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…

Memories of SARS 1: Tracking

I was never part of the effort, but I got to hear the war stories from the people who were, when we built a new cluster for one of the epidemiological tracking systems. And it was very much like a war: if you were one of the nurses and doctors, you made up one third…

What my company’s doing for COVID-19

As some of you know, I'm still working full-time in Toronto, where we learned a lot from the SARS epidemic. This is how a smart organization stops the spread of the virus by social distancing at the company level. The Company Stuff First of all, we're acting immediately to cut down the opportunity for transmission.…

Engineers are Birds

This picture is of a flock of starlings, who we see flying in tight formation as if they knew what every other bird was going to do. But birds aren't supposed to be telepathic. Oddly enough, I just came off a  project where engineers also acted that way, as if they were all of one…

Guaranties are limits, in the limit

One of the things I like to do is to challenge myself with interesting problems in computer science. It's fun to see if I can figure out how to solve them, now that someone has done it. Intro One particular thing I’d love to do is provide minimum resource guarantees to customers of a program,…