Literate Programming in Go

I've used literate programming before, especially for hard tasks like squeezing in the code and character tables of Canadian French, which includes accented capital letters. Into an x86 bios ROM of strictly limited size! Literate Programming was invented by Donald Knuth for hard tasks, like writing an entire typesetting program in Java. What I hadn't…

Measuring Apples and Oranges

Sometimes you really do have to measure two very different things. Recently I needed to compare an old batch program with a new Golang one, to see how much we’d improved. Introduction The problem sounded simple, but the batch program was multi-process, while the go program was multi-threaded. Hundreds of batch children would come into…

Section 230, Facebook and Newspapers

I suspect we need to hold the social media companies responsible for their decisions, not the postings of their readers. If it were a traditional newspaper, Facebook would be responsible for what it chose to write on its front page and what it stuck on page 9. Similarly, it would be responsible for what ads…

Time Budgeting

If you're concerned about the performance of your code, there is a classic performance-engineer's approach to managing risk, called a "time budget". If you're inside your budget, you can do capacity planning to get enough CPU and memory resources, at some price. But if you aren't, throwing money and developer time at a fuzzy performance…

Typhoid Mary

My local <coffee shop> opened up again, and I went in to see what looked like a good set of protections: signs, masks, plexiglass partitions and so on, but the server who made my latte handled the cup, cap and the stopper for the cap with his bare hands. This is exactly the scenario we…

The DBA said “Dave, …”

Sometimes, it's a case of not so much needing a guru as you do someone who exposes information for the smart people you already have. Like the DBA. Introduction Some years back, when Sun was still alive, I was part of a big capacity planning project with an industrial customer. The economy wasn't super good,…

Composing an “Arbiter of Truth”

William Gibson once said The future is already here—It's just not very evenly distributed. That also applies to the solutions to problems, like that of finding out who's telling the truth in widespread discussion. By Gibson's dictum, we should expect to find different parts of the solution, but not together, and likely in all sorts…

Living Through Dunning-Kruger

I had the good fortune to be diagnosed with a heart "flutter" this winter, and successfully treated. Found the bug, fixed the bug. But part of the treatment was a beta-blocker, which I was warned would sap my strength. What I was not expecting was it would turn me into a living example of the…

There are two kinds of tests, but lots of names

“reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction” tests RT-PCR tests PCR, or polymerase chain reaction tests dna tests rna tests nucleic acid tests tests using DNA and RNA, that recognize the virus directly, usually from nose and throat swabs blood tests serology tests antibody tests IgM-IgG tests Immunoglobulin tests tests where one detects antibodies in the blood, from…

Memories of SARS 2: Testing

More about SARS, very much second-hand. Without testing, we wouldn't have caught the second outbreak until it had started to spread again. And we could have a third and a fourth outbreak, happily killing doctors and nurses. Outbreak 1: Let's kill all the doctors It didn't take much testing to get started, because the second…