Over time, though, my initially rosy feelings towards ORMs have begun to sour. I gradually realised I was spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to coax the ORM into doing my bidding - and when I succeeded, the results were often ugly, slow and needlessly opaque. Analysing the performance of some of the more complicated portions of my data access layer was often painful, and I spent cumulative hours poring over generated SQL, trying to figure out what the ORM was doing and why. Usually, improving performance involved side-stepping the ORM altogether. Recently, a particularly gnarly performance issue prompted me to ditch the ORM from a project altogether, with surprisingly pleasant results.

What is Plurk? A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, and follow the events of the people that matter to you, in deliciously digestible short messages called plurks.

Jonathan Wilkins of iSEC Partners said the method had a total success rate of 17.5 percent against reCAPTCHA. The rate is significant because of the wide use of botnets by spammers and other miscreants. Even a modest-sized network of 10,000 infected machines with a success rate of 0.01 percent would yield 10 successes every second. That could translate into 864,000 new accounts every day, he said. [...] A Google spokesman said the data collected in the report was collected in early 2008 and didn't reflect enhancements made to reCAPTCHA since then.

Between $50 million and $6 billion may be owed to musicians and artists in Canada, but not from your run-of-the-mill file sharers. The Canadian recording industry itself is being accused of massive copyright infringement, and the list of miffed artists just keeps getting longer.

A cataclysmic flood could have filled the Mediterranean Sea — which millions of years ago was a dry basin — like a bathtub in the space of less than two years. A new model suggests that at the flood’s peak water poured from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin at a rate one thousand times the flow of the Amazon River, according to calculations published in the Dec. 10 Nature.

Welcome to definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009. First up - What is open source hardware? These are projects in which the creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source software like Linux, but this hardware centric.

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).

These games aren’t lost forever. You can still play many of them online. If you love the old classics, this list should have you busy for months. Below is a list of 95 old school video games that you can play online. Click on each title to link directly to the game. Also, we’ve reviewed and rated each game for you, our loyal AMOG readers.

Our Discussion Forum is the largest gathering of alternate history fans on the internet. [...] Alternate history is the exercise of looking at the past and asking "what if"? What if some major historical event had gone differently, and how could that have changed the world? Popular "what if" questions that you may have seen in fiction include "what if the Nazis had won the Second World War?" and "what if the South had won the US Civil War?", but it can be just as interesting to think about Aztecs resisting Spanish colonization or a Japan that did not turn its back on the world under the Shogunate. Alternate history is a literary genre, but here we're mainly interested in history itself - and the politics, strategy, culture, and more that define it. We spend most of our time debating our own ideas about history and how it could have gone differently, so this is a community focused on creativity and learning.

Some of our PERL tools require some CPAN modules that are not part of the standard Ubuntu distribution. It's obviously possible to install the module using CPAN but I like using deb packages where possible as then you only have one repository to manage. Fortunately with dh-make-perl it is possible to quickly turn any CPAN module in to a debian package!