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Sunday, March 31, 2019
Reporting on the Status of Clones During Database Development
The author uses SQL Clone, PowerShell, and Visio to build a live "clone network" diagram that shows when there was last activity on each clone and the number of object changes made to each one, alongside useful metadata such as the clone and image sizes, who created them, and when.
SQL Clone's dashboard gives plenty of summary information about the cloned databases, such as their size, when they were created, who by, and its location. All the clone-specific metrics such as the image size are displayed somewhere in the console. However, during development, I might want to know more than this, such as the number of object (metadata) changes made to each of the clones since they were created, and whether anyone is actively any of the clones. If I know these details, then I can make sure that no changes are lost if a clone is reverted or refreshed and, in the spirit of enlightened harmony between Ops and Development, avoid deleting a clone if someone is using it.
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Action Detection Using Deep Neural Networks: Problems and Solutions
Action detection is one of the most challenging tasks in video processing. It can be useful in security systems and closed-circuit television (CCTV), emotion and gesture tracking, sport event analytics, behavior observation, statistics gathering, etc.
In one of our recent projects, we were challenged with the task of detecting a particular human action in a high-resolution video. In this article, we talk about the importance of finding a balance between accuracy and performance, the challenges we faced with dataset preparation and network configuration, and how these problems can be solved.
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XML Parsing Using Java org.w3c.dom
You might often have challenging XML data to be parsed. This is an example showing you how to parse XML data efficiently using Java org.w3c.dom. 
XML Data to Be Parsed:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<COMMAND>
<DATA>
<TXNID>1234567891</TXNID>
<TXNAMT>15.00</TXNAMT>
<TXNID>1234567892</TXNID>
<TXNAMT>15.00</TXNAMT>
<TXNID>1234567893</TXNID>
<TXNAMT>15.00</TXNAMT>
<TXNID>1234567894</TXNID>
<TXNAMT>15.00</TXNAMT>
</DATA>
</COMMAND>
Most XML data can easily be parsed through JAXB, but there are situations like the above where we need to do manual parsing. If we give the above XML data to JAXB, it's quite obvious that JAXB can not churn it around and give you a clean object mapping. This is where XML parsers like org.w3c.dom and others come into play.
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Dropbox API Tips: Working With Dropbox Namespaces
A Dropbox namespace is a collection of files and folders that are within a single shared folder, team folder, app folder, or within a team’s root folder or a user’s home folder. Namespaces provide the ability to access these types of folders and their contents without having to specify the entire path the folder is mounted to in each API request. This is beneficial since a folder’s path could differ between users for the same shared folder. Dropbox’s guide to namespaces provides an introduction to namespaces and how to access them via the API. Below, we dive into some of the details with accessing content in team folders and how to get started.
Accessing Team Folders
The first approach we took to access team folder data as a team member was to call the sharing/list_folders endpoint to retrieve a list of shared resources. Filtering out the items where is_team_folder is false lets us identify the team folders to retrieve further metadata on. However, using the folders’ namespace IDs like the Dropbox guide suggests returns a 404 error:
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Kubernetes Secrets Management
The modularity of Kubernetes—and the container environment—means apps and microservices can be deployed to multiple servers in a seamless way. To take advantage of that modularity, it is necessary to develop your app or web service to be as fluid as the environment in which it is running.
Thankfully, config keys and value pairs can be used to make web services or apps compatible with different environments through Kube ConfigMaps. The use of values allows developers to seamlessly transition from the development environment to testing and production ones without changing the code directly.
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Speeding Up the Sieve of Eratosthenes With Numba
Lately, upon invitation from my right honorable friend Michal, I've been trying to solve some problems from the Euler project and felt the need to have a good way to find prime numbers. So I implemented the the Sieve of Eratosthenes. The algorithm is simple and efficient. It creates a list of all integers below a number then filters out the multiples of all primes less than or equal to the square root of n, the remaining numbers are the eagerly-awaited primes. Here's the first version of the implementation I came up with:
def sieve_python(limit):
is_prime = [True]*limit
is_prime[0] = False
is_prime[1] = False
for d in range(2, int(limit**0.5) + 1):
if is_prime[d]:
for n in range(d*d, limit, d):
is_prime[n] = False
return is_prime
This returns a list is_prime where is_prime[n] is True n is a prime number. The code is straightforward but it wasn't fast enough for my taste so I decided to time it:
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Leadership — Succession Planning and Philanthropy
I have been fortunate enough to have a successful career as a change agent. I leverage my experience of navigating the world with cerebral palsy — a world that was not yet ready to deal with a person with a disability — to help companies deal with their disability: their inability to change from the status quo.
My TED talk helping organizations deal with their disability — the inability to change from the status quo.
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The Top 7 Infrastructure-As-Code Tools For Automation
Since its inception over a decade ago, Infrastructure-as-Code, or IaC, has been transformative in the way IT infrastructure is set up and managed today. Historically, setting up new infrastructure meant stacking physical servers, configuring network cables, and housing hardware in a capable data center. Today, setting up more performance efficient, cost-effective, and secure infrastructure can all be done using software. Furthermore, thanks to the evolution away from legacy change management, by adopting consistent routines for provisioning and changing systems as well as their configuration help teams roll out thoroughly validated, yet fully, unattended new processes in minutes rather than days.
The wealth of cloud services and infrastructure tooling options now certainly make IaC even more appealing for developers. The use of infrastructure as code means IT infrastructure can be fully provisioned from source code rather than manually. IaC opens the door to the complete automation and configuration of infrastructure, with cloud elements such as servers, networks, and databases being treated similarly to software.
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How to Build an iMessage Extension for a React Native App (Part 2)
In this post, I will show you how we built an iMessage extension by writing a bridge for our React Native-based mobile app. This approach took our team around two weeks to explore and might save you significant time if you have a similar intention. This is part two out of two (you can find Part 1 here).
Project Recap
When we set out to build an iMessage extension for Lisk Mobile using React Native, we immediately hit an exciting challenge. As it turns out, when it comes to third-party applications, Apple likes developers to play by its own rules. If a company wants to benefit from the features of the tech giant's operational systems and rich user base, it needs to be built using Apple's own tools and programming language. iPhone's iMessage is definitely worth this hassle. It has proven to be a big hit since its release in 2016. Within the first six months, iMessage has generated thousands of innovative in-messenger extensions including those created by Airbnb and Dropbox. Late in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg admitted this feature is one of Facebook's 'biggest competitors by far.' Since the release of Lisk Mobile during Lisk's Berlin meetup in October 2018, our team has been busy implementing features such as Face ID Authentication, as well as developing blockchain-specific solutions. Identifying the opportunity to extend the iMessage option for our users, we got to work on our own integration.
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How to Use Recent MicroProfile and JDK Features to Scale Your Apps in the Cloud
Introduction
Managing a potentially unlimited number of autonomous, loosely coupled and frequently updated microservices on top of a flexible cloud infrastructure creates new challenges for developers. This article outlines features of recent JDK and MicroProfile updates for reliably deploying and scaling cloud applications while continuously integrating network and service updates. We’ll also cover tips for enabling documentation, authentication, and managing decoupled application dependencies, resources, and configuration.
Adding Notable JDK Updates to Your Microservices
The latest JDK release has an interesting collection of new features that can help with building microservice-based applications. JDK 11 has been generally available since September 2018 and is the first Long-Term-Support version after Java 8. As always, the features and schedule of the latest JDKs are managed via the JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) Process. I’ve included the JEP release numbers and links as a handy reference to the full details of each new feature.
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How To Measure Page Load Times With Selenium
There are a number of metrics that are considered during the development and release of any software product. One such metric is the user experience which is centered on the ease with which your customers can use your product. You may have developed a product that solves a problem at scale, but if your customers experience difficulties in using it, they may start looking for other options. Today, I will show you how you can measure page load time with Selenium for automated cross-browser testing. Before doing that, we ought to understand the relevance of page load time for a website or a web app.
Why Focus On Measuring Page Load Time?
More than 40 percent of the website visitors may leave if the loading time is more than 3 seconds. This is why your software development, design, and product development team should focus on improving the performance of your web product. Don’t believe me? Below, is an image from a study conducted by Google related to page load speed with respect to bounce rate
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Audit Your Azure Resources With Resource Graph
I recently delivered a session at Microsoft Ignite The Tour in London around governance in Azure. One of the critical points in this session is that before you try and implement any controls around resources, cost, or security, you need to have a good understanding of what your Azure estate currently looks like and what resources you are making use of, so you know where to focus your effort.
There is no point spending lots of time implementing policies to restrict which size web apps you can deploy if no one is using them. Similarly, if you go ahead and lock down the allowed sizes of VMs to D2-16 V3, but 70% of your deployments are still actually using the V2 SKU you are going to have some angry users. Before you implement any of these changes, it is essential that you have a good grasp on how your company is using Azure today. A great tool to help do this is Resource Graph.
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Self-Contained, Rich Web Application JARs
Self-contained JAR files are taking Java web projects by storm, providing great simplification in complex and bloated enterprise containers world. Thanks to the libraries like Dropwizard and Spring Boot, you can build a complete application environment executed from a single file in just a few lines of code.
The question is: how difficult could a project be? Obviously, it can include the whole backend logic, but what about web interfaces? Can they be the part of a single JAR file? Sure they do; Java offers a lot of decent templating and rendering frameworks to build complicated document structures. The problem is that, nowadays, web applications are, in fact, a lot more than just a simple documents network. Users expect dynamic, stateful, single-page applications with all the bells and whistles offered by the modern JavaScript libraries (as a matter of fact, developers also want to work with the latest JavaScript frameworks).
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Why the Industrial IoT Needs Open Source to Innovate
This article is featured in the new DZone Guide to IoT: Connecting Devices & Data. Get your free copy for insightful articles, industry stats, and more!
The industrial world has a long history of modernizing their process controls in order to keep production running efficiently and safely while minimizing downtime. Yet, many are locked in established data historian solutions that are costly and lack the methods needed to provide innovation and interoperability. In contrast, open-source software —which is built on the foundation of community — inherently provides diverse design perspectives not available from a single software vendor. It provides freedom from vendor lock-in, which means it will always provide you with the ability to integrate with other solutions. And finally, open-source software provides customization, allowing you to adapt the code to fit your ever-changing system requirements (which is not easy with proprietary systems). In this article, we will examine what the existing solutions lack and review a few open-source projects that should be considered for future success for operators.
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New Facebook tool answers the question “Why am I seeing this post?”
Facebook announced today that it is adding a feature called “Why am I seeing this post?” to News Feeds. Similar to “Why am I seeing this ad?,” which has appeared next to advertisements since 2014, the new tool has a dropdown menu that gives users information about why that post appeared in their News Feed, along with links to personalization controls.
Meant to give users more transparency into how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm works, the update comes as the company copes with several major events that have highlighted the platform’s shortcomings, including potentially harmful ones. These include its role in enabling the dissemination of a video taken during the shooting attacks on New Zealand mosques two weeks ago, which were originally broadcast using Facebook Live; a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that accuses Facebook’s ad-targeting tool of violating the Fair Housing Act and its role in spreading misinformation and propaganda (after years of complaints and criticism, Facebook recently announced plans to downrank anti-vaccination posts and ban white nationalist content.
Facebook’s announcement says this is the first time its “built information on how ranking works directly into the app.” Users will be able to access “Why am I seeing this post?” as a dropdown menu in the right hand corner of posts from friends, Pages and Groups in their News Feed that displays information about how its algorithm decided to rank the post, including:
- Why you’re seeing a certain post in your News Feed — for example, if the post is from a friend you made, a Group you joined, or a Page you followed.
- What information generally has the largest influence over the order of posts, including: (a) how often you interact with posts from people, Pages or Groups; (b) how often you interact with a specific type of post, for example, videos, photos or links; and (c) the popularity of the posts shared by the people, Pages and Groups you follow.
The same menu will also include links to personalization options, including See First, Unfollow, News Feed Preferences and Privacy Shortcuts. The company’s blog post said that “during our research on ‘Why am I seeing this post?,’ people told us that transparency into News Feed algorithms wasn’t enough without corresponding controls.”
“Why am I seeing this ad,” a similar feature that launched in 2014, will be updated with to include more information. For example, it will tell users if an ad appeared in their News Feed because a company uploaded their contact lists, like emails or phone numbers, or if they worked with a marketing partner to place the ad.
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We don’t need no education?
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and I’ve been watching the rise of Lambda School — which I think is fantastic, incidentally — and the combination has me wondering two things:
- how educated do software engineers need to be?
- And how well does that map to what they actually learn from formal education?
Let’s step back and define some terms before we try to answer those. First, by “formal” education I generally mean a four-year accredited university, whereas people with eg Lambda School or boot camps behind them are “informally” educated, and in turn distinguished from autodidacts. This is not universal. Early Google didn’t seem to consider anyone with less than a masters “formally” educated.
Second, of course there’s no absolute need. Since the dawn of the first vacuum tube, and very much including hardcore grotty stuff like compilers and cryptography, software has been a field in which people with no formal training whatsoever have thrived and succeeded wildly. Obviously neither a formal nor an informal education is actually necessary. What we’re actually asking is: in general, is there reason to believe software engineers with formal educations are better hires?
Note that, speaking as an employer, I don’t actually care whether this is due to selection bias, i.e. whether it’s because capable people are more likely to be formally educated or because they actually learned from it. I’m happy to accept that the entire university system in any country, especially yours, is deeply and increasingly pathological, unfairly and jealously hierarchical, terrifyingly high-priced, and deeply flawed at credentialing and capability signaling.
That’s a big deal to me personally … but when wearing my hiring hat, I don’t care about how that credentialing sausage is made. All I’m interested in, when I’m interviewing, is: are those signals meaningful? Are those people more or less likely to succeed, or make a mess I will subsequently have to clean up?
It’s awfully hard to find applicable statistics here, let alone any whose compilers didn’t have some implicit axe to grind. And of course I have my own biases: I have a four-year degree, from a (Canadian) school outside the hierarchy of the (American) nation in which I live, but with a strong international reputation (Waterloo), in a field (electrical engineering) only somewhat associated with software development.
I used to ask an interview question or few about theory. One of my go-to questions used to be: “Do you have a favorite algorithm, and why?” I’ve stopped asking it, because the answer is almost always some variant of “no.” Even those who have formally studied algorithms rarely care about them. Sometimes I get some variant of “I know what an algorithm is, but I’ve never actually written one.”
That’s not surprising. A whole lot of modern software engineering consists of connecting pre-existing components in slightly new ways. “Algorithms,” as we usually understand them, come baked into our tools and libraries. Does a formal education in big-O notation and Turing machines help at all? Short answer: no. Is prior experience with matrix multiplication and eigenvectors useful? Actually yes, in the rarefied case that you want to understand modern machine learning … but, as the tooling improves, not so much if you just want to use it.
Modern software engineering often — but not always — has much more in common with plumbing or carpentry than with hacking art, architecture, or computer science. It’s more like cranking out aggregative blog posts, or writing business nonfiction, than it is like crafting a novel, much less writing poetry.
Of course, this comes with the important caveat that the analogy only stands if every few years the tools which plumbers and carpenters used changed completely, along with the occasional rise of whole new approaches to their fields. But still, the need for constant re-education is probably an argument against formal training; why spend four years learning how to use tools which will probably be obsolete two years after you graduate?
So it seems reasonable to argue that if — if — you strip out theory and history, then the pedagogical content of “formal” education, vs. “informal” education plus a year or two of experience, is roughly equivalent. Autodidacts? …They’re a difficult edge case. They tend to be highly intelligent, and both hard and fast workers, but they haven’t spent as much time implicitly learning from others’ mistakes, so if still anywhere near their larval stage, they’re more likely to make them anew. An autodidact with an extensive history / portfolio, though, has no strikes against them.
What about the credentialing and selection bias of smarter people being drawn to universities? I concede there’s something to that. If it’s a university I’ve heard of (again, I didn’t grow up here) then that biases me in favor of a candidate. But at the same time, America’s education system is so screwed up, giving such advantages to the already privileged, and the existence of “legacy” students (who don’t really happen in Canada), that at the same time I’m extra wary.
You might conclude that ultimately I don’t distinguish between formally and informally trained students. But you’d be wrong. Most of the time they actually are surprisingly equivalent. But software engineering isn’t always like plumbing — and because of that, I find myself pretty unwilling to strip out theory and history from the analysis after all.
Formal education, whether it be engineering or the liberal arts, is supposed to teach you how to think critically, how to analyze systematically and strategically, and how to educate yourself efficiently, more than it’s supposed to import any particular body of knowledge. It doesn’t always succeed at this. And most of the time you don’t need any of those skills (except the last, which you need forever.)
But on the occasions that you do need those other meta-skills, you need them badly — and it seems to me that you’re noticeably less likely to gain them from informal training or autodidacticism. You’re probably right to be suspicious of this view. I’m suspicious of it myself. It’s probably essentially impossible to measure and test.
It still seems to me, though, that what you gain from formal education is not so much an expansion of your mind as a specific and (somewhat) controlled expansion of your worldview, one which hasn’t yet been replicated elsewhere. That doesn’t mean it can’t be. But there’s more to it than just intensive training in technical skills … and maybe that kind of meta-skilling is the next step in nontraditional education.
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Elon Musk, SoundCloud rapper
How’s your weekend going? Good, good. Now, here, have a billionaire’s super autotuned rap track about a famous deceased gorilla:
Tesla/Space X/Boring Company guy, Elon Musk has apparently uploaded a SoundCloud track titled “RIP Harambe,” about the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla who was shot to death at a Cincinnati zoo in 2016 after a three-year-old boy climb into his enclosure. No word yet on precisely what role Musk played in the creation of the track, beyond releasing it on his “failed […] record label.”
“This might be my finest work,” the billionaire tweeted about the track, uploaded to his Emo G (emoji) Records SoundCloud account. The song, which includes lines like “RIP Harambe / Smoking on some strong hay” appears to be more meme-centric that serious musical pursuit. But as James Dolan can happily attest, you should never let a little thing like being an ultra-wealthy executive get in the way of your dreams.
So, happy early April Fool’s Day, I guess. Honestly, I don’t really know anymore. Now back to your regularly scheduled weekend plans.
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Securing REST APIs With Client Certificates
This post is about an example of securing a REST API with a client certificate (a.k.a. X.509 certificate authentication).
In other words, a client verifies a server according to its certificate and the server identifies that client according to a client certificate (so-called mutual authentication).
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''So, How Does Your Solution Compare to...?''
If you have been doing developer advocacy for some time, it's very likely you've heard this question:
So, how does your solution compare to <insert_competitor_solution> ?
This is probably not a question of if someone will ask, but a question of when. This question can be asked at a conference, meetup, workshop, an online forum, or even just via email.
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Tom's Tech Notes: Microservices Advice for Devs [Podcast]
Welcome to our latest episode of Tom's Tech Notes! In this episode, we'll hear advice from a host of industry experts about how to make the most of microservices architectures and what you need to keep an eye on to use them most successfully. See what our guests have to say about system comprehension, standardization, and architecture.
As a primer and reminder from our intial post, these podcasts are compiled from conversations our analyst Tom Smith has had with industry experts from around the world as part of his work on our research guides.
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China’s grocery delivery battle heats up with Meituan’s entry
Fast, affordable food delivery service has been life-changing for many working Chinese, but some still prefer to whip up their own meals. These people may not have the time to pick up fresh ingredients from brick-and-mortar stores, so China’s startups and large companies are trying to make home-cooked meals more effortless for busy workers by sending vegetables and meats to apartment doors.
The fresh grocery sector in China recorded 4.93 trillion yuan ($730 billion) in total sales last year, growing steadily from 3.37 trillion yuan in 2012 according to data collected by Euromonitor and Hua Chuang Securities. Most of these transactions still happen inside wet markets and supermarkets, leaving online retail, which accounted for only 3 percent of total grocery sales in 2016, much room for growth.
Ecommerce leaders Alibaba and JD.com have already added grocery to their comprehensive online shopping malls, nestling in the market with more focused players like Tencent-backed MissFresh (每日优鲜), which has raised $1.4 billion to date. The field has just grown a little more crowded with new entrant Meituan, the Tencent-backed food delivery and hotel booking giant that raised $4.2 billion through a Hong Kong listing last year.
Screenshots of the Meituan Maicai app / Image: Meituan Maicai
The service, which comes in a new app called “Meituan Maicai” or Meituan grocery shopping that’s separate from the company’s all-in-one app, set out in Shanghai in January before it muscled into Beijing last week. The move follows Meituan’s announcement in its mid-2018 financial report to get in on grocery delivery.
Meituan’s solution to take grocery the last mile is not too different from those of its peers. Users pick from its 1,500 stock keeping units ranging from yogurt to pork loin, fill their in-app shopping carts and pay via their phones, the firm told TechCrunch. Meituan then dispatches its delivery fleets to people’s doors in as little as 30 minutes.
The instant delivery is made possible by a satellite of physical “service stations” across neighborhoods that serve warehousing, packaging and delivering purposes. Placing offline hubs alongside customers also allows data-driven internet firms to optimize warehouse stocking based on local user preferences. For instance, people from an upscale residential area probably eat and shop differently from those in other parts of the city.
Meituan’s foray into grocery shopping further intensifies its battle with Alibaba to control how Chinese people eat. Alibaba’s Hema Supermarket has been running on a similar setup that uses its neighborhood stores as warehouses and fulfillment centers to facilitate 30-minute delivery within a three-kilometer radius. For years, Meituan’s food delivery arm has been going neck-and-neck with Ele.me, which Alibaba scooped up last year. More recently, Alibaba and Meituan are racing to get restaurants to sign up for their proprietary software, which can supposedly give owners more insights into diners and beef up customer engagement.
As part of its goal to be an “everything” app, Meituan has tried out many new initiatives in the lead-up to its initial public offering but was also quick to put them on hold. The firm acquired bike-sharing service Mobike last April only to shutter its operations across Asia in less than a year for cost-saving. Meituan also paused expansion on its much-anticipated ride-hailing business.
But grocery delivery appears to be closer to Meituan’s heart, the “eating” business, to put in its own words. Meituan is tapping its existing infrastructure to get the job done, for example, by summoning its food delivery drivers to serve the grocery service during peak hours. As the company noted in its earnings report last year, the grocery segment could leverage its “massive user base and existing world’s largest intra-city on-demand delivery network.”
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A look at new power banks from OmniCharge and Fuse Chicken
When you’ve been doing this job long enough, you start to develop strange interests (though some might compellingly argue that strange interests are a prerequisite). Lately for me it’s been power banks. Quite possibly the least sexy product in all of consumer electronics outside of the ever-ubiquitous dongle.
I don’t know what to tell you. Blame the fact that I’m traveling every other week for this job. There are also all of the liveblogs from years’ past that got cut off in the last few minutes as my poor ancient MacBook put itself to sleep during those last precious battery percentages. Low batteries give me anxiety. I’m the guy who’s the first to notice when your phone’s screenshot is below 10 percent.
So the power bank has become constant accessory in my life, both home and on the road. Until last year, I used to carry a massive one that was just north of 20,000mAh. The peace of mind to back pain ration seemed sensible enough, but I learned the hard way that, not only do Chinese airports have a limit on battery size, they chuck yours in the trash without a second thought if you go over. It’s a quick way to lose $150.
The good news, however, is that between USB-C, wireless charging and the magic of crowdfunding, it seems we might be living through the golden age of the power bank. I know, right? What a time to be alive.
Point is, there are a lot of choices out there. Anker and Amazon’s house brand RAVPower both offer some good options on a budget. There’s also mainstay Mophie for those who don’t mind paying a bit of a premium for design.
Fuse Chicken was actually a brand that was new to me when they hit me up to try out their latest product. It’s a name I definitely would have remembered — because, honestly, it’s pretty terrible. Memorable, but terrible. Maybe that’s why the company went with such a mundane name for what’s a really interesting charger.
My dad ones told me that he gave my sister and I boring first names because we had such an unusual surname. I have no idea if this is true, but it’s an interesting story and could well apply here.
The Universal is a good example of making the most of out a form factor. It manages to jam a lot of features in without creating a Frankenstein’s Monster worthy of the name Fuse Chicken. On its face, the product looks like a black and white version of Amazon’s default power bricks. It serves that purpose, of course, coupled with a trio of swappable international wall adapters (bonus points for travelers).
But the brick also sports a 6,700mAh battery inside, so you can continue charging gadgets while unplugged. That’s ideal for a phone — you can keep a laptop alive for a bit as well, but you’re going to burn through that pretty quickly. There’s also a wireless charging pad up top, so you can power up another phone or, say, a new set of AirPods at the same time. The side of the device features a small display showing off how much juice is left.
It’s great having a bank that’s also a plug, though like Apple’s brick, it’s much too massive to plug into many vertical outlets. I learned this lesson the hard way on a recent coast to coast flight. Thankfully, though, it’s compatible with Apple’s extension cable.
OmniCharge, meanwhile, is a company I’ve been following since their earliest Kickstarter days. Matter of fact, the aforementioned power bank that’s currently sitting in a Chinese garbage dump is one of their products. R.I.P. noble battery pack.
The Omni Mobile 12,800 mAh is a much more basic product that the company’s earliest offerings. There’s no display for power information here — instead you have to rely on four lights to let you know how much juice is left.
As with most of the company’s products, I do quite like the design language. It’s subtle and unobtrusive and fits nicely inside a backpack. It’s definitely too big for carrying around in a pocket, however. Thanks the wonders of USB it will charge a laptop, as well, though once again, you’re going to run through that 12,800 mAh pretty quickly, if you do.
The Fuse Chicken and OmniCharge run $85 and $99, respectively. They’ve both served me well as travel companions these last few weeks. Here’s to long flights and avoiding life’s landfill.
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Mark Zuckerberg actually calls for regulation of content, elections, privacy
It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments and other bodies to increase regulation around the sorts of data Facebook traffics in. He’s hoping to get out in front of heavy-handed regulation and get a seat at the table shaping it.
The founder published a letter simultaneously on his own page and The Washington Post, the latter of which is an ideal way to get your sentiments on every desk inside the beltway. In the wake a couple of years that have come with black eyes and growing pains, Zuckerberg notes that if he had it to do over again, he’d ask for increased external scrutiny in four key areas:
- Harmful content – He wants overarching rules and benchmarks social apps can be measured by
- Election integrity – He wants clear government definitions of what constitutes a political or issue ad
- Privacy – He wants GDPR-style regulations globally that can impose sanctions on violators
- Data portability – He wants users to be able to bring their info from one app to another
The story of why the letter breaks down each doubles as kind of recent history of the social network. Struggles and missteps have defined much of Facebook’s last few years, with several controversies often swirling around the social network at once. Not every CEO gets asked to testify in front of Congress. Facebook houses and controls an incredible collection of data, playing a key role in everything from ad targeting and interpersonal relationships to news cycles and elections.
“Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree,” Zuckerberg writes, three days after issuing a blanket ban on “white nationalism” and “white separatism.” He goes on to describe the company’s work with various governments, along with its development of independent oversight committee, before anyone can accuse the company of completely passing the buck.
“One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and to measure companies against those standards,” Zuckerberg writes, “Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.”
Zuckerberg goes on to encourage increased legislation around election tampering and political advertisements. Notably, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development hit Facebook earlier this week with charges that its targeted ads violate the Fair Housing Act.
The op-ed rings somewhat hollow, though, because there’s plenty that Facebook could do to improve in these four areas without help from the government.
Facebook’s harmful content policies have long been confusing, inconsistent, and isolated. For example, Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was removed from Facebook but not from Instagram. Meanwhile, bad actors can just hop between social networks to spread problematic posts. Facebook should apply enforcement of its policies across its whole family of apps, publicly work through its logic for why it does or doesn’t remove things instead of having those discussions leak, and cooperate better with fellow social networks to coordinate blanket takedowns of the worst offenders.
As for election integrity, Facebook made a big advance this week by placing all active and old inactive political ad campaigns into keyword-searchable Ad Library. But after pressure from news publishers who didn’t want their ads promoting politicized articles to be included beside traditional campaign ads, Facebook exempted them. Those ads can still influence the electorate, and while they should be classified separately, they should still be archived for research.
On privacy, well, there’s a ton to be done. One major area where it could improve is allowing people to more completely opt out of search, including by their phone number, to avoid stalkers. And better controls should be available for how Facebook uses your contact info when uploaded in the address books of other users.
Finally, with data portability, Facebook has been dragging its feet. A year ago, we published a deep dive into how Facebook only lets you export your social graph as a list of friends’ names which can’t be easily used to find them on other social networks. Facebook must make its social graph truely interoperable so users don’t lose their community if they switch apps. That would coerce Facebook to treat users better since leaving would actually be a viable option.
Taking these steps would show regulators that Zuckerberg isn’t just paying lip service in hopes of getting a more lenient sentence. It would demonstrate he’s ready to make change that serves society.
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CMU team develops a robot and drone system for mine rescues
On our final day in Pittsburgh, we find ourself in a decommissioned coal mine. Just northeast of the city proper, Tour-Ed’s owners run field trips and tours during the warmer months, despite the fact that the mine’s innards run a constant 50 degrees or so, year round.
With snow still melted just beyond the entrance, a team of students from Carnegie Mellon and Oregon State University are getting a pair of robots ready for an upcoming competition. The small team is one of a dozen or so currently competing in DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge.
The multi-year SUbT competition is designed to “explore new approaches to rapidly map, navigate, search, and exploit complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks.” In particular, teams are tasked with search and rescue missions in underground structures, ranging from mines to caves to subway stations.
The goal of the $2 million challenge is design a system capable of navigating complex underground terrains, in case of cave-ins or other disasters. The robots are created to go where human rescuers can’t — or, at very least, shouldn’t.
The CMU team’s solution features multiple robots, with a foul-wheeled rover and a small, hobbyist style drone taking center state. “Our system consists of ground robots that will be able to track and follow the terrain,” says CMU’s Steve Willits, who serves as an adviser on the project. “We also have an unmanned aerial vehicle consisting of a hexacopter. It’s equipped with all of instrumentation that it will need to explore various area of the mine.”
The rover uses a combination of 3D cameras and LIDAR to navigate and map the environment, while looking for humans amid the rubble. Should it find itself unable to move, due to debris, small passage ways or a manmade obstacle like stairs, the drone is designed to lift off from the rear and continue the search.
All the while, the rover drops ultra rugged WIFI repeaters off its rear like a breadcrumb trail, extending its signal in the process. Most of this is still early stages. While the team was able to demonstrate the rover and drone in action, it still hasn’t mastered a method for getting them to work in tandem.
Testing the robots will begin in September, with the Tunnel Circuit That’s followed in March 2020 by the manmade Urban Circuit and then a Cave Circuit that September. A final event will be held in September 2012.
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