Sunday, December 31, 2017

National Parks Calendars 2018

It is amazing how much can be done quickly
with simple HTML tables (vs designer preferred DIVs)

Design optimized for viewing on mobile phones,
or printing on Legal or Tabloid size paper.

NP Calendar 2018 English Mobile PDF

NP Calendar 2018 Serbian Cyrillic Mobile PDF

NP Calendar 2018 Serbian Latin Mobile PDF


Design good for printing:

NPS Calendar 2018 English Letter PDF

NP Calendar 2018 Serbian Cyrillic A4 PDF

NP Calendar 2018 Serbian Latin A4 PDF


Please support National Park Service
donate to National Park Foundation

Public domain photos for the calendars
from: Wikimedia Foundation

Data Sets marketplace: DataCircle.io




DataCircle - Sharing Data
"Find, Buy, Sell and Exchange Data Sets easy"

"DataCircle is a data exchange network where you can find, buy, sell and exchange datasets easily. It is great for researchers, educators and students—there are more than 50 dataset categories... DataCircle is also dedicated to helping open communities—there is a free tier to use, share, and exchange free data assets."


There was a similar (purpose) service "Microsoft DataMarket" available on Microsoft Azure, now being retired


The actual viable data market is Kaggle, now owned by Google. 


Saturday, December 30, 2017

Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service

Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service is generally available | Blog | Microsoft Azure
"The Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service ... enables... to configure zero-touch device provisioning to Azure IoT Hub, and it brings the scalability of the cloud to what was once a laborious one-at-a-time process...
  • Zero-touch provisioning to a single IoT solution without requiring hardcoded IoT Hub connection information in the factory (initial setup).
  • Automatically configuring devices based on solution-specific needs.
  • Load balancing devices across multiple hubs.
  • Connecting devices to their owner’s IoT solution based on sales transaction data (multitenancy).
  • Connecting devices to a specific IoT solution depending on use-case (solution isolation).
  • Connecting a device to the IoT hub with the nearest geo-location.
  • Re-provisioning based on a change in the device, such as a change in ownership or location."


Thursday, December 28, 2017

$Azure > $AWS ?


"AWS revenue grew 43% in the quarter, with quarterly earnings of $3.66 billion, annualized to $14.6 billion.

Microsoft reported that its Intelligent Cloud division grew 11% to $6.8 billion, and that the Commercial Cloud division has a annualized run rate of $15.2 billion...

free class: Alexa: The Beginners Guide To Development



Alexa: The Beginners Guide To Development - A Cloud Guru

"In this course you will learn how to build 10 different skills for the Amazon Echo / Alexa service."

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Chaos Engineering @ Netflix, Twilio

Chaos Engineering @InfoQ

"Thirty years ago, Jim Gray noted that “A way to improve availability is to install proven hardware and software, and then leave it alone.” 

For companies that provide services over the Internet, “leaving it alone” isn't an option. Such service providers must continually make changes to increase the service's value, such as adding features and improving performance. At Netflix, engineers push new code into production and modify run-time configuration parameters hundreds of times a day."

Predictable system load: orange is predicted trend, blue is measured


Chaos Engineering at Twilio

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

IOTA: IoT + blockchain

Robert Bosch Venture Capital bets on IOTA as it invests in the future of IoT | VentureBeat

"IOTA is the first distributed ledger technology (DLT) to go beyond a blockchain — it enables machines to securely transact data and money with each other for a micro fee. Imagine a car that, from sensor data, retrieves information from Bosch about a malfunctioning car part."




"IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger (cryptocurrency) focused on providing secure communications and payments between machines on the Internet of Things. Using directed acyclic graph (DAG) technology instead of the traditional blockchain, IOTA's transactions are free regardless of the size of the transaction, confirmation times are fast, the number of transactions the system can handle simultaneously is unlimited, and the system can easily scale."

Latest foundation logo

link from:

Monday, December 25, 2017

Office Voice-Activated Assistants

CenturyLinkVoice: How Voice-Activated Assistants Will Change The Office

"By 2019, analysts at Gartner say that voice will play a role in 1 in 5 smartphone interactions."


Google and Amazon’s spat is the first skirmish in a platform war.
"We’ve seen these kinds of platform wars before..."
Photo illustration by Slate. Images by Google, Amazon and Thinkstock.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Creative Economy vs. Competitive Advantage


It's Official! The End Of Competitive Advantage @Forbes

"...competitive advantage is transient, not sustainable.
To operate, we need a new set of assumptions about how the world works
and “a new playbook to compete and win when competitive advantages are transient.
...
In the Creative Economy, where the quest is to find the next opportunity, 'companies are getting better at figuring out what people really need and will pay for, at designing better experiences, and at wresting new efficiencies from existing assets.'”

Friday, December 22, 2017

filesystem: FAT32 vs. exFAT vs. NTFS

Why your USB drive's file format matters: FAT32 vs. exFAT vs. NTFS | PCWorld

"FAT32 limitation is that it has a file size limit of 4GB

exFAT: maximum file size of 16 exabytes
One downside to exFAT is that it doesn’t have any journaling functionality,

NTFS can be read by Mac OSes, but not written to without third-party software. This means if you plug an NTFS-formatted thumbdrive into a Mac you can copy the contents from it, but you can’t alter the contents or write to it, so it’s not good for cross-platform sharing.

In summary, for USB drives, you should use exFAT if you’re in a Windows and Mac environment, and NTFS if you’re only using Windows."

What’s the Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS?

FAT32 vs. NTFS vs. exFAT - Difference Between Three File Systems


(more is better)
FAT32 vs. exFAT vs. NTFS USB3 Performance Comparison
When writing a small number of large files to a USB3 disk, the mature FAT32 file system outperforms the exFAT file system by 2% and the NTFS file system by 11% making it clear that the NTFS and exFAT file systems are more optimized for large numbers of small files while the simpler FAT32 file system takes the lead when working with a small number of large files

Differences between FAT and NTFS @ SanDisk.com

"NTFS has several improvements over FAT such as improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures for reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions such as security access control lists and file system journaling.

Notes for Flash Drives:
  • Formatting the flash drive as NTFS will make it unwriteable on a Mac computer. Most Mac computers can read NTFS, but not write.
  • NTFS is a journaled file system, this creates more read/write activities. Therefore, it MAY decrease life expectancy of your flash drive.
  • Once the device is formatted as NTFS, you MUST use "Safely Remove Hardware" to remove your device."




Tuesday, December 19, 2017

ML containers: Google Kubeflow


google/kubeflow: Machine Learning Toolkit for Kubernetes
"The Kubeflow project is dedicated to making Machine Learning on Kubernetes easy, portable and scalable:
  • A JupyterHub to create & manage interactive Jupyter notebooks
  • A Tensorflow Training Controller that can be configured to use CPUs or GPUs, and adjusted to the size of a cluster with a single setting
  • A TF Serving container"

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Forecasting with Excel 2016


Part of a spreadsheet showing the table of forecasted numbers and a forecast chart

Create a forecast in Excel 2016 for Windows - Excel


FORECAST.ETS Function (Exponential Triple Smoothing) in Excel - YouTube

FORECAST.LINEAR & FORECAST.ETS Functions in Excel 2016 - YouTube

Forecasting methods and formulas - Inventory Optimization Software - Lokad

MS Excel: How to use the FORECAST Function (WS)

Forecasting functions (reference) - Office Support

Exponential smoothing - Wikipedia

Holt-Winters Forecasting for Dummies (or Developers) - Part I - Gregory Trubetskoy
Implementation of Holt-Winters algorithms in Python 2
Python

In pursuit of happiness!: Holt-Winters Triple exponential smoothing
ExponentialSmoothing/HoltWinters.java at master · nchandra/ExponentialSmoothing
Java

holt-winters/holt-winters.c at master · pierre/holt-winters
C

tgres/tgres: Time Series in Go and PostgreSQL
GoLang



Plan B for internet: Danny Hillis @ TED

Danny Hillis: The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B - YouTube
"In the 1970s and 1980s, a generous spirit suffused the internet, whose users were few and far between. But today, the net is ubiquitous, connecting billions of people, machines and essential pieces of infrastructure -- leaving us vulnerable to cyber-attack or meltdown. Internet pioneer Danny Hillis argues that the Internet wasn't designed for this kind of scale, and sounds a clarion call for us to develop a Plan B: a parallel system to fall back on should -- or when -- the Internet crashes."


Microsoft Azure has private network that connects its data centers all over the world. 
Very likely AWS and Google have the same.
If big cloud service providers have direct connections, 
and the users find a way to connect to one of their access point, that could be "plan B". 
How to connect? Maybe Low Earth Orbit satellites...


Linus Torvalds @TED

The mind behind Linux | Linus Torvalds - YouTube

"Linus Torvalds transformed technology twice — first with the Linux kernel, which helps power the Internet, and again with Git, the source code management system used by developers worldwide. In a rare interview with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds discusses with remarkable openness"

AI: Azure Bot Service, Language Understanding

Announcing the General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding, enabling developers to build better conversational bots | Blog | Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Services Language Understanding (LUIS) are both generally available.

"Azure Bot Service enables developers to create conversational interfaces on multiple channels while Language Understanding (LUIS) helps developers create customized natural interactions on any platform for any type of application, including bots."


Bitcoin $ trillionaire?

Could Satoshi Nakamoto become the world's first trillionaire?
"We don't know the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin... But if Nakamoto is a single person, they're currently the 52nd richest person in the world when measured against Forbes' list of billionaires. And judging by the way Bitcoin's price has exploded, they might soon sit on top of that list, potentially as the world's first trillionaire."



Bitcoin Price | Bitcoin.com Charts

Bitcoin.com Charts

Bitcoin price | index, chart and news | WorldCoinIndex

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Azure IoT Edge update

Microsoft Announces Public Preview of IoT Edge
"IoT Edge uses modules to provide units of execution as part of device message processing and the release extends the previous SDK allowing containers to be executed as part of this processing pipeline. You can use either Linux containers for Docker or Windows containers for Docker."


"IoT Edge adds several capabilities to the previous SDK including:"

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Azure Durable Functions

Durable Functions in Azure Functions | Azure Friday | Channel 9

Durable Functions overview (docs)

"Durable Functions is an extension of Azure Functions and Azure WebJobs that lets you write stateful functions in a serverless environment. The extension manages state, checkpoints, and restarts for you.
The extension lets you define stateful workflows in a new type of function called an orchestrator function. Here are some of the advantages of orchestrator functions:
  • They define workflows in (C#) code. No JSON schemas or designers are needed.
  • They can call other functions synchronously and asynchronously. Output from called functions can be saved to local variables.
  • They automatically checkpoint their progress whenever the function awaits. Local state is never lost if the process recycles or the VM reboots."

Durable Task Framework extension for Azure Functions (GitHub repo)

Durable Functions and Bindings Extensibility Preview Announcement (blog)


Azure IoT Hub

Azure IoT Hub | Azure Friday | Channel 9

Azure IoT Hub
IoT solution architecture

Microsoft Azure IoT Reference Architecture (PDF)


Wednesday, December 13, 2017

IoT security: Mirai vs Minecraft (and internet)

The Mirai Botnet Was Part of a College Student Minecraft Scheme | WIRED

"...distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack a hundred times larger than most of its kind
...
many of the Mirai assaults had appeared to target 
Minecraft gaming servers. 
...
The brains behind Mirai were a 21-year-old Rutgers college student from suburban New Jersey and his two college-age friends from outside Pittsburgh and New Orleans... “They didn’t realize the power they were unleashing,” says FBI
...
At its peak, the self-replicating computer worm had enslaved some 600,000 devices around the world
...
Mirai attack was unlike anything anyone on the internet had ever seen, the first thermonuclear bomb of the DDoS world, topping out at 1.1 terabits per second as more than 145,000 infected devices bombarded OVH with unwanted traffic

...
Until then, a large DDoS attack was often considered to be 10 to 20 gigibits per second
...
Since Mirai malware exists only in flash memory, it was deleted every time the device was powered off or restarted.
..."

"Mirai (Japanese for "the future", 未来) is a malware that turns networked devices running Linux into remotely controlled "bots" that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as IP cameras and home routers.
...
Devices infected by Mirai continuously scan the internet for the IP address of Internet of things (IoT) devices..."

2016 Dyn cyberattack - Wikipedia

"The 2016 Dyn cyberattack took place on October 21, 2016, and involved multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) targeting systems operated by Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn, which caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America"



Closed vs Open Source: The Cathedral and the Bazaar (book online)

A story about how Linux and other open source wins.
Psychological advantages of open source. 

CatB Book Cover
The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (book online)

.NET Core Windows Compatibility Pack

Easing into .NET Core with the Windows Compatibility Pack @InfoQ

"Microsoft recommends an incremental transition:
  • Migrate to ASP.NET Core (while still targeting the .NET Framework)
  • Migrate to .NET Core (while staying on Windows)
  • Migrate to Linux
  • Migrate to Azure"
Announcing the Windows Compatibility Pack for .NET Core | .NET Blog
"This package is meant for developers that need to port existing .NET Framework code to .NET Core. "


Monday, December 11, 2017

Microsoft quantum computing: Q#

Microsoft offers developers a preview of its quantum computing kit

"Developers hoping to get on the quantum computer train early can now get started with Microsoft's Quantum Development Kit, a free preview version of which was released today. The kit, which was first announced at Microsoft's Ignite conference in September, includes the Q# programming language, a quantum computing simulator that can simulate 30 logical qubits of power and a companion collection of documentation..."


How about I# for AI :)

Sunday, December 10, 2017

leaning to code: Codesters

one more site used in some schools, like a video game,
without even mentioning concepts of programming languages, or Python...
Why not at least mention to students how things work?

Home | Codesters

Free demo:
Building your First Program - Intro to Codesters | Codesters Curriculum

img
"
def click():
    sprite.say("Hey there Codester!")
    sprite.move_up(100)
    sprite.turn_right(360)
    sprite.move_down(100)
    sprite.say("Great job.")
    sprite.wait(2)
    sprite.say("Click submit and next to continue!")

sprite.event_click(click)
"

AI: ONNX: Open Neural Network Exchange Format

ONNX.ai

"What is ONNX?

ONNX is a open format to represent deep learning models. With ONNX, AI developers can more easily move models between state-of-the-art tools and choose the combination that is best for them. ONNX is developed and supported by a community of partners."



"Open Neural Network Exchange Format (ONNX)
...is a specification standard for neural network models, so that different deep learning libraries can work together."




"ONNX was created by Microsoft and Facebook. The ONNX specification appears to have official support from Amazon (AWS), as well as hardware companies AMD, ARM, IBM, Intel, Huawei, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.

Neural network tools initially supported by ONNX v1 include CNTK, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, Caffe2, and TensorRT. Noticeably missing is official support from Google and their TensorFlow library. However, it appears that there is some sort of converter that allows indirect interoperability with TensorFlow."


Cloud Native Computing Foundation & free eBook


Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Home - Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Members - Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Samsung, Cisco...
Missing: Apple
Logo Image
Kubernetes - Wikipedia
"Kubernetes (commonly referred to as "K8s")  is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications that was originally designed by Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a "platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts". It supports a range of container tools, including Docker.

Kubernetes : Greek for "helmsman" or "pilot" 

Free Cloud Native Infrastructure E-Book – {code} – Open Source

Saturday, December 09, 2017

tool: Miniconda: mini Anaconda

Miniconda — Conda download

conda/conda: OS-agnostic, system-level binary package manager and ecosystem @GitHub

Glossary — Conda documentation

"The conda package and environment manager is included in all versions of Anaconda®, Miniconda and Anaconda Repository."

"Conda" Package, dependency and environment management for any language—Python, R, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Java, JavaScript, C/ C++, FORTRAN
Conda is an open source package management system and environment management system that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.


"While it’s possible to install Python directly from python.org, we recommend using Condainstead. Conda is a package management system, from ContinuumIO, created specifically to assist working with Python packages in a cross-platform fashion. Its real strength comes in handling Python packages which require compiled code–such packages are especially prevalent in the scientific Python ecosystem.

Anaconda vs. Miniconda

There are two options for getting Conda: Anaconda and miniconda. Anaconda is a full distribution of Python, and comes with over 150 packages in the download; consequently, this download is over 3GB. Anaconda is good if you want to have many packages downloaded and available in one shot; this is especially useful if you know you’ll be working offline for awhile. Miniconda contains only Python and other libraries needed to run Conda itself; other packages will be downloaded and installed as requested."


Or, get community edition of PyCharm



books: A Whirlwind Tour of Python; Python Data Science Handbook


A Whirlwind Tour of Python

free ebook:
A Whirlwind Tour of Python - O'Reilly Media

"To tap into the power of Python's open data science stack—including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-learn, and other tools—you first need to understand the syntax, semantics, and patterns of the Python language. This report provides a brief yet comprehensive introduction to Python for engineers, researchers, and data scientists who are already familiar with another programming language."



Amazon Market vs Brands?

 Amazon is spawning a new industry | Search | LinkedIn

The Hidden Player Spurring a Wave of Cheap Consumer Devices: Amazon - The New York Times


"Using Amazon to get around middlemen, Wyze Labs can sell its WyzeCam for $20 to $30, while comparable indoor monitoring cameras from Nest and Netgear cost around $200
...
The company’s three founders all worked at the retail giant, and they said they had been inspired by Amazon’s high-volume, low-margin approach to sales.
...
It’s not a race to the bottom...Sellers are forced to create better products at lower pricing, and sellers who aren’t able to do that just get weeded out.
...
Amazon... started a lending program to allow businesses sell through its platform to scale up; last year, its loans exceeded $3 billion.
...
In a way, Amazon is providing all this information that replaces what you’d normally get from a brand, like reputation and trust. Amazon is becoming something like the umbrella brand, the only brand that matters.”


Amazon's also sells its own security camera for $120, with similar specs as Wyze.  Marketplace, in particular on Amazon, has many affordable products, but most don't get attention and large sales, and those that do are creating new brands.

Amazon Cloud Cam Indoor Security Camera, works with Alexa

Friday, December 08, 2017

Azure ML Workbench

Diving deep into what’s new with Azure Machine Learning | Blog | Microsoft Azure

"The Azure Machine Learning Workbench is a client application that runs on Windows and Macs. It has an easy set-up and installation and will install a configured Python environment, complete with conda, Jupyter, and more, along with connectivity to all of the backend services in Azure. We intend it to be a control panel for your development lifecycle and a great way to get started using the services."
Artificially Intelligent - Exploring the Azure Machine Learning Workbench @MSDNmagazine

The Jobs Run History

Installation Quickstart for Azure Machine Learning services | Microsoft Docs

Thursday, December 07, 2017

Walmart: e-commerce + IoT + Pickles

Walmart Is Changing Its Name to Reflect Its E-Commerce Focus | Fortune

"After 47 years known as Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s largest company said on Wednesday that it is dropping “Stores” from its name in a nod to how much important e-commerce is to the business as it continues to compete with Amazon.com "


"...wants a sub-$1 sensor for the Internet of Things. For the right product, his company might be willing to purchase a few million of them — a year.

...a 500-person team working on IoT, robotics, and AI for the giant retailer."



"Walmart is trying to invent the food of the future to win the fight with Amazon and sell you everything."

Walmart is innovating new foods as part of their strategy to maintain dominance over Amazon.

tech: collaboration or competition?

China: collaboration
Baidu and Xiaomi are working together on internet of things and artificial intelligence | TechCrunch

US: competition
Amazon and Google are fighting, and that means consumers lose - The Washington Post

Wednesday, December 06, 2017

parsing JSON 10x faster than XML in SQL Server


and parsing CSV is likely 10x faster than JSON :)

JSON parsing 10x faster than XML parsing | SQL Server Database Engine Blog

"Usually, when people talk about the performance of JSON in SQL Server, they are starting with “JSON is not actually a native type, it is just a plain text” and imply that it is probably too slow. It is true that JSON is stored as NVARCHAR and that there is no special type like for XML or Spatial. However, it does not imply that performance is worse than performance of full-blown types. 

...parsing JSON plain text might be 10x faster than using native types."

Monitor Test

Contrast - Lagom LCD test

Quick gamma
  test image

Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Windows 10 on ARM

Microsoft launches Windows 10 on ARM, with HP and ASUS promising 20+ hours of battery life | TechCrunch

20 hours on a battery charge
can run x86 apps
recompiled the Windows 10 operating system for ARM. There is no emulation at the operating system level
 

AMZL US vs. UPS, USPS, Fedex

"Amazon Logistics"

Apparently UPS+USPS can not keep up with growth of Amazon sales,
so before drones, now there are Amazon trucks delivering...

Out of 500K Amazon employees, more and more are driving trucks.

Amazon Is Testing Its Own Delivery Service - Business Insider

"Amazon could be rolling out its own private delivery network to make more same-day deliveries and have more control over shipping expenses "

AMZL US - Amazon ships products using their own Shipping Carrier - Tool Craze


Deliver With Amazon (logistics.amazon.com)


Monday, December 04, 2017

containers tool: Kubernetes Minikube


to run Kubernetes on a laptop...

kubernetes/minikube: Run Kubernetes locally

"Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes or develop with it day-to-day."


excellent azure podcast: Episode 206 - Kubernetes


Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek)



CSEdWeek | Google for Education

"December 4-10 is Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek)—an annual event to get students excited about CS by trying an Hour of Code, no experience needed. "

free eBook: Azure Developer Guide

free ebook:

Developer Guide—App Development | Microsoft Azure
"The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure SECOND EDITION
How to develop on Azure from day one using common app design scenarios"

by Barry Luijbregts and Michael Crump

link from:
Azure podcast Episode 206 - Kubernetes

other related free ebooks from Microsoft:
Free eBooks from Microsoft Press - Microsoft Virtual Academy


Sunday, December 03, 2017

Oracle: Code Online event, Cloud free trial

Code Online | Oracle Cloud
December 12: Americas | December 13: EMEA | December 14: APAC

"Oracle Code Online is an online event that includes technical demonstrations and presentations from community advocates, Oracle ACEs, product leads, and Java Champions. The content is organized into five tracks, with individual sessions in each track. All you need to attend is your PC, laptop, or tablet."

Education | GoJava | Java Tutorials | Oracle Academy | Oracle University


Try for Free | Oracle Cloud
"Experience Oracle Cloud with $300 in free credit
*Free Credits available in select countries and valid for 30 days"


Microsoft has also recently changed "free trail" Azure options

Create your Azure free account today | Microsoft Azure
"Start free with $200 in credit to use on any Azure products for 30 days.
products for 12 months and to more than 25 always free products."

"includes offers that expire 12 months following sign up and others that never expire"

"12 Months: $300 free credit to get started with any GCP product."
"Always Free Free usage limits on participating products for eligible customers, during and after the free trial. "

AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud: Which free tier is best? | InfoWorld


Saturday, December 02, 2017

data: Creating Leaders

HBR (Harvard Business Review) is in business of business,
and here they presents statistically sound method to select and grow business leaders.
Interesting... likely it apply to other levels of organizations.
There are sound criteria for making decisions about promotions (below),
rather than typical observed level of ambition of potential candidates.

Why More CEOs Should Be Hired from Within

"... typical large American firm would, for example, hire a CEO from outside about 30 percent of the 
times. And there is some research that I believe in that shows that they should only be doing that on average six percent of the time. So, five times less. It is so much better to promote someone from within if you have the right type of candidate
...
typically have people from the top three levels—so, it’s CEO and the next three levels—that about 9 percent of them have the potential to become very successful CEOs. Now, what happens is this: if you only look at the next level, at the direct reports of the CEO, that’s typically about 8 people. So, you know, 9 percent of 8 people gives you 0.7 internal candidates, which explains why in the other 30 percent of the times they go outside
...
 you should do is start your CEO succession...three years before."

Fernández-Aráoz is the co-author of the new HBR article
Turning Potential into Success: The Missing Link in Leadership Development.”




The art of doing twice as much in half the time

The art of doing twice as much in half the time | Jeff Sutherland | TEDxAix - YouTube



Jeff Sutherland - Wikipedia


"Dr. Jeff Sutherland is one of the inventors of the Scrum software development process. Together with Ken Schwaber, he created Scrum as a formal process at OOPSLA'95. Sutherland helped to write the Agile Manifesto in 2001. He is the writer of The Scrum Guide."

Friday, December 01, 2017

Google AIY: DIY AI Vision & Voice


Google and Intel Release Do-It-Yourself Artificial Intelligence Vision Kit @ InfoQ

"Google created a do-it-yourself artificial intelligence kit that allows you to build an intelligent camera that can recognize objects. The main component of their kit is the VisionBonnet board for the raspberry pi. This board contains a Movidius chip created by Intel."

Do-it-yourself artificial intelligence


Google AIY Voice Kit @microcenter
$44.99

Google AIY VISION ProjectsGoogle AIY Exploded View


Get a FREE AIY VOICE KIT with purchase of Raspberry Pi 3 - $35 BUNDLED
BUY the BUNDLE

AIY VOICE KIT- $24.99

SOLID Principles with Slack & Twilio

SOLID Principles in Action: From Slack to Twilio
"...to show off the benefit of SOLID in a real-world, fully functional application
...using Slack API and Twilio API."


"SOLID, it is a set of principles for Object Oriented Design (OOD),
popularized by Uncle Bob Martin. SOLID is an acronym for:
  • S – SRP – Single Responsibility Principle
  • O – OCP – Open-Closed Principle
  • L – LSP – Liskov Substitution Principle
  • I – ISP – Interface Segregation Principle
  • D – DIP – Dependency Inversion Principle
By following this set of principles, your code is more maintainable and more easily extended"

Thursday, November 30, 2017

quote: "A complex system that works...evolved from a simple system that worked"

Mentioned by Dr. Werner Vogels, AWS CTO on AWS re:invent 2017
suggesting to use microservices and managed services to build reliable systems.

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to
have evolved from a simple system that worked. 

A complex system designed from scratch never works
and cannot be patched up to make it work.
You have to start over with a working simple system." 


– John Gall (1975, p.71)

IoT State of the Union @ AWS re:invent 2017

AWS re:invent 2017: IoT State of the Union (IOT210) - YouTube



What’s New at AWS – Cloud Innovation & News


AI cameras: Google Clips vs AWS DeepLens

"smart" like in smartphone does not count anymore... It has to be "AI inside" :-)

Amazon’s AWS DeepLens is an AI camera for developers | TechCrunch

"Amazon introduced its AWS DeepLens camera. The device functions similarly to Google’s recently announced Clips camera, utilizing AI to grab better shots, only Amazon’s version is targeted specifically at developers... The video camera was designed as a way to help developers up to speed with Amazon’s various forays into AI, IoT and server less computing..."

Google Clips is a new $249 smart camera that you can wear | TechCrunch

"Clips comes with 16GB of onboard storage, and also offers up to three hours of passive smart capturing per charge. Plus, it’ll alert you when its lens is blocked via intelligent notifications to your phone. The camera has a 130-degree field of view, Gorilla Glass 3 for durability, and has USB C, Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth LE for connectivity. It shoots at up to 15 frames per second, and selects for stable, clear shots of its subjects."

Google Clips | A new way to capture and save moments - YouTube


(not so) boring printers and hats

OK Go - Obsession - Official Video - YouTube

"In the new video for “Obsession”, OK Go has created a wall of 557 printers that are used as the backdrop for the band throughout the video. As Gizmodo mentioned, one might wonder if the paper waste was actually necessary, and that’s a fair question. But OK Go has an answer:
“By the time you see this, all the paper will have been recycled, and the proceeds given to Greenpeace,” reads a piece of paper at the top of the video."


"That’s a lot of hats: At $20 per, that’s approximately 15,000 hats sold thus far since they went on sale in October."

Windows "Sets" web-browser-like tabbed apps

Microsoft shows off Windows ‘Sets,’ a tabbed app interface that puts a web browser everywhere | TechCrunch

Sets in Windows 10 - YouTube


An update on what's coming next for Windows Insiders - Windows Insider

"Windows 10 feature ... calling “Sets” (not landed on a name yet). With Sets, what belongs together stays together — making it easier and faster to create and be productive. The concept behind this experience is to make sure that everything related to your task: relevant webpages, research documents, necessary files and applications, is connected and available to you in one click."

With this, Windows 10 will slightly resemble Chrome OS, where this is the only way apps work,
but "Sets" are better, since it keeps open apps together, and can re-open them on another computer also!

Amazon Neptune AWS graph database service

Amazon introduces an AWS graph database service called Amazon Neptune | TechCrunch

"Amazon Neptune has been specifically designed for relationship graphs. So if you’re thinking about building a social network feature, Neptune can help you.
... The database service supports graph models Property Graph and W3C’s RDF and their query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL."
Neptune-Diagram_knowledge-graph

Amazon Neptune – A Fully Managed Graph Database Service | AWS News Blog

To connect to the gremlin endpoint you can use the endpoint with "gremlin" to do something like: 
curl -X POST -d '{"gremlin":"g.V()"}' https://your-neptune-endpoint:8182/gremlin
You can similarly connect to the SPARQL endpoint with "sparql"
curl -G https://your-neptune-endpoint:8182/sparql --data-urlencode 'query=select ?s ?p ?o where {?s ?p ?o}'
Amazon Neptune is in a way AWS "answer" to Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB.

Azure Cosmos DB – Globally Distributed Database Service | Microsoft Azure

But while Cosmos DB is also a globally distributed database,
AWS added similar functionality in their relational database only.

AWS adds Global Tables feature to share data across multiple geographies | TechCrunch.

"Customers using AWS’ Amazon DynamoDB to store data have two new services to help make their applications work better and more quickly in more regions around the world."

Based on features, Neptune is more a cloud-based graph database, like Neo4j:

The Neo4j Graph Platform – The #1 Platform for Connected Data

Hosting Neo4j in the Cloud - Neo4j Graph Database


Amazon Alexa for Business



Amazon is putting Alexa in the office | TechCrunch


"At the AWS reinvent conference, Amazon announced Alexa for Business"

"Alexa for Business is a two-sided project for Amazon. On the one hand, Amazon gets added data and revenue from larger-scale customers and, on the other, enterprise businesses will likely hop on the platform to build APIs and skills for a new breed of customer."



"02:00 your employees solve that pesky printer problem 
  • Alexa, ask the office for more printer paper
  • OK, I've ordered more paper. Should I send your job to the printer 3 
  • Yes that'd be great"



Black Friday pushes Jeff Bezos’ net worth to $100 billion | TechCrunch

"So what’s he going to do with all that money?
Bezos wants suggestions. Over the summer, he tweeted a “Request For Ideas.” He said he wants his “philanthropic activity to be helping people in the here and now- short term- at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact.”"

Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) | Twitter