Unboxed Roundup: Our links for w/c 20th February 2017
Murray Steele
Feb. 24, 2017
Graphical depiction of ownership and borrowing in Rust - Charlie
https://rufflewind.com/2017-02-15/rust-move-copy-borrow
I know this is kind of specific but I also know I'm not the only one here that's interested in Rust. It's also a really good diagram for something that's not easily understood. There's even a PDF version for making posters to spread the good word.
Rails 5.1.0.beta1: Loving JavaScript, System Tests, Encrypted Secrets, and more - Chris H
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2017/2/23/Rails-5-1-beta1/
The first beta of Rails 5.1 has been released this week and this post details the changes. It's really great to see system tests become part of the framework and there are lots of changes in JavaScript land with the introduction of Yarn, Webpack and JQuery being removed as a dependency and much more.
The first SHA-1 collision has been found - Elena
https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-sha1-collision.html
According to Bruce Schneier the first SHA1 collission has been expected for over a decade. Now there's an algorithm to speed up collision generation.
Nine quintillion SHA1 computations and 110 GPU years were needed to arrive at the first collision. Comparatively MD5 can be broken on a smartphone in 30 seconds, and traditionally bruteforcing SHA1 would take 12 million GPU years.
Making animations from a series of images - Tom S
Using ImageMagick (installable from homebrew), you can do some cool simple
things like creating an animated GIF using the convert command. Take the
example below, where I’m inside a directly of images which have been ordered
sequentially:
/usr/local/bin/convert -delay 100 -loop 0 * ~/Desktop/animated.gif
This creates an animated.gif image which loops endlessly and has a delay of
100 ticks per second. If you want the animation faster then decrease the ticks.
Image to Image translation in Tensorflow - Elena
http://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/index.html
pix2pix-tensorflow is able analyze a sketch and generate an image of what it thinks you were imagining. It works by training on pairs of images (a sketch and an outcome).
From the examples given, it seems to be pretty intelligent in realistically rendering someone's doodles. It's fun to think that this might become useful for people who can't draw but would like to generate decent, believable artwork.
Here's What TfL Learned From Tracking Your Phone On the Tube - Charlie
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/02/heres-what-tfl-learned-from-tracking-your-phone-on-the-tube/
Setting any privacy concerns aside; I think these results from tracking passengers around the tube network is really interesting. TFL took efforts to protect privacy and make passengers aware (I noticed the posters). As well as the larger 'traffic flow' maps; there's also a plan drawing of a station with journey times annotated.
PostgreSQL Vacuuming: An Introduction for Busy Devs - Chris H
http://okigiveup.net/postgresql-vacuuming-an-introduction-for-busy-devs/
A project I've been working on recently had issues with PostgreSQL vacuuming and dead rows in a number of their large and more active tables. I found the PostgreSQL docs to be very useful and this link gives a nice overview of vacuuming, why it is used and how it can be improved.
Track of the Week - Sarah B
It always seems I get to do this the week before holiday! So, this time I am off skiing, with my family. And this song was playing on repeat on a holiday in Italy when I was younger, so reminds me of family holidays!