The other day I walked past the building in the picture above and
I felt a little sad. The reason I felt sad is because I have great memories
about this building. When I first came to the US from the Netherlands I was
amazed at how big this store was and how they had so many things on display. In
Amsterdam where I arrived from, you didn’t really have a store like this. The
story was named J&R, there was a J&R Music World store and a J&R
Computer World store. J&R stands for the founders Joe and Rachelle Friedman.
There were several items I bought at this store
The first camera I ever owned I bought in this place, it was
a Minolta but I don’t remember the model. I later sold the camera because a
co-worker needed the camera while he went on vacation to Equador. So I only had
it for 2 or 3 months.
A couple of years later I replaced that camera with a Canon
50E I think this Canon camera might have
also been known as an Elan. The E in the model name stands for eye-control,
this was an enhanced version of the 3-zone eye-controlled autofocus system that
was first seen on the EOS 5 camera. This was very high tech back then.
Another item that I have fond memories about was the first
MP3 player that I purchased; It was the first MP3 player that was available to
buy. It was the Rio PMP-300 portable MP3 player. I believe it was around $200
and you could hold about 10 songs or so since it only came with 32 MB of memory.
You could store more songs if you inserted a smartmedia card. But even then you
could not store hundreds of songs. I remember encoding the songs in WMA 64k
format so I could store even more songs…… lol1st world problems.
I bought many other things at J&R like camera lenses, filters for the camera, a tripod, RAM to upgrade the PC, I even purchased Plus! lol Plus had themes and utilities for Windows
The nice thing about J&R was that they had prices unlike
42 street photo or whatever those stores were called where you had to negotiate
the price. Also unlike at the Nobody Beats The Wiz store, they did not try to
sell you insurance with every item you bought.
These days I guess you would have to go to B&H to get asimilar experience, just be aware that they
are not open on Saturdays.
This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these
This week my youngest son and I decided to read all the Lord Of the Rings books. Both of us have seen the movies many times and I have read the books back in 2001. We decided to both sit in a room and I read out loud to him. It is kind of hard to read out load... I guess last time I had to read in front of people was back in high school
Finished 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music
This was a fun book, 1965 was the year of protest, drugs and very good music. Highly recommended.
After I was done with the book, I decided to get some of this music mentioned in this book from Amazon
Got these three songs
While My Guitar Gently Weeps (Remastered)
From the album The Beatles (Remastered) [Explicit]
By: The Beatles
The Sound of Silence (Overdubbed Version)
From the album The Best Of Simon & Garfunkel
By: Simon & Garfunkel
Like a Rolling Stone
From the album Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits
By: Bob Dylan
Except for Sound of Silence, I already had the other two songs somewhere but I was too lazy to go searching for it. I watched the movie Watchmen a week or so ago and that is when I heard the song Sound of Silence, now that it was mentioned in the book I had to get it. Surprisingly I don't believe I have ever heard this song before watching the movie.
Got a couple of other songs as well
Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta [Explicit]
From the album Uncut Dope [Explicit]
By: Geto Boys
You can hear this song in the movie Office Space... the best part is when someone is rapping pretending to be the president and it sounds just like Bill Clinton
Shout 2000
From the album The Sickness [Explicit]
By: Disturbed
This is a version of the Tears N' Fears song by the band Disturbed
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
From the album Eat The Elephant [Explicit]
By: A Perfect Circle
Was on the bestseller list.. sounded interesting, so I got iy
Paid In Full (Seven Minutes Of Madness - The Coldcut Remix)
From the album Paid In Full (Deluxe Edition)
By: Eric B. & Rakim
When I was a kid in 1987 I listened to this mix with the song Im Nin'Alu by singer Ofra Haza
If you know the song Girl You Know It's True by Milli Vanilli you will recognize the drum beat. This is one of those classic rap song that you wished were still made today
This Week I Learned
Watched parts of the SQL Server 2016 New Features for Developers Pluralsight course
Critical to all of this research were GPU accelerators – specifically the Tesla P100s used in the DGX-1 server from Nvidia – which enabled accelerated training of neural networks. They used the Wolfram Language neural network functionality, built a top of the open-source MXNet framework, that in turn uses the cuDNN library for accelerating the training on Nvidia GPUs. ADAM was deployed as the underlying learning algorithm. The significant horsepower of the Blue Waters system, which is also GPU accelerated, was brought to bear for their modeling data and for solving Einstein’s equations via simulation. The group are also looking into generative models GANs (generative adversarial networks) to further reduce the multi-week time taken (even for Blue Waters) for these specific steps.
I am still waiting for the day that SQL Server will be able to use GPUs in addition to CPUs
A team of scientists in Britain and at the U.S. Department of Energy say that they have bolstered the ability of an enzyme discovered in Japan to eat the plastic found in soda bottles. The plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) normally lasts for hundreds of years, but a release from the University of Portsmouth and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that a new bacteria will be able to chow down and speed up the process to deal with the huge amounts of waste humans make.
This is pretty cool, in the end technology will be used to solve the problem that technology created
Light is used for both image sensing and solar power.
This is awesome and scary at the same time... awesome because you can have cameras that you don't need to charge, scary because you know these cameras will be deployed everywhere and will be recording everything people do.
At RSA 2018, Microsoft announced the preview of Microsoft Azure Sphere, a new solution for creating highly-secured, Internet-connected microcontroller (MCU) devices. Azure Sphere includes three components that work together to protect and power devices at the intelligent edge.
Azure Sphere certified microcontrollers (MCUs):A new cross-over class of MCUs that combines both real-time and application processors with built-in Microsoft security technology and connectivity. Each chip includes custom silicon security technology from Microsoft, inspired by 15 years of experience and learnings from Xbox, to secure this new class of MCUs and the devices they power.
Azure Sphere OS: This OS is purpose-built to offer unequalled security and agility. Unlike the RTOSes common to MCUs today, our defense-in-depth IoT OS offers multiple layers of security. It combines security innovations pioneered in Windows, a security monitor, and a custom Linux kernel to create a highly-secured software environment and a trustworthy platform for new IoT experiences.
Azure Sphere Security Service: A turnkey, cloud service that guards every Azure Sphere device; brokering trust for device-to-device and device-to-cloud communication through certificate-based authentication, detecting emerging security threats across the entire Azure Sphere ecosystem through online failure reporting, and renewing security through software updates. It brings the rigor and scale Microsoft has built over decades protecting our own devices and data in the cloud to MCU powered devices.
These capabilities come together to enable Azure Sphere to meet all 7 properties of a highly secured device – making it a first of its kind solution.
Here is a short video that has also some information
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today cleared the first contact lens to incorporate an additive that automatically darkens the lens when exposed to bright light. The Acuvue Oasys Contact Lenses with Transitions Light Intelligent Technology are soft contact lenses indicated for daily use to correct the vision of people with non-diseased eyes who are nearsighted (myopia) or farsighted (hyperopia). They can be used by people with certain degrees of astigmatism, an abnormal curvature of the eye.
This sounds cool but if it takes 10 seconds for the lenses to go back to normal clear view you might have issues when going into a tunnel when you drive with these lenses in.
I've been on a lot of factory tours with various camera and lens manufacturers before, but had never had a chance to see how the optical glass was made that goes into the lenses we use every day. So I was really happy to receive an invite from Nikon to tour their Hikari Glass factory in Akita Japan, following the annual CP+ trade show in Yokohama this year. This was a pretty special tour, as we got to see the whole process, from start to finish, hosted by three of Hikari's top executives. Our hosts were Mr. Tatsuo Ishitoya, President-Director, Mr. Akio Arai, Corporate Vice President and Production General Manager, and Mr. Toshihiko Futami, Director and Management General Manager. Mr. Masaru Kobayashi, Assistant Manager of the Administration Section also accompanied us and contributed to the information we received. Arai-san is the person directly responsible for plant operations, and it was him who personally guided us on our extensive tour. All three executives briefed us before and after the tour itself.
Wow, I never thought about how complex this stuff is. Great article
This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these
On Tuesday, 13 March 2018 at 12:04 UTC a database query was accidentally run against our production database which truncated all tables.
It took us a day to uncover the root cause of the original database truncation. Using our API logs, and with information from our upstream provider about the IP address the query originated from, we were able to identify a truncate query run during tests using the Database Cleaner gem. The shell the tests ran in unknowingly had a DATABASE_URL environment variable set as our production database. It was an old terminal window in a tmux session that had been used for inspecting production data many days before. The developer returned to this window and executed the test suite with the DATABASE_URL still set.
This is why getting to the production DB should only be enabled on a handful of servers, which few people can access. Deploy to prod from there, test, staging and dev can be done from less restrictive machines. Never should you build both from the same machines!
The sale of battery-powered electric cars increased by 136% to 3,945 in the first three months of 2018, motoring organisation RAI Vereniging reported on Monday. The market for electric cars, so far, is miniscule, but the Netherlands is the world’s fifth-largest market for electric cars after China, the US, Japan and Norway, according to the International Energy Agency.
It's still a small number in the grand scheme of things but it is promising. Wondering if the Tesla 3 model will make an impact.
Recently, we shared information about the potential misuse of your Facebook data by apps and websites. We also shared plans for how we're taking action to prevent this from happening in the future. Check below to see if your information may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica by the app “This Is Your Digital Life.”
It looks like my data wasn't shared.. but then again I don't take silly quizzes. I also don't have facebook installed on my current phone which I got in December, neither have I ever logged in from the PC I am typing from at the moment.
A common FP critique of imperative programming goes like this: “How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2. Mutable assignment makes no sense.” This is a notation mismatch: “equals” should mean “equality”, when it really means “assign”. I agree with this criticism and think it’s bad notation. But I also know some languages don’t write a = a + 1, instead writing a := a + 1. Why isn’t that the norm? The usual answer is “because of C”. But that’s just passing the buck: why does C do it that way? Let’s find out!
I also always though it's because of C :-) Now you know why :-)
Researchers have found hundreds of years' worth of rare-earth materials underneath Japanese waters — enough to supply to the world on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a study published in Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports. Rare-earth metals are crucial in the making of high-tech products such as electric vehicles and batteries, and most of the world has relied on China for almost all of its needs.
Japan started seeking its own rare-earth metals after China held back shipments in 2010 during a dispute over islands both countries claim. These island are the Senkaku Islands, they are also known as the Diaoyu Islands and the Pinnacle Islands
Some of these houses are very unique, strange and in some cases very impressive. The Heliodome one looks really interesting.
Would you want to live in some of these?
See also http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7804132/ for a documentary about unusual homes. I like the house that uses the wing of an airplane as its roof
Some cool stuff you might enjoy
DatabaseFlow -- an open source self-hosted SQL client Database Flow is an open source self-hosted SQL client, GraphQL server, and charting application that works with your database.
Visualize schemas, query plans, charts, and results. You can run Database Flow locally for your own use, or install to a shared server for the whole team. Here are some screenshots of what it looks like
This shows in real-time where your electricity comes from and how much CO2 was emitted to produce it.
You can see what it looks like here
Some pics I took
Found this Indian Head penny from 1900 in my change. As you can see it's pretty worn out and not worth more than 25 cents probably. But it's still a nice piece of history to have. I think the older US coins were much nicer looking that the current ones. The Morgan dollar coin is probably one of the best looking coins ever made.
