philwise's comments

philwise | 4 years ago | on: Masten Space Systems is using Ada and Spark to land on the Moon's south pole [pdf]

Are there vendors who provide support for tool qualification for frama-c? By that I mean documentation support that can be provided as part of the certification process, so when you say "Frama-c verified this code does not contain any arithmetic overflow", it is possible to back that up with "And Frama-c version x.y.z has sound analysis, evidenced by ...."

philwise | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to improve code quality while maintaining decent velocity?

Talk to your line manager. It is quite possible that there are some skills around building long-term maintainable codebases that you haven't learnt yet. Different companies have vastly different ideas about what 'good enough' looks like, and so this may be the first time you've had to think about these particular issues.

A big, decent organization will have the structures in place to help you learn this. I'd suggest bringing it up at your next 1:1: 'I'm a bit worried about how I did in these PRs <open browser>'. Your manager may also have the same worries, in which case you skipped that conversation along to the point of working on a solution, or you might find out that what you are doing is on-par and there is nothing to worry about. Training in new skills is bread-and-butter stuff for a mature organization, so I would look for support in your normal management chain.

philwise | 7 years ago | on: Apple’s New iPad Pro Ads Were Shot and Made Entirely on the iPad Pro [video]

My wife taught the kids at primary school how to use PowerPoint. After they were given a camera to take some pictures around the school, some of them randomly figured out they could make stop motion animations. I was blown away.

Six year old kids can do amazing things, as long as their environment doesn't railroad them down boring paths.

philwise | 13 years ago | on: Draconian ‘Wi-Fi police' stalk Olympic Games

I think that the UK.gov were forced by the IOC to promise that they would get the law passed before they could submit a O*c bid.

Basically they waited until the last minute then it just happened without any consultation.

philwise | 13 years ago | on: How well does Khan Academy teach?

The article misses the point of Khan Academy. The point is that the world only ever has to find _one good example_ of how to teach something.

If someone comes up with a theory on a better way to teach something, cool. A/B test it and keep the winner.

philwise | 14 years ago | on: Urban Airship: Postgres to NoSQL and back

One thing to note is that dedicated server suppliers will foot the capital cost of servers for you, so there is no need to find the cash for the server up front. 100tb.com do this (I've not used them, know people who do) for example.

philwise | 14 years ago | on: Google App Engine leaves preview, new pricing

I would see this as a move towards 'enterprise' (yes I know people here hate that word), but look at the url...

$9/app/month means that it doesn't really make sense for tiny hobby sites any more: it is comparable in cost to a tiny VPS host, and my VPS currently handles 19 domains.

The place where GAE makes most sense is the 'line of business' app that is basically just a set of forms backed by a database. Those kind of apps don't have any complex things going on that are going to require integration with existing code or custom server configuration: both places where the current crop of PaaS offerings risky right now.

Line of business apps currently require lots of manual labour from DBAs and IS, so paying $9/month to run the HR application is going to be a pretty good deal.

philwise | 14 years ago | on: Amazon ElastiCache Details - Managed Memcache

That is pretty pricey. 1GB of RAM from crucial is $10. 1 GB of Memcache from AWS, (assuming 3 year amortization) $1900.

Obviously there is overhead, but if you have machines already and they are not maxed out on RAM then the $10/GB price is not far of the real cost.

philwise | 15 years ago | on: High Frequency Trading Development Kit

I used to work in the FPGA industry, and we had quite a few people looking at trying to do hardware acceleration of stuff currently done on CPUs. In short, it is hard.

There are plenty of suppliers who offer stuff in the market, for example replacing one half of a dual CPU system with an FPGA and in general some variant of 'pick a fast interconnect and stick an FPGA at the end'

I can't see why this offers anything more to the discussion over a product announcement.

philwise | 15 years ago | on: On moving from CouchDB to Riak

'Sharding' and 'a rest interface' are not really business requirements. Sharding is only a solution to handling certain types of high load, and REST is but one solution for IPC.

philwise | 15 years ago | on: On moving from CouchDB to Riak

"We store a lot of data... 2TB"

Given that a pair of 2TB drives is less than $250 on ebuyer right now, 2TB of data is not 'big data'. You could comfortably stuff that in any decent database (SQL Server for example, I'm sure PostgreSQL would work too).

Just because a tiny machine on slicehost isn't big enough doesn't mean that your data won't fit in a normal database.

philwise | 15 years ago | on: Meet the Bisickle, a Commuter Bike Concept

This appears to be a bike designed by someone who has never ridden a bike, and who never got a handful of bits of wood and mocked the thing up. For example:

1) The handle bars have two hand positions, yet no brakes. Dual brakes are possible, but expensive, fiddly and don't work with hydro disk brakes.

2) No mud guards.

3) Why solid spoke carbon fiber wheels when stressed steel spokes work so well?

4) Riding a bike with a 8 inch wide cross bar: a 10 minute mockup of this by sellotaping a lunchbox to to crossbar of a normal bike would reveal why this doesn't work

5) The saddlebag briefcase will interfere with your heel while pedaling: panniers need to much further back.

6) No lights

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