more signs of stress - avoidance and creativity

Today I read the google wave draft protocol spec. It was amazingly concise.

2.4. Operations

Operations are mutations on wavelets. The state of a wavelet is entirely defined by a sequence of operations on that wavelet.

Clients and servers exchange operations in order to communicate modifications to a wavelet. Operations propagate through the system to all clients and servers interested in that wavelet. They each apply the operation to their own copy of the wavelet. The use of operational transformation (OT) guarantees all copies of the wavelet will eventually converge to the same state. In order for the guarantees made by OT to hold, all communication participants must use the same operational transformation and composition algorithms (i.e. all OT implementations must be functionally equivalent).


Reading specs has become a weird kind of guilty pleasure for me... or at least, I never thought I'd enjoy it, but I find that I kinda do. Maybe because it lets me be smug, if only in my own head: "oh yeah if you just read the spec you'd see how they handle that..." And since like nobody reads specs, (because theyr'e written in math,) reading and understanding a spec is a recipe for instant self-esteem!

<_<

I also applied for access to the google wave developer sandbox. Because I don't have enough to do with my spare time?

1 comment:

  1. You should feel good about it!

    I personally can't get more than 2 or three sentences into those things without my brain going "BLAARGGGHHH" and trying to hide itself behind the cerebellum.

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