Adventures in Tech

I have always been allergic to buying specialized electronic devices that do only one thing, such as the Kindle, the iPod, and fitness trackers. Why buy these when technology evolves so fast that a multi-purpose device such as the phone or a smart watch can eventually do the same thing, but with the convenience of updates that fix bugs and add functionality? So, I was shocked when this weekend I made an impulse buy and got the newest Kindle Paperwhite—a special purpose device for reading eBooks. I was walking past the Amazon store in the mall and saw that the newest Kindle Paperwhites were marked down by $40 for the holidays. The device looked good in the display, so I went in to look at it closely. The Paperwhite is small and light, with a 6” screen that is backlit and waterproof.   The text was crisp and readable, and in the ambient light, it felt like I am reading a printed book. I was sold and bought it on the spot. At home I have struggled to put it down. The bo...

In an era where most retailers are trying to decrease their physical presence, Amazon is doing the opposite   by opening physical bookstores across the US. I visited one last weekend, and was very impressed with the genius of using the store to promote Amazon services and devices. First, unlike most bookstores that carry books on nearly every subject in the Dewey decimal system, the Amazon store carries a much smaller collection of books that are bestselling amongst customers in the geographical area. There were best sellers in fiction, art, cooking, business, self-improvement, health, children’s books, popular science, and that’s it. The pricing model was genius: if you have a prime membership you get the Amazon discounted price, and if you don’t you pay the book’s list price. My guess is that this will drive prime memberships as store patrons will opt to become prime members to nab the books they like at a discount. Second, the store has prominent displays of the Kindle...

This year's modern marketing experience conference took place in Las Vegas at the Venetian hotel. The hotel, like other Vegas hotels, contains a lot of fancy stores with prestigious brands. In between the sessions, the conference attendees would walk around the stores perusing the merchandise and enjoying the luxury of the stores. One of the more eclectic stores in the hotel that attracted my attention was Bauman rare books store .  I have never seen a similar store before, so I decided to go in and check it out. The store specializes in rare first edition books and ones that are signed by the author. I was surprised to see first edition books by Charles Dickens, and John Steinbeck, as well as Winston Churchill and author famous authors. The store appeals to rare book collectors, and the prices definitely reflect that .  Despite that, the staff were very friendly toward non collectors. They were very engaging and knowledgeable about each book's history and lineage. They e...

"Mining the social web" is a book about how to access social data from the most popular social services today by using the services' public APIs, and analyzing the retrieved data to gain insights about it. The book uses the Python programming language to access and manipulate the data, and provides code snippets of common tasks within the book, as well as full iPython notebooks on Github. The book is written as documentation for the freely available iPython notebooks, with the documentation providing context and background for the code, as well as describing the algorithms used to mine the social data. The author tries to be as concise as possible, although he did not succeed in the first chapter, where the first three section were verbose, and relatively unnecessary,  describing what twitter is and why people use it as a microblogging platform. With that out of the way, the writing style improves as the book progresses, and is a mixture of code examples and step ...

Recommendation systems are in wide use today, and Amazon's website is a prime example of that use.  In addition to the recommendations on the site, whenever I buy a new Kindle book, I receive emails with recommendations for other items I would be interested in. The recommendations are usually spot-on, and I end up buying more Kindle books, and the cycle continues. Recently I noticed that whenever I finish a Kindle book, Amazon sends me an email with related books that I might be interested in, which is pretty cool if you ignore the fact that an algorithm is watching when you finish a book, and triggers a recommendation email to entice you to read more. The feature might have been in place for some time, and I might not have noticed it, were it not for a very long book that I was reading on and off over the last year. After I was done, I received an email recommendation for other books by the same author, equally as long. Even though the recommendations are good, I am sure I am...

One of the areas often overlooked when writing software systems is thoroughly understanding what needs to be developed. Specifically who are the users that are going to interact with the system, what are they trying to accomplish with the software, and how is the system expected to behave under normal and error conditions. In short, developing software requirements and specifications before the software is written. " Software Requirements 3 " addresses these questions, with clear answers and advice in a rather longish format of roughly 673 pages. The book starts with a story about the importance of software requirements: a case of an employee who changed her last name without getting married, and the accounting software's inability to handle the change, with the repercussions that the employee will not get paid until the the "bug" is fixed. The book mentions that this is not an atypical situation, and that  ... errors introdu...

For people interested in developing Hadoop analytic applications there is a plethora of options. The options range from writing low-level, hand-tuned Java map-reduce code, to using a higher level language to manipulate the data such as Pig and Hive. There are pros and cons for each option. For the first, the code becomes complex for anything other than the canonical word-count example, and for the latter, to do anything meaningful, you almost always end up augmenting the higher level language with user-defined functions written in a different language to regain power and flexibility, causing maintenance nightmares. A happy medium in between is to use one of the data-flow libraries for Hadoop, of which Cascading is one. Since Cascading has been around for some time, the online documentation is relatively mature, and includes a gentle introduction to the library, with example source code, and a well written user's guide. However this does not obviate the need for a book that desc...

I finally finished The Shallows --a book by Nicholas Carr--about how the Internet is changing our thinking, and how the social network distractions are making us stupid. The book argues that with advances in technology, we have lost our ability to immerse deeply in reading, and consequently the ability for deep thinking. The book traces how knowledge transfer has evolved through the ages: from the early days of oration, where people had to focus hard to comprehend the message that is being conveyed, to writing on the scrolls without the use of punctuation, to the modern printed form, and finally to the digital display of information using devices with continuous scroll. Even though the book is an interesting read, it took me a long time to finish, probably for the same reasons listed in the book. I read the shallows on and off using my Kindle App on my laptop, and during these short spouts of reading, I was distracted by e-mail, social media, and researching topics on the web. What ...