Chad Dotson

A small town Computer Scientist / Software Engineer. Chad enjoys writing Python and JavaScript as well as tinkering with his Raspberry Pi and Arduino. When not programming, he enjoys Photography (especially lightning) and Sci-Fi.

Feb

2016

Bringing the Internet to Mars and Beyond

With the exploration of space and the eventual colonization of Mars humanity needs to establish a method for improving internet connectivity for people on the surface.

One method of achieving this is to place one or more satellites in high orbit around the planet. These would use interplanetary internet(delay tolerant) technology and protocols to service requests as well as actively mirror content for primary sites located on Earth. The goal of this strategy is to reduce the latency of user requests from 8-48 minutes down to at most a few seconds for popular content.

What is needed for a single node:

High bandwidth communications equipment similar to what would have been on the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter.
A cluster of servers in an a spacecraft the the size of a supply module. Something similar to Microsoft’s Project Natick would be about right for a first generation. There would be a redundant capacity built in to cover eventual server failure.
A heat management system.
A nuclear power generation system.

Now we just need NASA, Microsoft, SpaceX, Amazon (w/Blue Origin) AWS – Mars, or Google to make it happen!

Dec

2015

You’re Too Close

Have you encountered the following scenario?

You are trying to solve a problem (or helping solve a problem) and know or at least think you know the solution. You are in the middle of implementing it when someone else looks at it and says, “why don’t you do it this way, isn’t this way easier/better?” Taking a step back, you realize that the question not only has merit but is a better and much more obvious solution; you can’t believe you missed it.

What happened?

I think its because you were too close to the problem and had developed a very narrow focus. That narrow focus prevented you from seeing the better solution. Perhaps this is even a variation of functional fixedness in that we’ve latched onto an idea of how to solve a problem and our mind’s may not see alternatives easily.

What can we do?

Think about the broad (or product) level goals regularly.
Entertain questions and/or suggestions from others.
Ask: “Is this the best way?”
Ask: “Is this the practical way?”
Don’t overthink the problem.
Get it working then evaluate the solution and/or do a code review!

Nov

2015