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squeed

981 karma · joined February 3, 2011

rkt developer, cni maintainer, ipv6 aficionado.

irc.freenode.net #rkt squeed

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squeed··on In Denmark, Pedaling to Work on a Superhighway
Minneapolis was very lucky: they inherited a large number of extremely high quality freight rail right-of-ways as the industry moved out of the city center. These are perfect for conversion in to bike paths: few hills, and routed to minimize grade crossings (and hence traffic lights). I wish they were everywhere, but building bike routes of this quality in other cities will be much harder.

Denmark seems to have built the "superhighway" from scratch, which is pretty cool. It also seems to have only cost $1.5 million. Since the average freeway costs about $1 million per mile, WHY DON'T WE HAVE MORE BIKEWAYS!?

sorry, lost my composure there.

squeed··on Advice for Marissa Mayer from an ex-Yahoo
According to http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=YHOO+Balance+Sheet&annua..., Yahoo has $1.5 billion in the bank. I think they can afford it.

For all this talk, everyone forgets that Yahoo is (still) profitable! Unlike Nokia or Blackberry, they have a fighting chance, financially.

squeed··on [dead]
Ordinarily I'd agree, but a huge part of businesses like Skype is the network effect. In other words, Skype is useful because basically everyone has an account and knows how to use the software. So the attitude towards free users has to be more subtle than 'fuck them'.

Skype is mature from a user base perspective. Holding off on monetizing free users until network effects start to bring real pull is a great game plan.

squeed··on Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delivery network
Fair enough. The last time I was privy to this, it was more than a year ago. I didn't expect things to change that much :-).
squeed··on Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delivery network
Actually, no, Comcast's paid peering costs are significantly cheaper than all but the lowest quality transit. In other words, if you just have Cogent, you get what you pay for.
squeed··on Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delivery network
Comcast does not operate their own video delivery infrastructure. They contract that out to Akamai. Furthermore, Comcast will happily sell non-transit, A.K.A. paid peering, to all who come. They don't (and never have) sell colocation (DC space). Presumably, Netflix is just going to buy access to the Comcast network, same as every other CDN has done.

http://www.comcast.com/dedicatedinternet/

squeed··on Facebook IPO Seen Deepening Investor Distrust Of Stocks
You know what? Good. A stock that explodes after the IPO means it was priced too low, and the company didn't raise a fair amount of capital.

Facebook is obviously smart enough to think for the long term. I don't trust the financial machinery to do that.

squeed··on A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
Indeed. Inktomi also tried to position themselves as an arms supplier to the CDN business. It didn't help that the CDN business basically disappeared from 2001-2004, and that CDNs, to this day, rarely buy software.
squeed··on Submarine Cable Map
I'm surprised at how well connected Australia is. Why is their internet still so expensive?
squeed··on Don’t lie to me, Argentina. Imagine a world without statistics
Check out the comments in that article. Am I the only one who stops listening when the Economist is accused of conspiracy?

Sure, they have certain biases which are pretty easy to spot, but accusing them of being an American mouthpiece seems way off the mark.

squeed··on Dreamliner spells out "787" & Boeing logo over US during test flight
I'd just like to say: Thanks for running such an awesome site!

I use FlightAware to hack airlines by trying to locate the incoming flight that is to be my outgoing plane. Any plane landing ~60 minutes before my departure whose make and model matches my flight is a suspect. I can usually predict whether or not we'll have an on-time departure long before announcements are made.

squeed··on Mitmproxy - an SSL-capable man-in-the-middle proxy
Agreed, I've also used Burp to great effect. I'm glad this field is getting a lot of attention.
squeed··on And then...silence
I agree. I've lurked on StackOverflow for a long time now, and I watched the rise of 'meta' style questions as they polluted the question space. This lead to the establishment of the Meta-StackExchange site, which was not an obvious choice at the time. I love how the product they've created provides a very strict structure within which a community can take place.

I wonder what approach, if any, Quora will take to the potential of meta-pollution.

squeed··on foo@bar.com is a real email address
Some folks registered asdf.com, and had a similar experience. I wish they posted their inbox for all to see.

(http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html)

squeed··on Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation
Interestingly enough, the database is definitely copyrighted work in Europe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right.
squeed··on HP Names Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer
You're both right. While it is true that for the hardware business, HP's stability is surely good enough. On the other hand, when it comes to enterprise contracts, stability matters a lot more.

I have at least some first-hand evidence to this fact. $DAYJOB is currently at a large enterprise service provider. We are currently buying HP switches like crazy, and I don't expect that to change. I've also been privy to some aspects of the sales process. We can go through the sales song and dance forever and ever, going deeper and deeper in to technical and business details. However, when the prospect asks about company stability, size, and governance, this always signifies they are about to ask for a formal contract.

In other words, for big, enterprise customers, stability matters. It's impossible to tell what sort of effect this will have on HP. Maybe none. But these sorts of subtle changes to reputation have a funny trajectory of their own, independent of the instantaneous news cycle. I wouldn't be surprised if IBM et al. started using the shake-up to their advantage during the sales process. We very well might see some of the after-effects in the next six months.

The way HP handles this transition will be critical. If the board looks like they are floundering, I think they will be toast. If they can keep up the appearance of running a tight ship, they'll be alright.

squeed··on Opening a Delaware Corporation: an Incorporation Guide for Foreigners
Delaware is a the most common place for incorporation mostly because they have by far the most legal precedent. This reduces legal uncertainties. This also means that, in general, corporate lawyers are familiar with Delaware codes w.r.t. incorporation.
squeed··on The $700 Million Yogurt Startup
Chobani got an old factory that Kraft was letting go. Tesla got the GM NUMMI factory for pennies on the dollar, too.

It would do these large companies well to hand old factories over to internal skunk-works teams to tinker first.

squeed··on What programmers need to know about hardware prefetching?
The article really only touches on the absolute basics. It would have left me hurting for more specifics. However, I've read Ulrich Drepper's epic paper on modern memory architectures. (http://lwn.net/Articles/259710/)

You should do yourself a favor and read it.

squeed··on Amen: the world's most famous sample and the rise of the musical copyright
This is a great question, and not a hypothetical one. In fact, there are places in the world that have essentially no IP protection. As always, it's hard to say what the "results" are, since these places didn't switch from a IP to non-IP environment, but it can be interesting to compare.

The first example is China[1]. Chinese consumers have been raised in an environment where everything can and will be pirated over and over. "Chinese consumers 'won’t pay a penny' for recorded music," claims the article. Yet, artists are still producing a steady stream of music. The article is, sadly, short on details about how musicians and music distributors actually make money. Perhaps it's via advertisement? In another article that I can't for the life of me find, it seems that the only Chinese musicians that make any money at all have massive star power and can command high ticket prices. So, the Chinese music market has turned in to a publicity machine to sell celebrity and the resulting high ticket prices.

The second example is "Nollywood", or the massive Nigerian film industry[2]. In this case, the film studios have about a week before pirates manage to distribute new films. The only way they can make nmoney is to produce, well, a new film each week. I posit that the films would be of higher quality if there was less piracy.

So, I think it's fair to say that there can be such a thing as too little IP protection.

1: http://www.economist.com/node/17627557

2: http://www.economist.com/node/17723124

squeed··on JSON users: Avoid CSRFs by not using top-level arrays
Yours is a good solution, and effectively blocks the attack mentioned in this article. From a REST purity standpoint, it's "unclean" to require all API calls to be POSTS, but, hey, life is short.
squeed··on A year of non-Latin script domain names
Not exactly. There are already IDN TLDs in existence.

More specifically, the "." is still a separator. Any component of the domain name can independently have xn-- and it will be interpreted as Punycode. Today you could register ujjvala.السعودية and it would be completely valid.

squeed··on Working with Python subprocess - Shells, Processes, Streams, Pipes, Redirects
Python's subprocess module is great. It is definitely the cleanest wrapping of a system program of any of the scripting languages I've ever used. When you just want output, you call .communicate() and be done with it. When you want to interact, the file descriptors are there for you to play with. It's scripting heaven.

There is one feature that he could have touched on more:

shell=False is the only easy, safe way to put user-supplied input in a command line. This stuff is just too damned easy to get wrong.

I've seen heroic code that tried to work around shell quoting and escaping vulnerabilities. One colleague was trying to write a wrapper around the ldapsearch binary, and decided that filtering all "|" would do it. He'd completely forgotten that ` also triggers arbitrary command execution.

Don't be a hero. Keep bash away from your input.

squeed··on Netflix Now The Largest Single Source of Internet Traffic In North America
At least two of Netflix's three CDNs place servers or connections within the ISPs. Akamai has servers deployed within almost every ISP, and Limelight has peering connections to their datacenters. I'm not sure about Level3 (and they've been pretty tight-lipped given the Comcast brouhaha).

Rather than caching on the router side, I believe most of the magic happens in the load-balancing side. The effect (to the end-user) is the same, though.

squeed··on Deadlines Forces Creativity
This was also commented on in the Tao of Programming:

A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. "It will be finished tomorrow," the programmer promptly replied.

"I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager, "Truthfully, how long will it take?"

The programmer thought for a moment. "I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks," he finally said.

"Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete."

The programmer agreed to this.

Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement luncheon, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night.

-- "The Tao of Programming", section 5.3

squeed··on It's the Latency, Stupid
What you were seeing was the dreaded Buffer Bloat. It's really quite common nowadays. Memory is so unbelievably cheap, so device manufacturers all up and down the ISO stack are putting too much memory in their transceiver buffers.

Why is this bad? Because it screws with TCP window adjustments. Remember that your OS will send packets until it starts to see drops, then back off of the transmit rate. You can adjust the parameters (startup rate, backoff rate), but that's the basic principle. However, when there is an overly large buffer somewhere in the middle of the network, this delays drops. This has the effect of making it nearly impossible for your TCP stack to determine the true bandwidth.

For some reason, most mobile device manufacturers are the worst offenders when it comes to bufferbloat.

Anyways, this was a brief summary. For a much better explanation (including pretty graphs), see http://www.bufferbloat.net/

squeed··on RESTduino - Arduino hacking for the REST of us
checks date. Are you sure this isn't an April Fools' joke?
squeed··on VVVVVV 60% Off On The Mac App Store This Weekend
Warning: do not buy VVVVVV if you haven't yet finished your taxes. You will not get anything done.
squeed··on The secret life of punctuation - ¶ (The Pilcrow)
Slick article, and really dope wordpress theme. Anyone have the source?
squeed··on You Owe it to Yourself to be Old-School
"""Think about it, in the 'full stack' of browser -> client -> interweb -> web server -> app server -> db server the little bit of code that you wrote is minuscule compared to what you didn't write.""" This. The old saying "don't prematurely optimize" has never been truer. Too bad it's gotten harder to profile. Unless you write a boring CGI, one-load-per-page site, you're never going to be able to get all of that information server-side. The only way is with browser-based testing frameworks... Sigh.
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