Google solidly plants its stake in Robotics

Search may have sparked Google's beginning but it's now moving hard and fast into Robotics. With this week's acquisition of Boston Dynamics, and several earlier Robotics related acquisitions, Google is positioning itself as a major player in the field.

Scary? Perhaps. I find it somewhat anxiety-raising when one large company moves to put itself in the significant position to call the shots - hopefully they'll remember that motto, "Do no evil!"

Removing old Ubuntu kernels easily

Ubuntu doesn't automatically remove old kernel packages, so over time the number of unused kernel packages will build up. On recent releases, you could manually use the graphical UI of the Synaptic Package Manager (SPM) to locate and remove the old packages, but as of the Ubuntu Saucy Salamander release the SPM is no longer available.

However, there's a neat way to do it directly from the command line or a shell script, too. See this Ubuntu Forum article for details.

Registering Oracle Java using alternatives on CentOS 6

If you want to add the Oracle JDK to a CentOS 6 box, one easy way is to download the JDK RPM package, and use the rpm(8) command to install it easily, like this:

$ sudo rpm -ivh jdk-7u45-linux-i586.rpm

But chances are the newly installed JDK will not be visible at the command line, especially if the openjdk is already present. How to fix this? You'll have to use the alternatives(8) command to manually register the Oracle JDK. See the instructions on the if-not-true-then-false site for details. I recommend following the "Use Java JDK latest version" example.

Microsoft Office jumps to the net

Remember when Google Docs came on the scene and some commentators said it was the beginning of the end for Microsoft Office? Well, it seems Office may have turned the tables. See here, too.

Things to come

The Open Innovation Forum shares some interesting perspectives on how technology is changing the human race and will continue to do so ahead.

Easy home theater option

Sound bars are a neat way to drop in home theater easily, provided you're not a high-end audiophile. There may be other limitations, too - but if you want an easy installation with few or no wires required - they're worth a look.

Creepy robotics

This stuff is downright creepy to me. I guess I've read one too many Sci Fi stories about robots used for nefarious purposes. These surely give pause for concern - and unfortunately the trend is only likely to continue. It looks like drones are just the tip of the iceberg, folks.

• WildCat: You can't outrun it
• M-Blocks: No assembly required
• Atlas: Drones hit the ground running?
• Alpha Dog: The next war horse?

RSA says "No!" to NSA fingered random bit generator

Uh... yeah! Way to go RSA :-)

The Third Industrial Revolution

Here's a thought-provoking article that makes me wonder about what the near future will hold. Will we see an idealistic world of increased freedom from menial toil and labor, or a dystopian society where displaced workers and their families struggle to survive? Will the gap between rich and poor become so great that social upheaval and struggle is unavoidable? Or will we be able to provide opportunities for all to survive and prosper? As a society and culture, I think we must challenge ourselves to seek and shape the best possible outcome now.

Windows Sysinternals Tools

Windows Sysinternals is an incredibly useful tool suite for Windows devs, admins, and IT pros available for free from Microsoft Technet.

Using openssl to encrypt/decrypt text

Here's a simple example of using the Linux openssl command to encrypt typed text data into a file and then extract it back from the file afterwards. We'll use the AES-128 encryption algorithm for this example and ask openssl to base64 encode the encrypted data afterwards, so it can be happily stored in a text file.

First, let's encrypt a test string into the file /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt:

$ openssl enc -aes128 -a -out /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt
enter aes-128-cbc encryption password: your-desired-password-here
Verifying - enter aes-128-cbc encryption password: your-desired-password-here
This is the data I'm protecting ya know!

Note: To terminate the input type a couple of Ctrl-D characters.

Now, let's read the encrypted text from /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt and display the original string back:

$ openssl enc -d -a -aes128 -in /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt
enter aes-128-cbc decryption password: your-desired-password-here
This is the data I'm protecting ya know!

Cool, huh?

Privacy in the digital age

A favorite author of mine has posted an interesting perspective on privacy that's worth a read. The topic's been on my mind, too. I'll be adding some discussion about it ahead, too.

I'm so happy someone else wonders about these things, too

It's occurred to me on multiple occasions that if a hacker or agent can spoof software update processes, they can easily gain complete control of an end user system. So far, no such exploits have been seen to my knowledge, though.

Anyway, here's a serious yet ultimately humorous discussion of potential software update system exploitation - and how it might perceptually relate to cloud computing.

Functional Programming

Saw a great presentation by one of our interns today on Functional Programming (ala. Haskell). How practical will it prove to be and in which scenarios will it prove compelling? Hard to tell right now, but I'm pretty sure an impact will occur. There sure are a lot of related languages out there including OCaml, Haskell, Scala, F# and maybe more.

eTextbooks - Who's working on what

Interesting recap of eTextbook players and directions in the Sri Lankan Sunday Times. Much more going on in this area than meets the eye.

Industries experiencing disruptive change

Locating disruptive change is a big deal when investing for growth; it's become a catch-phrase for investors and a holy grail of sorts for the shrewd. From my perspective, I see a number of industries undergoing disruptive change and with the spread of technology, there will be others, too.

Some to watch right now:

• Learning - What it means to get an education, how it happens, availability to learning resources, and cost are all factors ramping up disruptive change in the learning industry. MOOCs (massively open on-line courses) are gaining traction (Coursera, Khan Academy, and Udacity). Helping students connect to colleges, learning resources, experiences, and each other is another area to watch (Chegg, AfterCollege, Zinch, Facebook, etc). Publishers and distribution networks (No Starch Press, Packt Publishers, O'Reilly, Amazon, Apple, etc) are experiencing and injecting change, too.
• Ticketing and Entertainment - the high cost tickets and events is another area ripe for change; new players such as Brown Paper Tickets are taking a fresh approach, which will inject change in this marketplace.
• Nanotechnology and Materials - There are so many emerging possibilities that it's hard to appreciate them all. The implications to the medical field (diagnostics, treatments, prostheses, augmentation) and industrial fields (electronics, batteries, sensors, solenoids, monitoring devices, 3D printing) are staggering, not to mention what will happen as small amounts of intelligence get added, too; enabling devices to report, confer, and decide.
• Food production, distribution, and nutrition - Initiatives to buy and eat locally (farm to fork), to take control of preparation, to use fresh and simple ingredients, etc are all introducing positive changes. New styles of farming (smaller scale, organic, specialized, and strategic) are making a difference, too. Some examples: Farm Fresh to You, Polyface Farms, Full Circle, Jacobs / Del Cabo, local farmer's markets, etc.
• Software Development and Computing - How it happens and the tools to make it efficient, productive, inherently secure, and sustainable continues to evolve. The Agile Manifesto started a revolution that's still in progress, as it requires dedicating significant resources (an organization must maintain a continuous integration / delivery process, implying significant computing and staff resources, although I suspect virtual machines and cloud computing are lowering cost barriers, too). The tooling now available to software developers is amazing (Eclipse and other IDEs, build management, defect tracking and database systems, testing frameworks, native language presentation and translation technologies, and multi-platform support). Where I think growth is needed is seamless support for multiple displays (web, mobile, and tablet) and efficient and affordable team management tools.

Netflix rates ISPs for their streaming speeds

Netflix now provides on-line info about how well ISPs perform with streaming media - organized by country, check it out.

Java 7 vulnerability

Here's the U.S. DHS advisory concerning the Java 7 security issue, along with the steps to take to address it. Interestingly, this basic information has been missing from most of the media reporting I've seen.

On-line privacy - what's left of it

Here's an interesting article on how determine which sites you visit are harvesting your Facebook info and, if that concerns you, some things you can do about it.

TANMS - research with serious potential

Check out this short UCLA Engineering article highlighting research into TANMS technology - pretty amazing stuff!

I'll take some crackers with my gluon soup, please!

We live in amazing times! If you think that's an overly optimistic statement, then check out this fun list of recent discoveries.

Amazing stuff: The quantum frontier

Congrats to the team at the CERN LHC on observing a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson postulate. What a breakthrough, once this discovery is validated and proves to be repeatable. Quantum fireworks on July 4th, WOW!

OLEDs - make way for LCDs!

A really interesting article about how Quantum Dot technology stands to revolutionize LCD capabilities, likely at the expense of OLEDs, which as discussed earlier probably won't scale economically anyway. So this is good news!

Fascinating Digital Media Ecoscapes

I recently saw the display advertising map from Luma Partners and was dumbfounded by what I already knew was a complex environment.

Here's a link to the complete set, which is even more mind boggling.

And you thought a display advertising budget was your biggest headache!

Great April Fool's joke!

TigerDirect has a real sense of humor. Sending out one of their normal advertising emails for the Kube X16 on April 1st; here's the details (ha ha!)

Making parts from scratch

When I first heard of 3D printers, I thought it was vaporspeak. I'd read about such devices in some good Sci Fi stories, but they seemed at least 50 years off, not something that would occur anytime soon.

Well, step aside and embrace the future! Now, you can fabricate small prototype parts and items (just plastic so far) at home if you want to pony up to do it.

The idea of direct CAD  to Fab is an amazing jump, even if it's just for plastic parts so far. Expect to see some noticeable advances in various industries from the application of this technology.

Some companies producing these machines:

• 3D Systems Corp.
• Hewlett Packard (the HP DesignJet 3D)

Why quality matters

Sort of a silly and obvious subject, but here's a real-life example.

On Jan 27, I received a new notebook from a large off-shore manufacturer. It's a generally satisfying computer, with the exception that I noticed one or two pixel failures on the display. Knowing that most manufacturers will state that one or two pixel failures are within acceptable tolerances and since it wasn't that big of a deal, I let it go.

A few weeks later, I noticed more dead pixels had shown up! Hmm, oh well. Not the best quality display, I suppose. I was mildly disturbed that the issue was growing, but hoped the worst was over.

Of course, it wasn't! There have been a few more pixel failures since then and this morning, when I started the laptop, there's a one-pixel wide vertical line on the left side of the display that's there to stay :-(

OK, that's it! This display clearly has a problem and it's getting worse over time. Now, our IT department will have to replace the unit, lots of people (myself included) will invest time and effort, and a lot of needless expense will occur just because of this issue. I sure hope its limited to my unit and not a larger issue, but I have to admit I suspect that mine might be the tip of an iceberg...

So, by now, it should be obvious that quality does matter!

List of Top Innovative Companies

Here's a link to Fast Company's list of top innovative companies. There are some interesting ones on the list!

Amusing physics comment

You can't always get what you want! From Lederman & Hill's book, Quantum Physics for Poets (a wonderful book and a recommended read):

The notion that nature (or God) plays dice with subatomic stuff never sat well with Einstein, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Planck, and others. Einstein cherished the belief that quantum theory was merely a stopgap, which would eventually be replaced by a theory that was deterministic and causal. Over the years, he made many clever attempts to show that uncertainty relations could be circumnavigated, but they were foiled, one by one, with relish, by Bohr.

The OLED future dims

According to this IEEE article, the future for OLEDs is less than bright. That's unfortunate, for those of us who've became enamored of organic technology from numerous Sci Fi stories and Babylon 5 in particular. It's always intriguing to think out of the box and consider contrary technologies that are self-healing like the human body or as vital and tenacious as biological processes. Oh well, CFLs and LCDs are a growing option and the incandescent's days and uses are clearly eroding.

Futil v2.4 available for download

I've posted futil v2.4 on SourceForge for download.

This minor release includes two new scripts:

• mhp - Modify Headers parser (useful for sorting and manipulating the header definitions in the Firefox Modify Headers add-on).
• purl - Parse URL script (parses one or more URLs on the input displaying them in an easy format for human eyeballs to read :-)

Enjoy!

Don't count that you can out-run that robot

Check out this interesting article on onmiwheels, robots will be able to change direction much faster than we can ;-)

Optimal settings for better PDF presentation on a Kobo eReader

Through experimentation, I found a set of MS Word 2007 settings that will allow a PDF to be generated with optimal presentation and pagination experience on the Kobo eReader.

SSL may not be good enough...

Some interesting findings were presented at this year's Black Hat conference. See this AP story to read more. This conference take-away recap is also interesting.

How to install the Ruby gem command

I hunted around for this for a surprising time and decided to post it here, because I couldn't find one place that said, "This is how you do it!"

To install the Ruby gem command on your Linux system:

1. For Ruby 1.8.5 or less, download rubygems-1.3.5.tgz:
      pushd ~/Downloads
      wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz

2. Unpack it in /var/tmp:
      pushd /var/tmp
      tar -zxf ~/Downloads/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz

3. Run setup.rb as root:
      pushd /var/tmp/rubygems-1.3.5
      sudo ruby setup.rb --no-ri --no-rdoc

That will do it! Now you can use gem to get lots of other useful Ruby packages :-)

My eReader Choice

I'd been watching the eReader market for a while with interest. At first, it was only Amazon and Sony, then Barnes & Noble jumped in. I didn't like the complexity of the Kindle, although I had to admit it has awesomely crisp and readable print.The Sony units would handle PDF documents, but they were pricey and were too bulky for my backpack.

One day, I visited a B&N store and handled a Nook live. I was surprised at how thick and heavy it felt. Silly me, I was also expecting a full color display, not realizing that only the small navigation LCD can do color. I liked the combination of features, but Nook and the other candidates were pretty pricey for me. So I passed on it and decided to wait a while longer.

Then, a month ago, I found out that Borders was jumping in to the fray with the Kobo eReader. I was immediately intrigued by the Kobo, as it seemed to offer simplicity, a comfortable feel, and was thin and light as well. Although it lacked wireless connectivity, I didn't care, because I usually have a laptop handy anyway. And the price (at that time) was half the cost of the others! So, I visited my local Borders store and ordered one; and it arrived at my door within ten days. Now, I'm happily eReading books and PDF docs that I wouldn't have been able to truck around in my backpack otherwise! SWEET :-)

Droid does - but do you want it to?

I'm perplexed by the "Droid Does" (tm) marketing blitz, which seeks to deflate the sails of a certain smartphone that doesn't run apps concurrently, etc.

The thrust seems to be "We allow full access to the platform, and they don't!" But, I'm thinking, do you really benefit from that? For one thing, it's an open door to virus, phishing, and commandeering abuse - and who really wants more of that?

Sounds like they should re-visit their marketing message to me.

Comcast testing DNSSEC for customer use

Interesting article in Ars Technica about how Comcast has started making DNSSEC available for customer testing. I've set my gateway to use the servers and it's working just fine. If you're a Comcast customer, you might want to try it out.

Open Source Easter Eggs

Well, it's almost Easter and here's a cool article from Ars Technica about Open Source Easter Eggs :)

Gaming and AI

For those who haven't read Daniel Suarez's Daemon, it's an exciting and riveting read. Some of the extrapolations in the book are becoming eeriely accurate; for example, see the following IEEE Spectrum article.

Cloud Storage Drivers

On-line collaboration services are well-suited for hosted storage within the cloud. Services like on-line groups, blogs, wikis, and the like will easily drive the growth of cloud storage, since it's accessible from anywhere, allows storage consolidation for all client types, scales uniformly, and can be backed up easier than locally-hosted storage.