Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Online Courses to help Colleges

Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden - NYTimes.com


Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.
...
So to reach students who are not ready for college-level work, or struggling with introductory courses, universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online materials, in hopes of improving success rates...



San Jose State (University) could become a living lab for (circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers), the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
...
The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.


Online classes are like a public library: free and available, but used only occasionally.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Federated Wiki by Ward Cunningham

Wiki(WikiWeb) creator is working on new idea,
that makes Wiki "distributed".
Conceptually this makes sense,
but its success will depend on implementation.

The challenge is not parallel editing, but "merging".
Interesting idea here is "side by side",
"drag-and-drop" view of multiple versions of same document.
So it is humans doing merge, not algorithms.


Smallest Federated Wiki:

interview: @ InfoQ

Netflix new API: post-REST, Functional, Reactive

At Netflix scale (that is at peaks 1/3 of internet traffic in USA),
even REST style of communication is not efficient and good enough.
So they have internally started implementing more optimized style of communication
that is more efficient on network traffic,
and more efficient on server side processing.

  • The first problem with REST is a need to send multiple requests
    (and wait for responses) that is very dependent on specifics of
    more than 800 types of supported devices.

    The solution are custom, more high-level messages,
    that are implemented for and by client team and running on severs
    to prepare complete data and return in one optimized message.

  • Second issue is how to make this server-side processing efficient,
    without creating too much additional load on servers.
    For this they have implemented "Reactive Functional Programming",
    that is first introduced by Microsoft Research's Eric Meyer as RX Framework
    and added to .NET and other tools.

    Netflix has adopted same style, and implemented for Java platform
    but not Java language: instead they are using Grails in JavaVM.

    article: The Netflix API Optimization Story
    Before (REST):


    After (Rx Client Adapters):


    presentation: Netflix API Revolution @ InfoQ

    presentation: Functional Reactive Programming in the Netflix API@ InfoQ

    blog post: @ Neflix blog

    Interview: Ben Christensen on Resilience at Netflix with Hystrix, Reactive Programming for the JVM with RxJava @ InfoQ


    All we need now is a clever catchy name for the new style protocols,
    and a simplified portable open source implementation, i.e. for Node.js :)
    If that can be a part of some PhD thesis (like REST was), even better :)

    Would "web sockets" and "comet-style" connections be effective here?

  • JavaScript and Web Frameworks

    A useful reference list (from a year ago):

    The Big Glossary of Open Source JavaScript and Web Frameworks with Cool Names - Scott Hanselman:
    "...JavaScript projects that are basically just hip sounding words with ".js" added to the end, it's a little overwhelming. Seriously, just pick a word out of the dictionary at random and that's the name of an up and coming JavaScript library..."

    Saturday, April 27, 2013

    Go: Engineered Programming Language

    A language designed to be "boring" but effective for Google.
    A very informative presentation:

    Go at Google: @ InfoQ
    "Rob Pike explains how Google designed Go 
    to address major development issues they encounter while using other languages: 
    long build times, poor dependency management, lack of robustness, etc."

    For example, Go programs build 40 times faster than equivalent C++ code!

    The Go Programming Language course @ Pliralsight


    Even curly brackets are preserved for a reason to keep it look "familiar"
    The same reason is stated for JavaScript, as well as Java and C#.
    This is to help developers transition from other programming languages.

    But there is also a more practical engineering reason:
    to avoid hard to detect semantic errors caused by changes in indentation,
    observed when embedding Python language, also popular in Google, to other tools.

    $99 Android 'Netbook' powered by Intel

    'Wintel' on the wane: Intel goes Google | Business Tech - CNET News


    Intel needs to re-imagine its market... or the profit is gone.

    Chrome:plugins, disable Adobe Flash Player

    Adobe Flash Player plug-in - Google Chrome Help:
    "Enable or disable Adobe Flash Player

    Type chrome:plugins in the address bar to open the Plug-ins page.

    On the Plug-ins page that appears, find the "Flash" listing.
    To enable Adobe Flash Player, click the Enable link under its name.
    To disable Adobe Flash Player completely, click the Disable link under its name."

    There is also chrome:about for many more hidden options.

    Flash plugin is still a major reason for frequent Chrome crashes,
    excessive network usage by annoying ads...
    So until they figure out to utilize HTML videos for ads, disabling Flash could help.

    Windows 8 tablets: 3 million, 7.5% in 2013Q1

    Windows 8 tablets hit 3 million shipped in first quarter | Microsoft - CNET News

    "Windows 8 tablets (which include Windows RT) took 7.5 percent of the global tablet market based on operating system (OS) market share in the first quarter...
    PC makers (including Microsoft) shipped 3.4 million units worldwide in Q1 2013"

    What's New in jQuery 2.0

    What's New in jQuery 2.0 - SitePoint
    "The second branch of the web’s most popular JavaScript library was released on April 18, 2013. jQuery 2.0 is now available for download but don’t rush off and install it just yet — there is one major change…

    No More Support for IE6/7/8
    (or IE9 and IE10 if they’re used in “Compatibility View” mode)."



    A better approach would be making the library "modular" if possible,
    where IE6/7/8 is a module included only when needed...

    A Little Graph Theory for the Busy Developer

    A Little Graph Theory for the Busy Developer: @ InfoQ

    Dr. Jim Webber is Chief Scientist with Neo Technology the company behind the popular open source graph database Neo4j, where he works on graph database server technology and writes open source software.

    Presentation.pdf

    book: Graph Databases


    Graphs could predict social events, including wars,
    as well as help with sales and advertising...
    Graphs are fast for processing large amounts of data in real time.

    A crash course in creativity: Tina Seelig @ Stanford

    A crash course in creativity: Tina Seelig at TEDxStanford - YouTube: "

    podcast: A Crash Course on Creativity @ Stanford Center for
    Social Innovation


    person: Dr. Tina Seelig is the Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center at Stanford University's School of Engineering

    article: @Stanford.edu

    book: @ Amazon.com


    article: @ MIT Sloan

    Innovation:

    • culture,
    • knowledge,
    • imagination,
    • resources,
    • attitude and
    • habitat

    blog post: @KUMU

    online class: Stanford Online: A Crash Course on Creativity
    April 22, 2013 - June 02, 2013


    To me, the most interesting insight is that innovation does require knowledge. There are too many cases where people and organizations try random things, and not surprisingly that does not work. Only real practitioners with real knowledge, in right conditions do produce real progress... But this is not too hard...

    3-D Printed Car, $0.02/mile to drive

    Urbee is a two-passenger hybrid car designed to be incredibly fuel efficient, easy to repair, safe to drive, and inexpensive to own. (200 miles / gallon)

    podcast @ IEEE spectrum: What’s Next For 3-D Printing? Car Bodies

    3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production | Autopia | Wired.com

    3D-Printed Hybrid Uses Sunlight, Ethanol or Gas @Wired #2011



    Friday, April 26, 2013

    AngularJS: JavaScript Framework

    Angular.js could be important for future of the web (and technology in general :)
    since it provides and effective declarative method for extending HTML syntax and functionality.

    presentation:
    Re-imagining the Browser with AngularJS
    , by Angular.js creator Miško Hevery from Google @ InfoQ.com

    AngularJS, by Igor Minar, Brad Green (both working on Angular.js in Google) @ InfoQ.com

    AngularJS — Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework @ angularjs.org

    Example:

    <input type="text" ng-model="yourName" placeholder="Enter a name here">
    <h1>Hello {{yourName}}!</>
    

    Tutorial

    Some of the Angular.js features are apparently being added to web browsers and HTML standards!

    Book:AngularJS

    Dan Wahlin interviews Joe Eames and Jim Cooper about AngularJS (Pluralsight)

    AngularJS Cheat Sheet

    Amazon Web Services’s slideshows on SlideShare

    Amazon Web Services’s slideshows on SlideShare


    Tuesday, April 23, 2013

    Cloud Events: OpenStack, AWS, Azure

    2013-04-17: OpenStack Summit (HP, Rackspace, Ubuntu, ...)

    2013-04-18: Amazon AWS New York Summit

    2013-04-23: Mirosoft Windows AzureConf

    OpenStack Summit: HP, Canonical Ubuntu Flex Cloud Muscle | Cloud Computing and Open Source content from Talkin' Cloud
    "...real-world OpenStack cloud deployments involving Best Buy, Bloomberg, Comcast and HubSpot...  HP and Canonical to offer updates on their respective public and private cloud efforts. 
    AT&T, T-mobile and China Mobile are running OpenStack with Ubuntu..."

    Global Windows Azure Bootcamp! On April 27th, 2013

    Amazon's S3 Now Stores 2 Trillion Objects

    Amazon's S3 Now Stores 2 Trillion Objects, Up From 1 Trillion Last June:

    "... it took Amazon six years to grow to get to 1 trillion stored objects, “and less than a year to double that number.” S3, Barr also writes, now regularly sees peaks of more than 1.1 million requests per second."

    Windows Azure price = AWS price

    poscast on Microsoft Channel 9:
    Episode 105 - General Availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) | Windows Azure Cloud Cover Show | Channel 9:

    Interesting info: Azure price is being significantly reduced, to match competition
    (that is Amazon Web Services :).
    Microsoft will keep reducing, since AWS keeps reducing prices.
    Features up, price down: competition is good :)

    Microsoft Windows Azure... announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth. This starts with reducing our GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33%.

    Azure Service Bus + Node.js

    Microsoft Offers Module to Scale Out Real-time Node.js Applications:
    "A new open-source contribution from Microsoft uses the Windows Azure Service Bus to provide scale out support for real-time Node.js applications. 
    This module, called socket.io-servicebus, connects multiple servers running the popular Socket.IO module."


    Energy Future: Thorium?

    An interesting podcast:
    Geeking Out on Thorium @ .NET Rocks!

    NORWAY BEGINS FOUR YEAR TEST OF THORIUM NUCLEAR REACTOR

    Almost all of the world’s nuclear power plants are uranium reactors.
    But interest in thorium reactors is strong, particularly in nuclear happy China.


    Energy Independence and Sustainability - The Energy From Thorium Foundation


    Thorium is apparently much safer and efficient that Uranium,
    but it was not "interesting" during cold war
    since it could not be used as a weapon.

    If only a fraction of military spending is used
    to speed up this research/development,
    it could enable safer future for energy and environment...

    And if USA does not do it, China will. What is US government waiting?

    "energy from thorium" Blog

    DARPA Gigapixel-class Camera

    2012/07/05 DARPA Successfully Tests Gigapixel-class Camera

    "DARPA successfully tested cameras with 1.4 and 0.96 gigapixel resolution at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. The gigapixel cameras combine 100-150 small cameras with a spherical objective lens. Local aberration correction and focus in the small cameras enable extremely high resolution shots with smaller system volume and less distortion than traditional wide field lens systems. The DARPA effort hopes to produce resolution up to 10 and 50 gigapixels"

    Monday, April 22, 2013

    CORS: Cross-origin resource sharing

    ASP.NET Web API: CORS support and Attribute Based Routing Improvements - ScottGu's Blog

    "Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a W3C standard that allows web pages to make AJAX requests to a different domain. This standard relaxes the same-origin policy implemented in web browsers that restricts calls to the domain of the resource that makes the call. The CORS specification defines how the browser and server interact to make cross-origin calls."

    HTTP access control (CORS) @ Mozilla

    Cross-origin resource sharing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Cross-Origin Resource Sharing @ W3C

    Glimpse Protocol and Visualization

    An interesting idea for visualization of JSON data.
    HTML is a perfect match rendering a hierarchy of objectes, tables, etc.
    Super-simple.

    More about Glimpse

    Glimpse Protocol Definition

    "The Glimpse Protocol... is a way of interpreting (JSON) JavaScript objects and rendering them based on their structure.

    The interpretation that occurs simply makes certain assumptions about how data that is structured a particular way should be formatted.


    {
        "Movie" : "Star Wars",
        "Genera/Theme" : "Science Fiction", 
        "Plot & Description" : "Luke Skywalker leaves his home planet, teams up with other rebels, and tries to save Princess Leia from the evil clutches of Darth Vader."
    }
    

    KeyValue
    MovieStar Wars
    Genera/ThemeScience Fiction
    Plot & DescriptionLuke Skywalker leaves his home planet, teams up with other rebels, and tries to save Princess Leia from the evil clutches of Darth Vader.

    Data
    [ 
        [ "Actor", "Character", "Gender", "Age" ], 
        [ "Mark Hamill", "Luke Skywalker", "Male", "21" ], 
        [ "James Earl Jones", "Darth Vader", "Male", "45", "quiet" ], 
        [ "Harrison Ford", "Han Solo", "Male", "25" ], 
        [ "Carrie Fisher", "Princess Leia Organa", "Female", "21" ], 
        [ "Peter Cushing", "Grand Moff Tarkin", "Female", "69" ], 
        [ "Alec Guinness", "Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi", "Female", "70", "selected" ], 
        [ "Anthony Daniels", "C-3PO", "Droid", "101" ], 
        [ "Kenny Baker", "R2-D2", "Droid", "150" ]
    ]
    ActorCharacterGenderAge
    Mark HamillLuke SkywalkerMale21
    James Earl JonesDarth VaderMale45
    Harrison FordHan SoloMale25
    Carrie FisherPrincess Leia OrganaFemale21
    Peter CushingGrand Moff TarkinFemale69
    Alec GuinnessBen Obi-Wan KenobiFemale70
    Anthony DanielsC-3PODroid101
    Kenny BakerR2-D2Droid150

    HP Moonshot

    Web Servers that take
  • 89% less energy
  • 80% less space
  • 77% less cost
  • 97% less complex

    HP Moonshot - The Disruption



  • Sunday, April 21, 2013

    Zepto.js: jQuery-compatible minimalist JavaScript library

    Zepto.js: the aerogel-weight jQuery-compatible JavaScript library

    "Zepto is a minimalist JavaScript library for modern browsers with a largely jQuery-compatible API. If you use jQuery, you already know how to use Zepto.

    While 100% jQuery coverage is not a design goal, the APIs provided match their jQuery counterparts. The goal is to have a ~5-10k modular library that downloads and executes fast, with a familiar and versatile API, so you can concentrate on getting stuff done.

    Zepto is open source software and is released under the developer and business-friendly MIT license."

    Note: jQuery appears to have better performance.

    On the other side, both jQuery and Zepto.js are much slower than direct access to DOM from JavaScript.

    12 Certainties That Will Transform Careers | Daniel Burrus

    12 Certainties That Will Transform Careers | Daniel Burrus - Technology Trends and Business Strategy Speaker

    • Cloud Services and Virtualization
    • Big Data and Real-Time Analytics
    • Mobile Hardware, Software, and Services
    • Gamification of Education
    • Social Business Enterprise Management
    • Cyber Security and Forensics
    • Intelligent e-Personal Assistants
    • 3D Web
    • Connective Intelligent Objects
    • Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing)
    • Advanced Robotics and Automation
    • Remote Visual Communications

    Nanotech: Air vs. Water, Air wins

    Mark Shaw: One very dry demo | Video on TED.com

    Bridges & Waterfalls @ Pinterest

    Bridges & Waterfalls

    Amazing Photos by Karen Hutton

    Places & Moments - Google+


    Saturday, April 20, 2013

    SolarCity: (free) Solar Panels for Home

    Latest company by (PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX) Elon Musk: SolarCity

    They offer an option to get solar panels installed for free,
    and you just pay for energy usage, that is less that current bill.

    Solar Panels for Your Home - Residential Solar Power Systems - SolarCity

    Samsung: SAFE with Knox

    Samsung announces SAFE with Knox, details plans to secure the enterprise Galaxy (hands-on)

    "SAFE, which stands for Samsung for Enterprise"

    A comprehensive collection of features that include Security Enhanced (SE) Android, secure boot, TrustZone-based Integrity Monitoring (TIMA) for protecting the kernel, Single Sign On (SSO) and that application container concept made famous by BlackBerry, just to name a few... Knox will ship pre-installed on select devices

    Pluralsight: teaching Levitation (and PhotoShop :)

    Vadering, Hadouken, and Levitation! We do it all! | the pluralsight blog



    Photoshop for Technical Drawings

    Friday, April 19, 2013

    Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity

    Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ... | Video on TED.com

    EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are -- what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful.

    Thursday, April 18, 2013

    Amazon RDS - low admin, high performance databases in the cloud

    MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, managed and optimied on AWS, using SSDs

    AWS Webcast - Amazon RDS - Running low admin, high performance databases in the cloud - YouTube

    aws.amazon.com/rds

    Watch Youtube Videos at Double Speed


    http://www.youtube.com/html5
    Join HTML5 Trial

    Watch Youtube Videos at Double Speed - YouTube"

    Amazon Web Services - AWS Summit 2013 @ YouTube

    Amazon Web Services - YouTube:

    The Six Main Benefits of Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services

    2012 re: Invent Day 2: Fireside Chat with Jeff Bezos & Werner Vogels

    Amazon Web Services @ YouTube

    $99 Android Phone from Archos

    A "branded" smartphone for less than $100:
    Is it time for an Amazon Phone?

    Archos throws hat into Android smartphone ring | Mobile - CNET News

    "Its most entry-level device is called the 35 Carbon. For $99.99, it runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, has a 1,300mAh battery, and is powered by a 1GHz processor."

    Archos also has iPad-like tablet for half of iPad price:

    Archos 97 Titanium HD tablet to offer Retina-like display
    97 Titanium HD. The 9.7-inch tablet will ship with Android 4.1 and a promising 2,048x1,536-pixel IPS display. This matches the resolution of the current-generation iPad.

    Wednesday, April 17, 2013

    Best Selling Cars 2012 (all 937 models)

    Best Selling Cars – Matt's blog » World Full Year 2012: Discover the Top 1000 best-selling models!


    Some people claim it is Fort Focus, but this list says it is Toyota Corolla.
    In fact it is VW Golf+Jetta, total of 1.3 M sold.
    Statistics...

    Tuesday, April 16, 2013

    The cost of owning your car? $9,000 a year

    The cost of owning your car? $9,000 a year

    "A new AAA reports shows, on average, the cost of driving 15,000 miles a year rose 1.17 cents to 60.8 cents per mile, or $9,122 per year. Overall, that's a roughly 2% increase on the cost of operating a car last year."

    The biggest percentage increase this year was in maintenance costs, which grew by 11.26% to 4.97 cents per mile, on average, for sedan owners.

    The second biggest increase: Insurance costs, which rose 2.76%, or $28, to an annual average of $1,029. AAA's insurance cost estimates are based on a low-risk driver with a clean driving record.

    Fuel costs rose 1.93% to 14.45 cents per mile for the average sedan owner. The actual average cost of regular gas went up 3.84% to $3.49 per gallon

    Depreciation costs, which had dropped in last year's study, ticked upward slightly, by .78% to $3,571 a year.

    Sunday, April 14, 2013

    Pinterest GUI

    Pinterest

    is quite interesting. Could be a next twitter, "PinIt" is now
    next to Facebook and Twitter share icons on many web sites.
    That is assuming enough people care about photos.
    And they do, making facebook biggest photo storage.

    I find in particular interesting Pinterest's GUI.
    It is quite simple, but efficient, with vertical columns
    to utilize all space and preserve proportions of photos.
    Vertical scrolling is natural for web.

    Should Windows 8 Tiles pages be like that?
    Problem with "metro tiles" is (lack of) efficiency.

    Google and Bing images searches do similar but with horizontal bands, so all images have same height, but there is no space for text. Being web sites, they can change design any time,
    but an OS like Windows 8 is much harder to change.
    Should not be, but it is.

    Anyway, "social photos" on Pinterest are great.

    15 Websites Similar To Pinterest

    Websites Similar to Pinterest Exist in Many Categories

    www.pinspire.com : a clone

    Wikidata: Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing

    Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others | TechCrunch 2012-03-30
    Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.

    @ Wikipedia

    http://www.wikidata.org/

    Friday, April 12, 2013

    Chrome for iOS: full screen, AirPrint/Cloud Print, save PDF to Google Drive

    Chrome for iOS gets updated scroll, AirPrint/Cloud Print and save PDF to Google Drive options | 9to5Mac

    Amazing National Parks app @ Windows Store

    Amazing National Parks app for Windows in the Windows Store


    Letters, E-Mail, Texts, WhatsApp

    podcast: Letters, E-Mail, Texts — What’s Next? | On Point with Tom Ashbrook

    Facebook is "old fashion" for "under 15 crowd"
    Investors are concerned (and they should be :)

    Custom apps, like WhatsApp for quick instant messaging are in,
    since they work with WiFi only (no data plan required on phones)
    could send instant photos, and messages could "expire" quickly.
    The electronic communication is becoming extension of voice,
    just with no distance and place limitation.

    And in all this (r)evolution, nobody managed to make email secure.
    Nobody even tried to attach simple digital signature to every email!
    The technology (i.e. PGP) exists for more than 20 years,
    and there is a need, and no even one major email system even tried.
    Maybe BlackBerry did make email secure?

    And to mix messaging, email, and document management?
    Again, not even attempted.
    How strange... or a conspiracy?

    Tuesday, April 09, 2013

    GitHub: How Great Leaders Serve Others

    Yet Another Podcast #94–Phil Haack: Git | Jesse Liberty

    Besides useful links for using Git and GitHub,
    an interesting discussion about "no management" structure of GitHub company,
    and virtues of empowering people.

    Phil cited a TEDx talk of a commander of a nuclear-powered submarine
    "We got a crew trained for compliance, and we got a captain trained for the wrong ship,
    and that was a deadly combination"
    So he "turned the ship around" to just communicate intent
    and empower people to make right decisions.
    And the ship tuned "from worst to first"...



    Deceptive simplicity of async and await

    Deceptive simplicity of async and await:
    "By introducing the new async/await keywords in C# 5 and by adding asynchronous APIs in .NET 4.5, Microsoft significantly lowered the bar for entering into the realm of the asynchronous programming. However, while presenting the new features of the upcoming .NET Framework release, answering the questions and helping to resolve the first issues I came to realization that this bar might be set too low."


    In fact, hiding actual functionality in some cases is creating problems,
    in particular when mixing with GUI events, when dynamic GUI depends on async data.
    Even a simple thing as reading a text file is not simple at all.

    Sunday, April 07, 2013

    $150 Android Tablet ASUS MeMO Pad

    As expected, price of Android tablets is adjusting.
    Every school student should have one.
    iPad is great, but it is expensive, and too large for kids.
    Amazon.com: ASUS MeMO Pad ME172V-A1-GR 7-Inch 16GB Tablet (Grey): Computers & Accessories


    Why is Google Nexus 7, almost identical device, more expensive ($199)? Asus MeMO Pad even has SD memory slot.

    Even Samsung has adjusted price of its 7" tablet ($179)

    Windows AzureConf 2013 Spring

    Windows AzureConf 2013 Spring

    April 23, 2013
    9:00 AM - 6:00 PM PST

    On April 23, 2013, Microsoft will be hosting Windows AzureConf, a free event for the Windows Azure community. This event will feature a keynote presentation by Scott Guthrie, along with numerous sessions executed by Windows Azure community members. Streamed live for an online audience on Channel 9

    Saturday, April 06, 2013

    Animating lists with CSS 3 transitions

    Modern browsers (HTML5/CSS3) could be fast, when used properly:

    Animating lists with CSS 3 transitions - Steve Sanderson’s blog - As seen on YouTube™:
    • For animations to be smooth and hardware-accelerated, they have to be done with transform: translate3d
    • Even so, element positions should still be determined by the DOM structure (minimizing use of JavaScript)

    podcast PhoneGap/Cordova - Is HTML a reasonable app solution? With Steve Sanderson @ hanselminutes

    Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available

    Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available - Somasegar's blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs


    Download VS2012.2

    Friday, April 05, 2013

    HTML5 - Intel Developer Zone

    After ARM has won (for now) mobile CPU battle,
    even Intel is a big supporter of HTML5 apps,
    and providing various potentially useful tools.

    One of tools is a PhoneGap "fork" recently acquired from AppMobi,
    and there is even a converter from Objective-C to HTML5!
    While it would make more sense to optimize for performance
    (C is at least 10 times faster than JavaScript),
    reality is that for most apps that makes no difference...
    HTML5 | Intel® Developer Zone

    "The Intel® HTML5 App Porter Tool - BETA is a stand-alone application that helps mobile developers translate portions of their iOS* applications into HTML5, allowing them to focus on key porting challenges."

    Wednesday, April 03, 2013

    Google Chrome "Blink", Firefox + Samsung "Servo"

    Chromium Blog: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project


    Google Chrome Browser, and related open source Chromium,
    is based on WebKit engine that Apple first used in Safari.
    Google is now "forking" this base to new project "Blink"
    in an effort to simplify the codebase
    (removing 4.5 million lines of code!)

    A Second Act for Firefox?

    Firefox creator Mozilla has announced that it's working with Samsung on Servo,
    a new rendering engine which is written in a programming language called Rust


    Firefox is trying to stay relevant,
    Samsung keeping options open (to reduce dependence on Google)
    and Google looking for more freedom "to innovate".
    Competition is good.

    Monday, April 01, 2013

    Fabric.js: JavaScript Canvas Library

    Script Junkie | Introduction to Fabric.js: Part 1 @ MSDN

    "Fabric.js—a powerful JavaScript library that makes working with the HTML5 canvas element a breeze. Fabric provides a missing object model for canvas, as well as an SVG parser, a layer of interactivity, and a whole suite of other indispensable tools. It is a fully open-source project, licensed under MIT, with many contributions over the years."


    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4