Manhattan, entrance to South Ferry subway station. Returning from a tour of Liberty and Coney islands, I stop to take a photo of a group of street performers taking a break between acts. One of them asks me something I can’t quite hear, I get closer and ask him to repeat. He says: “got that [...]

Well not really. There wasn’t much to eat, anyway. I sat down and thought about why I had a blog in the first place, and it seems that a lot of them disappeared:

to have a blog: mission accomplished! no need to actually write anything
for telling people who care about what I’ve been up to: Twitter is [...]

Italians take their food seriously.
How seriously? There’s a company called Flying Mozzarella that will deliver you freshly made mozzarella from Italy to anywhere in Europe (and possibly further, I’m not sure). You order online – in 1kg increments – they make it in the morning and ship it by air right away. It’s delivered it [...]

I’ve switched the RSS feed to Feedburner (mostly so I can play with the admin interface). Depending on which software you use to subscribe, this might cause a bunch of old items to show up as unread – my apologies for that.

Needing a break from what has become an all too mundane Ireland, I found an excuse to take a vacation and spent the better part of yesterday island hopping. How so? Well, I flew from Dublin to London to Reykjavik. It’s too late to make a proper post, so here’s several rough (it’s 4 AM) [...]

By default, xterm scrolling (with the mouse wheel) doesn’t work with screen. Since screen’s scrollback buffer is so useful (I set mine to 100000 – screen is routinely the largest process on my work machine), wouldn’t it be neat if the mouse wheel scrolled through it instead? It turns out it can, just add the [...]

A fundraising campaign aimed to put “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” ads on London buses raised, up until I write this, £42 110 (it was 16 000 this morning, and their goal was 5 500). This is easily the coolest thing I’ve seen recently.
Before you jump and say that Dawkins [...]

Well, not really. But if you’re in the tech industry you’ve surely heard about the recently discovered DNS vulnerability, and if you’re the curious type you tried to guess how it might work. Dan Kaminsky had wisely decided to postpone the full disclosure until the Black Hat conference, but it was just a matter of [...]

… except it’s in the present. An amazing video documentary about North Korea, well worth watching. I was young enough during the communist regime in Romania for this to not bring back too many memories, but I’m sure my older readers will find it terrifying.

By far, the most frustrating thing about working at Google is not being able to talk much about the technology we use internally – especially the scale of some of the things we do. I’m really glad to see that Jeff Dean gave an interesting talk at the I/O conference and that, among other things, [...]