Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

SwiftKey goodness

For a few years now I’ve been a happy user of the SwiftKey app.  SwiftKey is a predictive keyboard for Android and iOS.  I was very skeptical when I tried it the first time, but my mind was blown almost instantly.  The app does not just make generic predictions T9 style, but learns from your SMS history, emails, social network posts, and even your blog’s RSS (obviously, only those channels that you allow it access to).  With that, the predictions are so accurate that you rarely have to type more than a couple of characters for it to guess.  In fact, sometimes it guesses the next word without you even typing anything.

Well, OK, so I wrote this all before.  Why am I suddenly retyping this?  Because I got an email from SwiftKey with some updates as to what’s happening there.  And I think that it’s pretty cool how they’ve taken something so seemingly simple as a keyboard and turned into a … well, not industry yet, but something more and something exciting.

ninja themes

For all those touch-typing fans, they’ve released two keyboard themes Ninja Pro and Ninja Trainer.  If you mastered your laptop’s keyboard, enhance and extend your skill to the mobile and tablet now.

swiftkey 6

SwiftKey 6 beta version is out with some cool features.  Most notably  – Double-Word Prediction, which should save you even more typing.  SwiftKey has also reached 100 supported languages, so you can recommend it to your foreign friends much easier.

neural

And if SwiftKey wasn’t awesome already, they are pushing the boundaries with some real high end computing – neural networks and machine learning.  The blog post goes into detail of how this whole approach works and how it makes predictions better.

Wow!  Talk about a simple keyboard app for the mobile now … The sky is truly the limit.

2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop

Slashdot links to the story that quotes Linus Torvalds’ address of the LinuxCon 2015:

“2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop”

For those who’s rusty on the CPU hardware side, he’s a very easy to follow article, describing the key difference between ARM and x86 architectures.

rather – replace anything you want in your social feeds

rather

For all those people who complain about my pictures of food, somebody else’s pictures of babies, Justin Bieber photos, and the like, here’s something to try: get rather.

This sounds like a handy tool for anyone who hasn’t been blessed with patience or can’t figure out the “unsubscribe” button.

Weird New Tricks for Browser Fingerprinting

I’ve given up on privacy and security a long time ago.  So I don’t really care much.  But every time when my position is reinforced with things like “Weird New Tricks for Browser Fingerprinting“, I still lose some sleep for some reason.  And she is on the good side too …

On acting professionally

A few weeks back, there was this story about Sarah Sharp quitting Linux kernel development due to some issues she had with communications on the Linux kernel mailing list (aka LMKL).  I never cared much about this sort of things, so I skipped the story altogether (people disagree, no big deal).

Today I was catching up with my RSS feeds, and the story came up again (via this post and discussion thread in Russian), which linked to this Slashdot comment nicely summarizing the story.

Among all the other comments, there was a link to the related email from Linus Torvalds, where he opens up a bit about the “professional” behavior and communication.  I think it’s absolutely brilliant and everybody should read the whole thing.  But I’ll leave this small quote here for myself:

Because if you want me to “act professional”, I can tell you that I’m not interested. I’m sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what “acting professionally” results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.