1 week with iPhone X, studying Face Tracking with ARKit

It’s been a week with my iPhone X and I am drilling into technical details of what iOS 11 does with iPhone X. One of the big features is the facial recognition. Curious I watched an Apple Developer video on “Face Tracking with ARKit”  https://developer.apple.com/fall17/601

Everyone focus on the 1st one. Facial recognition and doing things like Animoji  

With expressions tracking you could use the Face Tracking as UI input.  

Here is where ARFaceAnchor can be used to show position and orientation of the users face, 3D topology, facial expression. Everyone is a bit different in how they reach, but they are in general consistent in their facial expressions. 

If you don’t think you can do this check out this list of facial tracking shapes. 

In operations lighting has a direct impact to the quality, accuracy, and speed of work. And, you could use Facial Tracking to get a reading of the Lighting in the environment. 

And last with the microphone support for Animoji you can use the same method to capture audio as well. 

Moderating Panels at Structure Conference 2017 as a storyteller

For years I have studied and valued the skills of a storyteller. An example of a story told well applied to the data center industry is the story of In Tents Computing. The story was originally written in 2008. It has been long enough that I can share some of the inner parts of the story. One of my friends wrote the story and she is a great writer, working at Microsoft for years in a range of roles. The first week of her job at Microsoft we met when she worked as a paralegal in the Microsoft legal team that supported the Microsoft font group where I worked. Does that sound boring? It was, but it is important to get fonts done and cleared by legal to ship Windows.

Back to the story referenced https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/the_power_of_software/2008/09/19/intense-computing-or-in-tents-computing/. The engineers doing the work were Christian Belady and Sean James, and Mike Manos said the team did some interesting work and it could be a good blog post. The excitement in the writing department came when Slashdot picked up the story https://m.slashdot.org/story/107413 and many other trade publications. What was funny to Mike Manos, the writer, and myself is how there was so much trouble caused in the company. Why? Because on the same day that the In Tents computing blog post went up Microsoft VP Debra Chapraty was at the opening ceremony of their 2nd data center in San Antonio and instead of the news being about San Antonio and the Microsoft executives, the news was discussing servers put in tents.

Telling a good story can be powerful and it is what i keep in mind when moderating presentations at Structure Conference.  The three presentations I am moderating are as follows. 

These may seem boring, but not nearly as boring as discussing fonts. :-) Athough to be fair fonts did make it into a Ted Conference where Matthew Carter discussed the crazy idea of why we created Verdana. At the end of this post is Matthew telling the story of Verdana. Stories work, but are so hard to do well.

Why Reaching Zero Data Centers is So Challenging

Juniper began its journey to transition its corporate applications to the cloud six years ago. While the company expected to complete that transition this year, the task at hand isn’t as easy as it sounds. There have been many takeaways and lessons learned that Bob’s team has bundled into a “playbook” – outlining best practices on how to achieve zero physical data centers, how to overcome the hurdles and why the process is more difficult than many realize. In this discussion, Bob will share why it’s so hard to get to zero data centers and detail how your company can successfully see the light (i.e. the cloud) at the end of the tunnel.

Speaker:
Bob Worrall

SVP, Chief Information Office

Kubernetes as a Hybrid Cloud Platform: Federating Across Public, Private and Edge.

Is it another workload orchestration technology, or is there something deeper driving Kubernetes adoption? Numerous factors have contributed to its success, including its origins in Google's infrastructure, the open source community contributing momentum, and real world deployments that speak clearly to its value. One use case stands out in terms of its relevance to the enterprise: Kubernetes as a hybrid cloud platform. In this panel distinguished leaders discuss this and offer insights for future evolution in the space.

Speakers:
Sirish Raghuram
Co-Founder and CEO, Paltform9
Vibu Pratap
VP of Engineering, Veritas
Allan Naim

Product Manager - Kubernetes, Google

Containers, Containers, Containers: Lessons from Liberating Enterprise Workloads

Everywhere you look, it's all about containers. It's clear containers will be the path forward for application virtualization and the convenience it brings to IT app management and workload transportability. In this panel we talk to three of the leading technologists in the industry who are putting themselves and their customers behind a container rich future. Come learn what containers will really mean for you.

Speakers:
Alex Polvi
CEO, CoreOS
Madhura Maskasky

Co-Founder and Platform9

Bill Gates shares one of the most important parts to drive change - Trust

Bill Gates writes about a recent trip he made to Tanzania to stop a terrible disease. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mass-Drug-Administration-in-Tanzania

“Lymphatic filariasis is one of the worst of these diseases. It’s caused by a parasite that’s spread by mosquitoes, and in the severest cases people may develop swollen limbs, a thickening of the skin known as elephantiasis, or other severe disfigurements. Beyond the pain and disabilities they experience, people affected by the disease are often ostracized by their communities and are unable to work, sinking them deeper into poverty.

To combat lymphatic filariasis, health officials could test everyone and then treat only those people who are infected. But testing the population for these diseases would be expensive and slow. The medicines used for treatment (ivermectin and albendazole), however, are inexpensive and have no side effects, making mass treatment a more effective approach to protect people from the disease. (And thanks to thegenerosity of the many pharmaceutical companies, billions of doses of these and other medicines combating neglected tropical diseases are being donated for free.)”

At the end of the blog post Bill shares the secret to success. 

”Walking from door to door in the village with the health workers, I was struck that perhaps the most important element of the program is trust. Taking the medicine is strictly voluntary, making it important that the health workers distributing it earn the confidence of the community.  The health workers I met certainly had. They were knowledgeable, passionate about their work, and clearly cared about the community they were serving.” 

For so many of the systems I have worked on I focus on the “trust.”   As trust increases everything works better. Without trust everything gets harder.

Implement DCIM with an IOT Platform like open source Kaa Project

I wrote about the DCIM is coming. http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2017/10/31/the-end-of-dcim-is-coming 

And an example of its end is how DCIM can be replaced by a more powerful, lower cost, platform like IOT. 

Here is a YouTube video with an example of KaaIoT platform with edge end points used in the data processing, reducing the data to the back-end system 100X. 

This approach has merit and I want to start investigating what can be done by KaaIoT or equivalent. 

Here is a snapshot of the architecture of KaaIoT from the below video

Why I don’t go for Home IOT, because I haven’t figured out the Home State Management IOT tool

I enjoy listening to my friend’s IOT podcast,  https://staceyoniot.com/. But I have few IOT things in the house. Why? Because having IOT at home I want a state management tool to managed, control, and connect the IOT things.

Curious I decided to search for tools and found these. https://www.how2shout.com/tools/best-opensource-iot-platforms-develop-iot-projects.html

Below is a video of one tool Kaa IOT’s platform.