One interesting phenomena I've noticed recently is a tendency to categorize something (and often dismiss it) based on plot mechanic. "The Hunger Games" has been compared to numerous other 'many enter, one leaves, and everybody watches' stories, especially ones involving children. "Limitless" gets compared to any other story involving medical ( Read more... )

IPv6 is supposed to solve all of the peer connectivity issues introduced by NAT. And, on the surface, it seems to do just that by making it possible to assign a unique, globally routable IP address to every conceivable device that could possibly want one.

But this doesn't really solve the problem of peer connectivity.

My cell phone, for example, ( Read more... )

I'm working on a small library to express computations in terms of composable trees of dependencies. These dependencies can cross thread boundaries allowing one thread to depend on a result generated in another thread. This is sort of a riff on the whole promise and future concept, but the idea is that you have chains of these with a potential ( Read more... )

I used to have a really good idea of what the architecture of a system that had to respond to multiple different possible sources of input or other reasons to do things (such as some interval of time expiring). My idea was basically to make everything purely event-driven and have big event loops at the heart of the program that dispatched events ( Read more... )

( Random rambling and noodling about a CAKE implementation issue )

I've been puzzling over a minimal and orthogonal set of properties for a session. I at first thought there were 3:
Message boundaries preserved Whether or not your messages are delivered in discrete units, or whether they are delivered as a stream of bytes in which the original sizes of the send calls bear no relevance to how the bytes are chunked ( Read more... )

Building codes serve a few functions. The most important one is safety. But another is ensuring that your home does not fall to pieces in 10 years (after the builders are long gone) by forcing certain minimum standards of construction.

To the latter end, I think building codes for multi-unit dwellings should require that each and every single unit ( Read more... )

In answering a question on StackOverflow I appear to have independently re-invented the Curiously Recurring Template idiom as applied to polymorphic copy construction.

Until I tried to answer that person's question I never realized there was such a nice and convenient way to avoid having to copy&paste cookie-cutter clone methods.

In many books about the singularity, the idea comes up of having your thought processes run on some interesting and imaginative substrate. Say, as an emergent property of a flock of pigeons. While this might well be possible, I think NP completeness places some hard limits on exactly what an external observer can determine about such systems.

( Read more... )

There are two articles that, in my opinion, give an excellent analysis of the Virginia Tech shootings.

The first is a scholarly piece by a professor of sociology that carefully dissects the situation and the blame spinning around it to raise some serious questions about exactly why the shootings happened:

MOBBING AND THE VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE

( Read more... )