"programming" entries

Four short links: 21 December 2015

Four short links: 21 December 2015

Anomaly Detection, Contempt Culture, Deep Learning Robot, and Compromised Firewalls

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 21, 2015
  1. Bro — open source intrusion and anomaly detection service, turns everything into events that you can run scripts against. Good pedigree (Vern Paxson, a TCP/IP elder god) despite the wince-inducing name (at least it isn’t “brah”).
  2. Contempt Culture (Aurynn) — for a culture that now prides itself on continuous improvement and blameless post-mortems and so on, we’re blind to a contempt culture that produces cults of criticism like “PHP isn’t a real programming language,” etc., where the targets of the criticism are pathways disproportionately taken by women and minorities. I’m embarrassed by how much of 2001-era Nat I recognise in Aurynn’s description.
  3. Deep Learning Robot — Built for advanced research in robotics and artificial intelligence (deep learning). Pre-installed Google TensorFlow, Robot Operating System (ROS), Caffe, Torch, Theano, CUDA, and cuDNN.
  4. Juniper ScreenOS Backdoor — here’s the ssh password that’ll get you into any unpatched Juniper firewall, courtesy a backdoor that will be keeping network admins and CEOs alike awake and unhappy around the world. The interesting analysis with long-term effects will be “how the hell did it get in there?”
Four short links: 18 December 2015

Four short links: 18 December 2015

Malicious Traffic, Visual Analysis, C History, and Immersive Gaming

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 18, 2015
  1. Maltrail — a malicious traffic detection system, utilizing publicly available (black)lists containing malicious and/or generally suspicious trails, along with static trails compiled from various AV reports and custom user defined lists[…]. Also, it has (optional) advanced heuristic mechanisms that can help in discovery of unknown threats (e.g. new malware). (via Nick Galbreath)
  2. Vega-Lite — high-level grammar for visual analysis, built on top of Vega. (via Curran Kelleher)
  3. C History — Dennis Ritchie’s 1993 notes on the history of the C programming language explains the origins of a.out and arrays as pointers, and has a reminder of how tight those systems were: Of the 24K bytes of memory on the machine, the earliest PDP-11 Unix system used 12K bytes for the operating system, a tiny space for user programs, and the remainder as a RAM disk.
  4. Zero Latency — immersive gaming with Oculus headsets. Detailed and positive.
Four short links: 14 December 2015

Four short links: 14 December 2015

Design for the Surveilled, Concept Learning, Media Access, and Programming Challenges

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 14, 2015
  1. Please Stop Making Secure Messaging Systems — how to design for the surveilled, and the kinds of tools they need BEYOND chat.
  2. Human Level Concept Learning through Probabilistic Program Induction — paper and source code for the nifty “learn handwriting from one example” paper that’s blowing minds.
  3. Access Denied (The Awl) — media had power because they had an audience, but social media gives celebrities, sports people, and politicians a bigger audience than media outlets. So, the media outlets aren’t needed, and consequently, they’re losing “access.” A reporter that depends on access to a compelling subject is by definition a reporter compromised. A publication that depends on cooperation from the world that it specializes in is likewise giving up something in terms of its ability to tell the truth about it. And nearly the entire media as it exists today is built around these negotiations.
  4. Stockfighter — a series of free, fun programming challenges […] suitable for programmers at all experience levels.
Four short links: 11 December 2015

Four short links: 11 December 2015

Probabilistic Algorithms, Copyright-Free, AI Hardware, and Autonomous Vehicle Policy

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 11, 2015
  1. Real-world Probabilistic Algorithms (Tyler McMullen) — This article addresses two types of probabilistic algorithms: those that explicitly introduce randomness through a rand() call, and those that convert input data into a uniform distribution to achieve a similar effect.
  2. Class of 2016 — those whose works will, on 1st January 2016, be entering the public domain in many countries around the world. Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot, Malcolm X, Bela Bartok, Winston Churchill, and W. Somerset Maugham among others. (Which person in which country depends on copyright term. Not for you, America. Nor us after TPP)
  3. Facebook to Open Source AI Hardware Design — Big Sur is our newest Open Rack-compatible hardware designed for AI computing at a large scale. Eight GPUs, and designs to be released through Open Compute Project.
  4. Driving Changes (PDF) — policy impacts, benefits, and considerations for autonomous vehicles. Written for Toronto but applicable to many more cities. (via David Ticoll)
Four short links: 8 December 2015

Four short links: 8 December 2015

Open Source ZeroDB, HTTP Statuses, Project Activity, and Database Readings

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 8, 2015
  1. ZeroDB is Open Source — end-to-end encrypted database goes open source (AGPL, *ptui*).
  2. Choosing an HTTP Status Code — or “an alternative to engineers duelling.”
  3. Open Source Monthly — views of open source projects through their GitHub activity.
  4. Readings in Database Science (5ed) — HTML and PDF versions of the papers.
Four short links: 11 November 2015

Four short links: 11 November 2015

Fundable Hardware Trends, Experience Heuristics, Robot Design Software, and Ops Feedback in Dev Tools

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 11, 2015
  1. 2015 Hardware Trends — HAXLR8R deck of the trends they see in fundable hardware.
  2. Heuristics — the heuristics and intuition risks that beset backcountry skiers are instantly recognizable to dev managers.
  3. Interactive Design of 3D-Printable Robotic Creatures (Disney Research) — paper describing software to let you design (add/remove motor-controlled legs, change shape, customize gait, etc.), modelling how they’ll move, and then 3D print when you’re happy. (via IEEE Spectrum)
  4. Runtime Metric Meets Developer: Building Better Cloud Applications Using Feedback (Adrian Colyer) — surfacing operations data like calls/sec, time to complete, etc. in the developer’s IDE. Wow, that’s genius. (And Adrian’s explanation/excerpts make this easy to digest)
Four short links: 29 October 2015

Four short links: 29 October 2015

Cloud Passports, Better Python Notebooks, Slippery Telcos, and Python Data Journalism

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 29, 2015
  1. Australia Floating the Idea of Cloud Passports — Under a cloud passport, a traveller’s identity and biometrics data would be stored in a cloud, so passengers would no longer need to carry their passports and risk having them lost or stolen. That sound you hear is Taylor Swift on Security, quoting “Wildest Dreams” into her vodka and Tang: “I can see the end as it begins.” This article is also notable for The idea of cloud passports is the result of a hipster-style-hackathon.
  2. Jupyter — Python Notebooks that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning, and much more.
  3. Telcos $24B Business In Your Data — Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica, and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP, IBM, HP, and AirSage to manage, package, and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It’s all part of a push by the world’s largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers’ mobile Web surfing, text messaging, and phone calls. Even if you do pay for it, you’re still the product.
  4. Introducing Agate — a Python data analysis library designed to be useable by non-data-scientists, so leads to readable and predictable code. Target market: data journalists.
Four short links: 22 October 2015

Four short links: 22 October 2015

Predicting activity, systems replacement fail, Khan React style, and an interoperability system for the Web

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 22, 2015
  1. Predicting Daily Activities from Egocentric Images Using Deep Learning — Our technique achieves an overall accuracy of 83.07% in predicting a person’s activity [from images taken by a camera worn all day by a person] across the 19 activity classes.
  2. Trying to Replace Multiple Systems with One Can Lead to None (IEEE) — check out that final graph, it’s a doozy. It’s a graph of x against time, from various “this project is great, it will replace x systems with 1″ claims about a single project. Software projects should come with giant warning labels: “most fail, you are about to set your money on fire. Are you sure? [Y/N/Abort/Restart]”
  3. Khan React Style Guide — in case you’re dipping your toes into the cool kids’ pool.
  4. ballista — An interoperability system for the modern Web. Like intents.
Four short links: 20 October 2015

Four short links: 20 October 2015

HyperCam, half-arsed software development, perceptions of productivity, John McCarthy's conditional expressions

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 20, 2015
  1. HyperCam (PDF) — paper from Ubicomp 2015 on a low-cost implementation of a multispectral camera and a software approach that automatically analyzes the scene and provides a user with an optimal set of images that try to capture the salient information of the scene. Can see ripeness of fruit, and veins in hands.
  2. Manifesto for Half-Arsed Software Development — Responding to change over following a plan … provided a detailed plan is in place to respond to the change, and it is followed precisely.
  3. Software Developers’ Perceptions of Productivity — In both studies, we found that developers perceive their days as productive when they complete many or big tasks without significant interruptions or context switches. Yet, the observational data we collected shows our participants performed significant task and activity switching while still feeling productive. (via Never Work in Theory)
  4. The Language of Choice — In the ’50s John McCarthy invented conditional expressions. Utility computing, AI, Lisp, and now what I know as C’s ?: syntax. His legend lives on.
Four short links: 15 October 2015

Four short links: 15 October 2015

The Chinese Dream, Siri Hacked, Indirect Measures, and Boring Technology

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 15, 2015
  1. Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream (Amazon) — Clay Shirky’s new 128-page book/report about how Xiaomi exemplifies the balancing act that China has to perfect to navigate between cheap copies and innovation, between the demands of local and global markets, and between freedom and control. I’d buy Clay’s shopping list, the same way I’d gladly listen to Neil Gaiman telling the time. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Feed Siri Instructions From 16 Feet Away (Wired) — summary of a paywalled IEEE research paper Their clever hack uses those headphones’ cord as an antenna, exploiting its wire to convert surreptitious electromagnetic waves into electrical signals that appear to the phone’s operating system to be audio coming from the user’s microphone. […] It generates its electromagnetic waves with a laptop running the open source software GNU Radio, a USRP software-defined radio, an amplifier, and an antenna.
  3. User-Centered Design (Courtney Johnston) — the wall label should always give you cause to look back at the art work again. I love behaviour-based indirect measures of success like this.
  4. Choose Boring Technology (Dan McKinley) — going into the new hire required reading pile. See also the annotated slide deck.