Tony is a Geek

Keep an eye out for how this pans out..... yep, Russia built their own internet.  Can't blame them really, if you think about how it was originally designed, how/where traffic goes through, how prone to reliance on other servers in other countries, it does make you wonder why they didn't do something like it sooner. Interesting article here and here and here one quote to keep in mind:  " It’s hard to object to the idea of a robust “sovereign internet” should such a thing become necessary, but it’s hard not to think of it as preparation for conflict to come rather than simple investment in national infrastructure. That said, what exactly Runet will grow to be and how it will be used are still a matter of speculation until we receive more specific reports of its capabilities and intended purposes. "

Found this video this morning and it made me smile.  It resonates close to my view of the world too.  Apologies upfront, if I become an old man and wander off telling you a much longer story linking into the theme so you can get context of what I'm trying to explain.  Apparently, I've hit "that age"... I recall being taught MODULA-2 , PASCAL and then C back in the 1988-1992 period of time. Maybe I just missed those classes at University in late 1992/1993 when they started to talk about C++, I didn't get it, the fact I can still remember the pain of having to try and write a shed load of code to draw a Christmas tree on the screen, with baubles (circles) and the tree structure (triangles) all doing tons of code to setup a structure for object-orientation just for the sake of it. My view, every 10 lines of code you write you introduce a bug of some sort.  You've written 100 lines for a Christmas tree in C++... I even remember getting so annoyed I re-wrot...

first, you'll have nodejs already installed and npm v5.2+ installed so you have npx installed too. next, go to the following github repo to follow the instructions:   https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app on a Mac, from a terminal window type: $ mkdir CODE $ cd CODE $ npx create-react-app my-app npx: installed 91 in 108.154s Creating a new React app in /Users/tony/Documents/IBM/GBS/LAND AI/CODE/my-app . Installing packages. This might take a couple of minutes. Installing react , react-dom , and react-scripts ... yarn add v1.19.1 [1/4] 🔍   Resolving packages... [2/4] 🚚   Fetching packages... [3/4] 🔗   Linking dependencies... warning "react-scripts > @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin > tsutils@3.17.1" has unmet peer dependency "typescript@>=2.8.0 || >= 3.2.0-dev || >= 3.3.0-dev || >= 3.4.0-dev || >= 3.5.0-dev || >= 3.6.0-dev || >= 3.6.0-beta || >= 3.7.0-dev || >= 3.7.0-beta". [4/4] ...

AI finds a glyph all on it's own...and it's pretty funky!  I want this as my Bluepages image to see if anyone notices :-) and here's the video.  IBM research use AI tech to scan Nazca lines in Peru and find 143 new ones (not saying they are all ancient, but pretty impressive). I was literally talking to my missus about something like this a few weeks back when we were thinking about how we could use AI to search for things.  I was thinking the surface of the moon or the oceans but hey - this is just as good!

Okay, no monarchs have died and I'm not a king nor do I work for one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_is_dead,_long_live_the_king! but, I've officially moved around within IBM...again.  Well, IBM is big enough to have such a vast array of interesting things going on that you really don't need to leave it and work for other companies to get access to more interesting technologies. So what am I doing?  Well....the same as I have been for the past 5-6 years!  But this time, I'm not the geeky specialist kept in a basement ( or customers basement ) working on things that I cannot tell you about.  I'm now being brought out into the light, working for GBS ( shock!horror! as far back as anyone can remember, no Lab Services employee has EVER moved from Lab Services to GBS before, ever...I like a challenge! ).  Therefore, I'm going to have to get more exposure to the outside world and the outside world is going to get more exposure to me. Most people know...

So, after having a bit of an issue a few weeks back concerning my own hearing, I started to look into the technology of "old people".  Well, that's a bit of a stereotype, it's not just old people who need hearing aids, it's all ranges of people.  It wasn't until I suffered from temporary hearing loss, that I really appreciated the value of hearing.  Sound a bit odd that, but try it someday.  I don't mean just sticking your fingers in your ears for a bit, or shoving earplugs in, that's not the same as "no sound".  It's freaky.  anyway, it got me thinking.  If my hearing does deteriorate in the near future, what am I going to do about it? I've seen the usual big hearing aids that you clip on your ears and have a little bud that you plug in, these apparently are very good, but very expensive and they have trouble focusing... I mean that in the sense that, if you have a person talking to you in front of you and a car drives past, the he...

Why take life so seriously? I actually think this is: 1) quite amusing 2) not that much of a waste of time 3) something I might do to the Lil'van - just for cuteness okay, okay, it's simple.  you have a motor that moves left and right for your windscreen wipers, it's a motor, you have controllers for motors that you can then write code to control them with.  I didn't say it was rocket science....and it'll probably end up burning out the wiper motor, but, hey, they're not that expensive (yay! go recycling activists) and if you can find old/abandoned wiper motors to use even better. On a different note: I'm still very keen to get around to my FarmerBot system.  Next year I really want to have the greenhouse all setup and automated - along with some lovely Machine Learning going on so some lessons can be learnt.  ie. I don't want to just read some sensors and have a hardcoded rule that states, if variable X == y and variable Z IN[1,2,3,4,5]...

Sometimes, just sometimes I am impressed.  Today was one of those days. Why? Autonomous ship being built in the UK with help from IBM....weren't expecting that were you? :-) Check it out at all these locations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50047449 https://www.ibm.com/blogs/think/2019/10/rethinking-the-mayflower/ https://ibmernews.voicestorm.com/member/post/ibm-boards-mayflower-autonomous-ship-project/da123706-8b4e-4647-875e-b7a5ecedf16a Some of you may or may not know, I originated in Billericay...yep the actual home of the Mayflower, or at least the people who made it, got it down to Heybridge basin, got it to Plymouth and then sailed over to the US and landed there to setup a new life.... okay, my history may not be 100% correct there, maybe just the people came from that region, but I do recall a pub in Billericay that myself and Frank used to frequent, called the 'Mayflower' and it had a pub sign with a ship on it, so that's good enough for ...

So, I've noticed that there is a fair bit of noise about 5G and the car industry.  When I was involved with this a few years back, I was hearing on the grapevine that we all have to wait for 2020 and 5G will be the saviour and that will make all cars interconnected, they'll have their own network and it'll handle the load etc... Time has gone by. I then just recently saw a couple of articles that were mentioning some ideas that raised my eyebrows.  This one is proposing to use the same sort of techniques that we used to use in the good old mobile development days when we would detect if the device was connected to a network, determine what network, then determine what it is that the user is wanting to do and then switch accordingly.  Wow, that just took me back to 1999-2003!   The theory was good, so not surprised it's being suggested here....but really.... satellites! Satellite internet technology is a more stable solution than 5G or LTE for connected ...

So this came up during the week.... "I need to be able to connect to a Cloud Service that uses authentication and make calls to it to get results.  I've used POSTMAN, but now I need to do some load testing, so I want to use JMeter to doing some load testing, but I cannot get it to work.  Help." Putting aside the initial chest puffing "sigh", as this was at 9pm and I had finished work and was back at my hotel, I thought to myself... "hey, why not help out"...... Turns out I had an ancient installation of JMeter from back in 2015, (must have been back in the IBM MobileFirst days), so I didn't bother to upgrade but thought I'd use that setup as-is. After taking a look at the UI for a bit, it started to come back to me and I also do remember having to setup getting access tokens for authentication way back then.  Okay, now I was hooked.  Digging through my laptop for old .jmx files and hacking about I finally solved the problem and shared...

Saw this article this morning and I have to tip my hat (did you see what I did there?!) to the creator/inventor, this is an ingenious idea to use a Raspberry Pi and Sense Hat in a cool way. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-sense-hat-impact-recorder-for-your-car/ Let the accelerometer and gyroscope of your Raspberry Pi Sense HAT measure and record impact sustained in a car collision. Instructables article available here In fact the instructable article goes into a lot more depth, even shares some python code. good stuff. I'm interested in this article for many reasons...one is I have a senseHAT sitting on a bench at home doing nothing, two, I have an RPi3 sitting on a bench at home doing nothing, three, I have four vehicles that I can use this device within.... okay, I'm not thinking of 'impact recording', but more about gathering telemetry data and associate it with a particular vehicle/driver and store that data so an ...

As much as I've been in denial....yes, I can now admit I have a problem... ..and that problem is that I've un-expectedly been moving into senior-management. I don't know how it happened, one-day I was happily skipping along, enjoying myself, gorging on all the new technology, new projects, new clients, new colleagues, life was awesome, it was great...and then slowly but surely as the projects started to change, the people started to change, the tasks I was 'expected' to do changed, there was more emphasis on planning, resourcing, organising, 'getting the right people' and it became less about myself being hands-on, physically making solutions to the problems....and then one day last week I was sitting at a meal with the latest project team and a work colleague turned and said to me, "So, how do I become a senior manager like you?". That stumped me.  I'm not a senior manager, am I?  I'm still (mentally at least) young and driven t...