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Patrick Steinert Posts

Published 04.12.16

A short recap of the missing half of 2016

This is a dirt bike!
This is a dirt bike!

Maybe you are a regular reader of my blog. By regular I mean at least once a year or so. ;-) If so, you may have noticed the last half of the year this blog was more or less abandoned. But this was not because nothing happened. It happened so much that I didn’t find the time to write. A common thing I’m sure you know about. But was going on? 

I took part in two Enduro Mountain Bike races. It was such a great experience. I got much impressions, learned to handle my bike in deep mud. Okay, I don’t got it, I crashed several times. I got a glimpse of what it means to be constant during a season. Daily training eats up your time, that’s for sure. Keeping up the motivation after three months was too hard for me. Results? I don’t want to talk about ;-), but I had great fun at the races and that’s what counts for me.

I have married! As usual, I keep the private things private on this blog. I decided to take over my wife’s surname. I updated this site domain, so please update your bookmarks, RSS readers, etc. to patricksteinert.de for best reading experience.

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Published 24.11.16

Note keeping – a hybrid approach

Notes - by INPIVIC Family - CC Attribution 2.0 Generic
Notes – by INPIVIC Family – CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

A productivity topic I always work on, is note keeping. One of the basic questions is ubiquitous: analog or digital notes? While I like Evernote a lot (I’m using it since years), I also like taking notes in a classic notebook. Inspired by Andy Brands article I decided to use the Quo Vadis Notebooks. But I also use a Moleskine 18 month calendar to track time planned things.

Pro digital note keeping

  • Ubiquitous access with any device at any time
  • Is “never” full
  • Is searchable

Pro analog note keeping

  • Unlimited styles of notes: drawings, decoration
  • Simple: Pen & Paper and here you go

So what to do?

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Published 07.03.16

Retrospective February 2016

Retrospective
Retrospective

Favorite slogan: So we are doomed!

What have I done:

  • Worked hard on launching new Cloud of Things Features: New Cockpit App is out!
  • Wonder how someone can setup a MongoDB Docker Cluster without persistence!?
  • Coded on some Cloud of Things API and Client stuff Had a new record on contributing code to Github: Longest streak 7 days
    January 30 – February 5.
  • Updating servers for glibc vulnerability.
  • Start planning for big CoT team ramp-up. Scale from one to four teams in one month. Big experiment.
  • Had a week of vacation. Practiced not to work. Successful.
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Published 02.02.16

Retrospective January 2016

Favorite slogan: You want to get things done, not building an inventory of unfinished work!

What have I done:

  • Kicked of the first quarter 2016 with hard deadlines for Cloud of Things (watch out for CeBIT)
  • Had some weekend & night shifts because of service outages of Cloud of Things. Turned out that a Gelf4J appender for Graylog caused the issues.
  • Started to play with JavaFX and build a Cloud of Things Genius Client for testing purposes on CoT. (Thanks code.makery for this helpful JavaFX tutorial)
  • Did a talk on our Deutsche Telekom M2M Day 2016
  • I have a new record on contributing to Github

Read:

 

PS: A new try to give a regular update on this blog. Last year I tried a weekly recap, didn’t worked out. But I’m pretty sure that this will work ;-)

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Published 07.01.16

Internet of Things – my thoughts revisted

I had written my first article about my thoughts on the internet of things about three months ago. I gained some more insights and experiences since then, also, for the beginning of 2016 I feel the time has come for an update.

Global Internet of Things Day Vienna, by Horst JENS, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Global Internet of Things Day Vienna, by Horst JENS (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In my last post I wrote about the maturity of IoT solutions. I think the market is still in the same position. There are many innovators, doing their first steps by digitalizing things and connect them with the Internet (by the end of 2016, do we still talk about the Internet of Things? Or just the Internet?). But the main issue is still the variety of technologies, the problems of physical implementations in retrofit, different types of use cases. Okay, I would make an exception for the Smart Home industry. These points are huge barriers for the implementers in terms of time, budget and quality (ROI).But all the machine manufactures, the producers of all the physical things which doesn’t need a power supply? The big tech companies (e.g. Amazon and Microsoft) are developing tools and services for the market, but they don’t address a major problem: the mass-market digitalization and connection of things.

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Published 01.01.16

Hotwo get an OpenShift custom HA Proxy router

I’m testing RedHats new version of their PaaS product OpenShift 3.0. I would like to find out, what capabilities are there for using different protocols than http and http+tls, because it was a missing feature in the 2.0 version. OpenShift 3.0 has the concept of routers to direct incoming traffic to the endpoints. Sad but true fact is, there are just two implementations of routers available (HA Proxy andF5 BIG-IP®) and they just support the protocols HTTP, HTTPS (with SNI), WebSockets and TLS with SNI. Nevertheless, there are some fancy HA Proxy configs for other protocols and I want to play with them. First of all I needed to get a custom HA Proxy running. Here is how:

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Published 23.09.15

Internet of Things – My thoughts on IoT

This week I read an article on Wired about the data flow in the Internet of Things. It is essentially about how things are connected and where the data flows through, and provides a good description of the basics of Internet of Things. But connecting machines, devices and other things, and transferring data from one site to the other is just the necessary stuff. Don’t get me wrong – it is pretty complex, perhaps even the most complex part of it. The heterogeneous physical interfaces, protocols, connectivity options and use cases result in maximum diversity on this site. However, with a good range of IoT software systems we can solve any problem. By the way, it is wise to choose an independent IoT system regarding devices and technology. This will assure your investment for the future. Sad but true – the amount of work for integration still does not fit all business…

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Published 01.07.15

Updates

It was very quite here since a while. This was manly caused by the heavy workload I had, to bring up our service Deutsche Telekom M2M Device Cloud (or Cloud der Dinge for German market). It is the starting point of Deutsche Telekom IoT solutions, a device management and IoT app-enabling service. Find more information about it on our website – which btw needs an overhaul, but you get the main point: Device Cloud. For German readers also interesting about the Telekom Industry 4.0 package. Of course, talking about the topic IoT, we mix up different buzz words, following the newest marketing wagon. M2M, Internet of Things, maybe Industry 4.0 is a little bit special because it covers more than IT. But roughly it becomes all the Internet again, as you follow this O’Reilly discussion. This is also my understanding. So, this week we started operation of our service. Not…

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Published 08.05.15

Setup Windows SSH to connect via Proxy to Host

I had the problem to connect to a SSH Host through a HTTP Proxy. I could run it with Putty, just entering the host and port in the proxy configuration section. Fine so far, but I want to clone GIT repositories from this host, git clone ssh://foo@host.org. So Putty was out (maybe I could tunnel…). So I used this solution: Install basic Cygwin Install packages openssh, git and corkscrew Setup  ~/.ssh/config (where 10.10.10.10 is the HTTP proxy host and 8080 the http proxy port. Host host.org ProxyCommand corkscrew 10.10.10.10 8080 %h %p That was all, I setup my SSH key and could connect.

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