December 20, 2014

Roy Fielding on Versioning, Hypermedia, and REST
Anticipating change is one of the central themes of REST. It makes sense that experienced developers are going to think about all of the ways that their API might change in the future, and to think that versioning the interface is paving the way for those changes. That led to a never-ending debate about where and how to version the API. ... This is precisely the problem that REST is trying to solve: how to evolve a system gracefully without the need to break or replace already deployed components.


Buckle up IT: The enterprise needs you for cloud adoption
"When you're talking about applications and services that are important to the enterprise, it's crucial to have IT in the loop so that they can assess security, performance and availability risk factors," Olds said. "Sort of like having your doctor by your elbow at the buffet. It's not as satisfying, but you'll be healthier in the long run." Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research, noted that the days of companies having multiple silos of information and applications running without IT's involvement or knowledge should be coming to an end in the coming year.


Dear Enterprises: Now Is The Time To Get Freelance Work Right
The writing is on the wall. In 2015, enterprises MUST get it right when it comes to managing independent contractors. More companies than ever are turning to freelancers and independent contractors — especially large, billion-dollar enterprises who can capture significant business value from deploying a flexible, non-employee workforce. Since we first started Work Market in 2010, we’ve been helping enterprise companies navigate the nuances of independent work. Fast forward five years, and we’re seeing a greater number of enterprises turn to independent workers than ever before.


SQL Zip Compression, RegEx and Random Functions
While SQL Server natively supports storing data as compressed, with this library we are able to achieve goals that transcend any one application layer. ... The biggest advantage is that since the data is stored and delivered compressed, it is low impact on SQL (both Disk I/O and CPU) and the network to deliver the data to the client. This opposed to SQL native compression where SQL compresses on receive and decompresses on send, the network then recompresses while sending, then the client decompresses the network packet on receive.


Wouldn’t it be fun to build your own Google?
Imagine you had your own copy of the entire web, and you could do with it whatever you want. (Yes, it would be very expensive, but we’ll get to that later.) You could do automated analyses and surface the results to users. For example, you could collate the “best” articles (by some definition) written on many different subjects, no matter where on the web they are published. You could then create a tool which, whenever a user is reading something about one of those subjects, suggests further reading: perhaps deeper background information, or a contrasting viewpoint, or an argument on why the thing you’re reading is full of shit.


New Intel Platform Rich with Transformative Features
Many high-performance computing (HPC) users are familiar with Intel AVX 1.0, which increased floating point packet processing from 128 bit to 256 bit. Now Intel AVX2 doubles integer packet processing, from 128 bit to 256 bit. That essentially doubles your integer processing ability on the same clock speeds. This advance will drive new workload performance gains, particularly for the demanding HPC applications used in life sciences, physics, engineering, genomic research, data mining, and other types of compute-hungry scientific and industrial work. In our testing, we have seen up to a 1.9x increase in performance with Intel AVX2.[1],[2]


We Still Don’t Understand Very Well How Social Change Occurs in the Digital Age
he Internet is responsible for one of the paradoxes of the digital age. We are just a click away from having a friend in the antipodes, but we end up following friends who we already know from work, school or just around the corner. Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, denounces the lack of globalism on the web and alerts us to a few hazards that may cause damage to the democratic quality of our governments. Zuckerman proposes alternatives to the current model of Internet business and puts the magnifying glass on users in order to understand how social changes come about in the digital age.


Creating a Sales Dashboard with Bootstrap and ShieldUI
Although a complete Dashboard can include any possible combination of widgets and layout elements, I have picked the most widely used. From a layout perspective, the page is divided into responsive panels, the positioning of which is determined by the Bootstrap layout system. On smaller screens, each section is adequately positioned to occupy all of the available space. The widgets used are JQuery QR code, JQuery rating control, two different layouts for the graphs, utilizing a JQuery Chart plugin, a circular progress bar, and a grid. From a development perspective, I have used a simple html file, which hosts all the required code.


Artificial Skin That Senses, and Stretches, Like the Real Thing
Finally, in a further effort to make the materials seem more realistic, they added a layer of actuators that warm it up to roughly the same temperature as human skin. The new smart skin addresses just one part of the challenge in adding sensation to prosthetic devices. The larger problem is creating durable and robust connections to the human nervous system, so that the wearer can actually “feel” what’s being sensed. In a crude demonstration of such an interface, Dae-Hyeong Kim, who led the project at Seoul National University, connected the smart skin to a rat’s brain and was able to measure reactions in the animal’s sensory cortex to sensory input.


Alchemy: Message Buffer
One topic that has been glossed over up to this point is how is the memory going to be managed for messages that are passed around with Alchemy. The Alchemy message itself is a class object that holds a composited collection of Datum fields convenient for a user to access, just like a struct. Unfortunately, this format is not binary compatible or portable for message transfer on a network or storage to a file. We will need a strategy to manage memory buffers. We could go with something similar to the standard BSD socket API and require that the user simply manage the memory buffer. This path is unsatisfying to me for two reasons:



Quote for the day:

"Ignorance is a death sentence for any leader as it eliminates the option to take action effectively." -- @ManagersDairy

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