“Fermi’s Paradox” is about intelligent life in the universe – if it’s so vast and has been around so long, why haven’t we heard from them? The recent This American Life show by the same name is a great one. And like so many of their great shows uses this basic idea as a springboard into much more emotionally resonant stories. (At least they were for me, YMMV.) The first part of the show goes…
Every time I saw Gwen Ifill on PBS or moderating a debate I was impressed by Gwen Ifill. She seemed to embody the best of journalism – uncowed by power, eyes on the prize of truth, not settling for either the easy questions or brush-off answers. This is a lovely article about her, drawing connections between her career and young people today who can lack the context of history and the…
The sqitch tool is a standaone database migration tool not tied to any language. It doesn’t try and sync models with your database, or assume that it should be managing everything in your database, or generally stick its fingers where they don’t belong. David Wheeler (the author) has put a ton of work into making installation straightforward, as evidenced by the substantial list of installation…
From A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge , Steven Levy, originally published in November 1984 Harper’s: …The spreadsheet user has no way of quantifying a corporate tradition or the misery of stockholders or whether the headaches of a drawn out takeover bid will ultimately harm the corporate climates of the firms involved. The flexibility of spreadsheets can encourage other heartless moves from…
We should know this, I thought. I imagined other, better experts who could do this job more quickly. But the guilt passed. I’d been doing this long enough to know that, pitiful as we were, we were it. The three of us struggling through the running of this database on a new operating system, flipping through incomplete documentation, using trial-and-error settings of options – this was what passed…
A recent Planet Money episode did a brief history of the spreadsheet, using as its base a 1984 Harper’s article about A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge . 1 I think the podcast is a great intro to the history – VisiCalc, Dan Bricklin, people buying computers just to use it – and gives some sense of how important the spreadsheet was to the computer being accepted in every day life. The contrasts…
Easier waffles These waffles were delicious, but required a big time investment, and their fussiness indicates to me that they’re fairly sensitive to variation. (8 1/2 TB of butter? So use that whole stick, then bust open another one so you can shave off 1/16 of it for that extra another half tablespoon. Fussy.) On top of all that the cleanup was fussy too. I wound up heating up the iron again…
Aggregating use over buckets of time is really useful when doing performance testing. For example, if you have a script that throws a bunch of requests at your system in a known time series you can re-run that script to gauge the effectiveness of your changes. So say we have a table: CREATE TABLE tasks ( id INT NOT NULL , task_type VARCHAR ( 8 ) NOT NULL , created TIMESTAMP NOT NULL , completed…
At ModCloth we’d periodically have a themed potluck lunch. We had themes like “Mexican” and “Pie”, but one of the unsurprisingly popular ones was “Breakfast”. And one of my co-workers made these waffles that were just amazing, the best waffles I’d ever had in my life. By far. I learned that these were called “Liège Waffles” and they were also Belgian. They’re distinguished by having a crispier…
One of the first things I sorely missed from my Nexus 4 was the keyboard. Which I knew was going to happen – one of the things keeping me away from iPhones was the lack of third party keyboards to enable swiping. That feature in iOS 8, combined with the larger phone, wound up pulling me over. Such a keyboard doesn’t come with the phone, so you need to install one. There are loads of reviews out…