Sea Ranch in the rain

It was a beautiful, though stormy, weekend, so we headed north.

We spent two delightful days in Gualala and Sea Ranch, with long walks along the ocean cliffs, drives along peaceful country roads, visits to lighthouses and quiet pastures, and lots of good food.

There were seals, osprey, dolphins, and whales.

Saturday evening, around 7:30 PM, we were seated at the beautiful bench on the lawn at Whale Watch Inn, binoculars in hand, relaxing at the end of a perfect day, when we were treated to a most amazing display by a pod of migrating whales.

One after another, whale after whale lifted up, high out of the water, then twisted and fell back into the water with a resounding splash, visible and even audible from more than half a mile away, a behavior I believe they call "breaching".

I've seen this on TV and in the movies many a time, but this was the first time ever to see it with my own eyes, and to see it a dozen times in just five minutes was truly glorious.

It even distracted us from the osprey we were following as it hunted for fish in the waves.

It was a most wonderful weekend.

How dry is it?

It rained the last two days, after 12 days without rain before that.

How dry is it?

As they say, "a picture is worth 1,000 words": California's Historic Drought.

The year 2013 was the driest in California's recorded history, and predictions for 2014 aren't much better.

Meanwhile, I talked to my in-laws in Ann Arbor, Michigan, today. There's still almost 3 feet of snow on the ground, temperatures remain below freezing, and the Winter Snow Season ended (on the first day of Spring) just 1 inch short of the all-time record for heaviest snowfall ever.

The world is changing.

Condemned to repeat it?

Apparently, 15 years is just long enough to prove the worth of Santayana's famous saying ("Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it").

An interesting story in this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle: How tech became the enemy - then and now.

The flyer tucked on the windshield of a tech worker's car on South Van Ness didn't mince words: "The Mission has been colonized by pigs with money. ... They help landlords drive up rents, pushing working and poor people out of their homes."

The leaflet urged people to key the cars of wealthy new transplants: "Take action now!"

The year was 1999.

San Francisco, of course, is one of the few places I know of, outside Manhattan, that have some sort of rent control, and a lot of this current struggle turns out to be about money, behind the scenes:

Meanwhile, 31-year-old housing activist Erin McElroy was struggling to get the media to link housing and tech. Evictions performed using the Ellis Act peaked in 2000, and though they've risen sharply in the recent years - surging 81 percent last year alone - they haven't returned to the levels of the dot-com boom. But McElroy said more landlords were turning to buyouts and tenant harassment to get units back on the market. And she blamed it on tech money.

There are lots of things you can criticize the new tech giants for: kow-towing to the NSA, selling our personal information to marketers and advertisers, building corporate fortunes on the backs of deeply poor Asian factory workers, etc.

But it's hard to see them as the devil for providing high-paying, interesting, safe, productive jobs for young people.

I guess that's why I have trouble feeling much outrage for companies who provide safe transit for their employees.

Over here in the East Bay, I'm kind of out of the argument (though we have plenty of Google Buses here), so maybe I'm missing the whole point.

Am I? Drop me a line and let me know.

Stuff I'm reading, March Madness edition

My bracket is a shambles ... Mercer?

But here's some madness of a different sort:

• Brief History of Latency: Electric Telegraph

  Brief look at the history of the electric telegraph - how it came to be, how it was used, and the early problems it encountered. Namely, networking congestion, which was caused by routing and queuing delays!

• Denial of Service Attacks

  Over the last year, we have seen a large number and variety of denial of service attacks against various parts of the GitHub infrastructure. There are two broad types of attack that we think about when we're building our mitigation strategy: volumetric and complex.

  We have designed our DDoS mitigation capabilities to allow us to respond to both volumetric and complex attacks.

• Go Concurrency Patterns: Pipelines and cancellation

  Go's concurrency primitives make it easy to construct streaming data pipelines that make efficient use of I/O and multiple CPUs. This article presents examples of such pipelines, highlights subtleties that arise when operations fail, and introduces techniques for dealing with failures cleanly.

• Marginally Useful

  But while it may be wishful thinking to imagine Bitcoin as a true currency, it’s a highly functional and effective technology. Bitcoin’s “block chain protocol” is built atop well-understood, established cryptographic standards and allows perfect certainty about which transactions occurred when.

• Hack

  Hack is a programming language for HHVM that interoperates seamlessly with PHP. Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.

  Hack provides instantaneous type checking via a local server that watches the filesystem. It typically runs in less than 200 milliseconds, making it easy to integrate into your development workflow without introducing a noticeable delay.

• Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future

  Facebook engineers Bryan O’Sullivan, Julien Verlaguet, and Alok Menghrajani spent the last few years building a programming language unlike any other.

  Working alongside a handful of others inside the social networking giant, they fashioned a language that lets programmers build complex websites and other software at great speed while still ensuring that their software code is precisely organized and relatively free of flaws — a combination that few of today’s languages even approach. In typical Facebook fashion, the new language is called Hack, and it already drives almost all of the company’s website — a site that serves more than 1.2 billion people across the globe.

• Facebook VP of Engineering on Solving Hard Things Early

  Building great products is hard enough without allowing the ease of early management to fool founders into thinking they invented something new. Build great management, train new managers, and introduce sustainable, scalable structure now. Do not wait until world-class managers and radical re-orgs are needed to fix poor information flow or productivity problems.

Skyrim snort for a Friday afternoon

It's not just a game, it's an obsession: The Cheesing of Lydia.

Stuff I'm reading, midweek edition

The weather's great; the snowpack isn't. Meanwhile, I read.

• Leslie Lamport Receives Turing Award

  “Leslie’s schemes for dealing with faults was a major area of investigation in distributed computing,” Levin says. “His work was fundamental there. Then it led to work on agreement protocols, a key part of the notion of getting processes to converge on a common answer. This is what has come to be known as Paxos.”

  Incidently, that work was independently invented at about the same time by Barbara Liskov, Turing Award winner in 2008, and her student Brian Oki.

  “Lamport’s paper [The Part-Time Parliament],” Levin adds, “explained things through the use of a mythical Greek island and its legislative body. Partly because he chose this metaphor, it was not appreciated for quite some time what was really going on there.”

  Lamport has a less diplomatic assessment.

  “With the success of Byzantine Generals, I thought, ‘We need a story.’ I created a story, and that was an utter disaster.

• Surprise! Science!

  Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Andrei Linde and his wife with the news that gravitational waves were detected, proving Linde's theory of an inflationary universe.

• Ernest Cline is the luckiest geek alive

  Cline spent eight years writing Ready Player One before it hit the presses in August 2011. Set in 2044, Cline’s book prophesied a future where everybody’s always plugged in to The Oasis, a virtual world hosting the Earth’s jobs, education, and secrets. Each Oasis user hooks in using a variety of haptic and visual inputs to simulate and stimulate the senses in a virtual world. Ready Player One is indebted to hundreds of other books, games, and films like The Matrix, and it wears them on its shirt-sleeve. Cline’s most original creation yet moved away from Star Wars into a world of his own, a world made out of his favorite things.

• Why Dorian Nakamoto Probably Isn’t Satoshi

  To me, one of the weakest points in Newsweek’s argument is their assertion that Dorian had the skills and background to create Bitcoin. All they really have as evidence is that Dorian trained as a physicist, worked as an engineer, and is reputed to be very intelligent. But none of that indicates that Dorian understood cryptography or distributed algorithms well enough to devise Bitcoin and write the original Bitcoin paper.

• Missed Alarms and 40 Million Stolen Credit Card Numbers: How Target Blew It

  On Saturday, Nov. 30, the hackers had set their traps and had just one thing to do before starting the attack: plan the data’s escape route. As they uploaded exfiltration malware to move stolen credit card numbers—first to staging points spread around the U.S. to cover their tracks, then into their computers in Russia—FireEye spotted them. Bangalore got an alert and flagged the security team in Minneapolis. And then …

  Nothing happened.

  For some reason, Minneapolis didn’t react to the sirens.

• Worse

  This isn’t just an Amazon problem. In the last few years, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have all made huge attempts to move into major parts of each others’ businesses, usually at the detriment of their customers or users.

• managers are awesome / managers are cool when they’re part of your team

  This bothered me a bit when I heard it last summer, and it’s gotten increasingly more uncomfortable since. I’ve been paraphrasing this part of the talk as “management is a form of workplace violence,” and the still-evolving story of Julie Ann Horvath suggests that the removal of one form of workplace violence has resulted in the reintroduction of another, much worse form.

• What Your Culture Really Says

  Culture is not about the furniture in your office. It is not about how much time you have to spend on feel-good projects. It is not about catered food, expensive social outings, internal chat tools, your ability to travel all over the world, or your never-ending self-congratulation.

  Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly. It is as much about the inevitable brokenness and dysfunction of teams as it is about their accomplishments. Culture is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly. The critique of startup culture that came in large part from the agile movement has been replaced by sanitized, pompous, dishonest slogans.

• Welcome to the Thirsty West

  Don’t get me wrong: This has always been an extreme environment. But over the thousands of years of human civilization in this corner of the world, people have adapted to little water. Problem is: The water supply/demand calculus has never changed this quickly before. About 100 years ago, the balance started to tip. Groundwater was invested for agricultural purposes. Massive civil engineering projects pulled more water from rivers. The human presence in the desert blossomed.

Stuff I'm reading, St Patrick's Day edition

While the corned beef is boiling, take a break, pour yourself a cold green-colored beverage and read.

• Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

  Those four lines and one practice encompass everything there is to know about effective software development. Of course, this involves a fair amount of thinking, and the basic loop is nested fractally inside itself many times as you focus on everything from variable naming to long-term delivery, but anyone who comes up with something bigger or more complex is just trying to sell you something.

• Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls

  If my pithy advice were little more than "Be more like John Carmack" then I can imagine a lot of readers throwing up their hands and saying "Well, fuck it, I'm a lost cause, because that's not going to happen." But what I can do is relate some of the things that helped me kill off some of my underachieving habits. The point isn't to become a superstar, it's to become better, since that's always the first step.

• The One Problem

  if you speak more than 30% in a conversation, you are boring the other person. If you forget everything I said and just remember to STFU and listen, you have a fair shot at building a product that market wants.

• Good Riddance to Hampton, Florida?

  The town's three staff members resigned in February, and so has the police chief, who at one point was employing 17 officers ("a word loosely applied here," said the Times) for a town of 477 people. The county sheriff said he did not know how many of the 17 were actually police officers or whether any of them were actually trained in radar detection.

• How Sony Makes Music For Your Favorite Games

  Yesterday, I was able to take a tour of Sony's state-of-the-art PlayStation Music Studio at the company's headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., where I met the guys responsible for the music in some of the best games released in the last few years.

• NTP and the Winter of 2013 Network DRDoS Attacks

  The only information that should come in to your network from the outside should be from messages that never have your address as the “sender” — the only place such messages should come from are from within your network. An “ingress” filter at your border would block these forgeries.

• A Plea for Architectural & Specification Stability with IPv6

  excuses for not deploying IPv6 are, to a great extent, just that: excuses. They have no relationship to the actual reason for not deploying it, which is, and has always been, "we see no benefit" (or, to a lesser extent, "our code doesn't support it", and "our code has bugs" -- both of which are temporary). These excuses mislead the IETF into thinking that the lack of IPv6 deployment means that there is somehow something wrong with the protocol. This in turn causes hand-wringing and standards-writing, but in my experience, that doesn't help: when we remove an excuse, people move on to another excuse -- because the excuse wasn't the real reason anyway.

• Using OpenSSH Certificate Authentication

  In 2014 ssh certificates are still a fairly obscure subject, neither widely understood or used. With such an obscure subject, one could almost expect it to be either hard or complex to implement – it is neither hard nor complex, just not well documented.

  The goal of this guide is to show how easy it is to use and manage ssh certificate authentication from small to very large environments in a practical way.

• The Infinite Lives of BitTorrent

  That’s why, among its many definitions and identities, BitTorrent is ultimately a very curious thing: a gigantic question about what startup success should look like. Most startups don’t achieve their world-changing ambitions, but the lucky ones happily settle for being acquired. BitTorrent seems to be stuck in the middle of all this--profitable, but unable to truly ever capitalize on the revolution it unleashed.