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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

  A Month With Scala

Although I’ve played around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*. First off let’s talk about why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal of my las...

   Scala,Functional,OOP,Java,Iteration     2011-12-10 06:03:23

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  Good to Great Python reads

A col­lec­tion of python “must reads”:The Python yield key­word explainedPython’s super() con­sid­ered super!Under­stand­ing Python DecoratorsWhat is a meta­class in Python?Meta­classes DemystifiedTry/Catch for val­i­da­tion or speed?Python (and Python C API): __new__ ver­sus __init__Python “self” keywordPython and the Prin­ci­ple of Least AstonishmentA Curi­ous Course on Corou­tines and Concurr...

   Python,Reference,eBook,Reading Material     2011-11-15 11:46:12

  5 things my 4-year-old taught me about technology

One of the great things about being a parent is that you get to see how kids use technology. I have a 4 year-old daughter who loves to mess around with my phone, watch videos on YouTube and play Angry Birds.It’s fun to watch her interact with these things, not only because she’s already better at some of the games than me. The really interesting stuff happens when stuff doesn’t work the way she expects it to, or when she finds ways to use tech that I hadn’t thought of...

   Learning,Children,Siri,Voice,Tech,Course     2011-10-26 07:07:48

  A re-introduction to JavaScript

Introduction Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. 2005 saw the launch of a number of high-profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer. It's useful to start with an idea of the language's history. JavaScript was created in 1...

   JavaScript,Types,Array,Re-introduction,OOP     2012-02-09 05:38:08

  Learning Server-Side JavaScript with Node.js

Node.js is all the buzz at the moment, and makes creating high performance, real-time web applications easy. It allows JavaScript to be used end to end, both on the server and on the client. This tutorial will walk you through the installation of Node and your first “Hello World” program, to building a scalable streaming Twitter server.What is Node.js?JavaScript has traditionally only run in the web browser, but recently there has been considerable interest in bringing it to the...

   JavaScript,Server side,Node.js.Implement     2011-09-20 13:33:15

  Write Scalable, Server-side JavaScript Applications with Node.js

If you live in the Silicon Valley area, you have already heard the buzz: Node.js is being hailed as the next big thing. It’s the silver bullet that offers scale, eases development, and can be leveraged by the vast pool of client-side JavaScript developers. So, what exactly is Node.js?Node.js is a server-side JavaScript environment that uses an asynchronous event-driven model. It is based on Google's V8 JavaScript engine plus several built-in libraries. The excitement around Node.js is tha...

   Node.js,Server side,Scalable,JavaScript app     2012-03-29 13:50:50

  Static Code Analysis

The most important thing I have done as a programmer in recent years is to aggressively pursue static code analysis.  Even more valuable than the hundreds of serious bugs I have prevented with it is the change in mindset about the way I view software reliability and code quality.It is important to say right up front that quality isn’t everything, and acknowledging it isn’t some sort of moral failing.  Value is what you are trying to produce, and quality is only one a...

   Static code,Analysis,Quality,Microsoft 360,Value     2011-12-24 06:50:18

  Installing Python Packages

Now that you have you system and project environment all setup you probably want to start developing. But you likely don’t want to start writing an entire project fully from scratch, as you dive in you’ll quickly realize theres many tools helping you build projects and sites faster. For example making a request to a website there’s Requests, for handling processing images there’s Python Imaging Library, or for a full framework to help you in building a sit...

   Python,Package,Installation,Library,Unix     2011-11-02 12:57:45

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