There's just not enough time

I need some rainy days; when it's sunny and beautiful outside I find excuses not to read ...

• Visual Explanations - Tufte's best book

  Printed with love, including pages with pasted in cutouts, this timeless book will never go out of date, and is likely to be passed on to future generations.

• More on Facebook's "Cold Storage"

  It is this careful, organized scheduling of the system's activities at data center scale that enables the synergistic cost reductions of cheap power and space. It is, or at least may be, true that the Blu-ray disks have a 50-year lifetime but this isn't what matters. No-one expects the racks to sit in the data center for 50 years, at some point before then they will be obsoleted by some unknown new, much denser and more power-efficient cold storage medium (perhaps DNA).

• Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash

  Segarra ultimately recorded about 46 hours of meetings and conversations with her colleagues. Many of these events document key moments leading to her firing. But against the backdrop of the Beim report, they also offer an intimate study of the New York Fed's culture at a pivotal moment in its effort to become a more forceful financial supervisor.

• Microsoft Closes SVC

  Microsoft is being pressed by the shift from PC’s as the main platform—where they had an almost monopoly on the OS—to a place where there are many players in the mobile world. This means that they are less able to support research of an open kind.

• A Perspective on Computing Research Management

  When I came to Microsoft in 1991, I had the opportunity to apply them in building the Silicon Valley research lab, although many of the same principles had already characterized Microsoft Research since its founding in 1991.

• Loyalty Nearly Killed My Beehive

  Then, this past spring, disaster struck. The queen wasn’t laying fertilized eggs, and if I didn’t act quickly, the hive would be dead by the end of summer. Thus began a months-long struggle that I only later realized was really about loyalty: mine to the hive, and the hive’s to its queen.

• The Mysteries of BCL Time Zone Data

  In other words, it’s always the time of day that would have occurred locally if there wasn’t a transition – in IANA time zone language, this is a “wall mode” transition, as it tells you the time you’d see on a wall clock exactly when you need to adjust it.

• Fun (?) with GnuPG

  If the holder of the key does not do anything, the key becomes expired, and the signatures in the signed tags stops validating. Luckily, the validity of a key can be extended by the holder of the key, and once it is done, the signatures made before the key's original expiration date will continue to validate fine.

• Eight Epic Failures of Regulating Cryptography

  If this sounds familiar, it's because regulating encryption was a monstrous proposal officially declared dead in 2001 after threatening Americans' privacy, free speech rights, and innovation for nearly a decade. But like a zombie, it's now rising from the grave, bringing the same disastrous flaws with it.

• Report offers ideas for a Boston beset by rising seas

  A report scheduled to be released Tuesday about preparing Boston for climate change suggests that building canals through the Back Bay neighborhood would help it withstand water levels that could rise as much as 7 feet by 2100. Some roads and public alleys, such as Clarendon Street, could be turned into narrow waterways, the report suggests, allowing the neighborhood to absorb the rising sea with clever engineering projects that double as public amenities.

• Making better use of dice in games

  In 2005, Queen Games published Roma from German game designer Stefan Feld. In this two-player game, players assign actions to die faces, and can only activate those actions by spending a die of the matching value.

  Since then, Feld has embarked on a personal crusade to make dice more interesting.

  “I really like dice,” Feld said, but he wanted players to have control of the game. He didn’t want them to win or lose based on simple luck. In most classic games like Monopoly and Risk, that’s exactly what can happen, and often does.