Family

• Jess and I felt nervous about the presidential election results while watching the news online. Despite Biden leading in the polls, just as Hilary four years ago back in 2016, I’m sitting at the edge of my seat as the results come in, not confident at all that Biden can pull off a victory. Again, as I mentioned in earlier posts, although I cast my vote for Biden, I’m more voting to get Trump out.

Graduate School

• Learned of a brilliant technique to simplify crash recovery by removing an edge case and exercising the same code as the abort transaction. Technique from RioVista papers. The crash recovery is also idempotent so it can withstand power failure during the crash recovery itself. Idempotent. First heard of this term when I was learning Ansible back in the day. Something to think about again.

Work

• Checked in some GRE header code that basically implements RFC 2784 and 2890. Stepping through the RFC, I learned how much unnecessary overhead the protocol carries with it. A 3 bit version field that MUST always be zero? Granted, I understand that the protocol designers were trying to future proof the protocol but now I understand why a protocol like IPIP prevails given that IPIP will encapsulate only IP.