A fabulous article about the Guardian’s MP expenses crowd sourcing experiment

Fabulous in so many ways, not least that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts:

• mp expenses
• guardian (not-for-profit org = win!)
• open source
• web frameworks (django, php, ruby on rails, catalyst)
• rapid development
• crowd sourcing
• amazon ec2

On that last point: entire server/hardware cost: £50 (using Amazon ec2) vs “The Guardian has lead time of several weeks to get new hardware”.

And something not explicitly mentioned - really good developers are really worth it. Not just in pay, but in listening to, supporting & giving them a brief, then getting the hell out of the way and letting the sparks fly.

I confess a (very personal) weak spot for the application of IT in media environments. It’s fabulous.

This ought to work for Airport Express devices too, although I’ve not tested it. Ditto it should be similar on a BSD like machine.

On your debian / ubuntu box

• If you have a firewall / iptables setup, enable UDP port 514 from your local network (or at least the IP of the Airport)

• Add the following line to /etc/syslog.conf

  local0.* /var/log/AirPort.log

• To prevent the Airport messages also appearing in /var/log/messages, find the stanza in /etc/syslog.conf that controls that file and add

  !local0.*;\

• Restart your syslog deamon

  sudo /etc/init.d/sysklogd restart

Access the Airport via your Airport Utility

• Advanced tab
• Syslog Destination Address is the IP or hostname of the Debian / Ubuntu linux box that you want to contain the logs. Start with the IP address to get it working, then flip to a hostname if you prefer.

See also AirPort Extreme: Remotely logging base station activity

Take a default Ubuntu/Debian install using the Mutt mail client (MUA) then switch to exim4.

You get the most monumental FAIL - your bcc addresses will be included in the message to everyone else. Dangerous and embarrassing!

Happily there is a fix, but it seems insane that you should even need it. Read on for details.

It appears to me that the javascript shipped in the open source movable type for Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) is broken. To be fair, it is listed as beta. Anyway, details and a fix follow …

Back after a short relapse and a move to a new server.

A few links to stuff that’s interested us of late:

• Secure password management using CPM. I’ve used ccrypt in the past along with a liberal sprinkle of grep and some wrappers in bash.
• Does the gmail train ever stop? Offline Gmail (along with some interesting hax0r vectors) and a hint that they might be trying PGP in Gmail. How nice would it be if my mum could get PGP email sigs without having to worry about all the nerdy details?
• One of Google Chrome’s natty features is DNS Prefetching and now, if you don’t mind having to login first, you can get a DNS prefetch extension for firefox too. We’ve been getting good mileage out of OpenDNS too of recent. It whips the ass of our (otherwise, pretty savy) isps offering. Our only niggle is that OpenDNS proxy google search pages which is vexing. That said, register a free account and you can customise the DNS settings for your ip address and, I believe, disable the google proxying.
• The consistently enjoyable High Scalability blog has a post about Facebook’s Cassandra. Yet another distributed data store solution, but on the surface, looks like it may be a decent contender.

Use Perl to create graphs from your network logs, then have your friends fire packets at you so they can “draw” on your log graphs.Nifty stuff, although it looks to be three years old!

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a neat idea, but I’ve often wondered why people don’t consider it slave labor the way they might a Nike sweatshop. (Nike settled.)And then High Scalability has a post about getting work done for free albeit this time to fight spam.

Some top picks from the last few days:A good overview and comparison of various Virtualization technologies from the ever interesting Kris Buytaert.The High Scalability blog pulls together a list of places that are discussing the state of the art in scaling in the cloud. Not entirely un-related is High Scalability’s overview of the Second Life Architecture. 12Gbit/sec in 2007 and growing huh?The Bend in the Weather blog covers how to setup your networking in VirtualBox.Enjoy! Comments or email always welcome.

What technology platforms do the big boys run (Digg, ebay, Amazon and YouTube)?What architectures do they use?What tips and lessons can they share?twit88.com has the details.

How cool - Stanford’s three-course Introduction to Computer Science and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.  Online and free.Materials, tutorial notes, handouts, exams and a social network to interact with other students.Not any old rubbish either - the Introduction to Computer Science is “taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates”http://see.stanford.edu/