This is absolutely hilarious. A very excited australian is doing a commentary on a Starcraft replay.

Recently launched(?) music store Lala.com has been hacked. No, nobody broke into their servers or did any fancy-schmancy SQL injection, someone just figured out a clever way to trick their system into delivering data they would otherwise make money of.

Once again, Slashdot is home to malicious code. Posted by Anonymous Coward, there’s a full perl script that will let you not only search their list of songs from your terminal, but it also constructs the full URL to download it. For free.

An anonymous tip confirms that it works. Just kidding, it was me.

When was the last time you compiled this? Never? Well then you missed this:

memcache.c:45:2: warning: #warning "Working around busted-ass Linux header include problems: use FreeBSD instead"
memcache.c:46:2: warning: #warning "http://www.FreeBSD.org/ - you won't regret it"

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He’s told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its “availability” as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster.

I really feel bad for all the people who purchased the OLPC, not only as a neat thing to play with, but more so a charitable act (for each one bought, they give one away to a child in need.) I don’t really know what to say. It was an admirable effort, and something obviously went wrong along the way. Negroponte on my list of people to murder on sight? Check.

Read the full essay

“So really, all you dynamic language freaks, all you closure nazis, with your fancy scripts and your typeless nirvana, how fucking hard can it be to get the fuck out of our world, and go try and get a job doing what you asshats actually WANT to do? If your life is so great, why the fuck must you CONSTANTLY hassle us and shit in our coffee?”

Fun, I was never fond of Java for various reasons, but at least I don’t consider myself one that aimlessly disregard Java’s place in todays software engineering.

Read the whole thing

Holy-shit brilliant.

Oops: Safari Carpet Bomb - O’Reilly ONLamp Blog

The greatest fucking show ever made.

Oh, and apparently I’m descendant from a rock.

…goes: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. source. He’s dead, by the way. Recently, too.

Yes, so, I’ve kept this quote in the back of my mind for a while now, and I wanted to break it out on a worthy occasion. It’s arguable whether this is that occasion. I’m not sure.

—

Undoubtably you’ve heard about Amazon S3, or Simple Storage Service. If you haven’t, here’s a sufficient summary:

• They let you store infinite data
• They’re always up (well almost)
• It costs, like, nothing.

People have done several cool things with this, I’m sure you can imagine a few.

One of the things this made possible, was a “virtual file system” via FUSE in the Linux kernel. This means you can have a mount point on your computer that reads and writes directly from S3. So you got infinite storage. Cool, eh? You’re limited to transfer speed, of course, but that’s in the details.

At first, I tried s3fs (courtesy of Google), and it does the job. Horrendously slow, too. Which, makes sense too, if you think about it, kinda. When you write ls it has to connect to S3, get a dir listing, and present it to you. For each operation, it has to connect to S3. Or, well, theoretically. What you can do, and what something like Brackup does, is to use an inventory file. Kind of a “manifest” of who’s on the plane, so to speak.

I haven’t looked in any kind of implementation details, but I’d imagine this is what PersistentFS does. I jacked in to the raw S3, and checked out the files, and they’re divided/sharded in a very non-obvious way. s3fs on the other hand, would just store it verbatim.

—

Wait, the impact didn’t come across strongly enough there. Lets try again: PersistentFS! Besides the fact that their website marginally resembles that of MSDN a few years back (I think I even saw it on OSWD), their solution is pure-breed magic. It’s fast like a race horse just after it had its vitamins and all your files are right there when you remount it. It’s truly indistinguishable from the black arts.

Don’t go and ruin it by commenting on how it probably has some kind of smart caching going on, just let me enjoy it for a while. Heck, go try it yourself. It’s a lot of fun, if you’re a nerd. Excellent piece of engineering.

The fuckin’ MacGyver movie!

Nuff’ said.

And don’t you dare saying anything about Mr. Anderson’s age, Vesty is sixty-fucking-one and he just did a very successful feature film.

*Goes into convulsions mumbling “oh my god” repeatedly*

A couple of days ago, Guido posted to the py3k mailinglist about the code review tool that was showed off back in 2006.

Guido being patriotic Dutch named the tool after Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (Cheese Shop, anyone?)

The version he wrote for the G-men has apparently become so integrated with their own infrastructure, so he has written a version in Django that we can all see.

http://codereview.appspot.com/

Did you happen to catch Carnivale?

The effers over at HBO canceled the show after season 2. They’re in the habit of that, unfortunately.

—

When watching the season finale (last episode) of season 2, some music played towards the end really caught my attention. The kind of stunningly beautiful classical music that leaves you speechless.

Today I remembered this while having a conversation about the show, and set out to find the track, without being too hopeful. These things are usually composed by people working for the show or the station, and they are usually not released. Even if they are, they’re more often than not really hard to get a hold of.

I have a new hero: Jeff Beal - He also did the score for Rome, Ugly Betty (???) and Monk (remember that show?) — somewhat inconsistent, but hey.

The entire score is freely available on his site!

This piece is breathtaking. Go listen.

Apropos, my good friend Eirik Stavem is still looking for an ID on this track.

SOAP.. Where do I begin. Citing Wikipedia yields an attempt as good as any:

SOAP once stood for ‘Simple Object Access Protocol’ but this acronym was dropped with Version 1.2 of the standard, as it was considered to be misleading.

If you have ever used SOAP, you will appreciate the misnomer. SOAP is anything but simple, especially down at the very core. It’s meant to be a thing in between CORBA and XML-RPC — not quite as ambitious as the first, not as basic as the latter.

Ideally, SOAP is not so bad. It’s a way to communicate between services, despite of the language they happen to be written in. All communication is happening over a well-tested protocol, and there’s even this cool thing called a WSDL that describes what methods are available (introspection for you RPC people), and allows for definition of entirely arbitrary data types (as long as they are constructed of XSD primitives.)

As SOAP was very early on backed by Microsoft, they are also one of the most thorough adopters. In the .NET framework, there is excellent support for SOAP, and if you’ve ever had to cooperate with a service provided by another company using .NET technology, chances are you’ve had your hands in the SOAP.

So what’s the problem?

—

In my line of work, and I know I’m not alone in this, we prefer to use open source tools and languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby. While I cannot speak on behalf of the Rubies, I can with much despair say that SOAP is not exactly well represented in neither Perl or Python [A quick Google search reveals that Ruby has support for SOAP at the very core. Good for them.]

Perl has SOAP.pm — it hasn’t been updated since September 2000; SOAP went from draft to “W3C Recommendation” in 2003. I have not undertaken any large endeavors in this personally, but there has been much frustration among former coworkers.

In Python, you have several options. The major players are SOAPpy, ZSI and soaplib, the last one being fairly recent, in my experience is not very mature, and development seems to have come to a halt. Besides, as with ZSI, generating code from a given WSDL is not the way to go, IMHO.

Even in Mark Pilgrim’s book on Python, the chapter on SOAP uses SOAPpy. Unfortunately the simple example on that page does not adequately express the poor API you are given.

—

Enter suds. This small ambitious project came out of necessity. Spearheaded by Jeff Ortel from Redhat, this project approaches the problem in a way I feel is “right”. There is no code generation, or other “patch” solutions like that. It takes a WSDL, gives you everything you need from that, and behaves as smooth as XML-RPC, without imposing the verbose overhead on you, the developer.

Personally I’ve been following the project closely over the past weeks, and even contributed a few patches. A client has hired me/us for an assignment heavily involving SOAP, and so far it has been smooth sailing with suds. As with any new technology, especially as rumored as this one, the approach has been cautious. Slowly we’ve put down our guards, and started to embrace it.

—

Does SOAP deserve a place in our hearts? No. I still don’t like it, it feels like foreign territory and is under-represented in even the most mature of development environments — it’s still a painful beast.

But at least now it hurts a little less.

Link again.