martes, 24 de febrero de 2015

My first weekend with Amazon Echo

So...after a not so long wait...this Saturday, the Amazon Echo arrived home -:) After a weekend using it...here are my thoughts...

Being an Amazon Prime Member, I got a discount on the Echo, so I get it for $100...which is a pretty good deal...

The Echo comes in a nice black box...which makes it more elegant...


The Echo itself is of course...Black too -;)


It comes with a charger and a remote control...that I haven't used yet as Echo comes with enough microphones to hear you out even a long distances...


Setting it up was easy enough...in no time I had it on my network and the companion app was linked to it...


Of course, I tried the expected, like..."Alexa, what's the weather" or "Alexa, play some music"...I even when farther beyond as asking "Alexa, make me a sandwich"...which Alexa (the waking up word for Echo) kindly replied that she lack the skills for that...

When I told her "Alex, I'm hungry", she told me that I should get something to eat -:)

Of course...there are some things missing...like when I asked her "Alexa, where's the nearest Italian Restaurant"...where she replied to me that she didn't had enough information to answer my question...but...Echo is still young and in constant development...so it's all good in the hood -:)

If you want to see and hear more...here's a small video...



So far...I can only say that I love Echo...I can pair it with my phone via Bluetooth and stream music...I can ask it about Wikipedia facts...and many more things that I'm sure I haven't tried yet...

And of course, I have applied already to be able to code for it as soon as it's available...as always I have a lot of ideas in my mind...

Would I have bought it if it cost me $200 instead of $100? Sure...of course...after having for a weekend...I can't think of not having it -:) And I'm excited about all the possibilities that it can bring in the future...

Happy Echoing!

Greetings,

Blag.
Development Culture.

sábado, 21 de febrero de 2015

My first post on OCaml

After tasting some Functional Programming with Erlang and Haskell I knew it was time to keep moving forward -;) This time...I choose to learn OCaml -:D

OCaml is a multi-paradigm, imperative, functional, object oriented programming language.

Of course...I'm reading a book to learn about it -:) So will see my review as soon as I finish it...


My first impressions on OCaml is that it looks like Haskell...but with some differences...which makes it akward because I tend to code in Haskell but then realized that some things are quite different...anyway...OCaml seems like a really nice language so far and of course...it's not a pure as Haskell...

As the best way to learn is to code...I build a Fibonacci Sequence Generator...based of course of my previous Haskell code -;)

Fibonacci.ml
open Core.Std

let rec fib num a b = 
 match num with 
 | num when a > 0 && num > 1 -> string_of_int (a + b) ^ " " ^ fib (num - 1) (a+b) a
 | num when a = 0 -> string_of_int a ^ " " ^ string_of_int b ^ " " ^ 
                     string_of_int (a + b) ^ " " ^ fib (num - 1) (a+b) b
 | num -> ""
 
let () =
 print_string "Enter a number: "
 let num = read_int() in
 printf "%s" (fib num 0 1)

When we run it...we're going to see this -;)



Greetings,

Blag.
Development Culture.