Stuffing the stuff

without getting stuffy
Everything here is my opinion. I do not speak for your employer.
October 2013
December 2013

2013-11-01 »

I actually used the NSA post-it diagram today to explain to a co-worker how we manage https and what's the difference between GFEs and backend jobs in prod.  I regret nothing.

2013-11-02 »

Wifi always sucks.  We're just haggling about how much and in what way.

2013-11-08 »

"Larry commented to me how excited he is by our plan to make WiFi experiences much better, esp. in Fiber cities [...]"

Oh phew, that must mean we found someone who understands how to make wifi work!  I look forward to meeting him or her.

2013-11-11 »

WHAT LUNATIC PUTS THE LEAST SIGNIFICANT BIT ON THE LEFT, asked apparently nobody at the IEEE ever.

2013-11-12 »

"The bunny... getting through customs... all this random legal stuff..." 
– actual quote from marketing phone call near me

I only wish my job were that surreal.

2013-11-13 »

I'm about 99% certain now that I need to get more sleep.

I just realized that the optimal format for transferring raw data intended for afterquery heatgrids is png.  It's a file format for lossless encoding of sparse matrices, essentially.  Also I can just load it directly into an HTML canvas and... never mind.

2013-11-14 »

Well, that's more horrifying than I expected from the title.  Once again, not cynical enough.

http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in_every_mobile_phone

2013-11-15 »

Sometimes people ask me what we do on our team. Until now I didn't have a clear answer.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf

2013-11-16 »

Just saw some amusing slides from a company about their recent acquisition of a similarly-sized company and how it's a good move strategically.  Some of the justifications, translated into my own words:

  • We're bigger now! (bar chart)
  • Acquired company does enterprise and we don't!
  • Acquired company is in other markets that we're not! (pie charts)
  • Acquired company makes products that are different from ours, so now we can be a greater percentage of the total solution!
  • Acquired company has revenues and profits, which when added to ours, makes the total bigger! (line charts)

Summary: all of the above would also be true if a software company acquired a breakfast cereal company.

2013-11-17 »

This year in Quotes from Avery's Performance Review:
- "goes on for pages and pages"
- "workaholic"
- "persistence to pursue it till death"
- "scary"

And that's just the strengths section!

(Joking aside, there's lots of actionable stuff in there.  Thanks, y'all. I think the new perf format is a success.)

2013-11-19 »

QoTD:
"""
Is this the [code] drop which panics immediately?

I guess that probably isn't specific enough: is this the most recent drop which panics immediately?
"""

2013-11-24 »

I had this idea to maybe run all APs on the same channel and deal with interference using some method other than switching channels (eg. backchannel TDM coordination + cts/rts).

The good news:  Someone else apparently is also doing this and selling it.

The bad news: the other product doing it sounds like snake oil :(

http://blog.merunetworks.com/blog/2013/07/can-single-channel-really-work/

October 2013
December 2013

I'm CEO at Tailscale, where we make network problems disappear.

Why would you follow me on twitter? Use RSS.

apenwarr on gmail.com