Dear Jonathan, Last month I installed the Java development kit so I could play at home. My dalliance with programming was fun. However, rolling out a beta for a major release soon demanded my full attention. I had forgotten about Java’s existence on my desktop until I happened to be doing some system cleanup. Oh, […]
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With my products’ release imminent, I spent last weekend coaxing Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ECC) into action. The ECC is appealing for a few reasons: It’s someone else’s high-throughput network – product distributions, especially with demo files, are in the hundreds of megabytes. The T1 at work is 1.4Mb/s. Sharing, firewalls, and proxies reduce my
While I was driving around Tucson, I was struck by how differently the traffic lights sequenced. (Phoenix didn’t seem to have the noticeable differences.) Consider this intersection of Some Boulevard and No Way: Some Boulevard is the moderately-trafficked arterial going left-right. In this intersection, left turns have to yield to oncoming traffic. The pedestrian crosswalk
Because my car is the mechanical-equivalent of a teenager, I have to start the biannual emissions check before renewing my license plate tabs. I knew Subarus had a blanket waiver from the dynamometer test because it effs with the all wheel drive, but I expected an exhaust probe while it idled. Instead, the test consisted
While Tivo-surfing for new material, I came across “How It’s Made,” focusing on the mechanical steps involved in producing a particular kind of widget. It’s much lighter than Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs, but still entertaining. Because the show has been around a while, my Tivo picked up a dozen showings before I told it to