State of Technology #86

elsewhere

·        Lessons for 2013: from AirBnB to Zappos

·        Best inventions of 2012: Indoor Clouds and Rest

·        After Japan, 3D photo booth opens in Manhattan

·        Etsy is one of the finest run SaaS shops. Simple motto: “Track everything that moves in a graph”. Their October 2012 Site Performance Report is a gold standard.

·        Stanford class CS198 is transforming the valley (it mainly teaches “how to act like normal human beings”)

 

Architecture

FlickR Web Uploader: 10,000 Photos in your Browser, fully Modular and Event-driven and “caches the hell out of everything”. Article Link.

 

Code

Rosetta Code Measures Lines of Code to achieve same task in different languages

 

Design

Definitive Guide to Form Based Authentication

Best practice: A short time delay that increases with the number of failed attempts, like:

·                  1 failed attempt = no delay

·                  2 failed attempts = 2 sec delay

·                  3 failed attempts = 4 sec delay

·                  4 failed attempts = 8 sec delay

·                  5 failed attempts = 16 sec delay

 

Essay

Jeff Bezos’school of Long-term thinking

“At Amazon, senior executive meetings don’t start out with conference calls or PowerPoint presentations, they start out with reading. “

 

Mobile

Mobile Trends in Five Charts

 

SaaS

 

Why we are pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first

“Ads are the Internet’s tax on users who want free apps and websites. Unlike taxes, however, ad-based services target lower-income and lower-education audiences because that’s where they make all of their money”

 

Service

50 Tricks for Faster Web Applications

 

Social

TL;DR – News for Busy People

 

Tool

Webpagetest is available to run within private instance

 

Hack

Google Open Sources Linear Book Scanner. One core component is a Vacuum Cleaner.

 

etc

·        Onion Copies TED, does much better!

·        First Book Ever Ordered on Amazon

Parting Thought

“Live in the future, then build what’s missing” – Paul Graham on Ideas for Startup

 

State of Technology #84

elsewhere

• 10 Best TED talks on Creativity
• Best Products you don’t know
• SSD on USB3 = 237 MB/s read; 143 MB/s write. $80.
• Jeff Weiner’s, LinkedIn CEO, “Five Rules of Happiness”
• For Holidays – 150 Essential Science & Tech Reads

Architecture

Netflix Global Cloud Architecture

Code

Writing Fast, Memory Efficient JavaScript

Design

The Language of Ambigram

Essay

Have we stopped thinking big? Are we now just focused on incremental innovation? “We wanted flying cars—instead we got 140 characters“

Mobile

Every 24 hrs, more iPhones are sold than babies are born. A good take on Mobile performance

SaaS

Most Dangerous Code in the World: Validating SSL Certs in non-browser Software

Service

Azul C4: Understanding Java Garbage Collection and What You Can Do About It

Social

Last 1 Million Tweet Map

Tool

Top Network Security Tools

Hack

Browser plug-in to strip ALL numbers from Facebook. Friendship is unburdened again!

etc

• Brush and App Quantify Tooth Cleaning
• How much did it cost YouTube to stream Gangnam Style?

Parting Thought

“..part of the popularity of Berkshire Hathaway is that we look like people who have found a trick. It’s not brilliance. It’s just avoiding stupidity.” – Charlie Munger

State of Technology #82

elsewhere

·        (FREE) Crash Course on Creativity from Stanford, still signing-up

·        Google Map adds (a) Amber Alert, (b) street-view of Grand Canyon

·        Standup Comedian who is also Twitter CEO

·        How to get flyers pay attention to Air Safety Video?

·        How do they (if) make money?

 

Architecture

Performance Tools you need for your site – most can be run from browser

 

Code

Why Coding Style Matters?  “Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.”

 

Design

Is it finally time for a “clock-free” design paradigm in chips?

“Software development proceeds from correctness to performance. After software works, we tune its heavily used parts to achieve the desired performance. Performance almost always depends on only a small part of the whole. Compare this to the situation in a clocked hardware design where each and every signal must arrive “on time,” even if it is rarely used. The tyranny of the clock wastes both engineering cost at design time and energy at runtime. What a needless waste!”

 

Essay

Are you solving the right problem? (PDF from HBR)

“In its search for a solution, the Oil Spill Recovery Institute framed the problem as one of “materials viscosity” rather than “oil cleanup” and used language that was not specific to petroleum industry. A chemist in the cement industry was awarded $20,000 for the solution.”

 

Mobile

*** Tablet App Quality Checklist – from Android dev team

 

SaaS

State of Internet 2012

 

Service

CTO’s Decision Tree Flowchart

 

Social

Wikipedia is nearing completion! There is only so much to write about Chartres Cathedral or Prague.

 

Tool

Smart-phone controlled light bulb

 

Hack

Toys from Trash

 

etc

·        Periodic table of Tech

·        Lego Robot solves Rubik’s Cube  the fastest, another Robot now dances Gangnam Style

 

Parting Thought

“The best elevator pitch doesn’t pitch your project. It pitches the meeting about your project. The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it.” – No one ever bought anything on an elevator (Seth Godin)

 

State of Data #123

Top Read

Presenter’s Paradox – The ‘average’ mistake you do not know you’re making

“When buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65!”

 

Analysis

AWS Costs Cheat Sheet

 

 

Big Data

Princeville, OR has about 10,000 people, but hundreds of thousands servers. Why Oregon hosts the cloud

 

Data Science

What is the most optimal way to find a parking spot - for lowest total walk-time vs. finding a space fastest

 

DBMS

CAP theorem about to enter teenage years. How the rules have changed in 12 years.

 

Idea

 

Do machines get more confused with Lots of Data too?

“The winning algorithm was a very complex ensemble of many different approaches — so complex that it was never implemented by Netflix. With three years of effort by some of the world’s best data mining scientists, the average prediction of how a viewer would rate a film improved by less than 0.1 star.”

 

Learning

Implement SQL with Common Unix Utilities

 

Visualization

How a viral photo spreads through Facebook

 

etc

• Helps more to win Nobel – (a) Eating Chocolate, or (b) Initial of Last Name

• Discrete SMS Wear Pattern

 

State of Technology #80

elsewhere

• 40 Minute Crash Course on Design Thinking
• Startup CEO’s favorite productivity hacks
• Ben Horowitz’s “#hit Sandwich” mode of giving feedback
• Google Data Center’s DiRT (Disaster Recovery Tests) theme – they test to see if Zombie Invasion or aliens could break it too!
• 10 Short Videos on Creativity

Architecture

Scalable JavaScript Design Patterns

Code

Peter Norvig on How to Code a Spelling Corrector

Design

Design Principles behind Firefox OS UX

Essay

Marissa Mayer, her leadership principles, and her “Macs and Madonna Theory”

Mobile

Choice between native app and responsive website is not really a budgetary one

SaaS

Russian Novel Programming

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov is also called Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka, Alyoshechka, Alexeichik, Lyosha, and Lyoshenka. Russian novel programming is the anti-pattern of one thing having many names. 

Service

Really crisp articulation of Lean Startup in about 30 super-light slides

Social

Slashdot turned 15 years – a tour of topics

 

Tool

Business Jargon Directory

 

Hack

Dentist Drill Plays Music

 

etc

• Thinkpad Turned 20
•  App Barks when Users Try to Text behind the wheel

 

parting thought

“Procrastination is finding the most difficult way of doing something, is jumping from one idea to another to another, is checking your emails.” – John Kelly

State of Data #120

Top Read

Big Data Cube – Volume, Velocity, Variety (and associated paper)

 

Analysis

 

Statwing for Small Data Analysis

 

Big Data

 

Foursquare Data reveals where you live accurately 78% of time (paper)

 

Data Science

Detect Ballot Stuffing with Data

 

 

DBMS

 

Fully graphic Dashboard using SQL*Plus?!

 

Idea

 

Data Centers waste 90% or more energy they pull

“McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations”

 

Learning

Simpson’s Paradox – or, how non-smokers could have higher mortality rates than smokers’?

 

Visualization

 

How to make XKCD style graphs in R?

 

etc

 

• @BigDataBorat

• Data Visualizations from 19^th Century

State of Data #119

Top Read

 

“Demystifying Big Data: A Practical Guide To Transforming The Business of Government” – Report (pdf) is filled with some key insights –

• While Big Data is transformative, the journey towards becoming Big Data “capable” will be iterative and cyclical, versus revolutionary
• Big Data is often characterized by three factors: volume, velocity, and variety
• Scalable analytics using software frameworks can be combined with storage designs that support massive growth for cost-effectiveness and reliability

Analysis

How ‘correlation does not imply causation’ became an almost irritating meme

 

Big Data

Life of Data at Facebook

Data Science

What do Real-life Hadoop workloads look like?

 

DBMS

Not sure if indexes will be used or how it will be used? You can always write such a small program to check for different execution paths. 

 

Idea

There are two types of data visuals– (a) Story Visualizations and (b) Answer Visualizations.

Learning

SQL Injection in 60 Seconds

 

Visualization

‘Information is Beautiful’ 2012 Award Winning Visualizations

 

etc

• Fermi Problems and Other Prize Winning Estimates

• New music album shows Real-time Music Sharing(Click on a few times till Gold lines appear)