'Abstract: Humor identification is a hard natural language understanding problem. We identify a subproblem — the “that’s what she said” problem — with two distinguishing characteristics: (1) use of nouns that are euphemisms for sexually explicit nouns and (2) structure common in the erotic domain. We address this problem in a classification approach that includes features that model those two characteristics. Experiments on web data demonstrate that our approach improves precision by 12% over baseline techniques that use only word-based features.' (via Tony Finch)

next in a long line of one-to-many communication systems used by bad guys

the 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!!

lovely run-through of the computer-vision algorithms this iPhone app uses (via Waxy)

features mainly posts from NAMA-sceptic economist Karl Whelan

'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

promises 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

'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.'

hilarious 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

'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.'

a 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

nice GMail userscript to remove the ads

The Beeb definitely takes it too far with this one; the song isn't clearly about 419 at all

the Washington Post on the Yahoozee thing

bit 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

from Julian "MailScanner" Field (via the SA users list)

'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'

'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

'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.”'

great blog post on the YAGNI principle. +1

YA set of "I got mine after queueing from 7.30am" posts. wtf Apple, this is a shambles

wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status

'[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

actually quite a good breakdown of software eng skill progression

'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

wow. can we (and by "we" I mean "the people in my del network") not just move en masse to Pinboard? ;)

"Life would be easier if you could mark people as spam"

lots of commercial and open-source-friendly-licensed icon sets, including the old reliable FamFamFam and Pinvoke icons

how to upgrade from 20GB to 120GB. this looks frankly terrifying (via Rod)

'Screams of "Of course, yes, I too can see the phone," were also heard at this time.'

massive 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)

good wrap-up from Anil Dash on "the new push"

lots of stuff about one of Boards' best topics, handily arranged by company (via Eoin)

what is the law, and how to make a complaint against an Irish company, via Donncha

good and cheap; good reviews; supported by Linux HID force-feedback joystick library; EUR58 at Play.com

an alternative way to get pedal controls working; use a racing-game steering-wheel controller, instead, since they're cheaper

good 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

'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.'

'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'

a 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

recommended by JB. 3 switches, USB, $120. Linux support seems tricky; requires running Windows apps to reprogram the pedal's firmware. ugh

comes 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

from Kinesis Ergo, claims to do mouse or keyboard actions, $129, USB. Linux support unclear

great 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.'

according 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

hooray, a decent review site for Dublin at last

well-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

'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

Canonical _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

good on them, spilling the beans at last! '“We haven’t seen any further attempts at cache poisoning since last week,” the spokesman added.'

turns out most of the McColo-based spammers were sending easy-to-block output

'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

wow, software archaeology. looks like the 3.1 release (which I worked on) still has its HTML release docs online

'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].'

"The Magazine For People Who Try To Have Conversations About Science News". oh god, this is my life

"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

'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.'

apparently 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

'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."'

Zed 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.'

whoa, 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.'

brilliant (via Waxy)

as 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.'

good 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

extremely detailed postmortem of the recent GFS outage -- a poorly-written MapReduce client issued repeated "query of death" messages, causing server-side stack overflows

'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.''

'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

'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.'

a 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)

'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.'

the _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?

so 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

must try this out and see if it's usable in Chromium on Linux yet

'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.'

lots of detail

8 key gotchas when implementing RESTful web APIs. great advice

'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.'

great demo and walkthrough from Cloudera

interesting 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

'The humble spice burger, one of Ireland’s few original contributions to world cuisine, has been saved.' YAY