Administrator – Page 8 – Stuff Yaron Finds Interesting

8/7/2012 – Primary and Special Election – Seattle, King County, Washington

It’s election time again! Oh joy.... This year is a bit different. The corruption in our society has reached such absurd levels that radical action is called for. From a government that ignores climate science to to one that allows parasites to commit endless financial crimes we have to do something very, very different because doing the same doesn’t work. For me that means stopping to vote for the parasite’s fully paid off lackeys, otherwise known as the Republican and Democratic parties. The parasites have sucked in enough cash and gotten enough court decisions to put themselves in absolute control of our politicians. So the only hope short of full revolution is to stop voting for the lackeys. So this year, with the honorable exception of Jim McDermott, I’m not voting for anyone who is part of or wants to be part of the Republican or Democratic parties.

A letter to Barnes and Noble about my Nook

I wrote the following letter today to Barnes and Noble regarding the issues I’ve had over the last year with my Nook SimpleTouch. Overall the Nook is actually a great device to read on. But it has a number of very specific failures that when put together are starting to make me regret I bought it.

Peripheral Bandwidths – PCIe, Infiniband, QPI, SATA, SAS, DMI/ESI & Ethernet

I’m trying to figure out just how much data I can move through a modern computer. To grok that I need to understand the bandwidth capabilities of the various types of peripherals one can attach to a modern computer. I therefore run through below what appear to be the main peripheral types and what kind of bandwidth they can maintain. Wikipedia has a great summary of the bandwidths of various technologies. Note however that the bandwidths listed in that article are raw (except, confusingly, when they are not) bandwidth, not data bandwidth, below I try to find numbers that represent actual data bandwidth.

My computer memory cheat sheet

For various reasons I need to better understand the gory details of how modern hardware actually works, especially NUMA systems. My first stop on my tour of modern hardware is memory, specifically all the gory details of DDR3 memory (I’ll start worrying about DDR4 when I can buy it).

How I manage our retirement portfolio

A friend of mine (Hi Matt!) made the awful mistake of asking how I manage our retirement portfolio. I decided to put together a relatively quick (and hence incomplete) explanation. It comes down to a total of five investment types so it's not too bad.

Investing in the global stock market

I want to invest in a global capitalization weighted free float stock market index. Below I explain what I mean, who provides such indexes and how I would build such an index using just two funds.

Losing exceptions in C#, there has to be a better way!

A nasty problem I've been tangling with for a while now is that C# likes to eat exceptions. If one is already in an exception context and another exception gets thrown then the first exception, by default, is just lost. I explore below some ways to deal with this and honestly they all suck. Does anyone have a better idea?

State diagrams for Paxos made simple

I was reading through Paxos made simple and I really wished there were state diagrams to help explicate the protocol. So I wrote them up and share them below. Please keep in mind that the diagrams just explore naive Paxos, that is single value, no distinguished proposer or distinguished learner. So this version of Paxos is pretty useless in practice but it completely captures the core mechanisms that make Paxos work (with the exception of how to pick a distinguished learner). Please note that this article is intended to be used by someone going through Paxos made simple. It is an adjunct, not a replacement.

Wrapped or Native Paxos?

So let's say I want to build a nice highly consistent multi-data center store, something like Megastore. Most everyone at this point has something like Bigtable already deployed in their data centers. What they typically don't have is a way to keep different instances of their table stores guaranteed consistent with each other across DCs. Megastore steps in to address this issue. But this begs a fundamental question - what's better, to wrap a Paxos coordinator on top of existing table stores or to build a new Paxos native storage service?

To rent or buy a house?

Should we rent or buy a house? A fairly quick and easy rule of thumb is (Price of a new home)/(monthly rent for equivalent home*12). As Dean Baker argues if the result is 15 or below then it makes financial sense to buy, otherwise renting is cheaper. For those who want more control over the calculations see the New York Time's rent vs buy calculator. My own settings for the calculator are give below.