Tag: computers

Smart Gadgets

I saw this post on what a smartwatch should look like and it got me thinking. I’ve got a Kreyos watch coming (I hope) and it fulfills some of the things I was looking for, and a few that the Pebble didn’t.

However I wonder where we’ll go with gadgets in the future. My son and I sometimes dream, trying to decide what we’d like to see built in the future. One of the main things we talk about is how we might wear things. A bracelet of some sort seems to be the consensus. Getting something larger that we can see better, but more convenient then a smart phone. Already I think the 5″ ones are a bit large and cumbersome to use. One of my complaints about the Galaxy S4 was that I couldn’t easily use it with one hand.

Glasses are an interesting idea. Google Glass has some good ideas, though I think the idea of including the camera was one that caused a lot of concern from people, and rightly so. Even though cell phone cameras haven’t caused too much of a problem, there certainly have been privacy incidents. I think I’d like the idea of getting some information in my field of vision, and I’d like to try some “smart glasses” at some point.

I found this post on gadgets out there, and most of them aren’t revolutionary and a few aren’t interesting. A USB drive in cuff links or a necklace? Doesn’t seem that interesting to me. What I’m looking for is perhaps some type of mix of gadgets that can work together.

Could I get a phone that connects with various devices that can run for a long time? Perhaps a belt buckle that provides power and also tracks movement like my Fitbit flex? It can connect to my watch as well, providing me with information from a device in a pocket. Ultimately I’m not sure what would be enhance the phone much. Any jewelry might not provide much more than notification of information through vibration, or possible light, and you’d still need a device.

Ultimately I think I’d like to have more ways to connect devices together. Easily get my phone to project on a larger monitor when it’s available, like in the kitchen or car, perhaps even using a camera there to communicate with others.

My hope is we’ll get gadgets that communicate, but with the separation of platforms and the reluctance for many to work together on common APIs, I’m not sure we’ll get there.

April 11, 2014
Downtime

Most of us that work with technology hate downtime. We don’t want a system that we’re using to go down. We don’t want any software that we depend on to fail when we need it. Most of all, we don’t want our phones ringing because some system we’re responsible for has gone down. We do everything we can to keep our applications online. We avoid patches. We try to test as much as possible before deploying changes. We also may apply generous amounts of hope and prayer.

However that’s not how all companies run their internal systems. Netflix has taken the opposite approach, actually creating downtime for some of their systems using what they call a “chaos monkey,” and they think it could help you. To be fair, Netflix doesn’t take their entire application offline, but they do cause failures in the hardware and software, specifically to see if their redundant and scaled-out architectures can limit the impact on users.

It’s an interesting idea, though one that I’ve not seen many companies be willing to implement. Netflix thinks you could benefit from it, but they also run a series of services that are scaled our across many machines. Many companies I’ve worked with have services on one machine handling an application, and they accept the risk that a system might fail and users will experience problems. Given the quality of modern hardware, that might be a good bet to place these days.

However more and more of us are running redundant systems for some applications. If you think the Chaos Monkey could help you, let us know.

Steve Jones

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The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

March 3, 2014
Interfaces
This editorial was originally published on April 23, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

Data quality is an issue in many of our systems that rely on humans for data entry. Even if you only import data from other sources, how reliable is the data that exists in those systems?

I found an interesting article on computer interfaces and it highlights some of the ways that have been designed to work with computers and put data into, as well as get data out of, computer systems. Most of these are probably familiar to you and there’s nothing really groundbreaking in the article.

It had me thinking, however, of whether or not there’s a better way to input and extract data from systems. I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD lately, and they primarily use voice recognition, but I see all kinds of flaws in that. My wife has worked with a lot of speech technology, and her current company makes the Dragon speech recognition software. I asked her if she thought it was good. She did, but it paled when compared to a good, old-fashioned keyboard. The rate of input and the few mistakes she makes typing far outweigh the benefits of using speech. Perhaps that will improve in the future, but I wonder if it will ever really supplant the keyboard.

Multi-touch has gained a lot of notoriety lately, especially in presentations, but I’m not sure it’s a great way to get data out of a system for a single user. There are other possibilities, but in anything we develop, the rate of input as well as mistakes, are things on my mind. As a data guy, I am entirely too aware of how much work it is to clean data later.

Managing, storing, and securing data all is great, and you can do the best job in the world, but if users can’t easily access and use the data, is it valuable? If it’s not correct, is it useful? The way we work with computers will likely evolve, and while I’m not sure what will work best, I do know that us DBAs will always be in demand to ensure the data is as correct as it can be.

Steve Jones

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November 5, 2013

Sensors and Data

The programmable world. It’s an interesting concept, but not one in which we have extremely detailed specifications and strongly bound software systems that must be built to interact with each other. I think many of us have assumed that’s how we would enable the further computerization of our physical world. As an example, we’d have cars that communicated with the road, with other cars, with semi-central authority(ies) that might be managing our interactions, all of the infrastructure pre-built.

However that isn’t necessarily what will happen. In this O’Reilly piece, the author notes cheap sensors can read the color of lights in the same way that humans or my Lego Mindstorm can detect color. Traffic sensors need not communicate with cars; these sensors could instead just identify cars and count them, measuring their speed and adjusting traffic lights based on actual conditions. Imagine the future when more and more sensors gather their own data and make decisions.

In a sense, this is how the Google self-driving car works. Rather than depend on infrastructure and external programming, the car gathers its own data and adjusts its behavior depending on the interpretation of the data. Whether or not you like the idea of self-driving cars (I do), the idea of an autonomous device acting based on programming and a large amount of data is a fascinating move forward in computing.

I think this shows that data gathering, processing, and analysis will become a more important part of our future computing worlds. Some of this data will be transient and discarded, but lots will be stored. We’ll use data to ineract with the real world immediately, but we will also perform analysis later and reprogram our devices to operate better in the future. That means there will be new, and more, opportunities for those of us working with data.

Steve Jones

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Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.