Last year I became the first journalist in the conference’s 24-year history to be thrown out of TED. The story is not a particularly glorious one, either for myself or for the organisers of TED, but I feel since a year has passed it is time to tell all. Excuse me if it sounds a little self-indulgent, but I feel the tale contains an important point about the way the conference is organised.

Haven't even finished this thing, but what a great lead in...

The nasty truth about TED :: Edmund Conway

http://www.mediafire.com/file/5zr02wkymy2/NitrogenDec2008.mp4

Nitrogen is a kick ass Erlang web framework that does all kinds of Web 3.0 things for you.

Thats right, I said Web 3.0. Fuck it.

Nitrogen Web Framework

directthought is proud to announce the development of a native iPhone application to access and control Amazon's EC2. You'll be able to keep tabs on your EC2 resource (instances, volumes, etc.) using this application running on your iPhone. Because it is a native application, it doesn't rely on any other server. All you rely on are your iPhone, Amazon's servers and your internet connection. This application is under development and has been tested on the iPhone and iPod touch. We're posting some preliminary screen shots. These are subject to change as the application is refined prior to release.

directThought

Ok recently I have been working on backing up my 17″ Mac Book Pro OS X machine (10.5). I am pretty good about backups… but not offsite backups, which would survive theft or server crash or house burning down.

I’ve become even more superstitious of late, because of what I’ve done to my Mac Book Pro - installing a striped RAID of two 500GB hard drives.

damien stolarz blog » Blog Archive » 1 Terabyte raid in my 17" Mac Book Pro

There is an annoying problem with Ubuntu. Using the command line editor nano, the backspace key acts sometimes as the delete key (deleting the first character on the right and not on the left).

You can fix this by adding the following line to your /etc/nanorc file:

set rebinddelete

//extrabright » Blog Archive » Ubuntu Nano Backspace Problem Fix

Select public data sets are hosted on Amazon EC2 for free as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots. Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use. If available, researchers can also use pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with tools like Inquiry by BioTeam to perform their analysis.

To get started using the Public Data Sets on AWS, simply perform these three easy steps:

1. Sign up for an Amazon EC2 account.
2. Launch an Amazon EC2 instance.
3. Create an Amazon EBS volume using the Snapshot ID listed in the catalog above for your chosen snapshot.

Fun, free datasets to play with on Amazon S3/EBS.

Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

You are probably well aware that Amazon S3 provides unlimited
scalability but does not have locking and transactions. There's also
a delay between the time when data is written to S3 and when it
becomes available for reading.

I tried several approaches but the best one turned out to be one of
hacking Mnesia internals to add s3_copies as a table type. I started
from scratch, as opposed to building up on Ulf Wiger's RDBMS but I
doubt I could have done it without reading the RDBMS code and asking
lots of questions, all of which Uffe was kind enough to asnwer.

Hacking Mnesia turned out to be a veritable pain in the rear as I had
to touch most of the modules, including today's extensive modding
session with mnesia_loader.erl. I will also need to apply the changes
to any upcoming releases of Mnesia.

Erlang Forum - Trap Exit - View topic - Amazon S3: Now with locking, transactions and caching

Are you running MySQL on Debian or Ubuntu with InnoDB? You might want to disable /etc/mysql/debian-start. When you run /etc/init.d/mysql start it runs this script, which runs mysqlcheck, which can destroy performance.

It can happen on a server with MyISAM tables, if there are enough tables, but it is far worse on InnoDB. There are a few reasons why this happens -- access to open an InnoDB table is serialized by a mutex, for one thing, and the mysqlcheck script opens all tables. One at a time.

The perils of InnoDB with Debian and startup scripts | MySQL Performance Blog

Learn how to write Erlang programs by sitting next to an experienced Erlang programmer as he builds a full-featured application from the ground up!

In these screencasts, Kevin Smith incrementally builds a distributed chat system using Erlang. You’ll learn first-hand how each aspect of the Erlang language fits together into a real-world application, starting with Erlang primitives and ending with an OTP application.

Whoop ass videos that if you grab the code from github and follow along and hack with him, you will wind up a decent Erlang hacker. $5 a video, I'm paying it.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Erlang in Practice

Yesterday I accidentally conducted a denial of service attack on my iPhone, using VOIP call flooding.

I failed to turn off the 'call workers' on one instance of a Scalr server farm, and then proceeded to load test it with valid POSTs to queue calls in the database. 50 call workers processes then began to pull call information from the queue - which contained 39,000 records, to make 50 calls simultaneously - to my cell phone.

It began to ring. Each time I pushed end call another was there. AT&T managed to deliver 37 simultaneous voicemails. In a couple minutes I managed to shut down the call workers and the flood ceased.

Sort of. I kept getting voicemails in blocks of 90 at a time for the rest of the day. The voice was me as 'Vinnie' threatening my life. It was kinda creepy. For a while my service turned off. Checking the logs, it seems that out of 350 or so calls that were made, about 300 got through and were able to leave messages. I find this somewhat impressive, but part of me regrets not spawning 500 call workers instead of 50 to see what the network could really handle.

I don't know if this has security implications beyond being humorous, but it is worth noting that every major VoiceXML/VOIP software provider provides developer accounts without much in the way of credentials. These accounts provide free outbound calling minutes for development purposes. It is also trivial to buy minutes in blocks from these same providers. Probably you could use this as a real DOS attack on someone's phone, or on an entire company or government agency's telephone system, if you had enough accounts distributed across providers.

I DOS'd My Cell Phone