile stories in the comments
... on Wed May 2 17:39:19 2007great Busted Tees tee-shirt -- as seen in this week's viral video
... on Wed May 2 16:50:49 2007I've heard this a lot recently -- Hotmail's "SmartScreen" filter has become extremely false-positive-prone, silently discarding lots of non-spam mail without warning to sender or recipient. not good
... on Tue May 1 10:55:04 200766% of tourists fear they'll be detained by DHS officials for a minor blunder -- *66 per cent*!! incredible, although given how many horror stories I've heard, I guess this is not surprising
... on Tue May 1 10:49:59 2007$0.01 per 1k PUT/LIST requests, $0.01 per 10k GET requests, but cheaper bandwidth rates; they claim 75% of customers would see their bill decrease
... on Tue May 1 09:16:43 2007John Handelaar's set up an IRC->blog gateway, blogging the .ie election, based on the 2lmc.org spool code it looks like (via twitterings)
... on Mon Apr 30 16:14:15 2007turns out the Independent on Sunday pretty much made it up -- one of the original researchers says "none of us have been able to do any of our work .. This is a horror story for every researcher to have your study reduced to this." Oh dear
... on Mon Apr 30 09:23:19 2007this is interesting -- will it be mobile? what will the price point be? coverage? This could be fully mobile broadband at speeds *higher* than its fixed-line competition
... on Fri Apr 27 18:46:45 2007'We at Neuros are working to fulfill the vision of the open set-top box' -- and for $239, that's a pretty good deal. certainly cheaper than an AppleTV...
... on Fri Apr 27 13:44:04 2007'the largest anti-spam lawsuit ever' .. 'Seeking more than $1B in statutory damages, .. on behalf of our members. If you've harvested email addresses or sent spam in the last two years, chances are .. we're coming after you.' w00t
... on Thu Apr 26 14:51:42 2007equipment for making my own maki-zushi. TODO!
... on Wed Apr 25 12:51:35 2007very cool -- Cloudmark's proprietary product, as a SpamAssassin plugin
... on Tue Apr 24 12:39:10 2007great article! I wish Wikipedia wasn't so idiotically uptight about this stuff, it's worth documenting
... on Tue Apr 24 09:49:27 2007Haughey was Ireland's embezzler-in-chief during the '80s, and still has a small number of elderly gullible fans who believe he did no wrong; a pretty good target for a 419 scammer, as a result
... on Tue Apr 24 09:42:07 2007jwz pessimism vindicated once again, this time re Novell's Hula project
... on Mon Apr 23 11:20:10 2007tiny (size of a deck of cards), cheap ($49) mesh networking node; acts as an 802.11b/g repeater. looks very cool
... on Fri Apr 20 15:29:53 2007another spam summit after the last one in 2003. Things have gotten a lot worse since then; here's hoping this one's a bit more productive
... on Thu Apr 19 15:52:53 2007Bennett Hasleton's incredible story of inept state judges in Washington State. if one of the few supposedly-decent anti-spam laws in the US is routinely ignored, and suits discarded, no wonder the US legislature has failed to deal with spam so badly! :(
... on Wed Apr 18 18:30:04 2007fantastic account of pirate TV broadcasting by a dissident radio astronomer during the martial law period in 1980s Poland -- with the aid of a ZX Spectrum!
... on Wed Apr 18 15:41:08 2007hilarious Lisper parody -- 'Paul Graham himself was completely rewritten in lisp, by an earlier version of himself, also written in lisp, by an earlier version of lisp. It's lisp, paul graham, lisp, paul graham, all the way down.' (via FoRK)
... on Mon Apr 16 20:20:36 2007another interesting feature-selection algo to investigate for SpamAssassin rule development
... on Mon Apr 16 15:31:14 2007might be useful to investigate some alternative feature-selection algorithms for SpamAssassin rules
... on Mon Apr 16 15:29:20 2007PDFs of the proceedings from web-spam research conference, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web. a few interesting-looking papers here -- interesting to see that one recommends a lightweight JS interpreter for spam-resistance! eek
... on Mon Apr 16 15:17:16 2007curious how they plan to render this non-evil
... on Sat Apr 14 09:27:30 2007oh good, we have a student working on this! It's been on the wishlist for a while, here's hoping this goes well
... on Fri Apr 13 13:39:25 2007fantastic site about the legendary Cambodian singer, loaded with MP3s
... on Thu Apr 12 11:45:06 2007ick. a pretty hacky way to embed ads in inline images; I think this isn't quite working
... on Thu Apr 12 11:40:42 2007a proposed EU "Intellectual Property" Enforcement Directive will turn "aiding, abetting or inciting" copyright infringement into a criminal offence. Sign the EFF Europe petition!
... on Thu Apr 12 10:10:11 2007"Caller ID is spoofable!" um, yeah. duh ;)
... on Wed Apr 11 11:26:16 2007Mark Langford, ex-director of ambulance-chaser 'no-win-no-fee' company The Accident Group, who famously sacked 2500 staff by SMS message, dies in a car crash. oh the irony
... on Wed Apr 11 09:32:14 2007'We're taking 10 gigabytes of the most popular "adult entertainment" videos from one of the largest subscription websites on the internet, and giving away access to anyone who can connect to it via IPv6.' are they serious? can't tell (via Adrian Colley)
... on Tue Apr 10 17:15:28 2007Ireland is suffering serious problems with spam SMS, which -- even worse than email spam -- cost the recipient 2 euros each to receive, and cannot be blocked! Astonishing how badly the regulator and telcos have allowed the consumer to be ripped off here
... on Tue Apr 10 13:23:39 2007as the "Geospatial Technologist for EMEA". interesting
... on Mon Apr 9 18:50:06 2007interesting. needs some way to display ads ;)
... on Sat Apr 7 09:41:03 2007'If it's not what you love, don't do it'; 'Learn the architecture of the machine'; 'Reputation is important'; 'Proprietary environments are a trap'; 'The network really is the computer'; and 'The community is more important than your employer'. Spot on
... on Fri Apr 6 15:38:49 2007Sun's amazing ZFS filesystem is now in FreeBSD HEAD, and will be in FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE as an experimental feature. cool. still waiting for the linux version ;)
... on Fri Apr 6 14:08:15 2007*this* is how you run a wifi network for a large event with many attendees; brilliant tips, stats, hardware recommendations, and war stories. Also, there's no way a hotel will ever match this level of expertise
... on Fri Apr 6 10:57:07 2007SpamGuru, IBM's research-produced anti-spam system which includes the Teiresias pattern-discovery algorithm, is not going to be in Notes/Domino 8. Pity, that sounded interesting. Maybe they'll open-source it ;)
... on Fri Apr 6 10:15:17 2007good info to diagnose poor-quality lines
... on Thu Apr 5 17:23:20 2007interesting startup factoids, by Vast's Naval Ravikant
... on Wed Apr 4 21:07:31 2007omgwtf. New Balance trainers featuring the cover of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" on the tongue and insole. so inappropriate (via FP)
... on Wed Apr 4 10:11:37 2007great data from Richard Clayton. We see similar massive swings in our private addresses and at the SpamAssassin spamtraps. I drew *exactly* the same conclusion from this data as Richard did.
... on Tue Apr 3 19:43:27 2007open source code release for a full-scale, actively-used-by-real-users, interweb SNS: consumating.com. wow, excellent! (via waxy)
... on Tue Apr 3 17:44:54 2007interesting LRB essay on climate change and the latest IPCC report. very long, but looks worth a read (TODO). thanks Lean!
... on Tue Apr 3 16:43:47 2007a little Tomi Ungerer drawing, mailed around the world for the recipients to photograph, as a school project for kids. great idea!
... on Tue Apr 3 11:19:11 2007fantastic! 'EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of (DRM) restrictions.'
... on Mon Apr 2 13:55:49 2007the Irish Times dives head-first into blogs, it looks like. comments, RSS feeds with full text, and a good blogroll which even links to Daev Walsh's Blather.net -- all very impressive!
... on Mon Apr 2 13:38:23 2007looks interesting; need to have a play around with this
... on Mon Apr 2 13:35:13 2007'In fact, if you sign up among the first 500 people, three (3) Old Witchcraft Spell Samples That You Can Use Right-Away, will be yours immediately at no charge (yes it's ALL free)'. two great tastes of gullibility that taste extra-gullible together!
... on Mon Apr 2 13:14:11 2007a huge mansion in a fantastic setting near Hook Head in Co. Wexford. now partially ruined, supposedly haunted, with a great supernatural legend concerning a visit from the Devil; sadly, it's no longer a working hotel. great spookiness factor, though
... on Sun Apr 1 19:24:35 2007great Koyaanisqatsi-referencing trailer for the new GTA -- EXCITED! scheduled release date: 16 Oct 2007
... on Fri Mar 30 11:23:00 2007Ubuntu bug of the day; the "powernowd" daemon startup script has been misused in Edgy to start unrelated kernel code, and now no longer starts the daemon in question at all unless you manually hack it. what a nasty, nasty hack
... on Thu Mar 29 17:03:47 2007good ILUG thread describing ways to figure this out on Linux 2.6.x. it's harder than it should be, unfortunately
... on Thu Mar 29 16:49:37 2007public web service API to a feed of new blog posts, taken from 1M non-spam blog feeds (via: Simon Willison)
... on Thu Mar 29 14:00:43 2007'Sauk County Sheriff Virgil "Butch" Steinhorst announced Tuesday that he believes a recent rash of Baraboo-area crimes was perpetrated by the al-Qaeda terrorist network or teenagers.' hahaha (via Bruce Schneier)
... on Thu Mar 29 11:30:58 2007staggering figures; that's a lot of money. 46% had no anti-spyware app, 13% didn't use a firewall, 7% even had no anti-virus software, and 20% replied to spam
... on Tue Mar 27 13:38:29 2007interesting anthropological stat - "the cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships" = 150. "a direct function of relative neocortex size", "in turn limits group size." See also Kaa's law
... on Mon Mar 26 20:44:00 2007'oh the humanity about 2 hours ago from web' (via Ben)
... on Mon Mar 26 18:52:36 2007Noted purely due to accidental sweariness: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gicker . According to the page, "Gickr is reopened on a new server", har har
... on Mon Mar 26 11:47:15 2007legendary footage where Herzog is shot during an interview, and carries on: "it is not a significant wound". awesome. see also: rescuing Joaquin Phoenix from car crashes, his take on chickens
... on Sat Mar 24 22:23:28 2007this could be really great -- I can see myself buying one as a new MythTV front-end -- or Apple could be all arsey and close it down very quickly. let's see what happens...
... on Sat Mar 24 12:01:03 2007yay! sanity. '[James Joyce's grandson & estate] have now entered into a settlement agreement enforceable by the Court that prohibits them from enforcing any of their copyrights against Shloss in connection with the publication of the supplement'
... on Sat Mar 24 11:28:11 2007CPAN module from Ricardo Signes - a simple client for SpamAssassin's spamd
... on Fri Mar 23 18:20:53 2007ugh, this is confusing :( Why not get them all IPv6-routable, at least?
... on Fri Mar 23 15:15:46 2007this works; it drastically improved response time for taint.org, as far as I can tell
... on Fri Mar 23 15:11:49 2007'SC34 suddenly has a lot of new ['participating member' countries] sending representatives, and I am interested to note the majority of their representatives are, as individuals, also Microsoft employees.' up to their old dirty tricks, then
... on Fri Mar 23 11:32:57 2007Avatars in militaristic FPS games representing ideologies, and player discomfort caused by that. Good post, esp. the Counterstrike story from October 2001!
... on Fri Mar 23 11:19:58 2007supposedly containing the same information required on the company's (paper) letterhead -- directors, registered office, etc. Could do with some corroboration here, and info on what states it's been transposed into law in, if any
... on Wed Mar 21 16:50:06 2007interesting, for post-move (via Craig)
... on Tue Mar 20 18:13:28 2007Last.fm staff member Russ: 'Unfortunately we can't release more recent data, and that's a shame.' user: 'Why can't you?' Russ: 'It is considered too valuable.'
... on Tue Mar 20 16:43:37 2007fascinating (and authoritative!) history of an Aussie outback myth, its (needless to say) drunken origins in the early '70s, and the mechanics of the "silly season", when newspapers print any old crap to fill column inches
... on Tue Mar 20 14:02:30 2007spawns/deletes EC2 instances depending on load, preforking-style. nifty! (via yoz, I think)
... on Tue Mar 20 12:42:49 2007'featuring reviews, info and commentary on anti-spam blocklists'. Right now, it has some FP%/FN% rates for common BLs, compiled using public ham newsletters; interesting results, must compare with SpamAssassin's sometime
... on Tue Mar 20 11:48:14 2007'start by outlining the continuum of opinions, including the ridiculous or unthinkable. Then the narrower range of the reasonable; the Overton window. The job of the think tank is to move this, so that ideas that were once unthinkable become acceptable'
... on Tue Mar 20 10:46:45 2007a classic spam-revenge prank; get the spammer to send you a prepaid-response FedEx bill, then ship them a really heavy, really expensive piece of crap they'll have to pay for in response. Also: note the spammer's Florida address; FL 34953.
... on Mon Mar 19 20:36:25 2007apparently not a joke. 'Waters, famous for a brief and acrimonious relationship with singer Sinead O'Connor, is a voluble campaigner for fathers' rights, blaming "poisonous mutant feminism" for grinding men into the dust of history.' seriously, wtf
... on Mon Mar 19 20:22:18 2007or, there are calls for this to happen in China, at least. bah (via Ben, who shares the same b'day)
... on Thu Mar 15 19:12:52 2007its massive popularity amongst Irish secondary-school and third-level students has given it the traffic to beat Google, Y! and MSN, according to Alexa's numbers. SNS populations are so insular; it's doing nowhere near this in the US
... on Thu Mar 15 15:17:52 2007web UI for the Perl::Critic lint-style static source code analysis engine for Perl, with most recommendations based on Damien Conway's _Perl Best Practices_
... on Wed Mar 14 15:44:01 2007'The primary component of the workload is the Open Source spam checking software SpamAssassin.' wow -- we're a benchmark now! ;) (via Fastmail blog)
... on Wed Mar 14 11:19:15 2007'a FOAF and trust metric based system to whitelist email coming from trusted senders and integrate the system into spamfighting tools, MTAs and MUAs.' one of the products is a SpamAssassin plugin -- sweet! Looking forward to seeing this progress
... on Tue Mar 13 12:17:52 2007really good tips on Dublin and elsewhere, from the Guardian; handy for the next time people ask me for mine ;) (via Blogorrah)
... on Tue Mar 13 12:04:37 2007'the firms are urging major e-mail and Internet service providers to allow only those e-mails [from eBay and PayPal which are signed using Domain Keys] to pass through their systems.' Hmm; no official announcement yet, take with a pinch of salt (via Neil
... on Tue Mar 13 11:02:46 2007Excellent spam-driven artwork: 'When a new spam email is detected by the (not very eco-friendly*) installation, it automatically prints it out. The printed email slides down a track into a shredder.' (via Paddy)
... on Mon Mar 12 16:38:27 2007'Announcing the arrival of a beautiful new baby boy at St. Francis Health Center . . . Urhines Kendall Icy Eight Special K'. wow
... on Mon Mar 12 15:42:33 2007'no enlargement required' - thanks for the plug, guys ;)
... on Mon Mar 12 13:59:45 2007the YT video is genius
... on Mon Mar 12 12:57:22 2007network latency measurement and graphing. bookmarked mostly for the very interesting "shades of grey" data-viz technique used in its RRDTool graphs
... on Sun Mar 11 12:47:22 2007good instructions from the DH wiki, involving building a custom perl install into your $HOME. it's a real shame DH don't keep the SA and Perl installs up-to-date, so their users wouldn't have to do this :(
... on Fri Mar 9 17:39:14 2007hmm, trying it out
... on Fri Mar 9 15:58:52 2007great blogging from McMurdo Base by FOAF SandwichGirl. fascinating for an Antarctica-obsessive like myself
... on Fri Mar 9 11:39:40 2007interesting idea to embed hash-verification of downloads into browsers and HTTP user-agents (via rOD). could do with support for multiple hashes for each URL, too
... on Fri Mar 9 11:28:58 2007'Last year, [Calvin Klein] went so far as to trademark 'technosexual' [..] A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: 'She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It's intense. For right now.'' hahaha! (via substitute)
... on Fri Mar 9 10:58:45 2007OMG enforcement! the SEC moves slowly, but the wheels seem to be well in motion now to cause a lot of trouble for the pink-sheets spammers
... on Thu Mar 8 18:35:14 2007'Jules is very awake and alert, and is drinking tea. Those who know him well know he gets through a fair few gallons of tea, so this is a good sign ;)'
... on Thu Mar 8 15:17:03 2007I've been getting well and truly sucked into this amazing series. Here's a truly encyclopedic episode guide, filled with answers for pretty much every single question you might have, and explanations of every plot arc
... on Thu Mar 8 14:30:00 2007a short interview with Chris DiBona on a massive-data-set-swapping project, where brick-sized multi-TB machines are physically shipped between research groups. Definitely inspired by Jim Gray's work at MS Research -- cool stuff
... on Wed Mar 7 18:09:13 2007The Windows Live OneCare software triggers on www.itsnotcheating.com.au, a Microsoft website, as a false positive. har har
... on Wed Mar 7 12:36:09 2007'Twenty-nine individuals and organizations have signed onto an amicus brief in support of anti-spam blacklisting service Spamhaus in its court battle against e-mail marketer e360 Insight. ... including well-known names from the e-mail marketing industry.'
... on Tue Mar 6 21:29:29 2007oh, very clever; upload files gzipped, then add "Content-Encoding: gzip" as a metadatum
... on Tue Mar 6 14:17:11 2007a really thorough article; good comments on security and performance
... on Tue Mar 6 14:14:50 2007a test back in Nov 2006. FF2 + Google's anti-phishing blocklist had 81.54% accuracy, but (a) false positives were not measured, and (b) the Phishtank public feed of bad URLs was used, which is surely used as a data source by Google?
... on Mon Mar 5 14:13:17 2007And *this*, in case it needs reiterating, is why we PGP/GPG-sign release packages. I wonder if the WP team are planning to do this any time soon?
... on Mon Mar 5 10:56:34 2007The last public dump of the collected mp3 playback data under its Creative Commons license was in May 2005; since then, they haven't uploaded a dump, despite 'repeated requests ... and assurances that it would happen soon'. Hmm. We've been here before :(
... on Sun Mar 4 13:04:28 2007sounds pretty low, probably because this is the detected rate, the rate for refunds given after advertisers asked for an investigation. I'd guess the real rate is a fair bit higher, then (via Nelson)
... on Thu Mar 1 18:38:40 2007'It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this idea that superheros were disastrous for humans; what better way to destroy a civilization?'
... on Thu Mar 1 17:29:56 2007every few months, some random member of the blogerati asserts that "trust networks / reputation systems are the solution to spam" -- here's ekr's response
... on Thu Mar 1 17:13:43 2007'Is it feasible to advance the use of reputation services to help answer the question, "do I want this message?" Can we leverage social networking services, or combine evolving global reputation services with local info, to [improve filtering]?'
... on Thu Mar 1 15:51:33 2007'Give birds a home and a place to hatch their young with the colorful and durable handcrafted ceramic Egg Bird House.' but: 'The 1 1/8" diameter entry hole will attract chickadees, wrens, and smaller birds, keeping house sparrows out.' Sparrow-ist!
... on Wed Feb 28 17:09:57 2007'all FOSS developers require an environment in which liability and other legal issues do not impede their important public service work. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) provides legal representation and other law-related services.'
... on Wed Feb 28 11:27:09 2007the MailChannels guys perform an internet SMTP-banner survey; Sendmail dominate, Postfix just behind, and Postini with 8.5% of the world's MXes. No sign of MessageLabs or McAfee (via fanf)
... on Tue Feb 27 18:35:56 2007'you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, ..., non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”)' e
... on Mon Feb 26 17:14:57 2007old-school Irish blogger and tech journalist gets her bloggage back online. Welcome back Karlin!
... on Mon Feb 26 11:40:03 2007cool -- Chris, the co-founder, ex-CEO and vice-chair of my ex-employer and Irish dot-com success story Iona Technologies, is blogging nowadays
... on Mon Feb 26 11:37:55 2007Bruce Schneier: the current model for airport security etc. is entirely oriented towards covering the asses of the officials creating the bureaucracy, and doesn't keep us secure; IOW, why creating a govt department was the worst possible response to 9/11
... on Thu Feb 22 13:20:47 2007try out S3DFS easily by booting an AMI; also, a javascript app to browse/access your S3 account
... on Thu Feb 22 11:30:57 2007interesting; mash-ups meet science publishing. A GreaseMonkey script to store files on box.net, using their API; and a way for journals to link to distributed conversations (ie. blog postings) on particular papers.
... on Wed Feb 21 14:57:45 2007'In time for St. Patrick's Day, Guinness yeast extract will be used to make a special spread, limited to 300,000 jars. It's available today 19 February 2007 for around £2.49 from supermarkets in the UK.' OMFGWTF!! I hope they mean 'in the UK and Ireland
... on Tue Feb 20 12:49:32 2007the downside of using Yahoo! accounts. I'm surprised this is the first time Flickr has been a large-scale spam target, actually
... on Sun Feb 18 10:56:33 2007by default, the Airport Extreme is totally wide-open to the 'net for any clients using IPv6 to connect to it
... on Sun Feb 18 10:55:17 2007featuring this: 'after your arrest, although handcuffed, you leapt into the air and switched off the power supply, causing at least four computers to power down and the triggering of unusual and very sophisticated computer encryption systems.' craziness
... on Sun Feb 18 10:46:49 2007'SOA is not complex. You are just dumb.'
... on Fri Feb 16 13:24:21 2007'in Outlook 2007, they are moving to a [HTML] rendering engine built on MS Word instead of IE. The deliverability team found out about this at the same time [as] the general public ... -- doesn't know why this decision was made by Outlook.' wtflol MS!
... on Fri Feb 16 13:15:11 2007lots of good techie details about Bitfrost. The design was contributed to by Simson Garfinkel, woo
... on Wed Feb 14 14:03:08 2007'We need to head primarily toward shared *nothing*. Sharing at the level prescribed in this paper, whether with locks or transactions, is simply uncalled-for 99% of the time. Sequential processes with shared-nothing message passing should be the direction
... on Wed Feb 14 11:58:41 2007Mozilla guy Brendan Eich: 'Threads violate abstractions six ways to Sunday; creating race conditions, deadlock hazards, and pessimistic locking overhead. And still they don't scale up to handle the megacore teraflop future' agreed
... on Wed Feb 14 11:53:23 2007including a Sun Studio-compiled version of Perl 5.8.8. Wonder if SpamAssassin goes any faster using this instead of a GCC-built perl? must give it a try sometime
... on Tue Feb 13 19:17:22 2007anti-spam DNS blocklists cause similar load issues when they are decommissioned. this model may be a possible fix
... on Tue Feb 13 11:35:29 2007Ireland's biggest YouTube stars find their 220+ videos removed and account disabled without warning, due to Viacom's massive wave of spurious DMCA takedowns
... on Tue Feb 13 11:06:49 2007great article. 'More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy.' (via jwz)
... on Mon Feb 12 19:23:09 2007'I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say they wouldn't use Ruby because it lacks automated refactoring tools. Ruby doesn't need them the way Java does; it's like refusing to switch to an electric car because there's no place to put the gas.'
... on Mon Feb 12 10:55:17 2007This brings me back! I spent much of my teenage years investigating these techniques on the C=64. This excellent presentation notes the similarities between those days and the techniques used nowadays on the Xbox 360
... on Sun Feb 11 11:38:51 2007Yahoo! and Lycos win, with the most unterminated phishing sites hosted on their servers
... on Fri Feb 9 12:44:27 2007w00t! sign me up. April 21st, the day of the upcoming CSS gig
... on Thu Feb 8 14:38:54 2007'a distributed file system for EC2, backed on S3. .. S3DFS uses a transactional, distributed cache to maintain a single file system view for all of the EC2 instances. S3DFS uses the Linux FUSE subsystem.'
... on Thu Feb 8 12:59:37 2007going by Roku's experience with iTunes 7, the life of an Apple DRM licensee is painful -- you're liable to the DRM mechanisms (and therefore your interoperability with iTunes) changing under your feet *without any warning whatsoever*, wtf
... on Thu Feb 8 12:52:46 2007the latest "mashups for the masses" concept. fetch feeds and filter using various web services; nifty, although (a) no HTML scraping and (b) I'm part of the 10% for whom drag'n'drop programming = ick. ;) still, will have to play with this for a while!
... on Thu Feb 8 12:35:42 2007good color-range schemes, to represent ranges of values using color. might add some of the ColorBrewer ranges to http://ruleqa.spamassassin.org/
... on Wed Feb 7 21:26:13 2007a small-time spammer makes about $300 per day (on a good day) by sending 10 million spams
... on Wed Feb 7 19:18:41 2007lots of PDF "leaflets" describing typical DIY jobs around the house. I'll probably wind up having to deal with yet more this stuff pretty soon ;)
... on Wed Feb 7 16:02:52 2007Charlie Brooker in his inimitable style; paging daringfireball.net for the obligatory fanboy retorts. 'Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose.'
... on Mon Feb 5 16:52:58 2007sounds awful -- lots of shortcuts taken to optimise for early-90's hardware. 'it's very hard and time consuming to make correct programs in Symbian, on the verge to be impossible in many cases.'
... on Mon Feb 5 13:01:49 2007full text of Illich's 1973 book, advocating a "convivial" approach to design, encouraging tinkering and the hacker ethic, as "an epilogue to the industrial age"; influential on Lee "Jhai PC" Felsentein, apparently
... on Mon Feb 5 11:44:53 2007RSS feeds (for new threads, and new messages) for every mailing list on the perl.org list server. *This* is what mailing list archives are supposed to look like!
... on Mon Feb 5 11:15:58 2007Applies to email, too, of course. me, I think threading encourages bad behaviour in commenters, and a flat reply-space is both more readable and encourages good habits. I still read mail using a threaded ordering, though
... on Mon Feb 5 11:03:41 2007Need to spend more time contemplating, but at a glance: (a) I think TLS client certs would be better, since the infrastructure is already deployed, most MTAs support it already, and it provides encryption as a bonus; and (b) legit MTAs *do* relay spam
... on Mon Feb 5 10:53:56 2007ouch. heavy sentencing: Samy 'pled out and [was] sentenced to three years probation, an undisclosed sum of "restitution" to myspace, and restrictions on his use of computers and the internet (employment purposes only) for an undisclosed period.'
... on Mon Feb 5 10:39:13 2007Enda Kenny makes an odd-sounding "Celtic and Christian" remark in a public speech, which later disappears from the online transcript on Fine Gael's official website. tut tut
... on Fri Feb 2 18:37:46 2007great discussion thread, with comments from Jeffrey "Mastering Regular Expressions" Friedl, perl 5.10 regexp hacker extraordinaire demerphq, and the article's author
... on Fri Feb 2 15:42:23 2007SmugMug guy on S3 reliability: about the same as other commercial vendors. also: 'Since April 2006, they’ve been more reliable than our own internal systems, which I consider to be quite reliable.' (via Nelson)
... on Wed Jan 31 17:51:57 2007Bunnie Huang on "ma", as in Ma Poa Tofu. WANT
... on Wed Jan 31 10:49:03 2007pre-packaged VMWare image, containing Razor, Pyzor, DCC, MailScanner, SpamAssassin and so on -- all in one download
... on Tue Jan 30 22:41:29 2007Bruce Sterling posts a well-deserved auto-back-patting message as the Viridian Design movement goes mainstream, well ahead of schedule
... on Tue Jan 30 20:26:50 2007FUSE-based filesystem for distributed clusters; one AWS developer is planning to extend it to use S3 as a backing store
... on Tue Jan 30 18:44:06 2007$3000 for a custom trojan to extract $1m worth of online banking details. bloody hell, this is really going to take off with those margins
... on Mon Jan 29 14:44:28 2007IMO, he's quite right; with the botnet problem, and malware designed to extract banking passwords, things are more serious now than ever before
... on Mon Jan 29 11:19:01 2007very cool
... on Sun Jan 28 20:14:54 2007scummy. You know, maybe allowing your product managers to blog is not a good idea, if you have the same kind of corporate approach to patents and ethics that MS clearly seems to have
... on Sun Jan 28 18:55:36 2007Linux-compatible PS/2 / USB key extenders, including stick-on button bars, pedals, jog/shuttle knobs, joysticks, with open developer APIs. also offers 150' cables for specialised kiosk UIs. very cool (via joshua)
... on Sun Jan 28 18:51:03 2007homebrew phones running Linux on Gumstix. whatever next!
... on Fri Jan 26 22:46:48 2007well-cited feature-selection algorithm; given hundreds of rules, with lots of dependency (overlap, in SA terms) between them, this will pick out a useful subset
... on Fri Jan 26 16:13:07 2007good statistical analysis of DNSBL and spammer behaviour. I'm cited ;) Published at ACM SIGCOMM 2004 and cited in a couple of CEAS 2006 papers; in fact, the papers that cite this all look good too
... on Fri Jan 26 15:18:21 2007lots of good graphs and stats on DNSBL effectiveness for Italian ISP Spin.it
... on Fri Jan 26 15:08:47 2007Fact-checking Cringely on BitTorrent traffic volumes and the AMS-IX peering point
... on Fri Jan 26 11:51:32 2007I bet this is really really slow
... on Fri Jan 26 11:00:56 2007Senderbase reinvented. probably not open source either
... on Fri Jan 26 00:10:11 2007'Look at all the noobs writing plugins for cacti and spamassassin and... users will write the plugins if the framework is accessible.' Yay, good to hear people like it. nothing worse than building a plugin framework that no-one uses
... on Thu Jan 25 12:16:01 2007Dublin property-for-sale graphs; there's been a constant increase recently
... on Thu Jan 25 11:14:57 2007'Ofcom said it was concerned about the impact on... DVD rentals and sales... it has recommended that the BBC's on-demand service reduces from 13 weeks the amount of time that users could keep downloaded programmes.' Crap! Back to torrents then
... on Thu Jan 25 11:04:10 2007I like the idea of *not* using a full-blown "web of trust" with N degrees of separation, and instead keeping it "shallow", at 1 degree -- in other words, the whitelists used are the ones published by people I pick individually. That could work well
... on Thu Jan 25 10:56:34 2007They've donated an estimated cost of 312m euros; 51 thousand person-months of work; 3 times more than any other body. wow. from the EC 'Economic Impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector' report (via redmonk)
... on Wed Jan 24 18:16:36 2007'I am not convinced that it is possible; I am especially not convinced that it is possible with published source; I believe that its existence endangers those who are not using it as they can never prove they don't have something to hide.'
... on Wed Jan 24 17:01:17 2007see method 4, "sg_start 0 --pc=2 /dev/sda". unfortunately, on my 2.6.x. box, a spun-down disk is auto-unmounted as a bad device pretty soon afterwards; there's no auto-spin-up; also IDE HDs have a very limited spin-down/spin-up lifetime
... on Wed Jan 24 12:56:30 2007'This [CPAN] module implements a function comparing regular expressions: it returns true if all strings matched by the first regexp are also matched by the second.' I can see this proving useful in SpamAssassin
... on Wed Jan 24 11:11:25 2007another "scrape web pages into RSS/ATOM/etc." scraping site, similar to http://feed43.com/ . This one needs a 133MB Java download to create new "robots", though (ugh). Also offers a REST API as output format -- in other words, it'll scrape queries, cool
... on Wed Jan 24 10:57:09 2007a concise, but complete, list of objections to Microsoft's proposed standardisation of the MS Word file format as an ISO standard. a strong case; tey even invent a new date representation, and treat 1900 as a leap year (MS vs. the Gregorian calendar!)
... on Wed Jan 24 10:34:12 2007A haul of approx. $1 million. expect to see a lot more of these now that it's been proven to work
... on Tue Jan 23 20:34:02 2007nifty -- displays live PR from various Google datacenters
... on Tue Jan 23 12:53:41 2007ha! the incredibly-broken UTF-7 strikes again. I presume Wordpress were stripping quotes before decoding charsets, instead of after; I'll bet there's quite a bit of other code elsewhere with similar holes
... on Tue Jan 23 11:07:55 2007evade spam by sandwiching the "real" MX between two fake ones that refuse all connections, exploiting SMTP's MX-failover algorithm, which many spammers don't implement yet. interesting, probably will require babysitting though
... on Tue Jan 23 10:45:13 2007very nifty (via Simon Willison, who keeps posting good stuff now that he's leaving Yahoo! it seems)
... on Mon Jan 22 10:46:17 2007"fornicate using your actual genitals" -- ha!
... on Mon Jan 22 10:35:50 2007oh crap, there goes my Google juice once this guy's career takes off ;)
... on Sun Jan 21 21:27:00 2007a good guide to the current state of MAME gaming -- 15 gigabytes of ROM images nowadays! -- for the copious free time
... on Sun Jan 21 20:07:01 2007cut-and-paste log of pretty up-to-date commands to get SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Freshclam, Amavisd, and Maia Mailguard -- and assorted dependencies -- all up and running quickly on an FC5 box
... on Fri Jan 19 23:02:31 2007good basic HOWTO doc -- pastable command-lines leading to a booted EC2 Fedora Core 4 instance
... on Thu Jan 18 19:19:53 2007neat hack, using the "free" md5sum metadata
... on Thu Jan 18 19:09:48 2007interesting anti-blog-spam idea; hide a common comments-form field (such as "email") using CSS, so that "real" browsers won't see it, and then discard any comments that arrive with that field filled out -- since they must have been submitted by a spambot
... on Thu Jan 18 11:48:18 2007"Happy Birthday to Elsa / Aunt Elsa 12/01/1926 to 12/01/2006 ". hahahaha!
... on Thu Jan 18 10:58:56 2007Phished by 'posing as AOL's billing department to trick people into giving up their credit card information'. 'The conviction is the first by a jury under the Can-Spam Act of 2003' -- what's taking so long?! (via enemieslist)
... on Wed Jan 17 18:45:20 2007a nice step-by-step HOWTO describing automated setup/teardown of httpd backends hosted on EC2 instances (using Pound as a reverse-proxy front-end)
... on Wed Jan 17 11:09:19 2007holy crap, 408GB of data, 213,000 simultaneous visitors. EC2, S3, and Cachefly were vital (via yoz)
... on Tue Jan 16 19:01:24 2007One of Joshua Schachter's classic pieces of advice: don't use sequential IDs. They invite automated crawling, expose database size, create inefficiency and create false social hierarchy (interesting!)
... on Tue Jan 16 12:14:19 2007some guy in the UK called Paul McDonald sold spammy address lists containing Microsoft spamtraps; MS sued him under the "EU Privacy and Electronic Communications directive of 2003", and won. Good result there
... on Mon Jan 15 18:05:13 2007SSDs as an intermediate speed level between RAM and disk. interesting idea, but worth checking benchmarks first; I wonder how true it is. In my experience with flash around 2000, it was very slow to write compared to disk
... on Sun Jan 14 20:41:40 2007Jon Lech Johansen with a reminder of Apple's own DRM-inflicting ways
... on Sun Jan 14 14:16:26 2007scrape a phpBB forum thread into an RSS feed
... on Fri Jan 12 13:28:39 2007very fishy; tickets for the gigs sold out within *seconds* of hitting Ticketmaster, virtually nobody seems to have gotten one
... on Fri Jan 12 11:16:23 2007'It is my fervent hope is that the threat is dealt with [...] to avoid reactionary changes likely to be taken after a disastrous Titanic moment. The Titanic was the catalyst for the imposition of regulation in the radio industry in North America.'
... on Fri Jan 12 10:56:46 2007'She drinks, she snorts, she's self-important, she hates her friends, she'll check her Blackberry during sex, she thinks Blogorrah is full of no-life-randomers and she will literally kill to marry a Heffernan. Still, saves a fortune on Brazilian waxes.'
... on Thu Jan 11 11:40:43 2007Google's cache of a PPT presentation. great facts and figures regarding open-data vs closed, Ordnance-Survey-style data models around the world; one estimate is that opening the EU's weather data would result in 10x revenue increases
... on Thu Jan 11 11:23:57 2007A list of regexps for each hostname, each one encrypted using that hostname as the key; quite a clever algorithm! Also includes a perl decoder script
... on Wed Jan 10 23:35:53 2007no external storage, no DivX, no ripped-DVD playback, no DVR features -- sounds pretty crappy
... on Wed Jan 10 21:39:57 2007MS inexplicably switches from an IE-based rendering engine, to the one from MS Word 2007! no background images, no Flash, no forms, no CSS floats, no animated GIFs. wow. still, may be good news for anti-spam/anti-phish protection
... on Wed Jan 10 11:31:05 200711,000 people in the town handed over money after being duped by scammers by phone and email -- a total of UKP 13m. wow, that's a lot of stupid
... on Wed Jan 10 11:25:16 2007that's good going for a Google Maps mash-up and a blog!
... on Tue Jan 9 18:48:39 2007A good intro by Eric Allman on the difference between authentication, reputation and accreditation in email and DKIM
... on Tue Jan 9 12:13:44 2007hooray, finally in, after 1 1/2 months of waiting. now to beef up my on-demand spam filtering infrastructure...
... on Tue Jan 9 11:06:47 2007on again this year, on Friday, 30 March 2007 in MIT. Topics expanded 'to include "other cybercrimes" such as phishing, IM spam, SMS spam, stock pump-and-dumps, email con games, exploit marketing, zombie bots and bot armies, and the like. '
... on Tue Jan 9 10:40:01 2007can I get a ticket for this? probably not but worth trying! tix 45 eurons, going on sale this Friday
... on Mon Jan 8 19:10:25 2007another spam postmortem from Joe Stewart! The Rustock botnet probably netted its spammer about $20K profit from a weekend's spamming
... on Mon Jan 8 16:42:30 2007my new ruleset -- saves quite a bit of CPU time by short-circuiting based on a few reliable rules, for SA 3.2.0
... on Sun Jan 7 21:23:32 2007lots of good features -- esp USB -- for $80
... on Sat Jan 6 02:21:34 2007best commentary so far. As doozer notes, I generally use Irish when I'm abroad, and need a code among other Irish people. Many of us can speak it, but choose not to most of the time...
... on Fri Jan 5 22:27:07 2007'S3InfiDisk for EC2 lets you mount any number of file systems on your EC2 instances. Each file system is stored on S3.' (via AWS blog)
... on Fri Jan 5 22:05:46 2007extracted the phish-sites blacklist, and measured it (presumably against a corpus?) to get a 2.62% false positive rate (via /.)
... on Fri Jan 5 15:27:09 2007an extensive list of cut-and-pasteable XSS tests, using a variety of encoding/obfuscation strategies (via torrez)
... on Fri Jan 5 12:29:34 2007looks vaguely interesting, but has shite, useless RSS feeds, like so many other UK sites. why? ah well, hopefully Yoz will keep reading it and pointing at the interesting stuff ;)
... on Fri Jan 5 12:22:28 2007ooh, a chance to get a nice print of Uprisings (the classic kozyndan "Great Wave Off Kanegawa ,in bunnies" image)
... on Fri Jan 5 10:37:12 2007another nice print
... on Thu Jan 4 22:04:07 2007nice print
... on Thu Jan 4 22:02:53 2007congrats to Daniel and Michael, the two SpamAssassin committers employed by IronPort!
... on Thu Jan 4 14:42:45 2007The fantastic "Charlie giving the fingers" tee, as seen on Andrew Maxwell on "The Panel" last week
... on Thu Jan 4 11:40:24 2007good interview. BTW recent press coverage has fixated on one aspect of current spam -- that they're now more image-based instead of textual -- as if this is the big problem; in fact, that's easy. The real issue now is the massive scale of modern botnets
... on Wed Jan 3 18:36:10 2007'This year, [CAN-SPAM] compliance [in spam] ran at all-time lows, never once reaching 1%.' IMO calling CAN-SPAM a "big disappointment" is a pretty massive understatement
... on Wed Jan 3 18:23:35 2007good data on spam relaying by ASN
... on Wed Jan 3 11:58:10 2007holy crap, I'm speechless. That's a _lot_ of stupid people
... on Tue Jan 2 18:12:23 2007The Irish ISP Eircom sells and installs Netopia wifi routers with a single, global, default WEP key: 8f90d76d164707b845ccfbbc63, and no admin password whatsoever. Incroyable!
... on Tue Jan 2 18:09:47 2007run SpamAssassin on a Rogers cable-modem account, using their DNS servers, and they'll cut you off due to a broken anti-abuse test!
... on Mon Jan 1 13:01:32 2007this was easier than I thought it'd be
... on Fri Dec 29 14:11:54 2006a really great 10-minute quickstart on rolling your own .debs from a tarball
... on Fri Dec 29 13:34:38 2006like SpamAssassin, except now for Orcs!
... on Fri Dec 29 11:38:58 2006app to decrypt HD-DVD AACS video files, reversed using the PowerDVD Windows player app (Coralized URL, via reddit)
... on Thu Dec 28 11:58:14 2006today's bug; broke audio on my main (Dapper) laptop after a reboot
... on Wed Dec 27 14:27:42 2006a DHTML/iframe hack. the Wii's browser is really quite capable -- impressed! (via Go Nintendo blog)
... on Tue Dec 26 18:55:43 2006brilliant -- homebrew Wii gaming via the web and flash (via rod)
... on Tue Dec 26 17:44:10 2006800x500, supports Flash 7 and javascript. video.google.com, gmail, and my sites all work; unfortunately, youtube.com doesn't (yet). Still, it's a great browser! I'm very impressed
... on Sat Dec 23 12:52:09 2006'for every PS3 you buy, we can buy Wiis for two of our employees. So when you get frustrated by those intricate combo-button moves, or bored by the underwhelming game offerings for the PS3, keep the spirit of the season in mind.' hahaha
... on Fri Dec 22 18:23:29 2006'OSBF-Lua (Orthogonal Sparse Bigrams with confidence Factor) is a Lua C module for text classification. It is a port of the OSBF classifier implemented in the CRM114 project.' just won the 2006 TREC bayes-filter shootout, which is good
... on Fri Dec 22 17:14:07 2006'Executive Executive Summary: The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.' Encyclopedic litany of horrors, read it and weep
... on Fri Dec 22 16:39:43 2006Full movie of the nuclear-war docudrama which scared the crap out of a generation, myself included. Great reminiscences in the MeFi thread
... on Fri Dec 22 11:01:35 200615% FP rate, yikes! Some of the tests described at http://wiki.clamav.net/Main/PhishingDetection gave us bad results too. however, the test set of emails is pretty odd -- it's all spam; it'd be better to see a test against nonspam mail.
... on Thu Dec 21 18:48:36 2006'An item in the Observer column on March 14 reported that Ludwik Dorn, Poland’s minister of the interior, had said some former police officers used the services of prostitutes. A more correct translation was that they had a "wide social life”.' ha!
... on Thu Dec 21 17:59:07 2006"Do you think that if we'd have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA and had decided to ship "Exchange Server" that Microsoft would be silent about it - or we should act aggrieved when they change the EULA to stop us?"
... on Thu Dec 21 17:22:00 2006'On Monday, Graef visited CNET's Second Life bureau for a discussion about her business ... as the interview was commencing, the event was attacked by a "griefer" [who] managed to assault the theater for 15 minutes with animated flying penises.' doh!
... on Thu Dec 21 11:32:46 2006Kensal Rise may be the most wanker-infested street in the UK, going by this article. see also http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2496033_1,00.html , which details one of the inhabitant's job as "writer and food stylist", whatever that is
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