Christmas Sparks

I had some time to play with my newest chunk of hardware, the spark core.  It is a sweet little board embedded in a breadboard for prototyping fun.  It also connects to Wi-Fi and has a cloud to support it.  You can read about it here.  Of course a picture is warranted:

Registration begins with a smart phone app that assists in Wi-Fi registration, much like chromecast but not as smooth.  Nonetheless it did connect after some handstands - hint you need WPA-2 not WEP and this finally moved me to upgrade my home network!  It is a good thing. 

The spark core folks include in their smart phone app tinker which lets you do elementary operations on the pins.  You can flash an led from your iPhone and more.

More on hacking with it later in the week.  Later, and Merry Christmas!

Killer UX

I just got finished reading Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule.  (Please note that O'Reilly provided a copy of this for free through their review program, which I recommend by the way.)  The book has several features that make it ideal for someone who is interested in usability or has been doing it for a few years.  What is unique about this book is that it provides a very comprehensive case study and weaves it into a thorough usability process.  This book is a great complement for more encyclopedic books such as Designing the User Interface or User Interface Design and Evaluation.  At the end an app, cook,  is produced and I actually downloaded it from Apple's app store.

The book takes the reader through the process using the app to illustrate the steps in the process: Research, Insight, Concept and Design.  Throughout she provides sage advice on when to delve deeper and when to let it go.  She also focuses on behavior and behavior change.  A quote from page 125:

Based on what we know about the users and the environment, what does a [new way of living and behaving] look like?

This illustrates the constant strong emphasis on behavior change and not just cranking out an app.  The book is lavishly illustrated and I do recommend it highly especially for folks interested in usability or in their early years.  Do not get it if you want a comprehensive survey of Usability.  Do get it if after reading the comprehensive books listed above you want to then actually focus on usability in your next project.

Bottom line is that I do highly recommend it.  In fact, I am going to use it in my HCI class in 2014.
It has been a while sicn eI posted on this site, hope to do better!  Later.

(cross posted - also on my Software Universe blog)

Tighten your bolts

Just a post wishing everyone a Happy Halloween and hoping you avoid zombie processes and scary code.  Continuing from my post last weekend the UDOO is quite a board.  More on it soon, later!

And this is my 2014 rendition of halloween:

Hop eyou enjoyed your halloween!

UDOO? Well I do.

So I received my UDOO last week which I snatched during its kickstarter campaign.  I was surprised at how easily it booted once I found the nearly appropriate power supply should be 6-15 volts dc at 2 amps, I found one at 9 volts 1 amp.  My next amazon order will include a 2 amp 12 volt power supply.

Here are pictures of the board and the initial screen.  Unlike rasbpi you do not get all of the gruesome but useful details of the boot - at least for their ubuntu OS variant, which is unfortunate.  I will probably boot android next and determine whether there are more initial diagnostics.

One immediate bit of advice for the aging hackers among us is to come prepared to create an .Xresources file and add this line:

xterm*font: *-fixed-*-*-*-18-*

Turns out the xterm in UDOO Ubuntu is initialized in 6 point font!  Very painful for my reading glassses.  You will have to reboot to make it so. 

I ran the old Byte nbench benchmarks and got some interesting results with what I am sure is not exactly a tuned kernel.  For example the numeric sort was 492.92 on the UDOO using gcc 4.4.1 while a 3 Gig Xeon ranged from 684 to 973 depending on the gcc version (not as recent as the UDOO version).  According to a post on the raspberry pi site the rasb pi did score was 200.4.  Not bad for a $100 quad sporting an arduino!  I will keep you posted on my adventures with more extensive comparisons to the raspberry pi and beaglebone black.

On a totally unrelated note, one of my friends Allan Wilks is walking from Scotch Plains to Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  You can follow him on the link I provided and his adventures are truly inspiring.  Allan is one of the nicest, kindest folks I have ever met and if you are along the way, please offer, if you can, to have him stay at your place for the night.  You will be rewarded with an evening with an outstanding and brilliant person.  Allan Wilks along with Rick Becker and John Chambers invented the Statistical package S - you may be more familiar with the open source package R.  If you are not along the way, check out the blogging on his site.  It is interesting and inspiring.

Much more in my queue but no time for now.  Hopefully more in another week.  Later!

Kid's say the darndest things

So I am up a week on iOS 7 and overall I like it.  From an Aging Hacker perspective the white glare caused by the thin fonts, results in a bit more page glare than I'd like An option to soften the white background would be great.  It gets tiring to read after a bit.  The bright colors will require an acclimation period too.  My least favorite iOS 7 converted app is the New York Times.  Absolute;y hate what they hav edoen with it, but not enough for me to unsubscribe.

But the best comments come from my favorite class of early adopters, kids.  Art Linkletter had a show with that title and he would ask children questions and would receive some stunningly honest and comedic answers.  This frank approach to life makes children intriguing for product feedback.  Therefore it was not totally a surprise to me that one of the members of my google group software-universe posted this comment:

To give you some background, my older daughter is 5 now and has been using my iPhone (and later iPad) since she was ~1. 

I upgraded my iPad to iOS 7 over the weekend. When she asked to play with it, I handed it over expecting her to react to the nice new wallpaper that I set up and new look for the lock screen. Instead, she was confused and no longer knew how to unlock it. Watching this unfold kind of soured the update for me...makes me think that there are fundamental issues with the design cues.

But then she acclimated:

...She hasn't had any trouble since that initial reaction, and is back to finding her Minnie Mouse puzzles and interactive books without issue.

Thanks Sean Kilpatrick for letting me blog those comments!  Another group member, Brad Bershad, creator of ZUMIC, pointed to this video of a child's reaction to the change.  Change is difficult!

On the hardware front I supported a project on indiegogo, $9 arduino leonardo compatible board (which was actually $11, I got 2, but he threw in some leds, buttons, a small breadboard, misc resistors, diodes, ..., and cables) from borderless electronics.   I took it for a spin this weekend and really liked it.  Looks like there is nothing in the way of moving to some Christmas lighting projects.

Sorry it was so long between posts, but I had a rough September.  Hope to do better in the coming months.  Later!

Fruit Pi, Clouds and a Snake

Okay, so maybe I went overboard on the title!  If you are interested in effectively using the Raspberry Pi and also working with admin on the open source cloud software,  OpenStack, one of the best languages to use is python.  Even if you are not interested in clouds or raspberry pi's, python is just a blast to use, so long as you pay attention to white space.  I am brushing up on my python and was pleasantly surprised when I supported a kickstarter  on a python course.  Real Python and Real Python on the web are superb courses.  The style quickly whisks you through the knowledge with lots of examples very efficiently.  These course/books should be a model for future language texts.  Highly recommended!

Although I have not been fortunate in generating much discussion, hope springs eternal.  My topic for this post is, "What version of Python are you using?"  I have been sticking to 2.7 since OpenStack uses it.  Would anyone recommend learn 3+ or should I wait?  Later!

The Twilight of Operating Systems?

Steve Crandall sent me a thought provoking pointer this week to a blog post by Benedict Evans.  The gist of the post is that Windows as an OS is declining in influence.  This is backed with some nice analysis and charts.  He contrasts this with the, "exploding sales of the new wave of mobile UNIX devices."  Somehow I do not think that I would call iOS and iPhone and iPad a Unix device.  However I think he is correct in suggesting the diminishing influence of the Windows OS, but I would extend this to all traditional OSes including linux.  Simply I think a much smaller portion of the public will be interacting with an OS that supports command lines, editors and file systems and more will be interacting with information appliances (old school term but still relevant).  Increasingly more folks are puzzled by a dos woot t-shirt I wear and I think this is indicative of the trend Evans discussed.  However I think the same could be said for classic unix prompts, $ or #.  Folks are interacting more with apps than OSs.  Within a decade, the number of folks who can work with OSs may approach 1970s levels.  This of course is good and bad but I am beginning to feel like the old auto mechanic bemoaning the days of strictly mechanical cars that could be repaired without use of logic probes!  I would be interested in your thoughts.

On other fronts my quadcopter has passed all the checkout tests and should be ready for first flight this week, I just have to pad some wire/frame interfaces so that the wires do not fray.   I will regale you with video when that happy event occurs.  Later