Distributed Processing in Trichotomy

Mindless code monkey

I’ve been enjoying work since coming back from my honeymoon, since most of it involves mindless programming. It’s a nice break from the research and cross-team coordinating from last quarter. As a result of not needing to use a lot of brain power at work, I’ve shifted to listening to a lot more jazz lately, and surprisingly recognised many names from listening to Johnathan Schwartz. I think they offers more of a distraction than classical pieces, so my coding doesn’t get too boring.

We have two new guys joining the team, one of whom used to work at the company, for four years, before taking a year off to work in a start-up. He’s good and has been very helpful on my part of the project; I certainly appreciate the help. We have also been working with engineers at a reliability team (basically ops) that have engineering advisement into the new system we are building. However they are so eager to make recommendations that they started recommending stuff before they understood the system. So that’s a drag to have to explain why these well-thought-out recommendations are not applicable to our use case, which they would have found out if they had just asked. However this team have been making changes to the current monitoring system and we are getting paged less and less, so I’ll take it.

So, lately, work has been monotonous but enjoyable.

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PhD fights

We had a “fight” last week while La Professeure was re-arranging storage at the house about storage schemes of lesser-use household items like extension cords, computer cables, batteries, flash lights, stationery, or electrical adapters. One of us prefers to assign a single designated storage area to each category of stuff, such that all items falling into that category will be stored at that storage area. However, the other one prefers to assign multiple storage areas to each category, and store each item by choosing among one of the designated storage areas at random.In the single-site storage scheme, any given item can only have one storage place, and thus if you needed to use an item, you can immediately know where to look for it. In the distributed storage scheme, an item can have multiple possible storage location, so you would potentially need to look at all of the locations before you find the item.

From a computer science point of view, the distributed storage scheme is more efficient due improved locality. Since there are multiple instances of each item and you don’t care which instance you find (e.g., we have 4 pairs of scissors, but whenever I need a pair of scissors I don’t care which pair I find, as long as I find a pair of scissors), and that the items are distributed randomly among possible storage locations, there is a high probability that you would find one of the instances of a given item in any assigned storage location, and thus you can look first at the closest assigned location, thus reducing overall retrieval time.

From a Cognitive Science point-of-view, the single location scheme is more efficient because there is more metadata involved in the distributed storage scheme (instead of one location per category, there are now multiple), so, due to fan-effect, the response time to even know where to look is going to overcome any advantage of shorter distance-to-retrieval.

When we visited our super-Jew friends last week, we posed this question to them. And the husband - who works in cyber-security - argued for the distributed storage scheme, but because the single storage location represents a single point of failure. If for whatever reason, the single storage location becomes inaccessible, or, damaged, then we would lose access to all items in it.

(btw, the super-Jews’s kid is so cute. He is not yet three but is already talkative - he would explain to me the rituals of Sabbath lunch, and they way he causes trouble was to go a flip a light switch during Sabbath.)

From a common-sense point of view, I think we are all overly-educated. When studies say that higher-educated couples can resolve conflicts more intelligently, I am sure that’s not what they mean.

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The show may or may not go on

Many music engagements were on hold in the summer, but they are starting back up now. The Self-taught soprano asked me to accompany her on the amateur group’s concert in a couple of weeks’ time because her original accompanist dropped out, so I said yes (it was just a Bellini piece, which is easy on me). The Treasurer is organising a Les Miz performance/sing-along for the community outreach branch of the art song group, and had recruited Schnookie to sing the young Cosette part, and thus I get involved to because Uncle NDS gets to accompany her. So it should be fun to look forward to.

We went to the Met opera summer screening last week after visiting the super-Jews. It was Don Pasquale, with Anna Netrebko singing Norina. Even La Professeure recognised her. It turned out we saw the exact same production when we just started dating, so we left after the second act.

I tried to get on the program for the November concert for the amateur musician’s group (I guess attendance dropped so much that they cancelled the October concert), but was told I have to wait. So I’m wondering if I should use the piece (Liszt’s Ave Maria adaptation) for next year’s Carnegie Hall… I think if I take the time to really polish it, it can be very good, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort. I’m also messing around with two French songs (Je te Veux and Les Chemins de l’amour) and may just play them at November instead of Ave Maria. I’m also looking at Earl Wild’s Gershwin etudes and they look like a lot of fun.

Speaking of French songs, we booked another river cruise next year (to use our return customer discount and the discount voucher we bought on our last cruise) , but it will be a shorter cruise (6 days, sailing up the Seine from Paris) and we’ll spend extra days in Paris before hands, so it’ll be 5 days in Paris, and 6 days cruising, so it should be fun. The funny thing is that when we told La Professeure’s parents about the cruise, the practically invited themselves to tag along. So they will join the cruising part (I think they know to give us some romantic couple-time in Paris) but I am happy that they decide to join because I’ve been advocating for them to travel more now that they are retired and they seemed to be reluctant about the idea till now. Though, I feel like an ocean cruise to Nova Scotia would be a better fit for them - there is no flight involved, and the ship is bigger and there is less physical activity. But, I hope they like it.

The cruise is set for October of next year, so it’s a long way away. I really liked river cruising, in the sense that it optimizes time by combining travelling with sleeping, but the draw back is that you can only visit towns close to a river.

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