Technology Archives - aster.cloud

6 min

Learn Expect By Writing And Automating A Simple Game

Code a “guess the number” game in Expect. Then, learn the real power of Expect with a separate script to automate playing the game. While trying to automate my workflow, I hit upon a configuration utility that defied meaningful automation. It was a Java process that didn’t support a silent installer, or support stdin, and had an inconsistent set of prompts. Ansible’s expect module was inadequate for this task. But I found that the expect command was just the tool for the job. My journey to learn Expect meant learning a bit of Tcl. Now that I have the background to create simple programs, I can better…

5 min

Technology

How To Make 5G Less Expensive

The 5th generation of mobile communications, 5G has arrived and it has brought us mostly higher throughputs and helped operators to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for mobile data traffic. This first wave of 5G uses the so-called “non-standalone mode”, which means that it still depends on existing 4G networks for coverage and control, so some of the advanced features of 5G are not yet available. Operators are already working on the roll out of the second wave of 5G, which will be able to operate in a standalone mode, independently of 4G. Only this standalone mode will be able to…

5 min

Want Faster Data And A Cleaner Planet? Start Mining Asteroids

Mining asteroids might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are companies and a few governments already working hard to make it real. This should not be surprising: compared with the breathtaking bridges that engineers build on Earth, asteroid-mining is a simple, small-scale operation requiring only modest technological advances. If anything is lacking, it is the imagination to see how plausible it has become. I am afraid only that it might not arrive soon enough to address the urgent resource challenges that the world is facing right now. As an academic researcher, I work with several asteroid–mining companies…

5 min

Knitting Helps You Understand Programming Patterns

Knitting as Programming or how I learned programmers owe it all to fiber As part of my bootcamp, I was asked to present for 10 minutes on any topic. I’ve been crocheting since 2013 and knitting since 2018, and I had noticed some similarities between the way I approached a project in either fiber arts or programming. What I did not expect to find was a rich history of fiber arts and programming influencing each other. The Beginning of the Relationship Between Fiber and Programming Fiber arts, like knitting, are crafts using yarn, string, thread, etc. This encompasses thousands of…

12 min

10 Best Email Marketing Tools In 2022

Emails have become an important tool in a marketer’s arsenal. Email marketing, in particular, is widely considered being the most cost-effective marketing strategy. If used appropriately, this strategy can help businesses promote their products or services in a bid to acquire new customers and retain their existing base. However, an email marketing campaign is only as good as the software being used to launch it. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to claim that the success and failure of your campaigns hinge on the email marketing software you choose to employ. Therefore, one must be wise in their pursuit of…

3 min

Can We Make Data Tidy?

Imagine: You are about to sit down with a newly-fetched data set, excited about the insights it will bring you and then you find out it is no use. If you’ve been there, then you know for sure what an untidy dataset is. A statistician from New Zealand once said: Tidy datasets are all alike, but every messy dataset is messy in its own way. Indeed, as data may come in various forms and shapes, sometimes we are inundated with it. As a result, our data science team becomes shortsighted and oops.. disillusioned by mountains of unworkable data. The only way data specialists can facilitate analysis is by…

3 min

4 Agile Testing Trends That Will Continue in 2022

Since their inception in 2001, agile practices have radically evolved. It was first about shifting from the waterfall model of software development to focusing on iterative development using Scrum, XP, and other methodologies, thereby removing many bottlenecks organizations had with faster software delivery. Agile is now about optimizing operations within the development process, using different practices and tools, and making the entire process more efficient. It is about starting the testing process right from the beginning of the development lifecycle to catch defects early and distilling insights from the data collected from each stage of the development process. Agile continues…

4 min

Open Source Is Life

We often don’t realize this, but open-source projects play a huge role in our life. Today, in this article, I am going to talk about how we use open-source technologies in our everyday life and what would happen if they didn’t exist 😱. Let us start with some open-source technologies we use in our daily life: Android Many of us have phones running the Android Operating System. Android by itself is an open-source project maintained by Google. The base version of android is popularly referred to as Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Now, what do I mean by the base…

4 min

5 Barriers To DevOps Deployment

According to a recent State of DevOps report, teams practicing DevOps benefit from a lower change failure rate, 24 times faster recovery from failures when they do occur, and significantly less time spent on rework and security issue remediation. In short, DevOps helps reduce risk, improve productivity, and reduce costs. Such teams tend to be more attractive to prospective hires and result in higher retention rates than companies without such practices in place. So why haven’t all teams implemented these processes and procedures? Unfortunately, while the benefits are substantial, change is a challenge all by itself. A number of substantial barriers…

4 min

Tech Trends: What Will Be The Biggest Innovations By 2022

Predicting the future is hard and risky. Predicting the future in the computing industry is even harder and riskier due to dramatic changes in technology and limitless challenges to innovation. Only a small fraction of innovations truly disrupt the state of the art. Some are not practical or cost-effective, some are ahead of their time, and some simply do not have a market. There are numerous examples of superior technologies that were never adopted because others arrived on time or fared better in the market. Therefore this document is only an attempt to better understand where technologies are going. The…

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