Shareholder Meetings

Matthew Rafat's blog willworkforjustice.blogspot.com has a first-hand record of shareholder meetings for a number of companies, though mostly in the Bay Area since that is where he is based. With organizations such as moxyvote starting up and various motions towards more responsive corporate governance, this record is an interesting data point. Large shareholders (pension funds, etc.) are still for the most part slumbering giants.

How long does it take to compile a web browser, Part 1

In today's brave new world, people can build and deploy a web app very quickly. However, on the other side of the equation, systems software such as web browsers are not getting any simpler. The cost of the rich media experience in modern web apps quite frequently borne by systems software including browsers, servers, and plugins. Just eyeballing, in Chrome (default multi-process mode), each tab take 30-100 MB of RAM. Luckily, I am not one to keep many tabs open concurrently, but many, many people do. A rich web experience can quickly gobble up whatever amount of memory you can throw at it. There are many people who have compared memory usage for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer (TechPP, CNet, Tom's Hardware, DotNetPerls, and many more I am sure), but, here, I would like to take a look at another facet of web browser complexity: source code size, time to build, and size of debug executable. This post follows and expands upon the type of study I did on open source finance software.

US Debt Service

The economic times have really changed. The scope of household deleveraging is quite astounding. The Federal Reserve releases a figure called the Financial Service Ratio which measures amount of consumer and mortgage debt servicing including automobile lease payments, rental payments on tenant-occupied property, homeowners' insurance, and property tax payments to disposable personal income. For renters, the ratio peaked around 2001 at 31.05. For homeowners, it peak a lot later around 2007 at 17.55. Both have been sliding ever since. This data refers to the country as a whole. The picture for the individual regions may look different.

Symmetric Type Sharing in ML

In the Standard ML language, there are two primary mechanisms for refining a module signature after the fact. One is a symmetric mechanism called type sharing and the other called where type, aka fibration. These are useful for facilitating modular programming by enabling reuse of module signatures (i.e., the syntactic "type" of a module).