YTechnology

Back in 2005, I wrote " Yam Technology? ", a light hearted article pondering my company name.  Today, the "technology" part of the name has proliferated, and I am sometimes mistaken for someone or something else.

By now, most of you are familiar with the story of CrowdStrike and the resulting worldwide outages. The initial, and angry, responses were along the lines of "Where are the devs? Where was QA?" As it turned out, the actual patch, or software code, was fine. The problem was in the config file  that governs the behavior of the patch.  Being flawed, it triggered the Microsoft Windows' blue screen of death. In a variation of "Who Watches The Watchers," the config file was indeed tested, but CrowdStrike's testing system was unknowingly broken.  The config file passed when it shouldn't have. Nothing is perfect all the time, but what would have mitigated the fallout would have been a gradual or staggered rollout of the config file instead of the apparent "big-bang" release to all machines at once. The staggered rollout is an old and reliable technique. I can think of 2 reasons why it might have been forgotten or abandoned: inexperience or over-confide...

  Stocks trade faster and more frequently than ever before, and make volatile price action inevitable.  There are, however, guardrails in place to protect the trader, and one of them is known as Limit Up Limit Down, or LULD. Back in 2012, the SEC approved a National Market System (NMS) plan to limit price variability to a specific range. The range, or price band, is governed by statistical measures, a stock's tier and reference price, and the time of the trade; prices are markedly volatile near market open and market close. To see the specific rules, visit the Limit Up Limit Down website . While at the NYSE, I had the privilege of working on this project. It wasn't easy. The scope spread across multiple systems and multiple teams. The specifications -- like all projects -- were ambiguous at first, and needed several iterations.  Questions arose, such as what happens to the reference price if a trade was cancelled, corrected, or flagged as an error?  We were careful d...

A fun narrative has Elon Musk really being from Mars and badly wants to go home. In my imagination, I add that Elon, having watched the movie E.T. , realizes that if he directly sought the help of space capable governments, he would likely be captured, imprisoned, and eventually dissected. Clever Martian that he might be, Elon would parallel the real life story of One Red Paperclip , where one man started with a single red paperclip and through 14 trades, ended up with a two story farmhouse. And so goes Elon, first with Paypal and selling it to eBay for more than a hundred million dollars, then using that fortune to start SpaceX (2002) and Tesla (2003), and later Starlink (2015), all in the hopes of amassing enough money and technology to get him home. Also in my fevered imagination, Elon is BFF with Bernie Sanders and AOC, because addressing the looming menace that is climate change is really that important. That they approach the climate threat from opposite ends -- private business ...

  When I wrote " Beauty In The Eye Of The Coder ," my idea of beautiful code was how well it stood up to time: Requirements change, database fields are added, code is refactored by multiple authors. Time conspires to distort and contort programs, but the ones that endure are often considered beautiful.   The book  Software Engineering at Google  tackles the nearly incomprehensible scale of Google's software engineering efforts, and the subhead " Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time " caught my eye. Was there room for beauty in software that was engineered for scale, time, and cost? More on that later. I discovered  Software Engineering at Google  at an online  ACM TechTalk , and the book's curators, Winters and Wright, provided an excellent starting point for exploring the book's hefty 600 pages. The authors distinguished programming from software engineering, and they were careful to point out that one was not better than the other because the d...

An electrical engineer received a custom Monopoly set from her company, STV . The bespoke tokens include a soldier, hard hat, bridge, space shuttle, rail vehicle, and school building, and you would be correct if you guessed STV was in the business of engineering, architecture, and construction management services.  The engineer writes: the picture in the center of the Monopoly board is the Coney island parachute jump. STV was involved in restoring it back in 2002.   An editor at the American Chemical Society recounted the Covid lock-down in early 2020. A travel book can be a source of strength to see the pandemic through, and ACS gave their employees a photo-rich coffee table book from National Geographic: Journeys of a Lifetime, Second Edition: 500 of the World's Greatest Trips . Now as we wrap up year two of Covid and Omicron, the book takes on a darkly humorous tone, highlighting beautiful locations we just can't get to... yet. Hoping 2022 will be a kinder new year.

The scientific among you might see a water molecule (H₂0), but Philip Yam, former editor of Scientific American, writes that the magazine handed out these balls to explore the science of juggling . Back in 1995, Philip also got a souvenir from the late James "The Amazing" Randi while interviewing him at a hotel over breakfast.  In Philip's words: "the magician had in particular made a name for himself by going after grifters and debunking claims of paranormal ability, especially by Uri Geller, who claimed he could bend spoons using the power of his mind. Randi pulled the same illusion on me over breakfast — in fact, he bent two spoons, breaking one. I pocketed the spoons so that our waiter wouldn’t notice them." Continuing on the theme of magic, Philip received a trick pen from Martin Gardner: " I visited Martin Gardner, the longtime Mathematical Games columnist for Scientific American, in his home in Asheville, NC, to do a profile of him in the 1990s. He...

We're well into holiday season, and my thoughts have turned to "corporate" toys; stuff given to employees that were unusual, interesting, and go well beyond the branded T-Shirts, pens, and mugs. I've collected some over the years. This can of Coke was distributed on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with Coca-Cola ringing the opening bell. I drank it with lunch that day, but the can will not go into the recycling bin! On November 25th, 2016, Target rang the opening bell and handed out their mascot, Bullseye. My family shops at Target, so this was a fun and relatable gift. I estimated its value at the time to be around $15 to $25, but Amazon and ebay show the price moves between $40 and $100. Note that this is the early Funko #05 edition, and not the later ones (#32 and #118). The dilemma is whether to open the box or not!  Lastly, here is a paper weight from the Federal Reserve Bank of NY thanking employees for getting the company through a serious event. On Au...

It's August. IBM introduced their PC this month back in 1981, and connected the corporate and hobbyist computing worlds. Shown here are the reference manuals in their classic D-ring binders. I used the denim blue Technical Reference manual the most. It was filled with hardware information covering I/O ports, memory locations, and DIP switches. The most important bit to me, however, was the the ROM BIOS listing. Written in 8086/88 Assembler, it was neat, structured, and copiously commented. Below is a fragment describing how to interact with the keyboard: Keyboard INT 16H Despite the information being clearly written and readily available, IBM PC internals were considered by many as dense and arcane, which made it a natural filter for those seeking jobs programming for this machine; that is, only those who found this material fun and fascinating need apply. Over time, as programming went to higher level languages and turned to the web, knowledge of the ROM BIOS became less important...

  Emerging from the conference room, a colleague put two fingers to her temple and mimicked shooting herself. The humor was clear; the meeting ran too long and little was accomplished. Meetings are a rich source of humor, pain, and to a lesser degree, nap time. I wrote The Mandatory "Optional" Meeting back in 2006, but it referenced a meeting that took place in the mid-1980s. It's safe to say that bad meetings have plagued us at least since the corporation was invented, and likely before that. Now, in 2021, as the pandemic subsides and employees return to the office, the subject of meetings has returned to the fore. The New York Times recently published two articles about them:  Meetings. Why?  and  Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There's No Evidence of It. Yet, despite the awareness that most meetings are unnecessary and poorly run, efforts to improve them mostly fail. The cynic in me suspects there remains, while not a majority, a sufficiently l...

  Second chances. I refer not to the car manufactured by American Motors Corporation, but to the movie theater company AMC Entertainment. Like a gremlin, AMC stock mischievously defied fundamentals hitting a high of $72.62 last week after being left for dead around $2 back in January. Financially,  AMC's second chance comes from deals with professional capital management firms , but the amazing amount of attention AMC garnered can be credited to Wall Street Bets (WSB), a trading group on Reddit. They are often portrayed as rough and tumble individuals, with names like " Deep F-ing Value ," but they aren't too different from the professional traders I've met working as a software developer in New York's financial district. Sometime in the 80s, a few of us were having lunch at a restaurant with a name I can no longer remember. Glancing up, I noticed a jungle of neckties dangling from the pipes and fixtures. The trader explained that it was a tradition here. When...

  Based on YouTube ads, Google classifies me as an overweight young adult who likes video games but struggles with arthritis. Clearly, Google has me confused with someone else, which is both amusing and a relief. Back in November 2020, I ran a little experiment where I enabled ad personalization for a period of 3 months. I was feeling a little... um...  Grouchy about privacy, and wanted to see if targeted ads hit or miss their Marx . Ads that pegged me as a college student or young adult included Grammarly , Dr. Squatch Soap , and video games. Admittedly, I watched most of the video game ads in their entirety, and by doing so, I likely misled the algorithm to my alleged youthfulness. But then there were ads I found intellectually insulting and wished I could block. They were from Prager U and The Epoch Times, and they would present news and commentary on politics, family, and climate change in a facile and seductive manner, rather than in a thoughtful and sincere way.  E...

  Ask forgiveness, not permission.  -- Admiral Grace Hopper Move Fast and Break Things.  -- Mark Zuckerberg Don't repeat old mistakes. Make new and innovative ones. -- Me These quotes are variations of a theme: don't be afraid to make mistakes. There are differences though. In the case of Admiral Hopper, she knew things moved slowly in a military bureaucracy, and recommended that if you have a good idea, go ahead and pursue it. With Mark Zuckerberg, the early days of Facebook required constant and rapid innovation, although today, the "break things" part seems reckless, and has indeed produced undesirable consequences. My take is that mistakes happen, and when they do, make it a new one. Repeating old mistakes is possibly the worst kind of mistake, suggesting that nothing was learned or addressed. Making no mistakes at all, however, indicates that you and your team aren't trying. Or worse, that your work environment shoots the messengers, throws staff members unde...

  A man page will give you, in black and white, specific information about UNIX. Brian Kernighan's new book adds color and depth about UNIX you won't find anywhere else. I'm not a gray beard (yet), but I imagine they would plow through the book knowingly, but at the same time, learn a few things. Those new to UNIX -- recent college grads or those experimenting with Raspberry Pi -- would be better off starting with Chapter 8 which describes more relatable events and the descendants of UNIX, including Minux and Linux. It's when they start to ask questions like "Where does UNIX come from?" and "Why is Gamora grep?" that they should start from the beginning: Bell Labs, 1969. Kernighan opens with a birds-eye-view of Murray Hill New Jersey, zooms in on the buildings, the offices, the significance of Center 1127, and offers a brief look at some of the key players there. As I progressed through the book, the two factors that made UNIX not just possible, bu...

When I wrote about  Apple's 30% Dilemma , I didn't expect Apple to have a solution so quickly. For this  small independent developer, it feels like a holiday gift. 30% was the original cut Apple took from developers on their app store. Critics felt it was outrageously high. I was more moderate because my past experience with app stores for Palm made clear the value of Apple's eco-system and the tools they produced. Still, I hoped Apple would lower the rate because it would the wise, and business-savvy, thing to do. Apple recently announced the App Store Small Business Program which reduced the commission from 30% to 15% on businesses earning up to $1 million per year. Ars Technica ran the story and a minority of the commentariat pointed out that the $1M limit would discourage development as earnings approached that figure. The reason being to avoid the 30% bracket. Entrepreneurs and creatives don't think like that. Bean counters do. Apple just gave the small independe...

Back in the day when Palm handhelds ruled , the major app stores were PalmGear and  Handango . While it's become common knowledge the cut Apple takes from its App Store , the cut taken by PalmGear and Handango wasn't as well known. Regardless, we developers weren't exactly happy then either. Comparing Apple to Palm risks comparing apples to oranges, but there are insights to be had. While the App Store is part of Apple, PalmGear and Handango were simply online software stores, and were not affiliated with the device makers Palm and HandSpring. Developers were free to sell elsewhere online, but PalmGear and Handango pulled in the majority of clicks. Unfortunately, these stores were as entrepreneurial as the developers and behaved like a startup -- that is, they spent aggressively for rapid growth. As a result, what started as a 30% cut slowly rose to 35% to 40%, with talk of 50%. And to make matters more painful, some developers were paid late. I soon set up my ow...

After parking your car, you: a) engage the parking brake b) engage the parking brake only if you are on a hill c) what’s a parking brake? Any answer other than "a" suggests that you, as a programmer, don't park your pointers after you free them. ZDNet recently published a couple of articles about  Chrome  and  Microsoft , reporting that 70% of all their security bugs were memory safety issues. That weighty number was made heavier coming from companies where resources are abundant and developers are first class citizens. I can only imagine the bug count is higher in companies where budgets are tight and developers are support staff. The article continued, describing C and C++ as "memory unsafe" languages, and attributing hackers with increasingly sophisticated attacks.  I even found myself reconsidering my  Symmetry post, where I insisted memory can be managed if you cared enough: common mistakes such as memory leaks and buffer overruns . . ...

Lunch time. It was raining, and the company cafeteria was crowded. Waiting in line at the short order station, I overheard the cook remark how busy the place was.  "It's because of the rain," I interjected. She looked at me wryly, and said "You're not supposed to say that." She added, "You're supposed to say how wonderful the food smells, and how good it looks." She was right.  I smiled and offered my only defense: "But I'm a computer guy." This was little better than the rude waiter who defended his behavior as just being "French."   And yet, if you think French waiters are rude, try talking to a sysadmin. Computer folk are notorious for being blunt. That's partly because when working with computers, we know we can't coax the machines to run faster by offering compliments and blueberry muffins.  Clever managers, however, know they can use compliments and blueberry muffins to coax developers into wo...

When I posted  2020 And The Year of the Rat , it was a twofer of optimism, welcoming both the 2020 New Year and the Chinese New Year. With the year nearly half over, much of the optimism has been drained, and we find ourselves in a pandemic. The second half of the year could be worse. Dr. Rick Bright warns that without a consistent and coordinated plan to contain Covid-19, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history . Regarding The Hidden Costs of Efficiency , the NYT examines  How the World's Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-cent Face Mask . Farhad Manjoo recounts what we learned the hard way, that just in time supply chains ... are built to optimize efficiency, not resiliency . When we eventually emerge from this pandemic, will we take this, and the many related lessons, to heart? Edit 06/10/2020 - "The second half of the year could be worse." It got worse. R.I.P. George Floyd.

When it comes to coding, we developers take pride in writing programs that run fast and aren't bloated. Taken to the extreme, the cost would be readability, scalability, and maintainability. We also take pride in writing software that is robust. Programs that recover gracefully when the unexpected happens are not just ideal, but real world requirements. Add security and privacy, and the cost here would be extensive testing, longer periods between roll outs, and a hit to performance. This tension between efficiency and robustness is something developers wrestle with all the time, and a popular saying among programmers (and engineers) is  "Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two." ¹ The impact of Covid-19 has prompted a bit of soul searching regarding efficiency and resiliency in the economy, supply chains, and manufacturing. Evidently, the world has tilted too far toward efficiency, and now finds itself vulnerable to shocks. For example, Will Oremus explains on Medium...