Month: January 2017

Just bought car insurance, a little over a hundred bucks a month. On the website of one of the insurance companies where I was making inquiries, I found an interesting thing. They offer to let you drive it around in your car for free, and then the insurance company’s big data servers will process information about your movements and driving style and might lower the insurance. But so far, all colleagues who have used it say that it only increases the cost of insurance. Apparently, insurance companies inherently have a higher opinion of us.

I wonder, can you ride it on a bicycle?

Watched the first episode of A Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket: 33 Misfortunes). Very strange film. It’s like a mix of Tim Burton and Wes Anderson.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4834206/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Today, Elizaveta Alieva and I crafted an erudite-scrabble from scratch in the last five hours, a large playing field on a big table. The standard one we have is too small for the table. Finished at two in the morning)

The idea was to create a “container” for different board games, with interchangeable panels. Scrabble – two interchangeable panels. Next up – backgammon. The size of the playing field is 19″ on each side, the overall size is 24″ x 24″. The photo shows the entire creation process from start to finish. Materials from Michaels – Baltic birch 9mm 12″ x 24″, balsa strips, foam sheets, alphabet tiles.

The first two photos – the final result, the rest – the creation process.

Gentlemen Java developers, does anyone know if there’s a product out there for creating interactive forms that can be easily integrated into a Java system? It would suffice if this module could output the filled form as XML or JSON or as a Java structure, be easy to configure (like adding a new field in two minutes, preferably via some tool) – and importantly, to be free and independent from any service, i.e., once downloaded and set up, to work forever 🙂 (I know many services for this purpose)

Impulsive purchases: on the way back from lunch, refinanced the car loan. Now it’s at 2.09% for 51 months with the option to pay off everything at any time without a penalty. The refinancing itself cost me five bucks.

Blog update on hybris: Tutorial on Pentaho ETL, converting XML to hybris Impex format (almost CSV). The task is simple, but it demonstrates the key capabilities of Pentaho. Quite useful for data migration projects from legacy systems to new ones. In the previous article, I wrote about a custom made tool. This time – about an enterprise solution. Open source, community edition. https://hybrismart.com/2017/01/15/migrating-data-with-pentaho-etl-kettle/

Today I was driving from DC, and on the way, I wondered why no one was doing lip-reading based speech recognition? Pulled over, sent myself a reminder by email from my phone. Now, back home, I googled it and found that the topic is fresh and the results are impressive. It is claimed that the neural network LipNet achieves a recognition accuracy of 93.4%. The videos demonstrate voice commands with the radio blasting, featuring various drivers. Another video about LipNet shows that even a set of short words is recognized fairly well, not just whole sentences. If it really works that well, one can expect this system to be an adjunct to speech recognition for improving accuracy. For those who have read this far – found an interesting detailed work on this subject: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453.7204&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Interestingly, theoretically all these AI systems could be trained on the myriad of videos already available. Feed it YouTube with faces, and wait for the outcomes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTkqA189pzQ

In July 2013, I bought these bio-recording watches (link to my article below) for $199 plus $73 for shipping. Today, the manufacturer refunded me $244.

After these watches, they released another model, and then an updated version, and the latest one had a blunder akin to the Samsung Note. They probably didn’t calculate the refunds for the latest model and decided to shut down the whole company. Since without their service my watches don’t work as well as with the service, the manufacturer decided to recall them as well and completely shut down the service. The service closed on December 31 last year, I sent the watches back a couple of weeks ago, and now, I’ve received the compensation.

It’s nice to be a customer in the States, right? Almost three years passed since I got the watches.

https://habrahabr.ru/post/187878/

https://m.geektimes.ru/post/269764/

I get the impression, reading the latest news about hackers, that the term ‘hacker’ has come to be applied worldwide to those who exploit the sheer incompetence of people responsible for information security. That is, if a departing employee of Company X still has access to resources, it is he who is the criminal and the hacker, and the person who failed to revoke the access, well, they probably just get a fine or a reprimand. If a café does not change the default ‘admin/admin’ on their Wi-Fi access point, the one who logs into it is always branded a hacker, while the café itself, of course, is not to blame.

Overall, each year it gets increasingly complicated with these copyrights and the protection of information.

https://meduza.io/news/2017/01/16/pervyy-kanal-zapodozril-hakerov-v-krazhe-epizoda-sherloka

Woke up, and here’s Masha finishing off the pancakes… Mmm…