Empower your Minions

 

device.modeOfTransport.on('changed', function(signal) { if (signal.previous === 'driving' && signal.current !== 'driving') { device.notifications.createNotification(car is parked here: ('
                + signal.location.latitude + ', ' + signal.location.longitude + ')' ).show(); } });

 

JavaScript may not be the best way to talk to your minions.  Wolfram Alpha’s natural  language seems more appropriate.  But now I shall never need to look for my car again.  It is likely someone has already written the JavaSript code for you to tell your minion what you need.

Putin, Snowden, Ukraine, incompetent NSA

Instant speed reading -- It works!

After years in “stealth mode” as a start-up, Spritz finally launched its application and within a few days dozens of clones popped up all over the interwebs.  Late to the game (as always) I stumbled upon the “squirt” bookmarklet, which is a nominal (but un-polished “quirky”) JavaScript re-implementation of the simple Spritz algorithm.  There are already many browser plug-ins and we can expect a calibre plug-in very soon.

The “spritz” algorithm is very easy to implement and shockingly effective.  I anticipate getting past 500 words per minute after a few hours of reading.

The first time I ran squirt I was shocked to discover that my most-comfortable “spritz" style reading speed is 440 – 460 words per minute.  My normal reading speed is about 100.

Like most of us, I have a large and growing collection of unread ebooks waiting for me to read.  Calibre can convert them to HTML or text and I shall now be able to read them 5x faster.   Awesome!

Supervising Smartphone Sensor Sucking Software?

Sensors

The amazing sensors in our phones track where we are, what we’re doing, what we see and hear, even our stress levels and pulse rate.

  

And the cool software we run in our phones helps us navigate, avoid traffic, communicate with our family, friends, and business associates, stay informed, and be entertained.  Sound, video, vibration, interaction, immersion, augmented reality….  It’s awesome.

Privacy is Dead

But the price we pay for this connected life is a complete loss of any modicum of privacy to institutions, companies, individuals, and artificial intelligences to whom we would not choose to surrender such intimate and private information.

 

Take Control with XPrivacy!

 

When it entered the phone wars, the evil search giant (ESG) used the idealistic and altruistic Open Source movement to mobilize the “crowd” of idealistic, motivated individuals who want to collaborate on developing systems together, where the information and intellectual property is shared freely.  The ESG created AOSP the Android Open Source Project, which they later treacherously abandoned to earn more money in the Phone Wars.

 

But the AOSP lives on!  And noble, rebel coders still produce cool software.  Here is a great example.  This application enables you (the phone owner) to decide which information the applications installed in your phone are allowed to see and use.  It feeds the applications fake or no data from sensors if you don’t want them to know where you are, who is in your contact list, with whom you speak on the phone, etc.  You decide which sensor and private data of yours the application is allowed to have.  Of course it’s free.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bokhorst.xprivacy.installer

“Double war crime:” attacks on children from behind civilian human shields

Soon after the final bell rang, sending children home from public schools across Southern Israel on Wednesday 3/12/14, a rain of about 60 rockets, fired from Gaza, began falling on civilian centers.

Hiding behind a dense civilian population (war crime number 1) the bad guys launched rockets at civilian kids walking home from school (war crime number 2).

War Crime #1: hiding behind civilians to launch rockets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another rocket attack from an olive grove in Gaza Wednesday 3/12/14:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The civilian targets for these rockets were the kids walking home from school (war crime).  Below is a photo of the blast from a rocket that landed in Sderot.

I cannot imagine having kids walk home while under rocket fire.  I cannot imagine why we reward double-war-crimes by paying cash to the kleptocrats who order these crimes.

200 million identities compromised via Experian

 

Experian gives ID Theft Service 200 Million Consumer Records

…each page containing at least ten different records full of personal data on multiple individuals — including my correct records. Revealing the more sensitive data for each record — including the date of birth and Social Security number…

Boston Business Trip

I flew a red-eye coach non-stop from Seattle to Boston.  The timing is very convenient because I was able to work all day Monday, have dinner with the family, then head to the airport.  However coach seating, pressed up against strangers is not the most amenable place to sleep.

The 737-300 had a “Russell Wilson, chief football officer” paint scheme 

 

 

 

I snapped some shots of the sunrise over Boston during landing

Boston Logan Airport is a big, inconvenient, slow-moving, inefficient airport with bad signage and poor facilities.

The polar vortex was in full-swing.  Outside temperatures where 19 degrees F (-7 C).

After dinner I attended a fun talk at MIT by eBay’s Hunch CTO Matt Gattis.  It was relatively well-attended and I met some great summer intern prospects.

Matt spoke about the Hunch taste graph and the team’s journey from Python to C, to assembler and then on to mobile applications as they coded their real-time machine-learning system.

The next day I interviewed a bunch of candidates at PayPal’s new Boston office at 1 International Center.  It is a gorgeous facility with a beautiful indoor fountain that drops water down from the ceiling of a big atrium in the central lobby.

 

View from inside the office out over the Charles river.  There is another view of the harbor on the other side.

 

There is a “Tom Brady” conference room.

 

The summer intern candidates were young, inexperienced, bright, motivated, facile at code, very deep in python idioms and libraries, and fun to interview.  I am hoping we can grab a bunch of them this summer.

 

Instead of staying at an expensive hotel, I saved my company some money and crashed at my sister’s house near-by, where we celebrated her birthday.