untyping

Over the last weekend, and sporadically this week, the computer that hosts untyped.com and Untyped’s email server has been under attack from a network of spam bots. It doesn’t appear that we’ve been targeted specifically. Rather, it seems that the bots are scanning for email addresses to spam, presumably to propagate the bots. It took down our email server over the weekend, but we’ve since taken steps to combat the flood of traffic. However, if you sent us an email and are waiting for a response, you might want to send it again.

We’d don’t know what bot is attacking us, but there is a good chance it is the “Storm Worm”. I didn’t know of the Storm Worm before we were attacked; my reading since then indicates it is a truly massive network, with the potential to cause a lot of trouble. This Wired piece discusses how Estonia was taken off the Internet by a massive bot net attack.

This is post is from Dave, though it is posted under my name — Noel

I use Amazon S3 as an off-site backup for data on my desktop
computer. S3 has two principle advantages: there’s no upper limit on
the amount of data you can transmit or store, and it’s very cheap…
sometimes a little too cheap.

Two days ago I received an auto-generated warning from S3 about my
account status:

Greetings from Amazon Web Services,

AWS was unable to charge your account based on the payment
information you provided. Please update your payment method
information using the Your Web Services Account section of the AWS web
site.

Sincerely,

Amazon Web Services

There were a few extra details in there that convinced me that this
wasn’t spam, but that was the gist of it. I logged on to my account to
find that my balance was a whopping $0.01. A single cent!

I checked my credit card details and they seemed to be okay. I
re-entered them to be on the safe side, and then emailed AWS asking
them to re-try the payment and let me know if it failed again. I
received this response:

Thank you for contacting AWS regarding the payment issue related to
your August 1st bill. We have found that some credit card issuers
decline charges of $0.01 (USD), especially when the amount is
converted to another currency. AWS is working on a solution for this
issue. In the meantime, please contact AWS
directly at webservices@amazon.com if this issue should occur again.

The $0.01 (USD) charge on your August 1st bill has been forgiven,
and your account is in good standing.

A month’s backups, totally free of charge – that’s value
for money. I shall be recommending S3 to all my friends.

There’s been a bit of a backlog building up for Untyping while I work hard on other stuff. Here’s so the of the stuff that has recently caught my eye:

• “Show, don’t tell” is an old mantra in creative writing.
  Announcing the Business of Software Wiki is a great example of this principle in action. Note how Joel doesn’t tell you what a wiki is, which would be boring, but shows you with a brief demonstration. In addition to making more engaging prose showing conveys information on how to use the wiki, which helps bootstrap new users. Neat.
• Facebook opened up an API recently. While Facebook could make an engaging platform for many things Jason Kottke gives a well-reasoned argument on why it probably isn’t a big deal
• Watching without being. Just read this. Its only a short blog post but there’s too much in it to summarise here.

This is what’s caught my eye today:

• Slideaware discuss their shift from Python to Ruby on Rails to Erlang. Tune in next time when they tell us if Erlang delived the goods.
• I think everyone should know about Dirichlet processes. This should be a blog post of it’s own. I actually had a dream about such a post, so I guess it is destined to happen.
• Publications from the Software Technology group at Radboud University Nijmegen are currently the only place I know where you’ll find ideas on how to capture web-based workflows in a high level manner. The basic observation is simple: given a data definition you should be able to generate most of a web site that allows you to interact with that data. The trick is making it general enough to be useful. Rails has scaffolding but it is quite limited in what it can do, so it tends to be used only for prototyping. We want to use it for production code. This area involves lots of PLT goodness: FRP, bidirectional programming, and metaprogramming all look like they’ll play a part.

• AThe curious rotational memory of the Electron is sure fascinating, and makes me wish I had paid more attention in Physics 110. Read through the archives and impress your friends with the amazing Feynman plate trick!
• If you read the archives like I suggested you are undoubtedly all excited about monads of probability, so go here and download some more reading goodness. My goodness!
• Dave G today: “Snooze is a pro-testing library!”. Damn straight! Software has the right to testing, and that’s a right I’ll fight for. (Music, apparently, has the right to children. The implications of this are uncertain.)
• Leo “Flapjax” Meyerovich drops by the comments to let us know he’s going to do the world’s funnest PhD (at Berkeley, no less). Maybe he can employ Ezra as a RA? This is actually worth a post on it’s own, but time is short. I’ll just say two things: servers and mixed synchronous/asynchronous signals. Might not mean much to you, dear reader, should be enough for me to remember what I want to talk about.

These quick posts are fun to write. This could be the start of something.

• A fascinating study of the surprisingly humane system of privateering. Read it and reflect on current attitudes towards ransom in places like Iraq.
• I got emailed a survey today. As an incentive to complete it, the company offered to either put me into a competition to win an iPod, or to buy 75 kilos of CO₂ from European industries. How could I go for an iPod when offered this? Clever.
• This discussion of useful features that didn’t end up being necessary is very familiar. We’ve spent many a day implementing some nice abstraction that we don’t end up using.

I’ve just received an iPod, and so the acquisition of digital music is suddenly much more interesting to me. I have the following requirements:

• I want music
• I want it cheap
• I want it to work with my iPod
• I preferrably want it without DRM

So I surely must prostrate myself before iTunes? They’re getting a lot of press following the announcement by EMI that they’re selling their entire digital catalog without DRM, and at a higher quality than was previously available. Actually, a bit of searching shows that there is some respectable competition out there:

• 7digital offers EMI’s catalog as 320kbps MP3s (probably better than iTunes 256kbps AAC), and are cheaper than iTunes.
• eMusic offers DRM-free 192kbps VBR MP3s on a subscription based plan that works out much less than iTunes’ per track cost. Now their selection is limited, but if you like good music (i.e. the music I like) you’ll be well covered. Catalog search and FAQ here
• Bleep sells DRM-free 192kbps VBR MP3s. Like eMusic their selection is limited to “good music”. Individual tracks cost more than iTunes, but albums are less.

None of the above options offer the range of iTunes, but all are certainly worth considering before hitting iTunes. My main problem with eMusic is the subscription model; while 40 tracks a month is great, my monthly music budget is a less, on average, than their subscription fee. 7digital’s site is just a mess, which makes it distinctly less appealing. So it looks like Bleep is going to be my first port of call for digital music, followed by 7digital or iTunes.

Inspired by a LtU post I downloaded Vendetta and, poof!, two hours disappeared as I blasted an assortment of evil bots into space dust. Vendetta looked even more impressive when I learned that the
guys who develop it number precisely four. Very inspirational!

S3 is Amazon’s rather awesome data storage service. I’ll just note that it makes a great way of backing up your data; if you want to know more read Matt’s excellent overview.

We ran into problems setting up s3sync on a client’s system. Specifically SSL didn’t work, with the handy error message SSL Error:. That’s right, we were told there was an error put s3sync wouldn’t tell us what the error was. We tried using wget which was nice enough to tell us we had a certificate problem. An hour of Googling later and the solution was this:

• Grab the CA Cert file (cacert.pem) from any one of the bazillion places on the Internet that mirror it.
• Copy it to /usr/lib/ssl/certs/cert.pem
• Set SSL_CERT_DIR and SSL_CERT_FILE to /usr/lib/ssl/certs/ and /usr/lib/ssl/certs/cert.pem respectively.
• Nothing more to do!

I found the Lynx documentation the most useful. The OpenSSL documentation was much less helpful.

If there is one downside to owning Apple hardware it’s the cost of repairs. I’ve just come across iFixit, which has excellent do-it-yourself guides to replacing all the major components in your Mac. Yay!