- BERG Closing — may open source their Little Printer server and IoT middleware. A shame, as Warren Ellis says, because they pulled bits of the future into the present. They were optimistic, not dystopic. I have a feeling BERG grads are going to be like BBC grads, where a certain crop from ~2003 or so went on to be influential at many different places. Dispersing dandelions of delight.
- Here Today, Gone Tomorrow — beating our minds’ misweighting of future events. This: When being invited to do things months in advance, the diary usually looks pretty clear and it’s tempting to say “yes”. But whenever a new invitation arrives, ask yourself not, “should I accept the invitation in March?” but, “would I accept the invitation if it was for this week?” (via BoingBoing)
- Weave — build a network of Docker containers running on different hosts. Weave can traverse firewalls and operate in partially connected networks. Traffic can be encrypted, allowing hosts to be connected across an untrusted network. With weave you can easily construct applications consisting of multiple containers, running anywhere.
- How Apple Pay Works And Why It Matters — for some reason this was the right level of explanation for me. Hope it helps. The end result is a token that can be used across merchants and both online (In-App) and offline (NFC, In-Person). Disaggregate and micropay for ALL THE THINGS.
"apple" entries
Four short links: 10 September 2014
Dandelion Dispersal, Future Weights, Networked Docker, and How Apple Pay Works
Four short links: 10 June 2014
Trusting Code, Deep Pi, Docker DevOps, and Secure Database
- Trusting Browser Code (Tim Bray) — on the fundamental weakness of the ‘net as manifest in the browser.
- Deep Learning in the Raspberry Pi (Pete Warden) — $30 now gets you a computer you can run deep learning algorithms on. Awesome.
- Announcing Docker Hub and Official Repositories — as Docker went 1.0 and people rave about how they use it, comes this. They’re thinking hard about “integrating into the build ship run loop”, which aligns well with DevOps-enabling tool use.
- Apple’s Secure Database for Users (Ian Waring) — excellent breakdown of how Apple have gone out of their way to make their cloud database product safe and robust. They may be slow to “the cloud” but they have decades of experience having users as customers instead of products.
Four short links: 9 May 2014
Hardening Android, Samsung Connivery, Scalable WebSockets, and Hardware Machine Learning
- Hardening Android for Security and Privacy — a brilliant project! prototype of a secure, full-featured, Android telecommunications device with full Tor support, individual application firewalling, true cell network baseband isolation, and optional ZRTP encrypted voice and video support. ZRTP does run over UDP which is not yet possible to send over Tor, but we are able to send SIP account login and call setup over Tor independently.
- The Great Smartphone War (Vanity Fair) — “I represented [the Swedish telecommunications company] Ericsson, and they couldn’t lie if their lives depended on it, and I represented Samsung and they couldn’t tell the truth if their lives depended on it.” That’s the most catching quote, but interesting to see Samsung’s patent strategy described as copying others, delaying the lawsuits, settling before judgement, and in the meanwhile ramping up their own innovation. Perhaps the other glory part is the description of Samsung employee shredding and eating incriminating documents while stalling lawyers out front. An excellent read.
- socketcluster — highly scalable realtime WebSockets based on Engine.io. They have screenshots of 100k messages/second on an 8-core EC2 m3.2xlarge instance.
- Machine Learning on a Board — everything good becomes hardware, whether in GPUs or specialist CPUs. This one has a “Machine Learning Co-Processor”. Interesting idea, to package up inputs and outputs with specialist CPU, but I wonder whether it’s a solution in search of a problem. (via Pete Warden)
Talking to Chromecast from iOS
Part One: Easily find Chromecast devices on your local network
Now that Google has opened up the Chromecast API for anyone to play with, it’s possibile to create iOS applications that can leverage the $35 device as a way to display to HDMI devices wirelessly. In this series of tutorials, we’ll go over the API, starting with configuring your project to use the framework, and finding devices out on your local network to play with.
Let’s assume you’ve set up a Chromecast device attached to an HDMI TV and have it configured for your local network. Now it’s time to get an App set up to use it. We’ll use the iPhone Simulator in these examples, since it can talk to Chromecast devices just like a physical device, as long as the Mac you are developing on is on the same LAN as the Chromecast dongle.
Begin by creating a project, as usual. For this example, I used a single-view Storyboarded app. I set up an UITableView inside the default UIView, hooking it’s datasource and delegate to the default view controller the wizard had created. Next, I went to the Google Google Cast API page and downloaded the iOS framework, then used the “Add Files…” project option to add the framework to the project, copying in the files.
Upward Mobility: Your phone is your robot’s best friend
Rosie the Robot may feel more comfortable talking to Siri than to you
Recently, Glenn Martin wrote an article describing how robotics in moving out of the factory and into the house. And while Glenn restricted himself mainly to the type of robots that pop into your head when someone says the word (either the anthropomorphic variety or the industrial flavor), the reality is that there are a lot of robots already in the hands of consumers, although it might take a moment to recognize them as such.
I’m speaking of drones, and especially quadcopters, which are proliferating at an enormous rate, and are being used to do everything from documenting a cool skateboard move to creating a breathtaking overflight of a horrific disaster site.
Upward Mobility: Predictions for 2014
All predictions are for entertainment purposes only!
It is a generally accepted requirement that all technology pundits attempt a yearly prognostication of the coming 12 months. Having consulted my crystal ball, scryed the entrails of a falcon, and completed a 3 day fasting ritual in a sweat lodge set up inside a Best Buy, I will now tempt the Gods of Hubris and make my guesses for the year in mobile.
Update Mobility: The Year in Mobile
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
As the end of December approaches, it’s time to take a look at the year that was. In a lot of ways, 2013 was a status quo year for mobile, with nothing earthshaking to report, just a steady progression of what already is getting more, um, is-y?
We started the year with Apple on top in the tablet space, Android on top in the handset space, and that’s how we ended the year. Microsoft appears to have abandoned the handset space after a decade of attempts to take market-share, and made their move on the tablet space instead with the Surface. In spite of expensive choreographer board room commercials, the Surface didn’t make a huge dent in Apple’s iPad dominance. But Microsoft did better than Blackberry, whose frantic flailing in the market has come to represent nothing so much as a fish out of water.
Upward Mobility: The Terror of iOS App Submission
Getting apps into the store is a non-deterministic process
One of the major topics of my Enterprise iOS book is how to plan release schedules around Apple’s peril-filled submission process. I don’t think you can count yourself a truly bloodied iOS dev until you’ve gotten your first rejection notice from iTunes Connect, especially under deadline pressure.
Traditionally, the major reasons that applications would bounce is that the developer had been a Bad Person. They had grossly abused the Human Interface standards, or had a flakey app that crashed when the tester fired it up, or used undocumented internal system calls. In most cases, the rejection could have been anticipated if the developer had done his homework. There were occasional apps that got rejected for bizarre reasons, such as perceived adult content, or because of some secret Apple agenda, but they were the rare exception. If you followed the rules, your app would get in the store.
Upward Mobility: Microsoft’s Patent Arsenal Is Full of Blanks
Why innovate in the product space, when you can leech money instead?
It is with some amusement that your humble servant read this week of Microsoft’s lucrative business licensing their patents to Android handset makers. How lucrative? Evidently, over two billion dollars a year, five times their revenue from actual mobile products that the company produces. What is harder to discover, unless you do a lot of digging, is what the Android vendors are actually licensing. You have to dig back into the original suit between Microsoft and Motorola to find a list of patents, although they may have added to their portfolio since then through further acquisitions. The thing is that, unlike many parts of the software industry, the cellular portion actually has some valid patents lurking around. Cell phones have radios in them, and there are continual improvements in the protocols and technologies used to make data move faster. As a result, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption to make that Microsoft has acquired some of these cellular patents, and is using them as a revenue stream. Unfortunately, a look at the Motorola suit patent list tells a different story. Read more…
Upward Mobility: The Mobile Payment Problem
Mobile Payment is going to take a lot of cooperation by a lot of competing interests, or a clever end-run
There was a time when the two big unsolved puzzles of online finance were micropayments and mobile payments. Micropayments were a problem because no one seemed willing to make sub-dollar transfers economically viable, while mobile payments had a chicken-and-egg solution / vendor paradox. Sites like PayPal and Square seem to have finally resolved the micropayment issue, as are more out-of-left-field ideas like Bitcoins. Mobile payment is still a morass of competing solutions, however.
For a while, Near Field seemed to be the sword that would slay the dragon, but Apple’s continual refusal to adopt the technology would leave a big segment of the mobile market out of the play. Even if someone comes up with a new point of sale (POS) terminal leveraging the more universal Bluetooth Low Energy, the real challenge isn’t the hardware. The problem is getting dozens of POS vendors and all the banks that issue cards to sign onto a new standard, and getting enough stores and retail venues to adopt it. Chicken and the egg once again.