Matt Hamer, founder of Attribyte, has been posting on mth·ology since 1999.

Introducing Attribyte

Mon, Feb 2, 2015

Attribyte’s Android app is now available for free in the Google Play store. I wrote a bit about the development and launch on Attribyte’s blog.

Normal Accidents

Wed, Oct 1, 2014

I’m just finishing Command and Control, a frightening account of a Titan II missile accident intermingled with other terrifying Tritium-related tidbits. You may have read an excerpt from it about a close call involving a crashed B-52 and two Hydrogen bombs.

My uncle was a cold-war-era B-52 navigator. As a kid, I never really understood what he did. I rarely saw him; but when I did, I remember him patiently answering my questions about airplanes and reviewing the (in)accuracy of my latest airplane designs. I thought about him, and his hazardous occupation, a lot as I read this book.

The epilogue paraphrases Charles B. Perrow’s, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Just added to my Kindle list.) If you are a software developer, I hope this quote rings true:

Certain patterns and faults seemed common to all of them. The most dangerous systems had elements that were “tightly coupled” and interactive. They didn’t function in a simple, linear way, like an assembly line. When a problem arose on an assembly line, you could stop the line until a solution was found. But in a tightly coupled system, many things occurred simultaneously — and they could prove difficult to stop. If those things also interacted with each other, it might be hard to know exactly what was happening when a problem arose, let alone know what to do about it. The complexity of such a system was bound to bring surprises. “No one dreamed that when X failed, Y would also be out of order,” Perrow gave as an example, “and the two failures would interact so as to both start a fire and silence the fire alarm.”