Saari blog

Thad Starner was working on proactive computing a long time ago, being able to build this kind of interaction is why I moved to Android

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/v/12_dps_uist2004_video.avi

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/v/12_innov-with.mov

There are two guiding principals I’m using for building wearable computer applications (Google Glass, EyeTap, etc.):

1. Focus on applications where the machine’s strengths can play in concert with the human’s strengths, or conversely, where each is filling in for the other’s weaknesses. Perfect memory, perfect recall, perfect computation, precise sensors, and 24/7 real time communication with rest of the world are a few examples of the machine’s strengths.
2. Many things can be achieved with a smart phone, but it usually requires user initiated action, and with push notifications it at least requires pulling the phone out of the pocket and looking at it. I’m focusing on applying the above strengths proactively without making the user have to pull out the phone. The challenge is determining what information is needed, and when, while not being overwhelming.

I’m calling this pattern proactive computing, and I see it starting to appear more often. The Washington Post launched TruthTeller, a real time video analysis doing speech to text and searching for known fallacies in political videos. Truth Goggles does a similar trick as a browser plugin that leverages PolitiFact data. LazyTruth does the same as a Gmail plugin. These three examples monitor what the user is doing and apply data to inform the user proactively. The Google Glass concept video is of course full of proactive computing, schedule reminders, weather updates, public transit updates, etc.

For someone that has been building GUI apps for a long time the verb and noun UX approach is all wrong, or at least it may as well be done on a phone. Proactive computing is more like building a spell checker or the Awesome Bar in Firefox where the goal is to watch the user, attempt to figure out what the user is trying to do and then see how you can help them. This is half of the problem that search engines must solve, so it should come as no surprise that Glass is coming out of Google.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxbB18QoYO4

Much of this talk has resonated with me in the past and now again as I find myself once again thinking about Applied Minds, various types of organizations and how to build them, and how Bran approaches product development. His discussion of requirements driven organizations is particularly interesting.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/12/google-taming-the-long-latency-tail-when-more-machines-equal.html

The effects of latency variability across a horizontally scaled service.

http://www.ioremap.net/projects/libeblob

libeblob is an append-only low-level IO library, which saves data in blob files.

Following features are already supported:

• fast append-only updates which do not require disk seeks
• compact index to populate lookup information from disk
• multi-threaded index reading during startup
• O(1) data location lookup time
• ability to lock in-memory lookup index (hash table) to eliminate memory swap
• readahead games with data and index blobs for maximum performance
• multiple blob files support (tested with single blob file on block device too)
• optional sha256 on-disk checksumming
• 2-stage write: prepare (which reserves the space) and commit (which calculates checksum and update in-memory and on-disk indexes). One can (re)write data using pwrite() in between without locks
  usuall 1-stage write interface
• flexible configuration of hash table size, flags, alignment
• defragmentation tool: entries to be deleted are only marked as removed, eblob_check will iterate over specified blob files and actually remove those blocks
• off-line blob consistency checker: eblob_check can verify checksums for all records which have them enabled
• run-time sync support – dedicated thread runs fsync in background on all files on timed base

http://substack.net/posts/e0741f

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/02/16/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-to-javascript/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/02/23/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-creating-observables/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/02/27/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-creating-observers/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/05/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-jquery-integration/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/11/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-composing-callbacks/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/12/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-from-blocking-to-async/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/15/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-wikipedia-lookup/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/16/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-composing-deeper/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/17/the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-released/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/19/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-drag-and-drop/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/03/21/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-jquery-live-event-integration/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/04/02/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-extending-jquery-ajax/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/04/09/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-a-separation-of-concerns/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/04/14/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-aggregation-part-1

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/04/15/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-aggregation-part-2/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/04/19/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-new-release-and-joins/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/04/23/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-going-parallel-with-forkjoin/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/05/04/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-refactoring-a-game/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/05/11/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-async-method-chaining/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/05/12/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-custom-schedulers/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/05/17/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-the-final-countdown-timer/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/05/28/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-wrapping-the-dojo-api/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/06/16/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-conditionals/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/06/24/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-looping-operators/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/07/20/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-error-handling-part-i/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/08/02/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-error-handling-part-ii/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/08/12/dojo-deferred-and-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript/

http://codebetter.com/matthewpodwysocki/2010/08/25/introduction-to-the-reactive-extensions-for-javascript-buffering/