So. Yesterday I installed kindle on my iPad. What a revelation.
No need for iBooks now it seems. Kindle books are cheaper, and a great selection.
Enjoying book number 1 already.
Also, re-reviewing my photos from aperture - wow stunning screen to look at them on.
Yes i may be a fully paid up member of the Steve jobs gadget club, but i love each one of them for what they are.
After much encouragements, thoughts, research and tests. I finally decided to open an online store to make available some of my pictures as high-quality prints in both the US and Europe. It took a bit longer than I expected because I wanted to make sure that the end result was worth it. I reviewed many different online businesses offering this facility such as Red Bubble, SmugMug, ImageKind, Zenfolio, PhotoShelter…and I ended up chosing ZenFolio. One of the main aspects being cost, ease of use for myself and the visitors as well as having a choice of printing labs in Europe (Photobox) and in the US (MPix) so that people ordering prints would not have to pay international shipping fees and potential custom taxes. Then I wanted to go through the process of checking myself the quality for each and every print in various sizes.
There are nearly 40 photos available taken underwater or topside in various places such as Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. There will be more variety to come as I gather feedback and then carefully select new images, process, soft-proof and print them (repeat and rinse until satisfied)
Printing sizes are for now available in 8 x 12″ (20 x 30cm), 12 x 16″ (30 x 40cm) and 16 x 20″ (40 x 50cm) and start at 35€ or $50. To celebrate the launch and benefit the (few) readers of this blog, until August 23 there will be 20% discount with coupon code SBBLLCH (enter at checkout time).
As mentioned on the online store, prints are 100% guaranteed, and if for whatever reason you do not like the print, you can ask for a refund or reprint whichever you prefer.
Again, I cannot thank enough all the people that have encouraged me to do this, should they be friends, family or people I bumped into while traveling and I hope the end result is to their liking. (and big thanks to the one who pre-ordered).
This evening yet another Apache Dinner took place in Berlin (this time Schöneberg), location booked by Simon Willnauer. As it was announced less then a week ago (see post below) we were expecting no more then some 7 people … we ended up being a group of 15 attendees: There was Michi Busch from Twitter together with Tanja, Uwe Schindler from Bremen joined us. With Matt and Josh some of our local Hadoop users from Nokia joined our group. We had Sebastian Schelter from Mahout. In addition there were the usual suspects, that is Jan Lehnardt, Simon Willnauer and Torsten Curdt.
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Indian food at Yogi Haus was great and very tasty - though we should introduce a sharing algorithm for the various dishes next time around. Speaking of next time: If you would like to be part of the dinner, subscribe to our Apache Dinner mailing list. Best way to make the location suit your needs is to simply send out the next proposal yourself.
As usual the Lucene guys are the last to leave: Currently they are on their way to X-Berg for further drinks, some food and lots of fun. Looking forward to the pictures you promised, Simon 
Update: Images added. Thanks for forwarding them.
A few online Pratchett stories.
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I've upgraded my open-source (Apache licensed) Kohmori Reports framework to now use JAXB internally. The new Version 1.1 is available in Kohmori's Maven repository, replacing the earlier 1.0.8 that relied on a manual POJO & SAX method. Switching to JAXB better formalizes the initial part of the report generation pipeline and removes much of the boilerplate code. The earlier manual process involved sketching the report data into an informal XML, manually creating a POJO to hold the data and an XML Reader to serialize it into XML. But that code is no longer necessary. With JAXB, you just need to create a Schema describing the report, then use the Maven JAXB plugin to automatically create the POJOs and then the super-convenient JAXBSource object to automatically handle the marshalling of the report POJO's to XML, necessary for its subsequent stylesheet processing. |
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These changes also further my goal of having Kohmori be a "no fat" project. All the technologies it uses--Java, Maven, Spring MVC, XSLT, XSL FO, and now XML Schema and JAXB are useful skills and most transfer easily to your other project needs. This report generation method also supports a high amount of code reuse, particularly within the report schemas and stylesheets, allowing you to build in more and more efficiencies with each additional report you create.
The Kohmori Wiki documentation has been updated for the new process. It shows how to deploy the sample Flight Reports webapp (which has three sample reports) to Tomcat and how to create a report from scratch. Kohmori supports PDF and RTF (using Apache FOP underneath for its rendering) and can also be used command-line. Enjoy!
Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza
: wow, fantastic review — real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA’s latest videogame
(tags: crime games japan videogames yakuza sega)
Man Lives In Futuristic Sci-Fi World Where All His Interactions Take Place In Cyberspace | The Onion
: ‘In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.’ brilliant pisstake of mid-’90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)
(tags: the-onion funny future futurism humour internet sf via:walter journalism cyberpunk 1990s cyberspace)
Irish Hackerspaces Week
: hackerspaces in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast, running events all next week (08-14 – 08-22)
(tags: hackerspace hacking ireland conferences events)
Our cheese shop has long been one of the best things in town. It’s one of the small shops in the area immediately outside the market: a shopping and services area that’s pedestrianised during shop hours.
This week it’s been joined by two more great food shops. Firstly the wholefood stall from the market has gone up in the world and moved into a real shop. On the other side, the olive stall has done the same. Both the new shops are taking advantage of their improved premises to expand their ranges a little, though it’ll be another day or two before the olive seller looks like a working shop!
That’s my three favourite specialist/luxury food shops all in a little row! Yum!
Oh, and any foodies might like to make a pilgrimage to Tavistock for the last weekend of this month, when the cheese shop hires the town hall for its annual cheese fair. A fantastic opportunity for the cheese-loving public (that’s me 
) to meet the producers, learn about their craft, and of course sample a huge range of cheeses, accompanied by supplements from local wine to pickle, and whatever new attractions they can bring us this year. In common with other locals, I use this annual event to expand the range of cheeses I’ll regularly buy over the following year.
This evening at Volkspark Friedrichshain, Café Schoenbrunn the next NoSQL summer Berlin (organised by Tim Lossen) is meeting to discuss the paper on Amazon’s Dynamo “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store”. The group is planning to meet at 19:30 for some beer and discussions on the publication.
SANS is reporting that alongside this Month's MS patches, Adobe has patches for Flash and other things out. Not acroread, fortunately, but for anyone who doesn't use flashblock to turn flash off, their browser only needs to go to one subverted site for their machine to belong to someone else
Sigh
This is one of the big problems with Virtualisation. Any VM image you don't keep up to date is a security risk, cost of keeping up to date is therefore proportional to the #of VM images you have. And any backed-up VM from months earlier is danger.
SANS also have a good article on Keeping SSH keys
secure, including some find commands to locate keys in tar files and temp dirs. Better not
forget those VM disks too though...
We started discussing TLS in Node.js at the meetup in Palo Alto tonight.
Lets imagine you wanted to implement SSL/TLS in an Asynchronous framework, like node.js.
For the sake of discussion, I will be using OpenSSL as an example. At least as far as I know, these issues also apply equally to GnuTLS or NSS. I would be happy to be wrong!
The goal is to provide both a TLS Client and Server API, allowing high level code to determine many of the common behavoirs you need to hook to provide a powerful TLS Platform. This includes basics like verification of certificates chains, but should also include: SSL Session Caching, OCSP stapling, SNI Validation, SPDY Protocol hinting, and more.
OpenSSL can decouple IO operations from sockets, using the BIO abstraction. This means your process can handle the actual socket, and its buffers, which is good for Node.js, and for most other asynchronous systems that don’t want to block for SSL to do work.
While the IO operations has a good abstraction in OpenSSL, many common operations, rely upon a callback.
For example, lets consider the OpenSSL SSL Session Cache API:
SSL_CTX_sess_set_new_cb(ctx, ssl_callback_NewSessionCacheEntry);
SSL_CTX_sess_set_get_cb(ctx, ssl_callback_GetSessionCacheEntry);
SSL_CTX_sess_set_remove_cb(ctx, ssl_callback_DelSessionCacheEntry);It is a basic caching API, you have 3 functions for caching an SSL Session object, Add new, Reading existing, and deletion.
If you examine the function signature for the get function, it returns an SSL_SESSION object directly, meaning when you return from the function you must either have the correct session, or return NULL to indicate a cache miss:
SSL_SESSION *ssl_callback_GetSessionCacheEntry(SSL *ssl,
unsigned char *id,
int idlen, int *do_copy)
{
/* Your SSL Session cache goes here! */
return NULL;
}The difficulty for async systems here, is that they most likely want to now perform file IO, network IO, or potentially other operations that go outside the current C stack in order to fetch the Session.
In Node.js’ case, this means you cannot provide a callback as users expect it to work in Node — they expect to be able to make an async callback, and then notify the caller when they have found the data.
In an ideal world, the Node.js api would look something like the following:
var sslctx = crypto.createContext{key: privateKey, cert: certificate,
session_cache_get: function(session_id, result_callback) {
memcached.get(session_id, function(data, err) {
result_callback(data, err);
})
}});
var server = http.createServer(..);
server.setSecure(sslctx);
server.listen(8443);We started talking through the ideas. How could you accomplish this API for TLS in Node?
This cannot work with the standard OpenSSL callbacks, because of how Node.js works, after the initial cache get call returned undefined, we would unwind up the C-stack, and we have no way to notify OpenSSL later on that we got a Session Cache from memcached.
There are a few more hackish ways to solve this, they include:
Hey guys, what if we just implemented the a TLS Protocol parser?
It wasn’t a new idea. But then we started talking it through the idea of implementing a TLS protocol parser, but still using OpenSSL for all of the actual cryptography, it seemed to make more and more sense. This would let an http-parser style API be used for TLS, which as far as any of us know, has not been done. The parser could be written in C (or javascript, but thats irrelevant), the TLS record protocol itself isn’t too complex, it consistents of a few fixed width fields, a few optional fields, but most of the complexity comes from the implementation of all the cryptography, which none of us have an interest in replacing.
I am scared. Reimplementing SSL or TLS just seems wrong.
But on the other hand, most SSL implementations are tightly coupled to their cryptographic libraries, GnuTLS perhaps being the least so, but these libraries we still designed before many evented style programing paradigms became popular. It seems like there is a niche to be filled by a liberally licensed, TLS record protocol parser library, which provided stubs to use OpenSSL (or another) backend for the actual cryptography, but basing everything on callbacks to user code.
Is this insane?
Better late than never, here’s my conversation with Sean Owen about Apache Mahout, which graduated from the Incubator earlier this year.
You can listen to it HERE, or via iTunes.
Related site: Apache Mahout
Various research projects focus on learning more on how open source communities work:
When asked to fill out surveys, especially in cases where that happens for the n-th time with n being larger than say 5, software developers usually are not very likely to fill out these questionairs. However knowing some of the processes of open source software development it soon becomes obvious there are way more extensive sources for information - albeit not trivial to evaluate and prone to at least some error.
Free software tends to be developed “in the open”: Project members with various backgrounds get together to collaborate on a common subject, exchanging ideas, designs and thoughts digitally. Nearly every project with more then two members at least has mailing list archives and some sort of commit log to some version control system. Usually people also have bugtrackers that one can use as a source for information.
If we take the ASF as an example, there is a nice application to create various statistics from svn logs:
The caveats of this analysis are pretty obvious: Commit times are set according to the local of the server, however that may be far off compared to the actual timezone the developer lives in. Even when knowing each developer’s timezone there is still some in-accuracy in the estimations as people might cross timezone bounderies when going off for vacation. Still the data available from that source should already provide some input as to when people are contributing, how many projects they work on, how much effort in general goes into each project etc.
Turning the analysis the other way around and looking at mailing list contributions, one might ask whether a company indeed is involved in free software development. One trivial, naive first shot could be to simply look for mailinglist postings that originate from some corporate mail address. Again the raw numbers displayed below have to be normalised. This time company size and fraction of developers vs. non-developers in a company has to be taken into consideration when comparing graphs and numbers to each other.
Yet another caveat are mailinglists that are not archived in the mail archiving service that one may have choosen as the basis for comparison. In addition people may contribute from their employer’s machines but not use the corporate mail address (me personally I am one of these outliers, using the apache.org address for anything at some ASF project).
101tec |
JTeam |
Tarent
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Kippdata |
Lucid Imagination |
Day |
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HP |
IBM |
Yahoo!
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Nokia |
Oracle |
Sun
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Easily visible even from that trivial 5min analysis however is general trending of involvement in free software projects. In addition those projects are displayed prominently projects that employees are working with and contributing to most actively - it comes as no surprise that for Yahoo! that is Hadoop. In addition if graphs go back in time far enough, one might even see the timeframe of when a company changed its open source strategy (or was founded (see the graph of Lucid), or got acquired (see Sun’s graph), or acquired a company with a different stategy (see Oracle’s graph) ).
Sort of general advise might be to first use the data that is already out there as a starting point - in contrast to other closed communities free software developers tend to generate a lot of it. And usually it is freely available online. However when doing so, know your data well and be cautious to draw premature conclusions: The effect you are seeing may well be caused by some external factor.
La Brea Starter And Rustic Bread Recipe
: another variation of the Nancy Silverton recipe, and a loaf recipe to go with it
(tags: recipes food bread baking sourdough la-brea-bakery)
Nancy Silverton’s La Brea Bakery sourdough starter recipe
: lots of recommendations, but looks like hard work; grown from natural grape yeast
(tags: sourdough starter la-brea-bakery baking food recipes)
On The Record » Guest post – 500 Words of Summer – Mumblin’ Deaf Ro
: Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats
(tags: mumblin-deaf-ro statistics music irma music-industry piracy filesharing)
