"web" entries

Four short links: 28 August 2015

Four short links: 28 August 2015

Ad Blockers, Self-Evaluation, Blockchain Podcast, and Mobile Fingerprints

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 28, 2015
  1. 10 Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Best Performance — This test is about the performance of an ad blocker in terms of how quickly it loads a range of ad blocked pages, the maximum amount of memory it uses, and how much stress it puts on the CPU. µBlock Origin wins for Chrome. (via Nelson Minar)
  2. Staff Evaluation of Me (Karl Fisch) — I also tried the Google Form approach. 0 responses, from which I concluded that nobody had any problems with me and DEFINITELY no conclusions could be drawn about my coworkers creating mail filters to mark my messages as spam.
  3. Blockchain (BBC) — episode on the blockchain that does a good job of staying accurate while being comprehensible. (via Sam Kinsley)
  4. Fingerprints On Mobile Devices: Abusing and Leaking (PDF) — We will analyze the mobile fingerprint authentication and authorization frameworks, and discuss several security pitfalls of the current designs, including: Confused Authorization Attack; Unsecure fingerprint data storage; Trusted fingerprint sensors exposed to the untrusted world; Backdoor of pre-embedding fingerprints.
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: 5 August 2015

Four short links: 5 August 2015

Facebook Video, Lost Links, Regulatory Push, and LLVM Teases

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 5, 2015
  1. Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video (Medium) — inexcusable that Facebook, a company with a market cap of $260 BILLION, launched their video platform with no system to protect independent rights holders. It wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook was working on a solution now, which they can roll out conveniently after having made their initial claims at being the biggest, most important thing in video. In the words of Gillian Welch, “I wanna do right, but not right now.“
  2. The Web We Have to Save — Nearly every social network now treats a link just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
  3. California Regulator Pushing for All Cars to be Electric (Bloomberg) — Nichols really does intend to force au­tomakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency’s heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regulations today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California’s famous highways. “If we’re going to get our transportation system off petroleum,” she says, “we’ve got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now.” How long until the same article is written, but about driverless cars?
  4. LLVM for Grad Students — fast intro to why LLVM is interesting. LLVM is a great compiler, but who cares if you don’t do compilers research? A compiler infrastructure is useful whenever you need to do stuff with programs.
Four short links: 23 July 2015

Four short links: 23 July 2015

Open Source, State of DevOps, History of Links, and Vote Rings

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 23, 2015
  1. The Future of Open Source (Allison Randal) — Inexperienced companies can cause a great deal of harm as they blunder around blindly in a collaborative project, throwing resources in ways that ultimately benefit no one, not even themselves. It is in our best interest as a community to actively engage with companies and teach them how to participate effectively, how to succeed at free software and open source. Their success feeds the success of free software and open source, which feeds the self-reinforcing cycle of accelerating software innovation.
  2. Puppet Labs’ State of DevOps Report (PDF) — Westrum’s model gives us the language to define and measure culture. Perhaps most interesting, Westrum’s model also predicts IT performance. This shows that information flow isn’t just essential to safety, it’s also a critical success factor for rapidly building and evolving resilient systems at scale.
  3. Beyond Conversation — tracing the history of the link from Memex to Web.
  4. Detecting Vote Rings in Product Hunt — worth implementing in every system that processes votes. Who are the jerks in a circle?
Four short links: 21 July 2015

Four short links: 21 July 2015

Web Future, GCE vs Amazon, Scammy eBooks, and Container Clusters

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 21, 2015
  1. Web Design: The First 100 Years (Maciej Ceglowski) — There’s a William Gibson quote that Tim O’Reilly likes to repeat: “the future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” O’Reilly takes this to mean that if we surround ourselves with the right people, it can give us a sneak peek at coming attractions. I like to interpret this quote differently, as a call to action. Rather than waiting passively for technology to change the world, let’s see how much we can do with what we already have. Let’s reclaim the Web from technologists who tell us that the future they’ve imagined is inevitable, and that our role in it is as consumers.
  2. Comparing Cassandra Write Performance on Google Compute Engine and AWS — tl;dr – We achieved better Cassandra performance on GCE vs. Amazon, at close to half the cost. Also interesting for how they built the benchmark.
  3. The Scammy Underground World of Kindle eBooks — The biggest issue here isn’t that scammers are raking in cash from low-quality content; it’s that Amazon is allowing this to happen. Publisher brand value is the reliable expectation that buyers have of the book quality. Amazon’s publishing arm is spending the good brand value built by its distribution arm.
  4. Empire — a 12-factor-compatible, Docker-based container cluster built on top of Amazon’s robust EC2 Container Service (ECS), complete with a full-featured command line interface. Open source.
Four short links: 17 July 2015

Four short links: 17 July 2015

Smalltalky Web, Arduino Speech, Testing Distributed Systems, and Dataflow for FP

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 17, 2015
  1. Project Journal: Objects (Ian Bicking) — a view askew at the Web, inspired by Alan Kay’s History of Smalltalk.
  2. Speech Recognition for Arduino (Kickstarter) — for all your creepy toy hacking needs!
  3. Conductor (github) — a framework for testing distributed systems.
  4. Dataflow Syntax for Functional Programming? — two great tastes that will make your head hurt together!
Four short links: 16 July 2015

Four short links: 16 July 2015

Consumer Exoskeleton, Bitcoin Trends, p2p Sockets, and Plain Government Comms

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 16, 2015
  1. ReWalk Robotics Exoskeleton — first exoskeleton for the paralyzed to receive regulatory approval; 66 bought so far, 11 with reimbursement from insurance. The software upgrades for the ReWalk 6.0 provide a smoother walking gait (with less of a soldier-like marching step), an easier stopping mechanism, and a much-improved mode for ascending and descending stairs. The user wears a wristwatch-like controller to switch the suit between sit, stand, walk, and stair modes. How long until a cheaper version hits the market, but you don’t always get to control where it takes you if there’s a sale on featuring brands you love? (via IEEE)
  2. Bitcoin Trends in First Half of 2015 — 94% increase in monthly transactions over the past year. 47% of Coinbase wallet holders are now from countries outside the U.S.
  3. Socket.io p2p — an easy and reliable way to set up a WebRTC connection between peers and communicate using the socket.io-protocol.
  4. 18F Content Guide — communications guide for government content writers that bears in mind the frustrations citizens have with gov-speak websites.
Four short links: 3 July 2015

Four short links: 3 July 2015

Storage Interference, Open Source SSL, Pub-Sub Reverse-Proxy, and Web Components Checklist

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 3, 2015
  1. The Storage Tipping Point — the performance optimization technologies of the last decade – log structured file systems, coalesced writes, out-of-place updates and, soon, byte-addressable NVRAM – are conflicting with similar-but-different techniques used in SSDs and arrays. The software we use is written for dumb storage; we’re getting smart storage; but smart+smart = fragmentation, write amplification, and over-consumption.
  2. s2n — Amazon’s open source ssl implementation.
  3. pushpin — a reverse proxy server that makes it easy to implement WebSocket, HTTP streaming, and HTTP long-polling services. It communicates with backend web applications using regular, short-lived HTTP requests (GRIP protocol). This allows backend applications to be written in any language and use any webserver.
  4. The Gold Standard Checklist for Web Components — This is a working draft of a checklist to define a “gold standard” for web components that aspire to be as predictable, flexible, reliable, and useful as the standard HTML elements.
Four short links: 30 June 2015

Four short links: 30 June 2015

Ductile Systems, Accessibility Testing, Load Testing, and CRAP Data

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 30, 2015
  1. Brittle Systems — More than two decades ago at Sun, I was convinced that making systems ductile (the opposite of brittle) was the hardest and most important problem in system engineering.
  2. tota11y — accessibility testing toolkit from Khan.
  3. Locust — an open source load testing tool.
  4. Impala: a Modern, Open-source SQL Engine for Hadoop (PDF) — CRAP, aka Create, Read, and APpend, as coined by an ex-colleague at VMware, Charles Fan (note the absence of update and delete capabilities). (via A Paper a Day)
Four short links: 18 July 2015

Four short links: 18 July 2015

WebAssembly, Generative Neural Nets, Automated Workplace, and Conversational UIs

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 18, 2015
  1. WebAssembly (Luke Wagner) — new standard, WebAssembly, that defines a portable, size- and load-time-efficient format and execution model specifically designed to serve as a compilation target for the Web. Being worked on by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
  2. Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks (Google Research) — stunningly gorgeous gallery of images made by using a deep image-classification neural net to make the picture “more.” (So, if the classifier says the pic is of a cat, randomly twiddle pixels until the image classifier says “wow, that matches `cat’ even better!”)
  3. The Automated Workplace (Ben Brown) — What happens if this process is automated using a “bot” in an environment like Slack? — repeat for all business processes. (via Matt Webb)
  4. Conversational UIs (Matt Webb) — a new medium needs a new grammar and conversational UIs are definitely a new medium. As someone whose wedding vows were exchanged on a TinyMUSH, conversational UIs are near and dear to my heart.