Monday, July 31, 2017

Amazon WorkDocs vs...

Amazon WorkDocs - File Storage, Sharing and Collaboration

workdocs_centralhub


Amazon WorkDocs - Pricing
"In most regions Amazon WorkDocs costs $5 per user per month* and includes 1 TB of storage for each user"
Amazon WorkDocs vs Google Drive. The Best File Sharing services

Why should I use Amazon WorkDocs instead of Google Docs? - Quora

Amazon Workdocs vs. Microsoft OneDrive for Business: Which Cloud Storage is Best for You?



Tech vet Adam Bosworth directing mysterious Amazon Web Services project at crux of non-compete dispute – GeekWire

AI, DL on 300 Million Images


Researchers Improve State of the Art in Image Recognition Using Data Set with 300 Million Images @InfoQ

"Many developers train their object detection algorithms using the ImageNet data set, which consists of 1 million images. Since 2011, no more images were added to this data set. .. The question Google researchers and scientists from the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) asked themselves was: what happens if we increase the amount of training data?

Saturday, July 29, 2017

cloud: Azure Container Instances

Fast and Easy Containers: Azure Container Instances | Blog | Microsoft Azure

Create your first Azure Container Instances container | Microsoft Docs

Microsoft’s new Azure Container Instances make using containers fast and easy | TechCrunch

"ACI is different from the likes of Azure’s existing Container Service, AWS’s EC2 Container Service and the Google Container Engine.

ACI, which is now in preview, is all about simplicity. It lets you spin up a single container with your choice of memory and CPU cores in a few seconds and usage is billed by the second. As Microsoft stresses, these containers are first-class objects on Azure and get all of the same role-based access controls, billing tags and other features that you’d expect on the platform. These containers are isolated from other customers using “proven virtualization technology,” Microsoft says."

Calculating the cloud cost is becoming increasingly complex...

 Pricing - Container Instances | Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Introduces New Azure Container Instances Service and Per Second Billing @InfoQ




developers big data: GitHub languages over time

Analyzing GitHub, how developers change programming languages over time · source{d} blog

Friday, July 28, 2017

Azure Durable Functions

Durable Functions Overview

"Durable Functions" is an extension of Azure Functions and Azure WebJobs that allows writing long-running, stateful function orchestrations in code in a serverless environment.

 
 


Hybrid Cloud: Azure Stack vs OpenStack

Microsoft Azure Stack vs OpenStack for Hybrid/Private Cloud Deployments
score: Azure Stack: 836 vs OpenStack: 530 points

Microsoft Releases More Azure Stack Details, Available September @ InfoQ


"Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, bringing the agility and fast-paced innovation of cloud computing to on-premises environments. Only Azure Stack lets you deliver Azure services from your organization’s datacenter, while balancing the right amount of flexibility and control—for truly-consistent hybrid cloud deployments.


Read the whitepaper for more details about Azure Stack

Download the Azure Stack datasheetMicrosoft Releases Azure Stack Enabling Hybrid Cloud Among Key Market Levers Versus AWS @ Forbes

Microsoft’s Azure Stack private cloud platform is ready for its first customers | TechCrunch

Azure Stack: Microsoft’s private-cloud platform and what IT pros need to know about it | Network World

azure stack interface

Microsoft introduces Azure Stack, its answer to OpenStack | Network World
"Azure Stack will begin shipping in September."

OpenStack - Wikipedia


AR, VR, cloud for Real Estate

With a wave of new VR and AR headsets and phones coming this year
we could expect virtual 3D for real estate, on sale or even being designed.
This is like Google Maps Street View, for for inside of homes and other buildings.
In fact Google already did that for select museums. Technology already exists...

Matterport 3D Camera | 3D scanning, create your own 4K 3D virtual tours

Matterport 3D Space Gallery - Matterport

Victoria Coast Home - Matterport

The Rise Of Virtual Reality In Real Estate
"Open house visits are a fun way to explore a property, but when you go for a visit, you have to imagine what it might look like with your own furniture, setup and style. You may know the space is a great fit for your needs, but the current owner’s furniture, staged furniture or empty rooms might not be conducive to really understanding what the home would look like if you moved in. Thanks to new developments in real estate tech, the days of imagining may soon be behind us."

Thursday, July 27, 2017

courses: Data Sciencs: Microsoft + edX

Why is Microsoft investing in training for Data Science?
Because it run on the Azure cloud, and in SQL Server!
Smart.

Programming with Python for Data Science | edX

"Traverse the data analysis pipeline using advanced visualizations in Python, and make machine learning start working for you."


Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Cloud Computing Q&A users: AWS vs Azure

Trends in Cloud Computing: Who Uses AWS, Who Uses Azure? - Stack Overflow Blog






Demand for cloud computing skills continues to outpace supply

Chess with Cloud


jusahah/LambdaChess: Chess position analysis on Amazon Lambda computation service

Project: Real Chess | Let's dev this. | Channel 9

Real Chess

dwcares/realchess: Chess using socket.io and node.js


programming - Chess engine with API - Chess Stack Exchange


ewindisch/alexa-chess: Chess for Alexa


Home - Stockfish - Open Source Chess Engine

official-stockfish/Stockfish: UCI chess engine
"Stockfish is a free UCI chess engine derived from Glaurung 2.1. It is not a complete chess program and requires some UCI-compatible GUI (e.g. XBoard with PolyGlot, eboard, Arena, Sigma Chess, Shredder, Chess Partner or Fritz) in order to be used comfortably. "


dwcares/RealTimeWeb-HOL: Build your own multiplayer chess game using Socket.io by following the steps in this hands on lab

"Build your own multiplayer chess game using Socket.io by following the steps in this hands on lab" http://dwcares.com/realchess

How to put a chess app on the cloud (play AI without threatening humanity!)

Put a Linux-based chess app on the cloud with Bluemix and IBM Containers

Free Internet Chess Server (FICS)

Developers • lichess.org

UCI protocol

Description of the Universal Chess Interface (UCI)

chessprogramming - UCI

Shredder Computer Chess Download - Download

Shredder Computer Chess Download - Online Chess


Chess engine - Wikipedia

Monday, July 24, 2017

Data as a Service (DaaS)

Data as a Service 101: The Basics and Why They Matter - DATAVERSITY

Data as a service - Wikipedia
"In computing, data as a service (or DaaS) is a cousin of software as a service (SaaS). Like all members of the "as a service" (aaS) family, DaaS builds on the concept that the product (data in this case) can be provided on demand to the user regardless of geographic or organizational separation of provider and consumer. Additionally, the emergence[when?] of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has also rendered the actual platform on which the data resides irrelevant. This development has enabled the emergence of the relatively new concept of DaaS"
Data As A Service: The Big Opportunity For Business


Introducing Enterprise Data As A Service - YouTube

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

AI self-driving Level 3 Autonomy: Audi A8

The Audi A8: the World's First Production Car to Achieve Level 3 Autonomy - IEEE Spectrum
"The 2018 Audi A8 counts as the world’s first production car to offer Level 3 autonomy. Level 3 means the driver needn’t supervise things at all, so long as the car stays within guidelines. Here that involves driving no faster than 60 kilometers per hour (37 mph), which is why Audi calls the feature AI Traffic Jam Pilot."

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

IoT Home: Amazon, Apple...

Episode 120: Learn how 3-D sensors work before Apple puts them in the iPhone – IoT Podcast – Internet of Things

Amazon’s latest service helps you set up your Alexa-powered smart home | TechCrunch
"Amazon has been quietly rolling out its own repair and installation service, a competitor of sorts to something like Best Buy’s Geek Squad, according to a report from Recode
...
The service even includes “Alexa Smart Home Consultations,” where consumers can ask questions and be recommended products"


Apple unveils smart home experiences in its retail stores worldwide | TechCrunch

• Sen.se
SensePeanut App
SensePeanuts are a new generation of smart sensors designed to easily solve one of daily life's concerns at an incredible price. They simply connect to your smartphone using Bluetooth with the free SensePeanut companion app.


Sunday, July 16, 2017

Cloud Native Landscape

cncf/landscape: Cloud Native Landscape

"The CNCF Cloud Native Landscape Project attempts to categorize many of the most popular projects and startups in the cloud native space"

Solar Thermal Panels


house small

Using solar for heating, claiming 10x efficiency compared to converting to electricity first.
Zonbak Economy series solar thermal panels

ZonBak, Our Mission
"the sun produces approximately 7000 times more power than we consume globally.
The challenge is to harness that power"

Zonbak was founded by John Sylvan, the cofounder of Keurig, and inventor the Keurig one cup brewing system ($2.5/year business)
passivedesign.pdf

Passive Solar Design Page 10 @ ZonBak.com
Passive Solar House Design


Saturday, July 15, 2017

Cloud Computing Tipping Point

Cloud Computing Hits a Tipping Point – Bernard Golden

(with "avalanche animated gif")

"Cloud computing is now established as the default choice for application deployment. More important, the IT disciplines that accompany application design and operation are now cloud-centric.
This means application architects assume infrastructure transience, horizontal scaling, and topology partitioning (microservices). It means operations groups recognize DevOps is table stakes, now that infrastructure availability is measured in seconds or minutes, not weeks or months..."

Friday, July 14, 2017

$1.2M Data Science competition: Zillow @ Kaggle

Zillow Prize: Zillow’s Home Value Prediction (Zestimate) | Kaggle
“Zestimates” are estimated home values based on 7.5 million statistical and machine learning models that analyze hundreds of data points on each property. And, by continually improving the median margin of error (from 14% at the onset to 5% today)

Zillow Prize, a competition with a one million dollar grand prize, is challenging the data science community to help push the accuracy of the Zestimate even further.

... participants will develop an algorithm that makes predictions about the future sale prices of homes.

...qualifying round which opens May 24, 2017 and the private round for the 100 top qualifying teams that opens on Feb 1st, 2018"

social big data: tweets indicating health

Analyze Words
"AnalyzeWords helps reveal your personality by looking at how you use words. It is based on good scientific research connecting word use to who people are. So ... enter your Twitter handle..."

What Your Tweets Say About You | The New Yorker

What Your Tweets Say about You and Your World | Coursera

WWBP-MOOC
"The World Well-Being Project is pioneering scientific techniques for measuring psychological well-being and physical health based on the analysis of language in social media. Watch this video to learn more."




Free online word cloud generator and tag cloud creator - WordClouds.com

Turn Your Twitter Timeline into a Word Cloud (using Python)

amueller/word_cloud: A little word cloud generator in Python @ GitHub
Peekaboo: A Wordcloud in Python

Word Cloud Generator


The World Well-Being Project - YouTube

AI, ML: Google Cloud Platform += Kaggle

GCP recently acquired Kaggle, a data science community site.
Kaggle is apparently using Microsoft Azure (see podcast interview below)
A small team (15 people) but a big name and community (1+ million)...
Likely it was an expensive acquisition...

Kaggle with Wendy Kan | Google Cloud Platform Podcast
  • Kaggle home page
  • Kaggle Competitions list
  • Kaggle Datasets list
  • Tensorflow: An open-source software library for Machine Intelligence tensorflow.org
  • Keras: The Python Deep Learning library keras.io

Google Cloud to enhance AI developments through Kaggle community - Open Source For You


Google is acquiring data science community Kaggle | TechCrunch

Google is acquiring Kaggle | Hacker News

Ask HN: How much did Google pay for kaggle? | Hacker News

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

JavaScript + .NET + Lisp (L#)

a crazy combination: Lisp interpreter in .NET called from JavaScript in same process.
Since edge.js is apparently used  in production for Azure Functions, it is a robust tool...
Why would somebody do this? Just because it could, and is fun :)

RobBlackwell/LSharp: L Sharp .NET is a powerful Lisp-like scripting language for the .NET Framework

Edge.js (Call Lisp from Node.js)

var edge = require('edge');

var factorial = edge.func('lsharp', function () {/*
  (def fact(n) 
      (if (is n 0) 1 (* n (fact (- n 1)))))
*/});

factorial([5], function (error, result) {
    if (error) throw error;
    console.log(result);
});

Edge.js interop model

edu: Pixar in a Box



There is a new trend with "MOOCs" where large companies contributed good educational content related to their business. Imagine a day when most of interactive education content will be available that way, with optional certificates for life-time learning.  Universities could use grands to create "wiki-like" educational content, not just lectures on YouTube...

Pixar in a Box | Partner content | Khan Academy

"Pixar in a Box is a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs. You will be able to animate bouncing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make virtual fireworks explode. The subjects you learn in school — math, science, computer science, and humanities — are used every day to create amazing movies at Pixar. This collaboration between Pixar Animation Studios and Khan Academy is sponsored by Disney."








Edge.js: .NET+JavaScript in Azure Functions

Azure Functions can run .NET code and a few other languages. 

Based in video below, for efficiency, .NET front end and JavaScript run in the same process by leveraging Edge.js. The next step is using Google's Protocol Buffers for efficient inter-process communication. 


"Create Functions in several languages, including JavaScript, C#, F#, as well as scripting options such as Python, PHP, Bash, Batch, and PowerShell"


The Edge.js project enables you to run Node.js and .NET code in one process.

Edge.js

RUN NODE.JS AND .NET IN-PROCESS
  1.  NODE.JS SCRIPTS .NET IN-PROCESS ON WINDOWS, MAC OS, AND LINUX (NEW!)
  2. .NET SCRIPTS NODE.JS IN-PROCESS (NEW!)




Monday, July 10, 2017

Microsoft 365: Windows + Office subscription service

Introducing Microsoft 365 - Office Blogs

"Today at Inspire, Satya Nadella unveiled Microsoft 365, which brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, delivering a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees. It represents a fundamental shift in how we will design, build and go to market to address our customers’ needs for a modern workplace."


Microsoft 365 bundles Office and Windows together for businesses - The Verge

Microsoft Now Bundling Windows, Office, Mobile Security Apps Together | Fortune.com


Azure Mobile App

iOS & Adndroid, build with Xamarin Native (no Forms), Windows version to come

Microsoft Azure - Android Apps on Google Play

Microsoft Azure on the App Store (Apple iOS)

Under the hood of the Azure Mobile App

Xamarin TestCloud - screenshots

Azure podcast: Episode 186 - Azure Mobile App

Azure Friday:
Azure Mobile App - Under the Hood
Azure Mobile App Overview

Developing iOS and Android Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services

Microsoft announces new Azure mobile applications for Android and iO

Saturday, July 08, 2017

Programming Podcasts

a nice random find... a directory of podcasts related to SW development

Programming Podcasts - The ultimate podcast directory for software developers

ProgrammingPodcasts.com Logo

.NET Rocks! vNext

Hanselminutes Technology Podcast: Fresh Air for Developers

MS Dev Show Podcast

Partially Derivative (Data Science)

AWS Podcast | Listen & Learn About AWS

this good one is missing in directory:
The Azure Podcast | Short podcasts on Azure by Cale Teeter, Evan Basalik, Russell Young & Sujit D'Mello

Graph Databases @ Cloud



Very interesting evolution of databases:
thanks to open source and cloud services
there are many combinations of "back end storage" services,  and "front end database engines / APIs".

Microsoft is providing SQL Database, MySQL, PostgreSQL
interfaces all with the same cloud storage service engine.

Now there is also Cosmos DB, a multi-modal global database service
that can be used as "document db", "graph db" or just tables queried by SQL.

Graph API for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is "Gremlin" that has links to Titan DB,
that is also used with Casandra DB as well as with AWS Dynamo DB and many others.
Like SQL is universal query language for data that can be viewed as relational,
Neo4j graph db has own "Cypher" query language but it also supports Gremlin.

Apache TinkerPop Gremlin API may be the "next SQL"
"Apache TinkerPop™ is a graph computing framework
for both graph databases (OLTP) and graph analytic systems (OLAP)."

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Neo4j vs. Titan Comparison
"Titan has been decommisioned after the takeover by Datastax. It will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking. A fork has been open-sourced as JanusGraph."

thinkaurelius/titan at 1.0.0
Titan: Distributed Graph Database

Graph database - Wikipedia

"Apache Cassandra was initially developed internally at Facebook, to handle large data sets across multiple servers. Facebook handles 50 billion photos from its user base.
In February 2015, DataStax acquired Aurelius LLC, the innovators behind the open source graph database TitanDB. DSE 5.0 was released in mid-2016 with the addition of DSE Graph.
DataStax Graph is a superset of DataStax Enterprise. "





IoT re-defined as part of Customer Experience

Salesforce's Benioff & Bosworth - Techonomy

"When you sell an experience instead of a product, you have to build a different set of values around that. Number one: trust." - MARC BENIOFF



Salesforce.com EVP of IoT Cloud Adam Bosworth - YouTube

Tech vet Adam Bosworth directing mysterious Amazon Web Services project at crux of non-compete dispute – GeekWire

measuring AI progress

Electronic Frontier Foundation Measuring Progress of Artificial Intelligence @ InfoQ

AI Progress Measurement | Electronic Frontier Foundation