SLC Tech Breakfast on Mar 21

SLC Tech Breakfast on Fri Mar 21 8:00-9:30 AM downtown at Newmont U. Bagels provided.

coursera at princeton (Josh recommends)

dynamic programming (same as memoization, sounds like)

spring roo (rails-like quick start for Java, if I remember right)

linq (for allowing SQL-like data queries in language), jlinq, jpropel

"clock of complexity"

malbolge: unreadable programming language

Tomorrow's tech breakfast

Tomorrow morning, 8 AM, downtown: above Jason's Deli at the Gateway.

From Garth: There is a parking lot in front of Jason's Deli (you just have to make sure that the parking space says for gateway office) and the doors to the office are to the right of the entrance to Jason's Deli. My office is in suite 230.

Bagels

Here's other background info.

Yet Another SLC Tech Breakfast

Anyone using functional programming?  (Josh has done Scala)

Josh Bloch (Effective Java) & anonymous types vs Neil Gafter & closures

Tom Clancy's game The Division has an impressive new game engine

TED talk: consequences of game on real life

languages: Dart, Go, Underscore.js

Speed dating with google glass

Last 2 SLC Tech Breakfasts

"Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" (Trent) surveys twin-adoption studies and asserts that nature surpasses nurture in most long-term qualities of life
EconTalk podcast interviewed that author, and other researchers to get the economists view

Henry Shrapnel invented bombs (Josh)

Recent Ping Identity Summit (Josh, from Rearden Commerce)
- OpenSSL, Josso
- potential for OpenID providers to manage the user's identity

AccountChooser.com is Google's widget for easy site authentication

"Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy", where engineered livestock has desire to be eaten

SOPA is yet another piece of legislation to empower the RIAA to shut down websites


Project VRM by Doc Searles aims to build consumer-oriented identity management
Other consumer-centered projects (which aggregate demand): Google Offers, Groupon.com, HomeRun.com

Interesting projects from Rearden Commerce: enterprises typically use SAML, and there are problems trying to pass customers between sites who shouldn't have info from each other

Wouldn't it be nice to have things centralized!  (But that's what we're avoiding.)

Internet Identity Workshop is an influential conference in the identity field


_____________________________________________________________
These notes are from last month:


Ryan: using git submodules (like svn externals) vs subtree merges
Linux started with BitKeeper, then wrote his own git
http://xkcd.com/963/
The daily WTF

The best way to run a company is to not only encourage loyalty and
staying with the company but also encourage people to grow and
possibly leave.

Ryan: open-source RockBox project, with great audio features for old
iPods and trying to migrate it to modern players (iPhone, Android)

Seniors: won't use a computer, but will use email on their phone
'cause it's easier; there's a service that gives you a printer connected
to the network and downloads and prints emails from some account

Today's SLC Tech Breakfast

Dan: Where is virtual reality?

Video search
One big part is speech recognition Sphinx (CMU) http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/
Why store text?  There are good reasons (Josh and Matt are doing a project on all this)

Augmented reality
- SixthSense from MIT http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
- Dan recommends Robert Heinlein - Double Star

Phones seem to be changing how we do things, eg. calling rather than working independently

The G2X phone is fabulous - Matt

There are headphones that stick near the ear so you can feel vibrations (without bugging someone).

There's a higher ratio of female engineers in India vs America

Other events
- Utah Code Camp http://pcamputah.org/ (though it may just be more ads; not a good impression of Newmont by people)
- Product Camp Utah http://pcamputah.org/
- Roots Tech http://rootstech.familysearch.org/
- UTOS Project Day http://project-day.utos.org/

Chromebook is out, about $500
Google is offering it for about $28/chromebook/year for organizations ($20 for schools)

Google says Javascript is not the bottleneck any more
- Trent is using knockout.js (also looked at backbone.js)
- Matt uses GXT (GWT version of ext.js), though the rendered code can be confusing (with synchronous events)

Today's SLC Tech Breakfast

Bitcoin, the distributed currency

Technical pioneers that suddenly went dark:
- Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin)
- why the lucky stiff (Ruby)

What motivates us?  Dan Pink says Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose: http://www.danpink.com/drive

New OSX features in Lion, such as versioned filesystem and saving to the cloud

The Obviousness of Anarchy: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/Obvious.pdf

Today's SLC Tech Breakfast

From today's SLC Tech Breakfast:

Ruby fibers vs threads, and a web server Goliath that allows you to write in a more comfortable linear fashion.

Testing methodology and unit tests, and how we improve software and really engineer while handling business needs and reality.

Dan: can we train developers to schmooze with managers? See maker's schedule vs manager's schedule
(See the video on "the internet in a box".)

Developers get better with age.

Today's SLC Tech Breakfast

From today's SLC Tech Breakfast:

Staying secure with guns; Dan recommends TheBoxOTruth.com for gun education

passwords and sharing
- SpiderOak (Makani doesn't recommend for UI)
- LastPass.com (password sharing)
- locking password file: KeePassX, OnePassword, LastPass

For security, Dan wants a hand-held retina-scanner (not a hand-held-retina scanner)

Quantum entanglement, Dan will look up whether a recent experiment that supposedly allowed faster-than-light communication

Sharing code from different languages
- one way is to use JVM-based languages that can be compile-time checked (Josh)
- in C# shop, wants to use Java tool (Flying Saucer) to convert documents, used IKVM.net, also see JNBridge.com (Dan)
- make web-services the architectural organization (Josh)... that's how we organize in FLUX networking (Ryan)

Enterprise security: we share an encrypted DB (KeePassX), but if an employee leaves...?
The best solution is an OAuth-style, revokable auth

OAuth is recommended for phones, too... including web auth (Josh)

How good are your unit tests? (Dan)
- We have over 10% coverage with Sonar (Josh)
- Continuous build: Hudson, Cruise Control

How do we manage DB versioning? (Dan)
- custom system, which builds at any version (Makani)
- each DB change represented by create SQL and hopefully reverse SQL, table with version number in DB (Josh & Makani)
- potentially: make each change a non-breaking change with previous version, so code roll-back is easy, eg. rename is add followed by drop later (Makani)


"No fluff just stuff" conference downtown SLC (Josh)
Jsconf JavaScript conferences
Defrag conference in Denver (Trent)
Javascript libraries: Require, Promise interface, dojo for apps (Josh)

Today's SLC Tech Breakfast

 From today's SLC Tech Breakfast:

create a secure internal network, still open to neighbors:
- use two routers, a secure internal one behind an external open one
- open WRT or DDRT
- by default they're all bridged, which can be changed
- might be easier to do with multiple SSIDs

RiffTrax (funny running movie commentary) came up again... maybe we should create our own

parselet, a PEG (vs LALR, etc) parser

Payvment.com: your own shopping cart with items from other sites with a rich API

pidye.com, with this (beta) that's 100% client-side javascript cart

Google create specifications for searching/indexing rich AJAX web-pages
(Update: I just noticed a storm of complaints about the hash-bangs, eg. Tim Bray.)

HtmlUnit: java testing for web-pages

search engines for the large invisible web (eg. where structured data may take a few steps to access)

blekko.com (which Josh mentioned but I had to leave... can anyone summarize in the comments)

Today's SLC Tech Breakfast

These links may only make sense to those of us who were there.

Setting up network booting securely (Ryan)

• PXE Preboot eXecution Environment for Intel machines
• GPXE open-source version
• TPM (Trusted Platform Module)
• Polar SSL Embedded SSL generator, but bad random number generator

quantum cryptography hacking (Trent)

lockpicking for any lock (Ryan)

SSL: Do people mistake communication security for trustworthiness? (Ryan)

XKCD.com

• setting up a site to gather people's passwords (since people use the same ones many places) (Josh)
• What if GPS systems worked like Windows progress bar? (Trent)

joindiaspora.com for personal ownership of social info (Trent)

... which references this enlightening interview of Eben Moglen at P2P Foundation (Trent)

Kynet and "Pull" by David Siegel, about the Semantic Web (Trent)

RiffTrax (Josh & Ryan)

Here is the calendar for future SLC Tech Breakfasts (next on Oct 8), and here's the announcement post I always reference with that and other relevant information.

Tech Breakfast miscellany

Here are my quick notes from today's breakfast (along with the people who brought up the topic, in parens).

We started on UI...

• Actionscript, Blaze DS (Phil)
• GWT 2, Google Closure, Ext JS (Josh)
  

... then HTML 5, and the Ignite SLC event including a rap...

• Mobile App Dev RAP BATTLE (Trent)

... and security, how we in tech tend to be lazy when it comes to security...

• Web Security: A Big Case of ...OOPS... (Trent)

... so maybe these books will help us with the issues...

• Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (Dan)
• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow (Trent)
  

... and luckily we have new tools for managing authorization...

• OAuth (Trent)
  
• Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP

... and maybe some verifiable anonymity?

• Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA
• pseud.ony.ms (Trent)

We discussed relationships, and tinychat.com and chatroulette.com came up.

Other... miscellany:

• Silicon Snake-Oil by Clifford Stoll (Dan)
• Archer Farm in Logan (... a historical farm here locally? Maybe someone can elaborate in the comments.)
  
• "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon Bonaparte (Phil)
  
• Fear the Boom and Bust, a rap battle between economists Keynes and Hayek (Trent)