Hacks

Ken Schwaber on Scrum

Scrum is a collection of tools for agile software development and project management. It helps to focus small software development teams into delivering a complete, tested, and quality product by breaking the development into small iterative chunks with a concrete output. Scrum doesn’t necessarily help a team produce code faster, but it allows a team […]

Memcached and high performance MySQL

Memcached is a distributed object caching system that was originally developed to improve the performance of LiveJournal and has subsequently been used as a scaling strategy for a number of high-load sites. It serves as a large, extremely fast hash table that can be spread across many servers and accessed simultaneously from multiple processes. It’s […]

Shield your files with Reed-Solomon codes

Thanassis Tsiodras wrote in about a utility for adding additional error correction redundancy to your backup data: The way storage quality has been nose-diving in the last years, you’ll inevitably end up losing data because of bad sectors. Backing up, using RAID and version control repositories are some of the methods used to cope ; […]

Photos of the Large Hadron Collider

View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. (Maximilien […]

Magnetic stripe card spoofer

We posted David Cranor’s Arduino card reader the other day, and today he wrote in with an even better magstripe hack: a way to simulate a card swipe using an iPod an electromagnet. David writes: When the card is swiped past the card reader, the changing magnetic field of the passing flux reversals induce a […]

Film canister flash diffuser

When you take pictures with the built-in flash on your digital camera, it’s common to get a washed-out, deer-in-headlights result from your subject. This is particularly noticeable with portraits and close-range photography. To obtain a softer, more natural look from your photographs and eliminate the glare, you need a flash diffuser to help disperse and […]