taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Through speed of traffic on San Francisco area streets vs. popularity with Flickr and Twitter users : “slower streets” generate more photos/tweets than “faster streets”, with a peak around 9 mph
(tags: data san-francisco photos flickr twitter speed driving)

Microsoft’s new IE “Ribbon” debunked : ‘nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right? Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.’ (via Nelson)
(tags: design hci microsoft ui statistics user-hostile ribbon windows)

The Daily Mail’s frequent copyright abuse finally catches up with them : This is how you do it — bravo to Alice Taylor, who got them fair and square as they did their usual trick of lifting copyrighted content without permission
(tags: copyright journalism photography daily-mail via:torrentfreak)

Real-World Scala: Dependency Injection (DI) : I think I prefer the structural-typing approach, TBH
(tags: scala patterns programming oo coding dependency-injection)

Bog Body: Committing to Open Source : Oisin Hurley on viable strategies for a commercial software company to handle participation in open source. Shame I’ve never found anywhere to viably put these into action, but they sound accurate
(tags: open-source oisin-hurley oss corporate work)

Fastest sort of fixed length 6 int array – Stack Overflow : huh, I’d never heard of sorting networks before
(tags: sorting-networks c algorithms sorting optimization sort stack-overflow)

‘What Idiot Wrote The Patent That Might Invalidate Software Patents? Oh, Wait, That Was Me’ | Techdirt : ‘So I was thinking – great they invalidated software patents, lets see what crappy patent written by an idiot they picked to do it – then I realized the idiot in question was me :-) Not sure how I feel about this. John – inventor of the patent in question.’
(tags: patents swpats reform usa software-development coding funny techdirt)

good taxonomy of memcached use cases : via Jeff Barr’s announcement of the Elasticache launch. from 2008, but a better taxonomy than I’ve seen elsewhere
(tags: memcached caching mysql performance scalability via:jeffbarr)

Bootstrap, from Twitter : ‘a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites’; ‘includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.’ Very, very nice, AL2 licensed (via Mick Twomey)
(tags: via:micktwomey twitter ui css design html styling web-apps layout)

echolibre & Orchestra : ‘In particular, we want to thank the Irish and Dublin web communities. I’ve met other web communities in Europe and in the USA, and I can say, hand on heart, they don’t have a patch on you guys.’ awww ;) Congrats, guys
(tags: echolibre php web startups ireland paas orchestra.io engine-yard)

Cracking the Code of the Zombie – New York Times : the Beach Bum Berry bible, much loved by mrneutron
(tags: beach-bum-berry drinks alcohol tiki cocktails recipes booze)

corkscrew : ‘a tool for tunneling SSH through HTTP proxies’. handy
(tags: ssh http proxies software linux tunneling isps)

IMDb: Best Titles With At Least 5,000 Votes : across all media — TV series, movies, *and* video games. fascinating (and can of course drill down to a specific type)
(tags: tv-series movies rating imdb gaming ranks top-10 lists)

Building with Legos : Netflix tech blog on how they deploy their services. Notably, they avoid the Puppet/Chef approach, citing these reasons: ‘One is that it eliminates a number of dependencies in the production environment: a master control server, package repository and client scripts on the servers, network permissions to talk to all of these. Another is that it guarantees that what we test in the test environment is the EXACT same thing that is deployed in production; there is very little chance of configuration or other creep/bit rot. Finally, it means that there is no way for people to change or install things in the production environment (this may seem like a really harsh restriction, but if you can build a new AMI fast enough it doesn’t really make a difference).’
(tags: devops cloud aws netflix puppet chef deployment)

Bog body found in Co Laois could be that of sacrificed king : ‘All of the other bog bodies were found on significant boundaries. The idea is that because the goddess is the land, by inserting bodies and other items relating to their inauguration as king along the boundaries, it gives form to the goddess.’ things were pretty damn gory back then
(tags: ireland history laois bog-bodies bog human-sacrifice)

VT220 terminal hooked up to a 2010-era Mac Pro : with picture. WAAAAAANT despite the sheer massive impracticality of it. I still love VT*20 terminals….
(tags: unix vt220 mac terminal dec digital retro)

nifty Cydia iPhone signal-strength app : very nifty. pity my phone’s not jailbroken, or I’d be trying this out
(tags: jailbreaking cydia iphone signal-strength 3g wireless mapping)

Pavo Real : amazingly detailed peacock print by Argentinian artist Azul de Corso; very nice
(tags: prints toget peacock azul-de-corso art)

Unbound: The Crowdfunding Cargo Cult – Telegraph Blogs : ‘why was Unbound set up in the first place? It’s because they constructed a cargo cult, believing that if they mimicked the superficial elements of successful crowdfunding, they could enjoy the same success as others – but perhaps even more, thanks to their relationships with publishers, agents, authors, and the media.’ They’re not the only Kickstarter-cargo-culting company, too. via waxy
(tags: via:waxy unbound kickstarter cargo-cult funding crowdfunding books uk)

Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies : bored on maternity leave, this is what happens (via Niamh)
(tags: movies babies funny via:niamh)

IT expenditure and failure – submission to public expenditure consultation : Antoin lays into the disfunctional Irish IT procurement system. “The status quo isn’t just making things expensive and slow, it’s asphyxiating the government’s ability to serve.”
(tags: antoin it procurement ireland government civil-service letters)

Why we should expel the Vatican’s Ambassador, the Papal Nuncio : ‘In 2011, we have a new Government, who have stopped making excuses for the Vatican State. The Facebook campaign now has over 5,000 members, who continue to send emails and letters to their TDs and to the Minister for Foreign Affairs expressing the clear message that we want action. Enda Kenny said yesterday that the Vatican downplayed the rape and torture of Irish children to to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’. We should expel the Vatican’s Papal Nuncio and send the message that they have destroyed the very things they prized the most.’
(tags: vatican papal-nuncio religion catholicism politics diplomacy ireland child-abuse cloyne-report)

Paintings by Daniel Castan : really striking oil paintings of Manhattan; looks like small-format canvases can be bought at http://en.carredartistes.com/acheter-un-tableau-peintre-et-vente-peinture-artiste/petit-format/daniel-castan
(tags: daniel-castan art via:mlkshk paintings toget cities new-york nyc manhattan)

Facebook group: Expel the Irish Papal Nuncio : “The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse in the Dublin ArchDiocese clearly states that the Papal Nuncio, the Diplomatic representative of the Vatican, refused to reply to investigators. Now the Cloynes Report has found that the Vatican’s Ambassador intervened to undermine the efforts to protect children as recently as 1996. This is not acceptable. The Irish Government has the power to expel diplomats. If we are to take the reports’ findings seriously, we must expel the Papal Nuncio.”
(tags: vatican politics ireland abuse facebook lobbying cloyne-report)

zen.org Communal Weblog » Bigger Than His Body : ‘My beautiful, smart, funny, geeky, blue-eyed, bearded, amazing husband died last night with me and two of his aunts holding him.’ So sorry for Elana and their boys — Brendan was a nice guy and a great hacker :(
(tags: brendan-kehoe awful leukemia life death rip)

Death Notice Of Brendan KEHOE, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland : ‘Removal on Saturday from Quinn’s of Glasthule to Mount Jerome Crematorium for service at 2pm. No flowers, please. Donations, if desired, to Educate Together.’
(tags: rip brendan-kehoe)

Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief | Stanford Center for Internet and Society : jaysus. the Epic Marketplace online ad network performs a history stealing attack to determine if the viewer has recently visited ‘pages about getting pregnant and fertility, including at the Mayo Clinic’. very very scummy — massive privacy violation (via Adam Shostack)
(tags: privacy history browsers history-stealing css attacks security via:adamshostack epic-marketplace nai ads)

How we use Redis at Bump : via Simon Willison. some nice ideas here, particularly using a replication slave to handle the potentially latency-impacting disk writes in AOF mode
(tags: queueing redis nosql databases storage via:simonw replication bump)

SSL perf tip : don’t use Diffie-Hellman ciphers, they’re slow
(tags: ssl tls nginx performance web diffie-hellman ciphers)

stud : ‘a network proxy that terminates TLS/SSL connections and forwards the unencrypted traffic to some backend. It’s designed to handle 10s of thousands of connections efficiently on multicore machines.’
(tags: stud tls ssl security networking web proxies performance)

an ex-Skype employee dishes the dirt on their buyout and acquisition : some incredible stories — pretty mind-boggling stuff, I’m amazed people stuck around
(tags: skype startups legal share-options shares economics)

PSI License [PDF] : the license under which the open data from various councils around Fingal and Dublin (see www.dublinked.ie) is being published
(tags: licensing open-data dublin fingal open public government county-councils city-council ireland)

Great Hacker News thread on Andy Baio’s “Kind Of Screwed” shakedown : full of good commentary on the rather horrific result. here’s one: “I wonder how the photographer would feel if the company that manufactured the trumpet played by Miles Davis had claimed that his photograph violated the copyright of their “sculpture” and the tailor Miles got his suit from also protested. Of all art forms, photography has some of the least claim on being an entirely original creation of the artist.”
(tags: photography miles-davis jay-maisel andy-baio waxy hn discussion copyright copyfight creativity art)

_Scaling with MongoDB_, Michael Schurter 2011 [PDF] : presentation with some rather terrifying MongoDB war stories
(tags: mongodb performance presentation scaling war-stories)

F.B.I. Seizes Web Servers, Knocking Sites Offline : law enforcement fail. “the agents took entire server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that “one enclosure is = to one server,” [DigitalOne's CEO] said in an e-mail.”
(tags: search-and-seizure law-enforcement fbi fail datacenters racks digitalone usa hosting)

Hero orang-utan sparks copyright row – The Irish Times – Thu, Jun 16, 2011 : “They did not have the right to sell it and have infringed his copyright. It is as simple as that.” Scummy — some company called “News Team International” taking YouTube content and passing it off as their own
(tags: youtube copyright scummy news-team-international video)

Hacker News | Ooops. : brilliant thread of epic “OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE” stories
(tags: fail ouch oops via:hn via:waxy computers software rm-rf)

64yourself : Damn. my 2006 hack http://taint.org/c64ize/ reinvented, although with a lot more panache :(
(tags: c64 images retro commodore-64 commodore)

_Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming_ : Gunnar Kreitz’ paper on its innards! ‘Spotify is a music streaming service offering lowlatency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks. Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol. In this paper, we give an overview of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide measurements of service performance and user behavior. The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and has been available in six European countries since October 2008. Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming with good results. In particular, 8.8% of music data played comes from Spotify’s servers while the median playback latency is only 265 ms (including cached tracks). We also discuss the user access patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the access patterns as they reach the server.’
(tags: spotify via:waxy streaming p2p music architecture papers networking)

Asciiflow : ‘ASCII Flow Diagram Tool’. great web-based ASCII-art drawing app; create diagrams in your browser
(tags: ascii art ascii-art diagrams drawing html)

Python Idioms and Efficiency Suggestions : will have to run this by our resident Pythonistas in work as a good set of guidelines
(tags: idioms programming python reference tips via:hn)

Scala: The Static Language that Feels Dynamic : a good intro from Bruce Eckel. We need a good excuse to deploy some Scala ;)
(tags: scala actors java language programming jvm coding)

Redditor explains why Apple power cables break frequently : “As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple’s products. And when I say “the most powerful”, I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it’s pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I’m sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn’t like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.”
(tags: apple cables design industrial-design power-cables funny)

France To Launch a National Patent Troll : ‘The operation, called “France Brevets” will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of [...] shaking down companies for money.’ I think the word is: incroyable
(tags: france fail omgwtfbbq patent-trolls swpats patents government innovation software europe)

The first Irish case on defamation via autocomplete : Google Instant has picked up people searching for ‘Ballymascanlon hotel receivership’ and is now offering this as an autocomplete option — cue defamation lawsuit. Defamation via machine learning
(tags: machine-learning defamation google google-instant search ballymascanlon hotels autocomplete law-enforcement)

Data Protection Commissioner investigating Eircom’s “three strikes” system : Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn’t been updated for DST. ‘this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management – i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime – for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.’ As TJ explains, this could have very serious results
(tags: dpc ireland eircom fail time dst daylight-savings three-strikes filesharing piracy)

Hipster Ipsum : ‘Adipisicing do Tumblr fugiat vinyl Pitchfork. Organic tempor laboris, esse Tumblr irure eu nostrud. Dolor Cosby sweater mustache qui consequat incididunt. McSweeney’s ullamco occaecat Wes Anderson. Minim aute lomo, duis ea proident enim Carles. Eiusmod culpa photo booth ex. Pariatur incididunt minim qui, dolor Pitchfork wayfarers mollit vinyl fixie.’ (via boogah)
(tags: via:boogah hipster lorem-ipsum filler text markov-chains funny humour)

Apple rips off student’s rejected iPhone app : ‘Wi-Fi Sync’ was rejected from the App Store last May — and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! ‘Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers’ kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”’
(tags: apple walled-garden protectionism iphone wifi syncing apps ip rip-offs)

Why Ryanair The Cookie Monster is just an urban myth : “If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
(tags: ryanair pricing airlines travel web shopping urban-myths)

Piracy: are we being conned? : The Age with a cynical take on pro-music-biz anti-piracy “reports”. “The quality of data and analysis is very weak as its political objective is so clear. It does not use actual ABS data but data taken from Europe. It’s an elemental statistical error, it’s fudging with numbers to come out with a figure which is ‘kinda sorta’ plausible.”
(tags: piracy filesharing copyright australia the-age newspapers ifpi acta)

Our 256,000 (and counting) atheists, agnostics, humanists and non-religious – The Irish Times : “The ‘non-religious’ are the largest group in the State after Catholics, according to the [2006] census.” Doubtless higher in this year’s, too…
(tags: humanism atheism religion census ireland)

Dr. Neal Krawetz explains perceptual hashing : ie. TinEye and other “images like this one” search engines. nice explanation
(tags: algorithm images analysis programming dct hashing perceptual-hash tineye via:hn image)

Telehack: May the command line live forever : ‘Connected to TELEHACK port 13 / It is 8:16 am on Saturday, April 30, 2011 in Mountain View, California, USA. There are 10 local users. There are 24139 hosts on the network.’ via Waxy
(tags: via:waxy simulation history telnet arpanet networking unix bbs)

irishindoleaks : ‘leaking the indo’s offline wikileaks coverage online where it belongs’ – scans of each article
(tags: irish-independent ireland politics wikileaks newspapers scans)

_Tim Robinson: Connemara_ : a new documentary, based on the work of Tim Robinson, the great Connemara map-maker. showing this Sunday at 1pm at the IFI in Dublin
(tags: ifi films ireland connemara tim-robinson mapping nature)

bump2babe – The Consumer Guide to Maternity Services in Ireland : wow, they’ve done a really good job on the statistics collation here
(tags: statistics birth childbirth ireland health maternity)

GTA4 Google Map : wow, very impressive — as far as I can tell, it really _is_ using GMaps infrastructure to some degree
(tags: google-maps google maps gta4 grand-theft-auto via:nelson games)

Gunnar Kreitz, _Spotify – Behind The Scenes_ : the innards of Spotify’s client, server fleet, and P2P layer, from the dev team themselves. good stuff
(tags: spotify streaming servers networking music mp3 dns p2p)

Kill Screen – Profile: Bennett Foddy : The author of cult web-games QWOP and GIRP is a member of Cut Copy! crazy
(tags: games interview cut-copy music via:infovore web qwop girp)

“Treasure Map” – Threadless.com : great tee
(tags: tee-shirts threadless apparel clothing)

Today in nose-leech news — it’s a species! : ‘The T. rex leech uses its teeth to saw into the tissues of mammals’ orifices, including eyes, urethras, rectums, and vaginas.’ OH JESUS
(tags: nose nose-leech leeches nature horror omgwtf via:jwz nightmare parasites)

The Secrets of Building Realtime Big Data Systems : great slides, via HN. recommends a canonical Hadoop long-term store and a quick, realtime, separate datastore for “not yet processed by Hadoop” data
(tags: hadoop big-data data scalability datamining realtime slides presentations)

Javascript PC Emulator : truly incredible — quite fast (about 386 speeds) under Chrome, even! from the HN comments: ‘I just forkbombed my browser. Nothing is sacred anymore.’ more comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349
(tags: browser javascript linux emulation fabrice-bellard hacks amazing cool google-chrome x86)

Graham Linehan and Osama Bin Laden : a master-stroke of Twitter-based media hoaxing, very funny. particularly like the assist from @Mike_FTW!
(tags: funny twitter graham-linehan osama-bin-laden news media)

The Hargreaves Report : ‘The publication of Digital Opportunity follows a six-month independent review of IP and Growth, led by Professor Ian Hargreaves. He was asked to consider how the national and international IP system can best work to promote innovation and growth.’ Some fantastic recommendations here. I hope this provides clear direction to similar Irish efforts…
(tags: ip law hargreaves uk patents copyright)

Netflix Beats BitTorrent’s Bandwidth : ‘For perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.’ A great demo of how *good*, legit, for-pay services, can beat out less usable, dodgy, but free ones (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy piracy bandwidth bittorrent internet netflix filesharing)

The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog – MongoDB live at Craigslist : ‘>MongoDB is now live at Craigslist, where it is being used to archive [10TB] of [old posts]‘. iiiinteresting
(tags: mongodb nosql craigslist systems)

Worldtime Buddy : easy timezone conversion — bookmarkable URLs, sensible levels of AJAX/JS, nicely done
(tags: timezones time conversion javascript world)

How to make WIFI work at tech conferences : a success story from JSConf. great tips, I’m sure some will be practical at smaller scales ;)
(tags: wifi 802.11b 802.11n networking 802.11g conferences jsconf wireless)

TwitPic assert ownership over images posted to it, signs licensing deal with sleb-photos agency : scummy. don’t use TwitPic if they are planning to monetize your photos, even if it’s currently just for a “small number of celebrities”. (via my dad)
(tags: twitpic ip privacy copyright via:dad photography)

Cool, but obscure unix tools : these are great – some new ones on me!
(tags: cli linux terminal unix tools command-line)

Charanjit Singh on how he invented acid house … by mistake : An interview (of sorts)! ‘Cast your mind to the acid house scene and your immediate thought probably doesn’t involve an ageing Bollywood session musician. Yet the softly spoken Indian man who greets me at the door of his friend’s suburban Acton home on a sunny Sunday morning is credited with creating what some have labelled the first ever acid house record.’
(tags: acid-house music via:xxjfg guardian interviews history india bollywood ragas)

Indian Street Graphics – a set on Flickr : a great collection (via Bruce Sterling)
(tags: via:bruces art culture design flickr india)