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A “Bob” story
If you are not familiar with the “Bob story” concept: I first heard about it on the Pauldotcom podcast, where Twitchy used to tell stories about how “Bob” went wardriving, created a fake AP and did other grayhat things. They may have taken the idea from somewhere, but this is where I’ve heard it first.…
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Launching The Twit Feeder
As the readers of the blog know, I’ve been slicing and dicing the Twitter RSS feed for some time. Finally I launched a free service which wraps all the improvements in one, easy to use and best of all, free (!) service: The Twit Feeder. Cross-Posted from The Twit Feeder blog: Efficiency is key for…
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Choosing a Java profiler
Recently I’ve been looking around for a Java profiler (since the two things you need for a successful performance tuning session are good data and clear targets). I’ll share the notes about my findings in the hope that they might be useful for someone. Quick disclaimer: don’t believe everything you read on the Internet! These…
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As if you need extra reasons for paranoia
As they say: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that you’re not being watched! Here are a couple of links which freaked me out recently: Warily, and with much trepidation – a blogpost about how one deleted his facebook settings because of privacy concerns. I do have a facebook page, but I only use…
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Don’t Yield to pressure?
or: does Thread.yield have its place in todays Java programs? I was profiling a rather old legacy codebase (since the first rule of performance optimization is “profile it” with the close second of “have clear goals in mind” – but that’s an other post) and – after optimizing the first few hotspots, Thread.yield appeared at…
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How to save/restore iptables rules on Ubuntu?
This might be an obvious thing to old Linux-heads out there, but it sure caught me off-guard, so there might be some use in spelling it out: iptables-save and iptables-restore do not actually save/load the iptables rules to/from an external file. You are responsible for redirecting the output of iptables-save to a file and modifying…
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How eco-friendly is a BMW?
The short answer is: I don’t know 🙂 While I was watching National Geographic, I caught a glimpse of the BMW “Efficient Dynamic” advertisement campaign. The claims made by this campaign were quite extraordinary and – being the cynic that I am – I thought: hang on, this sounds too good to be true. The…
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Recouping your data from a hung program
Scenario: you are typing away in your blog editor on Ubuntu doing a (somewhat) Flash-heavy post. You make the mistake of hitting “Preview” and the blogging software hangs. How can you get your post out? Find the PID of your blogging software Coredump it (gcore [PID] – this will create a file called core.[PID] in…
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Congratulation to AV-Comparatives!
AV-Comparatives is an independent, well-known and well respected testing organization in the AV/Anti-Malware field. They recently published two reports and one meta-report: Whole Product Dynamic Test Performance Test Summary Reports Go read them if you have questions like “which product is the best for me?”. Thank you Andreas for providing a great and impartial service.…
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Don’t listen alone!
Do you like Linux? Do you listen to podcasts? If you’ve answered yes to both of those questions, you should know what LUG Radio is (if not, do a quick checking – I promise you that it will be worth it!). The bad news? They stopped it in 2008. The good news? A documentary titled…