mphillips
Joined 12 years ago
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48
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8
Member since
Feb 6
Software developer
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Comment · 9 days ago
As I write this from South Australia, our grid (up to 3GW of demand, ~2 million people) is more than entirely powered by rooftop solar alone (https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=1d&...). The only synchronous generation, gas turbines , is providing just under 4%.
This is a regular event outside of the winter months, and has been for some years now. South Australia has a mixture of solar, wind, and gas generation, with some large batteries as storage.
Comment · 9 years ago
SA certainly wasn't the first to build a desalination plant, and it appears to have been working as designed for quite a while now ("Water production to date (to end of June 2017) = approximately 138 billion litres" [1]).
I think the infamy was unearned, and mainly due to people not understanding that it was never intended to run all the time, but is insurance for a time of crisis (which we will certainly have again at some point).
So, not a good example.
[1] https://www.sawater.com.au/community-and-environment/our-wat...
Comment · 12 years ago
In the short term, no. I’d like to think that the (somewhat unplanned) overhead of developing Basis will be paid off in future as a commercial advantage for my apps — I guess we’ll see whether that pans out ;)
In the longer term, yes absolutely I’d like to make it open source. In the meantime, I’m happy to share some of the lessons I’ve learnt along the way.
Comment · 12 years ago
OT is not so much an algorithm as an approach: a way of thinking about sensibly merging parallel sequences of change operations against a data model of some kind.
It’s a really interesting field, going back a long way: the canonical paper that the Google Wave (RIP) people referenced is nearly 20 years old (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=215585.215706). This is another, more recent, good paper: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/13/97/04/PDF/OsterIC....
In fact, Basis does use an OT approach in the delta merge algorithm: it breaks the deltas down into a canonical series of “micro operations”, merges them piecewise, then generates a new delta.
Thanks for the kudos!
Comment · 12 years ago
I'd be really interested to hear more about your approach. Maybe you’d write it up?
I did consider simply storing and replaying actions, but realised I'd still want a way to merge them: consider a series of actions like: "add item", "update item", "add item", ...<lots more changes>..., "delete items 1 through 20". If there’s no merge, a lot of redundant actions will end up building up in the offline case.
There are a lot of ways to approach this (I’m reading Brent Simmon’s adventures (http://inessential.com/2014/05/24/vesper_sync_diary_follow-u...) with interest at the moment).