JLG praises the solo programmer in his latest column:
One such example is Preview, Mac’s all-in-one file viewing and editing program. While the Wikipedia article is out of date and tepid, the two-part Macworld article titled The many superpowers of Apple’s Preview (here and here) does justice to the app’s power and flexibility. Read it and join me in my appreciation for this labor of love from a solo, unnamed programmer who, I’m told, has been at it since the NeXT days.
As a second example, he picked Gus Mueller’s Acorn:
To get an idea of the breadth and depth of the app, scan the documentation on the company’s web site. In addition to “straight” tech doc, there’s an FAQ, pointers to the Acorn communities, and a wealth of video tutorials for beginners, intermediate, and advanced users.
I would add another example with “Banished”, a game by Luke Hodorowicz available on Steam and Gog. It is a rock solid city builder praised by the critics.
§Thursday, August 27, 2015
A Microsoft Research project lets people to create high-quality 3D images in real time, using a regular mobile phone, with about the same effort it takes to snap a picture or capture a video. All computation is done on the phone (CPU+GPU), no network needed. The researchers will present MobileFusion in early October at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.
§Wednesday, August 26, 2015
The New York Times has made freely available more than 17,000 recipes on the site NYT Cooking, and for your cooking pleasure, they made an iOS application as well.
This is certainly of no interest for Alexa Von Tobel, but for the rest of us, I am sure there is something for everyone.
§Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Major Hayden has written a research paper about securing linux containers. LXC and Docker are new technologies allowing more efficient utilization of server resources than traditional virtualization methods, such as KVM.
The isolation layer between the container and the kernel, as well as between each container, is extremely thin. Weaknesses in the kernel or the container configuration can lead to compromises of containers or the entire system. The responsibility of managing the operating system within the container can also become blurry with time, and that can also lead to compromises of the container.
The paper is extremely clear, well written.
§Friday, August 21, 2015
Jessica Guynn wrote a very interesting piece about Twitter’s Adam Bain really worth a read:
Bain, who hailed from News Corp.’s Fox Sports and Fox Interactive Media unit, joined Twitter in 2010, when it had a small sales team and few ad products. On his watch, Twitter increased revenues from $28.3 million in 2010 to more than $1.4 billion in 2014 and is expected to surpass $2 billion this year. It’s one of the fastest advertising ramps ever.
See also “Adam Bain Is Soooo Nice” by Kara Swisher .
§Tuesday, August 18, 2015
From the Microsoft Edge Team:
Windows 10 virtual machines are now available with the latest updates to Microsoft Edge and the underlying web platform. With this release, we have automated the process we use to create the virtual machines, so future updates will be available more quickly as the platform is updated.
§Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Graham Smith writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
The software was one of a number of on-disc digital rights management solutions employed by PC game publisher and developers in the early ’00s in an effort to stop piracy and it was a pain even then. Eventually a security hole was discovered in November 2007 which allowed for “elevation of privilege” and for attackers to execute unrestricted kernel-level code, effectively taking complete control of a PC. This security flaw was patched by Microsoft, but the problems it caused became part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s arguments against DRM.
There is always a way to play a good old game without DRM.
Source: www.pcgameshardware.de
§Tuesday, August 18, 2015
It is not a new topic, but it is worth a reminder:
Music artists charge for their next album, they don’t sell one album and just keep adding and remixing songs for an all inclusive price. The same goes for movies, books, games or any other digital or physical product.
Software is the outlier. As I write this, I can’t think of any other business where the customer pays just once and receives free updates and improvements for life. But yet this is how the App Store has been setup for software developers. It’s simply not sustainable.
Paid upgrades reward continued development of an app. The developer gets paid for their work and users get more of the app they love. For a sustainable app ecosystem, things need to change.
If the App Store never offers developers the options for paid upgrades, it will continue to encourage a culture of disposable one time apps. This is not good news for developers, Apple or our mutual customers.
§Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Ami Mizroch reporting for the WSJ.D:
The company, which last week turned two, just hired its first data scientist, and it’s looking to invest in artificial intelligence. Butterfield acknowledges the challenge, saying his company will need partners with major AI capability.
“Apple spent billions of dollars on Siri and worked on it for a very long time with hundreds of engineers and a huge dataset of voices – and it’s f–ing idiotic. Siri is nearly useless,” he says. Apple declined comment.
Siri said “After all I’ve done for you?”
Butterfield aims for Slackbot to be the virtual assistant to everyone on a team simultaneously, while also having access to their organization’s institutional knowledge: who is working on which projects, where they’re stuck, who is on vacation and when they’re getting back. He reckons that Slackbot could boost a company’s productivity by 20-30%.
§Tuesday, August 18, 2015
The USC Institute for Creative Technologies in collaboration with the Imperial College London published a paper presenting the technique for synthesizing the effects of skin microstructure deformation.
While it would be desirable to simulate these changes in appearance during facial animation, curent techniques do not record or simulate dynamic surface microstructure for facial animation. One reason scale: taking the facial surface to be 25cm × 25cm, recording facial shape at 10 micron resolution would require real-time Gigapixel imaging beyond the capabilities of today’s camera arrays. And simulating a billion triangles of skin surface, let alone several billion tetrahedra of volume underneath, would be computationally very expensive using finite element techniques.
In this work, we approximate the first-order effects of dynamic skin microstructure by performing fast image processing on a highresolution skin microstructure displacement map obtained as in. Then, as the skin surface deforms, we blur the displacement map along the direction of stretching, and sharpen the displacement map along the direction of compression. On a modern GPU, this can be performed at interactive rates, even for facial skin microstructure at ten micron resolution.
Via The Verge.
§Thursday, August 13, 2015
Owen Williams reporting for TheNextWeb:
Docker Toolbox is an installer that helps pull together the various components of the platform for local development. It installs the Docker client, Compose, Kinematic, Machine and VirtualBox so you don’t need to install them separately.
I completely agree with Owen, Docker is the future of infrastructure and development.
§Thursday, August 13, 2015
The startup that makes it easy to deploy applications in linux containers announced Content Trust, a feature available in version 1.8.0, allowing to digitally sign a container image, in the hope of increasing trust in its public infrastructure:
Once Content Trust is enabled, image publishers can sign their images. Image consumers can ensure that the images they use are signed. Publishers and consumers can be individuals alone or in organizations. Docker’s Content Trust supports users and automated processes such as builds.
§Thursday, August 13, 2015
Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.
BTW, Sundar Pichai is Google’s new CEO.
§Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Mark Ward, reporting for the BBC:
“This seemed like just an interesting problem when we got started but as we went on it got scary,” said security analyst Bruce Potter who, along with researcher Sasha Moore, carried out the study that was presented at the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas.
From the “Entropy” entry at Wikipedia:
The Linux kernel generates entropy from keyboard timings, mouse movements, and IDE timings and makes the random character data available to other operating system processes through the special files /dev/random and /dev/urandom.
The seed needed by pseudorandom number generators comes from this pool of data. If the pool is to small, the server can not generate a truly random seed, thus weakening/compromising the whole cryptographic process.
UPDATE (August 12, 2015): Looks like this problem is not new. Thanks to Major Hayden, it already arose eight years ago and solutions were already provided (comments section).
§Monday, August 10, 2015
Windows Bridge for iOS (a.k.a. Islandwood or WinObjC, coming this fall) is distributed under a MIT license and supports Windows 8 and Windows 10 applications (both 32 and 64 bits). Salmaan Ahmed, Program Manager, explains why the bridge is not a port:
Behind this goal are three core principles that drove the architecture and design of the bridge:
- Full Windows API access: Making it easy to use Windows APIs within Objective-C code
- iOS compatibility: Empower developers to reuse as much existing iOS code as reasonably possible
- No sandboxing: iOS and Windows APIs should be able to work together
Our first principle is especially important because Windows has a rich and fully functional API set that continues to grow and evolve. If the current release of the bridge doesn’t support a particular feature that you need, then we don’t want you to feel “stuck” until the next update; instead, we’d much rather make it simple for you to use the corresponding Windows API and integrate everything seamlessly into your code.
§Friday, August 7, 2015
Mark Hachman reporting for PCWorld on the presence of a full-screen video advertisement that appears when the Challenge options are loaded :
Why this matters: Honestly, if you want to pay for more energy in Farmville or an upgraded weapon in some online shooter, it’s your business. But it does seem a bit odd that Microsoft can make Windows 10 — an entire operating system, mind you — a free upgrade, while asking you to pay to remove ads. If this is the future of Windows as a service, count me out.
§Monday, August 3, 2015
Dallas Thomas has posted a nifty Howto on everything you may want to disable in Windows 10 if you are concerned by your tablet or laptop’s battery life or default privacy settings:
§Monday, August 3, 2015
The Apple gods may strike us down with lightning, but we recommend against following these patterns because they fail in usability testing:
- Page control: dots to indicate pages
- Form Submit button at the top
- Plus (+) icon
- Move icon
§Sunday, August 2, 2015
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