Finch

tickler app: textbox and date picker. enter some text, pick a date. when that date comes up, it emails the text back to you. (ie, based on GTD tickler file)

ideas

ping -a produces an audible ping

linux sysadmin

Got our ABN AMRO chip and pin debit cards, which come with USB 2-factor auth devices. Of course, it’s a little anticlimactic since there’s no money in my account yet (have to do an international wire transfer next week to top it up).

netherlands

  • steek = sting, bite
  • partij = party
  • steekpartij = knifing

netherlands

The Invention of Concurrent Programming

Nice paper that summarizes the historical papers related to concurrency models.

distributed systems

Antifragile 2015

interesting looking conference on June 2-5 in london

dasmithii/GobDB

nice looking leveldb wrapper for go

golang

Well, OK, then.

Went in to the bank with Phoenix when she opened her account to see if they could just attach me to it as well somehow. Sure enough, the woman opening her account said that as long as I had a BSN, there was no reason I couldn’t open my own account, despite what we’d been told earlier. So now we both have Dutch bank accounts and are just waiting to get our chip and pin cards in the mail (along with hardware two-factor authentication devices!).

She also handles insurance and we figured out that (not surprisingly) the insurance that we’d had to take out before we could rent our apartment (Dutch law) was overpriced. Not surprising since we had very few options to pick through that we could get from the US before we had our completed residence permits, BSNs or domestic bank accounts. We’re stuck for a year, but then we can switch to a plan that’s about a quarter the price.

netherlands

lokalebasen/go-env

pull down environment variables from etcd and run a process with them

devops golang

Crash-only software: More than meets the eye [LWN.net]

“only way to stop is to crash. only way to start is to recover”

devops distributed systems

Enums in Go

Hadn’t seen this trick before.

golang

How Google Works

Google’s recipe for a modern, 21st century innovative company.

spokehub

Signals and Microinteractions for Smartwatches

Not interested so much in smartwatches, but the explanations of UX terminology are good.

Keys to SRE

Talk by Google’s SRE Czar.

  • 50% dev/maintenance ratio
  • at least 5% of support tickets need to go directly to developers
  • SRE’s are free to leave any project at any time
  • in an outage: minimize impact + prevent recurrence

devops

count-min sketch

probabalistic approaches to stream calculations

distributed systems

always bet on text

On the superiority of plain text as a communication technology.

spokehub

My Philosophy on Alerting - Google Docs

Writeup from a Google SRE on alerting/monitoring. Very well thought out.

Pages should be urgent, important, actionable, and real.

  • emphasis on reducing noise levels
  • emphasis on end-to-end, black box, symptom-based alerting rather than the cause (I assume there is still enough monitoring/metrics in place to quickly diagnose the cause from the symptom)
  • a daily report can be a good channel for non-critical, but time-sensitive alerts, particularly on causes, (disk getting relatively full, unusually large numbers of slow queries, etc)
  • “Every alert should be tracked through a workflow system.” not just dumped into an IRC channel or email list.

This is good for thinking about Hound. Overall, a lot of effort has gone into making all of Hound’s alerts be “urgent, important, actionable, and real” but some fall short. Eg, quite a few currently exist that aren’t really actionable (eg, monitoring of various LITO services, Wardenclyffe -> PCP failures), that we have because we’d just rather know when something we depend on fails before our users.

Things to consider adding to Hound based on this:

  • dependency chain: link symptoms to causes so we can silence the symptom alerts when we know the cause
  • different alert targets. So we can set up alerts that only go to the people who can actually act on them, rather than dump everything to ccnmtl-sysadmin and train people to ignore a lot of them (“somebody else’s problem”).

ccnmtl devops

Stanford Seminar - Joe Armstrong of Ericsson

Another good Joe Armstrong talk.

  • systems that they originally designed purely for fault-tolerance did better on scalability benchmarks than systems designed for scalability. Led to the observation that they are related and instead of a tradeoff (“you can have either scalability or fault-tolerance”), instead you have “you can have both or neither”
  • according to Alan Kay, messaging was really the key idea of OOP, as it truly decouples objects (original idea in Smalltalk/Squeak, but lost in XEROX PARC work)
  • error handling must be external because the machine the error happened on might be dead. Design fundamentally is to not have to program differently for everything running on one machine vs multiple machines.
  • Erlang terms are designed to be serialized/deserialized without parsing (just very low level marshalling). Part of the reason that databases like Riak can be so fast.

distributed systems erlang

Idea: private channels

Will require a bit more of a social network concept functioning with followers/etc. But it would be good to be able to designate that posts in a channel can only be viewed by users that you have specifically designated.

meta

Allowing a user to edit their posts wouldn’t be hard, technically. I’m kind of thinking that I like the current setup though, where you can delete, but not edit. It encourages you to not put too much into a single post. It also fits with the “publish” nature of the site. Once you’ve hit “submit”, it’s kind of like sending an email; anyone else could get/read it immediately. So you should think before you submit instead of after.

meta

As of last week, Phoenix and I have our Dutch resident ID cards (good for two years), are officially registered with the city of Utrecht, and have our Burgerservicenummer’s (BSNs), which are the tax ids.

We still need domestic bank accounts (we were waiting on BSNs) so Phoenix can get paid, we can pay our rent in Euros, and we can get chip and pin debit cards, which a lot of kiosks and stores here basically require. Unfortunately, it looks like I may never be able to get one. The woman at the bank claimed that I could not open an account without an employment contract with a Dutch company. It seems like there’s probably a way around that, but in the meantime, we may only have one account between us.

netherlands

Netflix for the rest of us

Docker container for overseas Netflix proxy

devops