The island that almost wasn't

KQED's Bay Curious podcast series did a nice episode on the dredging of the canal that eventually formed the Oakland-Alameda estuary.

In the late 1800s, Oakland was coming into its own politically and economically, developing its own banks, businesses and shipping companies.

“That grows and grows so that Oakland, by the early 20th century, is really thumbing its nose at San Francisco,” Walker says.

In response to local lobbying, Congressmen worked to bring in millions of federal dollars to pay the Army Corps of Engineers to improve the harbor.

Read it here, or listen online.

ZooKeeper ZOO_SEQUENCE ZNONODE

How's that for putting the search terms right there in the post title?

I wrote a little ZooKeeper program, very simple, basically just the lock recipe out of the ZooKeeper examples. You know, the one where you create a sequenced child node inside the parent container node, and your child node represents your position in the line of tasks waiting to acquire the lock.

My program seemed to be working quite well, I was pleased. But once in a long while it would fail, with an error message stating that it got a "no node" error when trying to create a sequenced child node.

Impossible! I said, for I knew that I had successfully created such a node just a few moments earlier, and I definitely hadn't run any of my own code which deleted the lock container node. So why wasn't it there?

After a while, I found a line in my ZooKeeper leader's log:

[ContainerManagerTask:o.a.z.s.ContainerManager@135] - Attempting to delete candidate container: /path/to/lock/node

That led me to the ContainerManager documentation, which in turn reminded me to check this note in the ZooKeeper documentation, which described my mistake precisely:

Container Nodes
Added in 3.5.3

ZooKeeper has the notion of container znodes. Container znodes are special purpose znodes useful for recipes such as leader, lock, etc. When the last child of a container is deleted, the container becomes a candidate to be deleted by the server at some point in the future.

Given this property, you should be prepared to get KeeperException.NoNodeException when creating children inside of container znodes. i.e. when creating child znodes inside of container znodes always check for KeeperException.NoNodeException and recreate the container znode when it occurs.

On my system, ContainerManager seems to make this check about once a minute, which meant that every so often, after enough minutes and enough use of my program, ContainerManager would delete the lock node just when I was about to try to create a new sequenced child node.

Voila!

I love this quote about the xz compression utilities event

From Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? :

In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.

Ah yes, database engineers.

Yes, that's a profession that definitely involves "years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck". Spot on!

There are still a lot of mysteries left about what exactly happened with xz, and this article is just a high-level summary.

But this database engineer loved that quote!

Why does housing cost so much?

Here's a very interesting article on the underlying costs of building a single family home. Well-researched, clearly-written, lots of detail about why it costs to much to build a new house.

Because of the enormous costs of housing, it's worth understanding where, specifically, those costs come from, and what sort of interventions would be needed to reduce these costs. Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself. However, in dense urban areas — the places where building new housing is arguably most important — this changes, and high land prices driven by regulatory restrictions become the dominant factor.

I really enjoyed the entire article, lots of fascinating observations and lots of additional links to chase for those who want to learn more. So I wanted to share it.

Sweet Thursday: a very short review

One day, on a trip from somewhere to somewhere else, we happened to stop at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. If you've never been to the Steinbeck Center, but you happen to be in Salinas and can spare a bit of time, you should definitely visit; it's a very interesting place.

While we were there, I stopped by the gift shop and picked up a copy of Sweet Thursday, a Steinbeck work that I wasn't familiar with.

Sweet Thursday is a sequel to the much more famous Cannery Row, and returns to the same setting and the same characters, for the most part. Cannery Row was set before WWII, Sweet Thursday was set after WWII, and there are many other ways to compare and contrast the two.

I think that if you liked or loved Cannery Row, you'll probably like or love Sweet Thursday just about as much. And, possibly, if it's been a while since you read Cannery Row, you might like Sweet Thursday even a bit more, since it will bring nostalgia and reminiscing about those earlier stories and how much you liked them and how nice it is to read some more about all those kooky characters.

Of course, the converse is true: if you found Cannery Row to be gimmicky and shallow, you probably won't enjoy Sweet Thursday

Happily for me, I was in the first camp, and I enjoyed Sweet Thursday very much.

It helps that I have always loved reading Steinbeck, and it also helps that the format of Sweet Thursday, with its three to eight page mini-chapters, is pretty much ideal for a commute-time reader, who has a scant 15 minutes of uninterrupted ferry-boat time for the occasional read. It was wonderful to carry Sweet Thursday around in my backpack, and pick it up when I had a few spare minutes, and read just one chapter, or maybe two.

Stretching it out this way may have even made me like Sweet Thursday better; I don't know. I think although it is quite short and easy to read, it was not actually meant to be rushed through, but rather to be sipped and savored, reflecting on those earlier times.

Kinda super Wednesday

So California joined Super Tuesday, hoping that would bring more enthusiasm for primary elections and for elections in general in these parts.

Our county's website has a quick take on the answer to that question.

More practice needed.

Bone: a very short review

My holiday gift from my sister-in-law was the marvelous Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume, Jeff Smith's career-defining work.

Bone is quite the gift to receive. It's almost one thousand four hundred pages long, and it's big enough that you can lose your coffee cup behind it. I have to confess: at first it was a little intimidating.

But a nice quiet day happened along, and there it was, waiting for me, and so I dove in.

Well, there went 2.5 months!

Bone is everything you could want from a fantasy epic. It has demons, dragons, monsters and villains galore. It has the lovely Princess Thorn and her force-of-nature grandmother. It has cow races!

But most of all, it has Fone Bone, the most lovable and approachable hero in many a year.

It takes a while to read a 1400 page book, even if it is a graphic novel.

But it was worth every page and I enjoyed it through to the end.

I hope Bone is read for generations to come, it's definitely got staying power.

Confession time: the dragon was the best, but Ted the cricket was superb, and I really liked Roque Ja.

Ted Chiang on AI

Have you read Ted Chiang's Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear ?

It's beyond remarkable that this essay is more than six years old at this point, it's still astonishingly accurate and insightful.

Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

...

... in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.

But as Chiang observes, this really isn't a discussion about runaway superintelligence, it's a discussion about modern capitalism.

Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

Chiang's essay is extremely important, even more important now than when he wrote it more than six years ago.

I hope more people will go back and rediscover this under-acknowledged gem, and read it all the way through, and re-read it some more, and go and tell everyone they know about it.

Oh how embarassing...

The Sunday crossword had a clue:

• Agricola author

I was getting all irate that neither "Rosenberg" nor "Uwe Rosenberg" fit.

Heh.

Well what the heck, worth a try!

Dead & Company: Dead Forever - Live at Sphere - Reserved Seating Fri · May 31, 2024 · 7:30 PM

Important mathematical observation

January 2024 happens to be a period of time during which, with a very small number of exceptions,

• All of the people born in 1961 are 62 years old,
• while all of the people born in 1962 are 61 years old

We state this without proof.

All the Years Combine: a very short review

Ray Robertson, a Canadian writer best known for other genres, joins the long list of people who have written books about the Grateful Dead and their music with his All the Years Combine: the Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows.

Robertson has the clever idea to orient his book around the band's concerts. Most other books about the Grateful Dead take much more traditional approaches:

• many are memoirs, by members of the band themselves (Lesh, Kreutzmann, etc.) or by members of the larger organization (road crew, managers, engineers, etc.)
• some are biographies, of individuals and of the band as a whole
• others are directly about the songs and music themselves, as more conventional music criticism

But very few have written directly about the band's enormous thirty year catalog of concerts (a notable exception to that is Cornell '77, an entire book about a single concert).

There are at least two good reasons why this is indeed a clever idea:

• Firstly, the material is unusual. The band made the decision very early on to encourage and emphasize recording and preservation of their live concerts. This was performed by the band themselves, who invested heavily in both equipment and personnel to enable capturing the shows as accurately and completely as possible, and then preserved that collection of material over the following six decades. But it was also performed by the fans, first rather anarchically, then later under the acceptance and support of the band, who made and curated and traded their own recordings of the shows. I have fond memories of friends who knew tapers and shared tapes of their favorite shows.
  
  Moreover, although Robertson doesn't overly dwell on this, the Grateful Dead were present at many of the seminal live performances of popular music during an extended period of several decades: the Summer of Love concerts, the Acid Test events, the Altamont Free Concert, Woodstock, Watkins Glen, the Concerts at the Pyramids, etc.
  
  This is rare, at least in popular music, and this rarity by itself makes it noteworthy.
  
  
• Secondarly, the concerts were important to the entire artistic process for the band. The Grateful Dead had a very unusual creative process, with multiple composers, multiple songwriters, influences from many other popular music genres, and so on. But also they had a very strong culture of music performance. In this respect the band drank deeply from musical areas such as jazz, blues, gospel, and bluegrass, in which improvisational performance, audience interaction, and other techniques were practiced in their music to a much greater extent than most people realized. As Phil Lesh noted, the studio recordings that the Grateful Dead made were generally viewed, even by the band themselves, as just advertisements for their live performances.
  
  This totally inverts the general approach taken by most popular musicians over the past 50 years (and still now): whereas the typical musician tours in support of the new album, the Grateful Dead nearly always issued a new album to support the upcoming tour.
  
  Understanding this is critical to undertanding why attending a Grateful Dead show in the 60's, 70's, and 80's was such an unusual experience: you weren't just hearing songs that you already knew and loved being performed by the artist in a live setting, you were actually participating in the composing, refining, and elaboration of works that were still in progress, still in the process of development.
  
  Very few artists had the willingness to experiment with unfinished new material live, in front of a large paying audience, before it had been thoroughly worked through and rehearsed and revised behind closed doors. And fewer still would see this as a process that they wanted to use. So this makes it worth describing.
  
  

Robertson is enthusiastic about his subject, and he's an enthusiastic writer, and reading All the Years Combine you get a good dose of his passion and enthusiasm and excitement.

It doesn't make for great literature; it's more like sitting around in some late-night diner after the show has ended, swapping observations about the event with your buddies, reveling in the high points and laughing about the missteps.

It's not the sort of thing that translates well to the printed page, and I think it's unlikely we'll see a lot of additional works attempting to do what Robertson has tried to accomplish.

But I definitely enjoyed the book, and happily sent it on to another Deadhead friend of mine.

Rebel Moon, reviewed by somebody else.

This review of Rebel Moon by SFChronicle columnist Drew Magary, is the best and most accurate movie review I've seen in years. Every word is oh, so true.

I am suffering. This movie is awful and promises to get no better. None of the characters are interesting. All of the visuals look like a high-budget Scorpions video. The script is like if you assigned a dozen seventh graders 10 pages each. And the fight scenes are boring as s—t. The more of “Rebel Moon” I watch, the more running time I appear to have left. You should get your name on a wall for finishing this movie, like when you polish off the 96-ounce London broil at Jim Bob’s Steak Barn. I really want to stop watching “Rebel Moon” and play some PlayStation. The effects alone would be 10 times better, and I can just finish the movie tomorrow morning. But I’ve come too far now. At this point, “Rebel Moon” is less a movie to me than it is a challenge, and I refuse to back down. I will defeat this movie, even if I die in slow motion while trying.

My review, had I bothered to even try to write one, would have been nowhere near as fun to read as Magary's, but would have come to precisely the same conclusion.