keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Loose cables at CERN and Time synchronization is hard

    According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it…

  • Manufacturing and devices

    The answer is obvious but few people stop for a second to wonder about this. After all, it is not like Apple has control over all aluminum in the world. Apple were just the first to see the potential of such bodies and began to increase their orders. In just a few years Apple became…

  • Julia programming language and hadoop

    While we’re being demanding, we want something that provides the distributed power of Hadoop — without the kilobytes of boilerplate Java and XML; without being forced to sift through gigabytes of log files on hundreds of machines to find our bugs. We want the power without the layers of impenetrable complexity. We want to write…

  • The UNIX file system as a recursive function

    Ignoring “write” operations, for the moment, a file system is just an implementation, a concrete manifestation, of a map from file names to file contents. A UNIX style file system complicates the story because file names are “paths” through a somewhat compromised tree structure.  You could try to express the relationships between nodes in this…

  • Apple’s A5 chip made in Austin

    Although I think it might have been designed here too. The A5 processor – the brain in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 – is now made in a sprawling 1.6 million square feet factory in Austin owned by Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics, according to people familiar with the operation. One of the few…

  • Richard Stallman speaks

    A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar, any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea…

  • Dennis Ritchie

    Truly a brilliant engineer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie  

  • Droning on about computer security

    Good grief. The US military’s unmanned Predator and Reaper drones are continuing to fly remote missions overseas despite a computer virus that has infected their US-based cockpits. Government officials are still investigating whether the virus is benign, and how it managed to infect the heavily protected computer systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada,…

  • The multics file system

    The design proposed in this paper is ubiquitous. A file is simply an ordered sequence of elements, where an element could be a machine word, a character, or a bit, depending upon the implementation. A user may create, modify or delete files only through the use of the file system. At the level of the…

  • Fukushima Robot Blog

    This from the IEEE is really fascinating. It is the blog of a robot operator in the Fukushima nuclear plants. Some interesting things about controls, robot handling, and durability are discussed. And, big surprise, the competence of the organization that created the disaster in the first place seems less than stunning.