Tony is a Geek

After getting an ear-bashing from my missus for having our personal music collection exposed to the world, I decided to finally get around to setting up an OpenVPN server onto a Raspberry Pi. Read all about it here: http://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/p/installing-and-setting-up-openvpn-on.html I now have hearing back in one ear and a secure mechanism for listening to my music collection from external places, like the shed, garage, hotels... all those places where the missus is out of earshot :-D

A new FireFox OS phone.... " Firefox OS unlocks the power of the Web as the platform and enables more devices and experiences to be connected to each other. We’re excited to work with partners like KDDI to create the Web of Things (WoT), which connects all types of devices using Web technology and enables many new innovative and custom experiences to be created across these connected devices, and this is just the first step. " It's "naked" and I imagine will be rather expensive too, but you never know, the OS might start making traction in 2015.

If you were "lucky" enough to have your Nexus 7 device auto-upgrade itself to Lollipop (v5.0) and are now pulling your hair out at just how slow and buggy it is, then fear not.... All you have to do is go to this link and download the previous version (v4.4.4) and flash that to your tablet...    https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images I say, "all you have to do is".  It's not quite as scary as it sounds, but I am assuming that it is the same as a factory reset, so you'll have to re-install all those apps you forgot you had installed.  I'd also connect to some online cloud backup service (or my Raspberry Pi :-) ) and backup all those files, pdfs, ebooks, music files and photos that you've also forgotten about, as they'll probably get fried by the reinstall. Fortunately for me, my 2 Nexus tablets and MotoG phone haven't had the option to upgrade yet, but, my wife (who has one of the first 2012 devices and hasn't let it...

Just incase you've been living in a cave for the past year, I'll let you read about Bluemix HERE. So, now that you've not bothered to follow that link, I'll give you a cut&paste snippet here: What is IBM Bluemix? IBM's Open Cloud Architecture implementation based on the Cloud Foundry project IBM Bluemix™ is the newest cloud offering from IBM. Bluemix is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering based on the Cloud Foundry open source project that promises to deliver enterprise-level features and services that are easy to integrate into cloud applications. CLICK HERE to read an intro article on how to get up and running with Bluemix & Cloudant....

Previously, I have focused on using the Worklight Studio within Eclipse, building the Mobile App and deploying the app to the embedded Websphere Liberty Profile Server that is contained within the boundary of the Eclipse environment. This is perfectly acceptable for development purposes and has worked well for me to get to grips with build the client-side mobile application and connecting from the mobile (android/iPad) device to my local laptop across my home network. (As I have known fixed IP addresses and everything is in my conrol). To now go beyond being a developer, I wished to setup a Worklight Server to be able to deploy the Mobile apps so that they are available from the App Center, but also to be able to host the server-side of the Mobile app adapters. Click HERE for a breakdown of setting this up and getting it running..... (and of course, I'll be looking at ways to getting it running on a Raspberry Pi and possible even my Open Pandora - just for kicks!)

Whilst cleaning up an old USB HDD, I found these thumbnail photo's from days gone by (2000/2001). I seem to recall that I had a couple of these on A3 size poster prints too: either in the attic or lost in house moves.  Here's some retro-Sync'n'Go images from AvantGo   I worked for AvantGo from Sept 10th 2001 until they were purchased by Sybase where I then continued working for iAnywhere until May 2007 - the whole time working (re-compiling at times) and using the great MBusiness Anywhere Server product and then the SUP tooling that is still in use by SAP. Nowdays?  Well, I now work for IBM and use the Worklight product , as Dion Ridley would say, " the more things change, the more they stay the same ".  Although the technology today is much more advanced and the scope of what you can interact with has increased, I believe it's an exciting place to be once again.

( another video from Anton Aleksandrov ) Apple introduced a new programming language called Swift. One of the key features is full interoperability with existing Objective-C code which allows to easily integrate existing frameworks and libraries into applications built with Swift.  Below video demonstrates the process of adding and using Worklight native API to an iOS application built with Swift. As usual - watch it in HD for a full screen resolution. Note that iOS8 and XCode6 are still in beta phase and therefore not officially supported by Worklight, so this is just a small proof of concept. Cheers Anton! (I'll be doing some work with XCode6 myself, so will post some further articles on my findings during Q3/Q4 this year)

From an application architectural perspective, I believe I am close to the goal I set out to achieve with the SWAMI application, as documented on the v2.0 to do list , there are still many things to add. I took some screenshots of the new app workflow, which you can see in these pages. I also uploaded the updated v1.1 Worklight v6.2 project file so you can import it and see the difference.  (I've also done a bit of house-cleaning). any questions.......well, you know what to do  :-)

Build highly interactive, data-driven, and modular web applications with the combined strengths of  Famo.us  and  AngularJS.   Check it out - click the image below:

It's time to get to know socket.io too..... should keep me busy for a week or so.

I spent a little bit of time, okay, probably more time that I should have done... making a sample application that would teach me how to use IBM Worklight v6.2, AngularJS, NodeJS, ExpressJS and MongoDB . After enjoying the ride, I thought, hey, I can't be the only one... there are probably other people that would benefit from knowing how this stuff connects together, so I documented the sample in a series of pages and screenshots. As I say, I have a list of v2.0 changes as long as my arm, but I decided to stop now, do a write up and then move onto v2.0 afterwards.   I hope this helps out anyone else wanting to create a Worklight v6.2 mobile app that uses AngularJS and JSONStore and the Worklight Adapters to retrieve and post data. GET STARTED with the ARTICLE here Download the Project Source code here Download the MongoDB source here (just import using RockMongo) v1.1 is now available - checkout the improvements in this post (new UI framework used: Ionic)

I upgraded to Firefox 31 today and I noticed a new feature (it may have been there a while? but it's the first I noticed it). Check it out: Firefox responsive design

Steps to make a Mobile Inspection "offline" application using IBM Worklight that will run on Android devices, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone and Firefox OS (potentially!)

(Not from me... but from Anton Aleksandrov) The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to create a MVC application with IBM Worklight and backbone.js Note that solid knowledge of both Worklight and Backbone.js is recommended for a maximum result. We will create a simple application that will retrieve RSS feed from Worklight adapter and display it on a screen. Clicking on a feed item will popup feed description in alert box. Download the sample project demo here

MEAN app v1 The start of the journey of making a MEAN app and then evolving it to be mobile and offline (mobile and offline, what have I done? gone back 10+years to AvantGo days?!)

Setting up for a simple AngularJS web app

How to make a raw Cordova mobile web app using AngularJS

oh no, not another raspberry-pi setup article Actually, no it's not, it's just a reference for me to rebuild my Pi if the SD card ever gets corrupted.

Everything geeky that I encounter will now be posted onto this Blog. My current toy of geekiness: BlueMix - check it out!