RISKS digest recently posted a link to the following. It’s definitely worth repeating in as many places as possible. The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing Peter Deutsch Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences. The network is reliable Latency is zero Bandwidth is infinite The network is secure Topology doesn’t change There is one administrator Transport cost is zero The network is homogeneous EDIT: Added the first fallacy, which I missed when I first posted it: The network is reliable.

It is really cool that hotels have ironing boards. It would be even cooler if they had (a) the small, narrow ironing boards for ironing sleaves, and (b) squirt bottles with starch solution. This is clearly asking for too much, however. 🙂

(Am currently in Bay Area until Saturday morning, on a customer visit. And on Saturday, Stacey’s flying home with me to Boston for Thanksgiving!!)

I found the following from the Risks Digest, authored by Robert Bruce Thompson, and the following had me rolling on the floor: For years, the conventional wisdom has been that one can’t trust Microsoft software until version 3.0, and that apparently is true for their security patches as well. The middle of last month, with much fanfare, Microsoft went to their new scheme of releasing patches in batches once a month.

I’ve been too busy to write this until now, but I want to remember the menu… very yummy and yet Atkins-compatible….

Friday

Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

Saturday

Brunch

Dinner

Lunch

Dim Sum at Peking Garden

Stacey really seemed to like my cooking. IPNH!

I’ve just taken delivery of 0.8 terabytes of hard drive, and it set me back less than $700. For some reason, this amuses me greatly.

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article about various forms of exercise “boot camps”. They rated one of them, which use “kettlebells”, cast-iron weights used by the training regimen used by the Soviet military, as being “surprisingly intense” because the revewier’s t-shirt was drenched after 40 minutes of exercise. Heh. You call that intense? I can get my t-shirt drenched after 30 minutes of Dance Dance Revolution, and if I go on for a full hour, I’m literally dripping onto the dance pad….

One of the advantages of having a father who is a doctor is that it’s easy to get blood tests done periodically. I just came back from visiting him in Chicago, and so I was able to get my HbA1C levels tested. The results? 5.2%, which is well within the normal range (4.6-6.2%)!!! The America Diabetes Association recommends a goal of under 7% for diabetics under treatment, and 9 months ago, I had a reading of 6.

I’ve recently decided to replace my 2nd telephone line with an IP telephony line from Vonage. There are a couple of really nice features with this service. First of all, the service is really cheap. $24.99/month buys you unlimited local/regional service, and 500 minutes of long distance service. If you go over the 500 minutes, the cost is only 3.9 cents a minute. International calls are also quite reasonable. (5 cents to call Europe, 6 cents/minute to call Tokyo, Sidney, etc.

For the last two days, my weight has been below 220 pounds. This is Goodness! This means that I have lost a little over 40 pounds since I diagnosed myself with type II diabetes, and have another 40 pounds to go before I’m at the “healthy” weight as defined by insurance tables. When I reach that point, I will try discontinuing my medications, and see if I can maintain my blood sugar levels using only diet and exercise.

A recent post by inspired me to write about one of my recent culinary strategies. Well, maybe culinary isn’t the right word; it’s not gourmet cooking, but it’s fast, easy, and pretty tasty.What I’ll do on the weekend, often on Sunday afternoon or evening, is to get 3-4 pounds of ground beef (usually 85% lean), and three large (spanish) onions. The onions get chopped, and cooked until soft in a large skillet or wok using some Joyce Chen Savory Stir Fry Oil.