SAP Executive Bernd Leukert's take on IoT

SAP's Bernd provides an overview of the myriad of IoT's that will be arriving at our door steps in the coming months and years. Some of them have already made their precense felt and more of them on the threshold.

As far as busines value is concerned it appears to be a deluge. It is anticipated that billions of devices will be interconnected and our private lives are forever compromised.

From the list of IoT collected in this article there is but one conclusion, it is not just IoT by IOET (internet of every thing).

Here is a compiled list that Bernd describes at length:

• The Internet of Home - HomeKit by Apple for iOS8
• The Internet of Health - fitbit, Apple's HealthKit, Jawbone, Helius System with                          ingestible sensor, etc. but fails to mention Microsoft  & IBM related news
• The Internet of Fashion- Intel's Smart Shirt, Smart Clothing for monitoring and                          acting on body messages
• The Internet of Traffic - Cisco's Connected Transport Challenge not mentioned
• The Internet of Environment -Smart America Expo,
• The Internet of Sustainability--AT&T and the carbon Wra room
• The Internet of Retail- Connected Vending Machines
• The Internet of Logistics - track and trace systems
• The Internet of Assets - enterprise asset management
• The Internet of Design -smart products
• The Internet of Manufacturing-100 Million M2M devices going to grow 7 times more
• The Internet of supply Chain- Jetsons Supply Chain, autmatic warehousing and transport

Read details here:
http://scn.sap.com/community/business-trends/blog/2014/07/07/the-internet-of-every-thing?source=email-americas-sapflash-newsletter-20141201&lf1=6091096760b816620489302b33654442

All this is fine but the lingering questions raised by many is really about security. Do all vendors address security issues at the same level of seriousness? For example, a toothbursh manufacturer (with low resources at his disposal) making his device an IoT may very well compromise other connected devices. One cannot assume that the hackers will sit by silently. They will have more opportunity to diversify. If they can hack Google, Microsfot they can hack into the smaller fries.
 

Notes and screenshots related to installing PHP 5.6 on Windows 8.1

The Windows 8.1 Professional on my Toshiba Laptop Satellite Series S70 did not have any PHP to start with. I wanted to take a look at the SQL Server Driver for PHP in CTP. I decided to install PHP. Then make sure it works with IIS 8.0. IIS may not be activated by default. You can activate it from Control Panel (Turn Windows features on or off ).
------
More details regarding the SQL Driver here, http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2014/11/php-driver-for-sql-server-released.html
SQL Server driver (SQLServer31.exe, 499KB, version 3.1.CTP) for PHP is now available as a CTP.

Now
PHP scripts can access Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
You can download the CTP here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20098&WT.mc_id=Blog_SQL_Announce_DI

Details of this version:
•This version supports PHP Version 5.5 and requires Microsoft ODBC driver 11 (or higher)
•It supports SQL Server 2012; localDB abd AlwaysOn features
•Buffered Queries are included

All SQL Server users can get it at no extra cost including SQL Server Express.
------

If the IIS 8.0 is activated you should be able to see the following screen when you access  http://localhost in  browser on your computer.

For the current laptop the following is the response:

Assuming you had no problem activating IIS 8.0 we can move to the next step of installing PHP 5.x.

Downloading and installing PHP 5.X:

PHP can be downloaded (free) using the latest Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which happens to be WebPI version 5.0 from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

The advantage of using the WebPI is that not only it installs the PHP engine but also configures it to work with IIS.

Launch WebPI (wpilauncher.exe 113 KB) which brings up the following page where you searched for PHP (there are many others):

 

There is no Version 5.5 which is supposed to pair with the SQL Server Driver for PHP in CTP mentioned earlier. Install version 5.6 by highlighting it, it first checks for prerequisites and then installs.

 

 

Accept and the install starts as shown.

 

 

When the installation is completed, you will be seeing the following in your Control Panel under Programs as shown.

 

Also under Program Files (x86) you would all the PHP files in two folders PHP: v5.3 and v5.6.

 

If you now access IIS 8 by typing in 'IIS' in the Search charm it will display the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager link. If you click on this link you should be able to see the following when you look for Handler Mappings:

 

 

In the IIS 8's Home you would see both PHP Manager and FastCGI Settings as shown.

 

 

 

In order to complete the installation check if the CGI is enabled in the Control Panel as shown.

 

In order to test if the installation was successful you need to run a small PHP script in your localhost. In order to do this type out the following code in Notepad and save it with the extension php in the root folder of your computer.

 

The file is very simple as shown in the next paragraph.

 

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

 

If your PHP engine is working well you should see the following (only part of a very long page is shown) when you browse this file in your IIS or type the following in the address box of your browser.

 

This completes the installation of PHP 5.6 on Windows 8.1 Professional that works well with IIS 8.0

 

In a future post we take a look at accessing SQL Server 2012 from a PHP application.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2014 TechNet Asia Pacific Assured Interoperability event in Honolulu

Mark up December 9-11 for the 2014 TechNet Asia-Pacific conference (29th) in Honlulu, Hawaii. You can access all details from here: www.afcea.org/events/asiapacific

This is a premier event for this region covering defense and government related tecchnologies with thousands of defense perssonel and over 150 exhibitors. This is also a key learning event with lots of courses and panel discussions.

On this site, you can create your own 'My Exhibitors' list after filtering the 150 or so exhibitors as it is impossible to see them all.

 

Searching Elbert JJon who has infringed on my rights

My previous posts on copy write violation of my site by the said gentleman may be found here and here.
However, I have neither been able to locate Elbert JJon nor find anything more about him. I certainly have not given any permission to use the content. I will be taking all possible actions against him unless he removes the content. Here is his profile on Google+.

After searching for Elbert JJon on the Web,  I found this site where Elbert JJon has written his posts for the following URL. I am not sure he has JP Morgan Chase Investors' permission to author.
http://jpmorganchaseinvestors2.blogspot.com

It is for the site owners to check and verify if there has been an infringement before proceeding further.

Here is a screenshot of the above site:

He has also authored on the following sites/blogs:

 

 

 

I am not sure these are the only ones.

 

Since they are all on Blogspot, I do hope Blogger will help in closing these accounts.

 

 

 

Apps for the IoT with AppMethod

IoT has to be 'Universal'. Therefore, it has to be multi-platform, multi-device, device-size agnostic and more. This is why you hear more and more 'cross-platform' development. This app works on iPhone but not on Android etc. will not do. AppMethod is one such program from the veteran, Embarcadero.

Sign up here to get software that you can use to build apps in record short time.
http://www.appmethod.com/sign-up?cid=701G0000000vHaD

 

Registration is needed, but easy with few elements.

Note that the downlaoded program (file size: 3GB) is free for only one year. Read the information on
the download page above.

See overview here taken from a video on the site



Features overview

• One-stop mulitdevice app development platform

• Supports Internet of Things

• FireUI Multi-device designer

• Enterprisemobility Devices with FireDAC support

Documenting the copywrite violation by the hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com

Previous post I described the content being lifted from my site in entirety and placing on another blogger account.

Here are more details showing both the content on my site and on the plagiarizing site. This is a requirement to file a complaint with Google. This is clearly an abuse by the website http://hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com/ 


This is on http://hodentek.blogspot.com ( I am the blogger)

This one is on the site (http://hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com/    )  which has lifted all my content

 

Looks like any click on this site goes to some AdSense.

 

I will give just one more example.

This one from my site.

 

 

 

This one from http://hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com/   

 

 

Also any link under 'Popular posts' (right hand navigation) opens an advertiser page in addition to the clicked item's content on hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com

For example clicking on Apache(1) opens the following page:
http://www.dnsrsearch.com/index.php?origURL=http%3A//www.needhouseloan.com/&r=
And this has been set up as a random advertisement and most of them have .in in the url indicating it is originating from India.

 

Here is the page displayed in hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com

when I clicked on Apache(1) in the navigation on the right hand side for archived items on the blog.

 

The click on Apache(1) also popped up this extra browser window.

 

 

 

 

Stealing contents from my blogs

I came across this blogger with the address, http://hodentekhyperloop2.blogspot.com/ who is just publishing the contents from my blog as is, even including the images.

The person who signs himself as Elbert JJohn is the blogger. I request him to take out all my content from his blog.

This is completely unethical.

Jayaram Krishnaswamy

 

You get all this for free in Visual Studio Community 2013

This post is about installing Visual Studio Community 2013 on a Windows 8.1 Professional on a laptop computer (Toshiba Satellite S70 series).

I wanted to see what I will get installing Visual Studio Community 2013. I downloaded vs_community.exe from this site here:
http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs
Installation starts with double clicking the downloaded program from the downloaded location.

 

You require something like 8 GB for the program. Check and accept license terms to go forward.

 

 

I selected everything as shown here .

I started late in the night and I just let it extract files from internet and install. I just clicked Install
In the morning I noticed that installation was successful and I could launch the application. You will have to have a Windows Live account or other authentication.

Clicking on Start Visual Studio brings up the start screen. I chose the blue theme.

 

This is the version information:

 

Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2013
Version 12.0.31101.00 Update 4
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 4.5.51641

 

Installing you will be getting all these for free:

 

Installed Version: Professional

Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013

 

Visual Basic 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual Basic 2013

 

Visual C# 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual C# 2013

 

Visual C++ 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual C++ 2013

 

Visual F# 2013   06177-004-0444002-02503
Microsoft Visual F# 2013

 

Visual Studio 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker   06177-004-0444002-02503

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker

 

Portions of International CorrectSpell™ spelling correction system © 1993 by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

 

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

 

Windows Phone SDK 8.0 - ENU   06177-004-0444002-02503
Windows Phone SDK 8.0 - ENU

 

Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio Package   1.0
Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio

 

ASP.NET and Web Tools   12.4.51016.0
Microsoft Web Developer Tools contains the following components:
Support for creating and opening ASP.NET web projects
Browser Link: A communication channel between Visual Studio and browsers
Editor extensions for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Page Inspector: Inspection tool for ASP.NET web projects
Scaffolding: A framework for building and running code generators
Server Explorer extensions for Microsoft Azure Websites
Web publishing: Extensions for publishing ASP.NET web projects to hosting providers, on-premises servers, or Microsoft Azure

 

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2012.2   4.1.21001.0
For additional information, visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=309563

 

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2013   5.2.21010.0
For additional information, visit http://www.asp.net/

 

Common Azure Tools   1.3
Provides common services for use by Azure Mobile Services and Microsoft Azure Tools.

 

Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools   1.3
Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools

 

NuGet Package Manager   2.8.50926.663
NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio. For more information about NuGet, visit http://docs.nuget.org/

 

PowerShell Tools   1.3
Provides file classification services using PowerShell

 

PreEmptive Analytics Visualizer   1.2
Microsoft Visual Studio extension to visualize aggregated summaries from the PreEmptive Analytics product.

 

SQL Server Data Tools   12.0.41012.0

Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools

 

Windows Phone 8.1 SDK Integration   1.0
This package integrates the tools for the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK into the menus and controls of Visual Studio.

 

 

 

 

 

Easy to create a TabView app with Intel XDK

You learnt how to do a ListView app using Intel XDK here,
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/09/creating-listview-type-of-cross.html

Now download the latest Intel XDK from here:

http://hodentekmobile.blogspot.com/2014/11/get-latest-intel-xdk-and-jump-start-app.html
(November 2014)
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/09/new-intel-xdk-release-september-2014.html (September 2014)

Using the above you can now code a TabView app as shown here. Yes, it is cross-platform.
http://hodentekmobile.blogspot.com/2014/11/creating-cross-platform-apps-with-tab.html

These are on the emulators.

 

iPhone5

 

Nokia Icon

 

Free Visual studio Community 2013 - hard to believe!

This is hard to believe, but true - Free Visual studio Community 2013.

Full featured VS IDE for free, unbelievable. Probably the express editions will be history. Yes, leadership changes can bring in bonanza some times. Also, one way to stem the Android.

In Microsoft's own words,
"The power of the cloud, state-of-the-art tools, and agile development services provide you with the most comprehensive free developer offering ever!"

You can code for multiple platforms from one IDE, Windows, Android, and iOS. Of course you get a bunch of tools and what not.

 

Here are some promo shots from Microsoft.

 

Powerful

 

Versatile

 

Extensible

Probably you have a lots of questions and these are all answered here and you can download now.
http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs

Download vs_community.exe at the above site.

Q&A of most interest from Microsoft site:

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

• Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:

• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Q: How does Visual Studio Community 2013 compare to other Visual Studio editions?
A: Visual Studio Community 2013 includes all the great functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013, designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams.

Q: How do I create a Visual Studio extension?
A: Millions of developers use Visual Studio extensions every day. Check out http://integrate.visualstudio.com for more information on building on any of the Visual Studio development tools and services.

 

Nokia Icon and Motion Data

In order to run the Bing / MSN Health and Fitness app you need the following:
GPS
Accelerometer

Icon seems to have the GPS and if one believes the specifications released by Microsoft (see next link) it should have the accelerometer as well. In fact ICON is supposed to have the following sensors:
Ambient light sensor, Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, Gyroscope, Magnetometer, SensorCore.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/phone/lumia-icon/specifications/

Although it has the required hardware, only the feature dependent on GPS works and the one related to accelerometer does not. You get an error that SenseNotPresent, etc.

Here is a response from Microsoft Windows Site when I used my authentication (linked to my Nokia Icon Phone) to find out if I could download Motion Data needed for step counting in the app .

This gives me the feeling that unless, Lumia Cyan or Lumia Denim is applied the Phone cannot use the Bing/MSN Health and Fitnes app.

The GPS based tracking works well. Here is my 2.4 mile route that I do most days of the week.

 

Filed a complaint to FCC

As I was getting no where getting any kind of response from Verizon regarding OS updates to my Nokia Icon Windows Phone, I resorted to filing a complaint. If I do hear from them I will let you know.

Here is the gist of my complaint:

"Microsoft released an update called Windows Phone 8.1 Developers' Preview which was installed on one of the phones (808-XXX-XXXX). This was just a preview for some special group. Microsoft started rolling out Windows Phone 8.1 and later released further updates to Windows Phone 8.1 broadly known as Lumia Cyan and Lumia Denim which makes the phone operate better with more feature enhancements.

The complaints is that Verizon is neither addressing the issue nor making any announcements to customers.

I would like to know,

1. Is it possible for FCC to see that the Phone Operating System is delinked with the carrier? If not why not?

2. Persuade Verizon to roll out the updates and to make good the lost time by asking Verizon to roll out the latest update.

I can assure you I am not the only one in this situation and there are angry voices all over the Internet.
I respectfully await your response.
"
I am not sure whether this is going to help, my gut feeling is it will not. I think keeping OS away from Carriers is a sure way.

Using SQL Server with PHP 5.5

PHP is adopted worldwide and Microsoft has been providing hooks in the past  so that PHP applications can access SQL Server data. Extending connectivity to SQL Database on Microsoft Azure need no explanation.

SQL Server driver (SQLServer31.exe, 499KB, version 3.1.CTP) for PHP is now available as a CTP. Now PHP scripts can access Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.

You can download the CTP here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20098&WT.mc_id=Blog_SQL_Announce_DI

Details of this version:

This version

• Supports PHP Version 5.5 and requires Microsoft ODBC driver 11 (or higher)
• It supports SQL Server 2012; LocalDB and AlwaysOn features
• Buffered Queries are included

All SQL Server user can get it at no extra cost.

This widens the interoperability range.

The soon to be released JDBC driver compatible with JDK7 for SQL Server will enable applications to connect to SQL Server widening connectivity with Java Platform.

I have covered in detail how to use PHP applications (PHP versions 5.2.4 or later) to access data on Microsoft Azure SQL Databases (formerly called  Microsoft SQL Azure) using PHP Data Objects. Details are on pages 369-373, Chapter 10 in my 2010 book here:

 

You can buy or join the library here:

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/microsoft-sql-azure-enterprise-application-development

 

NoSQL database Amazon DynamoDB to support JSON

Looks like this database is fast and flexible; and it is NoSQL. Single digit milli-sec latency is good especially if it does not change with scale. It supports both document and Key-Value pair data models.

Amazon claims it is a good fit most of the stuff you do on the Internet (Mobile, games, web, IoT etc.).

Amazon is offering a client-side version of DynamoDB Local for free.

Access the same here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/Tools.DynamoDBLocal.html
Here is a promotional video and its support for JSON using some NASA public data

JSON will assume greater role in IoT in the coming years.

Update your Intel XDK to November 4 release

Intel XDK is continuously evolving. The version number now is v1536 and you can download from here for the major mobile platforms:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/html5/tools

Also download product briefing here:
https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/Intel_XDK_ProductBrief_9_14.pdf

The key benefits from the pdf are listed here:

• Easy-to-use streamlined intutive workflow from idea, design, debug, build and deploy
• Develop efficiently: Integrated desgin, test, and build tools for many devices
• Deploy simpley: Across more app stores, and form factor devices

The new features in this release:

• Apache Cordova CLI and Plugin version is updated to 3.5
• Intel App Preview Updates
• App Designer Updates- App Starter deprecated
• Code editor and Web Services updated
• Google Play games services add to featued Cardova plugins list
• Build system has been updated

Also serveral issues in the previous version have been addressed

 

Read more here:
https://software.intel.com/html5/articles/release-notes-information-intel-xdk

So you want to use JSON with IoT

Here is a comprehensive article on the basics of using JSON, the Javascript Object Notation. JSON packs lot more power into just information in a piece of text.

http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-do-you-work-with-javascript-object.html

JSON has become a nice connector to bridge the physical (IoT) and the Digital worlds (Web Services).

Get this still in development plug-in (pURL) if you want to read URLs in JSON format to send out a listenable event. This is just the beginning to create automatons based on URL content, be it web services or something else.

http://freedomotic.com/content/plugins/purl

I have a new blog now

If you are tired of reading my stuff on the other four blogs:

http://hodentek.blogspot.com
http://hodentekHelp.blogspot.com
http://hodentekMobile.blogspot.com
http://hodentekMSSS.blogspot.com

I invite you to take a look at my latest blog here;

http://hodentekPlus.blogspot.com
I want the above to be different from others but items come streaming in.

Move towards large-scale Azure adoption: Three more services in Azure Data Space

The three new services that should enhance adoption of Azure were introduced recently.

Read the detailed article by Scott Guthrie here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/azure-announcing-new-real-time-data-streaming-and-data-factory-services

The three new services and where to find them (in the portal) are shown here;
Event Hubs:         Ingesting and storing data from websites, client apps and IoT sensors
Stream analytics: Cost-effective, event processing to expose real time info from data streams
Data Factory:      Deal with diverse data and move them

The last two services are in public preview whereas Event Hub is in GA.

You can find these services as shown in the following images as they are not present together under one heading in the portal(s):

Event Hubs

 

Stream Analytics

 

 

A recent post described some aspects of the Stream Analytics here:

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/11/real-time-analysis-of-iot-on-microsoft.html

 

Data Factory

 

 

Previous post on Data Factory here:

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/09/azure-data-factory-azure-service-in.html