- MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale — Google Research paper on the tech underlying the new cloud DataFlow tool. Watch the video. Yow.
- The Integer Overflow Bug That Went to Mars — long-standing (20 year old!) bug in a compression library prompts a wave of new releases. No word yet on whether NASA will upgrade the rover to avoid being pwned by Martian script kiddies. (update: I fell for a self-promoter. The Martians will need to find another attack vector. Huzzah!)
- epoch (github) — Fastly-produced open source general purpose real-time charting library for building beautiful, smooth, and high performance visualizations.
- Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services (YouTube) — Jeff Dean‘s keynote at Velocity. He wrote … a lot of things for this. And now he’s into deep learning ….
"Google" entries
Four short links: 27 June 2014
Google MillWheel, 20yo Bug, Fast Real-Time Visualizations, and Google's Speed King
Your money or your life
Microsoft, Google and pushing business models too far.
I know it’s hard to run a large company. I know that organizations can get too deep into their own visions to imagine conflicting values.
I realized yesterday, though, that:
- Microsoft ruined their brand for me by holding too tightly to things that they considered theirs. (Software.)
- Google is ruining their brand for me by holding too tightly to things that I consider mine. (Identity, everything they can possibly learn about me.)
It’s a weird difference, but the Google version makes me much sadder about the world. As I’d tell a mugger, “You can have my wallet, just don’t take me.”
Photo by Didier, used under a Creative Commons license.
It’s the end of the web as we knew it
You might feel fine.
For the past 15 years, Google has enforced the classic “HTML as foundation” architecture at the heart of the Web. Content creators and the developers who support them had to present content and link information as part of their pages’ HTML if they wanted Google’s spidering bots to see them. Google effectively punished developers who made links or content available only through JavaScript (or images, or CSS), giving them low or non-existent search results.
Google did this to keep their processing simple, not because of a deep fondness for HTML. Even as Google’s bots stuck to a simple diet of HTML, other parts of Google were developing JavaScript-centric approaches, like AngularJS: a “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework” that “is what HTML would have been, had it been designed for building web-apps.”
Angular is far from alone. As JavaScript grew, more and more programmers wanted to build their apps as programs, not as pages. Or, as Jen Simmons summarized it at Fluent, “Dang that stupid HTML, I’m just going to load an empty page… then I’ll run the real program, I’ll run the JavaScript.” Read more…
Four short links: 22 May 2014
Local Clusters, Pancoopticon, Indie Oversupply, and Open Source PDF
- Ferry — helps you create big data clusters on your local machine. Define your big data stack using YAML and share your application with Dockerfiles. Ferry supports Hadoop, Cassandra, Spark, GlusterFS, and Open MPI.
- What Google Told SEC — For example, a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities. The only thing they make that people want to buy is the ad space around what you’re actually trying to do.
- The Indie Bubble is Popping (Jeff Vogel) — gamers’ budgets and the number of hours in the day to play games are not increasing at the rate at which the number of games on the market is increasing.
- pdfium — Chrome’s PDF engine, open source.
Four short links: 6 May 2014
On Google, Non-Profit Cleverness, Textbooks in Markdown, and Amazon with Docker
- Letter to Google from CEO of Axel Springer — very well-written and articulate challenge to the positive Google frame: your company will play a leading role in the various areas of our professional and private lives–in the house, in the car, in healthcare, in robotronics. This is a huge opportunity and a no less serious threat.
- Brewster Kahle Talk — notes from a Brewster Kahle talk. Internet Archive using non-profit status to engineer lower costs in surprising ways: accommodation and banking. (via David Weinberger)
- gitbook — code to turn markdown for textbook-style works (including problems and solutions) into PDF, ebook, HTML, etc.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Docker — use Amazon’s deployment tool with Docker images or Dockerfiles.
Four short links: 1 May 2014
Cloud Jurisdiction, Driverless Cars, Robotics IPOs, and Fitting a Catalytic Convertor to Your Data Exhaust
- US Providers Must Divulge from Offshore Servers (Gigaom) — A U.S. magistrate judge ruled that U.S. cloud vendors must fork over customer data even if that data resides in data centers outside the country. (via Alistair Croll)
- Inside Google’s Self-Driving Car (Atlantic Cities) — Urmson says the value of maps is one of the key insights that emerged from the DARPA challenges. They give the car a baseline expectation of its environment; they’re the difference between the car opening its eyes in a completely new place and having some prior idea what’s going on around it. This is a long and interesting piece on the experience and the creator’s concerns around the self-driving cars. Still looking for the comprehensive piece on the subject.
- Recent Robotics-Relate IPOs — not all the exits are to Google.
- How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy From Big Data (Mashable) — “I really couldn’t have done it without Tor, because Tor was really the only way to manage totally untraceable browsing. I know it’s gotten a bad reputation for Bitcoin trading and buying drugs online, but I used it for BabyCenter.com.”
Talking to Chromecast from iOS
Part One: Easily find Chromecast devices on your local network
Now that Google has opened up the Chromecast API for anyone to play with, it’s possibile to create iOS applications that can leverage the $35 device as a way to display to HDMI devices wirelessly. In this series of tutorials, we’ll go over the API, starting with configuring your project to use the framework, and finding devices out on your local network to play with.
Let’s assume you’ve set up a Chromecast device attached to an HDMI TV and have it configured for your local network. Now it’s time to get an App set up to use it. We’ll use the iPhone Simulator in these examples, since it can talk to Chromecast devices just like a physical device, as long as the Mac you are developing on is on the same LAN as the Chromecast dongle.
Begin by creating a project, as usual. For this example, I used a single-view Storyboarded app. I set up an UITableView inside the default UIView, hooking it’s datasource and delegate to the default view controller the wizard had created. Next, I went to the Google Google Cast API page and downloaded the iOS framework, then used the “Add Files…” project option to add the framework to the project, copying in the files.
Four short links: 18 February 2014
Offensive Security, Sage-Quitting, Ethics Risks, and War Stories
- Offensive Computer Security — 2014 class notes, lectures, etc. from FSU. All CC-licensed.
- Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down (Quinn Norton) — The net doesn’t make social problems. It amplifies them until they can’t be ignored. And many other words of wisdom. When you eruditely stop using a service, that’s called sage-quitting.
- Inside Google’s Mysterious Ethics Board (Forbes) — nails the three risk to Google’s AI ethics board: (a) compliance-focus, (b) internally-staffed, and (c) only for show.
- 10 Things We Forgot to Monitor — devops war stories explaining ten things that bitly now monitors.
Four short links: 10 February 2014
Sterling Zings, Android Swings, Data Blings, and Visualized Things.
- Bruce Sterling at transmediale 2014 (YouTube) — “if it works, it’s already obsolete.” Sterling does a great job of capturing the current time: spies in your Internet, lost trust with the BigCos, the impermanence of status quo, the need to create. (via BoingBoing)
- No-one Should Fork Android (Ars Technica) — this article is bang on. Google Mobile Services (the Play functionality) is closed-source, what makes Android more than a bare-metal OS, and is where G is focusing its development. Google’s Android team treats openness like a bug and routes around it.
- Data Pipelines (Hakkalabs) — interesting overview of the data pipelines of Stripe, Tapad, Etsy, and Square.
- Visualising Salesforce Data in Minecraft — would almost make me look forward to using Salesforce. Almost.
Upward Mobility: Your phone is your robot’s best friend
Rosie the Robot may feel more comfortable talking to Siri than to you
Recently, Glenn Martin wrote an article describing how robotics in moving out of the factory and into the house. And while Glenn restricted himself mainly to the type of robots that pop into your head when someone says the word (either the anthropomorphic variety or the industrial flavor), the reality is that there are a lot of robots already in the hands of consumers, although it might take a moment to recognize them as such.
I’m speaking of drones, and especially quadcopters, which are proliferating at an enormous rate, and are being used to do everything from documenting a cool skateboard move to creating a breathtaking overflight of a horrific disaster site.