Month: July 2016

An iOS app called Summer of Darkness was released earlier this summer, just in time for the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. What few people remember is that Shelley wrote Frankenstein during a terrifying summer in the Swiss Alps, after a massive volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused weather across the globe to turn grim and cold. Many Europeans believed this disaster-induced climate change meant the world was ending. Summer of Darkness recreates this historical moment with daily updates from the writings of four famous authors who traveled together that summer.

Shelley spent the apocalyptic months between May and September touring the Swiss Alps. She was joined by a group of literary friends, including poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who would soon become her husband, as well as writer John Polidari. Spurred by a writing challenge from Byron and the terrible weather, the group wrote ghost stories. Two of those stories, Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidari's Vampyr, gave birth to new genres of popular fiction. Meanwhile, Byron and Percy wrote poetry together in a blaze of productivity kindled by their new friendship.

Summer of Darkness offers a fascinating look at the lives of these writers, as well as the events that inspired their creativity that year. The app was built by designer Andrew Sempere and author Anindita Basu Sempere, an American couple who have been living in Switzerland for many years, surrounded by the same landscapes that Shelley and her friends saw two centuries ago. As you read snippets of letters, poems, memoirs, and stories by the group, the app provides beautifully rendered maps to show where exactly each person was as the summer unfolded. Brief flashes of rain and lightning illuminate the screen behind the text, providing a delightful but non-invasive hint of atmosphere. You receive updates to unlock material as the summer unfolds in real time, and if you download the app now you can consume all the past updates in one glorious binge. New updates continue into September.

While Nintendo tried to temper expectations and the impact of augmented reality game Pokémon Go ahead of its financial results, its latest quarterly earnings still make for surprisingly bad reading. Compared to the same quarter last year, Nintendo saw net sales drop 31 percent from ¥90 billion (£651 million, $853 million) to ¥62 billion (£448 million, $587 million) with an operating loss of ¥5.1 billion (£37 million, $48 million).

While the company blames "foreign exchange rates" and "significant yen appreciation" for the loss, the reality is that hardware and software were down across the board, and software growth has been minimal. Nintendo sold 220,000 Wii U consoles, a 53 percent decrease year-on-year, bringing the total number of consoles sold to just over 13 million. Wii U software sales rose a mere three percent to 4.7 million units.

Meanwhile, 3DS hardware sales dropped seven percent to 940,000 units, but software fared a little better, rising seven percent to 8.5 million units off the back of games like Kirby: Planet Robobot and Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright/Conquest. Even Amiibo sales, which have been a bright spot for the company of late, remained flat due to "a lack of new titles that are compatible with Amiibo." Sales of downloadable games and content were also down year-on-year.

An attendee at the first day of the Democratic National Convention protests the DNC's treatment of Bernie Sanders, as hinted at by e-mails exposed by an alleged Russian hack. (credit: Chip Somodevilla , Getty News Images)

The well-timed leak of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, following a long-running breach of the DNC's network, is a masterful piece of information warfare. The leak may only be the beginning of an effort to shape the US presidential election, or it may be a backup plan triggered by the exposure of the long-running breach. But the hacking of the DNC and the direct targeting of Hillary Clinton are only parts of a much larger operation by Russia-based hackers who have breached a number of US government networks.

Evidence collected by the security firm CrowdStrike and forensic work by Fidelis point to the breach being caused by two "threat groups" associated with Russian intelligence organizations. A pair of reports published in June by SecureWorks suggests that the same threat groups conducted phishing campaigns against the e-mail addresses of the DNC. The same attackers targeted the addresses of Clinton campaign staffers, political consultants, journalists, and current and former members of the military, among others.

At a minimum, this suggests that the DNC breach was part of a larger intelligence collection operation. The leaked data from the DNC breach, however, may have been intended to create chaos and uncertainty around the election. But why would the Russian government open that can of worms? It's possible that this fits into a larger Russian strategy aimed at splintering NATO and countering what Russia has seen over the past decade as encroachment by the West on Russia's national interests.

It may not be all about the tables anymore, but the DBA role is still essential—even if the person doing it doesn't have the title. (credit: Michael Mandiberg)

For those of us who have been in the information technology realm for too long, the title "database administrator" conjures up very specific images. We picture someone pulling hair out over issues with backups or snapshots not happening, schemas growing out of control, capacity plans blown up by new application demands, sluggish queries, and eternal performance tuning.

That old-school role of the DBA still exists in some places, particularly large enterprises where giant database clusters still rule the data center. But virtualization, cloud data storage, micro-services, the "DevOps" approach to building and running applications, and a number of other factors have significantly changed how organizations store and manage their data. Many of the traditional roles of the DBA seem to be moot in the shiny, happy world promised by the new generation of databases.

"NoSQL" databases don't require a pre-defined schema, and many have replication built in by default. Provisioning new servers can be reduced to clicking a few radio buttons and check boxes on a webpage. Development teams just point at a cloud data store such as Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3) and roll. And even relational database vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM are pushing customers toward data-as-a-service (DaaS) models that drastically simplify considerations about hardware and availability.