today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 23, 2022,
updated Nov 23, 2022

• You Asked. We Acted: Three ways to ensure customer experience success in 2023

  The time for annual planning has arrived, and my team has been much like many other organizations over the past several weeks - fully heads down in planning. While we have been thinking ahead to our priorities for next year, we have also been taking time to reflect on how we helped to improve our customers’ and partners’ experience this year.

  I believe that taking time to reflect is important, but it’s not something we prioritize enough. It always seems to fall to the bottom of the ever-bottomless to-do list. It is important to reflect on ways that your team can improve, and to listen to what your customers and partners are saying so you can adapt and evolve your approach based on this feedback.

• Mastodon

  It’s a good idea to prefer alternatives to mastodon.social, because this server is being hammered by new traffic. For professionals in the software industry, these instances seem to be pretty good: [...]

• Host your own Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi

  Different servers have different policies, and some specialise in specific areas or provide additional tools like maths or translation. At Raspberry Pi, the team took the decision that they should run their own server just for the company fediverse presence. You can tell it’s official, as it’s a Raspberry Pi-owned domain name; and Raspberry Pi can run their own publishing and moderation directly. The account can’t get banned or shadow banned; the worst that happens is nobody looks at the content because it’s boring. Which can be fixed by writing more interesting things. Raspberry Pi can’t pay for adverts and force content on you – the fediverse just doesn’t work like that.

• Time’s up: the leap second is being scrapped

  The leap second was introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) roughly every 21 months. As these seconds are irregular and hard to predict due to the varying speed of the Earth’s rotation, they can disrupt systems that require precise timekeeping. Meta published a blog post earlier this year calling for leap seconds to be scrapped, highlighting that Reddit went down for around 40 minutes back in 2012 when a new leap second interfered with the company’s servers. In 2017, Cloudflare blamed the leap second for its DNS service going down on New Year’s Day, precisely at midnight UTC.

• It’s Official: The Leap Second Will Be Retired (a Decade from Now)

  So voted the member states of the international treaty governing science and measurement standards, at a meeting in Versailles, France, on Friday. The near unanimous vote on what was known as Resolution D was met with relief and jubilation from the world’s metrologists, some of whom have been pressing for a solution to the leap second problem for decades.

• New Metric Prefixes Get Bigger And Smaller

  It always fascinates us that every single thing that is made had to be designed by someone. Even something as simple as a bag and box that holds cereal. Someone had to work out the dimensions, the materials, the printing on it, and assign it a UPC code. Those people aren’t always engineers, but someone has to think it out no matter how mundane it is before it can be made. But what about the terms we use to express things? Someone has to work those out, too. In the case of metric prefixes like kilo, mega, and pico, it is apparently the General Conference on Weights and Measures that recently had its 27th session. As a result of that, we have four more metric prefixes to learn: ronna, quetta, ronto, and quecto.