Month: June 2011

NATO is weak

“The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country. Yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US, once more, to make up the difference.” The underlying reason for these failings is no secret. Most Europeans spend too little on defence, and what they do is often wasted. That Europeans would struggle, militarily and politically, to maintain 10k troops in far-off Afghanistan is understandable. That they should be tiring in a limited air campaign on Europe’s own borderlands (less intense than the Kosovo war of 1999, for instance) suggests something bigger is amiss.

NATO can’t even sustain a campaign against libya.

Extreme Dating

DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork: Chocolates. If that doesn’t work, try roses. Don’t make a complicated plan on how to win their heart – just think of something simple and honest. RefactorMercilessly: If your date is less than impressed with your appearence or your PC vs Mac jokes, you’ve obviously done something wrong. Work to readjust their expectations of a date to something simpler and more reasonable. If you dare. Change your strategy if it’s going badly. Change yourself if you can’t see how to proceed.

chuckle

Perversion Tracker

And all for only $0.99? Great giblets of glory!

It turns out that building, eating, sharing, and enjoying tacos involves exactly this:

While we thumb-thrashed about in confusion, muttering, “build? eat? share?!… enjoy?”, our armpits smelled something like a 9.3. We adopted this as the official rating for More Tacos! 1.0. May there never be a change to that version number, Pajenco LLC.

making fun of the app store since 2008

LulzSec

Although large sections of the security community will deny it if you ask them, they’re secretly enjoying watching LulzSec’s campaign of mayhem unfold. LulzSec is running around pummelling some of the world’s most powerful organisations into the ground… for laughs! For lulz! For shits and giggles! Surely that tells you what you need to know about computer security: there isn’t any.

because it puts the media to work highlighting the cavalier attitude of business to security.

Reverse Engineering Superbugs

You can see that the gene for PBP2_ECOLI has a 100% match inside the genome of O104:H4. Now that we have this list, we can answer some interesting questions, such as “How many of the known drug resistance genes are inside O104:H4?” I find it fascinating that this question is answered with a shell script: cat uniprot_search_m9 | awk '{if ($3 > 99) { print;}}' | cut -f2 |grep -v ^# | cut -f1 -d"_" | cut -f3 -d"|" | sort | uniq | wc -l The above script tells us that 1138 genes are a 100% match against the database of 1378 genes. If you loosen the criteria up to a 99% match, allowing for 1 or 2 mutations per gene — possibly a result of sequencing errors or just evolution — the list expands to 1224 out of 1378.

grepping the genome of e.coli for cure clues