April 2011
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Working with the Chaos Monkey
Coding Horror: “the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly”
Monday, 25 April 2011
IMF bombshell: Age of America nears end
MarketWatch: “That’s a largely meaningless comparison in real terms. Exchange rates change quickly. And China’s exchange rates are phony.” – This is using the new definition of “bombshell” that includes “something so unsurprising that DeLong wrote a book about it two years ago.”
In the Sorting Office
LRB: “Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses.”
Sunday, 24 April 2011
Today’s (Needless) Hysteria: the S&P Panic
James Fallows: “What I’d really like to know is who S&P likes in the Hornets-Lakers series, or this season of American Idol.”
Mysterious Pioneer Anomaly May Finally Be Solved
Discovery News: “and then, mind you, all those wonderful numerical coincidences people talk about are destroyed”
In Xanadu Did Kubla Khan a Stately PowerPoint Decree.
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: “And ‘mid these dynamic calls-to-action / Came a Family Circus cartoon with relevant caption.”
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Service Level Disagreements
Benjamin Black: “Outages that impact large sections of your customer base simultaneously are inevitable in large-scale, shared software infrastructure. If SLAs were insurance policies, vendors would quickly be out of business.”
Saturday, 2 April 2011
People in the USA are confused about the Federal Budget
Angry Bear: “Rather alarmingly the sum of median shares on the programs about which the pollster asked is 137%.”