machinagod

IDA Pro.

I've had good success in contacting Amazon's customer service when a product is mis-represented or of poor quality. Are they blowing it these days?

It _is_ possible to adapt Jackson (with minimal effort) to use Ion, since it's very similar to Jackson's native JSON format.

Hear, hear! Posted it as I've been raving about ion (particularly s-exp support) to non-amazonians, but credit goes all to them.

It's particularly interesting to see the fixes and improvements from the actual open source cleanup effort getting to (many) Internal production services.

At least in Seattle they do ask to get the bags back, although it's not enforced (we once got a number of dry ice freeze packs as well).

The packs are also cold-keeping, so I wonder if that makes the paper-bag alternative moot.

I've read recently the book that the article references - Why Humans like Junk food - and it's a fascinating read - despite being poorly written.

Putting theories behind food appreciation, like Vanishing Caloric Density, the Umami flavor (MSG, garlic and Friends) and flavor familiarity (vanyloids are present in breast milk) - on the context of foods your familiar with, changes your perspective when you're tasting any kind of food, allowing you to deconstruct what are you experiencing: "Ho, I like this because it's greasy, and it salty, and it has loads of umami from the garlic".

It allowed me to deconstruct a common action, changing it from an immediate appreciation to a more rational, pondered thought process.

Starting by congratulating Tesla in their system, which should win some converts, but there's something bothering me with it.

An automobile network that's also owning their "refueling" network concerns me with the usual lock in concerns. What'd append when other brands want to offer the same service? A multitude of recharge posts all accross the land space each under their car brand flag? Figuring that there's only tesla and ford on this city, instead of the Nissan charging station that I need?

This particular solution seems very specific to Tesla (or even only model S), is there any standard or independent initiative for battery-exchange stations?

The point about prioritizing clearing road-blocks for your team cannot be underestimated, but, in my experience, with a serious caveat:

- Unless your SURE you have the time, do not put the technical task onto yourself, try to redirect.

I've made that blunder over and over again: saying "heh, I'll hack this little bit up tomorrow", and in the middle of planning, helping other people and so forth you postpone, losing the blocked developers attention and focus.

Other than that, great write-up on my job description :)

I think that can be easily generalized to: "It's best to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic."

Throwing my 2 cents into the bucket: I'm involved in a small embedded device project, where we wanted our UI to be completely decoupled from a legacy, very heavy, single-threaded component.

We decided to model the whole UI transition flow into DFA's, using events from the touchscreen (pre-processed) as inputs. The state machine is modelled with boost::statechart, which has proven to live to it's thread-safe reputation.

The jump in development speed and the absence of flow bug is nothing short of remarkable from this experiment.

Although I pushed for it, I was a bit fearful that the formality would make developers resist the architecture, but I'm pleasantly surprised the opposite has happened!

...but, we haven't launched yet, so, fingers crossed. :)

EDIT: Added plug to boost. Boost is awesome.