Recently, I can’t but escape the feeling that a great portion of the high tech industry is taking crazy pills, as part of its morning diet. Seriously, if we are not taking crazy pills, you can’t explain the overload of Legacy Tech that is rapidly making a comeback – under a new name and flag. Yes, buzz-words were always a thing of this industry, but seriously, don’t you feel this is getting a little over-done lately?
What am I talking about? Well, let’s take a look at some recent buzz-words and go through them:
IoT – Internet of Things
If you lookup the term in Google, you will surely find the following on Wikipedia:
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data. The IoT allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems, and resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit; when IoT is augmented with sensors and actuators, the technology becomes an instance of the more general class of cyber-physical systems, which also encompasses technologies such as smart grids, smart homes, intelligent transportation and smart cities. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure. Experts estimate that the IoT will consist of almost 50 billion objects by 2020.
Cool – isn’t it? Well, the Internet of Things existed far before the term was invented. It simply looked a little different. We had devices with SIM cards or devices with some other form of interaction technology – and we didn’t use IP, we used something else. But the minute it used IP, it got the name “Internet of Things”, simply due to the relation to the IP protocol. Almost 10 years ago, an Asterisk based plant irrigation project was shown on the web. Is that IoT? maybe not, but the overall result is similar. Actually, it is exactly the same, 10 years before IoT – but if you can’t see that it is the same, you are taking crazy pills.
Contextual/Task Oriented Chat Bots
Oh my god – when people showed me slack for the first time, I really didn’t understand why they are so excited about it. To me it looked mostly like a glorified mash-up between IRC, EggDrop and fancy Pseudo-Agile management system.
Chat bots that do stuff? really? In 2001 I worked at a company where I had to monitor and
control a set of servers, interconnected with 6 different SMS connections to various carriers. In order to get this stuff working and also get it working from my mobile phone, I used a combination of Nagios, Kannel, EggDrop and IRC. I used the IRC server as my command and control interface, EggDrop carried commands from the IRC server over to the Kannel Server and the Nagios servers, to run remote tasks and test various elements.
In 1999, I consulted a company that was called eNow (back then, ChatScan). They were scanning thousands of IRC channels to Internet trend analysis. Now, think about it, we scanned these IRC channels using EggDrop. Simple, TCL based, IRC Bots that would roam the IRC networks in search of interesting things.
If you are wondering what EggDrop is, check out: http://www.eggheads.org/
Over Virtualising
Can someone please explain me the following scenario: You lease a cloud based, small foot print server from any of the cloud companies, you then run Docker it and create additional virtual machines on the VM instance.
Dude, might as well just have your own server with Proxmox, KVM or some other virtualisation container. I just don’t get it, the fact that you can do something, doesn’t always mean that this is what it is meant for.
The following video just shows this is the funniest way ever: