madphysics

Awesome article analyzing the massive yet subtle productivity difference between programmers:

Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. They may realize the problem they’re being asked to solve doesn’t need to be solved, that the client doesn’t actually want what they’re asking for. They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their problem. They may cheat. But just when they are being their most productive, nobody says “Wow! You were just 100x more productive than if you’d done this the hard way. You deserve a raise.” At best they say “Good idea!” and go on. It may take a while to realize that someone routinely comes up with such time-saving insights. Or to put it negatively, it may take a long time to realize that others are programming with sound and fury but producing nothing.

This epicurious recipe is awesome. The surprise ingredient is sweetened condensed milk.

Serious marbling

This is solid, but add a dash of cayenne.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/11892

Caesar Mayonnaise Dressing
2 small garlic cloves, minced and mashed to a paste with 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon anchovy paste
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon Dijon-style mustard
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 cup bottled mayonnaise
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Taken roughly from http://pkp.sfu.ca/wiki/index.php/HOW-TO_import_and_export_to_and_from_Gi....

1. Download and install http://www.cobite.com/cvsps/cvsps-2.2b1.tar.gz. I unpacked and did 'make' followed by 'sudo make install'. Voila.
2. Get your entire repo locally:
   

   mkdir /tmp/PROJECTNAME.cvs
   cd /tmp/PROJECTNAME.cvs
   rsync -av 'rsync://PROJECTNAME.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/PROJECTNAME/*' .
   

3. Import into git:
   

   cd /tmp
   git cvsimport -d :local:/tmp/PROJECTNAME.cvs -C PROJECTNAME.git -r cvs -k CVS-MODULE-NAME
   

4. Verify the git repo:
   

   cd /tmp/PROJECTNAME.git
   git log
   git status
   

5. Go to github and create a new project. Lets say its called PROJECTNAME
6. Push the local git repo to the new github project (these two lines are shown to you after you create the new project:
   

   git remote add origin git@github.com:USERNAME/PROJECTNAME.git
   git push -u origin master
   

7. Load the github page and confirm the source files are present with history

In a case of truly mad physics, a paper by Dr. Erik Verlinde proposes that gravity is not a fundamental force, but is instead an "entropic force", which is to say that gravity is merely a side effect the increase in entropy in the universe. A series of posts at the Hammock Physicist, break it down, and in the process the author proposes a toy model that shows how simple entropic action can generate what appears at the macroscopic scale to be an attractive force.

The mikado universe is a 2-dimensional square which is intersected by many line segments, or "rays" (let's say 200). Each ray can be "on" or "off", and thus represents a degree of freedom of the system. In other words the entire state of the system can be described by 200 bits. The system starts out with two or more "particles" (circles) of a given radius that are not intersected by any "on" rays. These regions of space intersected only with "off" rays are called "holes". The system evolves in time based on the following simple rules:

1. Pick a random ray

2. If the ray is on, turn it off.

3. If the ray is off, turn if on ONLY IF turning it on doesn't shrink a hole to the point where the particle can no longer exist without being intersected with an on ray. So if the ray is just shaving a bit off the edge it is ok.

4. Repeat ad infinitum.

What happens if you run this experiment? Over time the particle regions (holes) will merge. Try it yourself by clicking the "start" button below!

Why is it that the particles move towards each other vs just jiggling around forever? Because there are many more ways for this system to exist with particles overlapping vs separate. In the entire configuration space of all possible states of the system, more of them have the particles near, or overlapping. Consider if a given particle has 30 rays intersecting it. A single particle will thus force those 30 rays to be off, leaving only 2^170 possible unique configurations of the system. But two particles far apart force 30+30=60 rays to be off, leaving only 2^140 possible configurations. So the number of configurations available with particles overlapping is 2^170/2^140 = 2^30 = 1 billion times more than the number of configurations available with particles far apart. The rules by which the system evolves are more or less a random exploration of this configuration space, and thus it is overwhelmingly likely that the system will end up in a state with particles overlapping. This is no different from the way a teaspoon of milk when poured into a cup of coffee is overwhelmingly likely to spread out and blend evenly within the coffee, all due to more or less random thermal jiggling of the molecules involved. This is a very intuitive result of entropy. What makes the mikado universe interesting is that it represents a system where entropic action causes particles to attract together, vs spread evenly apart.

Source code at http://github.com/gtoubassi/mikado-universe

(Note: running in a few trials, it seems Chrome is about 25-30% faster than Safari, which is about twice as fast as Firefox 6)

Immediately branded a tourist as a result of ordering the comically
large mug of beer. I think when I finish my picture goes on the wall.
(zurich)

Holy frijoles was this good. Google "Alton Brown Baked Macaroni and
Cheese". My new go to recipe.

Marinated for 4 hours in 1C each of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar (the sweet kind), and sesame oil, and 2T of honey. Accompanied by a broccoli salad (bought cut in the bag), dressed with the same with a bit of wasabe, sesame seeds, and toasted almond slivers. Chops were cooked on the grill about 1-2 minutes on a side.

Equal parts ground beef, lamb, veal, and pork. Seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, oregano, onion powder, garlic powder, and dry mustard. Seared on each side for 2 minutes and then 5 minutes on each side with indirect heat.

With dressing recipe from WSJ: .5C red wine vinegar, .25t sugar, 1/2 lemon juice, 1.5t salt, .5t pepper, 1t Worcestershire sauce, .5t dijon, 1 crushed clove garlic, 1.33C extra virgin olive oil. Also I used a new and awesome cheese: Shropshire.

+ =

Takeaways from recent talk by Adrian Cockroft, "Netflix Cloud Architect":

1. Move to the cloud motivated by challenges keeping up with capacity needs. Growth is exponential, can't build out datacenters fast enough, and even if you could you would have to plan conservatively and therefore either are likely to overspend on capex or will be under provisioned and tip over.
2. Cost optimization was not a factor in their choice. These costs are minuscule relative to their 2 greatest costs: purchasing content and postage fees on DVDs. So this was not a cost cutting move, it was a move to agility and flexibility. This calculus will be very different for pure service providers running at scale.
3. They are biting off hard on the entire Amazon stack, not just EC2. Lots of SimpleDB and S3 as well.
4. CEO Reed Hastings (whom I did not realize is a former engineer) implored the team to "burn the boats", for example no mysql.
5. They are moving to Cassandra as their basic persistence store.
6. They pay the same retail ec2 rates that everybody else does, though based on facial expressions I take it they are attempting to negotiate bulk discounts (beyond the existing reserved instance pricing which they take advantage of).
7. They have 5,000-10,000 active instances at any time. Not clear if these are just prod instances or including hundreds of qa/test instances
8. Heavy services architecture. "Roughly one service per developer". This is not cloud specific per se and seems to be "de rigueur" when you get > 100 developers.
9. "Freedom and Responsibility" culture. Teams decide their own release schedules and frequency. They push when they want (freedom) and they receive the 3am wake up call when something goes wrong (responsibility). Again, not related to move to the cloud, but enabled by the services architecture.

Supposedly good on a burger