Monthly Archives: March 2014

Oculus Joins Facebook

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We started Oculus with a vision of delivering incredible, affordable, and ubiquitous consumer virtual reality to the world. We’ve come a long way in the last 18 months: from foam core prototypes built in a garage to an incredible community of active and talented developers with more than 75,000 development kits ordered. In the process, we’ve defined what consumer virtual reality needs to be and what it’s going to require to deliver it. A few months ago, Mark, Chris, and Cory from the Facebook…

Ryan Seifert‘s insight:

Big news from the Oculus team!

 

When I initially heard the news I had a negative gut reaction, but as I stopped to think a bit deeper into it the reaction changed to pensiveness. I think the Facebook team is going to focus on bring around Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ metaverse vision. I believe the team will grow to include a group focused on polishing the user input and preparing the device for larger acceptance. If this is the first step towards a connected world wide VR plane I am all for it.

See on www.oculusvr.com

RECURSIVE Query is Recursive – Practice Over Theory

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In Postgres you have the ability to write recursive queries that refer to
themselves. This is a very powerful construct, and among other use cases …

Ryan Seifert‘s insight:

I started using Postgres a couple years ago and have really enjoyed the experience. Previously I had used Sql Server, MySQL, Firebird, and SQLite (I liked SQLite out of that group; smal,l quick, and embedded). Postgres just worked; everything I threw at it was handled and handled well.

Its great to add a new tool to my arsenal for Postgres; I’m looking forward to trying this out. I’m not sure where I would apply it to production systems yet; the variable in performance is something to keep in mind. Assuming you will be returning for the data anyway; these queries should return better results than having to perform multiple requests.

See on practiceovertheory.com

The Corruption Of Agile Development – InformationWeek

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The Corruption Of Agile Development
InformationWeek
Many people over the years have discussed their distress with the religious tone that cloaks the implementation of Agile practices.

Ryan Seifert‘s insight:

Agile done right is amazing; agile is rarely done right.

 

I’m sure we have all heard how great agile is as well as many agile nightmare stories. Personally, I think it boils down to company culture, team interaction, and agreeing on what agile includes. Agile starts at the personal level and is a decision that each team member needs to embrace. You can be using agile and decide to remove commonly accepted practices such as TDD, scrums, etc if the team agrees that they are not needed. Agile is flexible and responsive by nature; it embraces change even in its rituals.

See on www.informationweek.com

Announcing the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (DK2)

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Since the launch of the Oculus Kickstarter, we’ve been focused on building the best virtual reality platform. The original development kit was a strong starting point that showed the world a glimpse of presence, but its shortcomings prevented it from delivering great VR. Almost exactly one year after shipping the original dev kit, we’re pleased to announce DK2, the second development kit for the Oculus Rift! The second development kit features many of the key technical breakthroughs…

 

Ryan Seifert‘s insight:

I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these. The VR leap this device makes is incredible. I think they have just barely scratched the surface of what will be possible with this new type of display and interaction.

See on www.oculusvr.com

Robot writes LA Times breaking news

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The Los Angeles Times was the first newspaper to publish a story about an earthquake on Monday – thanks to a robot writer.

Ryan Seifert‘s insight:

An interesting advancement in journalism that is nice to see outside of sports and finance news. Automating the specific facts quickly will help ensure accuracy and free up the journalist to pursue more in depth analysis and stories.

I think it is hilarious that the automated journalist took all of 3 minutes to post the story; but live news actually covered it faster!

See on www.bbc.com