Antbleed is a newly-discovered vulnerability in the firmware of “Antminer” Bitcoin mining devices made by Bitmain, who make an estimated 70% of the world’s Bitcoin-mining ASICs. You can read about it on Antbleed.com, Bitcoin Magazine, and International Business Times UK, or you can get the 30-second explanation from the infographic below (share and enjoy it, please!):
Here’s what’s happening for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs in and around the Tampa Bay area this week…
Click the graph to see it at full size.
How big is the mobile gaming market? About $46 billion, according to Newzoo, a market intelligence firm specializing in the global games and “esports” (I hate that word) industry. Their recent Global Games Market Report says that in 2017, 2.2 billion gamers worldwide will generate about $109 billion in game revenues, and mobile will account for 42% of that.
At this point, you’re probably asking yourself…
…and my answer would be:
Next Tuesday’s Tampa iOS Meetup will cover Apple’s SpriteKit framework, an excellent basis for building your own 2D iPhone and iPad games. We’re a group for people just getting started on their iOS programming journeys, so we’re going to keep it simple, but that doesn’t mean you won’t learn how to write a blockbuster smash hit game. That’s because I’ll show you how to write…
…Flappy Bird!
Dong Nguyen, an artist and developer, took this little sprite, a creature he’d designed for a game project that was cancelled in 2012…
…and over a period of several days, turned it into Flappy Bird. He released it in May 2013, and it unexpectedly enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity in 2014. The game is incredibly simple; it doesn’t increase in difficulty or vary at all throughout its gameplay. Despite (or perhaps because of) its simplicity, and even though he released the game as a free app, it still made lots of money — as much as $50,000 a day, thanks to in-game advertising.
You may be surprised to learn that Flappy Bird isn’t made up of much more than 4 or 5 screens’ worth of code. I’ll introduce you to the basics of SpriteKit and game development for iPhones and iPads, and walk you through the Flappy Bird code. By the end of the meetup, you’ll understand the mechanics underlying the Flappy Bird game, and you might have even made your first step towards getting a piece of the $46 billion mobile gaming market!
Food, drink and space for Tampa iOS Meetup is provided thanks to the generosity of:
Because this is the real world in 2017, this picture says “Here’s Joey, who spoke at last night’s GDG Sun Coast Meetup about Android and Augmented Reality, with John, who attended and won the draw for the new Kotlin in Action book.”
(Thanks for attending my presentation, John, and enjoy the book! Kotlin’s a pretty nice programming language.)
If this were the TV world in 1977, this picture would say “We just started our own detective agency…in Hawaii!”
This post also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Finding myself in the same boat as 1 in 20 of my fellow Floridians, I’m doing a couple of things:
The latter involves paying a visit to Connect, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity’s benefits site. Among the benefits you can get from visiting that site is a grand tour of late 20th century/early 21 century governmental website design, in all its Kafkaesque glory.
I kept getting stuck at one part of the process: the one where you provide a list of the prospective employers you contacted in a given week (you need to contact 5 to be eligible for benefits). For each prospect, you need to provide the usual contact info, including the URL of their website. The problem is that Connect doesn’t think that an URL is real unless preceded by a subdomain — in other words, it won’t accept example.com, but will accept the functionally equivalent www.example.com:
I’ve got to hand it to this motherless, godforsaken site: I now have an additional incentive to land a job pronto.
Click the graph to see it at full size.
The job search continues, and as you might expect, it’s had its ups and downs. I drew the graph above, inspired by the graph below, which has been making the rounds on LinkedIn and depicts the ever-changing mood entrepreneur:
I choose to view it as part of the adventure, and if you’re in the same boat as I am, I hope you see it the same way.
Last week, I participated as a “trained brain” at a workshop at the Dali Museum’s Innovation Labs to help an area business come up with new ideas…
Upgraded the RAM on my ThinkPad to elevate it from TPS Report-writing tool to half-decent developer and multimedia machine:
Prepared my upcoming presentations for Google Developer Group Sun Coast (Android and Augmented Reality) and Tampa iOS Meetup (Learn how to write Flappy Bird):
Discovered that my LinkedIn Social Selling Index score had gone up by a couple of points:
Answered some Stack Overflow questions, updated my Stack Overflow Developer Story, and discovered that my reputation score puts me in the top 4%:
and puts me in Stack Overflow’s top 10% for Python and top 5% for Ruby:
I’ve also been working away on apps and articles, and of course, looking for work:
I’m looking for my next great job! If you’re looking for someone with desktop, web, mobile, and IoT development skills who can also communicate to technical and non-technical audiences, or a marketer or evangelist who also has a technology background and can code, you should talk to me.
It’s a busy week for techies in the Tampa Bay area! Here’s what’s happening for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs…
That’s right: this Wednesday, I’ll be giving a presentation for GDG Sun Coast on Google Mobile Vision, the Face API, and using them to create a Snapchat Lens-like augmented reality app! Space is limited, so if you’re interested in this one, register now!
