Progress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakYes, the Viktorfeed is indeed down. Dubai Airport has redesigned its Web site, and the parser is now not parsing, and the error handling has failed to handle an error where the target page loads but contains unexpected HTML. I’ve stopped the cron job to save filling up the system logs. There will now be…
Read More FAILA thought; it’s surprising how much you can learn about computer science from cooking, and cooking from computer science. The von Neumann architecture – when you’re cooking, there is a central processing unit, which is the top of the stove, there is mass storage, which is the fridge and the cupboard, there is a user…
Read More cooking with John von NeumannSome data points relating to my last Sunday SDR post and specifically the points about the way in which some forms of advanced technology are becoming much more evenly distributed. Here’s Armscontrolwonk getting the wrong year, but more importantly, linking to India experimenting with hit-to-kill antiballistic missile/antisatellite technology. Here’s DARPA starting an app store for…
Read More Sunday SDR data pointsHere’s some more Iran sense. I especially like the bit where the Content is Free comments pit tries to explain to the Iranian all about Mohammed Mossadegh and all. that. jazz. Of course, he’s essentially reiterating the former head of the IRGC’s line. I’ve said before that the practicalities of this depend largely on what…
Read More who hid a radio under the stairs?OK, so the Dubai assassination team made regular phone calls on GSM devices during the operation. What numbers did they call? From which ones? Well, it looks like they both used prepaid SIM cards acquired in Austria and they called Austrian telephone numbers. Obviously, that’s partly explained by the fact that they probably talked among…
Read More Abu Asterisk strikes again…A proposal to deal with linkspammers – set up a central blackhole where you send everything that you spam-rate, and use the feed of URIs from it as an input to your automated spam filter. Its own web page is here. Unfortunately, as I point out, there’s a serious flaw here. Basically, if we’re going…
Read More anti-patterns in securityOK, so I did two things – I upgraded to OpenSUSE 11.2/KDE 4.3, which is great, and I’ve installed SQUIN, the semantic Web query server, on my laptop in order to work on WhoseKidAreYou. The concept of SQUIN is that it provides a SPARQL end point to do queries over the various, interlinked sets of…
Read More SQUINing like the proverbial 747Everyone’s taking the piss out of the Tories’ proposed £1m prize for a…something or other…ah, an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges Of course, it might be possible to make statements about this if only it was better specified. So everyone’s contented themselves with…
Read More a modest proposalOther people’s TDLs. I note that this year’s CCC has devoted some time to the wanktank phenomenon in Germany, and also elsewhere. Volker Bilk’s slides are here; it makes a lot of sense, but there’s quite a bit of German philosophical maundering in there, and I’d have liked to see more case studies/howtos. As far…
Read More CCC vs Wanktanks