I bought an AeroPress, a gadget for making coffee.  It’s as good as people say.

I’ve never really been a coffee nutter, so I’m peeved to discover that I now have to accept harboring opinions about grinders, beans freshness, and brew temperature.  Who is this person in my kitchen?  He’s practicing some sort of esoteric ritual first thing in the morning!

As the ritual takes more time and focus compared to my previous technique.  I recommend a cup of coffee first.  But, I’m getting better so I’d say it’s not more than twice as much work.

One thing makes a huge difference: having a tea kettle that targets the right temperature.   We just happened to have a very cheap electric kettle (acquired at a thrift store).  That guy in my kitchen wants something more exact, but I think it’s perfect.

I got the AeroPress on sale for $20, but it’s usually $25, the kettle can be had for $14, a good cheap grinder is like $20.

Or, you can go to the local high end kitchen supply store and pick up the Press for $30, an attractive pushbutton kettle for $100, and a really good grinder for $200.  The guy in my kitchen would like you to get two, and to send one of them along.  He says that store will ship.

James Chiles’ “Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology” is a fun read, except that it’s a spoiler for the books that tells the story of just one of these disasters.  The best part of the book, and the part you never get in books like this and certainly not in the books about a single debacle, is a section where he tells a few stories about people doing the right things to avoid the horrible outcome.

I particularly liked learning that Nobel had so much trouble getting with workers smuggling matches into the factory that finally he started making them strip naked each morning and walk thru a pool up to their neck.

It disappoints in some ways: there are no financial disasters and no software disasters.  There are no examples of failures of collective action or public good management, i.e. levee failures.  Or for that matter catastrophes caused by a the false sense of security that comes from gradual processes.

Since it’s mostly stories it is not a very useful book if you want to learn what makes dangerous systems and what to do about it.  Normal Accidents remains a good starting point for that.  But stories are fun, and very useful.  Everybody ought to read a few of the books on this shelf in the Library.

Oh, and don’t try to extinguish a fire by flooding the cargo hold with steam when it’s loaded with fertilizer.

This chart shows the Urban Consumer Price Index for cars divided by the total CPI since 1980.  Thirty years of falling car prices ended with the great recession.  Fire up your insta-theories(tm).

Update: I think I understand this now.  Growth in the medical sector dominates the total CPI.   If you divide any other segment of the CPI by the total CPI you will get a chart that’s similar to this one, i.e. one that shows that below trend growth for that segment.  Nothing can compete with medical for such growth.

I think the first time I noticed social  marketing was a few decades ago when a phone company started offering friends and family discount plans.  These, from the point of view of the firm, were clever because the locked the customer into a plan, since switching would need explaining to your friends and family why you were abandoning them.

Another famed example of social marketing was the viral marketing used by Hotmail.  Customer emails were infected with advertising in the hope that their correspondents would thing the customer was providing a product endorsement.

So here’s a new one.  Verison’s Fios division has an Ad running with the tag line “Is it you?”.  Pairs of customers ask this of each other with the implication that one of them is failing to provide a high quality relationship because she hasn’t signed up for Fios.  Shame on her!

I fell into one of those Internet rabbit holes.  Immersion cooling for servers with liquid that boils in contact with the hot spots.  3M makes some materials used for fire suppression and cooling that are good for this.  Here is a DIY example with a board laid on the bottom of a fish tank.   Here’s is a forum posting about a bit coin miner that uses this technique.  This video gets into some of the details about how to get better boiling.  Lots of interesting heat transfer problems.  In time will change entirely how electronics is packaged.   For example I bet people are working on using this stuff in laptops.  That last one is from a guy at 3M who has a facebook page about their research.  Here’s a video where the actual chip is exposed and you can see the hot spots on the chip.  Searching on Google for immersion cooling videos will turn up more examples.

These systems use one of variants of 3M’s Novec.  It costs a few hundred dollars per gallon.

I must be wrong, but apparently there is no well tooled standard way to manage trust for digital artifacts.  Consider an example: the instructions for installing Ruby’s rvm tool look like this:

curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash

That’s wonderfully simple, although it implies a lot of trust in get.rvm.io!

I run into this problem a lot. For example I have scripts that help me configure virtual machines. Here’s one that installs a hyperdex that I run as I’m setting up a new machine.

cat <<'EOF' > /etc/yum.repos.d//hyperdex.repo
[hyperdex]
name=hyperdex
baseurl=http://centos.hyperdex.org/base/$basearch/$releasever
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF
yum clean all
ls -l /etc/yum.repos.d/
yum --assumeyes install hyperdex
ls -l /etc/yum.repos.d/

I then do something like this on a fresh machine:

curl http://example.com/install-hyperdex.sh | bash -

I can share these scripts, but I’d be loath to entice people into the bad habit of running such things.

And this bad habit is becoming very common.  For example Continuum Analytic’s amazingly cool python data tool suite and it’s extremely useful tools for managing python versions and packages is conveniently installed by downloading a 16 megabyte shell script which you then cheerfully hand off to bash.

Of course there are systems that help with this mess.  Yum will check gpg signatures, and it’s lame that says “gpgheck=0”.   But why am I unaware of any tools that make it straight forward to check signatures on scripts like my install-hyperdex.sh script, or Ruby’s script for installing rvm. What I want is a tools that lets me tell users something like this:

To install Awesome-Software do this:

run-remote-script http://example.org/install-awesome-software

If you don’t have run-remote-script see how to install it by visiting …

Obviously we could ask users to step thru longer instructions.

To install our awesome software first be sure you have installed gnupg. Then download our signing key into your keyring.

curl https://example.org/our-signing-key.asc | gpg --import

Now you can download our install script and check that we signed off on it.

# Get the script.
curl -o /tmp/foo http://example.com/install-thing.sh.asc
# Verify it's signature looks ok.
gpg --verify $/tmp/foo

If that looks ok, then extract the script and run it.

sed -e '1,3d' -e '/-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----/,$d' /tmp/foo | bash -

That will work … if you don’t want users.

Why is this so damn hard?  As I said at the start: we have “no well tooled standard way to manage trust for digital artifacts”.  For heaven’s sake I had to use sed to extract the script!

One part of the answer would seem to be that systems like homebrew, ports, rpm, yum, etc. etc. are all trying to solve a larger problems.  Which is fine, but they fail to address my problem, or the problem the rvm team has, or the problem that the python data guys have.

I have tooled up some of this, for my own needs when building virtual machines. But, it’s hardly a useful tool for others.  And, it’s very much a work in progress.

Gosh, I feel like somebody must have already written a tool analogous to “run-remote-script.”

This talk, which I only listened to, about the Forbin Project’s Google’s systems for back up and restore was fun.  It just lets you glimpse little bits of what is obviously an elephant.

It is unsurprising but sad how extremely proprietary the computer industry has become.

Here are the things I enjoyed in the talk, particularly the first two.

• He hinted that they can use encryption key management to delete customer data without the bother of erasing all the backup fragments.
• It’s all about the restore.  That’s when the system comes under intense scrutiny.  So it must be fast and automated.   So much of the design evolved after that pressure became clear to them.
• They replicate, ala RAID 4, the restores across tapes.  Bad blocks identified (or suspected) are repaired
• They do regular restore testing  (5% ?).
• Replication/redundancy is necessary over many dimensions, not just copies.  Geography, mechanism, … but he didn’t enumerate the dimensions.
• He hinted that to speed restores they might use only half tapes, since that reduces seek time. Though if you think about it you’ll see that you can sort the tapes so redundancy blocks are in the 2nd half.
• They do ship data physically.
• Logistics planning is obviously a thing.

I would have loved to get a brief overview of the API they deliver to the systems that utilizes their services.  Particularly the introductory material that outlines the contracts you can negotiate via configuration and what then are your responsibilities as a user of the services.  There are some very slight hints about that, but not much.

The multi-dimensional aspect to redundancy got me to wondering if they have a backup exchange agreement with other big Sky Net operators.

The talk and questions is an hour and fifteen minutes.

A long time ago I was bewildered by a chart at the Oil Drum which showed that miles driven was basically perfectly correlated with GDP.  Here’s that chart.  In the years since I’ve occasionally thought that maybe it’s flat because Y axis is lousy.

This topic came up again.  Andrew, who is particularly interested in the inability of various actors to accept that they got it wrong, pointed out that the traffic planning folks have got their projections wrong for a while.  He reposts this damning “fan chart.”

Andrew’s post lead to an interesting, if cynical, conversation in the comments, which in turn triggered Raghuveer Parthasarathy to revisit that the correlation; updating the range, tidy up the axis, etc.  He posted these three charts.

First we have total miles driven.  Clearly something happened, i.e. this awful recession.  And maybe something happened to create a slight bend in the trend from the range between, say, 1995 and 2006.  I think that’s what the inset chart is intended to help clarify.  It’s odd that miles traveled appears to rise around the dotcom bubble burst.   That was not the case where I live!  What ever that four years is odd.   The lack of any recovery after the recession is a puzzle too.

The second chart is miles/person.  Now the lack of recovery post 2008 is even more striking.  Those last four dots seem to suggest that drivers are becoming dispirited.  Let’s blame Facebook?

And now the miles/$-gdp.  This is the oil drum chart updated with 10 new years of data.  But, yeah, the overlapping portions of the two charts do not agree with each other.  Weird.

Again we can see the odd four years around the internet bubble.  And, curiously this chart seems to shows that miles/gdp rises a bit around a recession   It’s a lagging indicator?

But of course the most fascinating thing is that there is a twenty year trend of less driving per GDP dollar.  I have a sickening feeling that’s the rise of the bank’s share of the GDP, but who knows?

Like my facebook or banking suggestions it’s not hard to find people making up other insta-theories.   Aging population.  Or: Have you tried to get a drives license recently, it’s a PIA!  Youth unemployment.  Student loan debt.  I don’t doubt there are professionals that think about this much more carefully than I can.  I’d love to know what they think.

This essay on the recent unemployment numbers is a pretty reasonable attempt to walk the line between the two “consensus” opinions about the economy.  I.e. “It’s could be better but there is steady improvement.  Oh yeah, inflation is concern.”  v.s. “Seriously stagnant man!  Oh yeah, that people are suffering is a concern!”

I found this chart particularly interesting.

Campbell’s law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

So true, and it also tends to drive out other things. … (ht: karim)