Category: Software

Google Cloud Summit & OnBoard

November 18, 2017November 18, 2017 PerfectSlayer Cloud, Software Leave a comment

The last few weeks, I attended to two conferences about the Cloud by Google. The first one was the Google Cloud Summit, the first toke place at Paris, the 19th of October in the Palais des Congrès. It started with a keynote by the VP (EMEA) of Google Cloud to welcome everyone and remember some impressive figures. Whereas Google deploys a new data-centers each month, the cloud only represents only 5% of the overall companies workload but it uses 40% of the Internet traffic! They invested $30 million until now and they want to be ready when the shift will happen!

Google Cloud Summit 2017 — Few minutes until the theater to be full!

The conference was divided in three tracks with theirs own subjects: Data, DevOps and Collaboration & Infrastructure. I personally chose to go to at least one conference on each subject so I covered various topics from technical ones with Kubernetes and serverless applications with Function to machine learning with Google APIs or using TensorFlow passing by secure applications on ChromeOS and Android. It helped a lot to understand the product catalog and offered a global vision of the Google Cloud Platform. Conference like “Where should I run my code” summarized it well.

The second event I attend was Google Cloud OnBoard, a training session about Google Cloud the 8th of November in the Salle Wagram at Paris too. Whereas the Google Cloud Summit was composed by 60% of developers and the others were mainly decision makers, the Google Cloud OnBoard was a technical training in order to (re)discover the Google Cloud Platform and its products. It started by some key concepts, like roles and permissions with IAM, then moved to key products like App Engine, Compute Engine and Datastore. OnBoard sessions trained more than 300k people across 50 countries.

Both events were very well planned and organized. Communication was excellent and everything was done in order to enjoy the moment. I mean, no queue to get your badge, WiFi password on the back of your badge, training notes and drinks set up on every seat of the room, people everywhere to answer your question or guide you to your next conference room: impressive! I really enjoyed those two days and it helped me a lot to understand the platform and how it can fit my needs. Don’t hesitate to create your account and give it a try: there is free trier on a lot of products and you will be offer $300 for the first year!

Microsoft Azure Days #1

July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 PerfectSlayer Cloud, Software Leave a comment

A quick blog post about the past Thursday at Microsoft conference center where the (French) Azure Days #1 took place. As a previous insider, I was invited to a full day of conferences about the Microsoft cloud platform and I was really impressed how it becomes massive: about 80 services from VM and hosting to database and AI. I won’t make ads here but numbers speak by them self:

Numbers about the strong Azure momentum — Azure Days #1 – Momentum

During the day, we learned basics of the platform: platform specific wording and concepts, how to prevision VM, deploy applications, setup networking and deal with the resource manager. The speakers, 4 architects, were very motivating and knew how to keep people attention (specific mention for Pierre’s distraction when a live demonstration temporary failed). The event will be repeated each 6 to 8 weeks and, good news, it’s totally free! Except if you have to take a day off like me because your company doesn’t think cloud is important… Anyway, I should be present the 12th of September for the Azure Day #2 and I’m now looking forward to participate to the first Google Cloud summit at Paris this October!

Dev story: project hosting

July 24, 2015July 7, 2016 PerfectSlayer Firefox, Software Leave a comment

It was a long time since the previous post and it’s the opportunity of trying a new format I call « dev story ». A less verbose post format but more based on day-to-day coder life. The story I would like to share is about the port of one of my Firefox add-on: Scroll Up Folder. I recently made big changes for this project on which I could share: first I had to change its hosting then I rewrote the whole add-on using a new SDK.

Security conferences by AFUP

June 7, 2014July 7, 2016 PerfectSlayer Security, Software Leave a comment

Early in the week, I was to the security conferences led by the AFUP about the software security. The main goals of those conferences was to make developers aware of the real dangers of security breaches. The first conference was given by the OWASP organization, a non-profit organization focused on improving security. The main key points of its talk was:

If your application wasn’t attacked yet, it will be,
If your are aware of the most critic security risks and you choose to handle them, you could prevent the bigger part of coming attacks,
You could handle security risk easily with theirs documentations and tools freely available.

The second conference was made by an AFUP member, Christophe Villeneuve, the creator of the elephpant. The talk focused on how to secure you PHP applications. It tooks the most common security risks previously described and explains how to prevent it with PHP language. He deals with subjects like database request escapement, user input cleaning or risky specific language features (PHP-SELF, global, …).

The third and last conference was made by a security engineer of Mozilla to present security solutions added to Firefox OS. She explained last additions like application signature and installation source, permission system or content security policy (CSP). It also was also opportunity to demonstrate the last version of Firefox OS 2.0 and a static JavaScript code analyzer ScanJS.

To conclude, the conferences were interesting and networking very pleasant. I would like to thanks talkers for their time and Mozilla for their premises and I end with some picture of the night and the video will be soon online.

Time4Popcorn for Android

May 10, 2014July 7, 2016 PerfectSlayer Android, Software Leave a comment

This week was released an Android version of Popcorn Time. For those who don’t know the project, it’s similar to Netflix: you select the movie or serie you want to watch and could instantly play it. Unlike Netflix, it’s free, based on user torrent seed and illegal in almost all countries. So don’t use it and go buy you DVD instead !

Existing versions still confine to desktop releases until now. So be happy mobile users, you day is coming ! Except one thing (or two, which career will allow you to download 1080p movie with p2p ?), it’s not the official / legacy team of Popcorn Time which releases the application. What does it means ? An alternative team is releasing the same software under an alternate name « Time4Popcorn ». But what for ?

Why Flash is still alive ?

June 17, 2013July 7, 2016 PerfectSlayer Security, Software Leave a comment

I post today to ask an open question : « Why Flash is still alive ? ». Some days ago I was raging again Flash on some website when I wondered why Flash is always used ? In my computer user life, I lost several hours trying to get Flash work properly. Bad Linux support, browser freezes, oh wait, making a list !

Cons:

CPU and memory consumptions (for the player itself and browser sandbox),
Security leaks and intrusion vector (see Adobe security bulletins numbers and date),
Bad support for OS other than Windows (only old and vulnerable versions for Linux),
No multiple screens support (start player from one screen, move it to a second one and go fullscreen: player displays content on full first screen),
Freezes and BSOD (under Windows at least),
Invasive updater (does not take care of user update preferences, no proxy settings, deletes itself if download fails, offline installer well hidden in Adobe site),
No more supported on mobile devices (Android, iOS, WP8).

Pros:

Advanced features for video player (stream quality switch, ads overlay),
Fast and cheap indy game development.

For the video player advanced features, I think web standard evolutions will quickly offer equivalent features (including standard adoption in browsers). Technologies like WebRTC show how browsers evolved into natively supported multimedia platforms. For the Flash browser game, how long could they fight against full web games when you see that Unreal Engine 3 works with JS and WebGL ? Or against the Chrome gamepad API ?

And how long browser developers will let Flash ruin their hard work of speeding up and responsibility increase ? Remember the other Adobe software plugged in browser, Reader, was brushed aside by some lines of fast JS.

Definitely Flash belongs to the past. But for how long will it remain in the present ?