Monday, August 23, 2010

H. L. Mencken - Wikiquote

Some excellent pithy quotes from Mencken, a dude I clearly need to read more of. Examples: "Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary"; and "To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride".

Monday, August 9, 2010

How to build your own CDN using BIND, GeoIP, Nginx, Varnish

Roll-your-own edge cache. Quite a, uh, concise write-up. Nice though.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

pwnat - NAT to NAT client-server communication

Cunning ICMP stuff to make direct connections 'cross NATs.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

TV Go Home

Remember this? From way back when Charlie Brooker's satire was brutally, bitingly good, and he didn't just write down the sort of lazy low-rent "criticism" that you or I or people we know quite easily come up with in the pub but don't bother to write down because it's just off-the-cuff throwaway tut and sell it to gullible editors because he can't be arsed to do anything proper like he used to? Like this, or Nathan Barley? Well, I do.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky

Joel reckons that SVN has made many people's mental models of version control a busted one, and that DVCSs like Mercurial are actually better. I'm-a read it and find out.

Monday, February 8, 2010

chandraonline.net » OpenVPN on a Jailbroken Iphone

So it turns out someone's written a tun emulator for Darwin and made a build for jailbroken iPhones. So, uh, hello routing all your iPhone traffic via a secure link to a remote node? Mmph.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Go Away

This is a very funny website. I like it a lot. I think you should read it and like it too.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Bombay Brasserie

I really want to go here and eat their amazing-looking food. You know, just in case anyone was thinking of treating me. Thanks in advance.

Monday, October 12, 2009

I like Unicorn because it's Unix

Unicorn is a "mostly pure-Ruby HTTP backend" using's Mongrel's HTTP parser but using a Unix prefork model to service requests. Interesting piece on how the Unix layer can doing the heavy lifting, via syscalls from Ruby.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Imogen Heap - Ellipsis

Long-heralded new album from Imogen. First couple of listens, it's definitely standing up to expectations.