Category Archives: Uncategorized

Only 10% of serious cycling injuries in Ireland were recorded by Gardai The Bedford Report for the HSE in 2011 showed that only approximately 10% of serious injuries (with hospital admission to a bed) incurred by cyclists in road traffic collisions were recorded by Gardai. If a cyclist is knocked off his/her bike from impact [...]

“Aeron: High-Performance Open Source Message Transport” [slides, PDF] a new networked pub/sub library from Martin “Disruptor” Thompson, based around a replicated, persistent log of messages, with exceptionally low latency. Apache-licensed. Very similar to the realtime messaging stack we’ve built in Swrve. ;) https://github.com/real-logic/Aeron (tags: realtime messaging pub-sub ipc queues transports martin-thompson slides latencies open-source java [...]

Life expectancy increases are due mainly to healthier children, not longer old age Interesting — I hadn’t expected this. ‘Life expectancy at birth [in the US] in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the [...]

Eircom have run out of network capacity This is due in part to huge growth in the data volumes and data traffic that is transported over our network, which has exceeded our forecasted growth. We are making a number of improvements to our international connectivity which will add significant capacity and this work will be [...]

Need To Know 1999-11-05 15 years ago today — Sitescooper appeared in NTK! Official NTK policy is that if you’re not reading this in its definitive, non-proportional e-mail form, you’re a fricking girl. And all the best fricking girls these days have a Palm, so JUSTIN MASON has been kindly running the Web page through [...]

Call for co-ordinated plan to combat soaring bike theft | Dublin Cycling Campaign Bicycle theft in Ireland has doubled in Ireland since the introduction of the Bike to Work scheme in 2009. Almost 4,500 bicycle thefts[1] were reported in Dublin in 2013, but the actual number of bike thefts is likely to be in the [...]

Great quote from Voldemort author Jay Kreps “Reading papers: essential. Slavishly implementing ideas you read: not necessarily a good idea. Trust me, I wrote an Amazon Dynamo clone.” Later in the discussion, on complex conflict resolution logic (as used in Dynamo, Voldemort, and Riak): “I reviewed 200 Voldemort stores, 190 used default lww conflict resolution. [...]

Zookeeper: not so great as a highly-available service registry Turns out ZK isn’t a good choice as a service discovery system, if you want to be able to use that service discovery system while partitioned from the rest of the ZK cluster: I went into one of the instances and quickly did an iptables DROP [...]

UK museums lobbying for copyright reform with empty display cases Great to see museums campaigning for copyright reform — this makes perfect sense. Display cases in the Imperial War Museum, National Library of Scotland and University of Leeds sit empty. They should contain letters from the First World War; from a young girl to her [...]

Chip & PIN vs. Chip & Signature Trust US banks to fuck up their attempts at security :( US “chip-and-signature” cards are still entirely forgeable because the banks fear that consumers are too stupid to use a PIN, basically. BK: So, I guess we should all be grateful that banks and retailers in the United States [...]

IT Change Management Stephanie Dean on Amazon’s approach to CMs. This is solid gold advice for any company planning to institute a sensible technical change management process (tags: ops tech process changes change-management bureaucracy amazon stephanie-dean infrastructure) Stephanie Dean on event management and incident response I asked around my ex-Amazon mates on twitter about good [...]

AtScript a new “types for Javascript” framework, from the team behind Angular.js — they plan to “harmonize” it with TypeScript and pitch it for standardization, which would be awesome. (via Rob Clancy) (tags: via:robc atscript javascript typescript types languages coding google angular) Carbon vs Megacarbon and Roadmap ? · Issue #235 · graphite-project/carbon Carbon is [...]

David Malone planning a commemoration of Dublin Mean Time next year Dublin had its own time zone, 25 minutes off what would become GMT, until 1916 (tags: 1916 dublin rising time dublin-mean-time dmt gmt perfidious-albion dunsink) Roshiak a Riak-based clone of Roshi, the CRDT server built on top of Redis. some day I’ll write up [...]

PSA: don’t run ‘strings’ on untrusted files (CVE-2014-8485) ffs.Perhaps simply by the virtue of being a part of that bundle, the strings utility tries to leverage the common libbfd infrastructure to detect supported executable formats and “optimize” the process by extracting text only from specific sections of the file. Unfortunately, the underlying library can be [...]

YouTube on jittering periodic/timed events Good best-practice link (tags: youtube google best-practices architecture jitter cron periodic timing coding synchronization lockstep randomness)

Hungary plans new tax on Internet traffic, public calls for rally 37p (EUR0.46) per GB — that’s a lot of money! bloody hell (tags: via:bela hungary bandwidth isps tax networking internet)

Jauter This Java library can route paths to targets and create paths from targets and params (reverse routing). This library is tiny, without additional dependencies, and is intended for use together with an HTTP server side library. If you want to use with Netty, see netty-router. (tags: java jauter scala request-routing http netty open-source) “Viewstamped [...]

BioBrick Holy shit we are living in the future. BioBrick parts are DNA sequences which conform to a restriction-enzyme assembly standard.[1][2] These Lego-like building blocks are used to design and assemble synthetic biological circuits, which would then be incorporated into living cells such as Escherichia coli cells to construct new biological systems.[3] Examples of BioBrick [...]

Load testing Apache Kafka on AWS This is a very solid benchmarking post, examining Kafka in good detail. Nicely done. Bottom line: I basically spend 2/3 of my work time torture testing and operationalizing distributed systems in production. There’s some that I’m not so pleased with (posts pending in draft forever) and some that have [...]

Tesco Hudl 2 review: a lot of tablet for the money wow, an actually quite-good cheapo Android tablet from Tesco for UKP65 of Clubcard vouchers, recommended by conoro. Good for the kids (tags: hudl tesco tablets android devices) [KAFKA-1555] provide strong consistency with reasonable availability Major improvements for Kafka consistency coming in 0.8.2; replication to [...]

Landlords not liable for tenants’ water bills What an utter fuckup. Business as usual for Irish Water: However the spokeswoman said application packs for rented dwellings would be addressed to the landlord, at the landlord’s residence, and it would be the landlord’s responsibility to ensure the tenant received the application pack. Bills are to be [...]

The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate Like, say, the Christian right, which came together through the social media of its day — little-watched television broadcasts, church bulletins, newsletters—or the Tea Party, which found its way through self-selection on social media and through back channels, Gamergate, in the main, comprises an [...]

Dublin’s Best-Kept Secret: Blas Cafe looks great, around the corner from Cineworld on King’s Inn St, D1 (tags: dublin cafes food blas-cafe eating northside) “Meta-Perceptual Helmets For The Dead Zoo” with Neil McKenzie, Nov 9-16 2014, in the National History Museum in Dublin: ‘These six helmets/viewing devices start off by exploring physical conditions of viewing: [...]

It’s been a while since I wrote a long-form blog post here, but this post on the Swrve Engineering blog is worth a read; it describes how we use SSD caching on our EC2 instances to greatly improve EBS throughput.

how King Cormac predicted Arguing On The Internet From The Wisdom of King Cormac: “O Cormac, grandson of Conn”, said Carbery, “What is the worst pleading and arguing?” “Not hard to tell”, said Cormac. “Contending against knowledge, contending without proofs, taking refuge in bad language, a stiff delivery, a muttering speech, hair-splitting, uncertain proofs, despising [...]

A Thing About #GamerGate – John Walker’s Electronic House Great anti-GamerGate post from the editor of Rock, Paper, Shotgun (tags: gamergate rock-paper-shotgun rps games gaming politics misogyny sexism 4chan reddit)

Eircode postcodes will cost lives, warn emergency workers A group representing frontline emergency staff has warned lives will be lost unless the Government reverses its decision on a new national postcode system due to be rolled out next spring. John Kidd, chairman of the Irish Fire and Emergency Services Association, said the “mainly random nature” [...]