It is done

Bryan,

• Polymath and Level 39 Adventurer,
• Truesworn of the Warsworn,
• Chariot of the Travelers,
• Holder of the Orison,
• Iconoclast of the House of Ballads,
• Proclaimed Unwritten by High King Titarion,
• Unraveller of Octienne,
• Last Member of the House of Sorrows,
• Siegebreaker of Mel Senshir,
• Slayer of Balor,
• Liberator of the House of Pride,

has at long last defeated Tirnoch, cast out the evil wizard Gadflow, ended the Crystal War, and brought peace to Amalur.

There were certainly flaws in Kingdoms of Amalur, but overall I loved this game and very much enjoyed completing it.

And, heck, it only took me four months!

Now, what's next...

The Beggar King: a very short review

The Beggar King is the third in Oliver Potzsch's books in the "Hangman's Daughter" series.

Once again we follow the adventures and mysteries of 17th century Germany through the tales of Jakob Kuisl, the hangman of Schongau, and his daughter Magdalena.

This time, the action shifts to nearby Regensburg, which allows Potzsch to introduce new locations, new events, and many new thrills and spills.

Potzsch is quite entertaining, and the hangman of Schongau certainly has an eventful life!

I certainly can't criticize any of Potzsch's technique, and the shift to Regensburg allowed him to introduce several fascinating new characters. Although there was a fair amount of "sameness" to this third book in the series, there was enough novelty in the new surroundings and new companions to keep me zipping through to the end once again.

High literature this ain't, but if you're looking for a lively summer vacation read, Oliver Potzsch should be on your short list.

A very easy ribs recipe

I'm not much of a cook, so this is the sort of recipe that appeals to me:

• Turn your oven to 300 degrees.
• Take one slab of ribs. Wash them and remove the membrane (search the net for "remove rib membrane" if you don't know what this means).
• Take some nice dry rub. This weekend, we used Tuto's Organic No Salt Seasoning, from Aloha Spice Company of Hanapepe Hawaii, which my daughters brought back from their recent trip to Hawaii, but almost any dry rub will do. Try to take it easy on the salt; some dry rubs are loaded with salt. Pat it generously and firmly onto both sides of the ribs
• Place the ribs on a cookie sheet, on a baking rack if you can. we have a nice large roasting pan with a roast rack that works wonderfully.
• Cook the ribs at 300 degrees for at least 2 hours. Flip them over every half hour if you remember. The longer you cook them, the better; 2.5 or 3 hours is even better.
• Enjoy!

It's weekend reading time!

In our neck of the woods, the Rhododendron are nearly blooming, and the wildflowers in the hills are at their peak.

Of course, that means a fair bit of sneezing. But in between the sneezes, I've been reading...

• The Creator

  Minecraft’s maker is a kingmaker in the video-game realm. “There are so many sides to that,” he says. “I try to tweet about the games I love and feel passionate about. But it got to the stage where I could ‘make’ a small studio, and so it began to feel like a duty. I started promoting games that I wasn’t so enthusiastic about.”

• Microsoft chooses key time to remind Olympia of its clout

  "It absolutely remains the case that Washington state is Microsoft's home," he said, adding that "it's more a question of whether the jobs that Microsoft is able to add in the future will be added in Washington state, another state or outside the United States."

• Better 155 years late than never: John Snow

  Wakley may have been the most outspoken of Snow's critics but his views were shared by most medical men at the time: miasma, or the stench from decaying vegetable and animal matter, was widely held responsible for epidemic disease. Snow's On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, first published in 1849, set out the then radical idea that cholera was a disorder of the digestive system not the blood; and that it was contagious and spread through the oral-faecal route, largely through contaminated drinking water.

• Running a software team at Google

  This is a huge relief from the constant pressure to work, work, work that is endemic of professors. I also feel that I get much more done now, in less time, due to fewer distractions and being able to maintain a clear focus. The way I see it is this: If I'm being asked to do more than I can get done in a sane work week, we need to hire more people.

• The Bw-Tree: A B-tree for New Hardware

  Our new form of B tree, called the Bw-tree achieves its very high performance via a latch-free approach that effectively exploits the processor caches of modern multi-core chips. Our storage manager uses a unique form of log structuring that blurs the distinction between a page and a record store and works well with flash storage.

• Meet the Bitcoin Millionaires

  After he recognized Bitcoin’s potential, he quit school and founded a company called Avalon, which sells hardware built solely for the purpose of mining Bitcoins. He isn’t interested in a quick score, he says: “Our goal is to protect the Bitcoin network so profits are available in the long term.”

• I Tried Hacking Bitcoin And I Failed

  BitCoin made a technical choice during its initial design that allowed some people to do far more work than others, simply by having a graphical accelerator or even by designing custom hardware. This is the precise capability that large financial actors and nation states have above and beyond the private sector’s capacity to produce, and it’s not obvious that even the BitCoin developers have the political ability to override a technical choice that would also harm the technology’s largest (public) players.

• Eventual Consistency Today: Limitations, Extensions, and Beyond

  This article begins to answer this question by describing several notable developments in the theory and practice of eventual consistency, with a focus on immediately applicable takeaways for practitioners running distributed systems in the wild. As production deployments have increasingly adopted weak consistency models such as eventual consistency, we have learned several lessons about how to reason about, program, and strengthen these weak models.

• In a nutshell: How OpenStack works

  Its mission is to provide a flexible solution for both public and private clouds of any size, and for this matter two basic requirements are considered: clouds must be simple to implement and massively scalable.

• Harmonic Averaging of Monitored Rate Data

  So, I wasn't completely sure about what I was saying. Good thing too, because the usual form of the harmonic mean doesn't work for time series! That, it turns out, is a very subtle subject and why I decided to use the slide format above to reveal my progressive technical understanding about what does work.

• Practical Techniques to Achieve Quality in Large Software Projects

  Code review helps promote a quality-oriented culture in the office. Engineers will trend towards producing better code and more tests to increase the number of positive comments they receive. Furthermore, having such a system in place helps new engineers learn the ropes faster.

• Gearing up for the Next Chapter

  Gary Kovacs, having accomplished the goals and objectives he and the team set out to achieve, will be stepping down as CEO later this year but will continue to provide vision and leadership as a member of our Board of Directors. An executive search will begin immediately for his replacement.

• Git Koans

  Master Git turned and threw himself off the railing, falling to his death on the rocks below. Upon seeing this, the novice was enlightened.

Version Control is the foundation

I loved this story about how LinkedIn is building amazing tools atop their version control system: The Software Revolution Behind LinkedIn’s Gushing Profits

LinkedIn’s newly-adopted software development methodology is known as “continuous deployment.” Under continuous deployment, a developer writes new code in tidy, discrete little chunks and quickly checks each chunk into the main line of software shared amongst all LinkedIn developers, a line known as “trunk” within the software version control systems standard in the tech industry. Newly-added code is subjected to an elaborate series of automated tests designed to weed out any bugs. Once the code passes the tests it is merged into trunk and cataloged in a system that shows managers what features are ready to go live on the site or in new versions of LinkedIn’s apps.

At my day job, we love to see people being successful by building tools and processes atop their version control system.

If you don't have a version control system, consider Perforce!

Version Control is the foundation; way to go LinkedIn!

Google Street View Hyperlapse

O.M.G.

Look at it, just look at it (watch the video, for starters): Google Street View Hyperlapse

We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material.

I can't keep it all straight!

Is my mind going? I keep getting myself confused between

• Algeria
• Albania
• and Armenia

It's somewhat easier for me to distinguish between Slovenia, Silesia, and Slovakia, because my father's side of the family is Slovak, a country that didn't even exist when I was born.

But today I got myself all confused trying to figure out the difference between:

• Moldova,
• Moravia,
• and Mordovia

Mordovia, I said? What or where is that? Luckily, Wikipedia knew, since I sure didn't.

Why was I interested in Mordovia? Well, Brian Krebs was interested, and whatever Brian Krebs is interested in, I am interested in, too.

For starters, Flashback was the first OS X malware to be “VMware aware” — or to know when it was being run in a virtual environment (a trick designed to frustrate security researchers). It also was the first to disable XProtect, OS X’s built-in malware protection program. These features, combined with its ability to spread through a then-unpatched vulnerability in Java made Flashback roughly as common for Macs as the Conficker Worm was for Windows PCs.