Tropicana Orange Juice Redesign
Tropicana has redesigned their orange juice containers, and the result is very web 2.0:
Note the high-contrast design, clean solid bands of color, and a splendid use of white space. The container packaging is now stronger looking and relaxed.
Rope Burning Interview Question
Kottke just posted the infamous rope-burning interview problem, which is actually quite easy:
You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn’t have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it?
The solution is the following:
- Light rope #1 at one end
- Light rope #2 at both ends
- When rope #2’s ends meet, light rope #1 at the other end. 30 minutes have been measured so far, leaving 30 minutes left on rope #1.
- When rope #1’s ends meet, fifteen minutes have been measured, for a total of 45 minutes.
Amazon S3 Goes Down
Netcraft has a great story about Amazon downtime. For what looks like roughly a day, their Alexa portal experienced extremely high latencies. Perhaps we should give them a new logo to represent their downsides:
I’ve always been against third-party web services solutions. What happens when they go down? It’s not a matter of if they go down, but rather when. No matter how many different locations you have, how many servers in your cluster, you will eventually experience a natural disaster, and lose connectivity. Until there’s some better way to maintain uptime, not prone to natural disaster, failure, or human error, you’re better off running your own systems.
