Tracy

"If the hub supports XML entity expansion (and some implementations clearly do), the attacker could easily create a feed that is minuscule on their end, but would expand considerably when pushed to the victim’s server." Heh. XML sucks for data representation. WhereTF are the NoXML meetings? I'll buy the pizza. Long live JSON. Die XML-scum. Regardless, a lot of these server abuse issues have to be dealt with for any type of server that will be processing untrusted input. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

"In the meantime, I'm happy to say that I think every issue he points out has already been or can easily be mitigated in the hubs that are out there, the biggest help being automatic subscription refreshing (http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/svn...) which can narrow the window of any attack significantly." http://groups.google.com/group... - Tracy

Sometimes I feel like a Caltrans worker late at night. I'm not sure that I agree that "Maintenance really is easy." There have been some architectural changes that had to be performed in-flight that I called many things but easy wasn't one of them. Things are really interesting with so many public APIs changing so frequently. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

Nice old post on writing bash shell scripts. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

Better (IMHO) advice: write any non-trivial script in Python (or Perl, if you swing that way). - Tudor Bosman

I think it depends on which layer of the system I'm working on and my perception of how heavily/tightly modeled I want this piece -- which depends on how long I think I will need the piece and how much I will build on top of it. If I need to manipulate the system via command line tools for a quick hypothesis or some ops emergency I rely heavily on bash. Pieces of the system that are... more... - Tracy

The sad tale of sound in Linux. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

interesting background, though much has since changed - Mike Chelen

It's true, much has changed, but not necessarily for the better. Pulseaudio _promises_ to fix various issues and become the standard Linux sound server ... but at the moment it's still a source of grief for many Ubuntu users (myself included). I've followed the evolution of Linux sound as an end-user since the OSS-only days, waiting, hoping, that it will stabilize - it hasn't happened yet. Linux distros seem to get lots of things right, and so it's puzzling why sound has been so consistently stuffed up. - Andrew Perry

DIY board games. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

It tastes so much better than blackberry brambles. - Tracy

Yum ! Mooooo ! Yum ! - Andrew Perry

after a hard day on the boat - Tracy

Called the “Plain Preferred Term Sheet,” the document (embedded below) was inspired by a recent debate sparked by entrepreneur Chris Dixon (co-founder of Hunch) and investor Fred Wilson, who have been seeking a way to simplify the complicated provisions that have crept into the average term sheet. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

OAuth proxy for those that use the command line. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

Hadoop + Hive is like MapReduce + SQL. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

Slides and video for Voldemort, Cassandra, Dynomite, HBase, Hypertable, CouchDB, VPork, MongoDb - Tracy from Bookmarklet

"As researchers rush to commercialize printable batteries that pattern organic semiconductors onto paper-thin, flexible substrates, a German team claims to be on-track for a 2010 product launch. " - Tracy from Bookmarklet

A common concern with the current crop of Solid State Drives is the performance penalty associated with block-rewriting. The flash memory used on today's SSDs is comprised of cells that usually contain 4KB pages that are arranged in blocks of 512KB. When a cell is unused, data can be written to it relatively quickly. But if a cell already contains some data--no matter how little, even if it fills only a single page in the block--the entire block must be re-written. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

on the nature of introspection - Tracy

ouch. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

I've solved a lot of bugs while sleeping. Now I just need a REM nap room at the office. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

"In a number of tests, we observed that our indexing scheme can answer range queries tens of times faster than the well-known indexing schemes." - Tracy from Bookmarklet

Using bitmap indices, range queries can be answered with bitwise logical operations. Since bitwise logical operations are generally very well supported by computer hardware, uncompressed bitmaps involving relatively smaller number of bitmaps can be efficiently answered. In most scientific applications, the number of bitmaps in a bitmap index is typically large, say more than 1000. This... more... - Tracy

Quick overview of scalable infrastructure components. - Tracy from Bookmarklet

Time to join the denormalization revolution! - Tracy

A combination of Paxos and two-phase commit by Jim Gray and Leslie Lamport http://research.microsoft.com/apps... - Sanjay Ghemawat

"Instead, invest the additional time in crafting a broader suite of web services that access data in ways that are most commonly used, so that the smallest possible payload can be returned." Minimization of payload size is not the only variable. Don't forget latency. Depending on response size, a denormalized response that doesn't require additional calls may be better. The best policy: It depends... - Tracy