Mastodon Monday

Now that Twitter is owned by someone who is clearly not a fit and proper person to be running a social media company, I’ve been thinking about what to do.

The most common alternative I’ve seen mentioned is Mastodon, where I already had a dormant account, so this week I thought I’d try a whole day there instead of on Twitter.

@jtonline@mastodon.me.uk

The last time I’d tried Mastodon was in 2017 and, well, I didn’t have high hopes. This time was a completely different experience.

Partly that was luck- back in 2017 I had picked a server run by James Smith and it’s still going strong, so there was already a community and people I recognised, and I didn’t have to think about where to create an account.

I think it was also partly the kind of people I follow on Twitter- a lot of them had recently created Mastodon accounts I could find and follow. Although it was also great to find people I haven’t seen on Twitter before, having some familiar faces was nice.

Overall it really did remind me of when I first joined Twitter. Back then I tried to keep the number of people I followed to a nice manageable 80… which I appear to have reached already on Mastodon! Oh well!

I’ll definitely be back for another Mastodon Monday so please say hi if you’re trying it out as well!

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Shed Message System

I’ve been shed working for a few months now and while being away from distractions is a big plus, sometimes you want a distraction. Especially when the distraction is a nice cup of tea!

The first Shed Message System was an old wireless doorbell, which worked but could be somewhat of a surprise on conference calls, so after “accidentally” buying too many Local Bytes smart plugs I upgraded the Shed Message System with an old LED light box. No more loud ringing!

Obviously the only message was “Tea!” which was good, but what if there was cake instead? I wouldn’t want to be ambushed! So a little bit of Home Assistant hacking later, and I now have a selection of messages using an input select helper.

Turning the smart plug (LED sign) on with the big tea button automatically sets the dropdown to “Tea!” (the original and still the best) and turning it off resets the dropdown. So now I just have to check Home Assistant when the sign lights up to get the message and, even more amazingly, someone in the house is daft/lovely enough to make tea and use the Shed Message System!

Deploying Hyperledger Composer Playground to Bluemix

Since I’ve been deploying my own variations of Composer Playground to Bluemix recently, I thought it might be worth jotting down a few notes for anyone else who wants to do the same. For example, it might be useful to have your own known level of the Playground if you’re giving demos, to avoid any new functionality from the weekly releases causing surprises.

Assuming that you already have a working Composer development environment, a Bluemix account, and the Cloud Foundry CLI installed, here’s how…

First you need the main Composer repository if you don’t have it already

git clone https://github.com/hyperledger/composer.git

 

Next, checkout the code you want to deploy. In most cases you’ll want a release that’s been through one of our weekly release parties. I’ve picked the v0.14.2 release here

cd composer
git checkout -b v0.14.2-deploy v0.14.2

 

Get lerna to do its thing

lerna bootstrap

 

Now build the playground

cd packages/composer-playground
npm run build:prod

 

Create a manifest.yml file for your application with the following content

---
  command: node cli.js
  instances: 2
  memory: 128M
  env:
    COMPOSER_CONFIG: '{"webonly":true}'

 

Log in to Bluemix (you may need to use the –sso option)

cf login

 

Push the new app

cf push <APP_NAME>

 

Enjoy!

Game on for Fabric Composer

Earlier in the week I was pondering some blockchain gamification with @howard_is, inspired by a recent GameOn challenge for early professionals in IBM. After helping out with a run through of the IBM InterConnect Fabric Composer lab this morning, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a start.

Instead of running yet another car auction, I think it could be fun to have a demo based on a ‘business’ network for playing games. To keep some similar elements to the more common trading examples, I’m currently wondering if keeping tabs on multi-player adventure games would work. This is the model I’ve come up with so far, and it seems like something that could be hooked up to a simple text based (powered by Watson Conversation of course!) or graphical game interface.

	/**
	* Defines a data model for a multi-player game
	*/
	namespace org.example.game
	enum ItemType {
	o POTION
	o WEAPON
	}
	asset Item identified by itemId {
	o String itemId
	o String name
	o ItemType type
	–> Player owner optional
	}
	asset Trophy identified by trophyId {
	o String trophyId
	o String name
	–> Player owner optional
	}
	asset Game identified by gameId {
	o String gameId
	o Player[] players
	–> Trophy prize
	}
	participant Player identified by characterName {
	o String characterName
	}

view raw

org.example.game.cto

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

If you’re interested in playing with your own blockchain network, fire up the Fabric Composer Playground and have a go. If you want to know more @danielselman will be at InterConnect next week, or get in touch with the community. Better yet, join in!

Watson Conversation System Entities

The Watson Conversation service now includes built-in support for a few new entities. These system entities make it much simpler to identify numbers, currency values or percentages in a conversation.

The only slight gotcha is that system entities are not enabled by default. I would definitely recommend enabling all the system entities when you create a new workspace- there’s no downside and you’ll start seeing what system entities will be matched in the try out panel. (It’s also worth checking for new system entities when you make any changes to an existing workspace!)

I’ve recorded a quick demo on YouTube if you want to see system entities in action, and there’s a demo workspace in the conversation-starter project on GitHub.

A little more conversation

More than a year seems to have vanished somewhere since I left MDM for new adventures with Watson. It’s even been a few months since the new Conversation service first appeared on Bluemix, along with the tools I’ve been helping to build.

If you’re interested in Watson Conversation, or just curious about what I’ve been up to for the last year, these are a few blog posts which I’ve come across which explain everything better than I could:

• A trilogy An awesome saga on how to build bots from Simon Burns (if you don’t read any others, read these!)
  • Seriously, what do I need a bot for?
  • The Bots Are Coming!
  • Getting Chatty with IBM Watson
  • Conversation Patterns with Watson
  • An Adventure with Watson
  • Bot Feedback with IBM Watson
• Another great trilogy More great posts, this time from Simon O’Doherty
  • New system entities feature
  • The road to good intentions
  • Using counters in conversation
  • Handling Low Confidence Answers in Conversation
  • Understanding How a Conversation Flows
  • What is Your Name?
• Build a chat bot in ten minutes with Watson
• Getting started with Watson Conversation in 6 simple steps
• Watson Conversation over SMS
• How To Build a Recipe Slack Bot Using Watson Conversation and Spoonacular API
• Watson Conversation with Alchemy Entity Extraction
• Create your Slack bot with Conversation API & Node-RED
• Automating creation of ChatBot dialog using the new IBM Watson Conversation service

This thing seems pretty popular, so there are videos too!

 

There are even a few GitHub repositories:

• bathrugby_bot
• botmaster
• conversation-simple
• conversation-starter
• text-bot
• tjbot
• WatBot

And of course, tweets

Watson Conversation – Curated tweets by jtonline

If that’s not enough, you can ask questions on Stack Overflow and dw Answers, or join the Watson Developer Community.

If you’re building something with Watson Conversation, I’d love to hear about it! And finally, if you have any tips or tricks that you could share, I’m trying to collect some for a conversation-starter project on GitHub.

Updated: lots more links!

 

Build it and they will come

Somehow I have spent way too much of my time over the last year on efforts to replace the build tools on projects that already have working builds.

Photo © Duncan Rimmer (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Granted the builds had/have problems, as most do, but for some reason the ‘solution’ always seems to be to move to the new shinny build technology of the week, without really focusing on what that’s meant to improve even at a technical level, yet alone from an end user/business perspective. You may as well be arguing about tabs vs 2/4 spaces.

The latest fun build technology adventure has been to switch from Grunt to Gulp. (If you’re fortunate enough not to have heard of either, you may think I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent but no, Grunt and Gulp are both real tools to help automate build tasks.)

If it was up to me, I would probably avoid using Grunt or Gulp completely:

• Why I Left Gulp and Grunt for npm Scripts
• Why npm Scripts?
• task automation with npm run
• Why we should stop using Grunt & Gulp
• How to Use npm as a Build Tool

It’s not up to me though, so here are a few early observations about Gulp:

• It seems to have a few issues with error handling, although gulp-plumber has helped
• More worryingly, Gulp appears to have a tendency to hang, which doesn’t seem ideal from an integration point of view
• A lot of the examples I found did things ‘the wrong way’
  (There’s a plugin blacklist and I’ve found a few strongish views on how not to do things in Gulp, just less concrete examples on what the right way is so far)
• There are some useful recipes to get you started
• It’s not really any better or worse than Grunt, just different
  (Not that I’ve spent that much time with Grunt)

Given there’s almost no chance of making everyone happy with the choice of build tools, I would just leave the decision to whoever creates a new project, hopefully taking in to account ease of development and continuous delivery, and then leave it alone.

If you really think you want to change from Grunt to Gulp, or between any other build technologies, don’t do it. No, really, it’s a waste of time. You’re thinking about trying Broccoli now aren’t you? Or Brunch? (Really, I’m not making these names up!) Why don’t you switch off your computer and go out and do something less pointless instead? If you really can’t stop yourself, at least buy everyone on the team lunch first.

Why doesn’t Eclipse/Installation Manager work on Linux?

For the next time I’m grumbling about yet more incompatibilities causing problems with Eclipse on Linux, adding the following properties to the bottom of the launcher configuration file seems to help:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.useCairo=false
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.cairoGraphics=false

For example, edit the install.ini file for Installation Manager, which is where I first encountered problems after updating Red Hat Enterprise Linux last year. The problem appears to be due to incompatible GTK and Cairo versions, and there’s a related IBM technote for Installation Manager on RHEL 6.6.

Unfortunately, while that was enough to get Installation Manager working, the Eclipse IDE still seems somewhat unstable. I been exporting the following environment variable for a while but, based on the SDK Known Issues wiki page, maybe that doesn’t make any difference with recent versions:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

Another suggestion I’ve seen recently, related to tooltips, is to export another environment variable, although so far I haven’t tried it:

export GRE_HOME=/dev/null

Need to experiment a bit more with those last two, and see if I can narrow down whether there are any other real problems.

Hadoop as a service

It’s been a fun year learning new stuff, and along the way Andy Piper helped out with a bite sized architectural debate while I was experimenting with a Hadoop service on Bluemix. Having a short lived/disposable memory I thought it would be worth posting the discussion here for future reference…

‏@jtonline: Still pondering how a hadoop buildpack might compare to a hadoop service

@andypiper: @jtonline why would you want a buildpack for Hadoop – surely data store = service (broadly) not runtime. #cloudfoundry

@jtonline: @andypiper hmm, maybe, but you want to bring the processing to the data don’t you? Currently seems like services will hold big data in silos

@jtonline: @andypiper for example, I might want to use one of the address verification services from my map reduce job. I’m probably missing something.

@andypiper: @jtonline multiple services can be bound to multiple apps. And you can call jobs in those services from those apps.

@andypiper: @jtonline PivotalHD ships as a service in PivotalCF – obviously you may need data access libraries in the buildpack for the app.

@jtonline: @andypiper not convinced hadoop is just a data store. Do I need apps on runtime to kick off oozie jobs with details of other services?

@andypiper: @jtonline the runtime/service debate on CF has been a long one but I think fairly clean/clear. I’d see Hadoop as a shared resource.

@andypiper: @jtonline bear in mind buildpack -> droplet -> runnable containerised app instance.

@jtonline: @andypiper agreed. Maybe what I’m missing is an easy way to wire services together?

@andypiper: @jtonline yeah maybe – you end up with apps acting as service coordinators I guess.

@andypiper: @jtonline coupled with the fact that apps are intentionally short-lived and best stateless… interesting architectural debate :-)

@andypiper: @jtonline (for “short-lived” read “disposable” my bad)

It should be an interesting 2015.

BigInsights Quicker Start

I’ve been taking a break from Liberty and JAX-RS recently to start tinkering with IBM’s BigInsights Hadoop distribution. To make things easier/more interesting my first attempts were using the Analytics for Hadoop service on BlueMix. In case it helps anyone, here’s what I ended up with before needing to install BigInsights myself:

And this is the script I used to upload data in the video (unfortunately I didn’t have any luck using the HttpFS API):

#!/bin/sh

BIUSER=biblumix
BIPASSWORD=password
BIURI=https://hostname:8443/data/controller/dfs

curl -iv –user ${BIUSER}:${BIPASSWORD} –insecure -X POST “${BIURI}/user/${BIUSER}/sample-data?isfile=false”

curl -iv –user ${BIUSER}:${BIPASSWORD} –insecure -X POST “${BIURI}/user/${BIUSER}/sample-data/orgdata.unl” –header “Content-Type:application/octet-stream” –header “Transfer-Encoding:chunked” -T “orgdata.unl”

curl -iv –user ${BIUSER}:${BIPASSWORD} –insecure -X POST “${BIURI}/user/${BIUSER}/sample-data/persondata.unl” –header “Content-Type:application/octet-stream” –header “Transfer-Encoding:chunked” -T “persondata.unl”

Notes:

• since recording the demo Bluemix has added a United Kingdom region, however it looks like the Analytics for Hadoop service is currently only available on the US South region.
• there is also now a BigInsights service on Bluemix which allows you to provision multi-node Hadoop clusters.