mult.ifario.us

Another entry for my personal Devil's Dictionary:

heisenbug, n. A error in a software system that can only be observed in the absence of detailed logging and/or a debugger.

For what it's worth, there are situations where heisenbugs do exist, e.g., toString() implementations with side-effects that are called in logging statements and other such pathological silliness.

Earlier in the week, I received an email from Ancestry.com informing me of how to change my password. This was of interest, since I'd never signed up on their site or even heard of them, and the company at least looks reputable enough that I doubt that they're artificially boosting their membership stats by shanghaiing people with guessable gmail addresses.

I poked around enough to find out how to turn off their marketing spam, but what I really want is a way to say "delete me" — remove any and all records of my personal information (including otherwise innocuous information like name and email address). Every app should have that functionality, but very few do.

I grilled some oysters this weekend, and while I've eaten them grilled before, this is the first time I've done the grilling. (Taylor Shellfish Farms sells 4-6" oysters — bigger is better for grilling — at our local farmer's market for $8/dozen, so it seemed like a low-risk experiment from a financial perspective.) The recipe is of the two-ingredient variety that I like (ingredient one: food; ingredient two: fire), and six minutes on a very hot gas grill was sufficient to cook but not overcook the oysters. The caveat is that when some of the oysters "pop" at around the five minute mark, they spew boiling hot oyster juice, but other than that, it was a simple and tasty meal. I chose a pinot blanc to accompany, which was an easy choice because it was the only white I had in the house, and it was a good pair. There are lots of other good choices.

While I'm fully prepared for whatever "the terrible twos" means for the kid, we had an entirely civilized father-daughter outing this past weekend, which is a far cry from some of our experiences past. She did largely as she was asked, where I mean things like not running around in the parking lot, not jumping into puddles, not climbing into the faux tide pool with the starfish. (The first stop on our father-daughter day out was the Seattle Aquarium, which was both overly crowded and just OK. I was spoiled by visiting the Shedd regularly in Chicago.) The kid's tour de force for the day, however, was sitting through an entire meal. Without being belted to her chair.

It was a great experience to just sit and have a conversation, albeit about whether or not bumblebees bite and what color lights are on top of police cars and fire engines.

Interesting question of the day over on Found+READ:

How do I deal with board member whose priorities seem to be diverging from mine and my co-founder’s at a critical time in the startup’s life?

[...]

The director is a well-connected investor, so we can’t afford to alientate him, or anyone else. And I figure if we go head-to-head with him we’ll lose. (Money talks.) So short of fostering more confrontation/conflict before the board, what can we do? The more time we spend assuaging his concerns, the less time we have for the real work.

Seems like an ill-posed question to me, since the director sounds like he's within his bounds. "Tough love" is not appropriate in this context. Some thoughts:

• It's your job to convince the Board that the company is being run properly. It shouldn't be that difficult or time-consuming to get information in front of the Board about the sales pipeline, state of deals, product status, and burn rate. In fact, all of that data should be in front of the Board already, so it should be easy for the Directors to assess where the company is headed and when it's likely to arrive.
• The Board is important. A dissenting director is not something to be ignored, since the proper functioning of the Board is one of the fundaments of the corporation. Look at it another way, your shareholders can always sue you, but running your Board by the book makes it less likely that they'll feel a need to and unlikely that they would win.
• Buy 'em out. If he's really that worried, get him out at a loss — have him offer his shares to another investor, have the company buy the shares back, let employees redeem their options, have the management team buy in, etc.

As for too many things to do and too little time to do them, welcome to entrepreneurship.

From Blaine Cook's RubyConf presentation on scaling Twitter:

(The SlideAware guys obviously have a different perspective.) As I've been bouncing around between languages for various projects (Java, Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, etc.), the only thing I've found that really makes me want to wield a fork or other sharp implement is what people do with the language as opposed to the language itself.

Just before JavaOne, I replaced my venerable G4 PowerBook with a black MacBook, and I've been pleased with the transition. (At over three and a half years, the PowerBook had an exceptionally long useful life for a laptop.) A few observations:

• A 2.0GHz Core Duo is more than fast enough. In fact, while I wouldn't have expected it, the MacBook handily beats my 4-way G5 for many development-oriented tasks like builds and starting up IDEA.
• Battery life is essentially the same as with the PowerBook, a little over four hours at minimum screen brightness.
• MacPorts, rsync, and the usual downloads (Aquamacs, Quicksilver, Adium) made it quick to get a usable configuration up and running.
• Just like the PowerBook, it's too damn hot to be truly used as a laptop without some additional insulation.
• The keyboard is odd, doesn't light up, but is otherwise tolerable.

So far, so good.