I dodged a...not a bullet, more like a slow-lobbed softball...today. I was a standby juror for the Cook County courtroom in Skokie today, but when I called in, only people with last names beginning H through S had to report.I'm relieved. Somehow, this time it just seemed like a drag.Although at least they've straightened out the cell phone situation, and all the juror … [Read more...] about No Jury Duty
Archives for October 2013
Physical Reality and the Federal Rules of Evidence
Jamison Koehler has a short post quoting from the Federal Rules of Evidence: According to Federal Rule of Evidence 401, the test for relevance is whether the evidence has a “tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.” I've heard that language before, … [Read more...] about Physical Reality and the Federal Rules of Evidence
500 Million Lines of Code?
500 million lines of code. That's how big the source code is for HealthCare.gov, according to this article at the New York Times. That number has since been repeated in a CNN editorial by Julianne Pepitone.That can't be right.I know for a fact you can build a healthcare enrollment site in under a million lines of code. HealthCare.gov does more than just handle … [Read more...] about 500 Million Lines of Code?
More Interesting News About HealthCare.gov Problems
Lena H. Sun and Scott Wilson in the Washington Post have a pretty good article about the HealthCare.gov mess that tells us more about what's going wrong. Let's start with the specification for the load: CGI built the shopping and enrollment applications to accommodate 60,000 users at the same time. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has said that the government expected … [Read more...] about More Interesting News About HealthCare.gov Problems
In Software Engineering, Sometimes Failure Is the Only Option
On day one of the HealthCare.gov roll-out, I explained that first-day glitches in a large production web site are meaningless. With only a few specialized exceptions (and some lucky ones) things always go wrong on the first day. It's a normal part of the shakedown process, and not necessarily a reason to get upset. However, just because first day glitches are normal, that … [Read more...] about In Software Engineering, Sometimes Failure Is the Only Option