Another small project I backed is the Gamebuino, an Arduino based retro game console. Simple concept to pick up basic game programming with this 8bit gadget that reminds me of the Gameboy that Nintendo launched in April 1989. Amazing, the one-man project managed to gather 1.000% of the funding he asked for. The device was funded for 25$ as early bird backer.
General
Hardware History Lane – Casio Cassiopeia
Over the years we spend a lot of money into gadgets and electronics, only to see its value dropping to zero and being out-dated the moment you open the box the first time. While doing some spring cleaning I unearthed the Casio Cassiopeia that I bought in 2001 (for ~800.- DM) , surprisingly it still charges and works.
Casio Cassiopeia EM-500G
This is EM-500G, a slimmed down version of the E-125. Some specs:
- CPU: NEC VR4122 MIPS (150 MHz)
- Memory: 16 MB ROM
- Display: LCD, 240 × 320 Pixel, 65536 Farben
- Interfaces: Seriell/USB and IrDA
- MultimediaCard Slot
- Windows Poecket PC 3.0
Compared to todays mobile phone and tablet hardware seems like nothing (vs. eg. a dual-core 1.7 GHz and 2GB of a Samsung Sx phone).
I am just wondering what we gain in 13 year with CPU speed times 10 and memory times 100 from a user point of view ? Yes, we have Android and iOS with 1.000.000 applications to download, 3D Games on HD screens, music and videos (the Cassiopeia can handle that too to some extent), but the basic features are still the same. I used the Cassiopeia that time to remote dial in into Unix servers, using a Siemens S35 as modem.
Casio Cassiopeia EM-500G
Links:
Crowdfunding Projects I back
Crowdfunding becomes more and more popular with many successful projects coming out of the various platforms in the web (most Kickstarter and IndieGoGo). I like the idea of independent smart people coming up with an idea and let a product or concept take off without backing by a huge MNC (though these companies might buy a crowfunded project and turn off supporters, but that is another story). I believe crowdfunding can be a source of genuine products which are not made solely to hog patents and increase shareholder values.
Doing panoramic and spherical photography for more than 15 years now, I am excited about the new ideas, technologies and products coming up.
Sometimes you should follow your ideas or visions, I did some basic research for an own panorama rig similar to the projects below back in 2007 (link), but did not really complete the project and with the requirement to export the images and stitch them in the PC it was not very practical. In 2007 I did not see the option to stitch with hardware on-board.
One already successful funded project is the Panono Camera Ball (a camera in the shape of a ball thrown into the air to snap an full spherical images with 36 small cameras built-in).
2 new projects that are still in the funding phase I back with 300 U$ each. Both try to create 360 degree images and videos
The CentrCam
At the time of writing the project still have to fund another 360.000 U$ in 6 days, seems to become unlikely being successful.
The 360Cam
which is already 280% founded.
Lets see who makes the race (they are not competing I guess) but is a bit strange that the 360Cam has a target of 150.000 $ only, with a much richer feature and quality list compared to the 900.000$ target of the CentrCam that would output video in a lower quality and smaller resolution. Anyway lets wait for the funding results, I am happy to support both (at least I add both to my panorama collection).
FB aquires WhatsApp – Bye and Thanks for the Fish
WhatsApp known for its massive security issues, still used by millions of people as a free replacement of SMS and MMS, was acquired by FB, one (maybe the) biggest data harvester in the internet. I dont use FB, the acquisition is a reason to finally move on to another more secure communication tool: Threema (Made in Switzerland app with end-to-end encryption). Hope they wont sell privacy for money. Please help to spread the word.
It is NOT free, but is time to understand FREE comes at a price !
Noise in LinkedIn versus Stackoverflow
The internet is huge dump ground full of knowledge and knowhow sharing. A market and meeting place. Given the trillions of websites one must be selective where you spend your time. Certainly StackOverflow is good investement (both to query and to answer).
You ever noticed that you pretty much dont see any jam postings on StackOverflow ?
I also joined LinkedIn (already a few years back) and I still dont understand how many so-called professional groups get flooded with rubbish postings, usually offering jobs where you earn a bomb by filling out surveys and other nonsense. Not sure why either LinkedIn is not capable to sort this out or the group owners let anyone in even without any profile.
For the fun of it (internet forensic for starters)I did a little background check on one of this postings. Quite often posted by someone without public profile, always a woman with a attractive looking profile picture and some fancy names (Cindy H., Evelyn P.,..). The URL in the posting are usually dating sites or other drive surf-by virus sites. You can backtrack an image and check with TinEye where the image is used in the web. I did it with a person called Jessica P. and put the image link into TinEye. It leads to Ukrainian Dating Site. Her name is Irina from Yalta and she is interested in dancing, swimming, shaping, aerobics, travelling. What would she do in an IT forum ? Supposedly she work as a translator. I suspect even this is fake. Anyway you can do the same with these 2..3 simple steps. Continue reading
Airtilus presentation @ prezi
How old is MS Powerpoint ? It was introduced in May 1990, a staggering 22 years in place and the main concept did not change – slides (the digital version of the old slide projector). Companies still depend on it and it is always a struggle to get it running at conferences, talks or customer sites (must bring your own notebook, cannot connect to projector,..).
..You still see people using the typewriter effects in presentations.
..You always see presenters fiddling around with powerpoint design mode when setting up or getting started.
Yes, at least we have free alternative, OpenOffice or LibreOffice (coming with the same features)
If you want to be a bit more presentation 2.0’ish you should try prezi which allows you to create very pleasing and fresh online (and offline!!!) presentations. You can edit and show them online, without relying on notebooks, installed powerpoint viewers etc. It also comes with an iPad app for mobile offline presentation. The only thing I dislike: it relies on Flash, guess just a matter of time until a html5 version is available.
I just created a product presentation with it and get a lot of good feedback, even it is not fully utilizing the prezi features.
prezi presentation
prezi design screen
What is Airtilus ?
A cloudbased (private and public) web solution for the airport community (authorities, groundhandler, airlines,..) that I am working on with my team. It covers Flightplan and Resource Management, Service Contract Management and more features. It is considered a AODB like (Airport Operational Database) application but stepping away from the traditional monolithic application silo towards a more open and flexible platform.
You want to know more, drop me a note (sven (at) bighugesystems (dot) com) and I will send you the link to above presentation.
iOS Development
Summer break is over ! Time to get back to the writing desk ..
I am not a fan of Apple products due to their restrictive policies and closed products, not denying the high level of quality and a undeniable form-factor. I like to create apps for Android because of its open platform and ease to deploy or even sell (not denying the high noise level of faulty, bad and harmful apps in the Android market, aka Google Play).
Still I joined the iOS developer program at 99U$ a year (versus 25U$ one-time fee for the Google program). I will not delve into the depth of Objective-C but get enough insights to understand the framework. Quite often customers are asking for iPad solutions (as part of the main product), so at least should be able to discuss, design and test apps (I plan to let a freelance developer do the coding).
Online IATA Telex Processor
I launched a first version of a Telex processor with a web frontend. It is a beta version and currently only processes MVT standard messages.
Some words about the requirements for a flexible interface processor
- Though IATA Telexes are defined by a standard, variations are common because some are produced automatically by other systems and some are created manually, which causes more errors. The processing of telexes, the pattern recognition, must be flexible enough to be able to handle extra inline whitespaces and dots, as well extra lines with free text or extra headers and trailer, eg. now it is more common to receive telexes via email and often some extra email information is added as header before it reaches your system. Customers also might create their own telex standards, meaning the whole message is transported as free text message, but inside the message the customer uses his own syntax for data transmission.
This requires a message interpreter that can be configured for new or non-standard formats on the fly, without the need to change any sourcecode and to redeploy a system.
(I saw a project at one airport where the change of LDM format interpretation would have cost the customer around 10.000 Euro because one of the cargo airlines send messages with an extra header line) - Other standard messages, such as AFTN, NOTAM or CFMU should be processed by the same engine using the same approach. One interface engine with the flexibility of the scripts covers the various aspects of the different types.
A few words about concept and architecture
- ESB
Certainly the word ESB sometimes might appear bloated like other IT buzzwords, but it hardly makes sense today to implement distinct own interface systems for every protocol or subsystem type you come across. In a heterogeneous IT landscape like an airport an ESB allows you to easily connect inbound and outbound to a number of other systems via TCPIP, Email, FTP,.. or even talk to other standard systems like SAP, Salesforce.com and so on. We use one connector to talk to the ESB, the rest we orchestrate in the ESB itself. With MULE ESB we have the freedom of an opensource product as well the power of enterprise support. The learning curve for MULE is not too steep.
For the sample of telexes: Sometimes you ‘receive’ telexes by using the auto export function of the Sitatex application and retrieve the files with the messages via FTP, or you receive the messages as email or via a queuing server from a central corporate entrypoint. We can swing over to another source or run in parallel without touching the main system. - Script Engine
Instead of hardcoding the various formats, we use a Java Script engine executing Groovy Scripts. These scripts, one for each message type, are stored in the DB and can be adjusted or customized easily. The scripts produce an internal XML formatted standard output which easily can be un-marshalled during the downstream processing using proper XSD. - Data Processing
Whatever requirements you have how to handle the received data. In our sample system here, receive from the web frontend and make it human readable.
Please feel free to drop by http://xxxxx (currently not available, apologies) and try by yourself. Please note: Do not process confidential as the data is transmitted unsecured and might be stored (to improve the quality). This is NOT a commercial offering but a technology showcase. There is no warranty that the server is available or the processor correct. You can use the example message and modify it, otherwise copy and paste your own message.
The service is currently running on a Amazon EC2 micro instance, performance might decrease with a lot of traffic.
Online Telex Processor
Outlook
- Summary for errors and rejected messages.
- For the next versions I will add some of the other available telex types will follow such as LDM and CPM.
- Add AFTN message interpretation.
- Email Reply (send an email to the service and the human readable version is emailed back to the user).
TED Talks
TED is always a source of inspiration and shows that not all people are putting monetary value upfront in what they do, but still doing research or look at complex dependencies from a different viewing angle. I dislike the way a lot of companies are hoarding data about me, my trails and patterns in the virtual world as well the attempt to track me down in the physical world too. Jer Thorp giving a talk at TEDx about visualisation which is quite interesting.
IATA Telex Types Definition
Updates about the online telex processor here
Last update of the list: 2018-08-12
Working in the airport IT industry you are always challenged with integration tasks at each airport. Usually you face a heterogeneous landscape of home-brew or taylored solutions and standard software running on anything from mainframe to virtual instances in a private clouds. Using an ESB we can tackle a lot of interfacing work and focus on the data integration part. One interface that you will find on all airports that operate commercial flights, is a link to the SITA network to send and receive IATA Telexes.
It is hard to find any information online, so I summarised the available message types here. Btw, these telex types are often referred to as SITA Telex types, which is not correct, IATA (Air Transport Association) defines the available telex types and SITA is operating the network to distribute the messages between airlines, airports, ATC, groundhandling agents and other relevant members of the airport community.
This list should be almost complete, giving you the type, the description and the AHM (Airport Handling Manual) or RP (Recommended Practice) reference. The AHM that you can purchase from IATA gives you all the syntax and details for most of the available types.
Find more info about baggage messaging here: IATA Type B Bag Messages and Baggage Messaging Refresher
| MVT | AIRCRAFT MOVEMENT MESSAGE | IATA AHM 780 |
| LDM | LOAD MESSAGE | IATA AHM 583 |
| PTM | PASSENGER TRANSFER MESSAGE | IATA RP 1718 |
| PSM | PASSENGER SERVICE MESSAGE | IATA RP 1715 |
| DIV | AIRCRAFT DIVERSION MESSAGE | IATA AHM 781 |
| BSM | BAGGAGE SERVICE MESSAGES | IATA RP 1745 |
| CPM | CONTAINER/PALLET DISTRIBUTION MESSAGE | IATA AHM 587 |
| UCM | ULD CONTROL MESSAGE | IATA AHM 388 |
| SCM | ULD STOCK CHECK MESSAGE | IATA AHM 385 |
| SLS | STATISTICAL LOAD SUMMARY | IATA AHM 588 |
| ASM | ADHOC SCHEDULED MESSAGE | IATA AHM 785 |
| PAL | PASSENGER ASSISTANCE LIST | IATA RP1707b, 1708 |
| LPM | LOAD PLANNING MESSAGE | IATA AHM 580 |
| ALI | ABBREVIATED LOAD INFORMATION MESSAGE | IATA AHM 584 |
| SOM | SEATS OCCUPIED MESSAGE | IATA RP 1712 |
| SPM | SEATS PROTECTED MESSAGE | IATA RP 1711 |
| PIL | PASSENGER INFORMATION LIST | IATA RP 1716 |
| TPM | TELETYPE PASSENGER MANIFEST | IATA RP 1717 |
| RQL | REQUEST LIST MESSAGE | IATA RP 1709 |
| PNL | PASSENGER NAME LIST | IATA RP 1708 |
| PRL | PASSENGER RECONCILE LIST | IATA RP 1719b |
| PNL | FREQUENT TRAVELLER LIST | IATA RP 1719a |
| PFS | PASSENGER FINAL SALES MESSAGE | IATA RP 1719 |
| IDM | INDUSTRY DISCOUNT MESSAGE | IATA RP 1714 |
| ASL | ADDITIONS AND DELETIONS LIST | IATA RP 1708 |
| SAL | SEATS AVAILABLE LIST | IATA RP 1713 |
| RQM | REQUEST INFORMATION MESSAGE | IATA AHM 783 |
| UWS | ULD/BULK LOAD WEIGHT SIGNAL | IATA AHM 581 |
| FMM | FUEL MONITORING MESSAGE | IATA AHM 782 |
Disclaimer: The list might not be correct or complete. It is for educational purpose only. For reliable information please refer to the IATA manuals.
MVT, LDM, PTM, TPM, CPM, PSM, UCM are among the most common telexes from my experience. If you implement a telex interpreter you definitely need to implement these types first.
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