-
Solving the "ghost" word game.
Ghost is played as follows: First player names a letter. Each subsequent player adds a letter to the front or back of the word fragment so far. If a player names a word of at least four letters, she loses. If a player is challenged to name a word containing the fragment he produced, and cannot, he loses (otherwise the challenger loses ( Read more... ) -
Predictions for 2018
Tintri asked me to put together some technology predictions for 2018. You can access the "on-demand webinar" here: https://info.tintri.com/Predictions-Webinar-Series-On-Demand-JumpPage.htm, or wait for the blog entry, or ask for spoilers. :) -
(Untitled)
Here's the letter I sent my representative about just one part of the R tax plan ( Read more... ) -
Selecting Strings in Solidity
For a personal project implementing procedurally generated content on Ethereum, I would like to find the most efficient way to accomplish the following in Solidity:
if ( n == 0 ( Read more... ) -
Plotting the Barnsley Fern in 1812?
The play "Arcadia" features a precocious young woman discovering fractal geometry (and the second law of thermodynamics in an amazing two-fer.) A contemporary mathematician explains that actually drawing a strange attractor by hand would require years and years of effort. Here's a sample fractal we can use for comparison, the Barnsley Fern: Read more... ) -
A Chomsky Hierarchy Puzzle
http://tracery.io/ is a tool to generate text. Its input is a mostly context-free grammar, and it outputs random instances of the language defined by that grammar ( Read more... ) -
The Puppy Functor
We introduce a finite category Pup. A standard representation is the objects {inside, outside} and in addition to the identities there are two morphisms that form a bijection:
door: inside -> outside
door -1: outside -> insideThe literature conventionally refers to these operations as "let the dog out" and "let the dog in", respectively ( Read more... ) -
Back from Tintri sales kickoff
Tintri has historically held its sales kickoff in the Bay Area to be close to headquaters. This year we went to Las Vegas instead, at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. I don't like going to Las Vegas; among the reasons is cigarette smoke and the Hard Rock is no exception ( Read more... ) -
Peter Thiel
Before the election, I thought that Peter Thiel's support for Trump was just Silicon Valley "disruptive" thinking at its worst. If the system isn't working, let's try something different (without a lot of thought as to whether it's actually better.) After all, Peter Thiel would not be the one suffering, so from his perspective it would be a risk- ( Read more... ) -
Retiring another interview question
I've been talking to people who have built cloud services that communicate with on-premises equipment (like storage arrays or routers.) One of my questions has been: "can you give me an example of some difficulties, or customer requirements, that you've encountered about the device-to-cloud communication channel ( Read more... )