Technology on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

10 Tips for Not Giving a Sales Pitch at a Meetup

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 10:55:00 +0000

How do you give a sales pitch at a developer meetup? Don’t.

Developer meetups are technical, so it can’t seem like a sales pitch. Even if you paid for the pizza and beer and everyone knows you are there to pitch them on something with commercial upside for you, they want to feel like it is a technical community event where valuable information is being shared. This is the epitome of the evangelical or educational sale.

Toddler Science and Big Data

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 01:16:00 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time following my son Patrick around watching him explore the world. I’ve shared a few of his important discoveries with Twitter and with friends, under the tag “Toddler Science”. Key discoveries include that tissue boxes contain a finite supply of tissue and that cat magnets do not stick to cats. I spent the New Years weekend with friends, and they too had an opportunity to watch Patrick learning.

2010 The Year in Bookmarks

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:45:00 +0000

As you may have heard, Delicious is going away, or at least being sold off, or otherwise being destroyed by Yahoo. In the last 72 hours, I’ve tried out the two leading alternatives, Diigo and pinboard. Along the way, I got to wondering why I keep all these bookmarks around. I do often search back for things. And in paging through my 1173 bookmarks from 2010, they formed an interesting lens through which to look back at the year. And so I present 2010, the year in bookmarks.

Yes Virginia, You Can Work on Great Technology at Startups

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 02:17:00 +0000

You can work on great technology at startups. You wouldn’t think that would be a controversial statement. But it is if you believe Ted Tso’s defense of Google, “Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap.” Ted dismisses the engineering that goes on in a startup, saying:

Similarly, you don’t work on great technology at a startup. Startups, by and large, aren’t about technology — at least, not the Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Groupon, etc. They are about business model discovery. So if you are fundamentally a technologist at heart, whose heart sings when you’re making a better file system, or fixing a kernel bug, you’re not going to be happy at a startup. At least, not if the startup is run competently.

Three Months Without Cable

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:03:00 +0000

As was widely reported in the media, the second and third quarter of 2010 show a steady decline in cable subscriptions. This is earth-shaking for the cable companies, who have seen growth in US subscribers over their entire history. It’s a key indicator of not only consumers being more careful with their spending, but the rise of Internet-delivered media as a compelling alternative.

In August of this year I joined the ranks of people “cutting the cord”. I was moving, and when we set up Verizon FiOS at the new house we left off video. Three months later, I’d like to fill you in on how it has gone and what I see in the future of consumer video delivery.

Captchas: The Bear Proof Trash Can Problem

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 23:03:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been selling a lot of things on Craigslist. Along with adventures in capitalism, every post to Craigslist requires filling out a CAPTCHA, specifically a reCAPTCHA. I’ve noticed that they have gotten quite difficult. In fact, at least one of the captchas I got recently was in Greek.

Captchas area a really clever idea, but they represent a special kind of arms race. The spammers are always improving their automatic and semi-automatic captcha solvers. At the same time, the average web user is not getting any better at solving captchas. The goal of the captcha company is to hit the window between what motivated spammers can do automatically and what web users can do manually.

Proactive Assumption Violation: Avoiding Bugs By Behaving Badly

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:38:00 +0000

Bugs are a fact of life in software, and probably always will be. Some bugs are probably unavoidable, but a lot of bugs can be avoided through good architecture, defensive programming, immutability, and other techniques. One major source of bugs, especially frustrating bugs, is non-deterministic behavior. Every programmer has experienced bugs which don’t reproduce, which require a special environment, or special timing, or even just luck to make happen. To avoid these bugs, programmers learn to favor determinism, making sure their software behaves the same way every time.

Apple is a Luxury Brand, Android Will Never Be

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:48:00 +0000

Recently I’ve had several good conversations about exactly what business Apple is in. They have clearly transcended their traditional role as a computer maker. Some people think that Apple has become a media company, or a telecommunications company. What they have really done is to become a luxury brand. As a luxury brand they are shielded from feature- and performance-based competition, enjoying higher margins and more stable revenues than other consumer electronics firms. The future of the iPhone and iPad and their strategy for competing with Android will be based on Apple’s luxury brand.

Non-Destructive Process Inspection on OSX: Blog Post Recovery

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:13:00 +0000

Moments ago I was writing a different blog post, about home renovation. Unfortunately just as I posted it a bug in ecto, the aging client I still use to edit blog posts, caused the complete loss of the text with no backup copies. Because messing about with system tools is more fun than rewriting that blog post, I present instead a brief howto for creating a core dump on OSX without killing a process, and inspecting that core dump to attempt to recover your data.

Platonic Browser Session Management

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 01:04:00 +0000

Firefox just crashed, and when I restarted it I was informed that it had some trouble reopening my 115 tabs. Understandable, but I went ahead and clicked the button that encouraged it to try harder. The result, after consuming what would have been several thousand dollars of computer time back when they charged for it, is that I’m back in the mess I made myself, with an unmanageable collection of pages open, covering topics like faucets, washing machines, coffee brewing, JVMs, whatever else came out of Google Reader, and the research I was doing for this post.

DEBS 2010 Highlights

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:49:00 +0000

I spent the first half of last week at DEBS 2010 at King’s College in Cambridge, UK. It was a great conference, many good papers and interesting attendees. As usual some of the best ideas came from the hallway sessions. But I’d like to provide some pointers to my favorite papers of the conference:

David Jeffery’s keynote on Betfair’s event driven architecture, past present and future. David presented not only on the performance challenges of running the core betting exchange, but also on the soft benefits. Thanks to their event driven architecture, Betfair is able to do more experimentation with less disruption, and be more agile as an organization.
Dan O’Keeffe presented Reliable Complex Event Detection for Pervasive Computing, a system for compensating for missing data. Most importantly, it lays out a selection of strategies that developers can select and the system can use to automatically choose the correct approach, based on wether the system should be optimistic, pessimistic, or something in between.
Quilt: A Patchwork of Multicast Regions was presented by one of the local students on short notice, because the author was not able to attend due to visa problems. This is especially frustrating when the paper is so interesting and the analysis quite strong. Quilt is a system for combining multiple delivery mechanisms to achieve efficient wide area distribution. Combining overlay-network based protocols with “patches” of true multicast where available, Quilt optimizes message routing for efficiency, reliability, and latency.
An Approach for Iterative Event Pattern Recommendation which was also presented by a colleague rather than one of the authors due to visa issues. The paper describes a system for recommending event patterns to domain experts based on their initial attempts to define the pattern. In a controlled user study, the recommendation system substantially reduced the time taken by users to define novel patterns. It was good to see a real user study of a programming efficiency system, but there is lots of room for further measurement.
Experiences with Codifying Event Processing Function Patterns, presented by the author Anand Ranganathan, dealt with a different kind of pattern. In systems using Ranganathan’s system, developers build template network flows, annotated with tags to define what components can be used in the flow. Any component that matches the inputs, outputs, and tags can be inserted into the template, and all possible template instantiations represent a domain of valid applications. End users are able to search this combinatorially large domain with a flexible interface, to find and instantiate applications that meet their needs.

There are many great papers and talks not listed here. Obviously my own bias shows, as does the fact that I didn’t attend every talk or read every paper.

Analysis of May 6th: The Importance of Near Misses

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:05:00 +0000

Since writing about stock market crashes and normal accidents, I spent even more time talking about the events of May 6th. Good analysis is starting to come out. The best I have seen so far is Nanex’s Flash Crash Analysis. Their conclusion is that the crash was precipitated primarily by a queuing and timestamping bug at NYSE, which lead to understandable but unfortunate flash mobbing by high frequency trading firms attempting to execute against the delayed prices being quoted out. I recommend their analysis and the supporting charts, which are quite compelling.

Device Convergence, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Kindle

Sun, 09 May 2010 20:05:00 +0000

A number of months ago I posted my disappointment in the version 1 Kindle. I’ve also tried out the version 2, and continue to be convinced that the Sony Reader is a better piece of hardware for dedicated book reading.

But (if there wasn’t a but there wouldn’t be much of a post here) the Sony eBook store is painfully terrible. Titles are expensive, hard to search for, and often not available. The result is that my book buying on the Sony gradually trailed off. On my last two business trips I haven’t bothered to bring the Reader, and it sits on a shelf right now, probably running out of battery.

Synthetic Biology and Big Ball of Mud

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Researchers at the MIT OpenWetWare project are attempting to engineer Synthetic Biology, creating reusable and composable biological components that can be combined to create useful organisms. In the process, they are discovering that biological systems don’t follow the same patterns of good architecture familiar to us from software.

In software engineering, architecture is perceived as critical to the success of a large implementation project, and also to the ongoing maintenance of the code created. Since software is very expensive, there is a lot of focus on architecture, choosing the right architecture, and making sure that the architecture is faithfully executed. Some of the biggest changes in software in the last 30 years, like object oriented programming and service oriented architecture, have come about because of a need for clearer architecture in ever larger collections of software that run modern life.

Acela WiFi: Finally Here, Could Be Better

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:36:00 +0000

Riding the Acela to New York yesterday, I had my first opportunity to try out the new WiFi service. I’m glad to see Acela moving into the 21st century and joining the ranks of BoltBus and LimoLiner by offering WiFi on trips to New York. It’s been a long time coming, and now that it is here I was looking forward to having good bandwidth through the swamps of Connecticut, rather than depending on my fickle EVDO card.

10 Days with the Google Nexus One

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:40:00 +0000

On Tuesday January 5 Google announced the Nexus One smart phone. On Thursday January 7, my Nexus One arrived.

For context, I’ve historically been a BlackBerry user, but have been steadily driven away by the browser experience. My wife was a zero-day iPhone adopter, and I’ve spent a lot of time using an iPhone. I also own an iPod Touch which I carry every day and use regularly as a gaming/apps/media platform.

Android G1 and Palm Pre versus iPhone and BlackBerry Benchmarks

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:26:00 +0000

In my last post, I shared benchmark data for the web browser on the iPhone versus BlackBerry. My theory is that web browser performance is critically important for smartphone user experience. Furthermore, the BlackBerry seems to be embarrassingly inferior to the iPhone in this respect. This begs the question, how do other phones stack up.

Thanks to two friends, I have SunSpider JavaScript benchmark results for the G1 and for the Palm Pre. Based on the graphs here, it’s clear that the G1 and the Pre are both considerably better than the BlackBerry Bold. Specifically, the G1 is 9.6 times faster than the Bold, and the Pre is 15 times faster.

BlackBerry versus iPhone – Benchmarking the Browser

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:17:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook. They seem trendy, and I like gadgets. But I’ve started questioning what I would get from one that I don’t get from my current devices. I’ve concluded that what I want isn’t a netbook, it is a phone that is actually good.

I’m the happy owner of a BlackBerry Bold. I upgraded from a Curve the day the Bold came out. I’m pleased with the device. It has a great keyboard. The built in push-mail client works well, and the calendar is also very good. Third party apps complete the picture, including google maps and gmail. In fact, the gmail client for blackberry is arguably better than the built in blackberry mail client. The device is small. It has a great screen, and a great keyboard.

How long will PCs and Servers use the same CPU?

Wed, 06 May 2009 13:48:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting at MIT on Cloud Computing. One of the questions from the audience was how cloud computing impacts high performance computing. The response was that in a cloud of inexpensive commodity servers, scientific applications must learn to spread applications across large numbers of parallel compute nodes. This is the most economical way to take advantage of state of the art computing in 2009.

Hello Wordpress!

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:02:00 +0000

I switched to Wordpress. Let’s see if anyone notices.

Thinking about Tufte: Resolution Isn’t the Key

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:56:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend Edward Tufte’s lecture in Boston thanks to StreamBase. This was one of his standard lectures on information presentation, for which he has become famous. As usual, it came complete with a set of his books. This was convenient since sometime in my last 4 moves and 3 jobs I lost my set.

I’ve been a fan of Tufte since I first encountered his work as a freshman at MIT. His books contain wonderful examples of good informational graphics, graphics that display quantitative and relationship oriented data, drawn from many modern and historical sources. They are entertaining to read, and provide lots of inspiration for user interface and graphic design.

Exchanging my Kindle for another Sony Reader

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:12:00 +0000

I replaced my Sony Reader with a hipper new Amazon Kindle, and I’m totally disappointed. The Kindle has a few good ideas, but it is terribly executed. I’m returning it today (something Amazon is making pleasant enough) and buying another Reader.

Read on for more detail…

About 6 months ago, I bought a used Sony Portable Reader from a friend of a friend. I travel a lot, and have a lot of open-format stuff I wanted to read (pdfs, html manuals, etc). I’ve always through electronic ink was interesting technology, and buying used appealed to my cheaper inclinations.

Bungee Connect: What I learned about platform evaluations

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:50:00 +0000

Catching up on email this Saturday, I got the opportunity to take a survey about my experience evaluating Bungee Connect. Evaluating bungee connect has been something that has popped onto my radar several times. They purport to be an application platform for web applications. They have their own language, their own ui toolkit, their own (browser-based) IDE, and their own code library and source control system. In my day job I create and sell a novel application platform (for streaming applications), so I like to look at new platforms on many levels. I signed up, and was shortly invited into the bungee beta.

VLDB Keynote: Data Access Patterns in The Amazon.com Technology Platform

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 06:53:00 +0000

The opening keynote for this year’s VLDB was a great presentation by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, describing their data management challenges. I particularly appreciated it because it echoed something I’ve been saying for a few years now: Web-scale companies have problems which cannot be managed with standard RDBMS, or with any common research systems, and so they have started to route-around the database research community.

Vogels presented lots of information. A big part was about the operational realities of a site as large as Amazon. This has been said before, but saying it to a room full of database researchers was a good thing:

The Lemons Meme in Software

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:52:00 +0000

A few weeks ago Bruce Schneier discovered a classic economics paper, “The Market for Lemons”. The paper describes the behavior of markets where sellers have detailed information about the products, particularly the quality of the products, that buyers do not have. It uses the example of used cars.

In these markets, the price buyers are willing to pay is defined by average quality of good. Buyers lack information, so can only assume they are going to get a product of average value. Unfortunately, this lower price drives the best products out of the market, because sellers (who know they have the best goods) won’t accept that price. When the best goods are removed from the market, the average quality drops, the price drops, and the next best goods are removed from the market. The conclusion is that in these markets quality falls until it matches the amount of information that buyers have.

CS Research Everyone Should Know: Xerox PARC Bayou

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 19:31:00 +0000

I was chatting last night with a Web 2.0-oriented friend of mine, and applications that support disconnected operation and synchronization came up. These have been in the noos a bit lately, with the release of the Ruby on Rails based Joyent Slingshot and talk of the Flash based Adobe Apollo.

The cliche that those who forget history (or never learn it) are doomed to repeat it is apt. A lot of people thinking about and building these applications have never heard of Bayou, though they have generally heard of Xerox PARC. The project ended in 1997, but there is still a retrospective page with publications list. From the overview:

Switching to OSX, productivity and development tools

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 19:11:00 +0000

Two weeks ago I got a new laptop from work. After extensive hemming and hawing, I went with an Apple MacBook (the black one, cause it looks hotter^Wmore professional). Previous to this I had been running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T40 bought around the founding of StreamBase. My goal for the change was to have a laptop that would “just work”, and to stop having to administer my personal machine. I was last on a Mac when I was in grad school.

Me.dium Beta

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:27:00 +0000

I got invited into the Beta at Me.dium, a new collaborative/social browsing system. It’s no dis-similar from the third-party-comments system I was pondering back in the spring, if anyone remembers that. However, rather than being focussed on comments, it is also focussed on real-time browsing. You get a side-bar that shows you what people are looking at. It also has a facility for inviting your friends and sharing browser state with your friends. If anyone is interested in an invitiation, let me know.

Algorithms for the 21st Century

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:51:00 +0000

Went to a talk at MIT tonight, by Stephen C Johnson, a researcher at The Mathworks. The talk was sponsored by the Greater Boston ACM. The paper, Algorithms for the 21st Century, was presented at Usenix 2006. The general thrust was how computer architecture has drifted from the idealized model used in most algorithms classes, in significant ways. The major focus was on the memory subsystem, and how caching can effect algorithmic performance. By looking at the behavior of very simple algorithms, we can see fairly complex variations in performance, by factors as high as 60 times worse. This in turn implies that the performance of complex algorithms will be even more diffi
cult to characterize.
One big take-away is that the built-in cache management schemes of modern memory systems are pessimal for certain algorithms. This actually sounds quite a bit like the complaints against operating system disk buffer/virtual memory management by database authors. Database algorithms, because they often have large storage access requirements that can be characterized in advance, benefit from managing their own buffers. Similarly, it seems like scientific computing (eg, Matlab), which wants to manipulate gigabytes of memory in very structured ways, would benefit from direct management of caching. Of course, cache management needs to run at processor-speed, unlike disk buffer management, so writing heavyweight algorithms is inappropriate. Unfortunately, the talk did not discuss any recommendations for extentions to enable management. I wonder if something as simple as being able to mark a page as no-cache in the TLB would be sufficient.
My other take-away is that computer science researchers don’t understand computers nearly enough. The presenter, while familiar with processor design and memory architecture, wasn’t really able to explain the behavior of these simple algorithms in their entirety. I’m always bothered when I encounter this lack of understanding. On some level it seems that it should be possible to fully understand computer systems. After all, they are developed by humans, and to a first approximation their behavior is deterministic and well defined. Unfortunately, they change rapidly, and so any abstract models we develop are shortly invalidated. Fundamentally, this is what makes computer science difficult.

propsmart – Finally a good MLS/google maps mashup

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 10:28:00 +0000

I just happened to catch a Google ad for propsmart, and I’m glad that I did. I enjoy regularly browsing real estate listings in both Michigan and Massachusetts. The web-based browsing systems have been gradually improving, but none of them have yet got it right. propsmart is a big step in the right direction. For those of you who have seen Housing Maps, this is basically housing maps applied to MLS and several other data sources, rather than just Craigslist.

Making offlineimap not die

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:29:00 +0000

I love offlineimap. I even love the quirky way it is hosted on a gopher site. The functionality is awesome. For those of you who don’t know, offlineimap syncronizes a remote IMAP mailbox heirarchy with a local Maildir folder heirarchy. This means you get disconnected IMAP operation with all your favorite Maildir clients (like mutt), while still retaining the ability to access your mail using other IMAP clients.

However, offlineimap crashes too often. Every couple of days I will fail to get any new mail for an hour or two, and realize that offlineimap has crashed. And due to Murphy’s law this generally correlates with a time when I was recieving some important mail.

Switched my laptop to Ubuntu

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:21:00 +0000

I switched to running Ubuntu on my Thinkpad. I’m very pleased with the experience. The install was painless, and everything thus far has just worked. It really feels like linux is maturing on the desktop.

I’ve also installed a shiny new tool, Gnome Blog. It’s a panel applet that makes it easy to enter blog posts. It sits on the panel and remembers the blog post you were in the middle of, so you can always stop and come back to it later.

This is a test of the gnome-blog client

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:01:00 +0000

I’m just testing the gnome-blog client.

Subversion greater than CVS

Sun, 29 May 2005 11:20:00 +0000

I recently finished upgrading
href=”http://typo.leetsoft.com/”>Typo (the software that runs
href=”http://innocuous.org/ntsh/”>Nothing To See Here) from 1.6.8
to 2.0.x, and at the same time moved my local changes into
href=”http://subversion.tigris.org/”>Subversion. Subversion is a
definite improvement over
href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/cvs/”>CVS. Being able to
rearrange my repository (I did this twice before I was happy with it)
was really nice. Once I was used to it, I gained the ability to just
add things anywhere I want and figure I could sort them out later. The
write-once nature of the directory structure in CVS had always created
a lot of anxiety whenever I was starting a project. I think I will
shortly be transitioning all of my personal projects to Subversion.
All the cool kids are doing it. Of course, if I was a really cool kid
I’d be using SVK, but I think I’m
not cool enough for that yet.

Setting up Typo: RubyOnRails, lighttpd, FastCGI and being a bad sysadmin

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:10:00 +0000

I took most of my evening last night to set up FastCGI and lighttpd. My goal was to serve a Typo, a blog engine based on RubyOnRails. I was thwarted by not knowing RubyOnRails very well, and by knowing FastCGI and lighttpd not at all.

The first issue was that Typo doesn’t like to run in a subdirectory on a webserver. That is, it wanted to be at ntsh.innocuous.org/, not innocuous.org/ntsh. This offended my sensibilities somewhat, so I decided to beat it into submisssion. This involved tracking down a bunch of places where paths were hard coded, which included a few places in the templates and the CSS.

BloGTK not so great

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 11:50:00 +0000

I’m currently using BloGTK with Typo and am not all that happy with it. I’m not a big fan of GUIs. I should find something command line based.

First Post

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 11:48:00 +0000

I’m trying out Typo, web log software, and liking it. It uses Ruby On Rails, and seems to work quite well.