John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
Tag Galaxy is a 2008 thesis project from Steven Wood at the University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg. It allows you to explore flickr tags while looking at solar systems that represent photos and related tags.
Check it out at http://www.taggalaxy.de
People keep saying to me, “I don’t get Twitter, what is it that you do anyway?”
We just put out a pretty slick video showing people in San Francisco and New York using it, so maybe this’ll help !
How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.
I’m heading to Defcon 16 on Thursday to talk to some fellow hackers, meet colleagues, and to hopefully, not lose my shirt in Vegas. I think I’ll be much too busy to gamble, really.
For a conference that is so technically minded, they didn’t post the conference schedule in a useful format (HTML only! ew!), so I converted the web pages to iCal format with quite a bit of scripting and cutting/pasting.
Just download the following zip, import it into iCal, and you should have a (fairly) complete conference schedule to carry with you on your iPod, iPhone, or any device that can read iCal/vCalendar formats.
This schedule includes everything except the contest area and very-long descriptions of each event. I decided not to include the contest area because most events run all day, or most of the days. Since the rooms for each of the conference tracks haven’t been announced yet, there’s very little in the way of room locations in these files. Sorry, but you’ll have to figure it out when you get to the Riveria!
The events are broken out into the five tracks in five seperate files, and a seperate ics file for Defcon Social events and meetups. Unpack the zip, and import each file into iCal.
Click here for the zipfile of .ics files
Once you;ve downloaded the zips, double click to unzip them, then import to iCal. If the system asks you what calendar to put events into, just click ‘New’, and our ICS files will fill in the rest.
Awhile back I gave a talk about The Snarkatron at Ignite SF. It’s a digital sign, installed facing the crowd at the DNA Lounge here in San Francisco. I DJ a number of nights there, and my recent transition from CD and Vinyl to Laptop/MP3 with M-Audio’s Xponent has given me many more chances to do things with the playlist that I create each night. The main reason why I bought the sign was to let the public know what songs we were playing, but we were never able to do this without typing in each song name. The holy grail of getting the song titles onto the Snarkatron, automaticaly, has never been fulfilled until now.
The trick here is that you connect Traktor to a local Icecast2 install, turn on audio broadcast (with no listeners) in Traktor, and then read XML off the Icecast2 install to extract which song is playing from Traktor. Traktor is very smart about the current song as well. It looks at the decks and crossfader to determine the current, live song, and forwards that to Icecast.
We can extract this and use it for our digital display!
The source for this dumb trick follows below…
(Sorry for the bad layout of this code; I have to fix our CSS file after the recent site upgrade)
For the last five years I’ve used Macjournal in one edition or the other (professional, standard, and the original free edition) from Mariner Software. I just dropped $34 on the new version, primarily because of it’s auto-encryption feature.
It’s become my repository for all things of interest at work, meetings, and conferences. When I left my last job, I was able to hand them a single set of files containing over three years of notes (the export feature can format for HTML, Livejournal, a number of blogging sites, an text). I loathe paper. You can’t search it, copy it, or easily distribute data that has been imprinted on pressed vegetation, although it’s role as a prevailing information technology for centuries has proven it’s worthiness.
I’ve experimented with EverNote, but it just can’t do what MacJournal can do. One of my favorite features is the cut-and-paste of web sites (complete with graphics and all layout). If you read Safari (O’Reilly’s online library) like I do, this lets you cut and paste entire pages of books and hang onto them.
The key feature in Macjournal 5 for me is automatic encryption and locking of journals. You can set specific journal folders to encrypt and lock after a period of inactivity, which makes for an ideal password and sensitive information store.
I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 and replaced the wordpress theme, because the older one was impossible to read and hey, I hated the ugly green banner.
Let me know if it breaks at all.
I’ve been very busy lately dealing with Twitter, but I’ve made some time to stop by SFBeta and earlier this evening, the OpenDNS party at fluid. Both were decent; OpenDNS was more of a mixer, and SFBeta, chock full o’ demos.
SFBeta was what you’d expect - Lots of industry folk, barely any food left if you showed up past 5:50pm or so (they opened at 5pm!), lots of people pushing random product at you, and not a hell of a lot of good technology. Most of it? Pointless, but every time I go, though, there’s at least one company showing a worthy technology.
i give you, search me:
A few months ago, it was PicLens, and this time, in the “we use and love coverflow” technology vein that PicLens is part of, it’s SearchMe.
They’re combining cover flow, Internet search, and a topic specific, topic sensitive system that displays categorical icons at the top of the page. The stacks feature allows you to drag and drop pages into a cohesive stack, share them with people on Digg, Twitter, and nearly every social networking site out there.
Give it a try - their developer tells me they are using their own crawler, which I think is a bad idea. I worked at Inktomi for a few years and I know how difficult it is to scale search. Their plight, in the face of Google and Microsoft, will not be any easier.
I’ve been experimenting with a few things this week while trying to wade my way through Twitter’s infrastructure. One tool that’s been of extreme help in digging through source code and an extensive set of configuration files has been ack!
It’s the only piece of software I know of that has ‘–thpppt’ as an option (Install it, and you’ll see.) It’s an optimized replacement for many of your favorite awk | grep | sed combinations, and includes syntax highlighting.
In other news, I’ve resolved a number of bugs and issued new code for running mod_telemetry on 64-bit Linux. Check out the SVN trunk for the latest branch. The data that this module has been providing to me has been invaluable for researching slow points in the back end.
I’m releasing my apache module which has been extremely helpful to me in performance tracking, and large site analysis.
mod_telemetry keeps track of all URLs on your site and how long it takes your server to deliver each request. It reports these by using a status handler (like Apache’s /server-status) to display real-time status information about the performance of your site.
It is extremely useful in optimizing back-end processes (for example, when connecting to Java, FastCGI, or Ruby back-ends) to identify when specific pages are performing slowly.
Because it runs in the server, it’s able to show end-to-end performance on each request
It requires that mod_status be enabled to work.
An initial version of this code is available on google code. Please help me debug and expand it’s capabilities.
I recommend you checkout the SVN trunk and not download the tar. It works with Apache 2.x and 2.2.x.
If you’re responsible for DNS at your organization, I urge you to immediately download updates for your DNS servers and patch them, today. Dan Kaminsky and other members of the DNS community announce that they are releasing patches for an extremely serious cache resolver issue impacting many vendors of DNS software, including ISC BIND and Microsoft DNS.
The CERT advisory is here.
A partial overview, from the PDF released by Secuonis…
On July 8th, technology vendors from across the industry will simultaneously release patches for their products to close a major vulnerability in the underpinnings of the Internet. While most home users will be automatically updated, it’s important for all businesses to immediately update their networks. This is the largest synchronized security update in the history of the Internet, and is the result of hard work and dedication across dozens of organizations.
Earlier this year, professional security research Dan Kaminsky discovered a major issue in how Internet addresses are managed (Domain Name System, or DNS). This issue was in the design of DNS and not limited to any single product. DNS is used by every computer on the Internet to know where to find other computers. Using this issue, an attacker could easily take over portions of the Internet and redirect users to arbitrary, and malicious, locations. For example, an attacker could target an Internet Service Provider (ISP), replacing the entire web — all search engines, social networks, banks, and other sites — with their own malicious content. Against corporate environments, an attacker could disrupt or monitor operations by rerouting network traffic traffic, capturing emails and other sensitive business data.
Exact details on this are being withheld for the safety of the Internet; I prefer full disclosure, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here given that the hole is so large and vulnerability so widespread.