Gather 2012: Middle Session

Making infographics that don’t suck – Mike Mike Dickison

  • www.numberpix.com
  • Didn’t have a chance to take notes cause it was so full I couldn’t sit down

Gather on mass – featuring Rowan Simpson, Karl von Randow and Penny Hagen

Rowan Simpsons

  • Developers + designers + dictators
  • Poster Boy Dictator = Steve Jobs
  • change made by people: who care, have authority, take responsibility
  • Careful about words they use – Don’t use “they” , careful how you describe colleges, other teams, “the business”
  • Domestics – members of cycling team supporting head rider
  • Focus – we all know it is good but it is uncommon.
  • Opposite of focus – Don’t get bored, don’t flail
  • You don’t have to invent you just have to leverage these and execute
  • Innovation just one action, execution requires you to keep going though many steps
  • MVP – whatever you can sell
  • Sales – How will overcome your obscurity?
  • Be a polymath – what else are you good at? where is the intersection?

Karl van Randow

  • Focus on design – how it looks and how it works
  • “NASCAR fans” – generic term for customers
  • Team in NZ, USA and Europe. ichat and skype
  • Camera+
  • Changed from “shoot and share” to “post-processing app”
  • Lots of mockups, iterative design
  • Initial startup page had animated viewfinder, launched with but removed after 6 months
  • Custom typeface, skewed thumbnails, etc makes app feel unique
  • Release to correspond with WWDC keynote, competition to give away $10k of camera gear. Lots of public charts of sales ( with nice infographics) to attract attention

Penny Hagen

  • Design in the Wild.
  • Iterative, largely private within company/studio at the start
  • Few users at the start in house, but only a few testers.
  • Beat blurs private/public
  • Crowd sourcing – get ideas from public – cars, nightclubs, ACC ideas
  • Open Design – Normal process but all phases open to public and takes input from public – eg Drupal website redesign ( 1600 people participated )
  • Emergent Design – Initial design and then evolve final design from there. Patchwork prototyping ( start with existing software product and patch )
  • DIY Design – Ponoko – Build a platform and let end users design
  • Constant Design – ongoing conversations
  • Potential / Challenges = mass distributed participation – transparency – everyone becomes a design
  • Questions – who, how, why? – who owns ideas/IP? – who decides what is good/right – what tools? – what is designers roles? – why aren’t more people doing it?

 

Share

Gather 2012: Morning

Automating things – Mal Curtis

babushka – http://babushka.me

  • nested dependencies.
  • useful to define what software you need on a system as well as configuration
  • similar to puppet and chef
  • each dependency has a url to grab it from and a .app which list install defaults, configs, dependencies,
  • server config just has a bunch of dependencies listed

Vagrant – vagrantup.com

  • Automate process of creating virtual machines
  • Runs program like babushka once machine is live

Capistrano

  • Code deployment

Jenkins

  • Continuous integration
  • hard to setup – look at “go ci” instead perhaps

 

Powering a Mt Eden Cafe – Nate Dunn

  • Tuihana Cafe in Mt Eden Rd
  • Runs 3bits design setup

Chellenges

  • Highly competative industry
  • Tight margins
  • Advertising doesn’t work very well

Get the basics right

  • Clean, bright warn environment
  • extraordinary staff and passionate staff
  • Great coffee and food with plenty of choices ( but not too many options )
  • Look after your regular customers

Clever Technology

  • eftpos over broadband, with nfc
  • naked DSL and VOIP – phone lines expensive, no need to dialup always on, have to have broadband for Free Wifi anyway, VOIP really cheap and works whereever you are
  • coffee ordering via sms, email, twitter. Twitter DM -> Custom Windows App, 2N cellular gateway on vodafone prepay -> nice printout + reply with confirmation of email/sms/twitter. SMS is most popular method. Inspired by subway’s system. Commercial SMS gateways too expensive at their scale just $10/month for prepay acct.
  • Learnt – word numbers not important, customers don’t read messages, some will register & never use, novelty for most, must-have for core group
  • NFC – visa paywave + mastercard paypass – quickest way to pay. Few people have cards or know how to use
  • Snapper not supported since they are with eftposnz and didn’t work with paymark eftpos provider
  • Free Wifi – expected by most customers, just works having codes too complicated, rate/protocol/time limited . Extremely rate limited on all ports except 80/443 , time limit to 1h. Seperate SSds for customers and staff. Powered by mikrotik
  • Google Alerts – looks for reviews anywhere, all sites. Put all reviews on our feedback page. Have a unique name so easy to find.
  • foursquare – not heavily used, has 2 offers but rarely redeemed
  • Only 150 followers, broadcast platform. DM ordering only used by a few
  • Facebook – most customers on it, best bang for a buck advertising, good analytics. Take the good and the bad facebook posts. More people will see facebook post and come in than will like.
  • custom facebook app checks twitter feed every 10 minutes and posts ( grabs photos off yfrog if linked ). People see posts of food and come in to buy
  • Blog – facebook don’t like pulling RSS feed so have custom app to pull facebook notes and post to blog

 

Official Information Act requests – fyi.org.nz

  • Need to be specific
  • Ombudsman office a bit slow. Some problems with lack of “case law” from them
  • Charges usually not a problem
  • Over 3000 government bodies listed, around 2000 of them schools
  • Bulk questions are discouraged, limits, has been abused overseas
  • Even the GCSB respond to OIA requests
  • Police and some govt departments require requests directly
  • Information include Police interrogation manuals!

 

Share

Links: CS, Criaglist Spam, Bread-and-Marge, housing

  1. Let’s Not Call It “Computer Science” If We Really Mean “Computer Programming” – Is Computer Science teaching the wrong thing instead of the stuff that people will actually need.
  2. Popular Craigslist Spam Tactics for Profit (and for Evil) – Examples of scams common on Craigslist (and sometimes elsewhere) with who is behind them
  3. Not by Bread-and-Marg Alone – How the food of the poor has evolved or devolved over the last 150 years.
  4. Finding Space (video) – An episode from the Canadian show “The National” on the evolution of housing. Focus on tiny apartments and laneway houses on existing properties. The main guy (starting 1 minute in)  in the 1st story has such a cute accent.
Share

Links: Chimneys, Fashion, Space Power and Tom Bombadil

  1. Why I wear the same thing every day, and what I wear. – There article doesn’t actually have a photo of the author in her outfits but here is one.
  2. Fred Dibnah laddering a chimney (part 1) – Video of Steeplejack Fred Dibnah showing how he climbs a [industrial] chimney.
  3. Do the math: Space-Based Solar Power – The extra output of space-based solar power doesn’t appear to outweigh the extra costs.
  4. Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil – probably for Lord of the Rings fans only.
Share

Links: Youporn, Cycling, Music and time

  1. Building a Website to 200 Million pageviews and beyond. – ( slides and video ) Very interesting talk about youporn.com migrating to a new architecture. The main link is too a summary on highscalability.com
  2. Why Jonny can’t ride – Why biking to school is banned at many US schools.
  3. Meet the New Boss, Worse than the old boss – Musician David Lowery compares economics of music now and in the past
  4. A ticking time-bomb – How the lack of time-synchronisation of medical devices can kill
Share

Links: Scaling Pinterest, NYT and SF charts, Flickr

  1. How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – Could yahoo have grown the flickr community from 2005 and beaten out facebook.
  2. A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time
  3. Amanda Cox and countrymen chart the Facebook I.P.O – Serious cool behind the scenes on the charts in the New York Times
  4. Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data
Share

Interesting links for May 5th 2012

  1. A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Overview on how early search engine Inktomi was knocked out by Google. The Hacker News discussion is quite good and includes a link to a video talk by Inktomi’s co-founder.
  2. Reddit interview  – IAmA Part Time Hooker in New ZealandRaw Interview or Summary of Q/A . Prostitution is legal in New Zealand so some people in other countries find it interesting how it works. NSFW obviously.
  3. Are Shakespeare’s Plays Encoded within Pi? – YouTube . The full text is in the text section of the page.
  4. Gather – Auckland BarCamp has decided to rebrand itself as “Gather”. Not sure of the point especially since they don’t even own gather.co.nz (or gathernz.com or something). Anyway it’s a pretty good unconference that happens each year. This year it is one June 30th
Share

New Year’s Resolutions – 3 month progress report

At the start of this year I made some New Years Resolutions. I thought I’d review how I was going after 3 months.

  1. Weight – Unchanged. Doing a bit of work here but obviously not enough, at least it is not going up.
  2. Driver License – Not started yet
  3. Chess – Done a lot of work here, plenty of practice and I’ve scored some good results. Feel I’ve made some improvement
  4. Programming – Not started yet

Overall it doesn’t look so good but I’m actually pretty happy. The chess is going well and I’m intending to start the programming course later this month.

Share

LCA2012 – Friday after lunch

Codec 2 – David Rowe

  • Open speech Codec. Low bitrate 2400 b/s down to 1400 b/s
  • Applcations for digital radio
  • Fills <5000 b/s gap
  • http://rowetel.com/codec2.html
  • Not a DSP talk
  • Can send 45 calls inside 64 kb/s chanel
  • Not useful for VOIP due to IP/UDP overhead of 8kb/s on 1400b/s data
  • Main use radio spectrum. Less data = less power required since your power gets concentrate on less bits
  • doesn’t matter too much if odd packet dropped
  • proprietary codecs slowing digital voice over radio
  • Proprietary codes: hardware or licensed software form, difficult to distribute, can’t modify
  • Example g729 license $40k. Doesn’t believe closed source codecs benefit society
  • Authors of propriety/patented codecs borrowed heavily from public domain. perhaps 5% is original. Good news is only 5% needs to be replaced
  • Speech coding: eg 16bit samples at 8kHz, comprss to 1400-2400 b/s . What can we thrown away, retain intelligible speech, retain natural speech. Use a model of speech, send model parameters, for effecient than coding waveform
  • Model: example is pitch, humans 50-500 Hz , can be represented with 7 bits, updated every 20ms 7/0.02 = 350b/s to represent pitch
  • Codec 2 uses Sinusoidal speech coding. Multiple Sine waves added togeather
  • Bit allocation: 56bits every 40ms. Of these: Amplitude 32 , Frame energy 10 , voicing 4, pitch 10
  • Developing Codecs: complex DSP algorithms, run codecs in non-realtime, dump values from codecs every “frame” ( 80 samples, 10 ms of speech) . Gnu Octave
  • Banned exports list includes ” Speech codecs below 2400 b/s ” . Have been advised by DECO that Codec 2 has “assessed as not controlled” but waiting for certificate

 

UEFI and Linux – Matthew Garrett

  • Replacement for PC BIOS
  • BSD licensed core
  • Adds standardized support for new hardware features
  • Platform init
  • EFI image load – loaded drivers
  • EFI OS loader load – oot from ordered list of EFIOS loaders
  • Boot services terminate -> OS handover
  • Boot services – memory allocation, timers, image loading, GUIDs.
  • Runtime services – non-volatile variable store, boot data, system information, crash dumps (already in Linux 3.2)
  • Able to update firmware by reset and grab new firmware out of variables on bootup
  • GPT – GUID partition table – no practical restrictions on size and number – more metadata about partition type and service
  • That all sounds good …. but ….
  • TianoCore – Open Intel reference UEFI reference implementation, 7061 files, >100MB of code, 10% of size of Linux kernel. Bigger than Linux core kernel
  • Large codebase, some bugs
  • UEFI is poorly tested in the real world. UEFI contains a lot of code. UEFI contains a lot of bugs
  • Some problems with secure boot 🙂
Share

LCA2012 – Friday Morning

Bloat: How and Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out) – Matt Evans and Rusty Russell

  • Cool projects: spark, plover, Homebrew Cray-1A
  • Compare PDP-11 Unix vs Modern Ubuntu 11.10
  • Binary sizes: cat 152 bytes vs  531k KB
  • grep command: 2176 bytes vs 687 KB
  • ls command: 4904 bytes vs 628 KB
  • V6 cat command just 12 lines of assembler, 2 * 512bytes buffers, a.out 16 bytes overhead
  • Binaries 30% because we chose speed over size. ~9% speed gain
  • V6 Runtime coverage: cat 99% , grep 78%, ls 85%
  • V7 has reduced coverage. some commands converted from assembler to C
  • x86 runtime with dietlibc coverage: cat 11% , grep 23% , ls 39%
  • x86 static cat has 700k of libc dependencies, 17% of libc, 313 objects it depends on
  • libc 1.7M but widely shared among hundreds of processes
  • dynamic ls accesses 90k of libc but 476kB paged in.
  • For sample system. libwebkit 8.5MB , 5MB wasted, 33MB wasted real RAM
  • What about a 64Bit version of a PDP-11 – a PDP-11 . Various assumptions on how binary size would increase
  • PDP-44 – binaries around 50% larger
  • 32 bit ubuntu binaries are 9% smaller than 64 bit ubuntu
  • Forward port V6 binaries to x86 . V6 cat almost same size as dietlibc version
  • More work to forward port V6 ls, lots of assumptions not longer true. Code tricks no longer work. 20% larger cause of ELF and nmap. 120% penalty due to modern infrastructure (eg malloc realloc)
  • Backport x86 “ls” and “cat” to V6. Only backport some options
  • cat: remove old options and error reporting. Kept some features.
  • ls: remove lots of options.
  • Binaries 60% larger due to flexibility
  • 440% bloat due to new features
  • Asmutls – reimplementation of current Linux utils in x86 assembler.
  • The talk is online, hard to do notes since it jumped around a lot and graphs hard to read

 

Open vSwitch – Simon Horman

  • Switch contains ports, ports has one of more interface, packets are forwarded by flow
  • Flows may be identified by lots of combos, address, vlan, ports, TOS
  • 1st packet in flow gets sent to userspace controller, controller makes decision, tells datapath what to do with future packets, resends first packet back to datapath. Later packets the datapath knows what to do (from hashtable lookup) and handles itself
  • Configured by JSON database, persists across restarts
  • database controlled via Unix socket or via TCP. Change action won’t return until database update performed
  • cute ” –may-exist ” options when creating stuff that does nothing if what you are requested already exists
  • He did some demos of standard sort of stuff, truck interfaces, port mirroring, fairly simple commands to do
  • Does VXLAN and GRE tunnels
  • Oracle looking to put in Oracle Linux soon to replace current bridging code
  • Can do millions of packets per second. Some bottlenecks in tunneling code
Share