Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for February 4th through February 11th:

• Schneier on Security: Interview with a Nigerian Internet Scammer – "We had something called the recovery approach. A few months after the original scam, we would approach the victim again, this time pretending to be from the FBI, or the Nigerian Authorities. The email would tell the victim that we had caught a scammer and had found all of the details of the original scam, and that the money could be recovered. Of course there would be fees involved as well. Victims would often pay up again to try and get their money back."
• xkcd – Frequency of Strip Versions of Various Games – n = Google hits for "strip <game name>" / Google hits for "<game name>"
• PeteSearch: How to split up the US – Visualization of social network clusters in the US. "information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there's a line between them.

  Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. For example Columbus, OH and Charleston WV are nearby as the crow flies, but share few connections, with Columbus clearly part of the North, and Charleston tied to the South."

• Redis: Lightweight key/value Store That Goes the Extra Mile | Linux Magazine – Sort of like memcache. "Calling redis a key/value store doesn’t quite due it justice. It’s better thought of as a “data structures” server that supports several native data types and operations on them. That’s pretty much how creator Salvatore Sanfilippo (known as antirez) describes it in the documentation. Let’s dig in and see how it works."
• Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com – Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

These are my links for June 11th through June 12th:

• Using Google Search to find interesting Twitter Users | Social Media Stuff | Justin Parks – Ideas for queries on Google to find Twitter users / content.
• David Ziegler’s Blog – A Python Script to Automatically Extract Excerpts From Articles – Some notes on cleaning up web page content to extract a text excerpt of the intended content.
• Papers on PageRank you should read | Science for SEO – A list of interesting PageRank and search relevance ranking papers. June 2009.
• aicoder: TunkRank Scoring Improvement – On influence ranking models for Twitter.
• datawrangling’s trendingtopics at master – GitHub – This repository contains the full source code for Trendingtopics.org, built by Data Wrangling to demonstrate how Hadoop & EC2 can power a data driven website. The trend statistics and time series data that run the site are updated periodically by launching a temporary EC2 cluster running the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution. Our initial seed data consists of the raw wikipedia database content dump along with hourly traffic logs for all articles collected from the wikipedia squid proxy (curated by Domas Mituzas). We made the first 7 months of this hourly data for all articles available as an Amazon Public Dataset. The current trend calculations are run with Hadoop Streaming and Hive. The output produced by these Hadoop jobs is loaded into MySQL and indexed to power the live site.

These are my links for June 9th through June 10th:

• Announcing the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop (Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!) – Yahoo releases its internal version of Hadoop, a source-only distribution of Apache Hadoop tested and used in production at Yahoo.
• Google Fusion Tables FAQ – Sort of like extra-large Google Docs spreadsheets, up to 100MB per table, 250MB per user. One interesting wrinkle is that it doesn't actually delete your dataset when you "delete" it, so the data is still available for derived tables that other users have built.
• Filesystem Performance from a Database Perspective – Presentation on performance benchmarks on linux filesystems (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, etc)
• What Assumptions Make: Filesystem I/O from a database perspective – Slide presentation comparing linux file system performance across various formats (ext2, ext3, etc), RAID configurations, readahead buffer sizes
• MySQL – Common Queries Tree – A collection of common queries implemented in MySQL

These are my links for June 3rd through June 4th:

• MIT Database Systems (6.830) TA Course Notes – marcua’s blog – Fall 2008 course notes on database systems, spanning history of databases and data structures up through mapreduce style systems.
• Ray Ozzie’s cloud hangs over the Valley | Beyond Binary – CNET News – Notes from Ray Ozzie talk on Microsoft and the cloud at Churchill Club, June 2009. Would be interesting to hear more of his thoughts on Google Wave, given his past work on Notes and Groove.
• Matasano Chargen » Blog Archive » Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong! – An epic discussion of shortcomings in various common encryption implementations for web applications, presented in the form of a somewhat random screenplay.
• Is Twitter A Substitute For Set Top Box Data? – The post describes a little experiment Simulmedia did to analyze TV channel surfers using only Twitter posts as their data source. Simulmedia explains why they turned to Twitter data for this work:
• NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream | Linux Magazine – A log structured (as opposed to journaling) file system with some advantages for write performance and shorter crash recovery times. Good for large working file systems?

These are my links for May 30th through May 31st:

• Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster | High Scalability – Collection of links to presentations and interviews regarding Twitter's architecture, implementation plans, and performance issues, from spring 2009.
• The Last Psychiatrist: The Difference Between An Amateur, A Scientist, And A Genius – An amateur is full of wonder and speculation, tinkering towards the truth but suffering from a lack of knowledge and idleness; he's not even sure if someone else has already made these discoveries. "Is this a worthwhile pursuit?"

  A scientist performs experiments to confirm or disprove a hypothesis, and in that way he grinds out the truth.

  A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think "out of the box". 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations.

• PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing – Research paper on sort of "super healing brush" for manipulating digital images, allows splicing together different sections of the image and automatically selecting similar textures to make the seam transitions work better.
• Light Blue Touchpaper » Blog Archive » Attack of the Zombie Photos – Social networking and sharing sites have challenges implementing and managing access control policies at large scale, and content delivery networks add another wrinkle.
• Map of all Google data center locations | Royal Pingdom – Where in the world is your search being served from? An attempt to assemble a list of known Google data centers worldwide.

These are my links for May 22nd through May 23rd:

• Improve MySQL Insert Performance – Summary – use LOAD DATA INFILE
• Scratch | Home | imagine, program, share – Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively
• Alice.org – Programming language environment for teaching kids, built on Java, geared toward a story telling approach.
• Jason R Briggs | Snake Wrangling for Kids – “Snake Wrangling for Kids” is a printable electronic book, for children 8 years and older, who would like to learn computer programming. It covers the very basics of programming, and uses the Python 3 programming language to teach the concepts.
• Benchmarking BDB, CDB and Tokyo Cabinet on large datasets – CDB comes out significantly faster. (It's for unchanging data though, so not totally surprising) Benchmark data for 11M key-value pair dataset stored in Berkeley DB, CDB, and Tokyo Cabinet.

These are my links for May 22nd from 06:31 to 07:14:

• Javascript Malware Analysis: A Case Study – "This particular beast was found in the wild in May 2009 on a site phishing for Facebook user credentials, and is a particularly-nasty bugger. Note the number of strangely-named variables created up front, many of which are not even referenced in the code blocks that follow. Additionally notice the odd ternary statements which have no impact on the operation of the code, and presumably must exist to trip up scanners (unless there is a fancy form of string replacement on the body of some functions, in which case the functions could be mutated before execution – and that would be scary. A cipher based on the body of the function has also been seen.)"
• MySQL: Forked beyond repair? | Developer World – InfoWorld – Now that MySQL is part of Oracle, will the forks take over? "if MySQL's approval ratings are slumping, all the more reason for Oracle to move decisively. Oracle must work to regain the trust and support of the MySQL community or risk losing mindshare to a fork, such as Drizzle or MariaDB. To do that, it has to avoid making the mistakes that Sun made when it acquired MySQL. In a sense, to succeed with MySQL, Oracle will have to stop acting like Oracle."
• Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Less Virtual, More Machine – Windows 7 and the magic of Boot to VHD – Notes on using Windows virtual hard drives to manage instances of multiple version of Windows in parallel, e.g. Windows 7 beta, WinXP, etc.
• How Opera’s business model works – Communication Breakdown – David Meyer’s Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community – Around 40M users, "Most of our revenue — 75-80 percent — comes from mobile devices, fom a free browser. We provide the browser for free, like Opera desktop and Mini, and then we generate revenue through our content partners. We provide the search in the right corner and things like that, and that generates revenues in the free distributions. Then you get paid by OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] for distribution — companies like Nokia and Motorola. Most of the mobile OEMs and a fair amount of the other OEMs. We signed up Ford recently and we're now in Ford trucks."
• Digicorp » Blog Archive » Prevention of Sql Injection with PHP – Notes on good coding hygiene for avoiding SQL injection attacks while processing web form input such as passwords and other text fields.

These are my links for May 19th from 08:04 to 19:24:

• List of Really Useful Free Tools For JavaScript Developers | W3Avenue –
• When Korean Culture Flourished – WSJ.com – In the geography of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the gallery devoted to Korea acts as a sort of land bridge between China and South Asia that all too often serves as passage rather than destination. The first in a series of shows to be held over the next 10 to 15 years, "Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600" may change this. With only 47 objects(!), the exhibition explores a fertile 200-year period in Korea's cultural history, revealing as much through its choice of works as it does through the order in which it displays them. The show's modest size makes the point that, sadly, little has survived from this period, when the Joseon — or Fresh Dawn — dynasty (1392-1910) united the Korean peninsula militarily, established Confucianism as the national ideology and introduced a phonetic alphabet.
• Axiis : Data Visualization Framework – Axiis provides both pre-built visualization components as well as abstract layout patterns and rendering classes that allow you to create your own unique visualizations. Axiis is built upon the Degrafa graphics framework and Adobe Flex 3.
• Report: Mint Considers Selling Anonymized Data from Its Users – ReadWriteWeb – A lot of people would be interested in that dataset. Tricky to balance data exposure with consumer privacy.
• Lendingclub.com: A De-anonymization Walkthrough « 33 Bits of Entropy – Step by step look at de-anonymizing a consumer data set. Given alternate sources, you can fill in a lot of gaps.

These are my links for May 14th through May 15th:

• Congratulations, Google staff: $210k in profit per head in 2008 | Royal Pingdom – Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft ($194K), Apple ($151K), Intel ($64K) and IBM ($30K).
• Statistical Data Mining Tutorials – A nice collection of presentations reviewing topics in data mining and machine learning. e.g. "HillClimbing, Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. Some very useful algorithms, to be used only in case of emergency." These include classification algorithms such as decision trees, neural nets, Bayesian classifiers, Support Vector Machines and cased-based (aka non-parametric) learning. They include regression algorithms such as multivariate polynomial regression, MARS, Locally Weighted Regression, GMDH and neural nets. And they include other data mining operations such as clustering (mixture models, k-means and hierarchical), Bayesian networks and Reinforcement Learning.
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Why Twitter’s Engineers Hate the @replies feature – Looking at the infrastructure overhead required for Twitter's attempted change to @reply behavior.
• Scratch Helps Kids Get With the Program – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – On my candidate list for 7th grade introductory programming and analysis. "Scratch, an M.I.T.-developed computer-programming language for children, is the focus of worldwide show-and-tell sessions this Saturday. "
• jLinq – Javascript Query Language – For manipulating data sets in Javascript, sort of like jQuery

These are my links for May 8th through May 12th:

• 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends – List of trend tracking sites, plus more in the comments.
• ToorCamp 2009, A Hacker Conference Inside An Abandoned Titan-1 Missile Silo – This looks like fun!
• neo4j open source graph database – Sounds interesting for social media graph hacking. "Neo4j is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables. A graph (mathematical lingo for a network) is a flexible data structure that allows a more agile and rapid style of development."
• One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages – A sample – "1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix."
• EJW.COM || SETTING THE EXAMPLE – Thoughts on URL shorteners from Eric James Woodward (tr.im / Nambu). tinyurl.com, bit.ly, tr.im etc know what everyone is shortening right now; is 15 minutes of lead time useful? Click throughs depend on audience size and can be gamed, etc.

These are my links for April 30th through May 2nd:

• FusionCharts Free – Animated Flash Charts and Graphs for ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, RoR and other web applications – Flash charting component that can be used to render data-driven & animated charts for your web applications and presentations. It is a cross-browser and cross-platform solution that can be used with PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations to deliver interactive and powerful flash charts. You do NOT need to know anything about Flash to use FusionCharts. All you need to know is the language you're programming in.
• Raphaël—JavaScript Library – Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library. Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
• A Really Gentle Introduction to Data Mining | Regular Geek – List of data mining blogs and related resources.
• BlackBerry SSH Tutorial: Connect to Unix Server using MidpSSH for Mobile Devices – Notes on using MidpSSH on Blackberry for remote access to servers. Seems to work, although big network lag on my BlackBerry Bold / AT&T.
• Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 – U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Beginning with the report for 2004, it replaced the previously published Patterns of Global Terrorism.
• DIY: How To Find Authoritative Twitter Users Plus 100 To Get You Started | Ignite Social Media – Some comments on recommendation metrics for Twitter, trying to use "favorites" mark as an indicator.
• SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."

These are my links for April 30th from 05:57 to 07:10:

• SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."
• How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – 100 remedies for the fatal flaws exhibited by famous evil overlords of the past. Also some business executives, I think.
• Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early | Wired Science – Google’s search data may have been able to provide an early warning of the swine flu outbreak — if the company had been looking in the right place. Last week, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, Google took a retroactive look at its search data from Mexico. And there the team found a pre-media bump in telltale flu-related search terms (you know, “influenza + phlegm + coughing”) that was inconsistent with standard, seasonal flu trends.
• What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees (SCREENSHOTS) – Some screen shots of current admin tools at Twitter for managing user accounts, blocks, whitelisting, suspensions, and user stats such as # follow attempts, # updates, #directs, etc
• Twitter Aggregator Sawhorse Media Raises Seed Round, Launches Pets, Celeb Sites | paidContent.org – "Channelized" feeds from curated lists of twitter sources.

These are my links for April 28th through April 29th:

• With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Use Yahoo to query and assemble data from around the internet, manipulate resulting XML recordsets with server side Javascript.
• Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool – Articles – MIX Online – "Makes jQuery accessible through a visual tool. The objective for Glimmer is pretty simple: to enable the power of jQuery through an interactive design surface. If jQuery is the "write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool. Glimmer has three core audiences: power users, designers and developers."
• Inside Facebook Reports: Why Hasn’t Facebook Grown More in China? – A look at Chinese consumer internet and social media usage, QQ, 51, Xiaonei, Kaixin, and some reasons why there are only around 300,000 Facebook users in China today.
• Facebook maps the swine flu hysteria | The Web Services Report – CNET News – Visualizing interest in swine flu by mapping percentages of mentions on Facebook wall pages, using data from Lexicon.
• Develop Twitter API application in django and deploy on Google App Engine — The Uswaretech Blog – Django Web Development – Walkthrough of a sample Twitter application on Google App Engine, using Django/Python.

These are my links for April 28th from 05:35 to 14:24:

• Official Google Blog: Adding search power to public data – Interesting. Wonder if the underlying public data sets will eventually become available on Google App Engine as well, sort of like the public data sets available for use with Amazon EC2 applications.
• MySQL And Search At Craigslist – Jeremy Zawodny's slides on MySQL, Sphinx, and free text search implementation at Craigslist, from last week's MySQL conference.
• Skew, The Frontend Engineer’s Misery @ Irrational Exuberance – For mashups and the like, the distinction between a FE engineer and web dev is rather small in terms of technical skills; they are both using the same skillset, they are both interacting with APIs, and so on. However, there are important distinctions between the two: 1. web developers tend to move in small groups or as individuals, whereas fe engineers work in larger groups, 2. web developers tend to design a product on top of an existing backend service (api, etc), while fe engineers are usually working in parallel with the backend being developed.
• Study: Twitter Audience Does Not Have A Return Policy – Over 60 percent of people who sign up to use the popular (and tremendously discussed) micro-blogging platform do not return to using it the following month, according to new data released by Nielsen Online. In other words, Twitter currently has just a 40 percent retention rate, up from just 30 percent in previous months–indicating an “I don’t get it factor” among new users that is reminiscent of the similarly-over hyped Second Life from a few years ago.
• Hey Americans, Appreciate Your Freedom Of Speech : NPR – Firoozeh Dumas on the underappreciated freedoms of speech and expression we have in the US vs journalists and bloggers in Iran.

These are my links for April 20th through April 23rd:

• What I’ve Learned from Hacker News – Paul Graham on social dynamics and managing Hacker News, user submitted comments and ranking (voting up/down) , editorial intervention and moderators, project goals.
• SEOmoz | Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed! – Looking at variations on algorithms for ranking items on social news aggregators
• NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome – Walkthrough on setting up cached PHP web server on nginx with apc.
• Particletree » PHP Quick Profiler – Lightweight tool for profiling PHP code.
• MySQL’s Full-Text Formulas – Database Journal –
• http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html – Online text-to-speech demo, with various male and female speakers, plus a few translations.
• Dealing with Duplicate Person Data – Proud to Use Perl – Classifying likely duplicate entries in name/address contact data using Levenshtein distance and tables of nickname synonym and assigned distance weights.
• Web Security Horror Stories: The Director’s Cut at <head> – Presentation slides from a talk by Simon Willison on cross site scripting, SQL injection, referer forgery, and clickjacking attacks on web applications.

These are my links for April 12th from 17:02 to 19:13:

• Dubai bashing and ‘what-aboutery’ – Joi Ito’s Web – Joi Ito comments on various recent negative articles on Dubai.
• A VR Geek Blog » Diva – Exploring your database in 3D – Visualization tool for looking at relational database structure in 3D, with optional data glove VR interface. Wonder if they ship with the cool techno music that's playing in the demo videos.
• Polar Rose | Naming is sharing! – Face recognition service, currently scans Flickr photo collections for tagging to Facebook names.
• iSerenity – A collection of background / ambient noise, including ocean, rainforest, city street, library, etc
• A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together | High Scalability – Notes on approaches to data caching in web applications.

These are my links for April 9th from 08:07 to 17:53:

• IP address geolocation SQL database – IP address geolocation with MySQL by Marc-Andre Caron. He's done all the necessary legwork to solve this problem, putting together a free, monthly-updated MySQL dataset that will allow you to derive country, region, city, zip, latitude, and longitude from an IP address.
• Del.icio.us Finally Gets Some Respect from Yahoo – Probably Too Late – ReadWriteWeb –
• In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson by Michael Rottman – The Morning News – "7. Do you feel protons decaying? Grand Unification may be occurring near your vital organs. "
• FT.com / Companies / UK companies – Dotcom veterans in Twitter ‘brains trust’ – "Mr Read has brought together a “brains trust” of advisers to Twitter Partners, including Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, founders of Lastminute.com; Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures, the London venture capitalists; and Toby Coppel, the former European vice-president at Yahoo."
• byteonic.com » What you cannot do using Java in Google App Engine – List of some restrictions on Java code running on GAE

These are my links for April 7th through April 9th:

• Stevey’s Home Page – Effective Emacs  –
• Why Reddit uses Python –
• Create a new social networking site in few hours using pinax platform (django). — The Uswaretech Blog – Django Web Development –
• One Laptop Battery Later And I’m A Django Fan –
• Bret Taylor’s talk in SF about FriendFeed’s… – Eric Florenzano – Some notes from a talk by Bret Taylor on FriendFeed's backend / database implementation
• Web 2.0 Asia :: See? I told ya Asian bloggers are different – Some statistics from Blogyam on blogger demographics and behaviors in South Korea.

These are my links for March 4th through March 6th:

• Welcome to VIPERdb – Scripps – VIPERdb is a database for icosahedral virus capsid structures . The emphasis of the resource is on providing data from structural and computational analyses on these systems, as well as high quality renderings for visual exploration.
• Virus images at VIPERdb – If you have ever wanted to make beautiful images of viruses, in colors of your choice, then go to VIPERdb, the virus particle explorer.
• Reverse HTTP – IETF draft-lentczner-rhttp-00.txt – Formal description of the reverse HTTP proposal for initiating connections through firewalls then reversing server and client roles.
• Reverse HTTP – Second Life Wiki – Experimental protocol which takes advantage of the HTTP/1.1 Upgrade: header to turn one HTTP socket around. When a client makes a request to a server with the Upgrade: PTTH/0.9 header, the server may respond with an Upgrade: PTTH/1.0 header, after which point the server starts using the socket as a client, and the client starts using the socket as a server.
• WTFs/m – The only valid measurement of code quality, WTFs/min

These are my links for February 27th through February 28th:

• jurriaanpersyn.com — Database Sharding at Netlog, with MySQL and PHP – Discussion and slides from a presentation at FOSDEM 2009 on database sharding and practical considerations implementing high traffic web services at Netlog.
• The New York Times Explains Twitter…to the New York Times | Peter Kafka – An introductory overview to Twitter for the New York Times, from the New York Times. Includes two embedded slide decks.
• Microsoft teams and products on Twitter | Adam Kinney, Continuum Explorer –
• The Big List Of Search Engines & Their Employees On Twitters –
• The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist – How many friends can you manage at once? Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.