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d4rt

56 karma · joined September 2, 2009

Duncan Turnbull Interested in IT Security, Compliance, Audit Partial to Log/IT Data analytics duncan.turnbull+hn@gmail.com
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d4rt··on PuTTY 0.61 released
I use GNU Screen for similar purposes (on Mac OS X)
d4rt··on Ferret: An Experimental Clojure Compiler
I loved the literate programming style and the cleanliness of the FFI also. Org-mode is even more useful than I had previously thought, the http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html Babel addition also has a wonderful introduction and looks like an extremely powerful way of presenting code and commentary.
d4rt··on Making Crash Bandicoot
Part 4 is probably the most fascinating piece, as it discusses how their technical choices were different from their competitors and how the leveraged those differences.
d4rt··on F.T.C. Online Privacy Plan Seeks ‘Do Not Track’ Option
Beef Taco is a Firefox extension designed to opt out of tracking cookies.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/180650/

I think it's an acceptable compromise to use such an extension.

d4rt··on Justin Kan: Measuring startup success by head count is toxic
Infuriatingly, it's not clear whether Burt Rutan built and designed his early planes by himself from the Wikipedia articles.

I may have bought into a mythical view of Burt, but I would definitely believe that Burt Rutan could build an aeroplane with 2 people.

d4rt··on Ask HN: Particularly elegant programs to study?
sqlite is both beautiful and has a significant test suite. http://www.sqlite.org/
d4rt··on Centralized Logging With Rsyslog
I've had to up the maximum simultaneous connections, but otherwise I've been able to log extremely large volumes of data from 1,000s of machines, with syslog-ng. I'd assume the same is true with rsyslog.

Looking at limits on open files, and considering tcp timeouts and cookies were all we needed. Total volume was in the order of high 10s of GB.

If you want to unpack offline, contact details are in my profile.

d4rt··on Why you should learn at least a little bit of Awk
I can't recommend the Sed & Awk book enough.

Regular expressions are my favourite secret weapon; So many problems are made simple by regular expressions and so few people (outside of IT) know of them.

d4rt··on Textarea, You Are A Sunken Nothing
Works for me with MacVim: http://phaseportrait.blogspot.com/2008/12/making-macvim-work...
d4rt··on Ask HN: 'Enterprise' hater
Enterprise extensibility and inter-operativity or inter-dependency is extremely complex to get right.

Multiple standards exist for just about anything, and most implementations of something are broken in one way or another. I've seen obvious and subtle breakage in things that ought to be simple: * timestamps (not unambigious, not including timezone data) * mac addresses (within SNMP, in a variety of formats in different places on the same kit) * integration with LDAP (group membership only looking at primary membership) * etc.

We live in hope. Postel's Law applies.

d4rt··on Ask HN: 'Enterprise' hater
An application is a software product which fulfills a useful purpose (performing a task, storing data, etc.)

An enterprise application is an application which is suitable for use in a wide variety of environments seen in companies. (for example, as a point of difference, an enterprise application might support a wider variety of platforms or data, or at greater scale than a non-enterprise application)

d4rt··on IE9 Preview: Large performance improvements and 95/100 on Acid3
The real shame is no IE9 for Windows XP. [1]

Some 60% [2] of the market share is Windows XP. IE 6 - 8 are going to be with us for some time.

[1] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/FrequentlyAskedQuesti...

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Microsoft_Win...

d4rt··on HTML5: Changing the browser-URL without refreshing page
wouldn't this be better if you could only go to the same level or lower, thus preventing server/~user1 pretending to be server/~user2?

does this break real use cases?

d4rt··on [dead]
corollary: if everyone complains your prices are too high, find a new market
d4rt··on Abine gets it right. Supports a product fork.
supporting the fork with updates to the opt outs is good, but the change to the add-on seems gratuitous.

a more user friendly approach would have been to give them the 'downgrade' update, and opened a tab offering the 'enhanced' abine privacy add-on. the update behaviour feels more appropriate for a scammy toolbar, than a useful privacy extension. among their target audience wouldn't this be a turn off?

d4rt··on Googler Drops Windows Zero-Day, Microsoft Unhappy
How do you know that IT pros are less likely to implement a workaround than hackers are to exploit it?

How prevalent is deploying workarounds and mitigations versus deploying patches? I don't know of any research in this area; it would be very interesting to know.

d4rt··on The end of :hover?
Adding a mode makes the interaction with it both modal and more complex.

Compatibility modes are confusing and user hostile, and two different methods of interaction increasing testing requirements.

d4rt··on Digital Sharecropping and Social Media
The important questions are how much value is derived from: - Privacy - Limited Sharing - Unlimited Sharing for both Facebook and the user. This can then be counterbalanced by the costs experienced by the user and Facebook, such as loss of privacy or spam from applications or adverts (a cost of attention/time)

If you do not derive a greater value from sharing your information than the cost, then do not share. It doesn't really matter to this whether Facebook is deriving value, only if you are incurring costs greater than the value received. I don't see how this is sharecropping.

d4rt··on Log file analysis with Haskell
Disclaimer: I work for a Splunk Partner.

Interesting technique, although I think a domain specific extension of Haskell for analysing log records might be more useful.

I'm sure there are more complex examples, but all the tasks in the screencast could be done easily with Splunk. It might, if you want to develop the idea of log analysis further to look at their search cheatsheet. http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/latest/SearchRefere...

Most of the syntax in the screencast is relatively guessable or explained, however NubBy means remove duplicates using the provided test condition. http://www.zvon.org/other/haskell/Outputlist/nubBy_f.html

d4rt··on Wage Slavery - Applicable to [Nearly] Everybody?
It's questioning the idea of work for wages, not the idea of producing in order to consume. An alternative system could be co-operatives or contract working, for example.
d4rt··on How to Spot a Spook
Could the lists in the article be cross referenced with 'public' data such as Facebook or LinkedIn to get better results?
d4rt··on How I Did It: Google's CEO on the Enduring Lessons of a Quirky IPO
With regards to the Dutch Auction it may not have captured the maximum value for Google, but did it capture more than the alternative?

According to http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_47/b3656143.htm the average IPO gained 14.1%, which would suggest they did leave money on the table, although I'd question if Google's IPO would be described as average. By comparison Akamai gained some 458% in it's first day of trading.

d4rt··on NAT-to-NAT direct connections with no proxy/STUN needed
On most firewalls this should be trivial. On an Cisco ASA:

access-list BLOCK_TIMEEXCEEDED deny icmp any any time-exceeded

(iirc) and then apply the acl. You should block all hosts as any could be chosen by the person. They could change 3.3.3.3 to any other IP.

NAT is not a security mechanism and does not ensure your hosts are protected. Denying tunneling of any kind is difficult as there are tunnels over most protocols. I'm not aware of any perfect prevention or detection technique, but detection could in the case of a moderate amount of data transit could possibly be done via analysis of netflow records. 

d4rt··on Carrots, Sticks and Lower Premiums
Hopefully soon we can engineer an eat watch http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/eatwatch.html

The rest of the Hacker's Diet is worth reading and has an excellent analytical approach to describe the eating (inputs) and energy use / exercise (outputs) of a simple model for your body.

d4rt··on James K Galbraith : In Defense of Deficits
I submitted this because it's a different viewpoint to those I've seen previously.

The point that countries with debt denominated in their own currencies are in a stronger position than others is valid, but I question the assertion that if inflation becomes the order of the day that there will always be buyers for sovereign debt.

d4rt··on Fire Your Relatives. Scare Your Employees. And Stop Whining.
His rules for supplier credit fail the basic rule of reciprocity, unless he also extends 45 days credit to his customers, which I doubt.
d4rt··on Ask HN: Everyday things you do that seem like magic
Using a text editor (Vim) to edit text. Particularly in this case use of the :g/ and :v/ commands to filter text and edit all lines matching a pattern.

Excel scripting and filtering and text functions. (Basic things, like looking for a particular string, and filtering a list to just those containing it using formula functions).

d4rt··on Drug money saved banks in global crisis
The Guardian and Observer are reputable news sources in the UK. Other reputable sources would include the Economist, the Times and the Independent, possibly also the Telegraph (it's suffered a decline in quality recently) and although satirical, Private Eye is also well regarded. The BBC is reputable, but not a newspaper.

The Daily Mail, Sun, Express are not as well regarded, and less likely to break stories of interest on the international scale. The Mail on Sunday tends to being more reliable, and has won accolades for its journalism, including Private Eye's Paul Foot awards (http://www.private-eye.co.uk/paul_foot.php?)

(Full disclosure: I am UK resident and read the Economist and Private Eye)

d4rt··on Everything Should Have An API
For my own personal use I think text based interfaces (with pipes) are superior, the higher level pluggable components in AppleScript/Automator seem more usable in general.

That said, there was an excellent article recently with the experiences of a trainer in getting people to use *nix, who found the minimalistic "command mode" more usable due to it's text oriented simplicity.

d4rt··on Death To The Div
This has the side effect of being unable to introduce any new tags in the HTML spec which have any properties different to div. (How would the browser know if it was a pseudodiv or a new tag? Possibly DOCTYPE, but that as a switch has had a varied history, which is one of the reasons for HTML5's <!DOCTYPE html>.) This solution creates more problems than it solves.