Announcement: Code Art contest deadline extended

Hey folks,

The library has extended the deadline to tonight midnight for those teams that haven't entered the competition.

I will give any team that produces a reasonable entry %1 extra credit.

Professor Watson

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Alisa Katz <akatz2@ncsu.edu>
Date: Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 2:39 PM
Subject: Code+Art Visualization Contest Deadline

It's almost time!

The deadline for the Code+Art Visualization Contest is this Sunday, November 23 @ midnight.

Cash awards and a small budget to work with!

Go to http://ift.tt/1BV3ppe for submission details.

Questions? Email codeplusart@ncsu.edu

Announcement: SAS Teams — visiting SAS and delivering video

SAS teams,

Below are the details for the SAS visit. As you'll see, it happens most of the day first Monday of examination week. A couple points:

• If you plan to attend, please indicate so on this form.
• Since I can't require you to attend, I'll offer 1% extra credit if you go. 

As I've mentioned, we'll be showing a few minutes of video content captured from our software prototypes at the SAS event, integrated with design's content. It is up to you to arrange delivery of that content to your design partners before December 8, so that they have time to integrate it well. This is required. Video like this is already a part of what you must deliver for our class projects by December 15. (You can continue to improve your prototype and video after the 8th).

Also, SAS has asked for a quick idea of what our contributions to the event will be like. They'd like it before Thursday! Again I can't require this of you, but I'll give another %1 extra credit to any SAS team that can deliver a rough cut of their video (unedited visuals and voiceover, or visuals and text script) to Professor LittleJohn by then. Just share it with her and me on Google Drive.

We'll be practicing your 2 minute SAS voiceovers about your projects in Monday's critique.

Professor Watson

***

Presentations take place in Building C (the Executive Conference Center), off Harrison in Cary, near I40.

***

9AM

• Student teams, instructors Deb, Robin, Ben arrive
• Set up and practice in the presentation room.

11:45-12:45PM

• Lunch downstairs in the C cafeteria. The students’ lunches will be covered by SAS. Faculty are welcome to attend.

1PM

• Presentations begin
• Junior class will go first, followed by Seniors

4-4:30PM

• meet & greet in hallway

Announcement: critiques today — four non-SAS teams

Folks,

We'll do critique for four teams today. If you're not one of the teams we critique, offer critique on our forum.

Professor Watson

Announcement: quizzes today — review if you can

We'll do quizzes first thing today. Review net tech and css questions if you can.

Professor Watson

Fwd: Code+Art Visualization Contest Deadline

Hey folks,

The library has extended the deadline to tonight midnight for those teams that haven't entered the competition.

I will give any team that produces a reasonable entry %1 extra credit.

Professor Watson

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Alisa Katz <akatz2@ncsu.edu>
Date: Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 2:39 PM
Subject: Code+Art Visualization Contest Deadline

It's almost time! 

The deadline for the Code+Art Visualization Contest is this Sunday, November 23 @ midnight. 

Cash awards and a small budget to work with!

Go to http://ift.tt/1BV3ppe for submission details.

Questions? Email codeplusart@ncsu.edu

Find: Talent magnet: The new Citrix building

Yup. I'd work there. 

*** 

Talent magnet: The new Citrix building
// Walter Magazine

VIEW FROM THE TOP: The building itself was created using ShareFile and other Citrix software, said Steve Nicholson, who directed the site selection, design and construction of the new building remotely, in part, from his base in Santa Barbara. He says he spent several months after Citrix’s acquisition of ShareFile “just watching how they do what they do” before deciding what kind of building would best suit the group’s needs.

by Liza Roberts
photographs by Nick Pironio

“The way people work is changing,” says Citrix vice president Jesse Lipson. “Work and play used to be clear-cut. Those lines are blurring.” As a result, “The nature of an office has changed.”
Lipson’s office, anyway.
The Duke philosophy major turned successful software entrepreneur sold ShareFile, the cloud-based file sharing software maker he founded, to Citrix for more than $50 million in 2011. On Oct. 9, to much fanfare, he unveiled its new Raleigh workplace.
The Citrix building on S. West Street took a former Dillon Supply warehouse and turned it into a place that has to be seen to be believed. With 170,000 square feet of custom-made, customizable Herman Miller workstations; a basketball court; a two-story living wall of 8,000 plants; nooks for naps; a rooftop yoga studio; art from North Carolina artists; a racquetball court; a gourmet café; fresh air from sliding doors and windows; a giant, fully equipped gym; bikes to borrow; and a bocce court with the best view in town, it’s no ordinary office. It’s green in all of the important ways, and has technology imbedded in everything from responsive lighting to automated ambient noise control. To say it’s the office of the future is like saying the Tesla Roadster is the car of the future. It’s extraordinary, but most of us will be lucky to get a test drive.

The two-story living wall – which hangs from a crane left over from the building’s previous life as an industrial warehouse – is home to 8,000 plants from 14 different species. They include several varieties of philodendron, orchid, and fern.

The building’s center is created by a cantilevered tower of eight recycled shipping containers, all named for different philosophers: Aquinas, Aristotle, Bacon, Boole, Camus, Cicero, Derrida, and Descartes. It seems entirely likely to a visitor that Citrix vice president Jesse Lipson, a philosophy major at Duke, won’t take long to tackle the rest of the philosopher alphabet as the company continues its warp-speed growth.

Envy was the running joke on ribbon-cutting day. Just about every person who toured the place – who ranged from elected officials including Gov. Pat McCrory and Mayor Nancy McFarlane to an assorted who’s-who of the Triangle’s business and community leaders – had the same thing to say, with a laugh for the sake of tact: Citrix, will you hire me?
Which is the idea.
Lipson, who found this unlikely spot for as many as 900 employees – in what was then an empty warehouse on a mostly empty street – says the building is designed not only to facilitate creative work from teams of people – but to convince them to work there in the first place. And to stay, once they do.
At first, Lipson says he hesitated to suggest such a massive, complex, expensive, and risky idea – gutting a warehouse to build an office like this one – to his then-brand-new boss, Mark Templeton, Citrix’s CEO. “I didn’t want to be the guy who got us into this disastrous real estate deal,” Lipson recalls. Templeton’s response sealed the deal: “He said, is this the place that will help you attract and retain the best talent in the Triangle? If yes, do it.”
That was two years ago. At that point, the company committed to add 340 jobs within five years – to grow from 130 to 470 workers – in exchange for more than $9 million in state and local incentives. As of last month, the company had blown past those numbers.  More than 600 employees fill the building today, and Lipson says the number will likely reach 900 in the next couple of years.
“It’s about inventing the future,” Citrix CEO Templeton told the 200-plus crowd gathered on opening day. “Powered by a whole new generation of people.” The N.C. State graduate says Citrix doesn’t have to look far to find them: “North Carolina is creating talent. The talent is here.”

 

Whiteboard tabletops and morphing conference rooms are made for collaborative work. Among the many pieces of recycled material from the Dillon Supply warehouse incorporated into the new Citrix building are several railroad ties that form the bases for glass-topped conference tables.

 

A rooftop bocce court is one of the building’s many recreational options on every floor.

OUTSIDE IN: Folding glass NanaWalls turn a rooftop patio into an alfresco dining spot.

A ride-in bike storage area has room for 80 bikes, including eight loaners for employees who need to zip to a cross-town meeting, or to take home if ride-share buddies leave them behind.

‘Climbing Figures’, a sculpture by Ranier Lagemann, scales the parking garage.

Announcement: access to recognition content

See link below.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mark F. <mafarris@ncsu.edu>
Date: Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 10:27 AM
Subject: Fwd: link to app assets
To: Benjamin Watson <bwatson@ncsu.edu>

Pat wanted me to email you and resend you the link to our shared  folder:
http://ift.tt/1HfpI9n

Everyone with an NCSU email address should be able to view this folder's contents.

Announcement: still have experiment opportunity

We still need folks for our mobile experiments. If you haven't already participated please contact Qian Liu or Agnes Davis at qliu10@ncsu.edu or aadavis@ncsu.edu.

You will receive extra credit for your participation.

Thanks

Professor Watson

Announcement: SAS visiting design class today — SAS teams please attend!

Folks,

The SAS UX team will be visiting our design collaborators today, and we are invited. So let me encourage those of you on the SAS teams today to show up at the usual design studio on main campus at least during our class time, to get a better sense of SAS needs. In fact the SAS meetings will be taking place outside of our class time as well, so I encourage you to attend before or after our class as well, especially if your partnered team will be presenting then. Here is the presentation schedule:

• 1:45–2:05: Design Team 1 Chelsea & Mark
• 2:10–2:30: Design Team 4 Andy & Will
• 2:35–2:50: Design Team 8 April, Blair, Lara
• 2:55–3:15: Design Team 5 Jenny, Mary, Kimmie
• 3:20–3:40: Design Team 7 Ioan & Justin
• 3:45–4:05: Design Team 2 Abbie & Meagan
• 4:10–4:30: Design Team 6 Emily & Luis
• 4:35–4:55: Design Team 3 Viktoria

Back at engineering, the rest of us will use the class time for project and review exercises. 

Professor Watson 

Find: on the evolution of web video standards

Skype in the browser would be good. 

*** 

Microsoft builds a Skype Web client… for at least one version of the Web
// Ars Technica

Skype is coming to the Web with in-browser instant messaging, voice, and video chat.

To start off, it's going to need a plugin to enable the voice and video portions, and it will support Internet Explorer 10 or newer, the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome, and on OS X, Safari 6 or newer. Rollout has started on an invitational basis.

That browser plugin should be temporary, however, as eventually it will use the open Web standards even for these parts. But this is more complex than it sounds, thanks to disagreements about the best way to support audio and video streaming on the Web.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs

Find: API copyrights a “threat” to tech sector, scientists tell Supreme Court

Mentioned earlier in class. Note the two founders advocating here: cerf and van rossum. 

Apis as a communication standard is an interesting concept. 

*** 

API copyrights a “threat” to tech sector, scientists tell Supreme Court
// Ars Technica

astanush

Dozens of computer scientists are urging the Supreme Court to overturn a May federal appeals court decision that said application programming interfaces (APIs) are subject to copyright protections.

The computer scientists, ranging from Vinton "Vint" Cerf—a father of the Internet—to Python creator Guido van Rossum, want the nation's high court to reverse the appellate ruling that said Oracle's Java API's were copyrightable:

The Federal Circuit’s decision poses a significant threat to the technology sector and to the public. If it is allowed to stand, Oracle and others will have an unprecedented and dangerous power over the future of innovation. API creators would have veto rights over any developer who wants to create a compatible program—regardless of whether she copies any literal code from the original API implementation. That, in turn, would upset the settled business practices that have enabled the American computer industry to flourish, and choke off many of the system’s benefits to consumers. [PDF]

Peter Kaminski

The scientists are represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which describes APIs as "specifications that allow programs to communicate with each other. So when you type a letter in a word processor, and hit the print command, you are using an API that lets the word processor talk to the printer driver, even though they were written by different people."

Read 8 remaining paragraphs

Find: Obama: Treat broadband—including mobile—as a utility

Remember that the president can't tell the fcc what to do — the fcc is independent. 

*** 

Obama: Treat broadband—including mobile—as a utility

// Ars Technica

Government IT we can't believe in.

Photograph by Matt Ortega

President Obama today urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reclassify broadband service as a utility and to impose rules that prevent Internet service providers from blocking and throttling traffic or prioritizing Web services in exchange for payment. Obama also said utility rules should apply both to home Internet service and mobile broadband.

In short, Obama is siding with consumer advocates who have lobbied for months in favor of reclassification while the telecommunications industry lobbied against it.

In a plan released today, Obama said, “The time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the same importance [as the traditional telephone system] and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other vital services do. To do that, I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act—while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services. This is a basic acknowledgment of the services ISPs provide to American homes and businesses, and the straightforward obligations necessary to ensure the network works for everyone—not just one or two companies.”

President Obama's Statement on Keeping the Internet Open and Free.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs

Announcement: still working on SAS team pairings

Folks,

Apologies, still working on SAS team pairings. Hope to have more tonight. Watch your mailboxes.

Professor Watson

Announcement: I'm gone next week — plans

Hey folks,

Next week I'm out of town on business.

On Monday, our Lingnan will run a review session followed by our first couple quiz questions.

On Wednesday, Professor Fitzgerald and Mike Nutt & Alisa Katz will sit in on guide the week's critique. Please prepare short (<10 minutes) presentations. SAS teams, you are scheduled to go back for longer chats with your design partners at Brooks Hall.

Professor Watson

Announcement: critique today

Folks,

Today we'll perform some critique of four non-SAS team projects, now that project proposals are in. Think about whether you'd like to volunteer! Or be volunteered....

Professor Watson

Announcement: SAS teams — post your preferences for design partners

SAS teams,

Please post your preferences for design partners, if any, in text files at our wolfware locker. Be sure to include:

• The members of your team 
• For each team that you wish to express a preference for:
• The members of their team 
• Your preference for them, from 1 (definitely not) to 5 (definitely yes)

Please do this even if you've already sent an email describing your preferences.

SAS teams have an extra week (until Monday 10th) to submit project plans.

Professor Watson

Study: Comcast and Verizon connections to Cogent dropped below 0.5Mbps

Strong evidence that ISPs are quite willing go unneutral and let customer service suffer to increase profits. 

This wouldn't be happening in a free market. 

*** 

Study: Comcast and Verizon connections to Cogent dropped below 0.5Mbps
// Ars Technica

Plenty of Comcast and Verizon customers know just how bad Internet service was on major ISPs during the months-long battle over who should pay to deliver Netflix traffic.

But now we have more numbers on the performance declines, thanks to a new report from the Measurement Lab Consortium (M-Lab). M-Lab hosts measuring equipment at Internet exchange points to analyze connections between network operators and has more than five years' worth of measurements. A report released today examines connections between consumer Internet service providers ("Access ISPs" in M-Lab parlance) and backbone operators ("Transit ISPs"), including the ones that sent traffic from Netflix to ISPs while the money fights were still going on.

Netflix eventually agreed to pay Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T for direct connections to their networks, but until that happened there was severe degradation in links carrying traffic from Netflix and many other Web services to consumers. Connections were particularly bad between ISPs and Cogent, one of the backbone operators that Netflix paid to carry its traffic.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs

Find: Wireless carriers are rolling out a horrible new way to track you

The data gathering continues apace. First Verizon, now Att. 

*** 

Wireless carriers are rolling out a horrible new way to track you
// The Verge - All Posts

Last week, privacy advocates turned up some unsettling news: for two years, Verizon's Precision Insights division has been seeding web requests with unique identifiers. If you visited a website from a Verizon phone, there's a good chance the carrier injected a special tag into the data sent from you phone, telling the website exactly who you were and where you were coming from, all without alerting customers or informing the public at large. Today, Forbes' Kashmir Hill reports that AT&T is testing a similar program, although it may be possible to opt out. In both cases, the message is clear: there's a lucrative business in tracking users across the web, and carriers want in on it.

Continue reading…

Find: HTML5 specification finalized, squabbling over specs continues

HTML5 specification finalized, squabbling over specs continues
// Ars Technica

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that oversees the development of the specs used on the Web, today announced that the fifth major version of the hypertext markup language specification, HTML5, was today given Recommendation status, W3C's terminology for a final, complete spec.

The last version of HTML was 4.01, released in December 1999, making it almost fifteen years between updates. That's a long time to wait. The story of HTML5's development was a messy affair. After HTML 4.01, W3C embarked on XHTML, an update to HTML that incorporated various XML features such as stricter validation of Web pages and which was intended to make HTML "modular," broken down into a range of sub-specifications.

XHTML wasn't particularly compatible with the real world, however—Web pages that are, per the specs, broken are abundant, and under XHTML rules, browsers should refuse to display such pages entirely—and many in the Web community felt that W3C had lost its way and was irrelevant to the needs of real Web developers.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs