- Computer Software Archive (Jason Scott) — The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world. Find me someone bigger. Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 years is settling in. (And documentation and magazines and …). Wow.
- 7 in 10 Doctors Have a Self-Tracking Patient — the most common ways of sharing data with a doctor, according to the physicians, were writing it out by hand or giving the doctor a paper printout. (via Richard MacManus)
- opsmezzo — open-sourced provisioning tools from the Nodejitsu team. (via Nuno Job)
- Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python — teaches complete beginners how to program in the Python programming language. The book features the source code to several ciphers and hacking programs for these ciphers. The programs include the Caesar cipher, transposition cipher, simple substitution cipher, multiplicative & affine ciphers, Vigenere cipher, and hacking programs for each of these ciphers. The final chapters cover the modern RSA cipher and public key cryptography.
"software" entries
Upward Mobility: A Web of Dependencies
The App Store model has increased the uncertainty of the software release process
The recent unavailability of the Apple Developer’s Portal just underscores how increasingly dependent developers have become on third parties during the software lifecycle. For those who are not following the fun and games, the developer.apple.com sites, which include much of the functionality needed to develop Mac and iOS applications, has been unavailable for more than a week as of this writing. Although iTunes Connect, the portal used to actually deploy apps to the App Stores, has remained available, the remainder of the site territory has been off-limits. This is all thanks to a security intrusion (evidently by an over-zealous researcher.)
The App Store model has fundamentally changed how software is distributed, mostly for the better (IMHO), but it has also removed some of the control of the release process from the hands of the developers and companies they work for. As I have spelled out previously in my book on iOS enterprise development, the fact that Apple has the final say on if and when software goes into the store has required more conservative release timelines. If you want to release on the first of September, you need to count back at least two weeks for “gold master”, because you need to upload the app, potentially go through a round of rejection from Apple, and then upload a fixed version.
Android apps don’t suffer from this lag, because most of the Android stores don’t do any significant checking of the applications uploaded to them. The Devil’s Deal that Apple developers have made with Apple is that in return for the longer wait time to get apps in the store (and having to follow Apple’s rules), they get a de facto seal of approval from Apple. In other words, it is assumed that apps in the iTunes store are more stringently policed and less likely to crash or do harm (deliberately or else-wise.)
The current downtime has brought that deal into question, however. Suddenly, developers who need new provisioning certificates, passbook certificates, or push notification certificates find themselves with nowhere to go. Even if iTunes Connect is available, it doesn’t do you any good if you can’t get a distribution certificate to sign your app for the store. I’m sure that there are developers at this moment who have had their finely tuned release strategies thrown into disarray by the in-availability of the developer portal.
Being essentially at the mercy of Apple’s whims (or Google’s, for that matter) can’t be a pleasant sensation for a company or individual trying to get a new piece of software out the door. The question that the developer community will have to answer is if the benefits of the App Store model make it worth the hassles, in the long run.
A Commencement Speech for Graduating 2013 CS Majors
Passion isn't just for romance novels.
[contextly_sidebar id=”aeee3889da100a7d1d12e43b59192f1e”]
Graduates, parents, guests, members of the faculty of <%= college.collegeName %>. I am honored today to have the opportunity to speak with you, as you move out of the cloistered environment of higher education, and into “the real world.” Except for those of you moving on to postgraduate degrees, of course. You will get to enjoy a life uncluttered by 401Ks and team building exercises for a few more blessed years.
But, for the rest of you, today marks your first step into a journey that will last the rest of your life, unless you’re able to cash in on your equity in some startup, in which case I’m sure you’ll be hearing from the
<%= college.collegeName %> alumni office before the check settles from your brokerage.
In my 35 years of experience in the software field, I’ve met a lot of developers, young and old. And the one thing that separated the truly successful ones from the crowd is passion. Now passion is an overused and abused term these days. Too often people take it to mean a passion for being successful, for achieving a personal goal in their life. When I talk about passion, I mean love. I’ve been in love with computers since I was 14 years old, and I’d be playing with them even if I didn’t get paid for it. If software engineering is merely a means to an end, you’re not going to be happy in the long term working in this field, because much of it is God-awful boring unless you have a passion for it.
Being passionate about software is critical to being successful, because the field is a constantly moving target. What will net you $130K today will be done by junior programmers in five years, and unless you’re constantly adding new tools to your belt, you’re going to find yourself priced out of the market. Many of the best projects I’ve ever worked on came to me because I had already gained the skill-set on my own. Play around with new technologies, contribute to open source projects, and you may find yourself with an opportunity to apply those skills on the job, and get them into your resume. You are rarely going to get an opportunity to have your current employer pay for you to learn things, so learn them on your own and be in a position to leverage the skills when a new project comes along. But if you have a passion for technology, you’ll already be doing it, and enjoying it without needing me to tell you to. That’s why passionate people have a leg up.
People in their 20s tend to jump into small, fledgeling companies, and that’s one of the best things you can do. A junior developer at Fidelity or Akamai is going to work on one thing for long periods of time, while at a start-up you’ll get a chance to jump all over the place, learning many different aspects of the field. But don’t fall into the trap of trading long hours and happiness for the gold ring of equity. You are never going to be in better shape, less constrained by responsibilities, or have more energy than you will right now. Burning 80-hour weeks grinding code is a terrible waste of that gift. Most companies crash and burn, and that equity they gave you will be just toilet paper. It won’t pay for the time you sacrificed eating take-out pizza in front of a glowing tube rather than enjoying the best years of your life.
If you’re passionate, you’ll do the job you’re required to do, and more, but don’t let your employer abuse your enthusiasm. One of my tenets of life has always been that “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” There will be times in your life when you have to step in and fix genuine, unforeseen emergencies, and burn the midnight oil. But if you’re being asked to do it regularly, just because your company didn’t allocate enough resources to see the job through, you’re being played for a patsy.
Consider the benefits of loyalty to your employer. More than just about any other industry, software suffers from a nomadic workforce, where spending five years at a single company is rare. Remember that in a good work environment, you make friends as well as money, and as much as you may say you will, you never keep in touch with them when you move on. But don’t be afraid to jump ship if you are truly unhappy where you are, either.
Read more…
Where will software and hardware meet?
Software is adding more and more value to machines. Could it completely commoditize them?
I’m a sucker for a good plant tour, and I had a really good one last week when Jim Stogdill and I visited K. Venkatesh Prasad at Ford Motor in Dearborn, Mich. I gave a seminar and we talked at length about Ford’s OpenXC program and its approach to building software platforms.
The highlight of the visit was seeing the scale of Ford’s operation, and particularly the scale of its research and development organization. Prasad’s building is a half-mile into Ford’s vast research and engineering campus. It’s an endless grid of wet labs like you’d see at a university: test tubes and robots all over the place; separate labs for adhesives, textiles, vibration dampening; machines for evaluating what’s in reach for different-sized people.
Prasad explained that much of the R&D that goes into a car is conducted at suppliers–Ford might ask its steel supplier to come up with a lighter, stronger alloy, for instance–but Ford is responsible for integrative research: figuring out how to, say, bond its foam insulation onto that new alloy.
In our more fevered moments, we on the software side of things tend to foresee every problem being reduced to a generic software problem, solvable with brute-force computing and standard machinery. In that interpretation, a theoretical Google car operating system–one that would drive the car and provide Web-based services to passengers–could commoditize the mechanical aspects of the automobile. Read more…
The makers of hardware innovation
Hardware is back and makers are driving it. Here are some of the signals.
Chris Anderson wrote Makers and went from editor-in-chief of Wired to CEO of 3D Robotics, making his hobby his side job and then making it his main job.
A new executive at Motorola Mobility, a division of Google, said that Google seeks to “googlify” hardware. By that he meant that devices would be inexpensive, if not free, and that the data created or accessed by them would be open. Motorola wants to build a truly hackable cellphone, one that makers might have ideas about what to do with it.
Regular hardware startup meetups, which started in San Francisco and New York, are now held in Boston, Pittsburgh, Austin, Chicago, Dallas and Detroit. I’m sure there are other American cities. Melbourne, Stockholm and Toronto are also organizing hardware meetups. Hardware entrepreneurs want to find each other and learn from each other.
Hardware-oriented incubators and accelerators are launching on both coasts in America, and in China.
The market for personal 3D printers and 3D printing services has really taken off. 3D printer startups continue to launch, and all of them seem to have trouble keeping up with demand. MakerBot is out raising money. Shapeways raised $30 million in a new round of financing announced this week.
Makers are discovering that the Raspberry PI, developed for educational uses, can fit into some interesting commercial niches. Read more…
Twisted Python: The engine of your Internet
Learn to build event-driven client and server applications
I want to build a web server, a mail server, a BitTorrent client, a DNS server, or an IRC bot—clients and servers for a custom protocol in Python. And I want them to be cross-platform, RFC-compliant, testable, and deployable in a standardized fashion. What library should I use?
Use Twisted
Twisted is a “batteries included” networking engine for writing, testing, and deploying event-driven clients and servers in Python. It comes with off-the-shelf support for popular networking protocols like HTTP, IMAP, IRC, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, FTP, and more.
To see just how easy it is to write networking services using Twisted, let’s run and discuss a simple Twisted TCP echo server:
from twisted.internet import protocol, reactor
class Echo(protocol.Protocol):
def dataReceived(self, data):
self.transport.write(data)
class EchoFactory(protocol.Factory):
def buildProtocol(self, addr):
return Echo()
reactor.listenTCP(8000, EchoFactory())
reactor.run()
With Twisted installed, if we save this code to echoserver.py and run it with python echoserver.py, clients can now connect to the service on port 8000, send it data, and get back their echoed results. Read more…
Four short links: 17 April 2013
Software Archive, Self-Tracking, Provisioning, and Python Ciphers
Designing resilient communities
Establishing an effective organization for large-scale growth
In the open source and free software movement, we always exalt community, and say the people coding and supporting the software are more valuable than the software itself. Few communities have planned and philosophized as much about community-building as ZeroMQ. In the following posting, Pieter Hintjens quotes from his book ZeroMQ, talking about how he designed the community that works on this messaging library.
How to Make Really Large Architectures (excerpted from ZeroMQ by Pieter Hintjens)
There are, it has been said (at least by people reading this sentence out loud), two ways to make really large-scale software. Option One is to throw massive amounts of money and problems at empires of smart people, and hope that what emerges is not yet another career killer. If you’re very lucky and are building on lots of experience, have kept your teams solid, and are not aiming for technical brilliance, and are furthermore incredibly lucky, it works.
But gambling with hundreds of millions of others’ money isn’t for everyone. For the rest of us who want to build large-scale software, there’s Option Two, which is open source, and more specifically, free software. If you’re asking how the choice of software license is relevant to the scale of the software you build, that’s the right question.
The brilliant and visionary Eben Moglen once said, roughly, that a free software license is the contract on which a community builds. When I heard this, about ten years ago, the idea came to me—Can we deliberately grow free software communities?
Code Simplicity: The science of software design
Learn to be a better programmer by taking charge of your interests
If you want to be a better programmer, a good first step would be to choose an area of software development to take additional responsibility for. Now, when we say “responsibility,” we don’t mean the sort of “you’re to blame and you accept it” responsibility that is so commonly thought of. Instead, we mean the willingness to take charge or the willingness to do something about an area.
So select out some area of software development, and decide to be a bit more responsible for it than one was before. The “area” could be simply some additional part of the current project you work on, the whole project itself, some type of software development that you haven’t done before, some aspect of software development you’d like to know more about, etc. If you’re feeling adventurous, try deciding that you’re personally responsible for the quality of the entire software project you’re working on. If you do, you may be surprised at how much easier this makes your life. When you’re trying to maintain the quality of only a piece of a software project, it’s very difficult. You’re surrounded by complexity or confusion, and you have to fend it off at every turn. But when you look at the project as a whole instead and try to decide what should be done with it as a whole, the solution presents itself much more readily. Now, it may seem like quite a bit more work to resolve the problems of the whole project, and it is. But it’s considerably more satisfying, tremendously more effective, and will bring you up to seniority as a software developer much more quickly than just trying to solve the problems of your one particular area.
New resource for developers
O'Reilly's new site for all things related to programming.
Welcome to O’Reilly Media’s Programming blog, our resource for all things related to programming. Whether you’re a professional developer, hardcore hacker, or student, I hope this site provides you with interesting ideas, ways to learn new skills, exposure to alpha geeks, and the opportunity to interact with our talented and unique editors. The best part of my days are conversations with our editors and authors, and I’d like you to benefit from the same exchange of ideas.
We’re building this blog to meet your needs with news, information, and analysis. Whether you work on front ends, back ends, or middleware, open source software or commercial, there’s something here for you. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be publishing how-to information, interviews, and our opinions in addition to exposing you to O’Reilly’s vast products and services.
We’ve seen an explosion of interest in the creation of software over the last two years. Groups like Codecademy promise to teach anyone willing to code, even people like Mayor Bloomberg of New York; one of the most important factors in the legal fight between Google and Oracle was a judge who knew how to code; and groups like Code for America are transforming the civic landscape.
With O’Reilly’s Programming blog, we intend to serve a broad and diverse group. If you’re a web designer, a C# developer working in SharePoint, creating more efficient JavaScript code, need to figure out how to build apps for mobile and other devices, a designer building effective user experiences, optimizing your company’s websites, deciding whether to deploy an app in the cloud, think Perl still rocks, or trying to get your product development group to work better together, we’ll provide you with the tools and information to be productive.
Open source remains one of the pillars of the programming community, but we’re building a very large tent — a tent that includes Windows developers, iOS developers, Oracle developers, and more. We’ll also pay attention to non-technical issues that affect programmers: jobs, developer culture, and occasional tangents into other obsessions (like food).
O’Reilly’s readers created the world we inhabit. Now, we need to bring a new generation into that world and expand it for those already making a difference. While we have a lot of ideas for the Programming blog, we want to hear your thoughts about what you want to see on the site and how you want to participate. Please let us know what you think through the comments or email me directly.
The coming of the industrial internet
Our new research report outlines our vision for the coming-together of software and big machines.
The big machines that define modern life — cars, airplanes, furnaces, and so forth — have become exquisitely efficient, safe, and responsive over the last century through constant mechanical refinement. But mechanical refinement has its limits, and there are enormous improvements to be wrung out of the way that big machines are operated: an efficient furnace is still wasteful if it heats a building that no one is using; a safe car is still dangerous in the hands of a bad driver.
It is this challenge that the industrial internet promises to address by layering smart software on top of machines. The last few years have seen enormous advances in software and computing that can handle gushing streams of data and build nuanced models of complex systems. These have been used effectively in advertising and web commerce, where data is easy to gather and control is easy to exert, and marketers have rejoiced.
Thanks to widespread sensors, pervasive networks, and standardized interfaces, similar software can interact with the physical world — harvesting data, analyzing it in context, and making adjustments in real-time. The same data-driven approach that gives us dynamic pricing on Amazon and customized recommendations on Foursquare has already started to make wind turbines more efficient and thermostats more responsive. It may soon obviate humans as drivers and help blast furnaces anticipate changes in electricity prices. Read more…