Documentation for Progress

I’ve noticed in my work recently that documenting my work is one of the most reliable ways of making steady progress. I likely gathered the idea from the internet somewhere, or perhaps from the generous amounts of advice spewed forth…

Building Linguistic Structure

Yesterday, I had an interesting thought. My advisor once made the cultural observation that many people in Computer Science invent their own language and then immediately write a self-hosting compiler. I agree that a compiler is quite a feat of…

Revisiting Cascade

I did an earlier post about finding a decentralized solution to the Cascade Failure problem. I was fortunate enough to explore this topic a bit more in depth by proposing it as my term project for the Distributed Systems class….

Preventing Cascade Failure in Networks

For some reason I was thinking about the cascade failure problem that I mentioned before my Holiday Hiatus. I discovered that this problem has gone largely unsolved when attending ACSAC ’08, and it’s been in the back of my mind…

ACSAC 2008

So, I went to ACSAC the other week, and sketched out some crazy notes: It seems that nobody is really working on large scale distributed systems reliability. By this I mean things like the Internet and the Power Grid. Both…

More Accurate Speedometer

I’ve been sitting on this idea for at least a year, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t blogged about it yet. It turns out that car speedometers are not very accurate. In fact, they can be on the…

Bounding Problution.

Problutions (noun, pl.): the problems that are an inherent part of solution to a very difficult and complex problem. These problems arise from within the solution itself, and are extrinsic to the original problem. Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit…

The Dryer Protocol

I’m becoming increasingly interested in systems engineering, but still don’t really know much about the subject. One thing that I read about recently (though I completely forgot where) was about how to choose a robust cooperation protocol, using the communal…