Everybody knows ZIP files. It’s what comes out when you compress something on windows and on OS X. It’s the commonly used format to store and exchange compressed data.
Now there’s a lot of things you can do when you know file formats, especially those with many algorithms involved, inside out. There is a lot of text explaining the ZIP file format, like this one.
With that knowledge it is possible to create a valid ZIP file that never ends. You might already know ZIP bombs bit this one is a different animal. You computer won’t stop decompressing…
The report for 2012 is in! Since 2008 Jehiah Czebotar is monitoring his daily life and he is compiling a report from that data for everyone to read. He self says that this is a hat tip to Nicholas Felton who himself is releasing beautiful yearly reports of statistics around his life.
I am a fan of those nice graphics and statistics about the life. It really gives you insights that you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. Especially with my own home automation and self-monitoring ambitions it’s quite a load of new ideas coming in from these nice graphics.
If you need data to fill your brand new (graph) database, go ahead, there’s something to load:
“KONECT (the Koblenz Network Collection) is a project to collect large network datasets of all types in order to perform research in network science and related fields, collected by the Institute of Web Science and Technologies at the University of Koblenz–Landau. KONECT contains over a hundred network datasets of various types, including directed, undirected, bipartite, weighted, unweighted, signed and rating networks. The networks of KONECT are collected from many diverse areas such as social networks, hyperlink networks, authorship networks, physical networks, interaction networks and communication networks. The KONECT project has developed network analysis tools which are used to compute network statistics, to draw plots and to implement various link prediction algorithms. The result of these analyses are presented on these pages. Whenever we are allowed to do so, we provide a download of the networks.”
If you can stand a little bit of cursing and bad words and if you’re a developer. You should give this site a visit. The commit logs from last night speak for themselves:
Usually the actors that allow you to switch power on/off and who measure power usage use the 434Mhz or 868Mhz wireless bands to communicate with their base station. Now the german manufacturer AVM came up with a solution that allows you to switch on/off (with an actual button on the device itself and wireless!) and to measure the power consumption of the devices connected to it.
The unspectacular it looks the spectacular are the features:
switch up to 2300 watts / 10 ampere
use different predefined settings to switch on/off or even use Google Calendar to tell it when to switch
measure the energy consumption of connected devices
it uses the european DECT standard to communicate with a Fritz!Box base station (which is a requirement)
For around 50 Euro it’s quite an investment but maybe I’ll give it a shot – especially the measurement functionality sounds great. Since I do not have one yet I don’t know anything about how to access it through third party software (h.a.c.s.?)
“0 A.D. (pronounced “zero-ey-dee”) is a free, open-source, historical Real Time Strategy (RTS) game currently under development by Wildfire Games, a global group of volunteer game developers. As the leader of an ancient civilization, you must gather the resources you need to raise a military force and dominate your enemies.”
And once again some smart people put their heads together and came up with something that will revolutionize your world. Well it’s ‘just’ home automation but indeed it looks very very promising. Especially the human-machine interface through speech recognition. First of all let’s start with a short introductory video:
“CastleOS is an integrated software suite for controlling the automation equipment in your home – an operating system for your castle, if you will. The first piece of the suite is what we call the “Core Service” – it acts as the central controller for the whole system. This runs on any relatively recent Windows computer (or more specifically, the computer that has an Insteon PLM or USB stick plugged in to it), and creates a network connection to both your home automation devices, and the second piece of the integrated suite – the remote access apps like the HTML5 app, Kinect voice control app, and future Android/iOS apps.” (from the CastleOS page)
So it’s said to be an all-in-one system that controls power-outlets and devices through it’s core service and offering the option to add Kinect based speech recognition to say things like “Computer, Lights!”.
Unfortunately it comes with quite high and hard requirements when it comes to hardware it’s compatible with. A kinect possible exists in your household but I doubt that you got the Insteon hardware to control out devices with.
That seems to be the main problem of all current home automation solutions – you just have to have the according hardware to use them. It’s not quite possible to use anything and everything in a standardized way. Maybe it’s time to have a “home plug’n’play” specification set-up for all hard- and software vendors to follow?
I plan to speak at a couple of conferences this year – first in the line will be the Open Source Data Center conference in Nuremberg.
“The Open Source Data Center Conference, with a changing focus from year to year, offers you the unique possibility to meet international OS-experts, to benefit from their comprehensive experience and to gain the latest know-how for the daily practice. The conference is especially adapted to experienced administrators and architects.”
The topic I will be talking about (in german though) is our fully virtualized data center testing environment at Rakuten Germany.
When you want to change things from “testing in production” to “testing in a test environment” it’s usually a very hard way to go. In this case we chose the way to virtualize whatever service was in the datacenter, with all the same configurations and even network settings. We called that “Ignition” and it allows us to test almost any aspect of our production environment without interfereing with it. My talk will cover the thoughts and technologies behind that.
I also want to stress the fact that there are a lot more interesting talks than mine. Go to the OSDC 2013 homepage and find out for yourself.
Slow is the right word to describe my html and javascript learning-by-doing progress right now. I have chosen the h.a.c.s. user interface as a valid project to learn html and javascript up to a point where I can start to write useable websites with it. The h.a.c.s. ui seemed to be a good choice because it’s at the moment only used by my family and they are a bunch of battle-proven beta testers.
So first a small video to get an idea what I am implementing right now:
So all you can see is SVG and HTML rendered stuff – made with the help of awesome javascript libraries, as there are:
I plan to add a lot more – like for swiping gestures. So this will be – just like h.a.c.s – a continuous project. Since I switched to OS X entirely at home I use the great Coda2 to write and debug the code. It helps a lot to have two browser set-up because for some reason I still not feel that well with the WebKit Web Inspector.
Another great feature of Coda2 is the AirPreview – which means it will preview your current page in the editor on an iOS device running DietCoda – oh how I love those automations.
So I reached the first goal set for myself for the user interface: It’s doing the things the old UI did and it’s maintainable in addition. I am still struggling with javascript here and there – mainly because the debugging and tracing is oh-so-difficult (or I am to slow understanding).
If you got any recommendation for a javascript editor that can handle multiple includes and debugging (step-by-step, …) and good tracing for events please comment!
