08.03.13

What Most Schools Don’t Teach…

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 9:44 pm by Liv

If you work in IT, you have probably by now have seen the famous video on YouTube labelled “What most schools don’t teach” — where Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and a few other prominent figures are talking about how easy it is to program, and how only 10% of the USA schools teach programming. It goes on more to bombard the viewer with some scary figures about how 1,000,000 jobs or more will go unfilled because there are not enough coders — I’m guessing as a motivational message to inspire people (kids?) to start programming.

The thing is, watching the video, I cannot but cringe at the hypocrisy employed in making this video! If the purpose of this message is to increase education efforts (at school level or individually) in the programming sector, then I’d say it probably does it job — in a very lame way, but it sort of does. If however this is intended to be a call to arms for “everyone” to start programming and either change their jobs to a programming job or if they are at the beginning of their career, to set their career path to be in programming, then I’d say the message is a hypocritical one. Even worse, it is setting up the targeted audience for a harsh comedown!

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27.02.13

Utility for Version-Enabled AWS S3 Buckets

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 8:01 pm by Liv

OK, Amazon, I have to tell you something: you dropped the ball a bit on this one! I absolutely love AWS and every day I seem to find something new about them (though, granted, not sure if that says something about the innovation in Amazon or it says something about my ignorance!?). However, having used S3 for a while, I have been waiting for a while for an utility like this that in the end I had to write it myself!

The problem that I have is that I use a few buckets where I have enabled Amazon’s versioning feature on the bucket. This means every time I write a file, S3 stores all the versions of a file, which is so cool because I can keep a full trail of each file changes, together with metadata around it. However, the problem arrives when you delete a file: any S3 file browser you get (including Amazon’s own web based one) shows that the file is no longer there, however, if you proceed to delete all the files in the bucket and then try to delete the bucket, you will get an error message which informs that in fact the bucket is not empty (and as such it cannot be deleted)! If you start digging into it, you will find that AWS API offers a specific set of functions for versioning — and once you employ those you start seeing that your bucket is far from empty and has lots of versions in it; unfortunately those versions are not visible because the file has been deleted, however, unless you delete these versions you cannot delete the bucket (not to mention that they are being stored in S3 in stealth “ninja” mode taking space — and costing you money).

That’s when I started looking for an utility who can deal with this, but up to now, I wasn’t that lucky. And the rule of today’s software tools says that if it’s not there it’s time to write one! Hence this utility — and the post here where I’m offering it for download.

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06.02.13

melovesvideos Goes Live!

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, News, Tech at 9:35 pm by Liv

About 2 weeks or so ago, Amazon launched their Elastic Transcoder and at the time this has captured my attention right away — to the point where I had to go and add it to my AWS account and try it for myself. Regardless of anything else, that is an amazing tool and Amazon did a good job of creating such a simple API for such a complex task.

If you ever attempted to transfer a movie from your say mobile device to your video handset, you will find yourself quite often in movie format conversion hell — while things are getting a bit more standardized nowadays, it is still occasionally the case that some manufacturers force you to use their software / firmware / drivers to get a movie from some obscure format onto your computer and be able to play it properly. (God forbid you made the mistake of tilting the camera so you get a panoramic view — as you will find yourself watching the movie on your computer screen with your head tilted in the opposite direction, trying to make sense of it!) Or vice versa, you have a powerful handheld device that can play anything you throw at it — and your “Transformers” BluRay you just bought comes preloaded with a HD MPEG version of the movie which you can download onto your phone; however, the damn thing “weighs” about 2Gb which seems a bit too much bearing in mind you’re watching it on a 480 x 320 screen! And there’s nothing out there to help you downsize the original for a more suitable format (and size) for your handheld…

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07.01.13

Product Idea — Dropbox Reloaded

Posted in Blogroll, News, Product Ideas, Random Thoughts, Tech at 10:39 pm by Liv

I just had this thought just now and I thought I have to start writing down these “product ideas” — which are just random ideas of small improvements for various products that come to my mind every now and then — as otherwise nothing will happen. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect that simply writing these ideas down will trigger a whole revolution in the products and companies I’m talking about, but if these reach the eyes and the ears of some people who thought of the same improvement to a product, then perhaps we can build some critical mass and get these add-ons to the products we love — or would like to love. After all, people pay good money to get the pulse on how their products and ideas perform “out there”, so why not take the initiative and give it to them, when we feel they could do with a bit of help?

With that in mind, I’ve started this new Category on my blog labelled Product Ideas — where I will be throwing anything from ideas of products (listen up all you Silicon Valley entrepreneurs wannabe who are still searching for that breakthrough idea! ) to (what I perceive to be) useful addendums to existing products. Feel free to (re)tweet these, facebook them, or forward them to the people in charge of these products (if you know them) — or just discard them right away as madness; my theory still stands about if you don’t voice these you will never get heard…

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20.12.12

Of Java and Assembler

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:04 pm by Liv

The title would no doubt puzzle quite a few of you — after all I’m putting in the same sentence a low-level, processor-specific language (for no better term for “assembler” — I know, I know, I know, “it’s not really a language”, right?) with a rather high-level, even platform-independent language like Java. So, right away you’d all be asking yourself “well, what can they have in common?” — or probably thinking that this is an article looking at how far apart these 2 languages are. The thing is, they’re not actually that far apart! Yup, I’m going to say that again and re-phrase is so the purpose of this post becomes more clear: they are quite similar in fact!

Now, I bet this got your attention, didn’t it ? Rest assured, I didn’t just say it for the sake of it — I will try to explain throughout this post how that is possible. And if you decide to read it all, and happen to work within the JVM space, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this — either via a comment here or simply drop me a line.

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