- LittleBits Adds Functionality (MakeZine) — That next big idea might come from one of the latest bits in the littleBits catalog, the cloudBit. The piece enables wi-fi control of your circuit in various configurations — from the Internet to the bit, from the bit to the internet, or from bit to bit.
- Big Data’s Big Ideas (Ben Lorica) — this is a lot of what’s on the O’Reilly radar at the moment. Excellent short summary, with links.
- Rodney Brooks and Robotics (Boston Magazine) — [The robot] Baxter’s LCD eyes will look at the spot where it’s about to reach, making its movements, from a human perspective, more predictable. “If you want a machine to be able to interact with people,” Brooks says, “it better not do things that are surprising to people.”
- FUZIX — new open source OS from Alan Cox. Runs on Z80s, mostly runs on 6502s, and in theory if it’s got 8 bits and banked RAM you can probably run Fuzix OS on it. (via Alan Cox)
"cloud" entries
Four short links: 3 November 2014
LittleBits Cloud, Big Data Futures, Predictable Robots, and New OS
Four short links: 10 October 2014
Evolving Malware, Male Advocates, Every BU is an Internal Startup, and Amazonian Warehouses
- Slow Release Malware — Prof. Vigna outlined scenarios in which an increasingly sophisticated and opaque breed of malicious executable will evolve to ‘mimic’ the behaviour patterns of benign software, in an attempt to avoid wasting its payload behaviour on a sandbox or virtualised environment. (via Slashdot)
- Top 10 Ways to be a Male Advocate — pass to any men in tech that you know.
- All Businesses are Now Digital Businesses (Vikram Kumar) — given that your business units are buying their own IT and thus reinventing their own business, How many CEOs and CIOs think of business units acting as tech start-ups?
- Amazon Opens First Physical Store (WSJ, paywall) — in NYC, for pickups, returns, exchanges, and same-day delivery of some items from the accompanying warehouse. I’m curious to see what of Amazon’s infrastructure, analytics, and other thin-margin tricks they can bring to substantial physical presence.
Cloud security is not an oxymoron
Think your IT staff can protect you better than major cloud providers? Think again.
I just ran across Katie Fehrenbacher’s article in GigaOm that made a point I’ve been arguing (perhaps not strongly enough) for years. When you start talking to people about “the cloud,” you frequently run into a knee-jerk reaction: “Of course, the cloud isn’t secure.”
I have no idea what IT professionals who say stuff like this mean. Are they thinking about the stuff they post on Facebook? Or are they thinking about the data they’ve stored on Amazon? For me, the bottom line is: would I rather trust Amazon’s security staff, or would I rather trust some guy with some security cert that I’ve never heard of, but whom the HR department says is “qualified”? Read more…
Four short links: 14 May 2014
Problem Solving, Fashion Mining, Surprising Recommendations, and Migrating Engines
- Data Jujitsu — new O’Reilly Radar report by the wonderful DJ Patil about the exploration and problem solving part of data science. Me gusta.
- Style Finder: Fine-Grained Clothing Style Recognition and Retrieval (PDF) — eBay labs machine learning, featuring the wonderful phrase “Women’s Fashion: Coat dataset”.
- Amazon’s Drug Dealer Shopping List — reinforcing recommendations surface unexpected patterns …
- Migrating Virtual Machines from Amazon EC2 to Google Compute Engine — if you want the big players fighting for your business, you should ensure you have portability.
Four short links: 1 May 2014
Cloud Jurisdiction, Driverless Cars, Robotics IPOs, and Fitting a Catalytic Convertor to Your Data Exhaust
- US Providers Must Divulge from Offshore Servers (Gigaom) — A U.S. magistrate judge ruled that U.S. cloud vendors must fork over customer data even if that data resides in data centers outside the country. (via Alistair Croll)
- Inside Google’s Self-Driving Car (Atlantic Cities) — Urmson says the value of maps is one of the key insights that emerged from the DARPA challenges. They give the car a baseline expectation of its environment; they’re the difference between the car opening its eyes in a completely new place and having some prior idea what’s going on around it. This is a long and interesting piece on the experience and the creator’s concerns around the self-driving cars. Still looking for the comprehensive piece on the subject.
- Recent Robotics-Relate IPOs — not all the exits are to Google.
- How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy From Big Data (Mashable) — “I really couldn’t have done it without Tor, because Tor was really the only way to manage totally untraceable browsing. I know it’s gotten a bad reputation for Bitcoin trading and buying drugs online, but I used it for BabyCenter.com.”
5 PaaS anti-patterns
Common behavior to watch out for when transitioning to a PaaS
Today I am going to cover 5 ways developers may be on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) but have not really embraced the new platform effectively. If you have done any of these things below while building your application hosted on a PaaS, like OpenShift, Heroku, or Google App Engine, don’t feel bad:
- PaaS is a relatively new concept in the development world and I think some of these patterns are only recently coming to light
- I have seen veteran developers making these mistakes as they move to the new paradigm
One piece of terminology I will use throughout the article is container. When I am using this word I am referring to the piece of the PaaS that hosts the application and does the work. An application can be composed of multiple containers and the PaaS will probably have a method to add your favorite server-side tech to the container. On OpenShift this is called a gear while on Heroku it is called a dyno.
So without further ado, let’s dig in on some of the code smells in the cloud.
Four short links: 27 February 2014
A Fine Rant, Continuous Deployment, IBeacon Spec, and LaTeX Gets a Collaborative Multiplayer Mode
- Our Comrade, The Electron (Maciej Ceglowski) — a walk through the life of the inventor of the Theremin, with a pointed rant about how we came to build the surveillance state for the state. One of the best conference talks ever, and I was in the audience for it!
- go.cd — continuous deployment and delivery automation tool from Thoughtworks, nothing to do with the Go programming language. The name is difficult to search for, so naturally we needed the added confusion of two projects sharing the name. Continuous deployment is an important part of devops (“the job of our programmers is not to write code, it is to deploy working code into production”—who said this? I’ve lost the reference already).
- Apple iBeacon Developer Programme — info locked up behind registration. Sign an NDA to get the specs, free to use the name. Interesting because iBeacon and other Bluetooth LE implementations are promising steps to building a network of things. (via Beekn)
- ShareLaTeX — massively multiplayer online LaTeX. Open sourced.
Four short links: 14 February 2014
Bitcoin Analysis, 3D Crime Scenes, 3D Display, and Cloud API
- Bitcoin: Understanding and Assessing Potential Opportunities (Slideshare) — VC deck on Bitcoin market and opportunities, long-term and short-term. Interesting lens on the development and gaps.
- Queensland Police Map Crime Scenes with 3D Scanner (ComputerWorld) — can’t wait for the 3D printed merchandise from famous trials.
- Atheer Labs — An immersive 3D display, over a million apps, sub-mm 3D hand interaction, all in 75 grams.
- libcloud — Python library for interacting with many of the popular cloud service providers using a unified API.
Four short links: 24 January 2014
Floating Point, Secure Distributed FS, Cloud Robotics, and Domestic Sensors
- What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic — in short, “it will hurt you.”
- Ori — a distributed file system built for offline operation and empowers the user with control over synchronization operations and conflict resolution. We provide history through light weight snapshots and allow users to verify the history has not been tampered with. Through the use of replication instances can be resilient and recover damaged data from other nodes.
- RoboEarth — a Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).
- Mother — domestic sensors and an app with an appallingly presumptuous name. (Also, wasn’t “Mother” the name of the ship computer in Alien?) (via BoingBoing)
Is the Jump Box Obsolete?
Security in cloud environments better enhanced in other ways
With compliance becoming an ever-increasing priority and hybrid infrastructures becoming the norm, many traditional IT practices must evolve or die. Perhaps a widely used practice that hasn’t kept up with the evolution of compliance requirements in increasingly hybrid environments is the jump server, often called the jump box.
The original theory for jump boxes made a lot of sense. Set up a jump box as a bastion host inside of your environment that everybody logs into and then you can “jump” to any of the other boxes or servers. The jump box would be a heavily fortified gatekeeper, ensuring that only the correct users could pass it. Audit controls would be placed on the jump box to track all user activity. For those that wanted to level up, multi-factor authentication could be installed at the jump box to make it harder for an attacker to leverage stolen credentials.