libp2p, H2, Python, Workflow, NFC, Bluetooth, MobilePay, Distributed Locking, GNU Taler, Zerotier

Post date: Jun 30, 2016 5:09:05 AM

• Interestingly to some central European servers connectivity from Elisa is 10ms faster than it's when using Telia / Sonera Internet connection. Well, that's life.
• Checked out libp2p - which is interesting development. Because it can offer different interfaces than the key value blob storage and retrieval. With OpenBazaar guys I said it often, relay mode is required. Libp2p does seem to implement it too. Because there can be any number of reasons why direct connections simply aren't possible. Also when talking about P2P tech, I really liked concept of using DHT. But in reality IPFS also uses DHT to route connections, which of course isn't surprising at all.
• Checked and verified H2 & TLS on all on the sites I actually care about and which I'm hosting. Seemed to work perfect, now using Let's encrypt certificates. Reread also certbot documentation.
• Read Google Python Styling Guide - Nothing new there. But it was a good read.
• Enjoyed endless meetings about Workflows and processes in customer organization discussions. As usual, customers want that thing X works easily and automatically. But when you ask what the X actually means, they don't even know. - Business as usual, once again. - Actually, this is always as funny. Even if it would be internal matter, it's usually the same. People asking something to be done, don't know what should be done. This doesn't only apply to software, programming, custom built software, etc. This is totally generic question in all businesses when something needs to be done. Of course it helps, if you have a highly experienced and skilled team which you can trust. Then you can get lot done with extremely bad specifications, but in many cases it'll just leads to total disaster. Then they claim that the project failed. No, project didn't fail. Because it wasn't even specified properly what the success would look like. Another thing is that they say that they need feature Y. Ok? What the feature Y is used for. Nobody knows. Excellent, how you can then claim you need it?
• I used Mobile NFC for very first time for actually something useful. What was that? I opened shopping malls website using NFC tag they had. I don't know if that's a great success, but it just shows that it technically worked. When tech works, then the actual applications are next step. Btw. I think Eddystone is better than NFC in this case. Because it provides better range than NFC.
• Danske Bank's MobilePay also uses Bluetooth and WiFi (WLAN) as addition to NFC. Usually the Bluetooth and WiFi work much better and faster than the NFC option which requires exact positioning and waiting for a while. Played a bit with that system one day to figure out what the best way to 'connect' is. Also found out that on some mobile devices their QR code reading didn't work. I don't know why, was out of my scope, so I didn't bother to troubleshoot at all. But as end user, I would have been slightly disappointed. Especially if I would happen to have a device which allows QR code as only option, or maybe I just as user prefer it over RF options, because it's guaranteed to be "local". Yet it might not mean that there's anything wrong with the app. Maybe it was the platform that the app was running on which caused the problems and then there might not be anything they could do about it. - That's life. Sometimes things wont work and that's just the way it is.
• A really nice article about pitfalls of distributed locking. I guess we've all had problems with transactions and locking. Things might work mostly well but then either fail or deadlock. Been there done that, but here's a few good points to remember.
• GNU Taler 0.0.0 released - Nice. I've been checking out this project and it's great that they're making progress.
• Studied Zerotier. The old concept, "trivial secure global networking". There are pros and cons with this approach, but I can see it being beneficial for many users because it reduces requirements for network configuration and makes connectivity trivial even with applications which do not provide 'easy' networking.