- Fast Lomb-Scargle Periodograms in Python — a classic method for finding periodicity in irregularly-sampled data.
- Facebook Bluetooth Beacons — free for you to use and help people see more information about your business whenever they use Facebook during their visit.
- Industry 4.0 — stop gagging at the term. Interesting examples of connectivity and data improving manufacturing. Human-machine interfaces: Logistics company Knapp AG developed a picking technology using augmented reality. Pickers wear a headset that presents vital information on a see-through display, helping them locate items more quickly and precisely. And with both hands free, they can build stronger and more efficient pallets, with fragile items safeguarded. An integrated camera captures serial and lot ID numbers for real-time stock tracking. Error rates are down by 40%, among many other benefits. Digital-to-physical transfer: Local Motors builds cars almost entirely through 3-D printing, with a design crowdsourced from an online community. It can build a new model from scratch in a year, far less than the industry average of six. Vauxhall and GM, among others, still bend a lot of metal, but also use 3-D printing and rapid prototyping to minimize their time to market. (via Quartz)
- runC — a lightweight universal runtime container, by the Open Container Project. (OCP = multi-vendor initiative in hands of Linux Foundation)
"mobile" entries
Battery performance in Android M
Exploring the new Android M battery performance features.
It has been a long held personal belief that most battery drain issues on smartphone devices are due to applications that are improperly tuned. I work very closely with mobile developers to help optimize mobile apps for speed and battery life with AT&T’s own Application Resource Optimizer. I am also in the process of finishing up a book on High Performance Android Apps that will be published later this summer. So I am always excited to see mobile application performance hit the center stage.
Last month, Google held its annual Google I/O conference, where they announce new products, tools and features. This year, with the release of the Android M developer preview, performance of mobile devices/battery life and app performance were on the center stage (and unveiled at the keynote!). Lets look at the new features and tools available to users and developers to make Android’s battery life better.
Read more…
Four short links: 23 June 2015
Irregular Periodicity, Facebook Beacons, Industry 4.0, and Universal Container
Four short links: 8 June 2015
Software Psychology, Virus ID, Mobile Ads, and Complex Coupling
- Psychology of Software Architecture — a wonderful piece of writing, but this stood out: It comes down to behavioral economics and game theory. The license we choose modifies the economics of those who use our work.
- Single Blood Test to ID Every Virus You’ve Ever Had — As Elledge notes, “in this paper alone we identified more antibody/peptide interactions to viral proteins than had been identified in the previous history of all viral exploration.”
- Internet Users Increasingly Blocking Ads, Including on Mobiles (The Economist) — mobile networks working on ad blockers for their customers, If lots of mobile subscribers did switch it on, it would give European carriers what they have long sought: some way of charging giant American online firms for the strain those firms put on their mobile networks. Google and Facebook, say, might have to pay the likes of Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica to get on to their whitelists.
- Connasence (Wikipedia) — a taxonomy of (systems) coupling. Two components are connascent if a change in one would require the other to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system. (Via Ben Gracewood.)
Add depth to your project with practical web audio
Enhance the user experience with the thoughtful use of sound.
There is little debate that Web Audio is cool. Take for example Stepkit by Brent Jackson (embedded below).
It’s definitely a fun toy to play with, but most of us probably couldn’t think of how this might be relevant to our jobs. When I presented 8-bit game music with the Web Audio API at last year’s Fluent Conference, I readily admitted that it was intended to be purely fun rather than practical.
Recently I explored the idea of adding audio to web apps, but I think the big problem isn’t that web developers were unsure how to add audio to their app, but that they don’t think they should add audio to web apps. In this article, I’d like to make the case that you should be considering audio when designing your web application user interface.
Four short links: 28 May 2015
Messaging and Notifications, Game Postmortem, Recovering Robots, and Ethical AI
- Internet Trends 2015 (PDF) — Mary Meeker’s preso. Messaging + Notifications = Key Layers of Every Meaningful Mobile App, Messaging Leaders Aiming to Create Cross-Platform Operating Systems That Are Context-Persistent Communications Hubs for More & More Services. This year’s deck feels more superficial, less surprising than in years past.
- When the Land Goes Under the Sea — As it turns out: People really despise being told to not replay the game. Almost universally, the reaction to that was a kernel of unhappiness amidst mostly positive reviews. In retrospect, including that note was a mistake for a number of reasons. My favorite part of game postmortems is what the designers learned about how people approach experiences.
- Damage Recovery Algorithm for Robots (IEEE) — This illustrates how it’s possible to endow just about any robot with resiliency via this algorithm, as long as it’s got enough degrees of freedom to enable adaptive movement. Because otherwise the Terminators will just stop when we shoot them.
- The Counselor — short fiction with ethics, AI, and how good things become questionable.
Four short links: 13 May 2015
Makey Makey Go, Driverless Accidents, HTTP/2 Guidelines, and Choking The Mac
- Makey Makey Go (Kickstarter) — $19 portable Makey Makey hardware kit. (via Makezine)
- US Driverless Car Accidents (NYTimes) — Delphi sent AP an accident report showing its car was hit, but Google has not made public any records, so both enthusiasts and critics of the emerging technology have only the company’s word on what happened. The California Department of Motor Vehicles said it could not release details from accident reports. This lack of transparency troubles critics who want the public to be able to monitor the rollout of a technology that its own developers acknowledge remains imperfect.
- Architecting Websites for the HTTP/2 Era — HTTP/2 introduces multiplexing, which allows one TCP/IP connection to request and receive multiple resources, intertwined. Requests won’t be blocking anymore, so there is no need for multiple TCP connections on multiple domain names. In fact, opening multiple connections would hurt performance in HTTP/2. This is going to be exciting.
- tripmode — software to control the downloads your Mac software wants to make, even when you’re tethered or on a pay-per-meg hotspot.
Four short links: 28 April 2015
Mobile Numbers, Robot Growth, Business Town, and The Modern Economy
- Defining Mobile (Luke Wroblewski) — numbers on size, orientation, and # of thumbs across mobile users. 94% of the time, it’s in portrait mode.
- PwC Manufacturing Barometer: Robotics — Planned acquisition of robotics systems over the next two to three years was cited by a maximum of 58% -– with nearly one-third (31%) planning to acquire a moderate amount (25%) or many more robotics systems (only 6%). A larger number plan to acquire a limited number of robotics systems (27%). (via Robohub)
- Welcome to Business Town — delightful satire. Captain of Moonshots is my favourite.
- The Asshole Factory (Umair Haque) — The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry. And that’s not just a tragedy. It is something approaching the moral equivalent of a crime. For it demolishes human potential in precisely the same way as locking up someone innocent, and throwing away the key.
Four short links: 10 March 2015
Robot Swarms, Media Hacking, Inside-Out Databases, and Quantified Medical Self
- Surgical Micro-Robot Swarms — A swarm of medical microrobots. Start with cm sized robots. These already exist in the form of pillbots and I reference the work of Paolo Dario’s lab in this direction. Then get 10 times smaller to mm sized robots. Here we’re at the limit of making robots with conventional mechatronics. The almost successful I-SWARM project prototyped remarkable robots measuring 4 x 4 x 3mm. But now shrink by another 3 orders of magnitude to microbots, measured in micrometers. This is how small robots would have to be in order to swim through and access (most of) the vascular system. Here we are far beyond conventional materials and electronics, but amazingly work is going on to control bacteria. In the example I give from the lab of Sylvain Martel, swarms of magnetotactic bacteria are steered by an external magnetic field and, interestingly, tracked in an MRI scanner.
- Media Hacking — interesting discussion of the techniques used to spread disinformation through social media, often using bots to surface/promote a message.
- Turning the Database Inside Out with Apache Samza — replication, secondary indexing, caching, and materialized views as a way of getting into distributed stream processing.
- Apple Research Kit — Apple positioning their mobile personal biodata tools with medical legitimacy, presumably as a way to distance themselves from the stereotypical quantified selfer. I’m reminded of the gym chain owner who told me, about the Nike+, “yeah, maybe 5% of my clients will want this. The rest go to the gym so they can eat and drink what they want.”
Four short links: 5 March 2015
Web Grain, Cognition and Computation, New Smart Watch, and Assessing Accuracy
- The Web’s Grain (Frank Chimero) — What would happen if we stopped treating the web like a blank canvas to paint on, and instead like a material to build with?
- Bruce Sterling on Convergence of Humans and Machines — I like to use the terms “cognition” and “computation”. Cognition is something that happens in brains, physical, biological brains. Computation is a thing that happens with software strings on electronic tracks that are inscribed out of silicon and put on fibre board. They are not the same thing, and saying that makes the same mistake as in earlier times, when people said that human thought was like a steam engine.
- Smart Pocket Watch — I love to see people trying different design experiences. This is beautiful. And built on Firefox OS!
- Knowledge-Based Trust (PDF) — Google research paper on how to assess factual accuracy of web page content. It was bad enough when Google incentivised people to make content-free pages. Next there’ll be a reward for scamming bogus facts into Google’s facts database.
Four short links: 3 March 2015
Wearable Warning, Time Series Data, App Cards, and Secure Comms
- You Guys Realize the Apple Watch is Going to Flop, Right? — leaving aside the “guys” assumption of its readers, you can take this either as a list of the challenges Apple will inevitably overcome or bypass when they release their watch, or (as intended) a list of the many reasons that it’s too damn soon for watches to be useful. The Apple Watch is Jonathan Ive’s new Newton. It’s a potentially promising form that’s being built about 10 years before Apple has the technology or infrastructure to pull it off in a meaningful way. As a result, the novel interactions that could have made the Apple watch a must-have device aren’t in the company’s launch product, nor are they on the immediate horizon. And all Apple can sell the public on is a few tweets and emails on their wrists—an attempt at a fashion statement that needs to be charged once or more a day.
- InfluxDB, Now With Tags and More Unicorns — The combination of these new features [tagging, and the use of tags in queries] makes InfluxDB not just a time series database, but also a database for time series discovery. It’s our solution for making the problem of dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of time series tractable.
- The End of Apps as We Know Them — It may be very likely that the primary interface for interacting with apps will not be the app itself. The app is primarily a publishing tool. The number one way people use your app is through this notification layer, or aggregated card stream. Not by opening the app itself. To which one grumpy O’Reilly editor replied, “cards are the new walled garden.”
- Signal 2.0 — Signal uses your existing phone number and address book. There are no separate logins, usernames, passwords, or PINs to manage or lose. We cannot hear your conversations or see your messages, and no one else can either. Everything in Signal is always end-to-end encrypted, and painstakingly engineered in order to keep your communication safe.