Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Latest Rational Team Concert - 6.0.2 now, keep agile delivery going :). Playgrounds

Recently I've (re)started to get things going with RTC, to the level of getting up-to-date with the latest developments and tweaks one can do in RTC.

As I'm not good at writing long posts to sell you how good RTC is (and free for up to 10 devs) , I'll limit myself to the purpose of this post: to raise awarness of where to play with it (no costs, DIY the quickest)

Currently I have two options (if more, let me know in comments please):

1. free sandbox avail for 6 months ! (yah, not 30 days)

On https://jazz.net/products/sandbox/?tag=clm
Here you need to login / create an account with some mail address. Use a free one, I do.

The thingies you do here have chances to get deleted later (than sooner), but I use this sanbox to do most of my studies before I apply changes to the actual project areas I use internally or for customers.

As the RTC concepts are the same as they were when RTC 1.0 started (I was playing that too :), this is mostly sparring me time of install/setup/configure. Ha, talk cloud advantage.

In the sanbox you can also access Quality Management and Requirements Management apps, which are part of the same platform, but yes, do different things :)

You can also invite others ! to your Project Area, so grab your team mates, have them play. Fair warning: stick them up for a while until they start grasping the concepts ! You'll be rewarded afterwards. And you'll thank me.

2. second option is called bluemix.net. And I stop here, as Ralph's entry is much more detailed.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

my POV on "smart" watches

Remember these, around 80' ? https://www.google.com/search?q=casio+electronic+watches+1980&newwindow=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X

At some point, as a boy, I actually remember having one of these. My Casio was outstanding: plastic, but it had buttons, that crystal screen, wasted time to learn each function, date, time, alarm. A real joy :)

The thing which triggered the idea for this entry is reading an article about someone complaining on the utility of Apple Watch, combined with different quirks in usage. You can read the article here.

Nowadays, I work all day long on a laptop. If I raise the eye, I can tell the hour. If I do anything, I can pop-up the thingie we call smartphone. Heck, even my daughter had one watch (simple one), she begged for it for three months. Now it's thrown away. Simple reaction of a 10 to 13 years old.... she does not need it, she has ... her devices displaying time. She's connected, she sees time .... all the time.

But, what I can't do nowadays, is to wear something on my wrist. Something which gets in the way of me typing on the keyboard.

So here's my point of view, where I also kind of envision some requirements for these things to make them more appealing for my taste:

- Smart watches are useless. The only use case for a watch is to tell the hour. Nothing else. Since we see the hour pretty much everywhere, synced with atomic clocks [think NTP].... ok, the world moved on.  More or less, a watch is a fashion accessory [or military/spy tool, that's a different story].
- Struggling to do things on watches is silly. App updates, texts, calls, bridging with phone .... humans don't need that. Usability for a watch is: raise hand, spot hour, day, day of week. Not even the alerting function, not assuming any interaction, since this would be a distraction.
- This fancy trend for "smart" watches from different vendors will vane in two to three years.

Instead, when we talk about health bands/monitoring which accidentally displays time .... this is something else, and serves a different use case in itself: you start with some other function, like check pulse, or check vital signs, or anything else. NOT displaying time. With me so far, right ?

So here would be my requirements:

- A watch I would wear is one I could not feel. It should be so light ..... Think a latex band displaying the date/hour. Or skin implant of some leds - suddenly thinking of In Time, without the creepy story :) ..... Or maybe glued somehow only on my top left hand, so the bottom side of my hand would be free to rub on the laptop as I work/type.
- I should not care looking for the watch around bed / house / office, because I would forgot I have it on me.

On a final note, know that if you wear one of these and meet me, you'll not get a good first impression. If it's a smart watch, for me you're looking dumb. Move on.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

SSL3 - workings for legacy crapware

I got it, and if you're involved with technology, you got it by now. SSL3 is bad, we get to be intercepted, poodle, whadawhada.

However, geeks, developers, admins, coders, whatever we are and work for and in our larger or smaller enterprises, need to check web apps over https://my-host-or-ip/my-other-url and be in after authentication. For one reason or another, to check functionality or simply curious or "whatever you need". Routers, devices, even old .wars/.ears deployed on older web containers, again, WHATEVER.

This intro is somehow a rant because I just wasted about one hr of my time trying to get into a whatever old app. And could NOT, because in the virtual where trying (smaller disk size) I only had Firefox latest version (45.0.1 at this time) which I want to update and keep it updated.

But then, what to do with my legacy crapware ?

Turns out there's a simpler solution. Grab an old Firefox. version 31.8.0esr downloaded from

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

As an archive in Downloads, uncompress, run from there, be done with that.

Why did I spend one hr to find this ? because yes, I wasted time with about:config

security.tls.version.min;0
security.tls.version.fallback-limit;0

in latest Firefox 45.x and most likely above.

For browser developers: keep your old versions available, as years pass by us and technical debt accumulates, you'll be sparring yourself some curses from people like me just wanting to use a freaking browser to get into a web app..... no matter how insecure....

re-activated on my blog

Just having a new thing to publish and noticed I managed the performance to have only one article posted on my blog for 2015. That's being caused by multiple factors:

a) I consider 2015 to be a crap year, mostly because of issues happening to people close to me.

b) I became involved in a project where I'm mostly learning (new tech skills) and teaching others what I know about Eclipse / RTC / linux ... and everything else.

c) On social front I'm mostly active on Twitter, sharing / re-sharing snippets that interests me. For longer posts (like this one), I think I considered G+ and medium.com as alternatives to this blog. That is no longer true: G+ no longer interests me, and medium.com reached a point of growth where they're looking to start monetize.

So, longer posts than 140 chars will keep flowing on this blog, for as long as blogger.com will be available with ads free, clean theme where I can write stuff that represents me.