Tony is a Geek

Okay, if you've been living in a cave or working in the backend of Denmark for the past week, you would have failed to notice the new Raspberry Pi has just launched and immediately sold-out! Check it out.... now , thanks to the size format it could be an Arduino replacement.  It's a lot more powerful and potentially is capable of doing a lot more for the IoT.  We'll see how it pans out and whether I can actually get my hands on one, or two....or three..... Now, randomly, PiHut will sell you one from £4 -> £18 depending on the SDCard size and Pimoroni will sell you one for £8 , but they don't mention SDCards. The only downfall I see is the lack of WiFi or BLE onboard, if they could have squeezed that in, then it would have been a killer-app, oh hang on, it's hardware, killer-hard, errr... killer-thing.  It would have been better.  :-)

So, you're a fan of using NodeRed, it's great for doing all sorted of IoT work. It's great.  But......well, it's running on your laptop and that kind of limits the usefulness beyond playing with things locally. Until now!  Now, you can deploy NodeRed to Bluemix .  Yep, that means you can run NodeRed in the Cloud.  Your IoT devices can communicate to the internet and interact with NodeRed.  Now, that makes it a lot more useful! CHECK OUT MORE HERE

I've been meaning to upload this for a while now.  Today, I'll finally get around to it, mainly for my own reference, but also to possibly help other people out. The scenario: 1) You are asked to make a demo application... 2) ...in as short a time as possible... 3) ...in a pressured environment... 4) ...did I mention "they" want it all finished 2hours before you even started You get the picture.  Nowadays, just because we have Design thinking and wonderful ways of quizzing a business user on how they feel and what they want a Mobile application to do and using all the Agile techniques you can throw at a buzzword bingo board, it still comes down to the basic element.  A coder, then has to code something and writing code takes time. I totally agree that making a prototype / mockup / wireframe app can be simple / easy / quick, but making a "real" application is not so, as there is so much more that you have to construct. Now, in previous coder w...

Continuing on from ArcTuRus v1.0 , here is ArcTuRus v1.1 Whilst it may seem like there were minor changes, it was actually more challenging than I had anticipated.  I also had far too many head scratching moments... CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE

IBM MobileFirst Platform explained on 1 presentation slide by  Curtis Miles This is a simple run through of the Anatomy of the MobileFirst Platform chart that is typically used to describe all the things that the MobileFirst Platform does.

WAMP  is an open standard  WebSocket  subprotocol that provides two application messaging patterns in one unified protocol: Remote Procedure Calls  +  Publish & Subscribe Using WAMP you can build distributed systems out of application components which are  loosely coupled  and communicate in (soft)  real-time . CHECKOUT THE WAMP WEBSITE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION OF "WHY?"

Node Red Programming Guide! Do you want to get started programming Node-Red?  If so CHECK OUT THESE LECTURES. The Node RED programming Guide is a series of lectures designed to introduce you to Node-RED - the new visual programming tool for the IoT. It will take you from the basics right through to advanced Node-RED programming. It is targeted at two types of readers - those who are new to the IoT and want to quickly prototype IoT applications and those who are already familiar with the IoT who want to understand Node-RED. The guide is structured into three sections, sections 1 (Lectures 1-4) introduces Node-RED and walks through a series of examples to explain its programming model, its basic nodes/features and how it can be used to access a variety of real world data sources. We use a hosted cloud based version of Node-RED so that readers don't have to worry about the details of installing and managing Node-RED. Section 2 (Lectures 5-7) explores in more detail Node-RED...

nogotofail - sounds like a function I would write in some code when things go very wrong in my code (that would never happen, surely?!) Nogotofail is a network security testing tool designed to help developers and security researchers spot and fix weak TLS/SSL connections and sensitive cleartext traffic on devices and applications in a flexible, scalable, powerful way. It includes testing for common SSL certificate verification issues, HTTPS and TLS/SSL library bugs, SSL and STARTTLS stripping issues, cleartext issues, and more. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT GETTING STARTED and USING IT

Here's my latest article on Installing MobileFirst Platform Server v7.1 on WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment.  (Including Operational Analytics and Application Center). If you've ever installed MFP using WLP  you'll realise that it's very easy to do and very simple to get up and running.  In fact, if you've installed Eclipse and downloaded the MFP plug-in from the Marketplace, you will be using WLP under the covers. Whilst MFP and WLP is great for development, if you want to go BIG, you need to install onto WAS ND .  Whilst this sounds simple enough, just replacing one Application Server for another, the difference between WLP and WAS ND is quite large and the skillsets are very different. Follow through the steps I take you through in this set of Pages (with VIDEOS!) and let's de-mystify installing MFP onto WAS ND. CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE WALK THROUGH

Well, it's not available until 2016, but I want one for sure! CHECK OUT THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE

The world's first MobileFirst Platform self-education resource: CHECK IT OUT!

Ever wanted to build a robot?  Of course you have!  You could just " buy " one pre-done and job done, but where's the fun in that? I was thinking..... robot interest flared at the end of the 90s and early 2000s but like the mobile industry it took a bit of a nosedive afterwards, just like the mobile industry.  The technology has now moved on leaps and bounds, what would be involved in building a robot that you could just bolt together and write a little bit of C code for? Back in the day( late 80's ), I got a GCSE in electronics, it interested me, but it was too low level.  I learnt the colour coding of resistors, making PCB boards, etc... but I'm a developer, not an engineer.  I don't " make " widgets, I " use " widgets to get a job done.  It took a few years for me to realise that. Keeping that in mind, now that the Arduino has matured and the Arduino Shields have come on a long way, these have now become " widgets " tha...

Google....good old Google have decided that the phone is not enough being just a phone.  It needs to evolve. Let me introduce you to PROJECT TANGO : " Project Tango brings Motion Tracking, Depth Perception, and Area Learning to mobile devices. Thousands of developers are building experiences that do things like finding your way around, measuring your world, and walking through stories. Show everyone what you can do with Project Tango by getting a Tablet Development Kit, creating an application, and uploading it to the Play Store. We believe this journey is one worth following." Well, I "was" building myself an Arduino based robot this week that could basically do all these things shown in the nice diagram above.... I'm now wondering if I should bother?  or should I just get myself a DEV KIT and use all the cool new tools/toys from Google instead? Nah, I think I'll continue building the robot side of things myself....and wait for...

After blowing the dust off the Arduino 'robots' that have been sitting on a spare desk in the "home office" for the past couple of years, I decided to see how much things have changed in the land of the new buzzword: Internet-Of-Things (IoT). I just ordered 9-10 items from DFRobot (how did it reach £200!?!), but, as they are in China, it's going to take a little while to receive the parts.  One of the items I ordered was the TEL0047 WiFi Shield for £50. In my impatience, I set about seeing what else was available.  I discovered the CC3000 WiFi Breakout board for about £30 , it looked promising. Then I found the Sparkfun ESP8266 WiFi Shield at Pimoroni.com for £15 including P&P.  [BUY] button pressed.  Arrived the next day. Then the fun began.......... [ CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT HOW TO SETUP AND USE THIS WONDERFULLY CHEAP WIFI SHIELD ]. If you don't have something hooked up to the internet soon, I'll be very surprised!

Augmented Reality and Pokemon Go.... just moved up to a whole new level! Pokemon Go for Android & iPhone Told you 2016 was going to be the game changing year :-)

We bought an Amazon Fire TV stick earlier in the year, so that we could use the Amazon Prime Instant Video service on our ma-hoo-sive Samsung TV (rather than via the X-Box). This weekend I looked into "what is the Fire TV stick"? turns out it's running Android. I also was a little disappointed that none of the Apps allowed me to run an app that would display the Crunchyroll Manga/Anime shows.  After checking the official forums it turns out there is no Crunchyroll app for the Fire TV stick. This got me thinking....the Fire TV stick is running Android and the Crunchyroll app is a .apk app.... I'll now explain,  how to go about getting Crunchyroll onto the Fire TV stick and watching all those great Manga/Anime shows! >>>>>>>>> CLICK HERE to view the photo's of how to get this working <<<<<<<<<<

Okay, okay, okay..... so this "might" be a little bit of a promo for IBM, but I have to say this is a really interesting field to work with. There are loads of scenarios that you can think of where you could utilise the beacons to detect the location of a persons smartphone If you want to get up and running using IBM Presence Insights via Bluemix, click on the following link and press the BIG red button at the bottom, it'll guide you through all you need: https://presenceinsights.ng.bluemix.net/piui/ Here's the link to the generic sales/marketing web site link To be able to try this out, you'll need: Android smartphone (okay, you "can" have an iPhone....but, pfffhhh, if you must, there is an SDK for both) A couple of Beacons (you can get some from beaconinside.com - they're not the smallest, but they'll do the job and not break the bank) Some time to write a sample app using either Eclipse+ADT or Android Studio I'll ...

The more I see Augmented Reality blurring with Virtual Reality and "new" ways of thinking, the more I am liking where things are going for 2016. I backed the KickStarter project for Oculus Rift a couple of years back, when I got my headset and access to the code I was excited by the possibilities.  Unfortunately, it was just too new and I didn't have the time to dedicate to writing 1000's of lines of code for libraries.  I had the vision, but not the time. I see now that a lot of those libraries have now been written, so what I had in mind can now be achieved in a couple of days of hacking code together. I'm impressed. Check out the original article here.

I thought I would do a write-up and share how to use the Wikitude SDK for Android to allow you to see how awesome Augmented Reality is from your phone. Here's a little YouTube video showing the outcome of the slides presentation above: any questions, feel free to ask.

Here's a great article from Ray: Working with Ionic, Box, and IBM MobileFirst Summary = Box is a cloud storage provider much like Dropbox, but also provides some pretty cool workflow services as well.  While it is still early, you'll soon see some interesting collaborations between IBM and Box.  Ray, sets out to see how easy it would be to integrate Box into a Hybrid Mobile application using both Ionic and IBM MobileFirst. Check the article out , it includes a Video too:

Official IBM press-release Ionic press-release Yes, yes, yes..... this is several weeks late.  What can I say, I've been "busy"  :-) The good news is, IBM has this product called IBM MobileFirst (I may have posted a thing or two about it?!) that helps support making, managing and securing the back-end services of your Mobile applications.....and Ionic Creator is just an awesome front-end product for building the Mobile application itself. Officially putting these two things together is great news (I've been doing it un-officially for quite some time, so it's great that it's now official news).

A quick sample video on React Native integrated with the MobileFirst Platform Foundation

Create high-performance mobile UIs with Famo.us Level up to a native-code user experience for JavaScript apps With the Famo.us platform, mobile web UIs written in JavaScript can be as compelling as native-code implementations. Work through this article's examples to find out how Famo.us helps you easily create a high-performance user experience in your mobile apps. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-famous/index.html

4 Free ebooks to learn AngularJS 1. AngularJS Succinctly 2. Recipes With AngularJS 3. Practical AngularJS  4. AngularJS in 60 minutes  Find out more here: http://www.jquerybyexample.net/2015/02/4-free-ebooks-to-learn-angularjs.html

Whilst building my ACE! app - I needed to be able to upload images for the events / presentations / speakers and attendees. I thought, hey, that's simple, we've been doing this on normal web-servers for decades, I'll just write a server-side php page (a couple of lines of code) that saves the posted files to a folder and then I'll know the URL to reference them.  Sorted! I should have it all finished before the kettle has finished boiling for my cup of tea. Then I pondered for a bit.  How does this now work in the PaaS world (Clouds like IBM Bluemix, Google AppEngine, Amazon, that Microsoft one, etc...).  Ah, not such a simple solution now.  But a challenge.  Whilst drinking my cup of tea, I then set about making this work on IBM Bluemix. Here's a Slides.com presentation of how I made this work for me:

I just (re)discovered that I made these gauges for the hot-rod two years ago: I'm glad I stashed the Arduino C code on a git repository, as I am now in a position with the hot-rod to be able to connect the sensors up to the code and get accurate readings now.  I've also got to figure out how to house the gauges and the Teensy v3 behind the dashboard.  Minor details, I'm sure... Checkout progress of the hot-rod at TheAlbatrossHotRod website.

Whilst having an end of year tidy up in the 'man cave', I found a couple of boxes with some " old " PC based computers contained within.  I had a couple of Gateway2000 Handbook 486 devices and a Fujitsu B-2154 touchscreen laptop.  I can recall, why I got them in the first place.  They are all small laptop/netbook sized, don't weigh very much and could be re-purposed for other things.  Well, that's probably what I thought when I first got them....did some stuff with them and then put them on a box for " coming back to them later on ". Well, " later on " just happened to be during the week between xmas and new year......