So, the news is going around that VW is attempting to claim just a few software engineers knew about the hack, and not any executives. The theory is that the executives made a decision to pursue a particular diesel technology strategy which couldn't be made to work, and so low-level engineers put a hack in to save their jobs ( Read more... )

I found this blog post interesting http://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/03/08/model-checking.html both because it discussed flaws in Chord (and I can't even start to name all the other research projects based on Chord or Chord-like designs from my time as a PhD ( Read more... )

While trying to restore a VMware Workstation VM that I had paused:


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Klee is a project which symbolically executes computer programs, looking for crash conditions or other errors. It can be used to automatically generate test cases with a very high degree of coverage ( Read more... )

I upgraded from 10.04 LTS ( Read more... )

Maybe they are and it's just not a feature set I'm familiar with? The inquiry comes because I spent much of today tracking down a performance problem which turned out to be a frequent SQL query that was not efficiently indexed. (In this case it was 7-day trending--- queries to find the most recent data were fine but those to find the earliest ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I played with GLPK, but I was curious how well it does at combinatorial-auction problems (expressed as a integer-linear program) so I ran some experiments last night ( Read more... )

Have I mentioned that I hate the whole aclocal/automake/autoconf toolchain with a deep and abiding passion ( Read more... )

I am trying to debug a problem with HTTP POST. We use it to upload a large file. The client program uses the Apache httpclient library. For some reason, the client thinks that the upload fails, while the server is of the opinion that it succeeded (like, verifying the MD5 checksum of the uploaded file, so we're really really sure that all the ( Read more... )

I had lived with the OpenOffice spreadsheet's annoying habit of popping up a dialog box on every delete. And only occasionally grumbled. But what idiot decided that autofill needed a dialog box too? I do practically nothing else with spreadsheets except enter formulas, autofill, and delete! Maybe in the next release entering a formula can have ( Read more... )