Headworx

I checked my Top Gear Picks 2017 post and to my surprise there are (almost) no changes to that list for 2018. This may be the sign that things have stabilized on the tech front. Or that I am aging.... I'm still using the Blackberry KeyOne . That simply means no one has come with anything phone that I could consider an upgrade. Has the smartphone industry stalled? I think I know what phone would get me excited. It'd be an iPhone XS Max, with the Google Pixel 3 camera and a USB-C port. Or the Google Pixel 3 XL with 512GB storage. Each time I turn to the Pixel phones, the lack of decent storage options puts me off. Apple, on the other hand, although it does a very proper job with the cameras, is not taking the computational photography to the level Google just did. So in the meantime i will keep enjoying the Blackberry... I'm still using the iPad heavily. Actually at the time of writing it is the 11-inch Pro with 1TB storage. While it is a technological marvel, I'd

Testing ha become a native part of any system development. Especially for software systems (what is not a software system today, after all?). And the common sense is that there is always not enough of testing and that most systems ship with bugs that surface while the system is in use, wrecking havoc or causing minor inconveniences. One, often forgotten part of testing is user manuals and procedures. Test systems are built by engineering teams. Manual tests are run by engineers. And the engineers usually "know" how the system under test is expected to perform. Missing the gap that may exist between a system and its manual. This happened to us last week, during a fairly routine procedure of testing the integration of our software into customer's product. The product was line powered (230V~) and simply exploded after power up. We found later there was a bug on the label, where terminals for N (Neutral) and L (Live) were shifted so both L and N led to the ground plane,

Actually the title should be long lasting battery - powered devices. It is just my afterthought on the convenience brought by portable devices that last long. I praised Garmin watches for some time and I really do love the fēnix 5 plus family for their long battery life: 2 weeks easily. Withings has taken it even further, promising 25 days of the Steel HR Sport watch. Almost a month - this is remarkable. The Blackberry Android phone goes for 3 days (or 2 on heavy use), and 10% of juice left is nothing to worry, as this means several hours of operation until it really dies. This is what keeps me from "upgrading" to more flashy phones with more powerful processors and more vibran displays. And this is still the part why I love DSLR cameras - they can keep going for a week of intense shooting on a single battery. Unlike the current generation of mirrorless that barely handle a day... Long lasting batteries combined with the ubiquity of the USB-C connector capable of Power D

For an airline, there are a number of mission - critical systems. The list probably starts with air traffic control that allows any plane to fly. Then there are network / schedule planning, maintenance and variety of other systems. So how does a consumer - facing web portal rank on that list? Well, I think it pretty much is a mission critical system for an airline today. Certainly none of the low cost airlines could do without that, as they completely offload any customer - related processes to that. They are also restricting travel agents from having middleman access (which in some cases might server as a backup...). Legacy airlines seem not to be entirely reliant on their web portals, but the question is how much does a broken portal affect an airline company performance? Certainly it seems Lufthansa does not consider their web portal important for their business. Being a Lufthansa frequent flyer, with close to 200k miles traveled in 2019 alone, I use (or try to use) that por

The IETF-103 was a great experience for me. I am somehow new to the Internet Society and it is a great experience watching and participating in the discussions. I am - of course - mostly interested in developments around the Internet of Things and low power wireless. Coming from the alternative world of Bluetooth, where I landed as a result of my ultra practical approach to solving real world problems, it is very interesting to see how the same (or similar) problems are being discovered and attempted to be solved by people coming from the highly structured and cleanly layered world of wired networking. Some highlights that were particularly encouraging to me came from the ROLL working group (ROLL stands for Routing Over Low power Lossy networks). For the 2nd time in a row I heard voices arguing along the lines: "this is radio, you cannot use the wired network paradigms here". So true. At Bluetooth mesh we have been designing for that since the inception. With the initial