Links for 2011-08-23

BBC News - Turning electrical goods into pure gold

Jem Stansfield throws his own mobile phone in with bits of old computers and circuit boards in an attempt to create his own gold nugget but it is not an easy task - potentially lethal acids and temperatures of 1,000C are needed if the experiment is to work.

How to Make a Grappling Hook Gun With a Fire Extinguisher

As surprising as it is, there really is no where on the internet where I found any decent instructions on how to make a grappling hook gun. Figuring it would not be that hard to make, I decided to design and make one myself. After running into many problems, obstacles, and a few prototypes, I think I finally have a really solid version that definitely will impress all who use/see/build it. Naturally there are sure to be plenty of upgrades and other ways to accomplish what I did but I will share the parts and methods I used to make this particular launcher.

DevOps: What It Is, Why It Exists and Why It’s Indispensable

DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is quite the buzzword now, and the discussion yielded many attempts to define it. One thing we agreed on: Unfortunately development and operations are two organizational entities that tend not to get along very well. In this post I’ll explain why DevOps represents a mental shift from „us versus them” to a more cohesive, results-oriented approach.

Goodbye, shitty Car extends Vehicle object-orientation tutorial

I propose a new rule for discussions of object-oriented programming: > **Anyone who brings up examples of Dog, Bike, Car, Person, > or other real-world objects, unless they are talking about writing a > clone of The Sims or something, is immediately shot**.

I feel that this new policy will improve the quality of the discourse enormously.

Wugazi • 13 Chambers by WUGAZI on SoundCloud

Wu-Gazi: Shaolin Ninja goes mosh-punk Here’s a great combo – take hip-hop’s finest Wu-Tang Clan and post-hardcore band Fugazi and mosh them together.

Why I’m not on Google Plus - Charlie’s Diary

Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It’s nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it’s to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they’re pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it’s not a real identity to them: it’s a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won’t magically induce civility: the trolls don’t care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence.

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Losing the HP Way - Cringely on technology

The decline of HP began, I think, with the spinoff of Agilent Technologies in 1999. Lew Platt was running HP and he thought the company was too diversified and really needed to concentrate on computers, storage, and imaging. So everything else was spun-off into Agilent. And while this made sense at the time and even today, there were unintended consequences of that spinoff — the loss of HP’s corporate soul. You see Hewlett Packard was in 1999 an instrument company that made a hell of a lot of money from printers, not a printer company that also built instruments. Hewlett and Packard were instrument guys: had they still been on the job in 1999 they would have gone with Agilent. If Packard was still alive in 1999 I doubt that the spinoff would even have happened.

Aktion ‘Freiheit statt Angst’ am 10.9. in Wien | unwatched.org

Ein breites gesellschaftliches Bündnis ruft auch heuer wieder in ganz Europa zu Aktionen und Demonstrationen für Freiheitsrechte, für einen modernen Datenschutz und für ein freies Internet auf.

Auf österreichischer Seite plant unwatched.org für Samstag, den 10. September 2011 eine Veranstaltung (#fsa11_vie) im Metalab in Wien.

Ziel ist es, unterschiedliche Organisationen und Akteure, die sich für eine freie, demokratische und offene Gesellschaft einsetzen, zusammenzubringen und über Möglichkeiten zur Stärkung der Zivilgesellschaft (in Österreich) zu diskutieren, Aktionen zu planen und Informationen auszutauschen.

SSL termination: stunnel, nginx & stud | Vincent Bernat

There are a lot of knobs you can use to get better performances from SSL: choosing the best implementation, using more CPU cores, switching to 64bit system, choosing the right cipher suite and the appropriate key size and enabling a session cache.

We will consider three SSL terminators. They all use OpenSSL behind the hood. stunnel is the oldest one and uses a threaded model. stud is a recent attempt to write a simple SSL terminator which is efficient and scalable. It uses the one-process-per-core model. nginx is a web server and it can be used as reverse proxy and therefore act as SSL terminator. It is known to be one of the most efficient web server, hence the choice here. It also features built-in basic load balancing. Since stud and stunnel does not have this feature, we use them with HAProxy, an high performance load-balancer that usually defers the SSL part to stunnel (but stud can act as a drop-in replacement here).

Tagged as: delicious, links | Author: Martin Leyrer
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