10⁹ Operations: Large Histories with Jepsen

This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00. This is not true. Or rather, it isn’t true in the sense most people...

In June 2023, when Threads announced their plans to federate with other Fediverse instances, there was a good deal of debate around whether smaller instances should allow federation or block it pre-emptively. As one of the admins of woof.group, I wrote about some of the potential risks and rewards of federating with Threads. We decided to wait...

I’m in the process of replacing a old radiator system with a centrally-ducted, air-source heat pump system with electric resistive backup heat. I’ve found that the default ecobee algorithm seems to behave surprisingly poorly for this system, and wanted to write up some of the settings that I’ve found yield better behavior. A disclaimer. I’m not...

Recently I’ve had users of my libraries start reporting mysterious errors due to a missing reference to SequencedCollection, a Java interface added in JDK 21: Execution error (ClassNotFoundException) at jdk.internal.loader.BuiltinClassLoader/loadClass (BuiltinClassLoader.java:641). java.util.SequencedCollection Specifically, projects using Jepsen...

This story is not practical advice. For me, it’s closing the book on an almost two-year saga. For you, I hope it’s an enjoyable bit of bureaucratic schadenfreude. For Anthem, I hope it’s the subject of a series of painful but transformative meetings. This is not an isolated event. I’ve had dozens of struggles with Anthem customer support, and...