Matt Brubeck: Planet Matt

"This paper discusses the construction of a session management system which is robust against disclosure of the authentication database."

"OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, by using the one strategy we *know* doesn't work."

"We rolled our own subsystem for logging chat messages (in C++) as well as an epoll-driven web server (in Erlang) that holds online users' conversations in-memory and serves the long-polled HTTP requests."

"beanstalkd is a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service."

"If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale."

From Perforce software, but the advice applies to any SCM system. A classic.

"The index is a mechanism for preventing what you commit from matching what you tested in your working directory. Huh?" The diagram in particular is super-useful.

Eleanor knows her colors now, although the only ones she signs are white, black, red, orange, yellow, brown, and green. Her favorite color is orange. She's a huge fan of any orange cats we meet outside—especially the two we captured on video last month, which she asks to see again and again.

Eleanor has always gone through cycles of good and bad sleeping. She's never slept through the night consistently, but she'll have approximately two-week periods where she manages it most nights, followed by a few weeks of more frequent waking. The worst periods are during teething, which recently started for all four of her canines. Now that she's older, she's also resisting sleep more actively in the evenings, and we've had to get more draconian about bedtime routines. No Cry has served us somewhat well up to this point, but we might need to give Dr. Ferber a try soon. I'm not enjoying this new phase.

During the day she's an absolute delight, fortunately. She is experimenting with sounds, and has expanded her spoken vocabulary to five words: mama, dada, baba ("baby"), wawa ("water"), and dowa ("door", we decided—she's still working on this one). She can walk five blocks to get to the park, and she (usually) likes helping with household chores. She also likes visiting our housemates, who will very graciously entertain her for a few minutes to give me and Sarah a little rest.

"Redfin is an online real estate brokerage that puts you in charge of buying or selling your home."

Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.

In an attempt to waste less time on the computer, I'm going on an information diet. I unsubscribed from all high-traffic mailing lists and most high-traffic web feeds. I love Google Reader's "trends" page, which ranks feeds by number of updates, and makes it easy to unsubscribe quickly. It also lets me see my progress:

(The really low days in the graph are the weekend, when most sites I read don't publish anything new.)

I moved some of the high-traffic feeds to a private Planet Venus page. Now I can check them if I have nothing better to do, but if I ignore them they'll just fall off the bottom of the page instead of piling up in my "unread" queue.

Taking a week off, to take advantage of some saved up vacation time before I leave Amazon.

How to combine, separate, and reorder patches.

"Each process needs be aware of other processes in the system. The processes need to know how requests are partitioned among the processes. They need to be aware of configuration changes and failures." Compare to Google's Chubby lock service.

"26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image"

"Will three generations of Friedmans be enough?" Great article about what Patri's up to.

"The key is that garbage collection in Erlang is per process."

"The critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin." (goes on to nominate the analogous critical technology for the past 50 years.)

Starting in early June, I'm working at blist, an early-stage startup located in Seattle. Their product is a web application that makes databases easy to create and share; check out the web site for more information.

I had a great three years at Amazon, but I was getting eager to do something new, and to get back into the small-company world. This happened a little sooner than I'd planned, sice the founder of blist contacted me last month with a opportunity that seemed to good to pass up. Among other cool things, I will be the fourth Mudder at blist (out of about 12 employees); the others are Paul Paradise '03, Jeff Scherpelz '04, and Jonathan Beall '07 (as an intern).

I broke the news to my team yesterday. This was a bit difficult, because the developer who's been on the team for the second-longest time (after me) also announced yesterday that he's leaving Amazon in June. So I feel even worse for my teammates than I expected, but, well, these things happen and the team has survived plenty of similar changes before. The hard part is that I really like my teammates, and that was the main thing that kept me at Amazon this long. If you like your work for its meaning or the challenge or the pay, then it's your own loss if you quit. But if you like it because you have great co-workers that you get along with really well, then you feel responsible for their feelings too.

I mentioned to the junior member of our team—a college hire from this fall—that I think everyone should experience working in both a big company and a small company. In either environment, you can learn and do things that you can't in the other. Right now I've learned all I was ready to learn from Amazon, and now I want to apply it somewhere where I can hopefully make a bigger impact.

Please please please?

I'm biased towards this article, of course. "When there are real constraints on your time, like you have to pickup the kids or make them dinner or put them to bed, it appears to bring a serenity of focus to the specific hours dedicated to work."

How to distribute ruby packages in a packager/deployer-friendly way. (See also the "Position on RubyGems" link in the sidebar.)

"Tcl allows for the shortest commands and it’s a real language. I’m fascinated."

$50 stand can "rotate your screen for portrait/landscape viewing."

pmb was talking recently about how the taboo on talking about salary hurts workers at the negotiating table, because the employers have more data. That reminded me of an idea I had a while ago…



I think it would be interesting to create a web site where users voluntarily share information that is normally kept private. This could include details of personal finances, medical history, sex/romance, web browsing habits, and more. It would also include basic demographic information (age, sex, location, occupation).



The site would resemble a social network or web of trust. Some or all of a member's data could be restricted in various ways: available only to friends, or friends of friends; only to other people who share the same data; or only as part of aggregate statistics that can't be tied to specific individuals. There would be several difficult problems of anonymity and confidentiality to solve. (For example, see the section here on re-identification of anonymized data.)



The members of the site would then form a sort of transparent society—or a collection of overlapping societies, if information is shared only between friends. In return for sharing their own details, members would have access to new information about their friends and society at large, both individual profiles (for those who so choose) and statistics about groups.



Is this a worthwhile idea? Any other useful feature or applications you can think of?

by James Hamilton – Windows Live Services Platform.

"StrokeDB is an embeddable distributed document database written in Ruby."

"I used to explain to people at Microsoft on a regular basis that by building a platform that encouraged components, we were 'architecting monopoly' for Microsoft." Great insights on software industry economics.