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Nice d3.js demo of the fat-tailed distribution:
A fat-tailed distribution looks normal but the parts far away from the average are thicker, meaning a higher chance of huge deviations. […] Fat tails don’t mean more variance; just different variance. For a given variance, a higher chance of extreme deviations implies a lower chance of medium ones.
(tags: dataviz via:hn statistics visualization distributions fat-tailed kurtosis d3.js javascript variance deviation)
Google Cloud Messaging for Android
GCM is a service that allows you to send data from your server to your users’ Android-powered device, and also to receive messages from devices on the same connection. The GCM service handles all aspects of queueing of messages and delivery to the target Android application running on the target device. GCM is completely free no matter how big your messaging needs are, and there are no quotas.
packetdrill – network stack testing tool
[Google’s] packetdrill scripting tool enables quick, precise tests for entire TCP/UDP/IPv4/IPv6 network stacks, from the system call layer down to the NIC hardware. packetdrill currently works on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. It can test network stack behavior over physical NICs on a LAN, or on a single machine using a tun virtual network device.
(tags: testing networking tun google linux papers tcp ip udp freebsd openbsd netbsd)
the TCP bounded buffer deadlock problem
I’ve wound up mentioning this twice in the past week, so it’s worth digging up and bookmarking!
Under certain circumstances a TCP connection can end up in a “deadlock”, where neither the client nor the server is able to write data out or read data in. This is caused by two factors. First, a client or server cannot perform two transactions at once; a read cannot be performed if a write transaction is in progress, and vice versa. Second, the buffers that exist at either end of the TCP connection are of limited size. The deadlock occurs when both the client and server are trying to send an amount of data that is larger than the combined input and output buffer size.
(tags: tcp ip bounded-buffer deadlock bugs buffering connections distributed-systems)
An excellent writeup of the TCP bounded-buffer deadlock problem
on pages 146-149 of ‘TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers’ by Michael J. Donahoo and Kenneth L. Calvert.
(tags: tcp ip bounded-buffer deadlock bugs buffering connections distributed-systems)