Susan Tilsley Manley - 1965-2016 - Artist, Friend.

Just found out that Susan Tilsley Manley passed away a few days ago. The sadness cannot be encompassed. Susan was always smiles and rainbows.

Would have had her, of a select few, hidden from death forever, if it was in my power. We are all powerless, except as we are remembered. Brevity does not do justice to her life.

Look Inward. Look Outward. Break it Down.

There are two types of entites in an organization. Those that look inward and those that look outward. This applies to any size organization. Each extreme is deadly. Too much inward looking and one loses sight of all the ways the world moves on organically outside. Too much outward looking and ones loses all sense of self control. The middle road seems worthwhile. All things in moderation.

The same inward and outward view is true of one's, potential and existing, customers or believers. The hope is to match outward and inward appetites.

Most very large organizations fall into looking inward. They focus on internal issues. They become protective. And they often close their borders. They raise up walls. This can work for awhile - especially when everyone in a domain is looking inward - including clients.

But in the face of even a moderate amount of client and competitive outward looking behavior, introspection is ultimately doomed. It is like the network effect: The power of the arrangement is more than simply a linear function of the participants. It goes more like the scale of potential connections.

This is, in technical microcosm, the story of APIs and microservices. The move to outward facing APIs and microservices is a reflection of the larger effect of a move to looking outwards overall.

Fintech organizations (banks "which can be defined as a bank or division thereof") now a see a world where it is important to look for new vehicles and new services. And to actively partner and acquire those vehicles. One bank buying another bank wants seamless integration. The melding should be about business initiatives and synergies and not about whether COBOL speaks to Fortran... those days are long gone. And the days where differences could be used an effective protective wall are likewise gone.

Industries where there are walls:
PLC communications. Cold chain management. Security systems.

Domains where the walls have been broken down:
Google maps and APis in general. AWS, Cloudfoundry and VMware systems. Network management protocols: Cisco.

Areas in transformation:
Building automation - witness a move to RESTful webservices.
Certain types of industrial automation - witness MTconnect. Platforms like GE Predix for IIoT. Renewable energy management - witness Sunspec and others.
Tools and platform providers are deaggregating- witness Microsoft Azure and IBM Bluemix.

Even energy itself is being deaggregated with Microgrids - with a strong analogy to microserviecs and APis. Utilities which continue to look inward will have serious problems.

There can be no knowledge without looking inward and outward. One needs to work on the viewpoint where one is most blind. 

GE Minds and Machines 2016 - November 15,16 - Pier 48 SF.

Was a real pleasure to attend GE Minds and Machines 2016, November 15,16, Pier 48 SF.

Highlights:
Current EMS Announcement. Here is a great talk by John Gordon. Also many new Current partners. Analytika is but one.

Meridium APM. Analytics for risk, availability and value management. Some great technical points made by Meridium. High in mind was a comment in an APM technical session that the majority of faults are not time related.

Many new players in the GE Digital ecosystem. TCS making great use of Predix Analytics. BitStew helping utilities. Too many to go into detail.

IoT and Security. Edge. Network. Tracking.

Security and IoT is a topic impossible to avoid. With the days of modern APIs, and smart edge devices, the days of isolated LAN architectures are numbered.

Recent DDoS attacks show systemic vulnerability in IoT device deploys. Some have taken the walled garden approach: Do not allow the user/owners local access to their devices. But that is not really what the customers want.

Others go with the status quo from twenty years ago. They transparently indicate their devices are for open shared LANs, and one had best put a series of walls around them. To be technical: Put them in a virtual private network. This puts a load, without much benefit, on IT. It also ignores internal to network breaches... systematic or accidental.

There has to be a middle road. Some set of practices that is acceptable to end points and users, and IT and the enterprise.Three seem to arise.

One:
Make some effort with the edge devices. This is old school but just recently becoming standard practice for IoT devices. When "password" is used below it can be interchanged with the term "access token" or even "authentication method".

A. Make sure edge devices have passwords.
B. Close all access methods not related to setup and operation.
C. Make sure no setup or access method can be repeated quickly, either to probe for entry, or deny others service.
In a way the ABCs are non-negotiable. D probably hardest, but most important:

D. Make sure edge devices have good passwords.  
This can be done by demanding first configuration password changes... Good for pilots, but unscalable in interesting large deploys. The other way is to set a strong and unchangeable password... which cannot by any means be deduced from the network. Generating a password from a network interface MAC address is close to this... except when MAC addresses leak from LAN to WAN - like when MAC are used for generating other defaults. Keeping manufacturer "cloud" databases of passwords leaves the end device a brick when the service expires. [NOTE this does not imply the owner of the device or the LAN on which it resides should not build and maintain a database of passwords - that is just their responsibility]. The key seems to be a unique long and strong local password, easy for human or machine entry, stored out of band, and only locally accessible. There are patentable and trade secret pathways therein... so let us leave it at that *grin*. Much of the above deserves genesis credit to James Lyne at a Xively Xperience 2015.

Two:
VPNs are still not easy to setup. And within a VPN their are no access controls. Modern IoT uses cases of remote service beg for a way to keep the setup interfaces, for example of a motor controller and its allied pressing machine controller, available only to select external parties, while they freely communicate with each other directly in the LAN. This speaks to access control lists - ACLs. Modern microservices architectures are forging a pathway here where even "interprocess" communications needs and has ACL-like constructs. True ACL-likes are heavy weight and hard to configure... and add more pain to IT setup.

Can ACL-like setup, for by-port access tokens, be automatically templatized and deployed automatically? Software defined perimeter is an emrging standard with offerings from those like Cryptzone. Some like Illumio for VMs and containers have a method which might transfer well from IT to OT.

Three:
Testing, tracking and logging. As well as one might develop edge and core and network and database strategies, they can be pried by inquiring minds, they can be broken by accident or misuse. One needs to do testing (like API testing by Smartbear, for development and production - DevOps)... but even more important, one needs continuous monitoring, so that one can learn each time something new arises -and something new will arise - one can find ways around passwords and network access controls.

At minimum on LAN and WAN, one should try watching transactions with Nagios. Wireshark tends to not run all the time, and MRTG is somewhat limited. And if one goes further there are tools for various types of tracking. Like those from Genians and PRTG. Will go further than tools and suggest one needs to consult with someone who has experience in real world, in the wild, large deploys and monitoring thereof. Like Cimetrics has with Analytika for automation systems.

APIStrat 2016 Boston November 2-4.

First week of November 2016 was API week in Boston. Still trying to absorb APIStrat 2016. Presentations the same week with similar API themes from IBM, SmartBear and GE Predix.

API?  Had in mind the API definition from Wikipedia. But the core is now more what is defined above as "Web API". API is about REST, SOAP - MQTT, CoAP - etc.

Presentations in past months and years on IoT from Axeda, Thingworx, PTC and IBM Bluemix and AT&T M2M and Amazon Alexa/Lambda were in retrospect more about APIs than anything else. The APIs for endpoints and platforms for IoT have been building. BACnet Web Services is but one example.

API is more than a "definition". API is about the rising ecosystem of business use cases and tools for APIs. Swagger, RAML, OpenAPI , Stoplight, even Postman, CURL and choices regarding REST, SOAP, XML, JSON and so forth.

Gartner analyst APIStrat keynote: Mark O'Neill : Business use cases gelling. Rich ecosystem of tools and cases for API creation. But also cases for API consumption... and there is a business opportinity therein. [Also *grin* Why are digital voice assistants like Alexa and Siri always depicted or embodied round? Are polygons too edgy? ]

Great easy venue for APIstrat at Marriott Long Wharf on Blue Line MBTA.

IoT Sensors from Reuse.

Reclamation as a way of recycling has always been dear to my heart. Believe there is plenty of "old" stuff out there that can be made new again. Like digital Westinghouse and Cutler Hammer meters running INCOM - made modern via a PXG600E to TCPIP protocols. PXG was perhaps ahead of its timeand internally conflicted? Certainly not to everyone's taste.

Thought about intelligent edge display and sensing devices a few years back. Hard to nucleate production. But what if you reused existing?

Well that is what Phonvert envisioned. Convert smartphones into IoT nodes.

And of late a few are making it more real. Manything. Modifi Wemodifi. 

Here is an IBM Bluemix IoT sensor recipe.

More generally IoT sensing apps.

What other existing infrastructure could we reuse?

In Short - Belief.

Here I am back again.

Have been away. Vacation and regeneration is part of it. But also examining other modes. Going back to back to back (parse that *grin*) conferences and books to absorb ideas. And exercising the short form muscles - via Twitter.

Twitter has been a great ride so far. It is like getting your news from the Agora. It is very up close and personal. That immediacy has advantages and severe problems. It can take one back to the pettiness of school yard name calling and hijinx.

Next foray is into video. Short form there as well. The under a minute form has all the same aspects as Twitter. Have been watching TED talks. Diving into the best and most inspirational in TED.

What does best and inspirational even mean? Pondering it for a little while I believe that.... it is about belief. Facts and truths have little "best" or "worst" or any shades of grey to them. And frankly they do not press the right buttons in the human mind. They do not inspire. What inspires us, what drives us to action, are beliefs. Then we can talk about proofs and truths and validation... Proof is necessary background work. But it all needs a start. We need to be inspired. And I do not mean some sort of unfounded theoretical belief. Belief is not an end in itself. Looking to examine beliefs that lead to results and actions.

So let me start up again with a blogging theme: Belief.

Background. Biases. Restart.

Have been away from blogging and working with short form social media. Namely Twitter... a forum and format has its pros and cons. Like Twitter immediacy and like the wide swath it seems to cast... at least for tech and economic news and tidbits. There is little bandwidth to indicate "who you are" on Twitter. Background often is made evident by the stream of one's posts... how happy or sad.. how positive or negative... where one's biases stand.

Privacy and humility would generally keep from disclosing.... but that is what it is to be in the public forum. It is about vulnerability and disclosure. So here is some context:

Believe the world is a generally positive place on a trajectory for better and good.

Grew up in Nova Scotia. Scottish and English ancestry. Fair share of enlisted Canadian military service in my family, though it bypassed my father and grandfather.... which is in some part why I am here. We are all the progeny of survivors - whether by luck or skill - and that biases our world view - something to think about. My immediate forbearers were farmers, foresters, millwrights and heavy equipment operators (construction trucks, tractors and bulldozers).

Grew up living in a trailer, and partially on the move, though my parents stayed put for me to stay at a consistent grade and high school. My family gave me much in the way of practical and moral compass and grounding... golden rule and trade and farm/forest skills. Learned to handle and repair farm and forest gear including firearms.  I was loved, nurtured and had a happy childhood. Which is not to say we had everything. We were sometimes hungry. We generally bought second hand. We were always on a tight budget. But living off the land, and the goodwill of family and community, always got us through.

We were cash poor but grace rich. Though we had our own sorts of family tragedies... including addiction and untimely death. But let that stand as a weak reflection to the lives of refugees, orphans and genocide survivors... We ALL live in a heaven compared to Seita and Setsuko in the Grave of the Fireflies. Have little patience with entitled attitudes otherwise.

Have worked as part of a crew in farm fields - hay, berries, husbandry, repair... hard hot/freezing honest work that gives one calluses.

Blessed in school (whether knack or persistence). But was only able to get through college because of scholarships and grants, and the goodwill and structure of the Canadian secondary education system. Was able to go to graduate school in Physics at Cornell through NSERC (Canada) funding.

Lived in a world, at least seemingly, largely devoid of criminality and corruption, and blessedly little bureaucracy. Will gladly pay taxes and fees to cover services, just do not make me do the paperwork to figure out what they will be. 

Not the first in my family through graduate education. Uncle Donald Putnam. My cousin Andrew was an MD.

Thankful for many friends through out the years. Though always sad when they drift away. But this is often how it must be. Change is the only constant. Thankful for past and ongoing opportunities to learn. Learning is my thing.... like my son Charlie, and my daughter Anna... no wait.. "purple" is her thing *grin*. And thankful for my family.

Try hard not to blame. Try hard not to remember that not everything is someone's fault. Some things are within our control. Some things are outside of our control. Sort of derivative from the Serenity Prayer.  And with that... back on to what has been going on lately...

AWE2016 Santa Clara June 1-2.

Thoroughly enjoyed AWE 2016 in Santa Clara.

Presence from AREA.org was one main thrust. AREA.org presented use cases for AR in utilities and manufacturing, with emphasis on asset augmentation. Another main topic was introduction of latest AR/VR gear: notably Epson Moverio BT-300 - high resolution - but taking a different path from sensors on Hololens. Would be remiss without mentioning Vuforia from PTC. Found out about AWE from Vuforia media campaign. Learned more about AWE on website and from pervious show videos. Got my AWE pass via Twitter.

Best AWE giveaways: Reality tops. VR cardboard headsets.

Best AWE takeway: AR for use in asset augmentation... reporting location, status and what needs to be done to foward the business applications.

As personal project: Always strive to "do whole trip without automobile". It went thus.

MBTA to work and then MBTA Blue Line in afternoon to BOS.
Jet Blue BOS to SJC.
VTA#10 Airport Flyer.
Metro Airport on Green VTA - Mountain View (actually took Blue - Alum Rock and changed at Tasman) to Great America (in front of San Jose convention center where AWE was being held). Then walked about a mile south past Great Anerica to Hotel Avatar.

Was very pleasant weather the whole time in San Jose. Walked out and back each day to convention center. Hardest part was that all food options closed at evening arrival at Avatar. Got a burger at nearby In and Out Burger. Got groceries at Walmart for the balance of days. AWE had no luggage holding area, so had to go back to the Avatar afternoon of departure to pickup bags.

Walked to Green VTA  - Winchester - to Metro Airport.
VTA#10 Airport Flyer.
Jet Blue SJC to BOS redeye. Packed flight. But able to sleep.
MBTA home, Blue and Orange Line, for a nap, referesh and then headed to meeting downtown with International visitors to Cimetrics.

Signatures. Detection. Pattern Analysis. All Kin.

Much of what we do each day as humans is pattern matching and signature detection. Cimetrics has this at its core too. It appears everywhere....

Signature detection is central to image recognition. Witness Tensor Flow, Ditto Labs, and others. Signatures arise in audio and RF (and even home brew RF using RTL SDR and others). And in power and water line fluctuations. Witness Norford and Schweppe at MIT. And their follow-ons - Zenzi - and even more currently Sense (at Bolt) - as opposed to Sense.io for big data analytics - not unrelated. And both too close in name to "Zensi" and "SensEye" and others.

See recent Cimetrics blog post on signatures.

Replace, Repair, Upgrade, Other Pathways.

You have had "old reliable" for ten years and you are unsure about whether to replace, repair or upgrade. Usually issue comes down to cost benefit analysis. And are there other options which you have not even considered?

Even if one has decided to do something like Continuous Monitoring or Lifecycle Management of the unit (because one has a programme for all units), the choice is still hard.

One craves data to inform decision, but a study or upgrade may be needed to even get data. That costs too.

A. Get a study. Or hook directly to remote monitoring. Externals are involved and that can cost. For too many reasons to list herein... that often will not work.

B. Replace it with modern gear and start fresh. Hard to argue with that. And if it can be gotten through - golden. But one will never know what was thrown away... and it will be questioned.

C. Repair and Upgrade. This is a trick option. When one is in the process of doing repairs, it always makes sense to do an upgrade. But you are at the mercy of the contractors who do this work. However often it is the best value. 

D. Give it a born again experience - warts and all. This last one was once as expensive as all of the above, and at least as much trouble.

What if you could magically turn dumb old reliable into a smart new system with self diagnosis. Not saying that we fix old reliable yet, or even have it mend its ways. Just make it talk. Just make it self aware.

That was just not an option as little as five years ago. It was expensive. Only the manufacturer or installer of old reliable could do such magic and their incentive was always to replace and repair first and ask questions later. Upgrade to self awareness often gets value engineered out of the process.

But think about what

• - NEST does for your furnace and AC system.
• - RESA Power Systems does for old switchgear.
• - Any OBD-II monitor can do for your car (insurance).
• - Eaton PXG600E does for a Westinghouse metering system.
• - Roku, Chromecast (or similar) does for your home entertainment system.

The age arises where you buy a "rebirth" box for old reliable: Hook the box onto old reliable (with sensors and wires to what little smarts old reliable has). Hook the box onto your existing network (and we all have networks - even if we do not think about them). Analyze old reliable with Internet tools.

Past ages made such a rebirth box expensive because:

• A. The box hardware was expensive. A PLC is thousands.
• B. The setup of the box was expensive. System engineering is just plain expensive... again in the thousands.
• C. Maintaining the box was expensive. The ecosystem of data exchange and support required massive organizations.
• D. The box (because of hardware, setup and ecosystem costs) was made to do everything possible - but not one thing well.

The key is in the economics of chips, simple interfaces, auto-configuration, and supporting ecosystem that have come from  the explosion in mobile devices. And the mantra of doing what it should do well is finally coming.

I like the idea of reuse. It turns the installed base into an opportunity instead of a liability. And it is good for everyone. I like the idea of a smart device. David Rose - Enhchanted Objects. I like the idea of this being magic.

Programmable Logic Controllers, PLCs, Reliability.

PLCs are not about all the long list that gets hauled out about their speed and ease of programming and all the issues of "how they work". PLCs are about reliability. PLCs are expensive... for reasons that many are too late in understanding.

You can make your own PLC if you work out how to get the hardware and ecosystem up to or better than the standards for existing PLC reliability. Most will never understand what this requires until they fail. Nor will they have the self awareness to get past their own flaws and look outwards (and maybe even bypass failure?).

Am I challenging you? Yes. Am I challenging you to "self sufficiency" or "rugged individualism"? Look at how ecosystem plays to reliability and then ecosystems like the open source and maker movement and then decide.

Are PLC use cases what is driving the massive reduction of costs in underpinnings of their function?  Spoiler: It is the glass screen in your pocket, and the search bar everywhere.

"Come now, let us reason together". You want to build one? Yes you do! *grin* Let's see how.

Docker IoT Meetup VMTurbo NVBOTS Resin.io.

Docker Meetup at VMTurbo Boston offices. Great presentation by NVBOTS. NVBOTS has a turnkey lightly managed 3D printing system aimed at organizations without expert staff, like schools and such. NVBOTS on the road to make 3D printing go down the self serve pathway that laser printers have long since travelled.

NVBOTS are using Resin.io. Resin.io has heterogeneous agancy management system for things like Raspberry Pi, Intel Edison, Beaglebone, etc.  Then Docker for DevOps. All together to manage your IoT fleet.

IoT So Far.

Have been following IoT now for three years. And it is still too soon to say how it will all play out. Here are a few observations though...

The billions of device predictions are correct in their own way, but one can credit the original RFID IoT banner carriers with making that prediction twenty years ago. Logistics (having perhaps the smallest motes of IoT and widest field) has always been a great place for automation, and it is no where near over. And if one allows handheld devices (phones and tablets) to fall under IoT (some do not) then clearly.

Sensor and analytics players contend (though admittedly it is self serving *grin*) that the only really new parts of IoT are sensors (new ways of sensing) and analytics (new ways of understanding). These can both be covered by the two different definitions of "seeing" and thus the single banner of "Seeing the Unseen". And they are the extreme ends of the chain that one can call IoT.

What of everything in between? Contentious, but not innovative. Technology in LAN, WAN, databases, aggregation, platforms, visualizations - are all well understood.

So some idea of who will prosper? And for what..

• IBM IoT. Because they are IBM.
• AWS IoT. Price. Open to all comers.
• Microsoft Azure IoT. Compatibility.
• Google. Search.
• Apple. Style.
• Xively. Security.
• Thingworx. Mashup. Design.

And some in well entrenched verticals who roll their own:

• GE Industrial.
• Auto manufacturers.
• Aerospace.

Or who are new and forward looking and for whom it will "just be"... in AI, AR, VR, Robotics.

Fast Food Combo Deals.

Noticed that fast food places had many combo deals running. Heard it this morning on local NPR as well.

Here is a piece from a WWNO.

Have been using combos to build a larger (healthy?) combo. Put chicken nuggets or the like, with a portion of a mixed green salad bag, and some dressing (store brand from Market Basket, Wegmans, Shaws or Stop and Shop will do nicely). If fast food could handle the lettuce logistics, then such a combo could easily be their combo. Wendy's small salad comes close. Maybe a Leafy Green Machine from Freight Farms out back of every location could provide the goods?