This last weekend I participated in the "Hack for the Sea" hackathon. As part of that, I needed to store images and structured data to Azure Storage. The process is very straightforward using F#'s async capabilities.

First, you'll need the connection string for your Azure Storage:

Use that to …

In Xamarin, if you observe / subscribe to a particularly-named NSNotification in an object that is IDisposable (this includes any class descended from NSObject!), you MUST explicitly unsubscribe from it in your Dispose handler, or you will get a segfault (the system will attempt to call a method at a memory …

Whalesharks are the largest fish in the ocean, but very little is known about their movements (where they breed, for instance, has been a huge mystery, although there's now pretty good evidence that some, at least, breed in the Galapagos).

Whalesharks have a "fingerprint" in the form of distinct spots …

They say to never write a negative review of a book until it has received too many positive ones. Which brings us to “Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” by Steven Pinker.

The tl;dr is that he doesn’t actually argue this case, he just …

fun-ny Faces : Face-based Augmented Reality with F# and the iPhone X

Each year, the F# programming community creates an advent calendar of blog posts, coordinated by Sergey Tihon on his blog. This is my attempt to battle Impostor Syndrome and share something that might be of interest to the community …

1. Create element without an explicit Frame.
2. Set TranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntroConstraints = false
3. Create an array of NSLayoutConstraints
4. Work top-to-bottom, left-to-right, or vice versa. Do this consistently throughout program
5. Use Layout Anchors
6. Use the top-level UIViews SafeAreaLayoutGuide to position relative to the Window / screen
7. For each dimension, set its location (LeadingAnchor / TopAnchor or …

The best Tensorflow is the one you have on your machine.

In my opinion, the bottleneck on a DNN solution is not training, but data preparation and iterating your model to the point where it's reasonable to start investing kilowatt-hours of electricity to the training. So I have Tensorflow on …

Sunday rant: I have a 2016 Dell XPS (high-end) laptop. I bought a Dell 25" 4K monitor. And on Friday received a Dell Thunderbolt dock for the monitor. I plug it all together and although the monitor displays wonderfully, the dock is not passing USB through. So I start fiddling …

Although I am pretty deeply entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, the recently-announced \$50 Dot was so inexpensive I could not resist checking it out. (Before I go further: I work for Microsoft, so take that into account as you see fit.)

Out of the box, the Echo is very easy …

[code lang="csharp"]
var k = Convert.FromBase64String("vlqnRQo8YYXdqt3c7CahDninF6MgvRnqNEU+/tcbWdM=");
var iv = Convert.FromBase64String("gaXwv734Tu3+Jw1hgtNrzw==");
DecryptStringFromBytes(Convert.FromBase64String("Yr2XWzCxceStAF1BaUgaqmWcqFjzWskDDN4foaxfGEO5JHc/oKvgukkMHZuOiw+dK0JxnOhzC1ZA3QLqZZsQxFtjX+qvu0VRM0p6VEfcv18="), k, iv);[/code]