Nelson's Linkblog 2011-04

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Royal wedding cake

Weird tradition of British monarchs mailing wedding cake slices

2011-04-30 cake • england • wedding

Sony's game network was hacked, all user data including passwords compromised.

2011-04-27 badtech • games • malware • security • sony

Wunderground has fire maps; they're great!

2011-04-26 aviation • fire • flying • marfa • texas • weather • wildfire

Open gay relationships

A serious, if limited attempt to study non-monogamy in gay couples

2011-04-25 gay • relationships • sex • sexuality

Simple bundled PDF downloads for free FAA data and documents

2011-04-25 afd • aim • aviation • far • flying • pdf • tp

Sony PSN outage theory

Claim that Sony's shut down their game network because folks figured out how to steal games via it

2011-04-25 games • piracy • playstation • sony

Startup Duo Security has really simple two factor authentication integration for OpenSSH

2011-04-25 openssh • security • ssh • twofactor

Travel philosophy

Interesting post from Justin halfway around the world; how to pick destinations when you have no particular plan

2011-04-25 india • tourism • travel

Great editorial calling for consumers to have a right to get their own data

2011-04-25 data • freedom • privacy

Guantanamo Docket

Visualization of the fate of all 772 prisoners we have information on

2011-04-25 guantanamo • prison • visualization • wikileaks

SmugMug vs. Amazon failure

Notes on how to use cloud services in a defensive way. Quick summary: add a lot of redundancy and complexity to your systems

2011-04-25 amazon • hosting • reliability

Guantanamo files

Many Wikileaks documents describe the structure and operation of the Guantanamo Bay prison

2011-04-25 afghanistan • civilrights • guantanamo • politics • wikileaks

Chinese Internet spying

Wikileaks article confirms the US knows the Chinese military is spying via the Internet

2011-04-24 badtech • china • internet • spying • wikileaks

Yanomamo heartbreak

Insane story of a US anthropologist marrying an Amazon tribal woman

2011-04-24 anthropology • culture • marriage • via:metafilter

EC2 vital service

"Life of our patients is at stake" in an Amazon Web Services forum post. Good lord.

2011-04-23 amazon • badtech • engineering • reliability

Eve time dialation

More MMO server architecture stuff; multi-tasking and time dialation

2011-04-22 eve • eveonline • games • mmos • optimization • realtime

Ronald McDonald shot

Not sure where this painting comes from, but I like it

2011-04-22 guns • jackinthebox • mcdonalds • painting • violence

Space Invader busted?

Rumour that the well known French street artist got picked up by LAPD

2011-04-21 la • lapd • losangeles • police • spaceinvader • streetart

Amazon's EC2 service is having trouble, causing problems for customers like Reddit, Foursquare, etc

2011-04-21 amazon • cloudcomputing • ec2 • foursquare • reddit

Ev's not an asshole

Nicely balanced, personal reflection from Matt Haughey about working with Evan Williams

2011-04-21 ev • evanwilliams • investment • mathowie • odeo • startups • twitter

Installable APRS tracker

2011-04-21 aprs • gps • hamradio • tracking

Working at Domino's

Metafilter comment from someone who makes pizza

2011-04-21 dominos • food • industrial • pizza • restaurant

Varanasi - Justinsomnia

Particularly good travelogue entry

2011-04-20 india • justin • photos • travel • varanasi

iPhone records where you've been. Being pitched as a security problem, but I think it's kinda cool

2011-04-20 iphone • privacy • security

nice pairing of photos and drawings made from the photos

2011-04-20 cheesecake • girls • pinups • via:metafilter

Naughty Nicholas Cage

Occasionally talented actor behaves poorly when drunk

2011-04-20 actors • drunks • neworleans • nicholascage

2011-04-17 automata • flash • music • via:metafilter

Game preview sausage

Intern explains how terrible games get gushing previews in the gaming press

2011-04-17 games • journalism • marketing

960 Grid System

Simple CSS layouts

2011-04-16 css • grids • html • layout

JavaScript Garden

Lots of nice notes on gotchas in the language

2011-04-16 javascript • programming

A new set of Python tools for cutting maps up into tiles via GDAL

2011-04-16 gdal • maps • tiles

Behind the poker bust?

Story about a payment processor who may have turned states' evidence against online poker

2011-04-15 fraud • gambling • moneylaundering • poker

Coreflood danger

FBI used the Coreflood servers to send shutdown messages to the zombies. That could backfire.

2011-04-15 badtech • botnet • coreflood • fbi • security

Coreflood takedown

FBI arranges the seizure of a botnet's command and control

2011-04-15 badtech • botnet • coreflood • fbi • lawenforcement • security

Historic phonemes

Provocative linguistics paper: analyzing phonemic diversity as a clue to language age and origin

2011-04-15 historic • language • linguistics

World Aero Club

Ride sharing website for pilots

2011-04-15 aviation • flying • maps

Emancipation Day

Washington DC holiday celebrating emancipation: it's on April 15 this year, which is why tax filing was delayed to April 18

2011-04-15 emancipation • history • slavery • taxes

Valve has people playing 13 indie games to get them to release Portal 2 early

2011-04-15 games • portal • valve

Cataclysm stats

Some graphs that show Warcraft activity in last year

2011-04-15 cataclysm • games • mmos • stats • warcraft

Migursky on NoGIS

Mike gave a great talk last week on a new software approach to geodata. Here's the talk in blog form.

2011-04-15 gis • hacking • mapping • nogis • software • stamen

Australia bush flying

Fun story about flying in backcountry Australia

2011-04-15 australia • aviation • flying

Super Meat Boy postmortem

2011-04-14 games • postmortem

Google Docs data loss

sad story of Google losing some files for a paying customer

2011-04-14 google • outage • service

New SSH client for iOS. $5.

2011-04-14 ios • ipad • iphone • ssh • via:waxy

Great screen grab

2011-04-14 design • movie • startrek

HD: B-17 and B-25

Beautiful flying videos

2011-04-13 b17 • b25 • flying • via:telstar • video • warbirds

greplin bloom filter

Everyone's favourite data structure has an open source implementation

2011-04-13 bloomfilter • code • grep • informationretrieval • ir • lucene • opensource • textprocessing

Legal child groping

We're now a country that debates whether it's appropriate to give six year old children intimate patdowns

2011-04-13 civilrights • security • securitytheater • tsa

Bioware and EA screw up their authentication servers. Once again, pirates get a better experience than legitimate customers.

2011-04-13 badtech • bioware • dragonage • drm • ea • piracy

Gmail security checklist

A practical guide to keeping your Google account secure

2011-04-13 badtech • gmail • google • malware • security

GPS track recorder for the iPhone

2011-04-13 gps • ios • iphone • tracker

This number seems grossly inflated, but I like the idea of anyone competing with google

2011-04-12 bing • google • microsoft • search

Lincecum in slow motion

Baseball pitching

2011-04-12 baseball • pitching • slomo • sports • via:kottke

A clear correlation between highway fatalities and Mexican lemon imports

2011-04-11 causation • correlation • funny • lemons • science • statistics

Google's HTTP replacement is now being used in production for some things, at least Gmail.

2011-04-11 google • http • performance • protocol • spdy

large page showing every unicode codepoint

2011-04-11 fonts • typography • unicode

Simple, clean terrain tiles

2011-04-11 acetate • maps

Yet another unusual writing system, invented by the king of Cameroon around 1900

2011-04-11 cameroon • language • unicode • writing

Introducing Unix

Charming video from the early 70s?

2011-04-11 belllabs • computing • unix

simple video shows 45,000 characters

2011-04-10 i18n • typography • unicode

lego sniper rifle

with video of mechanism

2011-04-09 guns • lego • via:iamcal

Lovely gay couple

Sweet profile of a Toronto socialite couple

2011-04-09 canada • family • gay • love • toronto

Online Identity

Ev breaks down different aspects of online identity

2011-04-08 facebook • identity • openid • twitter

Planned Parenthood activities

What the organization actually does

2011-04-08 budget • freedom • health • healthcare • politics • republicans

Hypoxia is no joke

Terrifying cockpit recording

2011-04-08 aircraft • atc • aviation • flying • hypoxia • medical • oxygen

projects page for Mike Bostock, genius Javascript hacker and visualization expert

2011-04-07 coding • d3 • javascript • opensource • polymaps • protovis • visualization

Eve: interview with The Mittani

Excellent interview with the head of Goonswarm, one of the most powerful alliances in Eve Online. "That’s why I play the game, really- to tear social groups apart."

2011-04-07 ccp • eve • eveonline • games • goonswarm • somethingawful • themittani

America, America VIII

Photography by Peter Granser

2011-04-07 america • art • petergranser • photography • photos

Facebook datacenter design

Nice to see this sort of innovative hardware setup going non-secret

2011-04-07 datacenter • facebook • google • hardware

he's mixing a few metaphors

2011-04-07 cosplay • darthvader • starwars • via:tumblr

Stupidest pilot ever

Painful recording of a jackass who decided to land on a beach in New York

2011-04-07 aviation • flying • pilot • stupid

Huckabee Whitewash

GOP presidential possibility destroyed records from his time as governor

2011-04-06 corruption • election • gop • huckabee • politics • president • republicans • transparency

Interesting numbers from the best iOS photo app

2011-04-06 appstore • camera • ios • iphone • photo

Verizon vs. ATTFail

Hard numbers on how awful AT&T's service is. 5% dropped call rate!

2011-04-05 att • attfail • cellular • iphone • mobile • verizon

Writing a PyPy interpreter

Simple example of using the PyPy infrastructuer to build a toy language

2011-04-05 compiler • jit • languages • optimization • python • via:mattc

Free iOS cached map app: 2 gigabytes!

2011-04-05 ios • ipad • iphone • maps • openstreetmap

P-51 Mustang rides

$975; it's not terrible

2011-04-05 aviation • flying • mustang • p51

Google Certificate Catalog

Google's been tracking SSL certificates and will give you data about them

2011-04-04 goodtech • google • security • ssl

I always think of this!

2011-04-04 flying • funny • iphone

Fantasy blueballer

NMA investigates the Song of Ice and Fire phenomenon

2011-04-04 books • fantasy • funny • iceandfire • nma • novels

UFO abducts aircraft

Event from Australia, 1978

2011-04-04 airplane • australia • aviation • flying • paranormal • ufos

Cannabis Culture

Hypnotic video of people passing joints at a wealthy party

2011-04-03 drugs • marijuana • party

Generic SQL injection attack seems to have infected hundreds of thousands of servers

2011-04-02 antivirus • badtech • lizamoon • malware • virus

Stalk people online via geotags in social media

2011-04-01 geolocation • geotagging • location • privacy

Module to add infix notation to long data processing

2011-04-01 clever • code • hack • python • software • syntax • via:joshua

Nice little joke from Google

2011-04-01 aprilfools • fonts • funny • google • helvetica

Sun n Fun damage

Huge storm hit a big airplane fly-in; lots of damage, really a mess

2011-04-01 airplanes • aviation • insurance • klal • lakeland • storm • sunnfun • weather