Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-27

• twitter/iago · GitHub

  Iago is a load generation tool that replays production or synthetic traffic against a given target. Among other things, it differs from other load generation tools in that it attempts to hold constant the transaction rate. For example, if you want to test your service at 100K requests per minute, Iago attempts to achieve that rate.

  Because Iago replays traffic, you must specify the source of the traffic. You use a transaction log as the source of traffic, in which each transaction generates a request to your service that your service processes.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-26

• Schneier on Security: Resilience

  Any system, whether it’s the financial system, the environmental system, or something else, is always subject to all kinds of pressures. If it can withstand those pressures without really changing its behavior, then it’s robust. When a system can’t withstand them anymore but can deal with them by integrating some changes so the pressures fall off and it can keep going, then it’s resilient. If it comes to the point where the only choices are to make fundamental structural changes or to cease existence, then it becomes vulnerable.

• An Upgrade Race for Data Centers - WSJ.com

  Traditionally, much of the intelligence for controlling data communications is spread around a network, managed by proprietary software that comes with each vendor's gear. In the SDN approach, those control functions are split off to be managed by one central program, which may be run on an inexpensive server system. Specialized switches and routers continue to handle other data-passing chores, but they don't need to be as sophisticated as most current hardware.

• How SSDs conquered mobile devices and modern OSes | Ars Technica

  One of the most important operating system features to arrive along with flash drives is support for TRIM. Though it's commonly written in all capitals, TRIM isn't an acronym; rather, it's the name of the ATA command that the operating system can send to the SSD controller to indicate that a certain page or set of pages contains stale data.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-25

• Ahead of the Pack: the Pacemaker High-Availability Stack | Linux Journal

  A high-availability stack serves one purpose: through a redundant setup of two or more nodes, ensure service availability and recover services automatically in case of a problem. Florian Haas explores Pacemaker, the state-of-the-art high-availability stack on Linux.

• Stuxnet Will Come Back to Haunt Us - NYTimes.com

  It is one thing to write viruses and lock them away safely for future use should circumstances dictate it. It is quite another to deploy them in peacetime. Stuxnet has effectively fired the starting gun in a new arms race that is very likely to lead to the spread of similar and still more powerful offensive cyberweaponry across the Internet. Unlike nuclear or chemical weapons, however, countries are developing cyberweapons outside any regulatory framework.

• Why health IT systems integrate poorly today, and what future EHRs can do about it - O'Reilly Radar

  The problem is not that engineers don't know how to create the right technology solutions or that we're facing a big governance problem. Rather, the real cross-industry issue is much bigger: Our approach and the methods we have chosen for integration are opaque, decades old, and they reward closed systems. Drs. Mandl and Kohane summarize it well in their NEJM article by saying "a few companies controlling much of the market remain entrenched in 'legacy' approaches, threatening other vendors' viability."

• Secret corpse flights, pizza boy delivery routes and the daily commute: Stunning aerial images reveal never-before-seen side of America | Mail Online

  The art of GPS: Secret corpse flights, pizza boy delivery routes and the daily commute revealed in never-before-seen side of America

• An update on Ubuntu and Secure Boot « Canonical Blog

  The Secure Boot portion of the UEFI spec defines how computers boot. In a nutshell, Secure Boot requires a digital key to boot a computer in order to reduce the possibility of an attack in which malware tries to control the boot process of your computer. Secure Boot will be widespread on new computers bought in the coming year.

• The Linux Graphics Stack | Clean Rinse

  This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-23

• The Science Museum's Alan Turing exhibition: A beautiful mind | The Economist

  LIKE artists, many scientists do not achieve the fame they deserve until after they are dead. Alan Turing, the British mathematician best-known for his codebreaking exploits at Bletchley Park during the second world war, and for fathering the information age, is a perfect example. The secret nature of his wartime work and the rarefied abstractness of his best-known papers - as well as his 1952 conviction for homosexual sex, which was illegal at the time - conspired to keep him relatively little-known for decades after his suicide in 1954.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-21

• Next Cameras Come Into View - WSJ.com

  The new camera collects more than 30 times as much picture data as today's best consumer digital devices. While existing cameras can take photographs that have pixel counts in the tens of millions, the Duke device produces a still or video image with a billion pixels—five times as much detail as can be seen by a person with 20/20 vision.

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