July 2011
1 post
Oracle acquires Ksplice →
“The Ksplice Uptrack service is planned to be included as a standard part of Oracle Linux Premier Support, and we will no longer be selling the service separately to new customers moving forward […]”
Ouch?
May 2011
1 post
HTC: no more locked-down phones →
I think I just dropped my Nokia down the staircase. Accidentally. Stupid me :P
March 2011
6 posts
Fukushima heroes
CNN writes:
The beleaguered crew had to abandon the plant control room Tuesday night because of high radiation levels, Kyodo News reported, citing plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company.
“Their situation is not great,” said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. “It’s pretty clear that they will be getting very...
Good shepherds
Michael Schuman, reporting for Time on how German managers pulled their companies through the “Great Recession”, writes:
Instead of laying off cherished staff, management deployed idled workers to new assignments. Bernhard Nick, a BASF president, believes the measures taken during the downturn kept the company primed to capitalize on the recovery. “It wasn’t just a...
A tiny glimpse of Gmail's backup infrastructure
This came as a bit of a surprise to me:
To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.
I had really not...
Thunderbolt is a brilliant move
I think Intel’s new Thunderbolt protocol/adapter is a truly brilliant move on their part. It’s more than just a new adapter, yet there’s not really a new protocol, in the sense that you don’t get to (nor need to) see much of the protocol.
It sounds like the adapters will be practically invisible in the software layer: we’ll just see PCIe and some display devices....
Luis Villa: Other Ways to Slice Revenue Pies →
Try not to get your eyes locked onto the delicious pie photo, and scroll past it for the insightful stuff…
January 2011
2 posts
"Search leakage is not FUD. Google et al., please... →
Gabriel Weinberg’s DuckDuckGo search engine offers some innovative privacy settings. I played with them at some point, removing query information from DuckDuckGo URLs by switching to POST requests, but later decided that it was just too convenient to have easy access to old queries through the browser history. Mr Weinberg’s latest post on search leakage got me to reconsider:
One...
Intel Insider: "No, It's Not DRM"
This is rather peculiar:
Now there are opponents and proponents of DRM, and I am not going to get into a discussion about the pros and cons of DRM in this blog; but I will say that Intel Insider is NOT a DRM technology.
Having established what it isn’t, the spokesperson goes on to tell us what it is:
Think of it as an armoured truck carrying the movie from the Internet to your...
October 2010
1 post
“All the party invitations in Cambridge come through Facebook. If you don’t...”
– Ross Anderson quoting a student of his
September 2010
3 posts
Anatomy of an exploit: CVE-2010-3081 →
From the guys at Ksplice:
There are three basic ingredients that typically go into a kernel exploit: the bug, the target, and the payload. The exploit triggers the bug — a flaw in the kernel — to write evil data corrupting the target, which is some kernel data structure. Then it prods the kernel to look at that evil data and follow it to run the payload, a snippet of code that gives the...
Severe Adobe Flash + Acrobat vulnerability?
Via LWN:
For those of you using the Adobe Flash player (including on Linux or Android), and, possibly, Adobe Reader users as well: the company has announced a “critical” vulnerability which, evidently, is being actively exploited.
We get to wonder how this can possibly be a critical vulnerability on each and every platform it runs on. Also, we’ll probably never find out...
h5py
After punishing myself for several years with the HDF5 C++ API, today I finally discovered h5py. It’s wonderful, beautiful, magnificent. That’s all.
August 2010
5 posts
Kindle 3
It’s so thin and light, you’d expect to easily break it at first. But the casing is actually very sturdy.
Page refreshes are fast. With this and the excellent page-turning buttons, you’d have a hard time turning a printed page half as fast as that.
Resolution is impressive. In portrait orientation, testing with an almost-a4 journal article displayed full-page (ie at less than...
“If prostitution were a typical industry, it might have hired political lobbyists...”
– Freakonomics returns: vice work if you can get it
Vim's undo tree
See usr_32.txt:
If you undo a few changes and then make a new change you create a branch in the undo tree. This text is about moving through the branches.
I’ve been on vim for over five years now, and I just keep finding more gems every day.
James Gosling: The shit finally hits the fan.... →
Driver error caused Toyota's 'runaway' cars, US... →
In preliminary findings delivered to Congress on 58 incidents, investigators found that in 35 cases, the brake was not applied. In a further 14 cases there was only “partial braking”. In one case, both the brake and accelerator pedals were depressed and another showed evidence of pedals getting trapped in a floor mat. But the investigation found no evidence of any electronic problem...
July 2010
2 posts
“People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they...”
– Paul Graham: The Acceleration of Addictiveness
“For my own library that I’ve spent the last 12 years building. I have to...”
– apenwarr: You can’t make C++ not ugly, but you can’t not try
June 2010
2 posts
Dilbert on computer troubleshooting
I always try to resist pushing jokes into this feed, because the funny stuff tends to take over over time, but this is really not a joke. Quoted for truth!
Go forth and... diversify
The Economist on the human-genome project:
[It may someday turn out] that some differences both between and within groups are quite marked. If those differences are in sensitive traits like personality or intelligence, real trouble could ensue.
People must be prepared for this possibility, and ready to resist the excesses of racialism, nationalism and eugenics that some are bound to...
May 2010
4 posts
1 tag
Blogroll: rc3.org
This is the first entry in a new post-category of mine, to be organised under the tag “blogroll” (so much for obvious introductions). I was going to create space for this in a sidebar, when I realised I hardly ever look at the sidebar on anybody else’s weblog (if I even get to navigate your pages at all - only if you provide a poor feed!).
So instead, I’ll try to...
Diary Of An x264 Developer: The first in-depth... →
With regard to patents, VP8 copies way too much from H.264 for anyone sane to be comfortable with it, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free.
I guess the thing is, H.264 never was the problem. The problem is simply that the Americans entertain such a thing as software patents at all.
Australia getting goverment-run fiber
This is quite interesting. I bet all the free-market zealots will have clicked away after reading about one-and-a-half paragraph, so let me quote this bit from somewhat further down in the article:
The obvious downside of this approach is that no other wireline competitors will likely emerge to challenge the government-controlled fiber network. On the other hand, there’s not that much...
European court to rule on data storage law
I’m weeks behind on all the news feeds (no withdrawal symptoms, strangely), but was glad to catch this bit of news today (via).
I suppose I’m now expected to append some personal opinions on the subject, but, as with code, reusing the work of others should generally lead to higher quality. Therefore, let me just link to one of Bruce Schneier’s better essays on the topic: there.
April 2010
4 posts
Stop ACTA! →
Important call from my buddy wzzrd (click through for English, too):
wzzrd:
Als je nog nooit van ACTA gehoord hebt, wordt het tijd dat je er iets over leest. Echt. Zoveel tijd is er niet meer. ACTA kan in potentie een groot deel van de verworvenheden van de laatste 50 jaar…
HOWTO: Read more books →
Funny and weird and entertaining and interesting. And it sounds like it would actually work.
The HTML5 web is going to be great
Some good news, via wzzrd: Google Puts Weight Behind Theora on Mobile.
Between Apple’s crusade against Flash, or Android, or their own app-developers, and Google’s sponsorship of a patent-free codec, I see a bright future for HTML5-apps. Frankly, I don’t care what noble and/or misguided motives these companies may have; I’m looking forward to frustration-free web...
Kicking the habit
I just bought Beverley Craven’s new album (well, it was released last year, but I’m slow to pick up on such things, so it’s still new to me) from Amazon’s MP3 store (no, that’s not an affiliate link). I almost ordered the disc, being a recovering obsessive-compulsive donottrustanyripbutyourown lossless-audio nut, but in the end I really must start to accept that that...
March 2010
11 posts
“It’s amazing, isn’t it? Turns out that what most people want is photos, music...”
– Paul Waite in comments at Simon Willison’s blog
Indeed, people are weird :)
Logarithmic calendar view →
Marco Arment knows good UI-design.
“There are people who cheat on their spouse but not at cards, and vice versa, and...”
– Clay Shirky
(The essay isn’t actually about this, but it’s a nicely condensed insight).
Law Enforcement Appliance Subverts SSL →
I guess this just highlights that, by principle, SSL is especially vulnerable to attacks by people in power. Very useful link found in the HN discussion: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/firefox.html
The Institute of Physics manifesto for the UK... →
There, I’ve practised my share of politics for this year :)
“Often, privacy isn’t about hiding; it’s about creating space to open...”
– Danah Boyd: Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity
I’d want to cut ten more quotes from that keynote. Do read it.
“Amazon’s revisionist “bookpad” vs. Apple’s recombinant “mediapad.” Rear-view...”
– Kontra
… I’m adding a new feed to my reader. Thanks to Marco.
“From Nexus One to Latitude to Talk, Google is in danger of being relegated to...”
– Kontra
If you’re up for it, the man actually has a lot more to say about GOOG.
Watch(Yes, another car snippet - maybe I’m turning into a youth again :))
I used to dream of owning a BMW, and talked about them all the time. It got so bad that my school girlfriends got me model cars for my birthday. How’s that for working on your nerd image.
And then BMW ruined everything by bringing us nearly a decade of ugly, ugly cars.
But it seems they’re getting back...
Try out the Duck Duck Go search engine →
Got strangely impressive results when I tried this pointless query, so let’s give it a few days as my browser default (via HN).
Unsolicited mail-configuration assistance
From the leaflet boxed with my new phone:
Your device supports easy, network-assisted e-mail set-up. […] During the e-mail activation process, your e-mail address, user name, and password, along with technical information, such as your device ID, may be sent to Nokia. Nokia will not process or store any personal, identifiable information after the activation, without your consent.
I...
February 2010
18 posts
Red Hat and Flat World Knowledge
This is kind of interesting: the open-textbooks company Flat World Knowledge writes a guest-post about their business for opensource.com, a Red Hat sponsored community-site. Right after the post gets accepted and published, Red Hat people comment and take Flat World Knowledge to the doghouse over their “fauxpen” licensing (their CC licenses are the non-commercial flavour).
It’s...
On performance bonuses and fair compensation →
For a long time, I used to have this naive reaction when friends quipped the usual smarts about executive performance-bonuses: that we’re all just envious, and banning such practices would discourage achievement. But lately my views have shifted - a lot - and I’d dare say they’re getting a bit more sophisticated and a tiny bit more mature.
Thanks to Shawn for sharing this link!
This Bloom Box
Lots of publicity this week. Rather sceptical discussions both at Ars and at The Guardian. The New York Times however writes
Mr. Sridhar contends the Bloom boxes, with reasonable maintenance, will have a 10-year life span.
This is the information every geek wants to know, and it’s not on the Bloom Energy website - not even in the data sheets. As a result, the Guardian and Ars...
“Self-expression is the new entertainment. So, you know, we used to never...”
– Arianna Huffington
Yale project study finds that people “more readily... →
This is important knowledge, because it’s not likely that you can change how millions of people’s brains work. If you want to change their opinion on anything, you’d better be pragmatic and use these findings to get your message across.
In other research the Yale team found that Hierarchical Individualists were more open to scientific evidence of man-made global warming when...
Lotus Elise uglified for 2011 →
I’ve mostly outgrown my love for cars, but seeing this facelift hurts all the same. In the end though, I still want one :)
“Ironically – given the recent media coverage – it feels a lot safer than any...”
– Danah Boyd on ChatRoulette
WatchBill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero. This, indeed, is the biggest challenge of our time. Even if you don’t “believe” in anthropogenic global warming.