Category Archives: Tools

Voice Assistants and The Letterbox Problem

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Digital, IoT, Productivity, Security, Tools

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microphone-338481_960_720There are lots of voice activated tools and services now available from software on your PC and in your car to physical hardware you can place around your home. These devices are becoming everyday occurrences, “Alexa, whats the weather”, “Siri, recipe for  Chocolate Cake” (too many to list).

The two main ways to control them is via a button press then speaking such as my car to get it into a listening state, or they are always in a listening state awaiting a set of specific interaction commands, such as the applications name. There is at least a turn of listening mode.

However with all these devices and software, there is a distinct lack of security around voice recognition and lack of interaction security. For instance a recent incident where a TV show caused a number of Dolls Houses to be purchased.

We are busy connecting these devices to all sorts of home automation to make it easier to do things, but how many stop to think of what I term as: “The Letterbox Problem”. This is where you have automated your home to a level that includes things like your lights, powered items and your house alarm. As you walk into your house you can say voice commands to turn on lights, put the kettle on and turn off the alarm. The Letterbox Problem happens when someone has the ability to literally shout through your letterbox and activate or deactivate items in your house. To a would be thief, turning lights on and off will check to see if anyone is at home first before going for the alarm.

There is a security challenge here is to ensure that a level of voice recognition and security controls are in place. Voice recognition by itself is not good enough as I’m sure you’ve heard an impressionist mimic a celebrity on a TV or Radio show.

I would like to see a form of two factor authentication on a voice system so it can be sure its me before it carries out the task. Voice may be one of these, but something else like a token code or app on the phone may be a solution.

There a number of basic steps you can take at the moment to help protect yourself such as:

  • Think about the systems you are connecting the voice device to. Can it compromise your security if anyone else uses it.
  • Use the mute button on devices or turn of listening mode when not in use.
  • Keep the devices updated with the latest patches and firmware.
  • Use good password security practices on any sensitive systems you use (ie Bank Accounts, Paypal etc).
  • Use strong passwords on any associated accounts to the voice assistants, (ie Amazon, Google, Apple etc).
  • If your system allows it, clear out its cache and old activities on regular basis so they can’t be replayed against you.
  • Don’t have a system listening when the TV or Radio is on, especially when your out of the room. You may end up with a new dolls house.

 

How you can begin to Code

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Programming, STEM, Tools

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code1With all the recent STEM activities I have been involved with and blogged about, I have been asked to write some posts around how someone can start learning to code.

The school curriculum covers an element of coding with some subjects and pupils may be lucky to get a BBC Micro:bit or Raspberry Pi, however you don’t have to wait until school before learning any coding.

You don’t have to be young to start coding either. Using the same methods and tools anyone can learn to code.

The phrase “Learning to code” may strike fear and thoughts of hundreds of lines text and numbers, but it doesn’t need to. There are lots of websites available to help people start to code and present a fresh way of learning to code.

So where to start…….. If your reading this blog then you have access to a computing device. All you need to get started is a computing device with a web browser and access to the internet.

At this stage, its not worth getting hung up on the choices of the many different languages out there such as Python, Java, C etc, but concentrating on some fundamentals of coding.

Depending if you like Minecraft, Star Wars, Dr Who or Frozen, you can learn basic commands through gaming and interaction. These games teach you some basics of coding and commands by getting you to move a character on a screen to complete a number of tasks. Each of the games work in a similar way, using someones favorite characters to help them learn. These also help keep focus and attention.

The first code that you will learn is through blocks.

Minecraft – https://code.org/minecraft

Dr Who – http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/doctor-who-game

Frozen – https://studio.code.org/s/frozen/stage/1/puzzle/1

Star Wars – https://code.org/starwars

Moana – http://partners.disney.com/hour-of-code

Once you have completed the tasks in blocks, you could then also try using a different language with some of the games such as Java if you wish. Its a great way of experiencing some of the differences in the languages.

 

 

The main program behind blocks is Scratch. To see more on the block programming method have a look at Scratch itself.

https://scratch.mit.edu/

At the scratch site there are learning tools and lessons to help you learn as well as access to the full programming language. The Scratch site also hosts a lot of other peoples programs which you can run/play and look at how they have constructed their code.

Scratch is a free visual programming language developed by the MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab.[1] Scratch is used by students, scholars, teachers,and parents to easily create animations, games, etc. It provides a stepping stone to the more advanced world of computer programming. It can also be used for a range of educational and entertainment constructionist purposes from math and science projects, including simulations and visualizations of experiments, recording lectures with animated presentations, to social sciences animated stories, and interactive art and music.[2] Viewing the existing projects available on the Scratch website, or modifying and testing any modification without saving it requires no online registration.

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)

Scratch allows users to use event-driven programming with multiple active objects called sprites.[1] Sprites can be drawn, as vector or bitmap graphics, from scratch in a simple editor that is part of Scratch, or can be imported from external sources, including webcams.

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)

All you need now is to dedicate some time each week to learn to code.

Site Reliability Engineering by Google

03 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by in Digital, Productivity, Programming, Tools

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learnHaving read this book previously its good to see that it is now available from Google on-line for reading/reference. The book itself is a collection of articles and essays on how Google run and maintain their computing systems by their Site Reliability Engineers.

The book can be accessed at  https://landing.google.com/sre/book/

List of the Table of Contents showing the articles and essays in the book.

Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Part I – Introduction
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Chapter 2 – The Production Environment at Google, from the Viewpoint of an SRE
Part II – Principles
Chapter 3 – Embracing Risk
Chapter 4 – Service Level Objectives
Chapter 5 – Eliminating Toil
Chapter 6 – Monitoring Distributed Systems
Chapter 7 – The Evolution of Automation at Google
Chapter 8 – Release Engineering
Chapter 9 – Simplicity
Part III – Practices
Chapter 10 – Practical Alerting
Chapter 11 – Being On-Call
Chapter 12 – Effective Troubleshooting
Chapter 13 – Emergency Response
Chapter 14 – Managing Incidents
Chapter 15 – Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
Chapter 16 – Tracking Outages
Chapter 17 – Testing for Reliability
Chapter 18 – Software Engineering in SRE
Chapter 19 – Load Balancing at the Frontend
Chapter 20 – Load Balancing in the Datacenter
Chapter 21 – Handling Overload
Chapter 22 – Addressing Cascading Failures
Chapter 23 – Managing Critical State: Distributed Consensus for Reliability
Chapter 24 – Distributed Periodic Scheduling with Cron
Chapter 25 – Data Processing Pipelines
Chapter 26 – Data Integrity: What You Read Is What You Wrote
Chapter 27 – Reliable Product Launches at Scale
Part IV – Management
Chapter 28 – Accelerating SREs to On-Call and Beyond
Chapter 29 – Dealing with Interrupts
Chapter 30 – Embedding an SRE to Recover from Operational Overload
Chapter 31 – Communication and Collaboration in SRE
Chapter 32 – The Evolving SRE Engagement Model
Part V – Conclusions
Chapter 33 – Lessons Learned from Other Industries
Chapter 34 – Conclusion
Appendix A – Availability Table
Appendix B – A Collection of Best Practices for Production Services
Appendix C – Example Incident State Document
Appendix D – Example Postmortem
Appendix E – Launch Coordination Checklist
Appendix F – Bibliography

Digital Tools- Voice Activated Assistants

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by in Digital, Innovation, Productivity, Tools

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blogger-336371_640Does the Voice Activated Assistant have a place in the business?   Yes it does. There are lots of voice activated assistants available to help us with our daily tasks. Some are built into mobile devices and some are purchased as specific items. The key is that they all respond to commands and can interact with other devices in our lives.

These devices are already within most business today, but may not being used to their full potential.

“<Insert Name of Assistant> turn on the lights” – providing that the assistant has been linked to the lighting system it will turn on the lights as requested.

Voice programs and activation have been around for along time, but have only recently become more mainstream with the advancements in the speech algorithms and technology to recognise the various dimensions and variants of the human voice. Also the ability to respond in a human voice. Brings back memories of playing around with Dr Spaitso (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso) or watching the film War Games and wanting a talking computer “Would you like to play a game….”.

The biggest market at the moment is the consumer market with devices such as the Amazon Echo being used to connect a myriad of devices and services to build a connected home. There are a number of other assistants out there on devices that can do the same, such as Siri, Cortana, AVIC, and Google Now on the market. There are lots of others available as well.

There are also lots of projects and wishes to have an AI Assistant similar to J.A.R.V.I.S from Marvel’s Iron Man. Such a project is being carried out by Mark Zuckerberg. https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis/10154361492931634/

For some having devices around that are constantly listening can be a security issue, however in the main having a voice activated assistants are becoming more common place in every day lives.

“Google says 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches” http://searchengineland.com/google-reveals-20-percent-queries-voice-queries-249917. This figure will be higher including all the assistants.

This trend is already seeing businesses building web based services to be voice friendly and allow access to data by looking at the type of natural questions someone may ask. Typically a voice search will take longer than a typed search as there is an additional processing step around the voice translation to search, however this is speeding up with the advancements in the programming and algorithms used.

Another example of a business application for voice assistants is where an operator is working with their hands and needs to get a part delivered or get answers to a question about the task they are doing.

In an office the assistant could be used to raise a ticket on the help desk AI, which in turn will try to solve the issue before raising a ticket for a human operator to assist.

Voice has been around for a long time and the future will see it mature to be a more personalised assistant with the ability to interact by recognising the user and have the ability to be called different names, removing the current standard activation names. Linking voice, business systems, data science, AI and machine learning will see a future of being able to ask natural language voice questions to the device about the business/data and obtain a natural language response from the system.

 

 

 

Chronodex 2017 (Jun-Jun)

23 Friday Dec 2016

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ChronodexThe first half of the 2017 Chronodex has been released by Patrick Ng.

Available at:  https://app.box.com/s/rcthk406yjp0obd3263nwsphk53h4nyk

There is still a place for a manual diary and journalling using a pen rather than a blog post as discussed here No Batteries Required: My Personal Journal. I am now on my 19th Journal and still going strong.

Pen Based Productivity Tools – The Chronodex 2016 part 2

08 Friday Jul 2016

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ChronodexThe second half of the year has been released for the Chronodex by Patrick Ng.

Available at:  https://app.box.com/s/ln730mbtqhd7kkkp8aj8osknzv3pw7zd

There is still a place for journalling using a pen rather than a blog post as discussed here No Batteries Required: My Personal Journal. I am now on my 17th Journal and still going strong.

Build 2016 Resources

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Development, IoT, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Security, Tools, Windows

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Following the latest Build 2016 conference Microsoft have new released a number of resources and videos on Channel 9, providing 49 pages of videos and presentations.

Lots of learning available.Code

Programming Nostalgia – Back to the 1980’s

08 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Programming, Tools

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As part of the update to the Usborne’s coding books for today’s kids releasing two new books:

Usborne have released some of their 1980 computer books as PDF’s that can be downloaded for personal use.

The released titles include:

Introductions to Programming

Computer Games ListingsSpeccy

Adventure Games

First Computer Library

Definitely a blast from the past. Thank you Usborne for taking me back to my early years! Now where is that emulator software….

Source

Click to access programming-tricks-and-skills.pdf

Digital Scouting

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Development, Innovation, Programming, Tools

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digitalThere have been a series of new badges introduced by the Scouting movement. Two of these replace the traditional IT Staged Badge with a Digital Citizen and Digital Maker staged badge. These are aimed at giving young people skills in the digital age and help with STEM education.

These badges also teach young people to follow the Scouts digital manifesto:

The Scouts’ Digital Manifesto

  1. Use digital to learn and embrace new skills
  2. Share your adventures digitally and inspire others
  3. Know when to switch off, balancing screen time with outdoor activities
  4. Use digital skills to support your family and community
  5. Use digital to be creative
  6. Stay safe online and know the risks

Each of the badges provides 4/5 stages and builds on each stage. The badges can be earn’t from Beavers, through Cubs, Scouts and Explorers (ages 6 up to 18) so start with the basics, then build into writing apps.

These are a set of badges that I am looking forward to helping the local Scout Group out with. All I need to find for my local Scout Group is some spare Laptops or some Raspberry Pi’s…….Any offers welcome.

Perhaps there is a Scout group near you where you can help volunteer your skills with these badges.

Badge requirements

(Source: https://members.scouts.org.uk/supportresources/4282/digital-citizen-staged-activity-badge)

Digital Citizen – stage 1

How to earn your badge
Complete every task to achieve Stage 1, showing that you have thought about the potential risks and how to stay safe for each activity.

  1. Show that you can:
    • turn on and log into a computer
    • use a piece of software, for example email or a game
    • name the main parts of a computer system
    • connect a peripheral (for example a scanner or printer) to your computer and use it.
  2. Create a piece of digital media. It could be artwork, a photograph, music or animation.
  3. Use the internet for research:
    • decide on an area of interest
    • find three websites with content that matches your area of interest
    • collect relevant information by printing or saving as files.

Digital Citizen – stage 2

How to earn your badge
Complete every task to achieve Stage 2, showing that you have thought about the potential risks and how to stay safe for each activity.

  1. Plan and then create a piece of digital media. It could be artwork
    or a photograph that you alter using creative tools, music, animation, CAD (Computer Aided Design) or a 3D sculpture.
  2. Show that you can:
    • send or reply to someone with a short email and include an attachment
    • download photos or other media from a camera or smart card
    • open and save a document then share it using a cloud service (like Google Docs or Microsoft Sharepoint) or a USB stick
    • create a document that includes media that you’ve downloaded or copied from another source.
  3. Use the internet for research:
    • decide on an area of interest
    • use two different search engines to find three websites you think are reliable
    • collect information by printing the pages or saving  as PDF documents
    • select relevant information by copying text or an image and pasting into a document
    • display your findings as a poster or a short report.

Digital Citizen – stage 3

How to earn your badge
Complete every task to achieve Stage 3, showing that you have thought about the potential risks and how to stay safe for each activity.

  1. Plan, make, edit and share a piece of digital media. It could be
    artwork or a photograph that you alter using creative tools, music, animation, CAD (Computer Aided Design) or a 3D sculpture.
  2. Explore social networking sites that are appropriate for your age, then create an example of a good social network profile. Show that you know how to:
    • use anti-virus software
    • set up or adjust settings for accessibility
    • recover from a frozen programme or screen.
  3. Use the internet for research:
    • decide on a specific area of interest
    • use at least two different search engines, using operators like AND, NOT and OR in the search box
    • collect information by using bookmarks or favourites. Save URLs or use a social bookmarking tool like Diigo, Reddit, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us or digg.
    • select specific, reliable information relevant to your area of research
    • create a structured display of the information you have gathered. You could do this in a document, on a website or using a social tool such as Pinterest.
    • share your research with other people, for example by email, on the web, by MMS or social media.

Digital Citizen – stage 4

How to earn your badge
Complete every task to achieve Stage 4, showing that you have thought about the potential risks and how to stay safe for each activity.

  1. Create a portfolio of digital media. It might include artwork or a
    photograph that you alter using creative tools, music, animation, CAD (Computer Aided Design) or 3D sculpture.
  2. Create a film, video, stop-motion animation or podcast and share it using a suitable media sharing tool.
  3. Create a social network profile for your section, a band, local interest group or something similar. Alternatively you could make a small
    website that can host content, like the film you made in step 2, photos, poetry or information about your local area.
  4. Use the internet for research:
    • Choose a local, national, community or Scouting issue, or something from the news or current affairs.
    • Collect information from different sources, such as spreadsheets, databases, online news services and ‘open access’ data sources.
    • Put your information together in a structured way, for example grouping similar information. Make sure you know where each
      piece of information comes from.
    • Select the information you think is most appropriate and reliable.
    • Create a multi-page website with your information and make it public. Present your information in a variety of ways – you could
      use infographics, images or graphs.
    • Share your website with a wide audience.
    • Explain your sources of information and why you picked out what you did.
    • Get some feedback on what you have done and make changes to
      improve your website based on that feedback.

(Source: https://members.scouts.org.uk/supportresources/4283/digital-maker-staged-activity-badge)

Digital Maker – stage 1

How to earn your badge

  1. Connect computer peripherals or accessories, such as a screen and
    keyboard, and explain what job they do.
  2. Design a game:
    • Use role play to act out how your digital game would work. Play the game with a group of friends and change the rules.
    • Using paper, prototype a game and explain to someone how it works. You could video your explanation.
    • Evaluate and share your idea.
  3. Edit an existing website. You could change the design using a paper printout or software.
  4. Play a game with a friend where one of you acts the part of a robot and the other sends the robot commands. Record on paper what sort of commands worked best and which were hard for the ‘robot’ to follow.

Digital Maker – stage 2

How to earn your badge

  1. Connect two devices and exchange data between them using WiFi,
    Bluetooth or a cable.
  2. Show that you can use two different platforms or operating systems. They could be systems that run different devices such as computers,  tablets, phones or games consoles.
  3. Design a game:
    • Make a cartoon, animation or video of a game using a video camera or other equipment.
    • Create some pseudo code to explain how some parts of your game will work. Pseudo code is an instruction for the computer to follow, but is not written in a specific language.
    • Design a sequence of a game, like a whole level or an in-game puzzle.
  4. Design a single page website. You can use a design tool but writing HTML code would be fine too.
  5. Create a set of instructions for a programmable Robot, turtle or toy to
    follow. Games like Minecraft can help you do this.

Digital Maker – stage 3

How to earn your badge

  1. Show how to troubleshoot problems with computing equipment, such as hardware  devices and software updates.
  2. Make a prototype of a game using a suitable tool. It must include:
    • event conditions (when your game reacts to something that happens)
    • user movement controls
    • iteration (when your code or instructions are repeated)
    • variables (for scoring, health or counting things within the game).
  3. Build, design and publish a multipage website with working hyperlinks for navigation between the pages.
  4. Make a robot using prebuilt components.

Digital Maker – stage 4

How to earn your badge

  1. Set up a home network and connect it to the internet.
  2. Install or run an alternative operating system on a computer. Alternatively,  use a ‘Live DVD’ or USB stick.
  3. Design a game:
    • Build a game that includes progression and is fun and interesting to play.
    • Get someone else to play and evaluate it.
  4. Create a fully functioning website including linking to a database.
  5. Make a robot using a kit with components that respond to sensor input (for example, a robot that backs away from an object in its path).

Digital Maker – stage 5

How to earn your badge

  1. Install the software to run a web server and host a webpage on a  computer or other device. Tools like LAMP, WAMP or Google’s Webserver project for the Raspberry  Pi could help you. You can find these for free online.
  2. Make a game or app that serves a purpose. It should:
    • have a clear objective
    • be challenging for the user
    • have a clear sense of progression
    • keep a score
    • offer a reward to the user for playing (for example the score could unlock levels or icons).
  3. Make a website that serves a purpose, provides a good experience for the user and meets any legal requirements.
  4. Use off-the-shelf components to make your own robot that responds to the environment (for example a robot that reacts to light, its proximity to other objects or sound).

 

 

Manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow

11 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Architecture, Development, DevOps/OpsDev, Innovation, Open Source, Productivity, Programming, Tools

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“Manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow”.

CogsThere are lots of Automation tools available to people and businesses today to automate tasks that are carried out in a manual way. The pace at which this is happening is varying based on Habits and Patterns that we use on a daily basis. Also because change is involved which sometimes causes its own set of anxieties and issues.

Back in 2012 Bruno Oliveir published a graph on G+ on Geeks and repetitive tasks, which, shows a view of time vs task and how as geek vs non geek might approach automation.

geeks-vs-nongeeks-repetitive-tasks

An alternative view was published by Jon Udell in 2012 – Another way to think about geeks and repetitive tasks which shows an alternative view adding in more steps to show repetition.

alternate-view-of-automation

xkcd has an interesting view on the subject that does ring true in some cases where something does not exist and needs to be created in order to Automate.

automation

You need to be careful that in spending lots of time in trying to automate a task, that you don’t may spend more time in developing automation than could have been spent actually doing the task.

To get over this an element that is missing from these graphs is reuse and blueprints/patterns. The chances are that someone else has had a go at doing what your about to automate so there may be something to reuse rather than developing something yourself.

There are lots of tools and code repositories available today with more being developed. It will depend upon what you are automating as what to use.

Some of the tools available include;

There are too many to list – lots of others available.

Using an Agile approach as well may reduce the length of the task size line on the graph as you do not need to boil the ocean to automate. Break up tasks into their components and you may find it easier to automate.

These tools are also bringing the geek and non geek lines together as Application’s and API’s make it easier for automation to be implemented. The plot of the graph changes into a repeatable process and in effect becomes a loop for both the geeks and non geeks.

Automate

So what will you automate today?