- Grantland and the Surprising Future of Publishing (Ben Thompson) — writing is good for reach, podcasts and video good for advertising $. The combination is powerful.
- Security and the Linux Kernel (WaPo) — the question is not “can the WaPo write intelligently about the Linux kernel and security?” (answer, by the way, is “yes”) but rather “why is the WaPo writing about Linux kernel and security?” Ladies and gentlemen, start your conspiracy engines.
- TPP Might Prevent Governments from Auditing Source Code (Wired) — Article 14.17 of proposal, published at last today after years of secret negotiations, says: “No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.” The proposal includes an exception for critical infrastructure, but it’s not clear whether software involved in life or death situations, such as cars, airplanes, or medical devices would be included. One of many “what the heck does this mean for us?” analyses coming out. I’m waiting a few days until the analyses shake out before I get anything in a tangle.
- Innit Future Kitchen — robots that cook. Is nothing sacred for these steely-hearted bastards?!
"Linux" entries
Four short links: 6 November 2015
Media Money, Linux Security, TPP and Source, and Robot Chefs
Boost your career with new levels of automation
Elevate automation through orchestration.
As sysadmins we have been responsible for running applications for decades. We have done everything to meet demanding SLAs including “automating all the things” and even trading sleep cycles to recuse applications from production fires. While we have earned many battle scars and can step back and admire fully automated deployment pipelines, it feels like there has always been something missing. Our infrastructure still feels like an accident waiting to happen and somehow, no matter how much we manage to automate, the expense of infrastructure continues to increase.
The root of this feeling comes from the fact that many of our tools don’t provide the proper insight into what’s really going on and require us to reverse engineer applications in order to effectively monitor them and recover from failures. Today many people bolt on monitoring solutions that attempt to probe applications from the outside and report “health” status to a centralized monitoring system, which seems to be riddled with false alarms or a list of alarms that are not worth looking into because there is no clear path to resolution.
What makes this worse is how we typically handle common failure scenarios such as node failures. Today many of us are forced to statically assign applications to machines and manage resource allocations on a spreadsheet. It’s very common to assign a single application to a VM to avoid dependency conflicts and ensure proper resource allocations. Many of the tools in our tool belt have be optimized for this pattern and the results are less than optimal. Sure this is better than doing it manually, but current methods are resulting in low resource utilization, which means our EC2 bills continue to increase — because the more you automate, the more things people want to do.
How do we reverse course on this situation? Read more…
A software engineer’s role traversal
Software engineer and author Jason Myers on changing roles in a changing market.
We often hear about how the tech job market is booming and has space for newcomers, but what does that mean for the developers already in the market? In December of 2014, Fortune.com predicted that 2015 would be an excellent year for developers to change jobs. Citing Dice.com, they note that jobs are popping up all over the country. In fact, Dice’s survey also reports 40% of hiring managers seeing voluntary departures, a higher number than was seen just six months earlier.
These are all large, general numbers. What does a job change, and the changing market, look like for individual developers? To get a better sense, I spoke with Jason Myers, who is working on our upcoming Essential SQLAlchemy, 2e title. Jason recently went from working for the email marketing service Emma, Inc., to working for networking giant Cisco. Here, he talks about how a change like that feels, and how the market looks to him.
The data lake model is a powerhouse for invention
In this O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Edd Dumbill on the data lake, and Rajiv Maheswaran on the science of moving dots.
In a recent blog post, Edd Dumbill, VP of strategy at Silicon Valley Data Science, wrote about the phrase “data lake.” Likening it to a dream, he described a data lake as “a place with data-centered architecture, where silos are minimized, and processing happens with little friction in a scalable, distributed environment…Data itself is no longer restrained by initial schema decisions, and can be exploited more freely by the enterprise.” He explained that he called it a “dream” because “we’ve a way to go to make the vision come true” — but noted he’s optimistic the dream can be realized.
Subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast
In this Radar Podcast epidsode, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum sits down with Dumbill to talk about the data lake, the opportunities the model presents, and the driving forces behind the concept. Read more…
Four short links: 28 October 2014
Continuous Delivery, UX Resources, Large-Screen Cellphone Design, and Scalable Sockets
- Build Quality In — an e-book collection of Continuous Delivery and DevOps experience reports from the wild. Work in progress, and a collection of accumulated experience in the new software engineering practices can’t be a bad thing.
- UX Directory — collection of awesome UX resources.
- Designing for Large-Screen Cellphones (Luke Wroblewski) — In his analysis of 1,333 observations of smartphones in use, Steven Hoober found about 75% of people rely on their thumb and 49% rely on a one-handed grip to get things done on their phones. On large screens (over four inches) those kinds of behaviors can stretch people’s thumbs well past their comfort zone as they try to reach controls positioned at the top of their device. Design advice to create interactions that don’t strain tendons or gray matter.
- fastsocket (Github) — a highly scalable socket and its underlying networking implementation of Linux kernel. With the straight linear scalability, Fastsocket can provide extremely good performance in multicore machines.
5 ways developers win with PaaS
Powering your app with open source and OpenShift
As a software developer, you are no doubt familiar with the process of abstracting away unnecessary detail in code — imagine if that same principle were applied to application hosting. Say hello to Platform as a Service (PaaS), which enables you to host your applications in the cloud without having to worry about the logistics, leaving you to focus on your code. This post will discuss five ways in which PaaS benefits software developers, using the open source OpenShift PaaS by Red Hat as an example.
No More Tedious Config Tasks
Most of us don’t become developers to do system administration, but when you are running your own infrastructure you end up doing exactly that. A PaaS can take that pain away by handling pesky config and important security updates for you. As a bonus, it makes your sys admin happy too by allowing you to provision your own environment for that killer new app idea you want to tinker with, rather than nagging them for root access on a new VM.
On OpenShift, it goes like this: let’s say you decide you want to test an idea for a Java app, using Tomcat and PostgreSQL (yes, we could argue about the merits of those choices, but work with me here). You can spin that up with a one-line terminal command:
rhc app create myawesomeapp tomcat-7 postgresql-9.2 -s
That -s on the end is telling the platform to make the app auto-scaling, which I will elaborate on later; yes, that’s all it takes. RHC (Red Hat Cloud) is just a Ruby Gem wrapping calls to the OpenShift REST API. You could also use the OpenShift web console or an IDE plugin to do this, or call the API directly if that’s how you roll. The key technologies in play here are just plain old Git and SSH — there’s nothing proprietary.
Four short links: 1 January 2014
3D Motion Tracking, Linux of Things, Techno Panics, and Great CS Papers
- Witrack — tracks the 3D motion of a user from the radio signals reflected off her body. It works even if the person is occluded from the WiTrack device or in a different room. WiTrack does not require the user to carry any wireless device, yet its accuracy exceeds current RF localization systems, which require the user to hold a transceiver. It transmits wireless signals whose power is 100 times smaller than Wi-Fi and 1000 times smaller than cellphone transmissions.
- A Linux Christmas — Linux drives pretty much all of Amazon’s top-selling consumer electronics.
- Techno Panic Timeline — chart from Exposing the War on Fun showing the fears of technology from 1493 to the modern day.
- Best Paper Awards in CS Since 1996 (Jeff Huang) — fantastic resource for your holiday reading.
Four short links: 17 October 2013
GUI Prototyping, Linux Containerisation, Searchable Apple Text, and Infosec Wargames
- Pencil — An open-source GUI prototyping tool that’s available for ALL platforms.
- lmctfy — open source version of Google’s container stack, which provides Linux application containers.
- ASCII WWDC — searchable full-text transcriptions of WWDC sessions.
- Cryptogeddon — an online infosec wargame.
Four short links: 10 October 2013
Retro Literacy, Open Source Car Middleware, Digital Textbooks, and Mario Reborn
- ActiveLit — interactive fiction as literacy tool. (via Text Adventures blog)
- Your Car is About to go Open Source (ComputerWorld) — an open-source IVI operating system would create a reusable platform consisting of core services, middleware and open application layer interfaces that eliminate the redundant efforts to create separate proprietary systems. Leaving them to differentiate the traditional way: ad-retargeting and spyware.
- The Digital Networked Textbook: Is It Any Good? (Dan Meyer) — “if you were hundreds of feet below the surface of the Earth, in a concrete bunker without any kind of Internet access, is the curriculum any different?”
- Full Screen Mario — web reimplementation of original Mario Brothers, with random level generator and a level editor, source on github. (via Andy Baio)
Four short links: 19 September 2013
Art and Money, Probabilistic Programming, Feature Flow, and Good Drones
- How Jim Henson Turned His Art Into a Business (Longreads) — When Henson joined on to the experimental PBS show Sesame Street in 1968, he was underpaid for his services creating Big Bird and Oscar. Yet he spent his free nights in his basement, shooting stop-motion films that taught kids to count. If you watch these counting films, the spirit of Henson’s gift shines through. I think any struggling artist today could count Henson among their ilk. He had all the makings of a tragic starving artist. The only difference between him and us is that he made peace with money.
- Probabilistic Programming and the Democratization of AI (YouTube) — talk by Brian Ruttenberg, examples in Figaro, a Scala library which is apparently open source despite hiding behind a “give us your contact details” form.
- Linux Panel — love the crossflow of features: “Embedded today is what enterprise was five years ago,” Kroah-Hartman said. “You have a quad-core in your pocket. The fun thing about Linux is all the changes you make have to work on all the things.” The advances in power management driven by mobile devices initially weren’t that interesting to enterprise developers, according to Kroah-Hartman. That quickly changed once they realized it was helping them save millions of dollars in data center power costs.
- A Drone’s View of the Colorado Floods (DIY Drones) — some amazing footage.