Mobitrends

This post has been on my mind for a long while, and even as I start writing it I know that this post won’t even allow me to dump a tenth of what I’ve had on my mind for a while now.

I’ve been doing or managing software projects for year now. Saw the rise of AGILE programming, saw people getting crazy about Test-Driven-Development… and yet I’ve rarely seen so much crappy software and such long development cycles in companies. Why ? Because Agile has become a method for hiding your responsibilities as a developer over a roadmap, a new way of crumpling  the whole development process where developers are empowered with everything while not given any responsibilities over the deliveries, a new way to fail project without consequencies.

AGILE is actually the less agile method I’ve ever experienced, where sprints are blind development tunnels where outside of the developers nobody can really evaluate how the project is progressing. With sprints lasting up to 2 months (I’ve seen it), and with no real ability o get anything delivered in-between, this is definitely the worst approach of all should you be a small-to-medium size company willing to deliver fast and iterate fast.

What are the real objectives for software ? In my opinion those points are a must and should always be granted

• The master branch has the current production code, and can be updated fast (after testing) should a bug be found. This is critical in my opinion : when a bug is found by a user in production : you must be able to correct it immediately ! And most of the time current methodologies just disable that from ever happening…
• No software goes to production before having been tested. An NO-UNITESTS ! Unitests are only good for testing complicated algorithms. You should focus on designing usage-based tests with scenarios following the most common user action suites. On the web, selenium is the way to go. And this is only going to enable you to limit regressions by highlighting potential side-effects of a latest code update that as a developer you may have missed.
• Deploy often. Why wait the end of a sprint to see a service update ? Some stories are fast to deliver and have limited impact on the codebase and can de done in a few hours… some require weeks of headaches… why choose your deployment speed to match the longest task development time ? Put each feature in a dedicated branch, merge them into testing when completed (for testing) and then into master for a final test run.

I’ve been wondering for some time now, following a conversation I had with Jordi Vallejo, how UAVs – aka Drones – will become available in the future to support non-military oriented use cases. There are already a bunch of companies providing civil drones, but those are still expensive 5keur+ and built by hand one-by-one… and they do not get very successful (those companies live on military budgets). On the other end companies such as Parrot with their AR.Drone have made the concept of UAV reach the masses with their cool toy, but unfortunately it’s really only a toy and cannot be used for other purposes. Moreover due to its high price and some intel I gather I think the AR.Drone is only a 100k-unit product with is very low for consumer electronics.

Yet civil drones have a wide range of use cases :

• Aerial photography (photographer, real estate, hotels, architects & construction companies, …)
• Aerial video (film industries, news, sport events, live events, …)
• Archeology
• Border control
• FirefightersInspection services (wind generators, smoke pipes, oil rigs, pipelines, …)
• Insurance & Reviewer
• Military
• Police
• Press & Media designer
• Scientific services (biologists, geodesists (GIS), meteorological service, …)
• Search & Rescue
• Security & Surveillance
• Special Forces

And those use-cases usually request expandable tools. If we take the firefighter case, they need to be able to get live update of a fire progress, yet when it’s windy they can’t fly manned copters, thus UAVs would be of high benefit to them to keep their ability to monitor a fire even in windy conditions.

Civil use case request also simpler controls (i.e. no complex remote) through a dedicated controller such as a tablet that would enable to basically pin the UAV to a point in the sky and have it hover around.

I’ve been wondering if it was feasible to make a sub 1000keur professional UAV that could be industrialized and it seems this is actually feasible. Below are a few renders of what it may look like. I’m now starting to wonder if I should push this initiative further.

On 46% of the cases when people use an online ID to sign-in to a website, they use Facebook.

This is quite incredible tech – Ascending and LaserMotive have teamed up to break the flight record time for a UAV having it fly for 12 hours without touchdown!

LaserMotive is a Seattle-based company developing laser power beaming systems to transmit electricity without wires, for applications where wires are either cost prohibitive or physically impractical. As our first project, we won $900,000 in the NASA-sponsored Power Beaming competition, part of the Space Elevator Games.

I’ve struggled to find this link again, but this is an incredible DIY initiative definetly worth mentioning. The “TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit“.

The new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat. It has three-quarters of the mass (0.75-kg or 1.65-lb) and volume of a CubeSat, but still offers plenty of room for most experiments or applications.  And, best of all, the price of the TubeSat kit includes the price of a launch into Low-Earth-Orbit on an IOS NEPTUNE 45 (N45) launch vehicle. Since the TubeSats are placed into self-decaying orbits 310 kilometers (192 miles) above the Earth’s surface, they do not contribute to the long-term build-up of orbital debris. After operating for a few months (the exact length of time on orbit is dependent on solar activity), they will safely re-enter the atmosphere and burn-up. TubeSats are designed to be orbit-friendly.  Launches are expected to begin in the first quarter of 2011.

32 TubeSats can be integrated into and launched by a single NEPTUNE 30 launch vehicle. Prior to launch, each TubeSat  is installed into one of the rocket’s 32 Satellite Ejection Cylinders.  Once on-orbit, the satellites are released according to a pre-programmed timing sequence. The timing sequence is designed to prevent satellite clustering. Interorbital expects to launch a set of 32 TubeSats per month.

You need an operator license to be allowed 2-way communication.

Interorbital Systems (IOS), established in 1996 in Mojave, California, develops and manufactures low-cost, state-of-the-art orbital launch vehicles and satellites for private, commercial, governmental, academic, and military applications.

I’ve been looking for a long time for a good VPN service that would both let me access country-restricted content (Hulu, int he US, Voddler in Sweden…) and give me a high bandwidth anonymous connection to the Internet. I finaly found a service that makes it all providing both OpenVPN and PPTP services with servers in Europe and USA. Unlimited bandwidth and multiple devices supported for 75usd/year. HMA (Hide my Ass) is one of those services you can easily become dependent of !

Jaron Lanier is a Silicon Valley visionnary who created back in the 80s VPL Research, the first Virtual Reality company who pioneered the VR product industry (and made the amazing Nintendo Powerglove !!).

In his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.