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  Cracking Siri

On October 14, 2011, Apple introduced the new iPhone 4S. One of its major new features was Siri, a personal assistant application. Siri uses a natural language processing technology to interact with the user.Interestingly, Apple explained that Siri works by sending data to a remote server (that’s probably why Siri only works over 3G or WiFi). As soon as we could put our hands on the new iPhone 4S, we decided to have a sneak peek at how it really works.Today, we managed to crack ...

   Siri,Cracking,Defect,Speech to text,Record,AI     2011-11-15 08:38:23

  Dart is to JavaScript as C# is to C++

Given the background of Lars Bak, the Google engineer whose V8 JavaScript interpreter upended Firefox's claim on speed, it was reasonable to suspect Google's new Web development language might look a lot like Smalltalk. But that might have taken the Web in a strange and different direction. Today, on the day of a Web developers' conference in Denmark, Google and members of the Chromium open source development team raised the curtain on Dart, the company's bid for a new and somewhat more str...

   Dart,Google,JavaScript,Virtual Machine,Chromium     2011-10-21 08:40:09

  Windows 8 Possible Features: Ribbon, Metro, Apps, Cloud Integration

Microsoft may still be plugging away at selling Windows 7 to consumers and the enterprise, but rumors have already started about the next version of the popular operating system—dubbed "Windows 8" by many in the media. Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, two bloggers with a track record of delving into Microsoft's proprietary code base, recently sparked a fresh round of chatter with a dissection of a supposed Windows 8 early build, adding their voices to a discussion that extends back to 201...

   Windows 8,New features,Touch,Metro     2011-04-11 02:10:12

  Why I Hate Android

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse. I should probably explain. Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Androi...

   Android,Hate,Feature     2012-01-10 07:19:27

  Create successful Python projects

The ecosystem for open source Python projects is both rich and diverse. This enables you to stand on the shoulders of giants in the production of your next open source project. In addition, it means that there's a set of community norms and best practices. By adhering to these conventions and applying the practices in your project, you may gain wider adoption for your software. This article covers practi...

   Python,Project,Open Source,Team Management     2012-02-03 08:09:27

  True Scala complexity

Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thou...

   Scala,Complexity     2012-01-10 07:17:07

  Battlelog: Modern Web Applications are Here

It's the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and statistic platforms. Call of Duty has Elite, Battlefield has Battelog.But just because these services are sitting in the same spot it does not mean they are in any way similar. An...

   Game,Call of duty,Elite,Battlelog,Web platform     2011-11-15 08:11:40

  Handling Plugins In PHP

A common problem that developers face when building applications is how to allow the application to be "plug-able" at runtime.  Meaning, to allow non-core code to modify the way an application is processed at runtime.  There are a lot of different ways that this can be done, and lots of examples of it in real life.  Over a year ago, I wrote a StackOverflow Answer on this topic.  However, I think it deserves another look.  So let's look at some patterns and common im...

   PHP,Plugin,Handling     2012-03-11 13:18:39

  So you want to write JavaScript for a living?

What do you need to know if you are interviewing for a job that involves Javascript development? What kind of expectations do employers have of candidates now that the state of client side development has been changed with the rise of asynchronous JavaScript and the often slick, supporting interfaces? These were questions I was asking myself after a friend pointed me to an interesting job posting over at Meebo that included some JavaScript puzzlers on logical operators, DOM odditi...

   JavaScript,Career,Skills,Knowledge     2011-10-22 12:53:11

  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

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