Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Internet of Things | Autolib

Internet of Things | Autolib' (Microsoft Windows Embedded)

"By creating an intelligent system that connects hundreds of handheld devices, more than 4,300 charging stations, 850 registration kiosks and 2,300 cars, Autolib’ is harnessing streams of data, gaining insights that allow it to better predict customer behavior, optimize car utilization and attract new members. "

Read the case study

IE critical zero-day exploit. Solution: Browser VM?

Windows XP Critical zero-day exploit - Internet Explorer all versions affected & no fix in sight - Stabley Times:
windows-XP-defaul-broken-security-flaw-1024x640

It may be time to "virtual-ise" web browsing.
The browser could run in a "thin" OS VM
with no access to local file system.

Windows 7 (pro) and newer already comes with HyperV,
and there are other free tools like VirtualBox.

This could be an opportunity to make ChromeOS or FirefoxOS
as a VM, essentially minimum Linux (or WinRT) kernel and a web browser.

Windows already had ability to run "compatibility mode" VM for single program.
It may be possible to make make similar for IE...

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Neural Networks for Machine Learning | Coursera

Interesting demonstration of using (artificial) neural network
for "imagining" shapes of digits, by reversing direction.

Neural Networks for Machine Learning | Coursera:


"Learn about artificial neural networks and how they're being used for machine learning, as applied to speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modeling language and human motion, etc. We'll emphasize both the basic algorithms and the practical tricks needed to get them to work well."


Monday, April 28, 2014

TED: SixthSense technology => Samsung?

4 years ago:
Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Talk Video | TED.com


SixthSense - a wearable gestural interface (MIT Media Lab)

Pranav Mistry

Well, all this "magic" evolved into a marketing "talk" with Samsung...
SAMSUNG Reveals GALAXY GEAR SMARTWATCH - Pranav Mistry at Unpacked IFA 2013- HD - YouTube
Pranav Mistry, Head of Samsung Think Tank Team presenting Samsung Galaxy GEAR

If he continued improving his MIT demo, Facebook would buy it for a $1B :)
But with Samsung, it may become a real product... would be nice.







Sunday, April 27, 2014

IoT: Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service

Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service (aka IoT) Limited Beta | Coding4Fun Blog | Channel 9:

"The Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service helps enterprises embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) by securely connecting, managing and capturing machine-generated data from a variety of sensors and devices. Watch this video to see how IoT is transforming the world’s first underground railway"



course: Data Visualization for Developers

Data Visualization for Developers - Online Training Course for Developers:
by: Dan Appleman @ pluralsight

The Rules:
  1. Start with story you want to tell, or question you want to ask
  2. Have a contrast to show the story or question
  3. Focus on data
  4. Don't "make people think" (make it obvious)
Humans are good in observing: 
  • differences in nearby objects (edges, side-by-side)
  • spotting contrast, object on a distinct background
  • and observing moving objects
and nothing else. Objects that are far away can't be compared.
Comparing area / size is very difficult, as well as similar colors. 

Only recommended charts: 
  • Horizontal bar charts
  • Vertical bar (column) charts (same width bars)
  • Line charts
  • Scatter charts
  • plus table with original data
Stacked bar charts, as well as pie charts are not recommended.
Use multiple charts instead mixing multiple. 


One more JavaScript/Canvas charting library (rgraph.net)


Is using using SVG / VML, bust still is simple JavaScript.
Warning: Google's library must be included from google.com, not re-distributed. 

Tiny ARM-Based chip for Internet of Things

Freescale Intros Tiny ARM-Based MCU for Internet of Things | News & Opinion | PCMag.com:

Freescale Semiconductor ... smallest-ever ARM-based microcontroller unit (MCU) for embedded devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) market, the Kinetsis KL03... is "smaller than a golf ball dimple" —the 32-bit MCU with an ARM Cortex-M0+ computing core shrinks the preceding KL02 unit by 15 percent in a package that measures just 1.6-by-2.0 millimeters.
Freescale Kinetsis KL03 Golf Ball
The MCU will be made available at volume for $0.75 per unit in 100,000-unit...
...48MHz ARM ... 32KB of flash memory, 2KB of RAM, and 8K of ROM


Saturday, April 26, 2014

"3D" Parallax View with Google Camera

DEPTHY the Lens Blur viewer:
"Make a photo using Lens Blur mode and load it using the button below.
Photos are processed on your device - no uploading!
It works on your Android device too!"


Google Camera - Android Apps on Google Play
The app saves images data in such way to preserve more (or multiple) info,
a the viewer then can simulate 3D=like view by slight movements.

Google Camera - screenshot thumbnail

Note: Works only on phones and tablets running Android 4.4+ KitKat

S vremena na vreme - Moj svet


YouTube Search

Moj svet - S vremena na vreme
Svako vreme ostaje
  u sećanju vršnjaka svojih
kao vreme ludosti
  strahova i radosti
al' ono što mu daje sjaj
  to je neko drugo vreme

Neprohodnim stazama
   išlo se u novo sutra
u ono magično
   što nikad nije konačno
u nama tinja isti žar
   i ista pesma je u nama

Moj svet
   čaroban i lep
sigurnost mi daje
   ka novom me vodi
moj svet
   čaroban i lep
sigurnost mi daje
   ja verujem u to...


Infographic: The Internet of Things

Infographic: The Internet of Things | News & Opinion | PCMag.com:
"While there's been a lot of discussion about whether the Internet makes us dumb, a new infographic from SAP explores how companies and municipalities deploying so-called smart technologies can improve our lives rather than turn us into bleary-eyed dummies."

Internet of Things

Distributed Datа: Consistency

Don't Settle for Eventual Consistency - ACM Queue:

"Geo-replication brings two key benefits to Web services: fault tolerance and low latency. It provides fault tolerance through redundancy: if one data center fails, others can continue to provide the service. It provides low latency through proximity: clients can be directed to and served by a nearby data center to avoid speed-of-light delays associated with cross-country or round-the-globe communication. 



Geo-replication brings its challenges, however. The famous CAP theorem, conjectured by Brewer1 and proved by Gilbert and Lynch,7 shows it is impossible to create a system that has strong consistency, is always available for reads and writes, and is able to continue operating during network partitions."



Dont Settle for Eventual Consistency



This experiment shows that for this real-world workload Eiger's causal consistency and stronger semantics do not impose significant overhead.

UX: the internet of things on Pinterest

UX: the internet of things on Pinterest:

Infographic Journal on Bloglovin

The Internet of Things: Heading Towards a Smart Planet 

Learning Path: AngularJS @ pluralsight

Learning Path: AngularJS:



AngularJS has held the top spot at Pluralsight for several months, so it’s about time for an AngularJS learning path!

There is something a bit strange about Angular, to take so much attention...
And it is not an easy technology, it is just easy to start... 

The sooner "web components"  become part of HTML, the better,
since most of this "glue" is better in browser, not in script libraries. 



Amazon Coins

Amazon.com: 500 Amazon Coins: Amazon Coins:

  • Purchase Amazon Coins and save up to 10% on apps, games, and in-app items.
  • Use Amazon Coins on your Kindle Fire, Android device, and Amazon.com.
  • Amazon Coins are redeemable on thousands of apps, games, and in-app items.
  • Give Amazon Coins to friends and family.
Amazon Coins
Not quite like BitCoin, but good marketing.
Essentially a virtual gift card.

Numerical Libraries for F# and .NET

Overview: Numerical Libraries for F# and .NET Framework:

Math.NET Numerics is released under the MIT license (allowing unlimited commercial and noncommercial use). 
The F# PowerPack and the F# MathProvider are both released under Apache 2.0 license (allowing unlimited commercial and noncommercial use). 
Microsoft Software Foundation is available in several versions. The Express edition is freely available, Standard edition is available as part of MSDN Subscription and Enterprise/Academic version can be obtained either commercially or as part of MSDN Academic Alliance. 

Friday, April 25, 2014

javascript: Polynomial regression

regression.js is a javascript library containing a collection of least squares fitting methods for finding a trend in a set of data. It currently contains methods for linear, exponential, logarithmic, power and polynomial trends


it even has nice charting by using flot.js


Polynomial Regression Data Fit (polysolve, js)
another online tool, with charting


Polynomial interpolation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The red dots denote the data points (xk,yk),
while the blue curve shows the interpolation polynomial.

edX course: Learning From Data (Caltech)


Learning From Data MOOC - The Lectures

CaltechX: CS1156x: Learning From Data | edX:
  • Free, introductory Machine Learning online course (MOOC)
  • Taught by Caltech Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa [article]
  • Lectures recorded from a live broadcast, including Q&A
  • Prerequisites: Basic probability, matrices, and calculus
  • 8 homework sets and a final exam
  • Discussion forum for participants
  • Topic-by-topic video library for easy review
Machine Learning Video Library - Learning From Data (Abu-Mostafa)

Map of Machine Learning (Abu-Mostafa)

Learning From Data: Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Hsuan-Tien Lin: 9781600490064: Amazon.com: Books

LFD logo

Another "MOOC" class,
interesting comparison with Cousera / Stanford
and Udacity / GeogiaTech

Online Education: Cal Tech vs. Stanford Machine Learning Courses - Anders.com


And apparently YouTube is  THE place to store all knowledge (and other stuff) of the world... And apparently a very profitable business for Google.






telerik/kendo-ui-core : free & open source

telerik/kendo-ui-core · GitHub:

"Kendo UI is everything you need to build sites and apps with HTML5 & JavaScript & Kendo UI Core is the free and open-source version of Kendo UI that provides access to the web's best UI widgets and key framework features essential for developing great experiences for the web and mobile."

It is not easy to compete with "free" like jQuery.
In fact, it may be a good business for Telerik to offer a free version,
since most enterprise developers would rather pay for support than not...

Kendo UI Labs · GitHub

Telerik · GitHub

HTML5 Canvas Tutorials

HTML5 Canvas Tutorials, Labs, and Articles:



Thursday, April 24, 2014

Second Screen: Google Cast API

Casting Your Content to the Big Screen - Google Cast — Google Developers: "Google Cast is a technology that enables multi-screen experiences and lets a user send and control content like video from a small computing device like a phone, tablet, or laptop to a large display device like a television. 

The sender may be a phone or tablet running on Android or iOS, or it may be a laptop computer running Chrome OS, Mac OS, or Windows. A sender application running on the sender device uses the Google Cast API appropriate to its operating system to discover and transmit to the receiver application running on the receiver device. You can use the sender APIs to enable your Android, iOS, or Chrome app to send content to a large display."

There is some "magic" in chromecast device WiFi setup,
since it can communicate with another WiFi device on the same router

even before being configured.


Windows 8.1 Backup and File History

Create a complete System Image Backup with Windows 8.1 and File History - Scott Hanselman:

image

How to Create and Restore System Image Backups on Windows 8.1

advanced-options-system-image-recovery

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

tool: GNU Octave

A tool used for Machine Learning | Coursera

GNU Octave:
"GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. Octave is normally used through its interactive command line interface, but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs. The Octave language is quite similar to Matlab so that most programs are easily portable."

screenshot

GNU Octave - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Visualize: Power View, Power Map

Visualize | Power BI:

Microsoft Office 365:
Visualize with Power View and Power Map for Excel
Data tells a story


IoT: Microsoft CityNext

Microsoft CityNext:

"Empowering People to Create More Sustainable and Economically Competitive Cities"



2020 vision: how our cities will look 60 months from now





Keynote at 13th Cloud Expo | Tim Park, Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft - YouTube



  • messaging based communication (MQTT, AMQT) instead of client-server; 
  • importance of shared schemas











Earth Day

Earth Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:





Earth Day Network | Earth Day 2014

Monday, April 21, 2014

IoT: Eclipse Paho MQTT

Interview with Andy Piper on the Eclipse Paho project (MQTT implementation) and the Internet of Things  @ InfoQ
Andy Piper, project lead of the Eclipse Paho project, which provides clients for the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol in a variety of languages.

MQTT originated in the industrial sector in the late 1990s – the first implementation was in 1999, to be precise. Companies wanting to monitor industrial and mechanical systems (think pipelines, oil pressures, water levels etc) needed a very lightweight technology, suitable for running on constrained systems and devices.

MQTT is a very light, publish/subscribe, asynchronous messaging protocol, ideal for the Internet of Things, mobile, and sensor networks. It started out at IBM, but in the past few years it has gone open source, with a standard being agreed at OASIS – so it is much more widespread than just being an IBM thing these days.

What kinds of Quality of Service does MQTT provide?
  • QoS 0 is essentially "fire and forget" – the message may arrive, it may not, but the data probably isn't critical anyway (in most cases the message will be delivered somewhere, of course, but there's no double-check to make sure that happens).
  • QoS 1 makes a bit more of an effort to ensure a message arrives: if an acknowledgement of receipt isn't received from the broker, we'll re-send the message again but with a duplicate header byte set, just in case.
  • QoS 2 is closer to the two-phase commit world and tries to offer once and once-only delivery, for data where you want to be sure the broker did receive the message for onward delivery. 
...compare MQTT with, say, AMQP, STOMP, or ØMQ.

MQTT It isn't a full-featured enterprise messaging protocol with fine-grained controls, ultra-reliable queueing, like AMQP; but it also isn't a queue grafted on top of a TCP socket like ØMQ


MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) V3.1 Protocol Specification @ IBM
  • The publish/subscribe message pattern to provide one-to-many message distribution and decoupling of applications
  • A messaging transport that is agnostic to the content of the payload
  • The use of TCP/IP to provide basic network connectivity





Comcast IoT: Smart Home

TecHome Builder Summit - The go-to technology resource for homebuilders.: "Comcast Xfinity Home, wants to equip homes with security cameras, door and window sensors, connected light switches, thermostats and more—and allow you smartphone control of your home from your work or office or while you’re on vacation."


Comcast - Internet of Things
including expansion of WiFi
Essentially, marketing departments are adopting IoT,
including any internet connected device... makes business sense...




Sunday, April 20, 2014

IoT: Azure+Netduino+Windows Phone

The Internet of Things with the Azure cloud, Netduino, Windows Phone, and lots of other buzzwords | RogueCode:



15 min talk from Build 2014

#IoTH: The Internet of Things and Humans

#IoTH: The Internet of Things and Humans - O'Reilly Radar:

"The IoT requires thinking about how humans and things cooperate differently when things get smarter."

by Tim O'Reilly

morris.js

morris.js:
"good-looking charts shouldn't be difficult"

for time-series data

morrisjs/morris.js · GitHub

demo: How Many Left?

IBM IoT: Data - New Natural Resource

IBM Crunches Internet Of Things Data - InformationWeek

IBM: Big Data: The New Natural Resource | The Big Data Hub:




IBM - A Smarter Planet - Overview - United States



Internet of Things & Data Smart Web (==)

Internet of Things Expo:

where: Javits Center, New York
from: 2014-06-10
to: 2014-06-12

"The Internet of Things (IoT) is the biggest idea since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago.

Why? Because the "things" are not just desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. The "things" come from the world of sensor-driven Big Data that is even now expanding the size of the Web beyond what we thought just a few years ago.


How big? Estimates from everyone from Gartner to the US Government foresee a 100X time increase -- then a 1,000X increase -- in Web traffic over the next few years. The world will need hundreds of billions of dollars of new servers, memory, storage, and data centers. The challenge to software developers will be increasing as never before."




Obviously, there is a business need and benefit to connect many "things".
It is already technically possible, in fact it was possible for a while.

The danger is that over-eager big businesses may end up making too complex solutions, that may not be a good platforms for the long-term.
Think "SOA". The "industry" needs a new buzzword every year.

Before TCP/IP and Ineternet, there was many "enterprise-ready", solid networking solutions. Does anybody remembers ISO/OSI now?
And then, before web's simple HTML/HTTP, there was many services on early (academic) Internet. Anybody remembers "Gopher" now?

If there was not "WWW", Internet would not be what it is now.
Technology would improve, but much slower, because it was complex and closed. Even "Mobile" would not be what it is, first iPhone's was about web browsing.

IoT is a useful push, but what it really needs it a higher level abstraction platform, like WWW was for Internet.
HTML & HTTP ware essential to make TCP/IP popular.

When WWW was created, there was no shortage of attempts to utilize "hypertext", and to connect distant networks. WWW was "special" because it was simple, and open. So simple in fact to be imagined and created by a single person, who was solving a real need at the time, in a generic way. Higher level of abstraction.

For IoT to work well on the long run, a simple "data smart web" platform is needed, and something like a Mosaic & Netscape web browser was.
IoT is an extension of Internet, and "Data Smart Web" is an extension of the "Web." 

Not an academic "semantic web", but a simple extension of WWW to work well with data from devices. Could it be already here, waiting to be "discovered", just like HTML was a simplification of SGML, and HTTP resembled other protocols of that time. So what is a "SGML for data" today?

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Polynomial regression - Rosetta Code

Regression analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term "regression" was coined by Francis Galton in the nineteenth century to describe a biological phenomenon. The phenomenon was that the heights of descendants of tall ancestors tend to regress down towards a normal average (a phenomenon also known as regression toward the mean)

Polynomial regression - Rosetta Code:

Find an approximating polynom of known degree for a given data.

Example: For input data:
x = {0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,   7,   8,   9,   10};
y = {1,  6,  17, 34, 57, 86, 121, 162, 209, 262, 321};
The approximating polynom is:
3 x2 + 2 x + 1




Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site. The idea is to present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible, to demonstrate how languages are similar and different, and to aid a person with a grounding in one approach to a problem in learning another. Rosetta Code currently has 730 tasks, 125 draft tasks, and is aware of 533 languages, though we do not (and cannot) have solutions to every task in every language.

IFTTT

About IFTTT - IFTTT:

FTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement: "if this then that"If this, then that. We call 'this' the Trigger, and 'that' the Action. Together, it is a Recipe.

IFTTT is pronounced like “gift” without the “g.”

IFTTT

  • Channels 
    are the basic building blocks of IFTTT. Each Channel has its own Triggers and Actions, like email, facebook, weather...
  • TriggersThe this part of a Recipe is a Trigger. Some example Triggers are “I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook” or “I check in on Foursquare.”
  • IngredientsPieces of data from a Trigger are called Ingredients. For example, the Ingredients of an Email Trigger could be: subject, body, attachment, received date, and the sender’s address.
  • Recipes
    • Personal Recipes are a combination of a Trigger and an Action from your active Channels.
    • Shared Recipes are useful templates shared by the IFTTT community. 
    • Most Personal Recipes check for new Trigger data every 15 minutes, some are even faster.
    • Personal Recipes can be turned on and off.

SmartThings.com

SmartThings:
"SmartThings lets you control lights, electronics, and switches from anywhere... and more. 

SmartThings offers you security, peace of mind, and limitless possibilities by being compatabile with hundreds of existing Zigbee, Z-Wave, and popular smart devices. Once you have the Hub and free mobile app, you can control and monitor your entire connected home from your smartphone."

Official SmartThings Shop - Buy Starter Kits, Hubs, Solutions, and popular smart home products

SmartThings

Some things About SmartThings | Scratchable Devices Blog
by Dr Michael L. Littman

Friday, April 18, 2014

2014 Honda Accord Hybrid

2014 Honda Accord Hybrid Review and Road Test - YouTube:

50 mpg

review includes details of interesting, advanced, hybrid drive system

   

2014 Honda Accord Hybrid Overview - Official Site

2014 Honda Accord Hybrid Test – Review – Car and Driver
Just a few years ago, pundits were wondering how in the world 2025-model-year cars would achieve the government-mandated 54.5 mpg CAFE bogey. Now we know: without a transmission.
(one more lesson learned from Tesla Model S)


JSON-LD - JSON for Linking Data

JSON-LD - JSON for Linking Data:
"JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is based on the already successful JSON format and provides a way to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. JSON-LD is an ideal data format for programming environments, REST Web services, and unstructured databases "
JSON-LD logo
{
  "@context": "http://json-ld.org/contexts/person.jsonld",
  "@id": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Lennon",
  "name": "John Lennon",
  "born": "1940-10-09",
  "spouse": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cynthia_Lennon"
}

Used by schema.org, for example for "Thing > Action"

IOT WORLD VIEW - Internet of Things

IOT WORLD VIEW - Internet of Things - News - Key Insights - Wearables:

An aggregation web site about IoT.
Lead by Cisco push,  most of large companies are "on board"
for "post mobile" world...

Internet of Things or Smarter Things?

IOT WORLD VIEW - Internet of Things - News - Key Insights - Wearables | Do we need Internet of Things or Smarter Things?:

Will it be possible to make smarter decisions, in real time, with real time information....without any human interaction? SAP President Steve Lucas delivered a keynote at the Internet of Things World Forum, and he thinks that this is possible.

He showed a logistics/replenishment example, where a driver has to load vending machines with products. The vending machines, with their sensors, determine what they need and share it with the other vending machines. The network then make the decision of what is the optimal route for the driver, and changes the old route. The driver just follows the new instructions.




Interesting presentation... SAP helping automate decision making in complex systems. "Smart" everything, being even "smarter" by being connected, to increase profit from not-so-smart (or healthy) products...
Doable and starting to be done...

SAP Internet of Things - YouTube

IoT: MQTT protocol

MQTT: (MQ Telemetry Transport)"MQTT is a machine-to-machine (M2M)/"Internet of Things" connectivity protocol. It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium".

MQ Telemetry Transport - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Historically, the 'MQ' in 'MQTT' came from IBM's MQ message queuing product line.[4] However, there is no queuing in MQTT.[5] Similarly, although the term Telemetry is used in its title, the protocol is not widely used in the sphere of Telemetry.


Micrisoft Research "Orleans"

Orleans: a Platform for Cloud Computing - Microsoft Research:
"A Framework for Cloud Computing
Orleans is a project to simplify development of scalable cloud services."

Actors allow building a stateful middle tier that has the performance benefits of a cache with the data locality and semantic and consistency benefits of encapsulated entities via application-specific operations. In addition, actors make it easy to implement horizontal, “social”, relations between entities in the middle tier.

Actor platforms such as Erlang and Akka are a step forward in simplifying distributed system programming. However, they still burden developers with many distributed system complexities because of the relatively low level of provided abstractions and system services.

Orleans programming model and runtime, which raises the level of the actor abstraction. Orleans targets developers who are not distributed system experts, although our expert customers have found it attractive too.




research.microsoft.com/pubs/141999/pldi 11 submission public.pdf

Pocast: Microsoft Orleans with Richard Astbury @ .NET Rocks

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Microsoft IoT Cloud for $1.6T

Microsoft Launches IoT Cloud - Business Insider:
  • SQL 2014 in-memory database (feature)
  • A new cloud service called "Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service" that will host IoT apps that can control all of those sensors used with all of those objects. This isn't the first such service. Salesforce offers a similar cloud, called Salesforce1.
  • A new product called the Analytics Platform System (APS) that combines Microsoft's SQL Server database with another trendy database technology called Hadoop. This would be used by companies that want to run their own big data apps in house, instead of using a cloud service. 
vision for the future in a blog titled "The data culture for everyone."

this "data culture" will create a $1.6 trillion business over the next four years, according to an IDC study commissioned by Microsoft.

In about a decade, it will be a $14 trillion market, according to Cisco


Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service | Microsoft
The Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Service helps enterprises embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) by securely connecting, managing and capturing machine-generated data from a variety of sensors and devices. 
@maryjofoley to come up with a code-name for new (IoT) feature/project

Twitter / maryjofoley: @jasonmalinowski @KirillOsenkov ...
Reykjavik


Cars: Top Picks and Tips

Official Kelley Blue Book New Car and Used Car Prices and Values:

top 10 lists, etc










Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Internet of Things: Smart Products and Microsoft Services

presentation @ Channel 9 (Microsoft)

Smart Products and Microsoft Services (Internet of Things) | Subscribe! | Channel 9: "Smart Products and Microsoft Services" (you could also say "Internet of Things with Microsoft Datacenter Services") 

about Public Transportation systems and Connected Car,

Internet of Things or Thing on the Internet?
- Clemens Vasters. - Site Home - MSDN Blogs


Service Assisted Communication” for Connected Devices - Clemens Vasters. - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

OpenSSL TLS Heartbleed in-security

How exactly does the OpenSSL TLS heartbeat (Heartbleed) exploit work? - Information Security Stack Exchange:

"This is not a flaw in TLS; it is a simple memory safety bug in OpenSSL.
Heartbeat allows one endpoint to go "I'm sending you some data, echo it back to me". You send both a length figure and the data itself. The length figure can be up to 64 KiB. Unfortunately, if you use the length figure to claim "I'm sending 64 KiB of data" (for example) and then only really send, say, one byte, OpenSSL would send you back your one byte -- and 64 KiB (minus one) of other data from RAM."



A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: Attack of the week: OpenSSL Heartbleed





Heartbleed victims start to come forward- The Inquirer


Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Security of Internet of Things

Security of Things: 

An Implementers’ Guide to Cyber-Security for Internet of Things

Devices and Beyond



Examples of Internet of Things uses include but are not limited to:
  • Personal: Health and activity monitoring and wearable computing. 
  • Vehicular: Telematics, control systems, and other supporting systems for road, rail, maritime, and air transport. 
  • Smart Homes: Home networks home automation, security, smart meters, entertainment, and domestic appliances. 
  • Smart Buildings: Electricity and building management systems. Electronic access management and monitoring. 
  • Smart Cities: Food safety, power generation and distribution, transit supporting systems and infrastructure, population (monitoring, management, and control), telecommunications, and emergency services supporting systems. 
  • Smart Business: Supply chain management, distribution, telepresence, and document management. 
  • Health Care Life Critical: Life supporting, monitoring, and diagnostics systems used within the health sector. 
  • Industrial: Robotics, industrial automation. 
  • Space: Satellites, space vehicles, and associated supporting systems. 
So it is "Smart Things", or "Smart Internet"... 

JSON Schema

JSON Schema Examples:

Here is a basic example of a JSON Schema:
{
 "title": "Example Schema",
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "firstName": {
   "type": "string"
  },
  "lastName": {
   "type": "string"
  },
  "age": {
   "description": "Age in years",
   "type": "integer",
   "minimum": 0
  }
 },
 "required": ["firstName", "lastName"]
}

Resilient Systems

podcast: RunAs Radio Resiliency with Michael Nygard

circulareconomy - Resilience vs Efficiency:
“Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.”"

"A system is brittle if it is unable to effectively absorb shock"

Consider a plate glass window in comparison to a trampoline net. 

The plate glass window can take a significant shock without budging, but at some point it can no longer absorb an impact and fractures. It is brittle. 

The trampoline net, on the other hand, will be moved by even a minor impact, but because of its ability to deform and stretch, it will not fracture (or tear) until far greater stress is applied then is needed to break the glass window. 


Resilience (network) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computer networking: “Resiliency is the ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation.”

R.I.P. Vecxo



Sunday, April 13, 2014

Raspberry Pi Compute Module

Raspberry Pi Compute Module: new product! | Raspberry Pi:
"The compute module contains the guts of a Raspberry Pi (the BCM2835 processor and 512Mbyte of RAM) as well as a 4Gbyte eMMC Flash device (which is the equivalent of the SD card in the Pi). This is all integrated on to a small 67.6x30mm board which fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector (the same type of connector as used for laptop memory*)...

Size: "new" vs. "old" Raspberry Pi
CM_and_pi-small
unit cost of around $30 in batches of 100



Full Stack Developers

The Full Stack, Part I: @ Facebook



"A "full-stack programmer" is a generalist, someone who can create a non-trivial application by themselves. People who develop broad skills also tend to develop a good mental model of how different layers of a system behave. This turns out to be especially valuable for performance & optimization work. No one can know everything about everything, but you should be able to visualize what happens up and down the stack as an application does its thing. An application is shaped by the requirements of its data, and performance is shaped by how quickly hardware can throw data around."



Full-stack developers - O'Reilly Radar

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Mobile Apps vs Mobile Web

cdixon tumblr, The decline of the mobile web:



image



image

Internet of Things Business

Business models that make the Internet of Things feasible - O'Reilly Radar:

  • Internet and phone service providers.
  • Construction firms and others who already do home upgrades, such as HVAC companies
  • Major retailers. Examples: Staples Connect and Lowes Iris

Snap.svg

Snap.svg - Home: "The JavaScript SVG library for the modern web."
by creator of popular Raphael.js, now working in Adobe.

Snap.svg is available under an Apache 2 license which means it’s completely open-source, and completely free.




Machine Learning Courses @ Udacity & Coursera

Machine Learning Course On Supervised Learning - Udacity:
Conversations on Analyzing Data
new class, with


Alternative:
Machine Learning | Coursera
by Andrew Ng
Stanford University
(co-founder of Coursera)