"software engineering" entries

Four short links: 21 August 2015

Four short links: 21 August 2015

Web Experiments, Virtual Time, Reading Postmortem, and Chinese Robot Companies

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 21, 2015
  1. Doing Science on the Web (Alex Russell) — Minimizing harm to the ecosystem from experiments-gone-wrong […] This illustrates what happens when experiments inadvertently become critical infrastructure. It has happened before. Over, and over, and over again. Imma need therapy for the flashbacks. THE HORROR.
  2. Virtual Time (Adrian Colyer) — applying special relativity to distributed systems. Contains lines like: All messages sent explicitly by user programs have a positive (+) sign; their antimessages have a negative (-) sign. Whenever a process sends a message, what actually happens is that a faithful copy of the message is transmitted to the receiver’s input queue, and a negative copy, the antimessage, is retained in the sender’s output queue for use in case the sender rolls back. Curl up with your intoxicant of choice and prepare to see the colour of infinity.
  3. Lessons Learned from Reading Postmortems — (of the software kind) Except in extreme emergencies, risky code changes are basically never simultaneously pushed out to all machines because of the risk of taking down a service company-wide. But it seems that every company has to learn the hard way that seemingly benign config changes can also cause a company-wide service outage.
  4. 194 Chinese Robot Companies (Robohub) — Overall, 107 Chinese companies are involved in industrial robotics. Many of these new industrial robot makers are producing products that, because of quality, safety, and design regulations, will only be acceptable to the Chinese market. Many interesting numbers about the Chinese robotics biz.
Four short links: 15 July 2015

Four short links: 15 July 2015

OpeNSAurce, Multimaterial Printing, Functional Javascript, and Outlier Detection

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 15, 2015
  1. System Integrity Management Platform (Github) — NSA releases security compliance tool for government departments.
  2. 3D-Printed Explosive Jumping Robot Combines Firm and Squishy Parts (IEEE Spectrum) — Different parts of the robot grade over three orders of magnitude from stiff like plastic to squishy like rubber, through the use of nine different layers of 3D printed materials.
  3. Professor Frisby’s Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming — a book on functional programming, using Javascript as the programming language.
  4. Tracking Down Villains — the software and algorithms that Netflix uses to detect outliers in their infrastructure monitoring.
Four short links: 14 July 2015

Four short links: 14 July 2015

Future of Work, Metrics and Events, High-functioning Dev, and Concept Calendars

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 14, 2015
  1. What’s the Future of Work (Tim O’Reilly) — Tim’s been exploring how technology is changing what work is and how we build our society around it. New conference coming!
  2. Monitoring 101: Collecting Data — the world-view behind instrumenting modern software is just as interesting as the tools to make it possible.
  3. Building a High-Performance Team: It’s Not Just About Structure — move beyond copying Spotify’s structure and work on your company’s Habits, Values & Culture, and Leaders & Management.
  4. Google Calendar Concept Art — In the future … your content will be available directly within your calendar.
Four short links: 6 July 2015

Four short links: 6 July 2015

DeepDream, In-Flight WiFi, Computer Vision in Preservation, and Testing Distributed Systems

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 6, 2015
  1. DeepDream — the software that’s been giving the Internet acid-free trips.
  2. In-Flight WiFi Business — numbers and context for why some airlines (JetBlue) have fast free in-flight wifi while others (Delta) have pricey slow in-flight wifi. Four years ago ViaSat-1 went into geostationary orbit, putting all other broadband satellites to shame with 140 Gbps of total capacity. This is the Ka-band satellite that JetBlue’s fleet connects to, and while the airline has to share that bandwidth with homes across of North America that subscribe to ViaSat’s Excede residential broadband service, it faces no shortage of capacity. That’s why JetBlue is able to deliver 10-15 Mbps speeds to its passengers.
  3. British Library Digitising Newspapers (The Guardian) — as well as photogrammetry methods used in the Great Parchment Book project, Terras and colleagues are exploring the potential of a host of techniques, including multispectral imaging (MSI). Inks, pencil marks, and paper all reflect, absorb, or emit particular wavelengths of light, ranging from the infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum, through the visible region and into the UV. By taking photographs using different light sources and filters, it is possible to generate a suite of images. “We get back this stack of about 40 images of the [document] and then we can use image-processing to try to see what is in [some of them] and not others,” Terras explains.
  4. Testing a Distributed System (ACM) — This article discusses general strategies for testing distributed systems as well as specific strategies for testing distributed data storage systems.
Four short links: 2 July 2015

Four short links: 2 July 2015

Mathematical Thinking, Turing on Imitation Game, Retro Gaming in Javascript, and Effective Retros

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 2, 2015
  1. How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (Amazon) — Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, and the existence of God. (via Pam Fox)
  2. What Turing Himself Said About the Imitation Game (IEEE) — fascinating history. The second myth is that Turing predicted a machine would pass his test around the beginning of this century. What he actually said on the radio in 1952 was that it would be “at least 100 years” before a machine would stand any chance with (as Newman put it) “no questions barred.”
  3. Impossible Mission in Javascript — an homage to the original, and beautiful to see. I appear to have lost all my skills in playing it in the intervening 32 years.
  4. Running Effective Retrospectives — Each change to the team’s workflow is treated as a scientific experiment, whereby a hypothesis is formed, data collected, and expectations compared with actual results.
Four short links: 26 June 2015

Four short links: 26 June 2015

Internet of Gluten, Testing Less, Synthetic Blood, and Millibot Guns

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 26, 2015
  1. 6SensorLabs — product is a grind-your-food-for-my-sensor product that tests for the presence of gluten. Or, as celiacs call it, death.
  2. The Art of Testing Less Without Sacrificing Quality (Paper a Day) — until finally you don’t test at all and it’s perfect!
  3. Synthetic Blood Transfusions Within Two Years (Independent) — Britain’s National Health Service, boldly planning on still being around in two years.
  4. Self-Assembling Millirobotic Gauss Gun (IEEE Spectrum) — they’ll blast their way through arterial blockages.
Four short links: 25 June 2015

Four short links: 25 June 2015

Enchanted Objects, SE Blogs, AI Plays Mario, and Google's Future of Work

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 25, 2015
  1. 16 Everyday Objects Enchanted by Technology (Business Insider) — I want a Skype cabinet between our offices at work.
  2. Software Engineering Blogs — ALL the blogs!
  3. MarI/O (YouTube) — clear explanation of how an evolutionary algorithm figures out how to play Mario.
  4. Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work (New Yorker) — But it turns out that future-proofed life looks a lot like the vacuum-packed present. […] Inside, it is about turning Google into not only a lifestyle but a fully realized life. The return of the Company Town.
Four short links: 12 June 2015

Four short links: 12 June 2015

OLAP Datastores, Timely Dataflow, Paul Ford is God, and Static Analysis

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 12, 2015
  1. pinot — a realtime distributed OLAP datastore, which is used at LinkedIn to deliver scalable real time analytics with low latency. It can ingest data from offline data sources (such as Hadoop and flat files) as well as online sources (such as Kafka). Pinot is designed to scale horizontally.
  2. Naiad: A Timely Dataflow System — in Timely Dataflow, the first two features are needed to execute iterative and incremental computations with low latency. The third feature makes it possible to produce consistent results, at both outputs and intermediate stages of computations, in the presence of streaming or iteration.
  3. What is Code (Paul Ford) — What the coders aren’t seeing, you have come to believe, is that the staid enterprise world that they fear isn’t the consequence of dead-eyed apathy but rather détente. Words and feels.
  4. Facebook Infer Opensourced — the static analyzer I linked to yesterday, released as open source today.
Four short links: 2 June 2015

Four short links: 2 June 2015

Toyota Code, Sapir-Wharf-Emoji, Crowdsourcing Formal Proof, and Safety-Critical Code

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 2, 2015
  1. Toyota’s Spaghetti Code — Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables. And he was critical of Toyota watchdog supervisor — software to detect the death of a task — design. He testified that Toyota’s watchdog supervisor ‘is incapable of ever detecting the death of a major task. That’s its whole job. It doesn’t do it. It’s not designed to do it.’ (via @qrush)
  2. Google’s Design Icons (Kevin Marks) — Google’s design icons distinguish eight kinds of airline seats but has none for trains or buses.
  3. Verigames — DARPA-funded game to crowdsource elements of formal proofs. (via Network World)
  4. 10 Rules for Writing Safety-Critical Code — which I can loosely summarize as “simple = safer, use the built-in checks, don’t play with fire.”
Four short links: 21 April 2015

Four short links: 21 April 2015

Chromebooks and Arduinos, 3rd Person Driving, Software Development, and Go Debugging

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 21, 2015
  1. Chromebooks and Arduino — two great edtech tastes that taste great together.
  2. 3rd Person Driving (IEEE) — A Taiwan company called SPTek has figured out a way to use an array of cameras to generate a 3-D “Around View Monitor” that can show you multiple different views of the outside of your car. Use a top-down view for tight parking spaces, a front view looking backward for highway lane changes, or a see-through rear view for pulling out into traffic. It’s not a video game; it’s the next step in safety.
  3. Lessons Learned in Software Development — omg every word of this.
  4. Cross-Platform Debugger for Go — take the source code of a target program, insert debugging code between every line, then compile and run that instead. The result is a fully-functional debugger that is extremely portable. In fact, thanks to gopherjs, you can run it right here in your browser!