What do you do when the users who generate your content revolt?
Digg's answer was to attempt to censor the users -- they ultimately failed.
Dublin!
I'm in Ireland at the moment for work -- I've been here a couple of days now (which might explain why I am online at 4am local time, I am having some trouble sleeping). Anyways, it's nice here. I wasn't really expecting to like it after how much I disliked London the last time I went there, but there you go. Photos et cetera will go online just as soon as I manage to do something other than go to the office.
Domain name lookup helper for python?
Hi. I have a list of the domain portion of URLs which looks a bit like this: Whois lookup for fycnds.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for wvgpzdea.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for zhnsht.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for frigo25.php5.cz Whois lookup for handrovina.php5.cz Whois lookup for blabota.php5.cz Whois lookup for pctuzing.php5.cz Whois lookup for viagraviagra.php5.cz Whois lookup for poiu.php5.cz Whois lookup for flasa.php5.cz Whois lookup for yoy4.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for hskly.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for 2i0wjwbc.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for harnhjc.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for gqru.digitalpoimt.com I need some code which determines which portion of these hostnames is a whois-able domain name. My problem is this doesn't seem all that simple to do -- some countries have a second layer of TLDs, and some do not. Does anyone know of a python library, or failing that simple algorithm, which will do this for me? (For those left wondering, I am trying to do some analysis of the spam I get on this blog, and for that I want to know if the whois information for a domain that left a suspect comment indicates anything suspicious.)
I imagine this is pretty much the worst case they design for
A major freeway interchange in Oakland (that's a large dormitory town north of Silicon Valley) just had a oil tanker roll under it and catch fire. The road way basically melted. I imagine this will take months if not years to fix.
Managing MySQL the Slack Way: How Google Deploys New MySQL Servers
Thanks to everyone who came along to Grant and my talk this morning about slack and how we bootstrap MySQL servers. Here is the slide deck as promised.
MySQL Users Conference
Well, they're definitely thinking about getting started. Like last year I caught the VTA down -- it's hard to beat a $1.75 trip without having to worry about traffic. Registraton wasn't as smooth this year as last, for example I didn't get my free book (there didn't seem to be any attempt to hand those out to speakers). Whatever. I'm now waiting for the replication talk to start.
Nerd link of the day
If you're an ACM member, or read ACM transactions on computer systems, or have a corporate membership to the ACM portal, then you really should checkout Inferring Internet denial-of-service activity. It's a surprisingly simple method of determining how common denial of service attacks really are on the Internet. Like all good ideas, it's also really obvious once it's been pointed out. @article{1132027, author = {David Moore and Colleen Shannon and Douglas J. Brown and Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage}, title = {Inferring Internet denial-of-service activity}, journal = {ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.}, volume = {24}, number = {2}, year = {2006}, issn = {0734-2071}, pages = {115--139}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1132026.1132027}, publisher = {ACM Press}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, }
Air America drug smuggling
Just saw a documentary about the Air America drug smuggling operation. It's really interesting -- modified light planes, flying into storms to avoid detection, basically not being as dumb as your average smuggler. There is a New York Times article online about the gang.
Mark is right
Mark Pilgrim is a smart guy, and he's right that the correct time to start writing is while you have that sense of wonder. That was the big difference in the approaches I took with the ImageMagick book (an attempt to be definitive and therefore boring to write), versus the MythTV book (a cleaned up version of my lab book notes from when I installed Myth and got it working nicely, with some other stuff added for completeness). The MythTV book was a lot more fun to write, and I don't feel nearly as burnt out at the end. Read more about Mark's burnout theory. So, I wonder what is next for me?
Status
The book went to print two days ago. Now we wait for it to come back...