The Daily ACK

Leaving the ivory tower

2013-04-02T17:05:00.004+01:00

I've been planning to leave academia for some time, but kept on putting it off. Unlike the U.S. where tenure is a thing pursued vigorously by the great and the good, here in the U.K. at least it has long gone to dust. But my job was as permanent as they get, and actually left me a lot of time to do a lot of other things outside it that interested me...

Looking out over the Pacific

However recently I took a look around and discovered that everything that was getting me up in the morning had nothing to do with my day job, and everything to do with what I was doing outside it. That just isn't any way to live. So, I've just pushed the big red switch. I now have a long rope and will be using it to leave the ivory tower real soon, my last day here at the University of Exeter is later this week, Thursday the 4th of April.

I was originally planning to take a couple of months off to look around, mainly because I'm in the fortunate position that I can do that, and such opportunities shouldn't be wasted. However some Tesla-driving individuals said "Yes!" and I've now working on something that's going to swallow my life for the next couple of months.

However, I'm not complaining, it's just the sort of getting out of bed project that I'm quitting academia to do in the first place. You'll be hearing more about it shortly, just as soon as I can talk about it...

In the short to medium term I'm planning on staying freelance, and doing consulting, contracting, writing or anything else that'll pay the bills and keep the wolves from the door. Although I'm not opposed to the idea of joining a (large) company, I've just spent thirteen years working for someone else, it'll be nice to work for myself for a while. Or at least be nearer the top of the tree, as you can generally see the rest of the forest much better from there. That said, it doesn't mean I'm not open to offers; they'd just have to be interesting offers.

So, while I've got a large number of things that might come off; I'm interested in work. Preferably work of substance, but beggars can't be choosers.

I've done a number of (some quite infamous) things with iOS, and have a lot of experience on the app side of things. I have done a number of things that are now generally being lumped into the "Big Data" camp. While I'm not a Hadoop and NoSQL guy, I've done some interesting work with machine learning and agent architectures, mostly to do with distributed sensor networks. I'm a hardware guy, or at least I'm an Arduino guy, and have done a number of other things to do with that increasingly ubiquitous hardware platform.

I like playing with mobile platforms, hardware, software, sensors, 3D printers and data visualisation. Or preferably all of the above at the same time, a good example of this is the work on the Data Sensing Lab I've been doing for O'Reilly.

Basically I'm an emerging technology guy. If it's new and a lot of people know nothing about it, I probably know something or am learning about it right now. Then I generally write a book about it and move on to the next emerging technology. I like being on the cutting edge. It's interesting out here. Oh yes, I also helped discover the most distant astronomical object yet found; a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. However I'm not so sure that's a useful skill outside of the ivory tower.

In summary then; I write, I code, I speak and am always willing to offer advice on things I know about.

Update: It has just been pointed out to me that I foresaw my own exit from academia some seven or eight years ago, back when I was still having fun in my day job, "...so what happens when I stop having fun? I'll probably have to sit down and make enough license plates so I don't have to worry about that stuff again."

Distributed Network Data

2013-02-23T18:09:00.002Z

My latest book, my first not talking about iOS and writing code for the iPhone and iPad, just went to press. It's called Distributed Network Data and it's hardware hacking for Data Scientists. It's the book of the +Data Sensing Lab and arrives just in time for this year's +O'Reilly Strata in Santa Clara, which starts tomorrow.

This book is intended for data scientists who want to learn how to work with external hardware. It assumes some basic computing and programming knowledge, but no real expert knowledge is assumed. From there the book walks you through build your own distributed sensor network to collect, analyse, and visualise real-time data about our environment.

If you're a data scientist, or a visualisation person, interested in getting started with hardware and collecting your own data, this is the book for you. You can use the code AUTHD to get 40% off print books, 50% on ebooks and videos when you buy the book directly from O'Reilly.

Making money faster than you can type

2013-02-21T00:40:00.001Z

The 3Doodler is a 3D printer, but it's a pen. This takes 3D printing and turns it on its head...

In fact the 3Doodler rejects quite a lot of what most people would consider necessary for it to be called a 3D printer. There is no three axis control, there is in fact no software, you can't download a design and print an object, it strips 3D printing back to basics.

What there is, what it allows you to do, is make things. This is the history of printing going in reverse, it's as if Gutenberg's press was invented first, and then somebody came along afterwards and invented the fountain pen.

While it looks simple they've obviously overcome some serious technological difficulties to get it working. One of the things that's hard to do on 3D printers, at least hard to do well, is unsupported structures.

As anyone that owns a 3D printer will tell you, the cooling time for the plastic as it leaves the print head is crucial to allow you to print unsupported structures. Too hot and it doesn't work, the structure sags and runs, too cold and it just plain doesn't work at all. From their videos they seem to have cracked the problem, building a free standing structure seems to be easy and well within the capabilities of the pen.

It also takes 3mm ABS and PLA as its “ink,” the same stuff used by most hobbyist 3D printers. I've got spools of this stuff hanging around my house which I use in my own printer. But unlike my printer, which cost just under a thousand dollars, the 3Doodler costs just $75.

It doesn't have the same capabilities, but that's the difference between a printing press and a pen. It has different capabilities, ones a "normal" 3D printer doesn't have. It's not a cheap alternative, it's a different thing entirely.

I'm currently watching the 3Doodler climb towards their first million dollars on Kickstarter, and I when I say their first million I mean that, they have over 30 days to go on their campaign which has today has gone viral and made them the best part of that million. This is the next Pebble. The next Kickstarter success story.

They've tapped into a previously untappable market; people that wanted a 3D printer but couldn't afford one, and people that see the obvious potential of a fountain pen over a printing press, for both art and engineering.

The guys behind the 3Doodler made $60,000 dollars while I wrote this post, my hat is off to them. Because it's not often someone comes up with an idea this good.

I'm going to be writing a series of posts on hardware startups for the Radar over the course of the next few months, and rest assured I'll come back to the 3Doodler. But not until they can type faster than they can make money.

The black rectangle won't last as long as the beige box

2013-02-13T12:21:00.003Z

It looks like putting #Linux on #Microsoft's new #Surface is going to be an up hill struggle. I was actually expecting that...

The era of the commodity beige box is coming to an end, and the days of the general purpose computer are almost over. Most people never needed or wanted a general purpose computer, and they're going to be happy with more limited devices optimised for a single, or a few, purposes. So long as those devices just work.

As a scientist I've benefited from being able to take mass produced PCs and be able to put them on desks very cheaply. The amount of compute power we've had access to as a result meant that money that would otherwise have been spent on expensive high end workstations could be spent elsewhere.

Those of us that need general purpose computing; designers, developers, scientists, are going to have to go out and buy increasingly expensive niche machines, effectively old-fashioned workstations. High end computing platforms that the general population just don't need on their desk or in their pocket.

The fact you can't install #Linux on the new #Surface is just the start of what is going to be an increasingly obvious trend. It's just a symptom. The things that are open and the things that are closed are changing. Time to wake up and realise that. Being able to install #Linux on your PC isn't important any more.

I think a lot of the web and mobile people are making the same mistake today that Nokia made five years ago, Nokia was all about the hardware and wasn't watching the software hard enough...

Today people are all about the software and aren't watching the hardware hard enough. Today's mobile phone, the black rectangle with, at most, a single button is a transition device. Don't get too comfortable with it, and don't stop thinking about innovation. Because the black rectangle won't last as long as the beige box.

Predicting a Singularity

2013-02-03T19:32:00.003Z

I think a lot about the future, and because of that I've gained somewhat of a reputation for making good predictions. This is a characteristic I share with prophets, messiahs and other ne'er-do-wells. I'm not entirely sure what to think about that.

However one of the problems with making predictions about the future, the main problem, is that it's actually not that hard to predict what'll happen next year. Although for some reason this doesn't really seem to help many of the major analysts whose job it is to make such forecasts. Conversely it's also not that hard to make a prediction for the far future, as "…any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."¹ Why is this a problem? Well if it's easy to make those predictions, making predictions in the sweet spot, both far enough ahead to be ahead to get you ahead of your competition, and close enough that you'll still be around to do something about it is actually almost impossible.

But how far in the future is the sweet spot? The strange thing is that this actually changes, a century ago it was twenty years, or even thirty, but twenty or thirty years ago it was just ten years. Today it's probably five, or less. The rate of technological progress is accelerating, and with it the amount of change we'll experience during our lives is also changing. The time it takes for new technologies to emerge, become mainstream, become dated and then obsolete is falling almost exponentially.

For someone like me, whose career more or less relies on being on, and being seen to be on, the bleeding edge, this is painfully evident. If I'm asked "Have you heard about…?" and I have to answer "No?" you'll generally see a look of pain cross my face, something sort of like constipation, don't worry, it's just my career flashing before my eyes...

At this point having angered both business analysts and science fiction writers I'm going to make a small admission, both professions have the right of it because "...the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."²

While the pace of change has accelerated, it's hard to see how that can be sustained as the size of the install base of existing legacy technology widens. So far we seem to have sustained that pace of change by trickle down economics, the older technology spreads out, and newer technology is dropped in, eagerly seized by early adopters like myself willing to pay the premium, and experience the inevitable problems that come with all new technology, at least until the bugs are shaken out.

Despite that I'm forced to point out that if you extrapolate the current rate of technological progress the view that some sort of technological singularity must almost be inevitable is hard to argue against. Unless of course there is some sort of major catastrophe, something to set us back.

Major catastrophes that could knock us back aren't hard to spot: a global pandemic, climate change, ecological disaster, super volcanoes, mega-tsunami, overpopulation, asteroid impact, a nearby supernovae and of course worldwide thermonuclear war are all favourites. The threat of some of these seems to be fading, but some seem more likely today than ever. There are others, many others, too numerous and depressing to list here.

They're also wildcards, because sometimes the things that should set us back push us forward. It's certainly arguable that two major world wars, so close together, were a major causal factor in the acceleration of the pace of change that is part of our lives today.

Depending on the current news cycle I can swing violently; between a horribly over optimistic view of the future and the inevitability of the rise of trans-humanism, and a view bleak in pessimism, in the inevitability of the abandonment of technology and a slow slide towards narrowing horizons and the eventual extinction of the human race. Doomed as a species that turned its back on space and by having its world view limited to just that, a single world with all the disasters and catastrophes that can result.

Despite this, I'll continue to try and make predictions in the sweet spot, it's fun to be proved right, and sometimes even more fun to be proved wrong.

¹ Arthur C. Clarke
² William Gibson

You don't have to be awesome all the time...

2013-02-02T20:33:00.000Z

In her post talking about the public-ness of mourning after the death of Aaron Swartz, Danah Boyd writes "...we’ve created communities connected around ideas and actions, relishing individualistic productivity for collective good. But we haven’t created openings for people to be weak and voice their struggles and demons."

Geek culture is, at least in theory, a meritocracy, and you are measured by your accomplishments. But that means the best of us, those whose work is held up as shining examples, suffer from Impostor Syndrome. Sometimes cripplingly so, even when they are accomplishing awesome things. Because awesome things sometimes look a lot less awesome from the inside, when you know the limitations, flaws and problems with what you've built and shared with the community.

But worse than that, it means when you have your moment of weakness (and we all do), and for a while cannot contribute, cannot accomplish the day-to-day awesomeness that qualifies you as a member of good standing of the community, things can look very bleak. Because we expect the most from those of us that deliver the most, and even the great and the good can fall sometimes, and need support.

We've built a culture where it's hard to acknowledge that you don't know something, because knowing things is intricately linked with the doing of awesome things — which in turn is linked to our stature with our peers.

For someone like me, whose career more or less relies on being on, and being seen to be on, the bleeding edge, this is painfully evident. If I'm asked "Have you heard about…?" and I have to answer "No?" you'll generally see a look of pain cross my face, something sort of like constipation, don't worry, it's just my career flashing before my eyes…

I have no solutions to offer, only the sure and certain knowledge, which I give freely to other geeks, that you are not alone. That the great and the good amongst us suffer as well. That it's okay to be weak and not know the answer to a question. That it's okay to rest and take from others for a while. We'll still be here when you get back, and we'll still remember how awesome you are. You don't have to live your life on Internet time.

Goodbye Aaron

2013-01-12T10:26:00.000Z

I heard this morning that Aaron Swartz has committed suicide. He was just twenty six. That's far too young by anyone's measure.

It's unclear how much the pressures of the unreasonably harsh federal prosecution for the JSTOR incident might have weighed on him, because it's been clear that he was depressed for some years. Like many of us that suffer from bouts of depression he had good weeks, and bad weeks. But the legal mess he was in can hardly have been a light weight to bear.

We've had several well known people in the community commit suicide over the last couple of years, and it's jarring. From the outside they look like the best of us, the brightest, sometimes with the most to lose. From the inside it can look much bleaker.

People in our community grew up geeks, many grew up friendless and carry that burden into adulthood. They have real trouble reaching out when they need help; to the friends they're not sure they really have, to the family they often regard as having not been there for them when they were at school. As a result the community is littered with people that suffer depression, that struggle every day with it, and with Impostor Syndrome. No matter how accomplished people look on the outside, and despite past records that should make those accomplishments as evident to them as it is to the rest of us, they suffer. Often in silence.

I didn't know Aaron well, we had exchanged a few words on a couple of occasions, but I should have had a chance to fix that. He was twenty six and he was at the start of things, not the end.

If you feel like you can't go on, if you feel like it's too much to bear the weight of your life alone. Please, don't do this, please reach out to your friends, your family, to strangers if you must. If you can't face your friends with the news that you hate your life. Because there is always someone that's going to miss you. Always.

Goodbye Aaron.

The inevitability of smart dust

2013-01-08T14:22:00.000Z

This post was first published on the O'Reilly Radar.

I've put forward my opinion that desktop computing is dead on more than one occasion, and been soundly put in my place as a result almost every time. "Of course desktop computing isn't dead — look at the analogy you're drawing between the so called death of the mainframe and the death of the desktop. Mainframes aren't dead, there are still plenty of them around!"

Well, yes, that's arguable. But most people, everyday people, don't know that. It doesn't matter if the paradigm survives if it's not culturally acknowledged. Mainframe computing lives on, buried behind the scenes, backstage. As a platform it performs well, in its own niche. No doubt desktop computing is destined to live on, but similarly behind the scenes, and it's already fading into the background.

The desktop will increasingly belong to niche users. Developers need them, at least for now and for the foreseeable future. But despite the prevalent view in Silicon Valley, the world does not consist of developers. Designers need screen real estate, but buttons and the entire desktop paradigm are a hack; I can foresee the day when the computing designers use will not even vaguely resemble today's desktop machines.

For the rest of the world? Computing will almost inevitably diffuse out into our environment. Today's mobile devices are transition devices, artifacts of our stage of technology progress. They too will eventually fade into their own niche. Replacement technologies, or rather user interfaces, like Google's Project Glass are already on the horizon, and that's just the beginning.

People never wanted computers; they wanted what computers could do for them. Almost inevitably the amount computers can do for us on their own, behind our backs, is increasing. But to do that, they need data, and to get data they need sensors. So the diffusion of general purpose computing out into our environment is inevitable.

Everyday objects are already becoming smarter. But in 10 years' time, every piece of clothing you own, every piece of jewelry, and every thing you carry with you will be measuring, weighing and calculating. In 10 years, the world — your world — will be full of sensors.

The sensors you carry with you may well generate more data every second, both for you and about you, than previous generations did about themselves during the course of their entire lives. We will be surrounded by a cloud of data. While the phrase "data exhaust" has already entered the lexicon, we're still essentially at the banging-the-rocks-together stage. You haven't seen anything yet ...

The end point of this evolution is already clear: it's called smart dust. General purpose computing, sensors, and wireless networking, all bundled up in millimeter-scale sensor motes drifting in the air currents, flecks of computing power, settling on your skin, ingested, will be monitoring you inside and out, sensing and reporting — both for you and about you.

Almost inevitably the amount of data that this sort of technology will generate will vastly exceed anything that can be filtered, and distilled, into a remote database. The phrase "data exhaust" will no longer be a figure of speech; it'll be a literal statement. Your data will exist in a cloud, a halo of devices, tasked to provide you with sensor and computing support as you walk along, calculating constantly, consulting with each other, predicting, anticipating your needs. You'll be surrounded by a web of distributed sensors and computing.

Makes desktop computing look sort of dull, doesn't it?

The fifth horseman never gets invited to the good parties

2013-01-06T12:27:00.000Z

This article was originally posted on Google+.

Yesterday +MG Siegler argued on +TechCrunch that Samsung is the fifth horseman of technology, filling in for the ailing Microsoft, when the four horsemen: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google go riding.

I have to disagree with the underlying assumptions. We're at yet another tipping point in technology. A few years ago we moved from the beige box to the black rectangle, but the black rectangle won't be with us for as long as the beige box.

That black rectangle, the ubiquitous form factor of today's smart phone, is a transition device and it's going to disappear quickly as the speed of technological change is accelerating rapidly. Of the four horsemen only Google seems to be working on alternatives with +Project Glass. It's possible the others, including Samsung, have working hardware, but the successor to today's smart phone is going to be all about context and user interaction.

I've stood up in front of audiences before and argued that our smart phones have our lives on them, the next generation of mobile technology is going to stand between us and our lives and add context. It's hard to do that without a lot of information about the user.

It's also going to be a big leap for the horsemen to make. Despite getting into hardware recently Amazon is about selling content, Facebook has never done hardware and I don't think have this sort of paradigm shift in their corporate bones, Apple has, but without Steve Jobs I don't think they'll have the guts to kill the iPhone and innovate. Samsung, the fifth horsemen that never gets invited to the good parties, is a box shifter. They know hardware, but they don't know design, and they don't know anything about their end users. Their customers are other companies, like Amazon, not you and me, the eventual consumers.

So out of all of them Google seems to be the only one positioned to move forward, and it'll be a big leap for them even so. The developer release of +Project Glass later this year is going to be crucial. If I had the money to lose making a wager, I'd wager that it'll be some startup you or I haven't heard of yet that makes the leap to the next ubiquitous form factor.

Either way, it's going to be an interesting year...

The rise of the personal space program

2012-12-28T13:39:00.002Z

This article was originally posted on Google+.

Just over a year ago now, the first ever project I backed on Kickstarter was Kicksat. A project to put a swarm of small nano-satellites in orbit. The size of a couple of postage stamps each satellite has solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a micro-controller along with memory and sensors.

Today in the mail my souvenir satellite arrived, it's just 3.5 cm square. It's an engineering prototype, presumably one that failed verification, and it doesn't have it's solar cells attached, but otherwise its just like the ones that'll be flown into orbit.

An engineering sample of a flight ready Sprite nano-satellite.

At it's heart is a +Texas Instruments CC430F5137. It's a whole system on a chip based around an MSP430 CPU, a 16-bit RISC ulta-low power micro-controller, along with an onboard RF transceiver operating in the sub-1GHz bands, a real-time clock and an integrated temperature sensor.

As well as the big solder pads at the top of the board for the solar cell there are a number of unpopulated pads on the board, including space for some through hole components, so there is certainly room for more sensors to be added on the board itself, and the MSP430 has the capacity to handle them.

However the satellite is going to be entirely reliant on the solar cell for power, there is no battery back up on the board, and the satellite will only be able to operate on the Sun-ward side of its orbit. That means power is the limiting factor. The CC4305137 has good brown-out reset capability, probably one of the reasons it was chosen, however you have to wonder how much more can be crammed onto the board and still reliably operate.

While it's might not seem much beyond a shrunken down Sputnik at that point, the Kicksat is ground breaking. In just fifty-five years we've advance from the point where it takes the might of one of the world's only super powers to put something like this into orbit, to the point where several hundred of them can be put into orbit by a graduate student with some enthusiastic backers.

Despite the pessimism I often express at the way the space programme is going, this is something that gives me a lot of hope that we aren't going the wrong way. That we aren't starting a march towards the abandonment of technology and a slow fall towards an age of declining possibilities and narrowing horizons.

Kicksat, the CubeSat designed to carry hundreds of these small Sprite nano-satellites aboard, is now on track for launch in the autumn of 2013 onboard the CRS-3/ELaNa-5 mission. This will be the third Commercial Resupply Service (CRS) flight to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a +SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. KickSat, along with 5 other CubeSats, will be hitching a ride as a secondary payload thanks to +NASA's ELaNa program.

Teardown of Wireless Sensor Tags

2012-11-11T19:01:00.001Z

The Wireless Sensor Tag is a smart tag system by CAO Gadgets.

The Wireless Sensor Tag
(Credit: CAO Gadgets)

The system is based around an Ethernet Tag Manager, a small box that connects directly to your home router and manages the all the associated tags. Basically it acts as a bridge between the wireless tags themselves and the Cloud backend which manages the tags.

The Tag Manager
(Credit: CAO Gadgets)

Each tag has motion and temperature sensors and can be configured to notify you via tweet, email, push notification, or via a URL callback (either to an Internet facing host or directly to an internal IP on your home network) when the tag is moved, or when the temperature goes out of a user defined range, or if the tag itself is moved out of range of the tag manager. Each tag also has a piezo electric buzzer and an LED which can be triggered using the same ruleset.

Ordering

I actually ordered my system back in August, only to be told that the sensor tags had not been CE certified, and they weren't quite prepared to do that just yet. I could either cancel my order, or wait until they had enough orders to that it would make "economic sense" for them to obtain CE marking at which point they'd ship me my order.

I have to admit I wasn't that impressed by that. If you're offering something for sale internationally then you should have the items in stock and you should be able to ship it out of the country. If they weren't prepared to ship into the EU, they shouldn't have processed my order, or billed my credit card.

They also seem to be having supply chain problems as their current stock is sold out and their store has a note on the front page saying that the lead time for a new order is currently one to one and half months between order placement to fulfilment.

However it looked like someone had put a lot of thought into this problem space, and despite the number of similar systems that are starting to appear, the system should be a neat solution. So I hung on, and I'm glad I did, as I I'm actually quite impressed with the build quality of the hardware and how it hangs together as a system...

Unboxing

My system arrived in a plain USPS box. Inside was the tag manager, an ethernet cable, a USB power adapter and cable, ten tags with velcro strips, and somewhat oddly, seven spare batteries.

The Wireless Sensor Tag System

Setting up the system is a fairly simple procedure. Plug the tag manager into your router and let it grab a DHCP address and announce itself to the mytaglist.com server. Theoretically the tags included in the tag manager in your shipment should come pre-associated, but at least for me this didn't seem to be the case, but that said associating them is no big deal. Pull the battery tab, and if you have a flashing LED that means the tag is unassociated, go to the web app and click on the button to add a new tag. The tag then shows up in the list on the web backend and you can go ahead and configure the triggers for that tag.

The Software

Unfortunately despite initial promise, I'm not finding the system amazingly reliable as yet. Tags that are within a few feet of the tag manager are being periodically being reported as "Out of Range" by the web interface. However it's possible that the hardware is fine and I'm just not understanding the software.

Update (12 Nov): Just got an email from the manufacturer saying that they've "fixed some bugs on the server" and these spurious "Out of Range" notifications shouldn't happen any more. It's a bit soon to tell one way or the other, but certainly I'm not seeing them at this point, so this might well be fixed now.

The web application used to manage the tags on your system

The web application is confusing, the interface basically looks like someone has exposed the backend database schema in software without much thought as to how the user is going to interact with it. At the moment the interesting hardware is being let down badly by the back end software, there should be preset options, e.g. "this tag is attached to a door", "this tag is attached to a moveable object", that would auto-configure the tag to common presets.

As it is there are numerous settings to go through for each and every tag, and most of these aren't well explained, and the buttons to set the options are not self explanatory or just flat out confusing.

I'm sure it makes sense to the programmer that built it, as they understand exactly how the system works and how the components interact, to the rest of us, at least initially, it's confusing.

I've been playing with the system for about an hour now and I still can't figure out how to get a tag to start bleeping when moved, and then keep on bleeping until manually reset. It's something you'd commonly want to do for a tag that's attached to something that might be stolen, and the system should be able to do it, but I can't figure it out. It's probably obvious once you know how, but...

They need to get a good UX person in, along with a designer, to overhaul the backend. That could make a big difference to the software and its usability for the average person. The system itself is really elegant, and easy to get up and working, the software to configure the tags is letting it down.

Another frustration for me is that the iOS app that allows you to monitor the tags, and receive push notifications to your phone when one of your triggers is tripped, is only available in the US App Store. The ability to get push notifications was one of the major reasons for me to buy this system, so I'm hoping this is going to be resolved quickly. Again, if you're going to ship outside the US you need to make sure your system is ready to go there.

Update (12 Nov): The iOS app is now available in the UK store, which resolves one of my main problems with the system. Although unfortunately the software UX problems extend to the iOS application. It's comprehensive, but not easy to use.

The iOS Tag Manager application running on my iPhone 5

The Hardware

There is actually very little information about how the system hardware works, and I'm not in favour of "just magic", so I wanted to take a closer look at the board to try and figure out what's going on under the hood.

The rubberised enclosures are more-or-less indestructible and amazingly stretchy so they're fairly easy to take off, which is a good thing as you'll need to do that before pulling out the battery tab to activate the tag as they tend to break off if you try and do this with the enclosure still on...

Wireless Sensor Tag

The tag is powered by a single CR2032 button cell Lithium battery which they're claiming will last anywhere between two months and seven years depending on the sensitivity and polling interval you choose for the tag.

The onboard processor is a Microchip PIC16LF720 micro-controller, an interesting choice that draws about a fifth of the current than the Amtel ATmega micro-controllers used in the familiar Arduino boards. Wireless operations for the tags is provided by the Microchip MRF 49XA radio, which operates in the sub-GHz MHz ISM bands. While this can be changed, the tags ship and by default operate at 436 MHz. Unlike the US this is not an ISM band here in the UK, and although it is part of the amateur band, a license to operate is required and the primary user of the band is the MOD.

The choice of the sub-GHz ISM band is an interesting one, most competing products on the market use the 13MHz RFID bands, or more commonly the 2.4GZ band used by both Wi-Fi, Zigbee and Bluetooth LE devices. I'm guessing that they went with the sub-GHz bands to keep power usage to a minimum and extend the battery life of the tags themselves and provide a good range.

Motion sensing is provided by an Honeywell HMC5883L sensor, a three-axis magnetometer, again an interesting choice as most of the competitors are using linear accelerometers. I'm presuming they used a magnetometer to get good angular measurements, which is a perfect fit for one of the main uses cases for the tags; checking whether doors are open or closed.

Finally I'm guessing temperature measurements are provided by a fairly anonymous chip marked with "AXWB." While that's just a guess, the word "TEMP" is the silkscreen legend next to it, so it's probably a decent one. I haven't been able to track down the data sheet for this chip or the manufacturer, although the specifications page gives an operating range of -40°C to 85°C with an typical accuracy of ±1°C and a -2 to +4°C maximum deviation, with a sensor quantisation of around 1°C.

Developer SDK

The system isn't "open hardware" but that's just fine, not everything has to be open, people have to eat and keep a roof over their head and that takes money. However I was pleased to see that there is some developer documentation available for the web service API of the mytaglist.com backend server, along with the the source code for the management software I was complaining about earlier. The source code for the iOS and Android applications is also available if you email the company.

Update (12 Nov): I emailed the manufacturer and they want to know why I want the source code, and for me to sign an NDA before they release it to me, which wasn't exactly what I was expecting from the API documentation. I'm not sure what to think about that...

The system does crucially rely on a back end server provided by the manufacturer, but the FAQ tells us that if the tag manager can be flashed to point at a different server, and it's at least theoretically possible to run your own. The vendor then talks about licensing their own server side software, and promises that if their mytaglist.com server gets shut down that they'll release the code and allow you to update the tag manager to point at your own server. So I'm happy enough at that point.

Summary

Just as I thought when I initially placed my order, someone has thought long and hard about this problem space, and it really shows in the quality and flexibility of the hardware if not the software.

I'm fairly sure the software issues are going to get ironed out eventually, at least for me the existence of some sort of documentation would probably solve most of the problems I'm having. Although I do think that for the average user the interface needs a good UX expert and a redesign.

~~I also hope to have my hands on the iOS app so I can use the tags as I originally intended, and enable push messaging to my phone, as that'll vastly increase the utility of the system for me.~~

From poking around on the manufacturer's website it seems that there are probably more tag types coming, including current (for home energy monitoring?) and moisture (for detecting water leaks) sensor tags. I'll certainly go ahead and purchase those when they arrive.

Despite some of the criticism above, I am impressed with this system and would recommend it.

Update (23 Nov): My tags were suffering from spurious "out of range" and "reconnected" messages. So I have just sent all my tags back to CAO Gadgets for a firmware update.

With conflicting stories, all we can believe is the data

2012-09-06T14:05:00.003+01:00

This post was originally published on the O'Reilly Radar
under the tile "Digging into the UDID Data"

Over the weekend the hacker group Antisec released one million UDID records that they claim to have obtained from an FBI laptop using a Java vulnerability. In reply the FBI stated:

The FBI is aware of published reports alleging that an FBI laptop was compromised and private data regarding Apple UDIDs was exposed. At this time there is no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data.

Of course that statement leaves a lot of leeway. It could be the agent's personal laptop, and the data may well have been "property" of an another agency. The wording doesn't even explicitly rule out the possibility that this was an agency laptop, they just say that right now they don't have any evidence to suggest that it was.

This limited data release doesn't have much impact, but the possible release of the full dataset, which is claimed to include names, addresses, phone numbers and other identifying information, is far more worrying.

While there are some almost dismissing the issue out of hand, the real issues here are: Where did the data originate? Which devices did it come from and what kind of users does this data represent? Is this data from a cross-section of the population, or a specifically targeted demographic? Does it originate within the law enforcement community, or from an external developer? What was the purpose of the data, and why was it collected?

With conflicting stories from all sides, the only thing we can believe is the data itself. The 40-character strings in the release at least look like UDID numbers, and anecdotally at least we have a third-party confirmation that this really is valid UDID data. We therefore have to proceed at this point as if this is real data. While there is a possibility that some, most, or all of the data is falsified, that's looking unlikely from where we're standing standing at the moment.

With that as the backdrop, the first action I took was to check the released data for my own devices and those of family members. Of the nine iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices kicking around my house, none of the UDIDs are in the leaked database. Of course there isn't anything to say that they aren't amongst the other 11 million UDIDs that haven't been released.

With that done, I broke down the distribution of leaked UDID numbers by device type. Interestingly, considering the number of iPhones in circulation compared to the number of iPads, the bulk of the UDIDs were self-identified as originating on an iPad.

Distribution of UDID by device type

What does that mean? Here's one theory: If the leak originated from a developer rather than directly from Apple, and assuming that this subset of data is a good cross-section on the total population, and assuming that the leaked data originated with a single application ... then the app that harvested the data is likely a Universal application (one that runs on both the iPhone and the iPad) that is mostly used on the iPad rather than on the iPhone.

The very low numbers of iPod Touch users might suggest either demographic information, or that the application is not widely used by younger users who are the target demographic for the iPod Touch, or alternatively perhaps that the application is most useful when a cellular data connection is present.

The next thing to look at, as the only field with unconstrained text, was the Device Name data. That particular field contains a lot of first names, e.g. "Aaron's iPhone," so roughly speaking the distribution of first letters in the this field should give a decent clue as to the geographical region of origin of the leaked list of UDIDs. This distribution is of course going to be different depending on the predominant language in the region.

Distribution of UDID by the first letter of the "Device Name" field

The immediate stand out from this distribution is the predominance of device name strings starting with the letter "i." This can be ascribed to people who don't have their own name prepended to the Device Name string, and have named their device "iPhone," "iPad" or "iPod Touch."

The obvious next step was to compare this distribution with the relative frequency of first letters in words in the English language.

Comparing the distribution of UDID by first letter of the "Device Name" field against the relative frequencies of the first letters of a word in the English language

The spike for the letter "i" dominated the data, so the next step was to do some rough and ready data cleaning.

I dropped all the Device Name strings that started with the string "iP." That cleaned out all those devices named "iPhone," "iPad" and "iPod Touch." Doing that brought the number of device names starting with an "i" down from 159,925 to just 13,337. That's a bit more reasonable.

Comparing the distribution of UDID by first letter of the "Device Name" field, ignoring all names that start with the string "iP", against the relative frequencies of the first letters of a word in the English language

I had a slight over-abundance of "j," although that might not be statistically significant. However, the stand out was that there was a serious under-abundance of strings starting with the letter "t," which is interesting. Additionally, with my earlier data cleaning I also had a slight under-abundance of "i," which suggested I may have been too enthusiastic about cleaning the data.

Looking at the relative frequency of letters in languages other than English it's notable that amongst them Spanish has a much lower frequency of the use of "t."

As the de facto second language of the United States, Spanish is the obvious next choice to investigate. If the devices are predominantly Spanish in origin then this could solve the problem introduced by our data cleaning. In Spanish you would say "iPhone de Mark" rather than "Mark's iPhone."

However, that distribution didn't really fit either. While "t" was much better, I now had an under-abundance of words with an "e." Although it should be noted that, unlike our English language relative frequencies, the data I was using for Spanish is for letters in the entire word, rather than letters that begin the word. That's certainly going to introduce biases, perhaps fatal ones.

Not that I can really make the assumption that there is only one language present in the data, or even that one language predominates, unless that language is English.

At this stage it's obvious that the data is, at least more or less, of the right order of magnitude. The data probably shows devices coming from a Western country. However, we're a long way from the point where I'd come out and say something like " ... the device names were predominantly in English." That's not a conclusion I can make.

I'd be interested in tracking down the relative frequency of letters used in Arabic when the language is transcribed into the Roman alphabet. While I haven't been able to find that data, I'm sure it exists somewhere. (Please drop a note in the comments if you have a lead.)

The next step for the analysis is to look at the names themselves. While I'm still in the process of mashing up something that will access U.S. census data and try and reverse geo-locate a name to a "most likely" geographical origin, such services do already exist. And I haven't really pushed the boundaries here, or even started a serious statistical analysis of the subset of data released by Antisec.

This brings us to Pete Warden's point that you can't really anonymize your data. The anonymization process for large datasets such as this is simply an illusion. As Pete wrote:

Precisely because there are now so many different public datasets to cross-reference, any set of records with a non-trivial amount of information on someone’s actions has a good chance of matching identifiable public records.

While this release in itself is fairly harmless, a number of "harmless" releases taken together — or cleverly cross-referenced with other public sources such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook and other social media — might well be more damaging. And that's ignoring the possibility that Antisec really might have names, addresses and telephone numbers to go side-by-side with these UDID records.

The question has to be asked then, where did this data originate? While 12 million records might seem a lot, compared to the number of devices sold it's not actually that big a number. There are any number of iPhone applications with a 12-million-user installation base, and this sort of backend database could easily have been built up by an independent developer with a successful application who downloaded the device owner's contact details before Apple started putting limitations on that.

Ignoring conspiracy theories, this dataset might be the result of a single developer. Although how it got into the FBI's possession and the why of that, if it was ever there in the first place, is another matter entirely.

I'm going to go on hacking away at this data to see if there are any more interesting correlations, and I do wonder whether Antisec would consider a controlled release of the data to some trusted third party?

Much like the reaction to #locationgate, where some people were happy to volunteer their data, if enough users are willing to self-identify, then perhaps we can get to the bottom of where this data originated and why it was collected in the first place.

Thanks to Hilary Mason, Julie Steele, Irene Ros, Gemma Hobson and Marcos Villacampa for ideas, pointers to comparative data sources, and advice on visualisation of the data.

Update: In response to a post about this article on Google+, Josh Hendrix made the suggestion that I should look at word as well as letter frequency. It was a good idea, so I went ahead and wrote a quick script to do just that...

The top two words in the list are "iPad," which occurs 445,111 times, and "iPhone," which occurs 252,106 times. The next most frequent word is "iPod," but that occurs only 36,367 times. This result backs up my earlier result looking at distribution by device type.

Then there are various misspellings and mis-capitalisations of "iPhone," "iPad," and "iPod."

The first real word that isn't an Apple trademark is "Administrator," which occurs 10,910 times. Next are "David" (5,822), "John" (5,447), and "Michael" (5,034). This is followed by "Chris" (3,744), "Mike" (3,744), "Mark" (3,66) and "Paul" (3,096).

Looking down the list of real names, as opposed to partial strings and tokens, the first female name doesn't occur until we're 30 places down the list — it's "Lisa" (1,732) with the next most popular female name being "Sarah" (1,499), in 38th place.

The top 100 names occurring in the UDID data

The word "Dad" occurs 1,074 times, with "Daddy" occurring 383 times. For comparison the word "Mum" occurs just 58 times, and "Mummy" just 33. "Mom" came in with 150 occurrences, and "mommy" with 30. The number of occurrences for "mum," "mummy," "mom," and "mommy" combined is 271, which is still very small compared to the combined total of 1,457 for "dad" and "daddy."

[Updated: Greg Yardly pointed out on Twitter that I was being a bit British-centric in only looking for the words "mum" and "mummy," which is why I expanded the scope to include "mom" and "mommy."]

There is a definite gender bias here, and I can think of at least a few explanations. The most likely is fairly simplistic: The application where the UDID numbers originated either appeals to, or is used more, by men.

Alternatively, women may be less likely to include their name in the name of their device, perhaps because amongst other things this name is used to advertise the device on wireless networks?

Either way I think this definitively pins it down as a list of devices originating in an Anglo-centric geographic region.

Sometimes the simplest things work better. Instead of being fancy perhaps I should have done this in the first place. However this, combined with my previous results, suggest that we're looking at an English speaking, mostly male, demographic.

Correlating the top 20 or so names and with the list of most popular baby names (by year) all the way from the mid-'60s up until the mid-'90s (so looking at the most popular names for people between the ages of say 16 and 50) might give a further clue as to the exact demographic involved.

Both Gemma Hobson and Julie Steele directed me toward the U.S. Social Security Administration's Popular Baby Names By Decade list. A quick and dirty analysis suggests that the UDID data is dominated by names that were most popular in the '70s and '80s. This maps well to my previous suggestion that the lack of iPod Touch usage might suggest that the demographic was older.

I'm going to do a year-by-year breakdown and some proper statistics later on, but we're looking at an application that's probably used by: English speaking males with an Anglo-American background in their 30s or 40s. It's most used on the iPad, and although it also works on the iPhone, it's used far less on that platform.

Thanks to Josh Hendrix, and again to Gemma Hobson and Julie Steele, for ideas and pointers to sources for this part of the analysis.

Update: A really nice analysis from David Schultz using the frequency of UDID duplicates and the names of those devices to track down the source of the leak. I really should of thought of that...

Interestingly however it does support my own analysis. BlueToad makes apps for magazine publishers, hence the predominance of of the iPad over the iPhone in my results, as those apps are more normally used on the iPad.

Also they seem to mostly market into the U.S., which supports my ethnicity findings, and looking at the list of titles they curate, it does look like my demographics are more-or-less spot on as well. Those look like magazines marketed to men in their 30's and 40's to me...

I'd actually been really confused about what type of app could possibly have that narrow a demographic, and this sort of clears up my confusion. Nice!

Hardware Hacking for iOS Programmers

2012-08-30T12:49:00.000+01:00

This post was originally published on Josetteorama.

The arrival of the iPhone changed the whole direction of software development for mobile platforms, and has had a profound impact on the hardware design of the smart phones that have followed it.

Not only do these devices know where they are, they can tell you how they're being held, they are sufficiently powerful to overlay data layers on the camera view, and record and interpret audio data, and they can do all this in real time. These are not just smart phones, these are computers that just happen to be able to make phone calls.

Alasdair Allan demonstrating an Augmented Reality application

The arrival of the External Accessory Framework was seen, initially at least, as having the potential to open the iOS platform up to a host of external accessories and additional sensors. Sadly, little of the innovation people were expecting actually occurred, and while there are finally starting to be some interesting products arriving on the market, for the most part the External Accessory Framework is being used to support a fairly predictable range of audio and video accessories from big-name manufacturers.

The reason for this lack of innovation is usually laid at the feet of Apple's Made for iPod (MFi) licensing program. To develop hardware accessories that connect to the iPod, iPhone, or iPad, you must be an MFi licensee.

Unfortunately, becoming a member of the MFi program is not as simple as signing up as an Apple Developer, and it is a fairly lengthy process. From personal experience I can confirm that the process of becoming an MFi licensee is not for the faint-hearted. And once you’re a member of the program, getting your hardware out of prototype stage and approved by Apple for distribution and sale is not necessarily a simple process.

However all that started to change with the arrival of Redpark's serial cable. As it's MFi approved for the hobbyist market it allows you to connect your iPhone to external hardware very simply, it also allows you to easily prototype new external accessories, bypassing a lot of the hurt you experience trying to do that wholly within the confines of the MFi program.

Another important part of that change was the Arduino. The Arduino, and the open hardware movement that has grown up with it and to a certain extent around it, is enabling a generation of high-tech tinkers to prototype new ideas with fairly minimal hardware knowledge.

Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers. While it started off as a project to give artists access to embedded microprocessors for interactive design projects, I think it’s going to end up in a museum as one of the building blocks of the modern world. It allows rapid, cheap prototyping for embedded systems. It turns what used to be fairly tough hardware problems into simpler software problems.

Turning things into software problems makes things more scalable, it drastically reduces development time scales, and up front investment, and as the whole dot com revolution has shown, it leads to innovation. Every interesting hardware prototype to come along seems to boast that it is Arduino-compatible, or just plain built on top of an Arduino.

Controlling an Arduino directly from the iPad

I think the next round of innovation is going to take Silicon Valley, and the rest of us, back to its roots, and that's hardware. If you're a software person the things that are open and the things that are closed are changing. The skills needed to work with the technology are changing as well.

Alasdair demonstrating an Augmented Reality application

At the start of October I'll be running a workshop on iOS Sensors and External Hardware. It's going to be hardware hacking for iOS programmers, and an opportunity for people to get their hands dirty both the internal sensors in the phone, and with external hardware.

The workshop is intended to guide you through the start of that change, and get you hands-on with the hardware in your iPhone you've probably been ignoring until now. How to make use of the on-board sensors and combine them to build sophisticated location aware applications. But also how to extend the reach of these sensors by connecting your iOS device to external hardware.

Blinking the heartbeat LED of a BeagleBone from the iPhone

We'll look at three micro-controller platforms, the Arduino and the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi, and get our hands dirty building simple applications to control the boards and gather measurements from sensors connected to it, directly from the iPhone. The course should give you the background to build your own applications independently, using the hottest location-aware technology yet for any mobile platform.

The workshop will be on Monday the 8th of October at the Hoxton Hotel in London at the heart of Tech City, and right next to Silicon Roundabout. I'm extending a discount to readers; 10% off the ticket price with discount code OREILLY10. That makes the early bird ticket price just £449.10 (was £499), or if you miss the early bird deadline (the 1st of September) a full priced ticket still only £629.10 (£699).

Monday 8th October 2012

Hoxton Hotel, London

Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)

Normal Price: £699

Save 10% with code OREILLY10

Now with added Beagle Bone

2012-08-26T12:37:00.000+01:00

After the last couple of days my workshop in London on the 8th of October, at the Hoxton Hotel, now has added BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi.

Blinking the BeagleBone's heartbeat LED using the iPhone

We're going top go hands on in a small class setting, deep diving into the iOS internal sensors and how to connect your iPhone or iPad to external hardware. Everyone will get their hands dirty, and everyone will come away knowing more about both the iPhone hardware and how to work with external accessories. So come along and get your hands dirty playing with iPhone, Arduino and now the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi and get 10% off the Early Bird ticket price today only with code BEAGLE10.

Monday 8th October 2012
Hoxton Hotel, London
Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)
Normal Price: £699
Save 10% with code BEAGLE10

Blinking the BeagleBone's heartbeat LED from the iPhone

2012-08-25T18:02:00.002+01:00

Following up on the work I was doing last night connecting the iPhone to the BeagleBone using PeerTalk. I've now reached the blinking LED stage, which is more-or-less the "Hello World" stage of any bit of hardware hack.

Blinking the BeagleBone's heartbeat LED using the iPhone

I've been having a great back-and-forth on Twitter with David House while hacking away with this project, who is working away as I type to get this working on the Raspberry Pi. It's been a lot of fun.

If you want to replicate this on the BeagleBone you should first download and build the PeerTalk library, and then build and deploy the iOS and OSX example applications and get that up and running.

Then connect up and boot your BeagleBone. You'll need to power the board using a mains adapter as when you're compiling things it's possible you'll be drawing enough amperage that you're computer will turn off the USB port to protect itself, and as a result power down your BeagleBone. I had this happen to me a couple of times before I finally dug a mains adapter out of my office drawer. However since you're powering the board from the mains you'll also have to connect an Ethernet cable so that you can ssh root@beaglebone.local and log into the board over the network.

1. Go ahead and login to your BeagleBone as root.

2. Download, build and install libusb. Version 1.0.9 builds, links and installs okay.

3. Download, build and install cmake, which you'll need to build usbmuxd later. You'll need to grab the latest Git nightly checkout as older release versions don't build, having problems with the stock libbz2 compression on the BeagleBone.

4. We also need libplist, however this is available as part of the package management system on Ångström Linux, so all you need to do to install this is type opkg install libplist-dev at the prompt.

5. Download, build and install usbmuxd. Version 1.0.8 builds, links and installs okay, although you may beed to use ccmake and configure by hand, rather than using cmake, as it can't seem to find the libusb include files that got installed into /usr/local.

6. Create a usbmux user

groupadd -r usbmux -g 114
useradd -r -g usbmux -d / -s /sbin/nologin -c "usbmux user" -u 114 usbmux

7. As the BeagleBoard doesn't have syslog turned on by default, and you'll need it for debugging, turn on syslogd from the relevant script in /etc/init.d.

8. Run up the usbmux deamon, by typing usbmuxd -v -v at the prompt.

9. Plug your iPhone into the (host side) USB on your BeagleBoard, you should see some debug scrolling by in /var/log/messages.

10. Download David House's peertalk-python and its dependances.

11. On your iPhone start the PeerTalk client for iOS.

12. Start the python client on the BeagleBone by typing python ./peertalk.py at the prompt.

Type in a message at the prompt, and you should see something like this...

Bi-directional communication between the iPhone and the BeagleBone via USB

From there it's pretty trivial to replicate my "Hello World" example, just by hacking around with David's code and toggling the heartbeat LED when the BeagleBone receives any messages.

    def run(self):

        framestructure = struct.Struct("! I I I I")

        ledOn ='echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/beaglebone::usr0/brightness'

        ledOff ='echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/beaglebone::usr0/brightness'

        i = 0

        while self._running:

            try:

                msg = self._psock.recv(16)

                if len(msg) > 0:

                    frame = framestructure.unpack(msg)

                    size = frame[3]

                    msgdata = self._psock.recv(size)

                    print "Received: %s" % msgdata

                    if i == 0:

                       os.system(ledOn)

                       i = 1

                    else:

                       os.system(ledOff)

                       i = 0

            except:

                pass

Which gets you to this point...

Toggling the BeagleBone heartbeat LED with my iPhone over USB.

Which is pretty much where I've reached right now. Next steps is a proper application on the iOS end of things with more generic control of the BeagleBone's header pins, and a more flexible Python backend on the BeagleBone itself...

Update: David House has managed to get everything up and working on the Raspberry Pi. The only changes from the above is that you should grab libplist using apt-get rather than opkg, and since you won't be logged in as root you should remember to sudo usbmuxd -v -v when you start the USB daemon. Apart from that, you should be good to go...

David House (@davidahouse)
25/08/2012 20:22
Video of iPhone controlling LED on Raspberry Pi.

Controlling a LED connected to a GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi with an iPhone

Update: Come along to my workshop in London on the 8th of October and get your hands dirty playing with iPhone, Arduino and now the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi. Get 10% off the Early Bird ticket price today only with code BEAGLE10.

Monday 8th October 2012

Hoxton Hotel, London

Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)

Normal Price: £699

Save 10% with code BEAGLE10

Update: David House has just updated his Github repository with a better description of what he did to get the iPhone to control the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins.

David House (@davidahouse)
26/08/2012 13:40
@aallan I just updated my github repo with a better description with attributions. Had a blast working with you...

Controlling a LED connected to a GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi with an iPhone

PeerTalk and the BeagleBone

2012-08-25T03:45:00.000+01:00

Earlier today I came across an excellent bit of wizardry by Rasmus Andersson called PeerTalk. It's a Objective-C library allowing you to communicate between your iPhone and your Mac over the USB dock cable using TCP sockets.

PeerTalk Demo

My immediate thought was that if this really only depended on having USB host mode capability at the far end, the same mechanism should be able to be used to talk to something like the BeagleBone, or the Raspberry Pi, not just your Mac. This would allow you connect your phone directly to the micro controller board and to drive hardware directly, a lot like the Redpark cable but bypassing Apple's External Accessory framework.

Yup, this is going to be useful...

So I started digging around inside the source code to see if it depended on anything that was going to be specific to OS X, it became apparent that PeerTalk was mostly some really nice socket code sitting on top of the USB Multiplex Daemon (usbmuxd). This bit of software is in charge of talking to your iPhone over USB and coordinating access to its services by other applications. Effectively this is what iTunes and Xcode use to talk to your phone when you plug it into your Mac's USB port.
So any device that wants to talk to the iPhone using this method needs usbmuxd. Fortunately for me there are a number of people that have worked oout how to talk to the iPhone from Linux, and there is a working usbmuxd for Linux.

The BeagleBone

As well as a few other dependences which aren't present on the stock Ångström Linux distribution on my BeagleBone, or even packages via opkg, building usbmuxd on my BeagleBone requires libusb and cmake. So before building usbmuxd, I had to build cmake, which meant resolving some problems with the stock compression libraries that shipped with Ångström.
However several hours later. after enough waiting around for software to build to convince me that before doing any serious development on the BeagleBone I really had to build an ARMv7 toolchain on my Mac to cross-compile things instead of building them directly on the board....

The iPhone talking directly to my BeagleBone using PeerTalk

...I managed to get a simple "hello" from my iPhone to the BeagleBone and then via screen to my Mac using port forwarding and that old stand by, telnet.
While I was hacking away on getting this working, I wasn't alone. David House was looking down some of the same back alleyways to get PeerTalk talking to his Raspberry Pi, and we batted the problem back and forth on Twitter while waiting for code to compile well into the night...
The next step is to put together a client on the BeagleBone sitting on top of usbmuxd that'll talk natively to the PeerTalk on iOS. Since I've got the source code of both ends, this isn't going to be too hard. I'll probably put something together in Python. More soon...
Update: Following on from this I pushed forward till I managed to blink the BeagleBone's heartbeat LED from the iPhone which is, more-or-less, the "Hello World" stage of any hardware hack...

A drawer full of phones...

2012-08-19T14:31:00.001+01:00

I had a huge clear out of my home office this weekend, including the draw full of old mobile phones. A free copy of the second edition of Learning iOS Programming to the first person that can successfully identify them all...

A collection of mobile phones, but the iPhone changed everything..?

Answers accepted on the relevant thread on Google+ only....

iOS Sensors and External Hardware Masterclass

2012-08-16T17:10:00.000+01:00

I'm going to be down in London for O'Reilly's Strata conference in October, key-noting on the Tuesday morning, talking about the hidden data that follows us around and how I've leveraged that for my own advantage. I'll also be talking, along with my colleague Zena Wood from Exeter, about People Watching with Machine Learning and using modern smart phones, like the iPhone, to do interesting sociology. It should be good.

However I'll be kicking around town for most of the following week afterwards, talking to various people. But I had a gap, a big gap, at the beginning of that week. So I've decided to try and interesting experiment...

I've often argued that both the increasingly rich sensor suite and the ability to easily connect today's smart phones to external hardware, and sensors, make them an amazing lever on the world. It's something I've focused on a lot over the last year or so.

A conversation with Dale Dougherty and Alasdair Allan

While I've run a lot of conferences and workshops over the years, it's always been on someone else's dime. Time to put my money where my mouth is, I'm going to run a workshop.

In fact I'm going to run a master-class on iOS Sensors and External Hardware. This is going to be hardware hacking for iOS programmers. It's going to be hands on, bring your Mac, bring your iPhone and make sure you've got Xcode set up so that you can deploy apps onto your device. It'll be a small group, no more than twenty, and I'll be doing a bunch of live coding.

We'll start the day talking about the internal sensors: the accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope and how to combine these into sophisticated applications. Here you'll really get the benefit of my physics background, because I can take you under the user friendly skin Apple have put on top of these sensors as part of the iOS SDK and hopefully give you a decent idea of what their limitations are and how they work.

Then we'll move on to talk about how to extend the reach of the on-board sensors by connecting your iPhone to external hardware. We'll look at how to connect the Arduino micro-controller platform to your iOS device, and build simple applications to control the board and gather measurements from sensors connected to it, directly from iOS. This course will give you the background to build your own applications independently, using the hottest location-aware technology yet for any mobile platform.

iPad controlling an Arduino board via the Redpark cable

You'll take away with you an Arduino Uno board, a Redpark TTL Serial Cable for iOS, and everything you need to connect your iPhone to your new micro-controller. You'll also receive a copy of my books Basic Sensors in iOS and iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino.

The workshop will be on Monday the 8th of October at the Hoxton Hotel right next to London's Silicon Roundabout. I've opened registration and I'm offering 30% off the ticket price until the 1st of September. Sign up early, and sign up often.

More about exactly what I'm going to be talking about on the workshop's own website. I've done similar things on smaller scales in the past, but this should be a lot of fun. Hope to see at least some of you there...

Monday 8th October 2012
Hoxton Hotel, London
Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)
Normal Price: £699

Mining the astronomical literature

2012-08-15T17:56:00.003+01:00

This post was originally published on the O'Reilly Radar.

There is a huge debate right now about making academic literature freely accessible and moving toward open access. But what would be possible if people stopped talking about it and just dug in and got on with it?

NASA's Astrophysics Data System (ADS), hosted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), has quietly been working away since the mid-'90s. Without much, if any, fanfare amongst the other disciplines, it has moved astronomers into a world where access to the literature is just a given. It's something they don't have to think about all that much.

The ADS service provides access to abstracts for virtually all of the astronomical literature. But it also provides access to the full text of more than half a million papers, going right back to the start of peer-reviewed journals in the 1800s. The service has links to online data archives, along with reference and citation information for each of the papers, and it's all searchable and downloadable.

Number of papers published in the three main astronomy journals each year. CREDIT: Robert Simpson

The existence of the ADS, along with the arXiv pre-print server, has meant that most astronomers haven't seen the inside of a brick-built library since the late 1990s.

It also makes astronomy almost uniquely well placed for interesting data mining experiments, experiments that hint at what the rest of academia could do if they followed astronomy's lead. The fact that the discipline's literature has been scanned, archived, indexed and catalogued, and placed behind a RESTful API makes it a treasure trove, both for hypothesis generation and sociological research.

For example, the .Astronomy series of conferences is a small workshop that brings together the best and the brightest of the technical community: researchers, developers, educators and communicators. Billed as "20% time for astronomers," it gives these people space to think about how the new technologies affect both how research and communicating research to their peers and to the public is done.

It should perhaps come as little surprise that one of the more interesting projects to come out of a hack day held as part of this year's .Astronomy meeting in Heidelberg was work by Robert Simpson, Karen Masters and Sarah Kendrew that focused on data mining the astronomical literature.

The team grabbed and processed the titles and abstracts of all the papers from the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A), and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) since each of those journals started publication — and that's 1827 in the case of MNRAS.

By the end of the day, they'd found some interesting results showing how various terms have trended over time. The results were similar to what's found in Google Books' Ngram Viewer.

The relative popularity of the names of telescopes in the literature. Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer seem to have taken turns in hogging the limelight, much as COBE, WMAP and Planck have each contributed to our knowledge of the cosmic microwave background in successive decades. References to Planck are still on the rise. CREDIT: Robert Simpson.

After the meeting, however, Robert has taken his initial results and explored the astronomical literature and his new corpus of data on the literature. He's explored various visualisations of the data, including word matrixes for related terms and for various astro-chemistry.

Correlation between terms related to Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). The opacity of each square represents the strength of the correlation between the terms. CREDIT: Robert Simpson.

He's also taken a look at authorship in astronomy and is starting to find some interesting trends.

Fraction of astronomical papers published with one, two, three, four or more authors. CREDIT: Robert Simpson

You can see that single-author papers dominated for most of the 20th century. Around 1960, we see the decline begin, as two- and three-author papers begin to become a significant chunk of the whole. In 1978, author papers become more prevalent than single-author papers.

Compare the number of "active" research astronomers to the number of papers published each year (across all the major journals). CREDIT: Robert Simpson.

Here we see that people begin to outpace papers in the 1960s. This may reflect the fact that as we get more technical as a field, and more specialised, it takes more people to write the same number of papers, which is a sort of interesting result all by itself.

Behind the project and what lies ahead

I recently talked with Rob about the work he, Karen Masters, and Sarah Kendrew did at the meeting, and the work he's been doing since with the newly gathered data.

What made you think about data mining the ADS?

Robert Simpson: At the .Astronomy 4 Hack Day in July, Sarah Kendrew had the idea to try to do an astronomy version of BrainSCANr, a project that generates new hypotheses in the neuroscience literature. I've had a go at mining ADS and arXiv before, so it seemed like a great excuse to dive back in.

Do you think there might be actual science that could be done here?

Robert Simpson: Yes, in the form of finding questions that were unexpected. With such large volumes of peer-reviewed papers being produced daily in astronomy, there is a lot being said. Most researchers can only try to keep up with it all — my daily RSS feed from arXiv is next to useless, it's so bloated. In amongst all that text, there must be connections and relationships that are being missed by the community at large, hidden in the chatter. Maybe we can develop simple techniques to highlight potential missed links, i.e. generate new hypotheses from the mass of words and data.

Are the results coming out of the work useful for auditing academics?

Robert Simpson: Well, perhaps, but that would be tricky territory in my opinion. I've only just begun to explore the data around authorship in astronomy. One thing that is clear is that we can see a big trend toward collaborative work. In 2012, only 6% of papers were single-author efforts, compared with 70+% in the 1950s.

The above plot shows the average number of authors, per paper since 1827. CREDIT: Robert Simpson.

We can measure how large groups are becoming, and who is part of which groups. In that sense, we can audit research groups, and maybe individual people. The big issue is keeping track of people through variations in their names and affiliations. Identifying authors is probably a solved problem if we look at ORCID.

What about citations? Can you draw any comparisons with h-index data?

Robert Simpson: I haven't looked at h-index stuff specifically, at least not yet, but citations are fun. I looked at the trends surrounding the term "dark matter" and saw something interesting. Mentions of dark matter rise steadily after it first appears in the late '70s.

Compare the term "dark matter" with a few other related terms: "cosmology," "big bang," "dark energy," and "wmap." You can see cosmology has been getting more popular since the 1990s, and dark energy is a recent addition. CREDIT: Robert Simpson.

In the data, astronomy becomes more and more obsessed with dark matter — the term appears in 1% of all papers by the end of the '80s and 6% today. Looking at citations changes the picture. The community is writing papers about dark matter more and more each year, but they are getting fewer citations than they used to (the peak for this was in the late '90s). These trends are normalised, so the only regency effect I can think of is that dark matter papers take more than 10 years to become citable. Either that or dark matter studies are currently in a trough for impact.

Can you see where work is dropped by parts of the community and picked up again?

Robert Simpson: Not yet, but I see what you mean. I need to build a better picture of the community and its components.

Can you build a social graph of astronomers out of this data? What about (academic) family trees?

Robert Simpson: Identifying unique authors is my next step, followed by creating fingerprints of individuals at a given point in time. When do people create their first-author papers, when do they have the most impact in their careers, stuff like that.

What tools did you use? In hindsight, would you do it differently?

Robert Simpson: I'm using Ruby and Perl to grab the data, MySQL to store and query it, JavaScript to display it (Google Charts and D3.js). I may still move the database part to MongoDB because it was designed to store documents. Similarly, I may switch from ADS to arXiv as the data source. Using arXiv would allow me to grab the full text in many cases, even if it does introduce a peer-review issue.

What's next?

Robert Simpson: My aim is still to attempt real hypothesis generation. I've begun the process by investigating correlations between terms in the literature, but I think the power will be in being able to compare all terms with all terms and looking for the unexpected. Terms may correlate indirectly (via a third term, for example), so the entire corpus needs to be processed and optimised to make it work comprehensively.

Science between the cracks

I'm really looking forward to seeing more results coming out of Robert's work. This sort of analysis hasn't really been possible before. It's showing a lot of promise both from a sociological angle, with the ability to do research into how science is done and how that has changed, but also ultimately as a hypothesis engine — something that can generate new science in and of itself. This is just a hack day experiment. Imagine what could be done if the literature were more open and this sort of analysis could be done across fields?

Right now, a lot of the most interesting science is being done in the cracks between disciplines, but the hardest part of that sort of work is often trying to understand the literature of the discipline that isn't your own. Robert's project offers a lot of hope that this may soon become easier.

They promised us flying cars

2012-08-03T22:18:00.000+01:00

This article was originally published on the O'Reilly Radar.
We may be living in the future, but it hasn't entirely worked out how we were promised. I remember the predictions clearly. The twenty first century was supposed to be full of self driving cars, personal communicators, replicators and private space ships.

Google has received Nevada's first autonomous-designated license plate. Credit: Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles
Except of course all that has come true. Google just got the first license to drive their cars entirely autonomously on public highways, Apple came along with the iPhone and changed everything, three dimensional printers have come out of the laboratories and into the home, and in a few short years, and from a standing start, Elon Musk and SpaceX has achieved what might otherwise have been thought impossible. Late last year they launched a spacecraft and returned it to Earth safely. Then they launched a another, successfully docked with the International Space Station, and then again returned it to Earth.

The SpaceX Dragon capsule is grappled and berthed to the Earth-facing port of the International Space Station's Harmony module at 12:02 p.m. EDT, May 25, 2012. Credit: NASA/SpaceX
Right now there is a generation of high-tech tinkerers breaking the seals on proprietary technology, and prototyping new ideas, leading to an rapid growth in innovation. This generation, who are building open hardware instead of writing open software seem to have come along out of nowhere. Except of course they haven't. Promised a future they couldn't have, they've started to build it. The only difference between them and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Steve Jobs and those guys got to build bigger toys than the rest of us.

The dotcom billionaires are just regular geeks just like us. They might be the best of us, or sometimes just the luckiest, but they grew up with the same dreams, and they've finally given up waiting for the government to build the future they were promised when they were kids. They're going to build it for themselves. The same thing driving the Maker movement, and that generation of high-tech tinkerers, is the same thing that's driving the next space race.

Unlike the old space race, driven by national pride, and the hope that we could run fast enough in place so that we didn't have to start a nuclear war, this space race is being driven in part by personal pride and ambition, but also by childhood dreams.

A lot of big business seems confused by the open hardware movement, they don't understand it, don't think it's worth their while to make exceptions and cater for it. Even the so called smart money doesn't seem to get it, I've heard moderately successful venture capitalists from the Valley say that they "...don't do hardware." Those guys are about to lose their shirts. Makers are geeks like you and me, who have decided to go ahead and build our own future because the big corporations and the major governments had so singularly failed to do it for us. Is it any surprise that dotcom billionaires are doing the same? Is it any surprise that the future we build is going to look a lot like the future we were promised, and not so much like the future we'd be heading towards.

What do you do when you've changed the world? You do it again...

The new space race

2012-08-02T14:20:00.000+01:00

In a few short years, and from a standing start, Elon Musk and SpaceX has achieved what might otherwise have been thought impossible. Late last year they launched a spacecraft and returned it to Earth safely. Then they launched a second which successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) and again returned it to Earth safely.

"The impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination, of which road they should take...", John F. Kennedy

Working relatively independently of NASA and the other government agencies, and building their technology stack from the ground up, SpaceX has in under a decade already demonstrated Apollo-era capability. However their Dragon capsule is no Apollo, it's a flexible space transport system built with modern technology, whose full capabilities have yet to be demonstrated.

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on the end of the Canadarm2.
SpaceX is the first commercial company to send a spacecraft into orbit and recover it successfully, something that only three governments - the United States, Russia and China - have ever done, and with the retirement of the US Space Shuttle they have the capability that only two governments - Russia and China - now posses. The European ATV and Japanese HTV have no return capability and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, and the US currently has no manned space capability.

Dragon Spacecraft in Ocean After Splashdown from SpaceX

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft floats in the Pacific after returning to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). Credit: Mike Altenhofen/SpaceX

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the Dragon is the only spacecraft in the world capable of returning significant cargo from the station as the Russian Soyuz has only minimal cargo capacity.

Space Stations

The first generation space stations; the Soviet Salyut and Almaz stations, along with the American Skylab station, were all monolithic designs. It wasn't really until Mir was flown with a modular design that we entered the modern era, it was the only second generation station to fly, with the US sitting on the sidelines resting on its Lunar laurels, and the Europeans seemingly uninterested in manned spaceflight.

The ISS and the docked Space Shuttle Endeavour, taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking on May 23, 2011. It was the first-ever image of a space shuttle docked to the International Space Station. Endeavour at left. European ATV cargo carrier at right. Credit: NASA/Paolo Nespoli

Today's ISS is a bastard child of the follow-on station projects from the various countries involved in space race; the Soviet/Russian Mir-2, the American Freedom project which included the Japanese Kibō Laboratory, and the European Columbus space station. None of which came to fruition separately, mostly due to budgetary considerations but also due to politics.

The first component of the ISS was launched in 1998, and construction began the Russian Mir station was still in orbit. The last manned mission to Mir was a privately funded Soyuz mission by MirCorp, in April 2000, which carried out repair work with the hope of proving that the station could be made safe. There was no return to Mir however which was deorbited the following year following the permanent occupation of the ISS, which began in the November of 2000.

OPSEK and Gateway

Despite being declare "complete" there are two more modules destined for the ISS are due for launch over the next couple of years, both from Russia. The Nakua module will serve as Russia's primary research module on the ISS. It will replace the current Pirs module, When that happens Pirs could become the first permanent ISS module to be decommissioned, and would be destroyed during atmospheric re-entry. The Node Module is intended as the primary core of the Russian OPSEK station. Initially attached to the ISS, it will be detached along with Nakua and some of the other Russian modules before the ISS is decommissioned and deorbitted, and used for the basis of a new station.

Recent proposals by Boeing call for some of the "left over" parts of the ISS program that are still on the ground, notably the unlatched Node 4, to be used to build a Exploration Gateway Platform to be located at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points to be used as a launch platform for deep space exploration, robotic relay station for moon rovers, telescope servicing and a deep space practice platform located outside the Earth's protective radiation belts. The new platform would be assembled at the ISS before being boosted towards the Lagrange point. If this came about it could drastically cut the cost of future manned Lunar, Mars or NEO missions, and would represent the first manned presence beyond low-Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended in the 1970's.

Commercial operations

With the launch of first Cygus spacecraft scheduled for October of November, the number of commercial companies with access to low Earth orbit will grow to two, although SpaceX will remain the only company with return capability. There is no immediate expectation that the US government, and NASA, is on track to regain any sort of direct access and commercial operators will therefore remain the only access to space for the US for the foreseeable future.

The Bigelow Genesis-I Space Station in orbit
The decommissioning of the ISS, now scheduled for 2020, would leave no US government presence in space. Of course by then Bigelow Aerospace, already with two pathfinder launches under their belt (Genesis I and Genesis II), plan to have a human-habitable commercial station online. Tentative launch dates for the first modules are around 2014 and 2015, and Bigelow has reserved a 2014 launch slot on SpaceX's Falcon 9, although they have not yet announced the payload.

Unlike the ISS and previous stations Bigelow's station technology is different, and potentially game changing. Based on the TransHub technology and patents, which Bigelow bought from NASA when they were directed to discontinue work on module by the US Congress, Bigelow's inflatable modules will provide large useful volumes for a much smaller launch weight than traditional hard-shell modules.
By the time Bigelow is ready to launch its first station SpaceX should have a fully man-rated Dragon capsule, and possibly a crewed launch to the ISS under their belt. Earlier this month Bigelow and SpaceX teamed up to do joint marketing to international customers of crew transport on SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon up to the Bigelow BA330 space facility.

Bigelow has agreements with seven sovereign nations to utilize on-orbit facilities of the commercial space station: United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Sweden and the United Arab Emirate of Dubai.

Of course who knows what the Jeff Bezos and his skunk-works company Blue Origin are doing behind heir "cone of silence," beyond their initial test flight back in 2006 we heard very little out of the company until the beginning of September last year where they reported the loss of their second test vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 at an altitude of 45,000ft. I'm not sure most people were aware they were testing at those altitudes, at least not at the time.

Then there is Excalibur Almaz who are now planning to take customers to the Moon, with a ticket price of $100 million a seat.

History of the Soviet Almaz military program on which the Excalibur Almaz technology is based.
The company relies on the use of decommissioned Salyut-class spacecraft which Excalibur Almaz purchased from Russian. They currently own four reusable reentry vehicles and two station modules, similar to components of the Mir station and the currently flying Zarya module attached to the ISS.

Close to home

Somewhat overshadowed by SpaceX and Dragon, Virgin Galactic has announced that the FAA had given an experimental launch permit for its sub-orbital SpaceshipTwo and air carrier WhiteKnightTwo.

SpaceShipTwo flying with crew for the first time, during a dress rehearsal flight for its first free glide flight in 2010. Credit: Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composities
WIth this permit in hand Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are able to press ahead with the testing program and carry out rocket powered test flights of the new craft.

The long duration future

The new commercial space companies have ambitious plans; SpaceX's Red Dragon which may launch as early as 2018 and use a modified Dragon capsule to carry heavy instrumentation for a soft landing on the Martian surface, and as a precursor to a manned mission.

Artist's rendition of a Dragon spacecraft using its SuperDraco thrusters to land on Mars. Credit: SpaceX.
Almost complimentary to the push towards manned spaceflight from the commercial sector, is the arrival of Planetary Resources earlier in the year with a goal of developing a sustainable (and profitable) robotic asteroid mining industry.

The new space race

The US and Russian governments aren't doing planning any novel endeavours in space, and it seems the Chinese are determined to tread the path that the US and Russia has taken before them, their own station seems to be a mix-and-match copy of the historical Russian programme, although the capability of their Shenzhou spacecraft to leave the orbital module behind means that their station might grow incrementally and much more rapidly than the ISS.

The really interesting development work happening in the space industry right now seems to be going on in the private sector. The new space race has begun, it's between SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences and the other commercial companies. The goal isn't national pride, it's part personal pride and ambition, as most of these companies are founded by individuals, and part profit motive.

Interviewed at O'Reilly OSCON 2012

2012-07-23T00:51:00.002+01:00

I'm currently on the way home from O'Reilly OSCON. While I was out in Portland for the convention I was interviewed by Mac Slocum about growth in embedded devices and the arrival of ubiquitous computing, which should be any time now... probably!

Play testing the Lords of Midnight for iOS

2012-06-02T19:14:00.000+01:00

In 1984 a game called Lords of Midnight written by Mike Singleton was released for the ZX Spectrum, conversions to the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC soon followed. It came to dominate my game playing during my mid teens, games came and went, but always I returned to the War of Solstice and the Lords of Midnight.

The Lord of Blood stands in the Keep of Blood looking north towards the invading armies of Doom Guard as they pour through the Gap of Valethor and onto the Plains of Blood. Things are not going well for the Free.

The game had a well written back story, and for the time an amazing amount of depth to the game play. A unique blend of war game, strategy, and landscape that was ground breaking...

The Lands of Midnight

...and thanks to Chris Wild's bout of nostalgia in the early nineties, and his port to MS-DOS, I went on playing the game. There was even a multi-player version of the game, called Midnight/MU built, allowing you to play online through your browser. It seems I wasn't alone in my nostalgia.

But things changed with the arrival of the iPhone, and even more so with the arrival of the iPad. I thought the iPad was the perfect platform to revive the game. While it was epic in nature, the turn-by-turn nature of the game meant that unlike some other strategy games it was well suited for the dip-in and dip-out nature of gaming on the platform. More so, I wanted to play my favourite game on my new hardware. I stopped playing Chris' port and started to think idly about porting his code, or more likely his Midnight Engine to iOS. I poked around in the source code, but eventually decided against it. Instead I waited. Someone else was going to do it, it was just a matter of time.

My patience was seemingly rewarded, there was going to be an iOS port and Chris Wild and Mike Singleton were going to work on it together...

...but time passed, actually quite a lot of time passed, more than a year, and it started to look like vapourware. Until just a couple of months ago Chris posted some video footage of the game to his blog. It existed, if only in the roughest sense, and it was playable.

The pre-alpha demo of Lords of Midnight for iOS

Content to wait at that point, I sat back. Not only was there going to be an iOS version, but because of the way Chris had ported his Midnight Engine, using the cross-platform Marmalade SDK, there was going to be a port to Android, Mac OS X and MS Windows. This wasn't just an simple iOS port, this was a cross-platform remake of the original game. There was even discussion of finally making the almost legendary missing sequel The Eye of the Moon.

I waited, I'd gotten good at it...

The Lords of Midnight for iOS

...and then Chris put out a call for play testers. I didn't spot it, but amazingly my editor at O'Reilly, Brian Jepson, did. I managed to make it into the play test, which is another one I owe Brian.

Play testing the iOS port

The graphics are still the original imagery taken from the eighties, and the interface is still a bit shaky, and there are a few bugs in artificial intelligence, but I'm enjoying having early access to the game. I'm enjoying wallowing in my eighties nostalgia.

But beyond that I think, that with the bugs and interface problems properly addressed, and the graphics updated to something that looks at home in the twenty first century, that this is still and above all a solid game. That in fact this is a game that appears as if it was always intended to be on the iPad, as if it was always meant to run on touch hardware. The new platform suits it, like a new suit of clothes.

This isn't an ageing rock star coming out of retirement for one more nostalgia tour, this is something bigger. Just like it did the first time around, I think the Lords of Midnight for iOS could change how gaming is done on the platform.

Not bad for a game that's now approaching thirty years old?

Getting Started with Arduino and iOS

2012-05-15T18:39:00.000+01:00

To celebrate the release of my new video course Getting Started with Arduino and iOS, O'Reilly Media are offering 60% off when you buy it along with my book iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino.

60% off when you buy both the video and book together

It's the MAKE: Hardware Innovation Workshop this week, as well as Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, and I'll be hanging around both talking about this and other things and well as doing some live demos. So come and talk to me if you see me, and you want to know more about connecting your iPhone to the open hardware world.

Location Enabled Sensors at Øredev

2012-05-15T15:39:00.000+01:00

Back in November last year I spoke at Øredev in Malmö, Sweden, about location enabled sensors, and the video of the talk has just been put up onto the web by the organisers.

Øredev - Location Enabled Sensors for iOS from Øredev 2011.

If you're interested in the topics discussed at Øredev, all the talks will eventually make it onto the website including another talk I did at the conference on visualisation which hasn't made it online quite yet.