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I made a sled
Facing yet another day of being snowed in, with Dublin’s icy roads and footpaths driving us all stir crazy, I came up with this: More pics, vid — fun!
View ArticleIrish Times “Most Read” Article Feed
If you visit the Irish Times at all frequently, you’ll probably have noticed a nifty “wisdom of crowds” feature in the right sidebar: the list of “most read” articles. It’s quite good, since they’re...
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Against The Use Of Programming Languages in Configuration Files
It’s pretty common for apps to require “configuration” — external files which can contain settings to customise their behaviour. Ideally, apps shouldn’t require configuration, and this is always a good...
View ArticleMy Problem With Norris
I’m uncomfortable voting for David Norris for President. Here’s why. In November last year, he was a key voice in a Senate debate on the topic of “Protection of Intellectual Property Rights”, where he...
View Articletemporary Hackerspace at MindField
This sounds very cool! Nice one, hackerspace ppl. Ireland’s Hackerspaces and Makerspaces (091 Labs – Galway, Belfast Hackerspace, MilkLabs – Limerick, Nexus Cork and TOG – Dublin) have been asked to...
View ArticleRead these links via Twitter
Thanks to IfTTT, I am now posting the Pinboard link feed to Twitter, as well as on this blog. If you’d prefer to read them there, here’s the link. Enjoy!
View ArticleIn Dublin? Hear me talk about AWS network monitoring!
Reminder to Dublin-based readers — next week, Amazon (my employers) will be putting on Under the Hood at Amazon, billed as ‘A night of Beer, Pizza and Cloud Computing for Software Developers’. I’ll be...
View ArticleTelegraph spam in 1864
Here’s a letter to the editor of The Times, dated 1st June 1864: TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. Sir, — On my arrival home late yesterday evening a “telegram,” by “London District Telegraph,” addressed in...
View ArticleFlood of posts
Sorry for the flood of recent posts — turns out my cron job to gateway from Pinboard had stopped running due to cron fail. (I should really set up some monitoring someday ;)
View ArticleLeaving Amazon
So, after just over 3 and a half years, I’m leaving Amazon. It’s been great fun — I can honestly say, even with my code being used by hundreds of millions of users in SpamAssassin and elsewhere, I...
View ArticleThe easy way to find JMX metrics in the field using jmxsh
(oh look, a proper blog post!) JMX is the de-facto standard in the Java and JVM-based world for exposing service metrics, and feeds nicely to tools like Graphite using JMXTrans and others. However,...
View Articlethe coming world of automated mass anti-terror false positives
Man sues RMV after driver’s license mistakenly revoked by automated anti-terror false positive: John H. Gass hadn’t had a traffic ticket in years, so the Natick resident was surprised this spring when...
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Don’t use Timers with exponentially-decaying reservoirs in Graphite
A common error when using Coda Hale’s Metrics library is to record Timer metrics on things like API calls, using the default settings, then to publish those to a time-series store like Graphite. Here’s...
View ArticleElsewhere….
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...
View ArticleRecipe: clara con limón granizado
I came across this cocktail in Pals, in Catalonia, in 30 degree heat, a few weeks back — I saw it on the menu at the cafe in the square of the old town, and had to give it a go. It’s incredible....
View ArticleFixing echoing sound effects with Huawei Histen
Here’s a quick tip for people using Huawei or Honor phones. Huawei recently released EMUI version 9.1.0.326 as an OTA update, which I applied once it was offered as an upgrade option. Once I installed...
View ArticlePeer-to-peer COVID-19 contact tracing without the surveillance
Maciej Ceglowski asks for a massive surveillance program to defeat COVID-19. However, as I mentioned on twitter — there IS an alternative, privacy-preserving approach, which is what is being done in...
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E-Paper Home Dashboard
As a lockdown project, I decided to build a home dashboard to display a few useful details for ambient home use. I’ve written up some details here.
View ArticleRichard J. Hayes, Ireland’s WWII cryptographer and polymath
This is new to me — Thanks to David Mee for the pointer. ‘During WWII, one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious communication codes was broken by a mild mannered librarian and family man from West...
View ArticleDynamoDB-local on Apple Silicon
DynamoDB Local is one of the best features of AWS DynamoDB. It allows you to run a local instance of the data store, and is perfect for use in unit tests to validate correctness of your DynamoDB client...
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