TWID Jan 13th 2019.. Rules of 3. hacked photosynthesis. Containers Killed The Virtual Machine

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 I Learned

Finished the Getting Started with Docker Pluralsight course


Rules of 3... for survival
3 Minutes for air
3 Days for water
3 Weeks for food

This Week I Tweeted

Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' In Search Of More Productive Crops

"This is a very important finding," she says. "It's really the first major breakthrough showing that one can indeed engineer photosynthesis and achieve a major increase in crop productivity."

It will be many years, though, before any farmers plant crops with this new version of photosynthesis. Researchers will have to find out whether it means that a food crop like soybeans actually produces more beans — or just more stalks and leaves.

Then they'll need to convince government regulators and consumers that the crops are safe to grow and eat.

Giant CES fair in Vegas shows US remains too big to ignore for Chinese tech firms even as trade war swirls

Times are tough in 2019 thanks to the US-China trade war and an escalating war of words between Washington and Beijing over tech leadership

Chinese companies at CES all agreed though that while the trade war has adversely impacted their business in the US, it remains a very important market

“We are definitely affected by the tariffs, in fact one of our big US customers is moving their manufacturing operations outside of China to Vietnam to avoid an increase in the cost of doing business,” said Yuki, a saleswoman from Dongguan-based Ruiheng Electronic Co. Ltd., which manufactures power adaptors and circuit boards.

Costco Sells Out of 27-Pound ‘Storage Bucket’ Mac and Cheese With 20-Year Shelf Life

Bad news for those looking to stock up on Costco’s food hit, the 27-pound bucket of macaroni and cheese with 20 years of shelf life: it’s now sold out on the warehouse’s website after going viral on social media.

Who buys this stuff?


Containers Killed The Virtual Machine Star

We predict new enterprise application development will pass a tipping point in 2019 and shift away from legacy virtual machines (VMs) and strongly toward containers and Kubernetes container orchestration.

To be precise, we predict that:

• The future is multi-cloud, and multi-cloud means Docker containers with Kubernetes orchestration. Every public cloud has its own APIs, and in that sense, they are all new versions of proprietary mainframes.
• “Lift-and-shift” of VMware virtual machines will be more expensive than customers realize. Paying no money up front, in this case to refactor and port applications to Kubernetes, typically means paying more during operations.
• Java is not dead. It may play an important middle ground between lift-and-shift and the expense of completely refactoring applications for cloud-native environments. Java may be a light touch version of “move-and-improve.”
• It seems likely that Lenovo will take a look at acquiring SUSE, with Supermicro perhaps also in the mix.

Docker/Kubernetes and other container technologies is all the rage now...especially with DevOps

Print.. the disruptor of batch deletes in SQL

A SQL Server post showing you how the print statement might mess up your batch delete statement

Dozens of government websites rendered insecure or inaccessible due to 80+ expired TLS certificates that haven't been renewed due to the US government shutdown

As the U.S. federal shutdown continues, dozens of U.S. government websites have been rendered either insecure or inaccessible due to expired transport layer security (TLS) certificates that have not been renewed.

In fact, .gov websites are using more than 80 TLS certificates that have expired, according to a new Thursday report by Netcraft. That’s because funding for renewals has been paused. That opens the impacted sites to an array of cyber-attacks; most notably, man-in the-middle attacks, which allow bad actors to intercept exchanges between a user and a web application—either to eavesdrop or to impersonate the website and steal any data that the user may input.

That's not good... shouldn't these people be on the essential employee list?

 

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

500 Top PDFs posted to Hacker News in 2018

The top 5

1. Norwegian Consumer Council report on how tech companies use dark patterns [pdf]
score: 661 comments
2. Assembly Language for Beginners [pdf]
score: 590 comments
3. The Periodic Table of Data Structures [pdf]
score: 534 comments
4. Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2017) [pdf]
score: 514 comments
5. DEF CON report on vulnerabilities in US election infrastructure [pdf]

Rest can be found here:  https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/08/top-pdfs-of-2018-hackernews.html

Mongo song....

Hey Mongo I just met you And this is craaazy but here's my data so store it maybe?

B bu but.. it's webscale :-)

The ideal amount of sunlight for growing your garden

See the infographic here: https://www.dailyinfographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Garden-sunlight-infographic.jpg

Roadmap to becoming a Web Developer in 2019

Seems very overwhelming to me

See it all here: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

.



Alexander Hall as seem from Blair Hall at Princeton University

Took this on my way to pick up the kids from an event

TWID April 23, 2018

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

This Week I tweeted

GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets 

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


Scientists make new plastic-eating enzyme in fight against pollution

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-Powered Camera The prototype gets 15 frames/second, no external power needed

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.


Microsoft built its own custom Linux kernel for its new IoT service

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





FDA clears first contact lens with light-adaptive technology

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.

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Glass for geeks: An in-depth tour of Nikon’s Hikari Glass factory

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

TWID April 16, 2018

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 I Learned

Finished the Understanding Machine Learning with Python Pluralsight course

This was a pretty interesting course and it's perfect for a beginner. You don't need to know any AI, you also don't need to know much Python either

This Week I tweeted

Oops... connected to the wrong server


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 electric cars more than doubles in first quarter in the Netherlands

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.


Check if facebook shared your info with Cambridge Analytica

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.



Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? 

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 :-)



A massive, 'semi-infinite' trove of rare-earth metals has been found in Japan

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



Unusual Homes Around the World

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

Electricity Map

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.

TWID April 08, 2018

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


I skipped a couple of weeks but decided to get back to post these again


Went to Washington DC with the family during spring break. I always wanted to see the cherry blossoms in DC but so far every time I visited Washington DC it was in the middle of the summer. This year I got lucky because it was colder than normal for March so the cherry trees didn't bloom until the first week of April.

Here is a pic I took of the Jefferson Memorial with the cherry blossoms in the foreground.



The plan was to visit NPR studios, see the Air and Space museum in Virginia and then to hit a museum or two.

The drive from Princeton to the Air and Space museum was not bad, it took a little under 4 hours. There were a couple of things I wanted to see in the museum, these were

The Space Shuttle
The Enola Gay plane
The Concord
World War II fighter planes


Here is the space shuttle



For some reason I thought the space shuttle was bigger, I guess I was comparing the shuttle to a Boeing 747

We took a tour and the tour guide was quite good, he had some interesting stories and facts that he gave us



In the pic above you see the Enola Gay plane, this is the plane that was used to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tour guy told us that when they were training in the US with this plane, there was only one person that knew what the real mission would be. It was interesting to see how shiny this plane was. I wonder who has to keep these plane polished and how long it takes
Here is also a close up of the cockpit
 

The plane below is a Hawker Hurricane IIC


The Hawker Hurricane IIC plane was the first British monoplane fighter and the first  British  fighter to exceed 483 kilometers (300 miles). Hurricane fighters fought the Luftwaffe and helped win the battle of Britain in the summer of 1940


The plane below is a Heinkel He 219 A Uhu



A Heinkel He 219 A Uhu was armed with up to 8 cannons and guided to its target by radar. The Heinkel He 219 A Uhu (Eagle Owl) was one of the Luftwaffe most formidable night fighters. On the aircraft's first mission, a single Heinkel He 219 A Uhu shot down at least five British bombers

Here are some Luftwaffe planes with swastikas on them

Finally here you can see the 'real' Air Jaws :-)

 

The Air and Space museum in Virginia is really cool, it is bigger than the one in Washington DC and the entrance is free as well


NPR



We took a tour of the NPR facility in Washington DC. The tour was really good, it took an hour and they took us to several floors as well as the roof. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures on ever floor so I can just share a handful of pics.


Studio
I was surprised that NPR had a bunch of windows machines... I expected them all to be Macs or even Linux but nope... all Windows machines. Below is a pic of the backup studio, the microphones come from Germany and are quite expensive



Sound Diffuser
What you see in the picture below is a sound diffuser.



Here is how wikipedia explains what a sound diffuser is

Diffusors (or diffusers) are used to treat sound aberrations, such as echoes, in rooms. They are an excellent alternative or complement to sound absorption because they do not remove sound energy, but can be used to effectively reduce distinct echoes and reflections while still leaving a live sounding space. Compared to a reflective surface, which will cause most of the energy to be reflected off at an angle equal to the angle of incidence, a diffusor will cause the sound energy to be radiated in many directions, hence leading to a more diffusive acoustic space. It is also important that a diffusor spreads reflections in time as well as spatially. Diffusors can aid sound diffusion, but this is not why they are used in many cases; they are more often used to remove coloration and echoes.

Diffusors come in many shapes and materials. The birth of modern diffusors was marked by Manfred R. Schroeders' invention of number-theoretic diffusors in the 1970s.

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_(acoustics)



In the pic below you can see my daughter Catherine holding the Emmy Awards that one of the Tiny Desk hosts won



Tiny Desk, yes you read that right... tiny not tidy  :-) Most of the stuff you see in this picture is the stuff that performers left after performing. Adele left her water bottle, I believe they KISS guys also left a water bottle.  Pretty cool to see all this stuff





In the pic below is the camera David Gilkey was carrying when he was killed in Afghanistan on June 5th 2016. David Gilkey was a staff photographer and video editor for NPR, covering both national and international news

This Week I Learned

Learned a bunch of stuff about PostgreSQL by taking a Pluralsight course

This Week I tweeted

Nikon versus Canon: A Story Of Technology Change

Pretty cool post showing you how Canon gained ground on Nikon

The high-stakes battle for the Pentagon’s winner-take-all cloud contract

There is a battle afoot, one you might not have heard about yet, but it involves a high-stakes winner-take-all contract for the Department of Defense’s cloud contract. It could involve billions of dollars and when a humongous sum of money meets a set of powerful tech companies, intrigue can’t be far behind.

The story even has a Star Wars reference with the Pentagon dubbing the project the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short). Who says the Pentagon is staid?

The tech names involved include the likes of Amazon,  Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Rean Cloud, LLC.

Based on Trump's tweets last week... I doubt it will go to AWS

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

It's time to head back to RSS? 

THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.

Well I never left RSS, after Google Reader was shut down I switched to Feedly and have been using it ever since

Some pics I took

You can see all my Washington DC pics I posted on flickr here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/denisgobo/albums/72157689618100060

TWID Jan 15, 2018

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


Finished the blockchain pluralsight course this week and started on the Github course

Should be done with the Github course by tomorrow

Watched Hell or High Water,  the movie was really good and I especially like the music. The music is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and it's I guess Western music?


Started to listen to the King of Kings podcast from hardcore history, I think this is the third time I am listening to it. Such great stuff!!

This Week I Learned

Merkle tree
While watching the Pluralsight course Blockchain Fundamentals I learned about a Merkle tree

In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the hash of a data block and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.

The concept of hash trees is named after Ralph Merkle who patented it in 1979

More about Merke Tree here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree


White Plague
Heard about this on the Lore podcast episode 77. White plague is also known as consumption or tuberculosis, never heard it called white plague before. Tuberculosis I know very well, my grandfather died from it, he was 23 years old and when he died my father was only a month old. It was a rough time for my grandmother having to raise 3 kids on her own in the 1950s past war time frame.


Iron
Heard about the different kind of iron on the How it began podcast episode: Mastering Metals: From Sticks & Stones to Cars & Computers
Wrought iron... this is produced by putting the rock on a fire and then manipulating the iron by banging on it
Cast iron...  this is produced by using ovens and melting the iron.. it is however brittle
Steel... this is produced by removing carbon and it is not brittle like cast iron

This Week I Tweeted

A Vast, 430-Year-Old World Map, Full of Places and Creatures, Real and Imagined

The map shows a lush, highly personalized take on the world, with a surprisingly large collection of real and fantasy beasts carousing and cavorting on land and sea. Rumsey’s scan and digital assembly of the cartographic puzzle represents the first time that Monte’s work has been seen in its full glory: It is the single largest world map of the 16th century, and one largely forgotten or overlooked by cartographers and scholars.

Some interesting stuff, would be nice to have this hanging on the wall


Royal Mail’s Game of Thrones Stamp Collection available to order

These stamps look great.

Twitter, Snapchat tie up with Fox to provide coverage of FIFA World Cup

Twitter Inc is partnering with Twenty First Century Fox Inc’s Fox Sports to stream a live show on the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament set to be hosted in Russia later this year.  

Who is going to watch this on crappy telephone screens?

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Good block chain material from ycombinator: http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/

Small sample

• The official Solidity docs are a good place to start.
• The Truffle Framework is one of the best solidity frameworks.
• See how tokens and token sales are developed in the zeppelinOS repo, one of the most trusted libraries to build dApps.
• Blockgeeks also provides an in-depth Ethereum token guide with code samples and high-level concepts.
• You can even learn from Crypto Kitties and create your own digital game on the blockchain.

In addition, the developer communities are remarkably receptive and helpful. Check out:

• /r/ethereum
• /r/ethdev
• https://blockgeeks.com/

Find more here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/

Some pics I took

Eight feet of snow.... will take a while to melt.

TWID Jan 07, 2018

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


Skipped last week, so here is a bunch of stuff from two weeks combined


Made a whole bunch of chicken broth from the leftover bones I saved up over the last couple of weeks



I use this as a base for lentil soups, vegetable soups, risottos or I just have it as is to warm me up.


Finished: The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin

This was pretty good, if you like history I recommend this book

Blueprint for Armageddon

Since a lot of podcasts took a hiatus or had a best of episode, I had some spare time. I decided to listen again to the fantastic World War I podcast episodes Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin. I think this is the 3rd of 4th time I have listened to it.


Cold spell is still going strong in the Northeast. Worked from home Thursday and Friday. For some reason there was a Comcast cable above ground. The first snow cleaning truck that passed by clipped that cable right into pieces. There went cable and internet. Used the hotspot on my phone to continue working. Comcast had the cable repaired within 2 hours so that was not too bad

Went to pick up some eggs and cheese at the farm and saw these cows drinking water.
The water was frozen in the container on the right side so these cows were pushing each other to get to the water in the container on the left side. The cows seemed contend, not sure how because it was bitter cold. Maybe now if you mil them, you get ice cream instead of milk  LOL




I finally watched Downfall
The movie is well known as the inspiration for "Downfall parodies". One scene in the film, in which Hitler launches into a furious tirade upon finally realizing that the war is lost, has become a staple of internet videos. In these videos, the original German audio is retained, but new subtitles are added so that Hitler and his subordinates seem to be reacting instead to some setback in present-day politics, sports, entertainment, popular culture, or everyday life

I highly recommend this movie, although you know the outcome, if was interesting to see Hitler as a broken man suffering from Parkinson's Disease and still thinking that the war could be won. The human treatment of Hitler raised some concerns by critics

This Week I Learned

kebeb case
Snake Case

In Snake Case, all words are lower-cased, then all spaces between words are replaced by underscores.
So you would get

then_all_spaces_between_words_are_replaced


Kebab Case is similar except that the first letter of each word is capitalized, and hyphens are used instead of underscores:
So you would get

Then-All-Spaces-Between-Words-Are-Replaced

More here: http://blog.greglow.com/2017/12/29/sdu-tools-converting-t-sql-strings-snake-case-kebab-case/

bombogenesis
Bombogenesis, a popular term used by meteorologists, occurs when a midlatitude cyclone rapidly intensifies, dropping at least 24 millibars over 24 hours. A millibar measures atmospheric pressure. This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters  https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bombogenesis.html


Who comes up with these words?

This Week I tweeted

As drone demand soars, New Jersey poised to bar drunken droning

U.S. drone sales in 2017 topped $1 billion for the first time ever, but don’t raise a glass too quickly if you are in New Jersey, where lawmakers are poised to outlaw drunken droning next week.

Drunk droning is the new drunk driving...


Christopher Nolan on the power of the people and why '2001' should be required preschool viewing

I understand you showed “2001” to your children when they were very young, like 3 or 4?
I did. I think they’re able to absorb it on the most important level at a young age. That’s what happened to me. I saw it when I was 7 years old, and that’s the level I think it works the best — pure cinematic spectacle. I was extremely baffled by it, but excited by it.

When people talk about the age of people watching a film, part of what they’re asking is, “How does a 7-year-old parse the content?” And if you look at “2001” and you think about it, you can’t parse it anyway as an adult. The experience is the thing.

Interesting... most people I know say this is the best movie ever or a very boring movie

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Listen to live Bitcoin transactions: http://btclisten.com/ 

Listen to live Wikipedia updates: http://listen.hatnote.com/


 Smells Like Teen Spirit’ music video auto-tuned to major chord

Nirvirna - Teen Sprite from Sleep Good on Vimeo.

Wow this really is uncanny valley territory

Some pics I took

Trail near my home, looks cold but it is actually very nice to run on snow.


Went to pick up some eggs and cheese at the farm and saw these cows drinking

TWID Dec 24, 2017

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


Finished Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World 
It's on okay book and I said this before, it's not technical. Sometime I think the authors live in some utopia thinking the blockchain will solve everything. The issues they list are either already solved or have no need for blockchain per se

See also this part from a review here: Only good for the kool-aid

The thing is, many of the things Tapscott claims CAN be fixed by blockchain could ALSO be fixed with a decent website. May of the problems he highlights are social, human problems that remain unsolved because they are hard and no one has rallied the will to tackle them. For example, the problem with governance isn't that there isn't a way to expose all the corrupt interactions to trace who paid for what and which parts of which bills were advocated by which legislator. It's that those in power don't have the will to build a system to expose all of that. Blockchain isn't going to magically convince governments to change how they do business any more than the ability to post their correspondence, schedules, donations, and votes on the web did.

 I had a hard time finishing the book. The *one* thing it is good for is giving the reader a sense of the insane hyperbole that many blockchain advocates spew. Tapscott drank the kool-aid, and it is useful to understand how many miracles people say this stuff will create. Not because the miracles are likely, but because making a coherent case for the actual changes that blockchain will catalyze requires understanding the entire context of the conversation that has gone before

I completely agree with that what's written in the review

Worked from home two days in a row and had a huge podcast backlog, this is just part of it

This is supposed to be a quiet period at work however one co-worker is on vacation, the other had a kidney transplant so I am responsible for their stuff while they are out till January 12th or so. So far I have been bombarded with requests by business folks.

This Week I Learned

This week I learned that the chocolate puzzle I have is really hard to finish  :-(

This Week I tweeted

Bitcoin Takes Bigger Wall Street Stage With Smooth CME Debut

Bitcoin futures started trading Sunday night at CME Group Inc.’s venue, a week after Chicago rival Cboe Global Markets Inc. introduced similar derivatives on the volatile cryptocurrency. CME is a much bigger player in futures, so many traders expected it to make a bigger splash in the nascent space.

CME got off to a faster start with more efficient pricing. Its most-active contract changed hands 221 times in the first hour versus 570 during Cboe’s debut. But that’s a win because CME’s contracts are five times more valuable -- they’re tied to five bitcoins compared with only one with Cboe’s futures.

Smooth sailing....


European Ruling Buries Uber’s Platform Myth
The European Court of Justice has ruled, without the possibility of appeal, that Uber is a taxi company, not a software one. This is the official beginning of the end of the tech industry's deceitful attempt to present its innovation as something outside previous human experience and therefore outside the scope of previous regulation.

The ruling ends a legal battle started in 2014 by a taxi drivers' association in Barcelona, called Associacion Profesional Elite Taxi. It accused Uber of unfair competition: The Uber Pop service used unlicensed drivers and wasn't authorized to carry passengers. Uber, as it always does, claimed it was just an intermediary connecting drivers with passengers

Of course it's a cab, instead of using your hand or a phone, you use an app to hail it.


Like Black Monday....

Bitcoin crashed hard on December 22nd. I decided to create a poll and ask if people thought that this was a crash or a correction., You can see the results below

A correction that was due or the start of a crash... what is your opinion https://t.co/aOGB0cFJZT #BTC #Bitcoin #CryptoCurrencies #link

— Denis Gobo (@DenisGobo) December 22, 2017

Netflix Now Supports HDR on Windows 10

We are thrilled to announce the addition of High Dynamic Range (HDR) support on Windows 10 for both the Edge browser and the Netflix app. With this update, Netflix members who have a supported device and a premium plan can enjoy amazing Netflix movies and shows in HDR. 
With HDR enabled, fans can immerse themselves in the delicious colors of Chef’s Table, the terrifying depths of the Upside Down in Stranger Things 2, and enjoy the upcoming Netflix film Bright starring Will Smith. And this is just the beginning! Today, we have over 200 hours of HDR entertainment, and in 2018 even more HDR PCs will enter the market and support the growing number of Netflix originals.

I am still waiting on 4D TV.....


Why hasn’t The Year of the Linux Desktop happened yet?

Having spent 20 years of my life on Desktop Linux I thought I should write up my thinking about why we so far hasn’t had the Linux on the Desktop breakthrough and maybe more importantly talk about the avenues I see for that breakthrough still happening. There has been a lot written of this over the years, with different people coming up with their explanations. My thesis is that there really isn’t one reason, but rather a range of issues that all have contributed to holding the Linux Desktop back from reaching a bigger market. Also to put this into context, success here in my mind would be having something like 10% market share of desktop systems, that to me means we reached critical mass. So let me start by listing some of the main reasons I see for why we are not at that 10% mark today before going onto talking about how I think that goal might possible to reach going forward.

I think Apple is the biggest reason here, all those people who might have switched to Linux, they switched to MacOS instead.  Will 2018 be the year of the Linux desktop.... answer is NO!!

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

United States of Greater Austria

The United States of Greater Austria (German: Vereinigte Staaten von Groß-Österreich) was a proposal, conceived by a group of scholars surrounding Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, that never came to pass. This specific proposal was conceived by the lawyer and politician Aurel Popovici in 1906 and aimed at federalizing Austria-Hungary to help resolve widespread ethnic and nationalist tensions.

Who knows what Europe would look like today if Gavrilo Princip didn't fire those shots that  killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Greater_Austria

Some pics I took

Power Breakfast.... Eggs, sweet potatoes, peperoncini, arugola and spicy tomato sauce

TWID Dec 17, 2017

TWID Dec 17, 2017 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

Married 20 years this week, amazing how time flies, I can still remember like it was yesterday.

Started to read: Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World ..
Read about 30% or so until now. This book is OK, nothing special. This is not a technical book, it is a chronology and prediction of blockchain itself. If you want a technical book, take a look at Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Went to the gym, had to bike 5 miles in 15 degree weather without a hat. Man it was brutal when you go downhill, my feet were still frozen 45 minutes after I arrived at the gym, don't even ask about my ears, they were red like Rudolph's nose

Transferred some bitcoin to my blockchain wallet from bitminter, I mined these 3 years ago, not sure what to do next with it. Should I leave it or convert it into cash? When I say bitcoin I mean a fraction of a bitcoin not a whole bitcoin.

This Week I Learned

Alphabet City.. what the cops say those letters stand for
Listened to the latest London Real podcast episode with John Joseph from the Cro-Mags some crazy stuff that this guy went through. At one point he discusses Alphabet City, this is a part of Manhattan that used to be really bad. Here is what the cops said about it

Avenue A: Adventure
Avenue B: Bold
Avenue C: Crazy
Avenue D: Dead

I have only been up till Avenue B when I left in the city. On Avenue B there was an after hour bar I used to go to, I believe it was called La Barca, and the only reason I ended up there is because Save The Robots was closed one night and these dudes were handing out business  card for this joint. I have been to Avenue A many times, a buddy of mine had a bar on 10st and A, this was near the Russian bath house. Not far from Alphabet City was St. Mark's Place and Webster Hall, I spent many evenings there between 1993 and 1996.

This Week I tweeted

Hundreds of Tesla Model 3 vehicles spotted at delivery centers as regular customer deliveries start

Hundreds of Tesla Model 3 vehicles were spotted at delivery centers in California this weekend as regular customer deliveries are reportedly starting.
As expected last week, the early Tesla Model 3 reservation holders that were in the first batch to be invited to configure their car without the Tesla employee priority delivery are starting to take delivery this week.

It looks like this is finally getting some traction. Have not seen as model 3 in the wild yet. At the Princeton Junction train station there are about 5 Tesla model S cars, I also see a model X regularly


Yahoo Finance has added over 100 cryptocurrency quote pages

Here is what the heatmap page looks like

I like they way this looks, I actually haven't visited Yahoo finance in a very long time, I was using Google finance for the last 10 years or so. The latest redesign made Google finance unusable for me, maybe I will use Yahoo finance instead, I do still use Google sheets with their finance formulas.

SpaceX uses SQL Server

Yes, it's true, the position is still open, Elon Musk knows when he sees a good thing  :-)

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Develop code for automation of tasks in T-SQL, PowerShell, and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

• Set up database monitoring

• Develop stored procedures and optimize queries via T-SQL

• Develop detailed test conditions and test cases to ensure quality of queries and reports

• Research and troubleshoot data questions

• Collaborate on problem resolution, team decisions and project planning

Check it out here: http://www.spacex.com/careers/position/209011

Twenty companies including Unilever and the Virgin Group announced on Tuesday that they will phase out usage of coal in order to combat climate change

Twenty companies including Unilever and the Virgin Group announced on Tuesday that they will phase out usage of coal in order to combat climate change.

The companies announced their decision at the One Planet Summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. Coming a month after the COP23 in Bonn, Germany, the announcement puts the companies in a position similar to the "Powering Past Coal Alliance," a partnership of 26 nations founded in Bonn by Britain, France, Mexico, New Zealand, Costa Rica and the Marshall Islands.

Among the list of companies committing to the coal phase out are BT, Engie, Kering, Diageo, Marks & Spencer, Orsted and Storebrand.

That's a good thing

The Trump administration banned CDC officials from using certain words

In a 90-minute briefing on Thursday, policy analysts at the nation's leading public health institute were presented with the menu of seven banned words, an analyst told the paper. On the list: "diversity," "fetus," "transgender," "vulnerable," "entitlement," "science-based" and "evidence-based."

Alternative word choices reportedly were presented in some cases. For instance, in lieu of "evidence-based" or "science-based," an analyst might say, "CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes," the source said. But those working on the Zika virus's effect on developing fetuses may be at a loss for appropriate -- or acceptable -- words.

It's not April 1st, fake news or the year 1500, this is just incredible.

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

I discovered OneTab this week. The OneTab browser extension collapses a messy browser full of tabs into one tab with a bulleted list of your previous tabs! This helps conserve computer memory, it also declutters your browser. You can also share all your collapsed URLs with someone if you wish to do so

Here is what it looks like

To restore a tab, all you have to do is click on the link. Get it here https://www.one-tab.com/

Some pics I took

Took this pic after it snowed a little, pretty don't you think?

TWID Dec 10, 2017

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


Big Lebowski
I finally watched this movie, it was OK, I don't think it was as good as everyone claims it is. Maybe it was a little over hyped it and then I was a little disappointed.

Bitcoin crossed 17K this week

Incredible lol... how is this even possible?

This Week I Learned

Emetophobia 
Learned about emetophobia on the How Vomit Phobia Works podcast episode.

Emetophobia is a fear of vomit, including a fear of vomiting in public, a fear of seeing vomit, a fear of watching the action of vomiting or fear of being nauseated.

There is also a Rate My Vomit site, this site is actually used by people to get rid of their vomit phobia.


Caveman internet...
In 1910... here is what the internet looked like...  During the "Fight of the Century" boxing match between Jack Johnson and James J. Jeffries in Reno Nevada. people would pay money to be in a room in New York, Chicago and other cities. A blow by blow account of the match was delivered via telegraph. A person with a megaphone would then read out the match progress .  There was also a room where paid actors reenacted the fight blow by blow. Can you imagine how far we have come?

This Week I tweeted

CBOE Will Start Bitcoin Futures Trading on December 10  

Cboe Global Markets Inc. said Monday it will start trading bitcoin futures on Dec. 10, after getting the green light last week from regulators.

That gives Cboe a week of exclusivity. The exchange operator’s larger Chicago rival CME Group Inc. has said its contracts will begin trading Dec. 18.

Now it's legitimate and real  :-)


The Icelandic Translation of ‘Dracula’ Is Actually a Different Book

The Icelandic version of Dracula is called Powers of Darkness, and it’s actually a different—some say better—version of the classic Bram Stoker tale.

Makt Myrkranna (the book’s name in Icelandic) was “translated” from the English only a few years after Dracula was published on May 26, 1897, skyrocketing to almost-instant fame. Next Friday is still celebrated as World Dracula Day by fans of the book, which has been continuously in print since its first publication, according to Dutch author and historian Hans Corneel de Roos for Lithub. But the Icelandic text became, in the hands of translator Valdimar Ásmundsson, a different version of the story.

Interesting.. of course back then you would ship a manuscript to be translated and probably would not hear anything back for a year. How many people speak Icelandic anyway? Believe it or not, I read Dracula for the first time last year. After I finished the book, I then watched the movie from the 1930s with Bela Lugosi. I was really disappointed in the movie, the book is so much better.


Reading Information Aloud to Yourself Improves Memory

A recent Waterloo study found that speaking text aloud helps to get words into long-term memory. Dubbed the “production effect,” the study determined that it is the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory.

“This study confirms that learning and memory benefit from active involvement,” said Colin M. MacLeod, a professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Waterloo, who co-authored the study with the lead author, post-doctoral fellow Noah Forrin. “When we add an active measure or a production element to a word, that word becomes more distinct in long-term memory, and hence more memorable.”

I wonder if you read along while listening to an audio book counts  :-)

Some people are not very smart, take a look at this

Haha really, people fall for this?

China Green Licence Plate Scheme Going National


The green licence plates are split into two categories, small electric vehicles and large electric vehicles. The small electric vehicle plate is gradated green, while the large electric vehicle plate combines both yellow and green. Additionally, the green plates increase the numbers available from 5 to 6 and the Ministry of Public Security has implemented anti-counterfeiting technology.

Because new energy vehicles include non-electric vehicles, the new plates have to use letters to distinguish between them. D for electric and F for non-electric new energy vehicle. The small vehicle plates put the letter at the start of the number but after the region identifier, whereas the large vehicle plates put the identifier at the end of the number.

You must admit, these look pretty cool

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Lectures from Princeton on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies 

Intro to Crypto and Cryptocurrencies

1.0 Welcome - 2 mins
1.1 Cryptographic Hash Functions - 18 mins
1.2 Hash Pointers and Data Structures - 8 mins
1.3 Digital Signatures - 9 mins
1.4 Public Keys as Identities - 5 mins
1.5 A Simple Cryptocurrency - 14 mins

How Bitcoin Achieves Decentralization

2.1 Centralization vs. Decentralization - 4 mins
2.2 Distributed Conesensus - 13 mins
2.3 Consensus Without Identity: the Blockchain - 17 mins
2.4 Incentives and Proof of Work - 19 mins
2.5 Putting It All Together - 18 mins

There are 60 lectures in total, find the full list here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7il1sx/sixty_free_lectures_from_princeton_on_bitcoin_and/


Free eBook – The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure now available

This eBook was written by developers for developers. It is specifically meant to give you the fundamental knowledge of what Azure is all about, what it offers you and your organization, and how to take advantage of it all.

The eBook covers the following topics:

• Chapter 1: The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft
• Chapter 2: Getting started with Microsoft Azure
• Chapter 3: Adding intelligence to your application
• Chapter 4: Securing your application
• Chapter 5: Where and how to deploy your Microsoft Azure services
• Chapter 6: A walk-through of Microsoft Azure
• Chapter 7: Using the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Get it here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/free-ebook-the-developer-s-guide-to-microsoft-azure-now-available/

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python!


This opinionated guide exists to provide both novice and expert Python developers a best practice handbook to the installation, configuration, and usage of Python on a daily basis.

Get all the good stuff here: http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/

Some pics I took

First snow of the season