Decorator Pattern

Rise of “forever day” bugs in industrial systems

Martin Szarski — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:56:08 +0000

Arstechnica has an interesting article examining the effect of unpatched vulnerabilities in industrial control systems.
Specific mention is made of an exploit allowing remote code execution on robots using some old ABB software.

According to an advisory (PDF) issued last week by the US Cyber Emergency Response Team, the flaw in ABB WebWare Server won’t be fixed even though it provides the means to remotely execute malicious code on computers that run the application.

Link.

Debugging Code from 60 Million Miles Away

Martin Szarski — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 07:05:03 +0000

This is a fascinating Google Tech Talk about writing mission critical software for spacecraft.
A really interesting look into something that most of us aren’t often exposed to.

Amazon and Kiva Robots

Martin Szarski — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:39:01 +0000

Amazon has just bought Kiva Systems for $775M. Why?
Probably because of this:

The Value of Immediate Feedback

Martin Szarski — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 06:14:17 +0000

You may have heard of Bret Victor from his “Kill Math” project and the beautiful differential equation playground that he has created with his Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System.
It caused quite a stir a while ago and since then we have seen Apple take on some of those ideas in its new eBook push. Even if you’ve seen it before it is definitely worth a refresher viewing:

Since then, Bret has apparently been quite busy building some proof-of-concept tools for designers and weaving together some of his ideas into an amazing talk.
The talk showcases UI concepts that allow programmers and designers to interact with their creation directly instead of through symbol based abstraction, the idea being that such symbol based abstractions are better suited for paper than the digital canvas and create a barrier between the creator and their creation.
In a few short demos Bret shows how powerful developer/designer tooling can truly be. These livecoding demos really showed me how valuable immediate feedback can be.
I have often ‘played’ with an algorithm in a dynamic/exploratory environment such as MATLAB when trying to solve a problem, and then when I have a handle on how the data feels re-implement the algorithm into another language to integrate with the rest of the system. After seeing this video I’ve decided that kind of workflow can be improved. Visualisation should not be an afterthought. It should be implemented first.

This video is well worth your time:

Multithreaded access to a SQLite database

Martin Szarski — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:09:36 +0000

If you use SQLite like me you’ll know that it is amazingly powerful, convenient, and compact. However if you have an app that needs to do a lot of database IO concurrently with SQLite you may run into the fact that it is classically single-threaded and does not give you the guarantees that are present in normal RDBMS systems. Here is a nice writeup of a few of the strategies you can use to perform SQLite reads/writes in a multithreaded app. Worth a read if you use SQLite. Link.

Starry Night interactive visualisation

Martin Szarski — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:19:00 +0000

Petros Vrellis has used OpenFrameworks (which I used for my Kinect Pong demo) to create a beautiful fluid flow simulation of the famous Van Gogh painting ‘Starry Night’
Recommended viewing:

Algorithm Measures Human Pecking Order

Martin Szarski — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:53:18 +0000

The MIT Technology Review has covered a fascinating paper that concludes : “The way people copy each other’s linguistic style reveals their pecking order.”
Worth a read.

Link.

The original paper is here on the Arxiv.

AI Challenge Post Mortem Article

Martin Szarski — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:14:53 +0000

The winner of the AI Challenge 2011 has posted a detailed description of their code.
It’s worth a quick read and spells out the algorithms clearly, with example code in Java.

Link.

SCADA Hack Destroys Mains Water Pump

Martin Szarski — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 05:23:23 +0000

“Hackers gained remote access into the control system of the city water utility in Springfield, Illinois, and destroyed a pump last week, according to a report released by a state fusion center and obtained by a security expert.”
Link.

Patenting the impossible

Martin Szarski — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 04:23:45 +0000

Jean-loup Gailly (author of gzip!) dissects US Patent 5,533,051 on ‘compression of random data’.
The title immediately raises suspicion as it’s impossible to compress truly random data.
Anyone with a background in mathematics or information theory is probably familiar with the relevant proofs already, but the article does a great job of explaining the arguments and addressing each patent claim so I recommend checking it out.

Link.