Monday my colleague reports severe a problem in our test system. It was my fault. I checked in an incomplete work into our system last Monday. What I don't understand is why no QA or customer report this for an entire week. Nevertheless I fixed it right away.

After solving the problem, I go back to do other works.

Then I realized what has happened. We have 2 days off last week and only one release went out before I checked in my bug. I was confused yesterday. The way I did the fix will actually do great harm. The fix goes into a wrong branch. And I let the problem escape the QA's detection so that it could break our production system. This literally wake me up at night and I got out of bed to fix the problem around 6am.

Did I mention I sorted out the confusion while I was sleeping? Yes, somehow I accurately figured out the sequence of events in my dream. It wakes me up because I worry my colleagues who works in European timezone and other late nighter would have published my faulty build to the customers.

I don't know what my mind was doing while I was sleeping. Does it work in autopilot mode and solve the problem I couldn't solve during day time? Or perhaps I just couldn't relax and bring my day time issue into bed?

2011.11.29 [science, personal] - comments

From crowdsourcing to crime-sourcing: The rise of distributed criminality - Just as legitimate business and public benefit from Internet based collaboration, criminals are increasingly using Internet to distribute operation to players all over the world. A credit card stealing operation can become a collaboration in a crime network of different specialities, like phishing, botnet rental (cloud computing?) and money laundering (financial services). Just as technologies revolutionizing our life, it is also empowering criminals.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. Placebos are considered a statistical nuisance by drugmakers. A benchmark to beat to prove the effectiveness of drugs. Increasingly new drug testings are failing to do so. This article bring us back to the early days when the concept of placebo are first introduced. That was a watershed development in the science of pharmaceutical and it remain a gold standard to prove drug efficacy. These days scientist are intrigued by the apparent therapeutic effect of placebos. It begins to shed some light on the brain's own healing mechanisms and the mind body connection.

2011.11.03 [science] - comments

I've learned some nugget today regarding face perception. These are some hacks to exploit humans' capability to recognize faces.

• Robohash is a cool web service to generate unique robot image from any text. The robots look funny. But it is actually created for an excellent application to help quickly identify a caller from a large pool. The source code is available in github.

http://static1.robohash.com/tungwaiyip235345689cdef

• The project is inspired by Identicon. It has similar idea but uses geometric shapes to generate icons.

• Chernoff faces, a visualization technique invented by Herman Chernoff, display multivariate data in the shape of a human face.

2011.07.22 [design, science] - comments