Misc

Bing is getting a new look and feel, powered by Microsoft AI and OpenAI (ChatGPT) and was announced yesterday. There is a lot of buzz around this, and I thought I would share my thoughts on this as I got access today. What is the new Bing? Well, it is the thing that is making the 800-pound gorilla in the room, Google, come out and dance on its toes. 🦍 The new Bing is an overhauled version of the search engine that uses ChatGPT technology to understand questions and generate answers. It runs on the next generation of OpenAI’s language model, which is significantly more capable than the version of ChatGPT that has been available since November 20221. The new Bing provides more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if you want them3. You can also chat and create with the new Bing, using its natural language and creative abilities4. The new Bing is live starting today, with limited capabilities. ...

I had been thinking for a while to move away from WordPress for the blog to something simpler and cleaner. WordPress has been great for me when I first moved to it from another engine. However, over time, I found that things have gotten slower, as I added themes and add-ins. Some of these have been great, and others are not really needed. I also wanted to dogfood some of the things we built at work, though in my case that wasn’t the primary motive, just another nice to have. 😄 ...

A key virtue of a programmer is laziness. As an example it is what inspires me to automate my home to the point where I don’t have to lift a finger to switch on the light. Removing friction from a system is a anesthetic joy. The drug of efficiency, feels really good. I still write code and people get surprised by that sometimes - maybe it’s the quality of the code 🤓. ...

Containers are all the rage right now and rightfully so - not only do they help abstract away some of the complexity and dependencies of your apps and solutions, they also make managing of environments, and, deployments much simpler. And the fact that you can do it in a consistent, and repeatable fashion is just icing on the cake. As a simple example, with Docker, on Windows (as in my case), I can run a dockerized app, on a different OS than the host, which can also be interactive. ...

I guess you can see the similarity. No? 😈

In addition to the HoloLens Device Portal ( see part 1 ), another option is using the UAP HoloLens companion app which you can install from the store . I think this is a little more end-user friendly, and perhaps a little less developer focused. It exposes a subset of the same functionality. Once you install it, you connect more or less in the same manner; I think most people will like the live streaming option. There is a bit of latency between the device and what is shown, but that could be somewhat because of our (possibly crappy) wireless which was overloaded with many folks at work. ...

One of the advantages of running Windows 10 on the HoloLens is that it has all the regular features that you would expect. From a developers perspective, one of those being the Device Portal which is awesome. It is essentially a web server that is being hosted on the machine, and allows you to manage your device over Wifi and USB. It is a must have if you want to stream your apps (including Holograms) so that others can see it, or alternatively you can record and then share. And of course there are details for various debug situations and the Virtual input saves your fingers from getting tired! 😄 You also use this to side load the apps you built. There are REST APIs you could use if you want to program, and there is also a UAP app on the store (more on that in part 2 ). ...

As we start to play and explore with new AR/VR mediums like Oculus and HoloLens there is a stronger shift from the traditional medium of working from a more transaction with-known-outcome based model to a more expressive and exploratory model. In the context of many enterprises this is a bigger shift - albeit some of it they have started seeing with mobility but still not the same. I really like how Rick explains and expresses this both in terms of definition and thinking. The clay analogy I think really helps. ...

Can we see the formula displayed in lovely maths? (and trying a simpler equation, as the last one did not parse properly) $$i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left|\Psi(t)\right>=H\left|\Psi(t)\right>$$ Ohh, looks pretty! Though some LaTeX is being finicky, need to take out time to start posting some stuff here, given this is supported. 😁

At home I have a multitude of sensors and devices - ~80 or so which are a combination of water sensors, motion sensors, door sensors, humidity, temperature, etc. A good bunch of these are controlled and integrated with Smartthings, and some I can interact with other apps (e.g. Amazon Echo or Philips Hue etc.). Most are Z-Wave based and some are WiFi. I wanted to know if there are any z-wave visualisers? Essentially software that uses a USB z-wave network device as a node and then can plot what the mesh looks like. Would be awesome to be able to debug the packet hops from the controller to the device. ...

It has been a while since I blogged, and is something I want to try and get slowly back into. I did find this site which has cool visualization tools if that is something you are interested in. As an example, here is what a interactive bubble chart looks like for the blog: Build bubbles for your page Dashboards ...

I am on the latest version of both WordPress and Firefox as of this writing - namely v4.1 and v34.0.5 respectively and running on a TechPreview of Windows 10 (Build 9879 to be precise). My main browser is Firefox, and whilst I also have Chrome and of course IE - I use them only on occasions of in some cases when I have to use them for one reason or another. ...

Samsung SUR40 which recently got stuck at boot up (see the photo below). Once the Kernel lib loaded, for some reason was getting stuck at: StrongROM version 03.30 Build:_P MS PixelSense not booting up Powering it off or on, did not help. Neither did trying to get into the BIOS to try and change some things. I did get this back up and running, and in the end the solution was quite simple - I had to physically take out the power cable (just powering it down was not enough); wait a few seconds and then plug the power cord in, and boot it back up. ...

Here are the interesting finds of this time around. IDA - A cool debugger which runs on most platforms and different from the MS variety. TypeScript - as the name suggests, it is strongly typed JS which compiles down to standard JS! This can only be good I think given all the crazy things one can so in JS. More details here . Can you hide anything from NSA? TV Tuners - did you know they can let you spy - who knew? grepWin - a powerful regex-based search and replace tool - and can work across multiple files. Twine - is a wireless sensor block tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. What all things one can do with Twine? Here are a few examples for inspiration . Visual.ly - tell your story visually; good resource for infographics and data visualisation Can an $11,111 coffee pot turn out a better cup of joe? What the Internet of Things (#IoT) needs to become a reality? Freescale has an interesting paper (pdf) on it. High expectations Asian Fathers - enough said! How to be a hacker ? 14 Kickstarter projects to watch out for in 2014 Alloy.UI - a really cool HTML and JavaScript library with lots of useful UI features . Builds on top of YUI3 and Bootstrap. DON’T PANIC - The Facts About Population . Very interesting, especially the visualisation. You can find more on that here . As sites and services become product aware, the age of pervasive commerce begins (remember Minority Reports ?).

The wife recently bought a Nike FuelBand which she was loving. However in about 4-5 weeks of regular usage, the strap on it broke and the links which hold it together fell apart. The device itself is working, but it cannot be worn now as it won’t lock making it quite useless. 😢 I was quite surprised as this is supposed to last more than this given both what it is meant to do and the cost of the device as well. Now this is an expensive paperweight. ...

After my WHS died and I moved to a Synology DS413 and using that as a ‘home server’ and have been extremely happy with it! The only thing I miss is backing up the Windows machines automatically (as WHS did), but overall I think this is better, flexible and more powerful compared to WHS. I needed to look for a new wiki software. I recently moved from ScrewTurn Wiki (which was great BTW, but then is a dead project now) to DokuWiki which is perfect for my needs. I run two wiki’s at home and has much of our day-to-day things we as a family need. There are some sections of the Wiki, which are sensitive and I don’t want anyone one the network getting to it. I wanted to authenticate the user and once they login only then get to that. ...

I don’t know what WordPress thinks of IE 10 (running on Win 8), but when I upgraded to WordPress v3.6, and I login to the Dashboard, it does not like IE running in compatibility mode and shows me the following. It would think I am still running IE 6! Also whilst I don’t get this with the compatibility mode switched off, everything does not work correctly and one has to use either Firefox or Chrome. ...

This has to fall in the weird category. Vodafone’s Corporate Online site, where I need to login to see my company provided mobile bill has timings from 07:30 to 22:30 GMT - WHY??? Don’t they get it, this is online and the site can be up and running 24x7! This is not some technical support I am talking about where they have actual humans monitoring and answering - this is access to the billing system. ...

Yes, I am still alive. Between a baby and work, don’t have time for much else. I did want to say Hello World. Will try and be more regular here.

I am getting bored with the current WordPress theme on the blog and was interested in getting another theme (preferably free), got any recommendations? And nothing from the 10 ugliest WordPress themes please. :-)

After upgrading to the latest WordPress (v3.0.4), I also decided to have a look at the various plugins I am running. As part of that I stumbled across Ultimate Collection of WordPress plugins which are very interesting. If you run WordPress (and if you don’t, why not :)), I would highly recommend to check them out. I already was running some of these and not heard of others which are great. ...

First post from my brand new Android phone and the Wordpress app. Quite impressed with it so far. I sure do miss the keyboard though. Suggestions for any apps? My phone is HTC wildfire and nothing fancy so the apps should be able to run on this phone.

Just upgraded the blog to WordPress 3.0 - two clicks and I was done - can it get any simpler? What a pleasant surprise compared to the pile of crap that CS 2007+ turned out to be. Try upgrading that in something like two clicks? Ha! Well done WordPress!

… the average wife spends nearly 8,000 minutes a year nagging her husband!