Blog
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For this week, my distributed systems course just assigned us students a reading assignment: “Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process“. Apparently, this paper is a seminal piece of work that goes on to describe and prove that, given a single process failure within a distributed system, the underlying system cannot achieve consensus (i.e.…
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I recently watched a YouTube video titled “My Guitar Teacher TOMO FUJITA Gives Words of Wisdom”. In this video (below), YouTuber Mary Spender interviews Tomo Fujita, a guitar instructor who taught at Berkelee school of music for over 20 years; he takes his years of accumulated knowledge and shares some words of wisdom. From this…
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Not too much to report this week. Not because nothing happened, but because I wasn’t at diligent in capturing this week’s activities; I was on-call this week and carrying the pager almost always disrupts my flow, this week being no exception. My pager alarmed me out of bed several times (e.g. 12:30 AM, 2:30 AM,…
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For the last couple days, I’ve been watching the distributed systems video lectures and reading the recommended papers that cover logical clocks. Even after making multiple passes on the material, the concepts just haven’t clicked: I cannot wrap my mind around why Lamport’s clocks satisfy only consistency — not strong consistency. But now I think…
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Rotem-Gal-Oz, A. (2005). Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained. Cognitive biases (built-in patterns of thinking) and fallacies (errors in thoughts) creep into our every day lives, sometimes with us not even knowing it. For example, ever wonder why you work just a little harder, a little quicker, when you think someone is standing over your shoulder,…
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Schneider, F. B. (1993). What good are models and what models are good. Distributed Systems, 2, 17–26. Paper Summary In his seminal paper on models (as they apply to distributed systems), Schnedier describes the two conventional ways — experimental observation; modeling and analysis — we normally develop an intuition when studying a new domain. And…
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Summary Distributed systems are everywhere: social media, internet of things, single server systems — all part of larger, distributed systems. But how do you define a distributed system? A distributed system is, according to Leslie Lamport (father of distributed computing), a system in which failure of some component (or node) impacts the larger system, rendering…
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Yes! I’m finally registered for the distributed computing course. This course is hot off the press! It’s spanking brand new to the OMSCS program and offered for the first time this (Spring 2021) term. I’ve been eagerly waiting over two years for a course centering around distributed systems, combining both theory and practice. The course…
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Survival First things first: I’m grateful for surviving this difficult, weird and straight-up dystopian year. 2020 was the absolute worst; although the year will permanently leave its mark in our memories, we’re all ready to leave it behind, ready to move on. Who could have, apart from maybe Bill Gates during during 2014 Ted Talk,…
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While perusing Aaron’s Swartz’s blog, I stopped and read his post titled “Writing A Book: Part 2”. In this post, Aaron swoons over Ira Glass’s unparalleled storytelling skills. Wanting to learn more about Ira, I whipped out my iPhone, opened up my YouTube app, and loaded a (podcast) interview where Ira Glass shares his thoughts…
