Wednesday, November 18, 2009
This is such a great bug. There’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again. The 17th is the start of a new [...]
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
We have a little joke around the house. When somebody starts complaining we occationally lean back and mumble – “Tell it to the blog.” It’s s cruel and unsympathetic pleasure. So … I’m here to tell it to the blog. I love my MacBook Air but for the last week we have fallen into [...]
One of my favorite managerial tricks is to introduce the idea of ‘coordination cost,’ as in “How are we going to manage to coordination costs here?” or “What would estimate the coordination cost on this is going to be?” or “Looks like a coordination problem.” I find this helps people step back from the problem [...]
To install unix software on my Mac my prefered tool is Darwin’s port. Which mostly works. But there is a problem. For quite a while now I’ve been unable to upgrade my collection of installed software, a lot of stuff. I think I finally figured out the problem. Or at least I appear to have [...]
We build monitoring frameworks like the one I outlined in “Listening to the System” for at least four reasons. Their maybe legal requirements that we keep records for later auditing and dispute resolution. We may want to monitor the system so we can remain in control. We may want to collect data in service of [...]
Google has signaled that they would like to see wave widely adopted. In service of that goal they have a dot-org site which reveals a rough draft for a design that enables wave servers to interoperate so their users can collaborate. But, the whole story is much more complex. There is a lot to do before their [...]
This posting isn’t really about Wave, it’s about a lovely detail in the protocol design, in particular in the crypto spec. Imagine that Germany, Britian and France are running wave servers for their citizens, and of course many wave documents have participants from all three countries. These three servers are all federated and a torrent [...]
Wave is neat and I currently think it will be very widely adopted. This note is quick summary of what it appears to be. This is very impressionistic. The specifications are amazingly rough! I’m not sure I’d call this a platform but I’m sure other people will. It certainly creates a large option space for building things. [...]
Recently I’ve been taking a recreational climb up the Erlang learning curve. I’ve been up this hill before, it’s a lovely walk. This afternoon I took a restful detour to see one of the sights. Gosh, it’s so pretty. Webmachine an elegant implementation of an HTTP server (code and wiki, blog, talk and video) written [...]
People lose control and act impulsively all time. It is important to forgive ‘em. If you never act impulsively then you seem humorless, uptight, officious, bureaucratic. When professionals act impulsively we wonder: should let this guy steer the ship? One scheme to temper impulses is to smooth things a bit using a group. When your managerial team act [...]
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