Saturday, January 31, 2015

web: Google Cultural Institute: Art, World Wonders

atractive visual design

Google Cultural Institute
"The Google Cultural Institute puts the world’s cultural treasures at your fingertips."

Cultural Institute – Google
  • Art Project
  • World Wonders Project
  • Archive exhibitions

  • Take a virtual tour
  • See works in great detail: available in ‘gigapixel’ format, allowing you to zoom in at brushstroke level.
  • Create your own gallery
  • Share with your friends

mobile web: Multi-Device Layout Patterns


Multi-Device Layout Patterns by Luke Wroblewski
"Through fluid grids and media query adjustments, responsive design enables Web page layouts to adapt to a variety of screen sizes. As more designers embrace this technique, we're not only seeing a lot of innovation but the emergence of clear patterns as well. I cataloged what seem to be the most popular of these patterns for adaptable multi-device layouts."
Mostly Fluid Pattern
multidevice layout patterns

Column Drop  Pattern

multidevice layout patterns

Layout Shifter  Pattern

multidevice layout patterns

Tiny Tweaks Pattern

multidevice layout patterns: Tiny Tweaks

Off Canvas Pattern

multidevice layout patterns: Off Canvas


big data: Microsoft "Cosmos"

Could Cosmos be Microsoft's next commercial big-data service? | ZDNet
"Microsoft is launching more and more internal and external services on Azure. Given CEO Satya Nadella's focus on creating a "data culture," it's not too surprising that big data services are a top priority. HDInsight, Microsoft's Hadoop on Azure service , was Microsoft's first commercially available big-data service. I'm wondering if Cosmos might be its next. 

Currently, Cosmos is an internal-facing Microsoft service. It's Microsoft's massively parallel storage and computation service that handles data from Azure, Bing, AdCenter, MSN, Skype and Windows Live. According to a recent Microsoft job posting, there are 5,000 developers and "thousands" of users inside Microsoft using Cosmos. Cosmos was built using Microsoft's Dryad distributed-processing technology."

Report: Microsoft to revive Hadoop killer in cloud form | SiliconANGLE
Microsoft’s analytics framework has apparently evolved a great deal since the paper came out in 2011.

Cosmos, Big Data and Big Challenges, Pat Helland, July 2011

"Cosmos is composed of a distributed compute component (somewhat comparable to Hadoop's Map-Reduce, using the Microsoft Dryad solution, which (unlike Map-Reduce) allows an arbitrary DAG of computation. Cosmos supports a SQL-like syntax (similarly to HIVE/PIG) and includes a distributed storage component (comparable to HDFS); Overall, Cosmos provides highly scalable, reliable, fault-tolerant and automatically scaled compute operations on huge data sets."

image

Note: there is another "Cosmos", an open source OS based on C#, not related.

There is a similar service from Google:
Google Cloud Dataflow — Google Cloud Platform

smart tool: KanbanFlow: Kanban + Pomodoro

KanbanFlow - Lean project management, simplified
"The Kanban board gives you an excellent overview of your current work situation. Visualizing work in a team environment simplifies communication and lead to improved effectiveness.

Optionally improve your focus even more by using the popular Pomodoro technique  for time tracking of your tasks. Track and measure any interruptions to your focus."