2007
Heheh.. Elite! snakes on a #$#%@# plane!
Courtesy of afx:
Awesome data visualization stuff…
Steven Murdoch over at lightbluetouchpaper did an investigation into the Privila internship program.. What was also cool however was that he threw together a quick visualization of the data
Moving graphs are always cool, and the fact that he got it together so quickly was impressive.. a quick check shows that he used the Prefuse toolkit which is a totally BSD lic. visualization toolkit that looks simple to use with some awesome examples..
Another attempt at you-tube science, aka how to save 36c when changing the batteries on your remote!
ok.. so a long time ago we tried the you-tube mentos stuff and happily wasted time (and coke) in the office parking lot.. (of course this was after half assed attempts to mimic the experiments imperfectly.. given the typical office makeup, this ensured that we tried it with various other softdrinks, various other sweets and at one point even tried microwaving the drink cause roelof thought “the cold was ruining it”.)
Medical Doctors.. bah! hambug..
I’ve ranted a few times about things i hate about the way we “do medicine”. (Doctors are not alone here.. i cant believe that in the age where we operate on the eye with lasers and see production ready nano-tech. we consider yanking teeth with a pair of pliers a reasonable option)
Recently i heard an interview with the head of MS Research where he spoke about some of the same things.. i.e. that 9/10 people are visiting the doctor for the same thing (that new strain of flu going around) and that we could help alot of things with a simple “if you have a fever, and a runny nose and red spots today, u have the latest X going around.. take 2 of X and get some rest”. This would handle the majority of the ppl walking in..
How Gentoo got hacked.. holy #@^%&!!
If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then i dont want to know what this reads…
SensePost, now a company of SecureData…
For those of you haven’t yet seen, the J.S.E listed SecureData bought 100% of the shares in SensePost late last week.. We have had many offers over the past few years and while the money was generally good, the fit was not.. We believe we found this fit with SecureData (formerly ERP.com) as an independent company within the SecureData stable.
The deal changes very little operationally for SensePost, with all management and directors staying exactly where we are.. We wont be moving offices (and i still wont be wearing a suit any time soon!). Our independence remains and we will remain product agnostic. (if anything it will now mean that we will get a bunch of kit to break from/for SecureData :> ) Our reports remain privileged information between us and our clients, and our advice like always will be whatever we believe is in the customers best interests.. Both SensePost and SecureData believe that this impartiality is important and we would not be going forward with the deal without this being agreed on in spirit and on paper..
Thunks from hacking games
In Vegas I bought Herman “Exploiting Online Games” by Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw. Being the saint that I am, I looked at the book thoroughly on the plane on the way home. Fortunately I was able to verify that most of the pages were there and intact and that were no blatant spelling or grammatical errors – it wouldn’t do to give Herman a broken book.
Whilst I was checking the Herman’s gift *anyway* I figured it wouldn’t hurt to also read and absorb some of the content – just to make sure I wasn’t giving him nonsense (with all due respect to Greg and Gary). In particular what interested me was whether their thinking on online games held any lessons for the work we more traditionally do on online financial and e-commerce systems. I thought the book was fascinating, particularly in this context. What follows is a mind dump of some of the thoughts I had as I was reading.
It begs the question…
I cant recall who said it in yesterdays meeting, but my response is simple: http://begthequestion.info/
MTBF and Light Bulbs..
Some of you will know that i finally moved out of the shoe box i lived in for 6 years and moved into a house (about 3 months ago) Since then i have replaced 3 different light bulbs at different places in the house.. Now this made me start thinking.. Surely when the house was new, they fitted in all the bulbs as brand new.. Now some sections of the house light a series of 4 or 6 bulbs at once.. yet there appears to be no link at all between “sibling” bulbs and their life-span..
BMC Video on DTrace..
BMC did his 90 minute engedu talk on DTrace at google to show some of its coolness (and from the looks of things to help get a Linux port going). DTrace looks awesome for system instrumentation (like strace on steroids)(although limiting it like that does it no justice at all). From the DTrace Page: “DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.”
Its the #1 thing that has me all excited about leopard (shipping with dtrace by default) and i genuinely cant wait (maybe now ill spend the extra minutes finding out how growlNotify manages to occasionally hose my box ;> )