January 2011
Decoding the Virtual Dragon →
Over the past several years, Chinese information warfare (IW) and information operation (IO) capabilities have become more visible and troubling. These capabilities have been used actively in a series of events aimed at a variety of countries. It is unknown exactly how many Chinese IW reconnaissance or offensive events have transpired or the actual intent of these incursions. Several episodes have...
Thirty-Six Stratagems →
The Thirty-Six Stratagems (三十六計／三十六计, Sānshíliù Jì) was a Chinese essay used to illustrate a series of stratagems used in politics, war, as well as in civil interaction, often through unorthodox or deceptive means.
“Using the comparison of a weak mouse operating against a huge cat, Li asked “How...”
– Strategies and Technology
VIM from novice to professional by: Derek Wyatt... →
This is a Vim Introduction to be watched by those looking to start using Vim or are curious about what it can do, or whatever.
Why Doesn't Anyone Pay Attention Anymore? | HASTAC →
Neurologically, attention has no “off” switch. All the best new work on the brain (think about Morcom and Fletcher or Raichle’s work) shows that the “still” and “quiet” brain is constantly distracting itself. Buddhist monks know this best, or they wouldn’t spend a lifetime “practicing” meditation. In that still, quiet place alone, the...
December 2010
~xjobs/ - the home of the xjobs utility →
xjobs reads job descriptions line by line and executes them in parallel. It limits the number of parallel executing jobs and starts new jobs when jobs finish. Therefore, it combines the arguments from every input line with the utility and arguments given on the command line. If no utility is given as an argument to xjobs, then the first argument on every job line will be used as utility. To...
GNU Parallel - GNU Project - Free Software... →
GNU parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel locally or using remote computers. A job is typically a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables.
Next Year's Wars - Captions by International... →
Across the globe today, you’ll find almost three dozen raging conflicts, from the valleys of Afghanistan to the jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the streets of Kashmir. But what are the next crises that might erupt in 2011? Here are a few worrisome spots that make our list.
Synalyze It! Home →
Imagine … you got a binary file and don’t know its contents. Or some software creates binary files where you have a specification but don’t want to decode them manually. Synalyze It! allows you to create a grammar for binary files interactively. Unlike in regular hex editors or viewers the files are interpreted automatically for you!
Home Internet with Anonymity Built In - Technology... →
Many political activists, nonprofits, and businesses use an anonymity system called Tor to encrypt and obscure what they do on the Internet. Now the U.S.-based nonprofit that distributes Tor is developing a low-cost home router with the same privacy protection built in.
This Window: Close It - Minimalism Is A Viable... →
As I cruised through my morning news, I came across a contentious article by Vivek Haldar, “Minimalism Is Not A Long Term Viable Intellectual Strategy.” In it, he argues that Minimalism is not only a silly and smug movement, but that it’s ultimately self defeating. I’d like to provide a counterpoint to this: Minimalism, at its core, is the process of prioritizing your life and working towards...
Terminal: "The administrator has set your shell to... →
If you try to change your shell with the “chsh” command to a shell not on this list, it will simply refuse to do so. Brute force changing it with NetInfo will cause Terminal.app to break. If you change your shell back to “/bin/bash” in NetInfo, you can then use “sudo nano /etc/shells” to edit the list of valid shells, adding, for example, the the MacPorts...
Logging in Varnish — Varnish v-trunk documentation →
One of the really nice features in Varnish is how logging works. Instead of logging to normal log file Varnish logs to a shared memory segment. When the end of the segment is reached we start over, overwriting old data. This is much, much faster then logging to a file and it doesn’t require disk space.
The Chess Master and the Computer by Garry... →
The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine,...
Top 1000 sites - DoubleClick Ad Planner →
You can see a list of the largest 1000 sites worldwide, based on Unique Visitors (users), as measured by Ad Planner. This list is updated monthly as new Ad Planner datasets are released. The list defines sites as top-level domains.
Varnish Configuration Language - VCL — Varnish... →
Varnish has a great configuration system. Most other systems use configuration directives, where you basically turn on and off lots of switches. Varnish uses a domain specific language called Varnish Configuration Language, or VCL for short. Varnish translates this configuration into binary code which is then executed when requests arrive.
Varnish Community | Varnish makes websites fly! →
Varnish is a web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind. It’s modern architecture gives it a significantly better performance than many of it’s competing products. Varnish store web pages in memory so the web servers don’t have to create the same web page over and over again. The web server only recreate a page when it is changed. Additionally Varnish...
The Algorithm + the Crowd are Not Enough « Rand's... →
In the last decade, the online world has been ruled by two, twin forces: The Crowd and The Algorithm. The collective “users” of the Internet (The Crowd) create, click, and rate, while mathematical equations add scalability and findability to these overwhelming quantities of data (The Algorithm). Like the moon over the ocean, the pull of these two forces help create the tides of popularity (and...
Blog year 2010 in review | (R news & tutorials) →
A performance step beyond “Economists’ Hubris” points out that random portfolios are a more powerful method of performance measurement than the method that is suggested in the “Economists’ Hubris” paper (though that method is probably pretty good).
CSS outline property - outline: none and outline:... →
It provides visual feedback for links that have “focus” when navigating a web document using the TAB key (or equivalent). This is especially useful for folks who can’t use a mouse or have a visual impairment. If you remove the outline you are making your site inaccessible for these people.
Free Kindle Math Books →
The CK-12 Foundation is a wonderful non-profit organization. Recently they released several free Kindle ebooks about Mathematics. Currently in the Kindle store you can find the following CK-12 Foundation math titles, all priced at $0.00
Best paper awards for AAAI, CHI, KDD, SIGMOD,... →
Best paper awards for WWW, SIGIR, CIKM, AAAI, CHI, KDD, SIGMOD, ICML, VLDB, IJCAI, UIST
A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer | Smart... →
At a 1958 tournament in Yugoslavia, Mikhail Tal, a legendary attacking grandmaster and one-time world champion, mocked chess prodigy Bobby Fischer for being “cuckoo.” Tal’s taunting may have been a deliberate attempt to rattle Fischer, then just 15 but already a major force in the highly competitive world of high-level chess.
‘BitTorrent’ exploit could be used to stage... →
“For example, one could tell tens of thousands of users that an HD version of Inception is available at an address that really is the web server of a corporation,” technology publication Gigaom noted. “All of these users would immediately try to download the file under that address, bombarding the server with requests and possibly taking it down in the process.”
Predicting the Future with Twitter →
Math-loving traders are using powerful computers to speed-read news reports, editorials, company Web sites, blog posts and even Twitter messages — and then letting the machines decide what it all means for the markets.
Interview: How Bitcoin Created a Decentralized... →
Bitcoin is an open source, peer-to-peer electronic currency created by Satoshi Nakamoto and maintained by a small team of developers.
Pragmatic Rails: Thoughts on Views, Inheritance,... →
While hacking on Cells for Rails 3 with Yehuda earlier this year we were discussing if Cells’ view inheritance will be superseded by Rails.Yehuda patiently postponed any work on it with the words “we will do that for you” :-) Apparently, he didn’t lie.
'Zombie' satellite comes back to life - Technology... →
A “zombie satellite” that spent months sending out signals while it was adrift in orbit has sprung back to life, resetting itself after its unexplained breakdown in space earlier this year.
InfoQ: Cloud Patterns from VMware →
Over the last few months WMware’s Steve Jin has published several design patterns around working with virtual machines in the cloud, especially vCloud. He follows a common dialogue in each published pattern which makes it easy to read and consume.
ArrayAdapter | Android Developers →
A ListAdapter that manages a ListView backed by an array of arbitrary objects. By default this class expects that the provided resource id references a single TextView. If you want to use a more complex layout, use the constructors that also takes a field id. That field id should reference a TextView in the larger layout resource. However the TextView is referenced, it will be filled with the...
Android App Development- Controls Part Four:... →
The GridView is similar to ListView but it gives you the ability to control the look of the grid. You can specify the number of columns and columns width and spacing.
Android App Development – Layouts Part Three:... →
As we can see, not all the buttons are displayed and that the layout does not fit in the device screen. The solution to this problem is to use ScrollView as a container for the controls and a scroll bar to make the layout fit in the screen.
MultiAutoCompleteTextView | Android Developers →
An editable text view, extending AutoCompleteTextView, that can show completion suggestions for the substring of the text where the user is typing instead of necessarily for the entire thing. You must must provide a MultiAutoCompleteTextView.Tokenizer to distinguish the various substrings.
Android App Development-Controls Part One:... →
Layouts in Android are constructed from two objects: View and ViewGroup. The View class is the base class for many widgets sub classes such as TextView and Button classes.
Kinect Hacked to Control Humanoid Robot: First... →
Another day, another Kinect hack, but this one really gives us a taste of a sci-fi-esque future: Kinect can now directly control the limbs of a humanoid robot. Yup—those Evangelion or Avatar dreams now seem a little more possible.
Heroku For... →
With the success of Heroku, both in terms of the recent sale and the fact it’s awesome, it was always just a matter of time before other languages and frameworks got into the platform as a service game. Here’s all the one’s I know about so far, many of them in or entering beta testing at the moment.
Tilt Sensor - 4-way - SparkFun Electronics →
This tilt sensor can be used to detect multiple orientations. Inside the sensor or infrared emitters which are either reflected or not, depending on the orientation of the sensor. By reading the output of the various pins you can easily determine the orientation of the sensor and your project.