mikemacd

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[Study] How well do you recognise faces if you first see them masked or unmasked?

[Study] How well do you recognise faces if you first see them masked or unmasked?

Please take part in my wife’s academic study on facial recognition and mask wearing – takes about 10mins of clicking buttons and pressing keys on a website. Here’s my wife’s study: https://www.labvanced.com/player.html?id=34918 (more…)

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Serverless event feedback processing and analytics using #aws

Serverless event feedback processing and analytics using #aws

I recently was involved in organising a techie conference. We wanted a feedback mechanism so I made a serverless event feedback system. Here’s how it works…

Have a bunch of ipads/tablets with a nice feedback form:

Collect up the feedback and sent it to a lambda function via API Gateway:

const APIurl = "https://api.mydomain.net/eventFeedback?"; //upload to AWS and start looking for…

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Building a custom lambda runtime for anything? Even Pascal? Yes! #lambda #reinvent #aws

Building a custom lambda runtime for anything? Even Pascal? Yes! #lambda #reinvent #aws

At AWS Reinvent 2018, Werner Vogels said it was now possible to use any language in AWS Lambda. I thought I’d put that to the test!

I thought it’d be interesting to add lambda support for Pascal, specifically the FreePascal variant found with Lazarus (the free, cross-platform version of Delphi). Mainly because it doesn’t really fit, it’s a compiled language, but I do have a remaining soft spot…

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AWS re:invent is huge. So here’s my tips and tricks:

Good shoes. Not new ones, but comfy ones. There’s a lot of walking, the hotels are huge! This is about 1/6 of the registration hall at the Venetian. The scale is so big it’s hard to get it in a photo!

Room snacks. You’ll get a lot of free food and drink but sometimes you need a snack, and you definitely will need water. Rather than use the hugely expensive hotel shops I go to the shops literally next door on the strip to buy bottles of water.

Portable phone charger. Your phone will run out of batteries due to all the picture taking, tweeting and app shenanigans.

Schedule your sessions early. Yep, I know it’s too late now, but there’s still going to be a lot of open repeats, and the overflow rooms are actually pretty cool, with a silent disco vibe of coloured headsets.

Parties. There’s lots, follow @reinventParties for details!

How to guide: Watch the Youtube How To Reinvent Guide

Certification Lounge: If you’re certified, go to the certification lounge. There’s a slightly higher than 0 chance of the occasional seat – which is a remarkable thing at re:invent. And it’s full of doughnuts and retro games machines 🙂

Find a secret coffee shop. The main ones will have big queues and the generally available free coffee is ok, but I like to go to my secret coffee shop. Sorry, I won’t over expose it.

Expect change. There will be some huge announcements, and a sudden unveiling of loads of extra sessions so be prepared to change your schedule at the last moment. I tend to prioritise my sessions so I’ve already decided which ones I can drop and which ones I won’t. If you’re going to drop one, do it early so you can release the reserved seats. My account team are being tight-lipped, but based on the amount of stuff that’s been already announced, and their teasing – I’m expecting big things.

Follow your learning style. There are all sorts of different things like presentations, chalk talks, deep dives, hackathons, workshops, gamedays etc. Do what works for you not what everyone else is doing.

Painkillers. Take some, whether it’s flights, jet lag, crazy long days, too much partying or just the intensity of a big event, headaches are fairly inevitable. Or maybe that’s just me.

Take an Echo. For music in your room, naturally 🙂

Manage your swag! It’s possible to get too much swag. And then you need to buy another suitcase to bring it home. Doh!

Finally, keep track of what’s going on by using my reinvent twitter dashboard – I’ll be posting updates on twitter regularly.

#aws #reinvent 2018 – my tips, tricks and photos AWS re:invent is huge. So here's my tips and tricks: Good shoes. Not new ones, but comfy ones.

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Why getting #aws certified is different and worthwhile

Why getting #aws certified is different and worthwhile

I’ve done a bunch of professional certifications over the years in processes, languages and technologies. Usually because someone else wanted me to or was paying me to. Generally, I don’t think certifications are worth the paper they’re printed on as they rarely seem to be indicators of real world experience.

As an example, look at Certified Scrum Master. First you have to go on a mandatory 2-day…

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AWSome Twitter Sentiment Analysis for #aws #reinvent #reInvent2018

AWSome Twitter Sentiment Analysis for #aws #reinvent #reInvent2018

I built a dashboard that keeps track of the #reinvent2018, #awsreinvent, #reinvent twitter hashtags. It automatically translates non-English tweets into English, and does sentiment analysis (to detect emotional content) and keyword/entity extraction to see what people are talking about.

Over time it’s interesting to see how sentiment changes. Most tweets (97%) are neutral and so I don’t add them…

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How to deploy static websites to S3 using AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline #aws

How to deploy static websites to S3 using AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline #aws

git repository -> S3 based website

Create a git repository for your html/css/js files

Add a buildspec.yml to tell AWS CodeBuild what to do

Create a new CodeBuild project to do your builds

Create a CodePipeline based on your CodeCommit repo that triggers whenever you push to the repo (skip the Deploy stage)

Push changes and sit back and watch the magic. (Note if you’re using CloudFront then you…

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How to use Lambda@Edge to redirect a CloudFront url #aws

How to use Lambda@Edge to redirect a CloudFront url #aws

You’ve got a published URL: http://mydomain/an_old_link and you’ve moved your site to AWS CloudFront and that published URL is causing you problems. The good news is that you can use Lambda@Edge to trap the incoming request and redirect to a file of your choice.

This means you can redirect http://mydomain/an_old_link to https://mydomain/a_new_link.htmleasily, and most importantly, transparently…

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Forward commands from PHP to LightwaveRF

Forward commands from PHP to LightwaveRF

I write this little forwarder recently so that other bits of software in our house/network could send commands to our LightwaveRF kit without needing to be registered on the hub, effectively giving local speed access to all software integrations.

I’ve got a little web server running on a Pi, that machine is registered with the lightwaverf hub (it runs my Logitech Harmony integrations). That…

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My Alexa skill is now live in the UK

My Alexa skill is now live in the UK

Every month at my kung fu club, Chi Wai Kung Fuin Cheltenham UK, there’s a series of strikes of the month that are on rotation for extra attention. Also there’s a rotating black belt syllabus. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to remember all of these details, and whether or not you need to take a bo staff or set of escrima sticks to the club. So, I thought I’d write an Alexa skill to…

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Chi Wai Kung Fu @ Cheltenham now with extra tech! #alexa

Chi Wai Kung Fu @ Cheltenham now with extra tech! #alexa

For over 6 years now I’ve been going to Chi Wai Kung Fu! A few years ago I achieved a lifelong ambition to become a Black Belt in Kung Fu. Now I’m a second Dan and a brown belt in Dacayana Eskrima as a bonus!

Chi Wai is great, my whole family go there :) My two boys started when they were little and now are both black belts. It’s done them a huge amount of good, it’s far more than just…

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How to remove duplicates in Amazon Music playlists

How to remove duplicates in Amazon Music playlists

I’ve recently migrated to Amazon Music from Spotify and local media servers. It’s actually pretty good although getting my playlists migrated was a pain.

Uploading seemed to cause a lot of duplicates, so then creating playlists from the recently imported or added files caused a lot of duplicates in the playlists. I listen to playlists on shuffle so this annoyed me because it means the probability…

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Send messages to another room using Amazon #Alexa #dirtyhack

Send messages to another room using Amazon #Alexa #dirtyhack

Here’s a fun trick to get Amazon Alexa to send messages to the kids in another room or whatever…   This is a bit of a hacky workaround but it’ll do the job until Alexa can do push notifications. 1) Record some custom mp3s (or go to http://www.readthewords.comand generate some) 2) Save them with good names and upload them to Amazon Music in a “Messages” playlist 3) From the Alexa app you can…

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How to call a webservice api from Amazon Alexa using Javascript in a Lambda function

How to call a webservice api from Amazon Alexa using Javascript in a Lambda function

This wasn’t trivial and I’ve seen a lot of questions about it online so I thought I’d share how I did this to get Alexa to respond to questions about my kids pocket money :)

You can call a URL like this: (note I’m assuming a JSON response, you’d need to modify for non-JSON)

var http = require('http'); function getWebRequest(url,doWebRequestCallBack) { http.get(url, function (res) { var…

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Amazon Alexa - what it needs to do next

Amazon Alexa – what it needs to do next

I’m a big fan of Amazon Alexa. I bought a dot to experiment with and it’s so useful I have it in several rooms now. Alexa can control my smart lighting (courtesy of lightwaverf kit), play music, order food, order some amazon stuff, manage my shopping and to-do lists amongst other things, but she’s got a few drawbacks.

Here’s what I’d like to see Alexa tackle next:

Conversation flow – the ability…

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Holistic Software Development - the book

Holistic Software Development – the book

The HSD book is currently in it’s final editing phase. If you’d like to purchase the book then please bookmark this page and come back soon.

What’s inside?

The book covers a detailed introduction to Holistic Software Development and it’s principles. Covering the H-Modeland how it us used to map levels of decomposition to recomposition and integration the book then follows a structured path through…

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Howto: Controlling LightwaveRF lights with a Raspberry Pi, Flirc and Logitech Harmony One IR remote

Howto: Controlling LightwaveRF lights with a Raspberry Pi, Flirc and Logitech Harmony One IR remote

I’ve recently got into home automation and so thought it would be fun to integrate my smart lighting with my media centre and remote control. When I watch TV or streaming video I want the main lights to go off and the side/back lights to come on in my living room. When I pause I want the main lights to come up a little and when I play I want main lights to turn off again :)

My setup

I use Lightwa…