Reading

The case of the missing notifications

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

Steam engine Britannia 70000

While waiting for my train to pull into Oxenholme station this afternoon, we we parked next to the steam engine 70000 Britannia with steam up while she was having some work done and I got a video of one of her coupling or connecting rods carried away.

Like 60163 Tornado on Friday, there was a coach with her.

9 Billion Names of God.

I re-read the 1967 story 9 Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke, where a Tibetan monastery are calculating all possible names of God, which they think will be some sort of culmination of the universe.

When I first read it I hadn't noticed that it was written when using a computer to print all the possible combinations of something was still quite new.

It does feel like all those permutations make sense in a Buddhist monastery, but AFAIK he must have based that on Kaballah and made up the connection to Buddhism.

He wrote it in a long weekend away. But he added a comment that there was something wrong with the maths and he'd needed to fix it later so I guess he didn't QUITE finish it in one go :)

The numbers be gave were 9 billion names, 15,000 years by hand, 100 days by computer printout. A custom alphabet. 9 letters at most. And a few combinations are forbidden. I'm guessing he chose 9 billion as a good sounding title and a reasonable length of time, but that something^something didn't quite come out at 9 billion, so added the forbidden combinations or custom alphabet to adjust it a bit.