I was going to blog about the software I’m currently writing, but that’s not happening, yet (although it’s been beta-test-ready for about a week and, given that I’ve made just under 100 subversion larger-than-ideal check-ins in the last seven days, it’s been getting refinements literally almost by the hour). Instead, I’m going to share a …
Continue reading Atomic conditional inserts with complex conditions
I was going to write a proper blog post today, but I got stuck in a good old fashioned TTC delay for about forty minutes this morning (this also means I haven’t proofread this post nor thought too much about the topic). Some poor folks that left later than I may have been held …
Continue reading Fault tolerant… public transit
About a month ago, I switched cellular service providers from Rogers to WIND Mobile. Aside from the abysmal quality of the phone or more precisely, the Android operating system, I purchased for use on the new network, the cellular network infrastructure requires some work. Indeed, WIND Mobile is well aware of this problem and has …
Continue reading Identifying gaps in wireless network infrastructure
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a charitable organization that has laudable goals including improving healthcare and reducing extreme poverty. One of its current fights recently suffered a setback when it was announced that a polio outbreak had struck Tajikistan, a place that had previously beaten back the disease. With an infusion over the …
Continue reading Peddling an idea
I don’t know how many of you own a digital camera, but they sure seem to come with a lot of “scene modes” nowadays. You know the ones: portrait, dusk, backlit, night, sports, landscape, macro, indoor/party, fireworks, snow, beach… but what if I want a night photo of fireworks at dusk on a beach such …
Continue reading Obscene scene modes
If, say, your entire office burns down due to an electrical fire from a photocopier next door, off-site backups are worth their weight in platinum. If you don’t believe me, just look up how much professional data recovery services cost and compare that to the weight of a hard drive or fifty. Some people use e-mail …
Continue reading Green Backups
The following post is a collection of excerpts from a draft of my Ph.D. depth paper, less citations, which exist in the original document.
Few computer systems spend all of their time at full utilization; even in always-on situations such as servers, a properly provisioned system will be spend almost all of its time at less …
Continue reading Towards better energy-efficiency labels