Category: NewsFeed

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AWS EC2 instances and the coming leap second

Each EC2 instance has its own clock and is fully under your control; AWS does not manage instance clocks. An instance clock can be affected by many factors. Depending on these factors, it may implement or skip the leap second. It may also be isolated and not synchronize to an external time system. If you need your EC2 instance clocks to be predictable, you can use NTP to synchronize your clocks to time servers of your choice. For more information about how to synchronize clocks, see the following documentation:

Adding the leap second is currently the standard practice. If you use public time servers, like time servers from ntp.org (the default for Amazon Linux AMIs) or time.windows.com (the default for Amazon Windows AMIs), your instance will see the leap second unless these synchronization services announce a different practice.

Source: Look Before You Leap – The Coming Leap Second and AWS | AWS Official Blog

A reminder to check how (y)our EC2 instances are going to deal with this before it happens at the end of June.

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The Conference Manifesto: 10 Steps to a Better Conference

Acceptance to the conference could be contingent upon the speaker reading and signing an agreement to meet the following criteria in their talks:

1) I understand that the conference paper should do something that an article cannot. Since it involves direct, real-time contact with other humans, the speaker should make use of this relatively rare and thus precious opportunity to interact meaningfully with other scholars.

2) I will not read my paper line by line in a monotone without looking at the audience. I needn’t necessarily abide by some entertainment imperative, with jokes, anecdotes or flashy slides, but I will strive to maintain a certain compassion toward my captive audience.

3) I understand that a list is not a talk. I will not simply list appearances of a theme in a given corpus.

4) I will have a thesis, and if I don’t, I will at least have a reason that my talk should exist.

5) I will keep direct citations to a minimum, not relying on them to fill up time. I understand that audience members shudder at lengthy blocks of text in the PowerPoint or on the handout.

6) In the Q. and A., I will not ask an irrelevant question for the sake of being seen asking a question. If my question is hyperspecific and meaningless to anyone but myself, I will approach the speaker after the talk with my query.

7) I will not make a statement and then put a question mark at the end to make it sound like a question.

8) If I ask an actual question, I will a) not take more than a minute or so to ask it, and b) ask it politely even if I disagree with the speaker.

9) I respect the time of my colleagues who’ve come to hear me speak. I will do my best to be as clear and succinct as possible, and make their attendance worthwhile.

10) I understand that if I disregard these recommendations, I might be complicit in the death of the humanities.

Source: The Conference Manifesto

This is aimed at academic conferences in the humanities, but it applies equally to academic conferences in law and to many tech conferences. CALIcon would be an even better conference if presenters and attendees kept these things in mind.

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How much can technology actually improve collaboration?

Communication and collaboration are not synonymous. One is a simple exchange of information, the other is the co-creation of shared outcomes that are richer than they would be otherwise because the participants respond to learning and insight during the process itself.

How much can technology actually improve collaboration? | ZDNet  http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-much-can-technology-actually-improve-collaboration/

Good explanation of the promise of and problems with modern collaboration tools. Tech isn’t a silver bullet.

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Want to disrupt the legal industry? How about some block chain tech?

Millions of developers use Git on a daily basis and rely on commit hashes to create an ordered guarantee of history. However, Git users must manually choose who they trust to update commit changes.

However, imagine the following scenario:

  1. Thousands of transactions, or pieces of data are being recorded each second.
  2. All of that data can be committed to a Git repository. Perhaps data can be batched together into a single commit.
  3. After recording thousands of commits, each containing thousands of transactions, a single hash, such as “f883f426c6da861bb31c5b5d645e638d44cb2c1f” is published each day.

This hash guarantees the integrity of all of the commits in the Git repository. The hash could be tweeted, or even published in a newspaper, guaranteeing an ordered history of events.

via Is Git A Block Chain? · Domus Tower.

I think block chain technology is one of the few truly innovative and disruptive technologies in the legal space. I mean let’s face it does law practice need another expert system, search engine, or  document assembler? All of that tech is decades old at this point and improvements are nice and useful but hardly disruptive. Block chain on the other is actually something pretty new that provides lots of interesting potential in the legal space.

Imagine following the scenario outlined above but instead of just uniquely identifying bits of code, you’re talking about legal documents. Contracts, leases, bills of sale, judicial opinions, briefs, opinion letters, statutes, regulations, complaints, answers, depositions all uniquely identified and identifiable in a block chain. That would be an actual innovation and would disrupt the entire legal system.

Work is starting in this area with some interesting papers already beginning to turn up on SSRN. If you’re truly interested in disrupting the legal industry quit looking at warmed over 20th century tech and focus on something truly new.