All posts in General

• May 6, 2013

  Firefox OS at its Peak: Upgrading Gaia on Your Geeksphone

  

  I received my Geeksphone Peak Firefox OS Developer device today. Firefox OS consists of two core parts:

  1. Boot2Gecko, which is essentially a Gecko rendering engine stapled on top of the Linux (Android) kernel
  2. Gaia, which is the HTML/JS/CSS front-end

  The Geeksphones are aimed at developers, so you’ll want to live on the bleeding edge (and in this case: you really should). Out of the box the Geeksphones come with Gaia 1.0.1 installed, which is pretty old. There’s some significant improvement going on for 1.1. Here’s how you upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Gaia. I tested this on a Mac, I assume on Linux and perhaps Windows it works similarly. I own the Peak phone myself, but for the other models the steps should be the same (other than the HIDPI thing, which I’ll note later).

  Read more

• April 25, 2013

  Tim O’Reilly’s Google Glass Experience

  Tim O’Reilly received his Google Glass preview in the mail. From his G+ post: 

  

  I just got my Google Glass last night, and it’s been a long time since a tech gadget has had me grinning ear to ear so often. I was at the Tech4Dem event, and let Marci Harris and Macon Phillips try on my Glass. Both of them quickly got the same big grin!

   

  It’s not at all what people expect! It’s a magical experience. I haven’t yet been quite able to put my finger on why it feels that way, but I think it’s the immediacy. Rather than fumbling for your phone, then opening the camera app, you can take a picture or a video with a touch, and share it with another touch. You can also talk to the device, taking pictures, doing google searches, getting directions, or sending emails or texts, without ever touching the devices. (You can wake it up with a touch or by tossing your head slightly.)

   

  A couple of comments:

  1. People have this notion that it’s privacy-invading. It really isn’t. It’s pretty easy for people you’re interacting with to see when the device is on – the lit-up screen is viewable from the other side. Yes, you can quickly take a photo or video, but only with either a voice command, or a push of a button on the frame, so it’s clearly noticeable.
  2. People also have the notion that you won’t be able to tell when someone is talking to you and when they are on the device. Again, that’s just not true. It sits above your eyes and it’s very clear when someone is looking up at the screen rather than looking at you.
  3. Speech is the natural interface for this device, but there are also a lot of gestures on the frame that control it. It’s elegant and intuitive. But some of the magic is the immediacy of talking to it, or touching it, and having something happen.

  More.

• April 24, 2013

  TraceGL

  Rik Arends, my former boss at Cloud9 launched a pretty cool product yesterday: traceGL. It’s a trace debugger for node.js and browser JavaScript code. I asked him some questions about it on InfoQ.

• April 19, 2013

  If you read only one thing about Bitcoin, read this

  
  I’ve been following Bitcoin, the cryptographic currency, for a year or two, but I still learned a lot about it from this article by Felix Salmon. There’s two angles to Bitcoin: the technical angle (how does it work, why does it work) and the economic angle. Felix Salmon does an excellent job at covering the economic angle:

  A few days ago, the value of all the bitcoins in the world blew past $1 billion for the first time ever. That’s an impressive achievement, for a purely virtual currency backed by no central bank or other authority. It’s also temporary: we’re in the middle of a bitcoin bubble right now, and it’s only a matter of time before the bubble bursts.

  There are a couple of reasons why the bubble is sure to burst. The first is just that it’s a bubble, and any chart which looks like the one at the top of this post is bound to end in tears at some point. But there’s a deeper reason, too — which is that bitcoins are an uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency. The commodity value of bitcoins is rooted in their currency value, but the more of a commodity they become, the less useful they are as a currency.

  If you read anything about Bitcoin and its future, read this.

• April 18, 2013

  Amazon Sure Knows How to Scale: 2 Trillion Objects, 1.1 million reqs/s on S3

  Wow…

  Last June I blogged about the first trillion objects stored in Amazon S3. On the first day of re:Invent I updated that number to 1.3 trillion.

  It is time for another update!

  I’m pleased to announce that there are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 10¹²) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second.

  It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number. 

  How many things can you keep in your head at once?

• April 17, 2013

  Code Hard or Go Home

  Good article about Google forking Webkit under the name Blink by John Siracusa:

  When Apple decided to make its own web browser back in 2001, it chose KHTML/KJS from the KDE project as the basis of its rendering engine. Apple didn’t merely “adopt” this technology; it took the source code and ran with it, hiring a bunch of smart, experienced developers and giving them the time and resources they needed to massively improve KHTML/KJS over the course of several years. Thus, WebKit was born.

  Even has some cool-looking graphs.

• April 16, 2013

  Google Glass APIs Released

  Google has released documentation to the Mirror APIs, the API to program against Google Glass. Google Glass, if you spent the past year living under a rock — and even if you didn’t — is Google’s “I’ve got a weird little thing on my glasses that gives me useful information” upcoming product.

  While Glass is supposedly powered by Android, that’s not the way to develop applications for us regular folk. Instead, we get to build web services. From what I can deduce from the documentation, the way it works is that your glass keeps a persistent connection with Google’s servers, which calls third-party web services on behalf of your glass. Similarly, if you need to push stuff to glass, you do so by calling Google’s webservice end-point, which in turn will push this data to the glass in question.

  Diagrammatically it would look something like this:

  

  Glass offers four groups of APIs:

  • Timeline, to shove notifications in the glasser’s eye.
  • Subscriptions, to receive notifications of, for instance, a glasser calling an action on your timeline item (for instance “reply”, or “delete”).
  • Locations, to enable stalking.
  • Contacts, to create, update and delete contacts (supposedly, this is what you’d use if you want to build a service that syncs Facebook or LinkedIn contacts).

  For now, only a developer edition is available of glass to a select group of developers (that were willing to pay $1.5k for alpha quality hardware) — the rest of us will have to wait until 2014 to look as cool as the — clearly satisfied — glass users below.

  

  

• April 15, 2013

  Live programming with Conception