The last year has been a fast moving one in the world of 5G. Therefore it was good to get a chance to catch up with the state of play by attending the annual 5G one day conference arranged by the IET RF and Microwave TTN (Technology Technical Network).

In November, Terzo Digital attended the WITS Plugfest at the National Football Stadium in Belfast. We were demonstrating an updated version of our WITS-IoT software stack.

Terzo Digital have been members of the IoT-SF (Internet of Things Security Foundation) for several years now. The foundation has a strapline of “Build Secure, Buy Secure, Be Secure” and is trying to promote security best practice within the IoT community. You can read more about their mission statement here.

It seems like 5G has been promised for a long time. I found out recently what the current reality looks like.

Introduction

This article is part of our series describing the basic concepts for databases.

Introduction

A cryptographic hash is a short, fixed length sequence of numbers which is easily calculated from a much larger input sequence such as a file downloaded from the internet. By recalculating the cryptographic hash of such a file and comparing it with an advertised cryptographic hash, one can check that the file has not changed. This allows the integrity of a file to be checked and any malicious or accidental changes to be spotted.

Introduction

Here’s my second article on database design basics. I’m hoping to tackle other database design topics in future articles – let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to cover.

In part 1, I covered “CRUD’ – Creating, Reading, Updating and Deleting records.

I’m going to cover the basic building block for data storage in a database – the table. A database usually has more than one table. Tables can have relationships with other tables – and this is what makes a ‘relational database’.

Introduction

Here’s my first article on database design basics. I’m hoping to tackle other database design topics in future articles – let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to cover.

There came a point in the development of the WITS-DNP3 protocol, many years ago, when we had to migrate from writing documents about the protocol and thinking about how it would work, to building and testing real devices. To do this we used plugfests. For WITS and many other organisations, a plugfest is a chance to bring various bits of equipment together and test that the interfaces between them all work as expected. In the early days of WITS, the plugfests were pivotal to converting the paper standard to a real and working protocol on multiple vendor’s devices.

Introduction

I had an iPhone for ages, then I flipped over to using Android. Why? Smartphones of both hues seem to do all the things we need, so why not just pick one, learn all its quirks and foibles, and stick with it?

Introduction

Simplistically, software maintenance is a service you buy once you have purchased a software licence to ensure the ongoing quality of that piece of software.

You’ll hear it called “support”, “maintenance”, “warranty”, “subscription” and these are all similar but subtly different concepts:

No doubt you will have heard of ‘2-factor authentication’. It’s often something your UK bank would say they’re introducing in order to beef up the security of online banking. What does 2-factor authentication mean? This article provides a brief introduction, but first of all we must start at the beginning with….

With many years’ experience in the telemetry industry and a background in electronic and embedded systems, it was only natural that I would have an interest in the Internet of Things (IoT); “who wouldn’t” you might say, given its position on the Gartner hype curve! That interest resulted in me joining and attending various meetups, chatting with companies in the sector and attending related lectures when I could. One of the meetups I have thoroughly enjoyed attending is the Internet of Things Guildford Meetup.

Introduction

Over the years I’ve been involved in countless IT projects. Lots of them have been software development projects, but I’ve also done other types of IT-related work. I’ve been a team member (working for a project manager); I’ve been the project manager; and I’ve also managed a programme of multiple projects. Not all of them have gone smoothly by any stretch of the imagination, but here’s eight tips from my accumulated experience…

A little while ago we published an article which was a gallop through the web-based apps we found we essential to operate our start-up business as efficiently as possible.

A year on, we thought it was time to provide a quick update.

We presented at the Water Industry Telemetry Standards (WITS) Expo conference on 18^th October 2016.

Everyone’s heard of IT – Information Technology. It’s very likely that someone at your work, or a whole team, are responsible for providing IT for your organisation. But have you ever heard of IT’s sibling, ‘OT’ - short for Operational Technology? If not, then read on…

Generally, projects, and in particular software projects, require some time to plan, design, build, test and deliver; but not all the time. Sometimes a project requires a quick turnaround and can have demanding deadlines! How do these projects differ and what factors might be important in determining the overall success of a quick project? In this article, we’ll look at a few of those factors and how they can set you up for a good experience.

Overview

I’ve been working in OT as a supplier to utility companies now for nearly twenty years. OT stands for “Operational Technology” – distinct, but a sister to, the more familiar IT – Information Technology. OT shares much of the characteristics of IT – it’s about hardware and software – but focuses on managing assets in the field, rather than, say, helping users in offices.

Devoxx is one of my favourite conferences! Having volunteered to help last year, I put my name forward to help again this year and was lucky enough to be selected. Volunteering allows you to attend parts of the conference in exchange for working in various capacities in other parts; for instance: room monitor, handing out swag, or manning the reception desk. It is also a chance to be part of the friendly team who put the conference together which is just as rewarding as seeing all those great talks.

Introduction

The WITS-DNP3 Protocol is an open communications protocol designed to allow Field Devices to talk to Master Stations within the water industry. For the first time the protocol gives the water industry a common language for communication between devices in the field and their telemetry masters. In turn this provides the users with a genuine choice of Field Device instead of being tied into using the Field Devices made by the vendor of the Master Station they have deployed.

The country goes to the polls for the EU in/out Referendum on 23^rd June 2016. I was recently discussing voting habits with some other small business owners, when one queried why we couldn’t vote using our mobile phones, and if/when that option would be available? Whatever the type of vote – national, local or referendum, I don’t believe it will be anything but paper-based for quite some considerable time, and here’s why.

Introduction

I’m often meeting other software developers. If things get a little more formal and we need to convey a potted history of our careers, a 2 minute run-through usually starts with “I graduated with a degree in Physics in 1998” or similar. It’s shorthand for “this is my education and background for the time before I started my working life”.

Many other developers seem to have a background in the sciences. Apart from scientists and developers being “technical”, I wondered why one would often lead on to the other. So I started researching studies and information on the web, and found surprisingly little. So in the absence of hard facts from other sources, this article is generally based on my experience and speculation….

This month I am only presenting a small article on what we’ve done, but hopefully a few will find it useful. If you have not already stopped reading because of the article title, I’ll start by giving a bit of an introduction so that you can decide whether this is something you will find interesting.  gdb is the Gnu Debugger a tool which “allows you to see what is going on ‘inside’ another program while it executes – or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.” according to its website.

Young Enterprise  - What is it?

The Young Enterprise (YE) scheme is a charity which enables young people, coming towards the end of their school careers, to develop their skills and attitude through setting up and managing their own business.

A group of pupils decides to be part of the YE programme, and forms a business. The pupils have to decide on the purpose of the business. It could be a commercial one, to build and sell products, or it could be a charity. Selecting the purpose of the business is one of the early challenges the team faces. Within a few specific exclusions and guidelines, pupils can setup a business to do something out of a wide variety of potential options.

As part of our work for Anglian Water Services (AWS), Mark recently attended the SWAN Conference in London. SWAN (the Smart Water Networks Forum) is a worldwide industry forum promoting the use of data technologies in water networks, making them smarter, more efficient and more sustainable. The conference was well attended with around 200 delegates from organisations including companies in the water and smart water space, water companies from the UK and abroad, consultants, and researchers from academia working in the water sector. You can see highlights of the conference, who spoke, and their slides on the SWAN website.

I’ve been involved this month in surveying a group of people to gather their opinion on a regular networking event, on behalf of the organiser of that event.

In the years that I have been involved in software, it seems that the methods I followed in developing and testing software often revisit me with a different name and a heightened sense of hype. Luckily, the second coming of these ideas often cement sensible lessons I should have learned from my first experience and result in new methods which invariably seem to improve on my original experience. I have found this to be the case, given some poetic licence, with testing and the test automation pyramid. In this article, I look at what the test automation pyramid is and compare it with the older techniques I used to use.

This article introduces the concept of MVP – Minimum Viable Product. It’s a simple concept and is well accepted in large parts of the software development community. Ten years ago it was a different story….

You may have heard the term “Internet of Things”, often abbreviated to “IoT”. If so, it may conjure up a particular image in your mind, or you may have an impression of what it means. The concept is actually quite flexible, and can mean lots of different things to lots of people. In this article, I provide a brief, fairly non-technical overview of the subject.

Cloud or Local Hosting

Within small companies today, there are a great many functions of the business which can be conveniently provided using IT; these might include accounting, CRM, file storage, ticketing systems, office applications, source code control, backup or automated build systems. Having decided that you are going to utilize IT to provide one of these functions a question one often has to answer is: should that service be provided from the cloud or implemented in the local IT system? This article discusses that question and details the factors one should consider in coming to a decision.

On 17^th February, we attended a presentation on the smart meter rollout in the UK. In particular, the talk focused on the technology used for the communications between the end-point meters and the central computer systems.

In February, Mark attended the 16^th IoT Guildford meetup. The meeting was held at Collaborate.works in Woking, a collaborative workspace available to small businesses, freelancers, start-ups and entrepreneurs. Amongst the speakers were Stuart Black of BrainTrain UK and Geoff McCormick of Alloy.

It will have been difficult to miss the news that the FBI and Apple are in debate about getting information off iPhones. Don’t worry if you have though, because in this piece I will try and link some of the best stories I have seen with some of my thoughts and give you a fighting chance of understanding what is happening in the debate.

Passwords. They’re a real pain, and they’re everywhere. You probably have more than a hundred accounts that require a password, from ones you use every day (such as logging on to your computer) all the way through to ones on websites where you signed up to get access to a one-time service, have never used it since, and have probably forgotten that you even signed up with that company.

Neil visited the Distributech conference in Orlando in early February. Distributech brings together tech providers in the OT (Operational Technology) space.

When we first set up to write apps for mobile phones, we initially selected to use the Android platform because of its free availability and the popularity of Android phones. However, it soon became apparent, that for any commercial application there was a strong requirement to support both Android and iOS.

How many times have you seen someone just about to, or actually, make what they thought was going to be a “quick change” on a live IT system without enough evidence that it was going to work? Or worse still, a big change?

Whatever project you're working on, in whichever sector of business, you are likely to start collecting a series of issues with that project which need to be addressed. Those issues could be of pressing concern right now or they may not require any attention until a much later stage of the work. When there are only a few issues we can all manage them through our normal daily workloads, but as the number of issue grows, the task of managing the issues starts to become non-trivial. This article delves into why it is important to deal with the ever growing load of issues and how we should go about dealing with them.

Terzo attended the Surrey Chamber of Commerce (SCOC) Intellectual Property (IP) Forum, held at Guildford University on 3^rd December 2015.

As part of our continued interest in Java EE, JBoss and Wildfly we are members of the JBUG (JBoss User Group) in London. In early December 2015 Terzo attended a JBUG meeting at CodeNode, the new venue for Skillsmatter in London. The main part of this meeting was a presentation by Marc Savy of RedHat on apiman, a free and open source API Management tool. Marc is a core developer on the apiman project.

Being long enough in the tooth, I remember when there was no internet. I have watched with keen interest the development of communications technologies through dial-up to 4G and more latterly new wireless technologies aimed at IoT like SIGFOX and LoRa. During that time, I have worked on a number of communication projects, but most recently I have been heavily involved with telemetry in the UK Water Industry.

Utilities companies within the UK water industry would normally have many thousands of devices deployed to monitor their estate. Those devices would likely have been deployed over many years; with some devices in the field being new and others much older. It is a non-trivial process replacing and maintaining all that equipment and the industry therefore moves at a slower pace than other cutting-edge young industries. The utilities companies were however very interested when early machine-to-machine (M2M) communications became possible with mobile 2G networks. With the advent of improved battery technologies and mobile communications it became possible to deploy telemetry in locations which had neither landline communications nor power.

Intro

In this article I’ll go through the basics of “project triangle principle”. [Sometimes referred to as the "Iron Triangle" or the "Triple Constraint"]

The Project Triangle theory is interesting because:

1. It applies to most, or arguably all, projects; covering a very wide range of sizes and subjects
2. It gives a vital frame of reference for managing a project, and helps you, as the project manager, to understand that there is an interplay of constraints at work and that varying one key aspect of a project is likely to have knock-on effects on other aspects

Most project managers will be familiar with this concept, but many of you who haven’t “formally” managed a project will no doubt have managed “projects” in your personal lives and will recognise the concept. You are likely to be, or have been, a project manager – whether you have been given that formal title or not!

Anglian Water have awarded a support and consultancy contract to Terzo Digital to provide specialist support for WITS system development. Mark Davison and Neil Tubman of Terzo Digital both have a number of years of experience of DNP3 and WITS in the water telemetry industry, with Mark having served on the WITS PSA committee for the last four years and having been recently voted back onto the WITS PSA committee representing Terzo Digital.

 

WITS is the Water Industry Telemetry Standards group. The group was set up to look after telemetry standards in the Water Industry and in particular the WITS-DNP3 Protocol.Traditionally water companies could only use proprietary devices which utilised the same communications protocol as their telemetry systems, limiting the water companies choice in devices. The WITS-DNP3 Protocol allowed water companies to utilise telemetry devices from various vendors on their telemetry system and hence control costs and select more effective equipment. The WITS group is made up of water companies (a combination of WaSCs and WOs) and telemetry equipment vendors or related companies. Terzo Digital were recently elected onto the WITS PSAC for a further two years. The article below was produced for WITS and is available here on the WITS website. 

 

So you are considering implementing a WITS Field device? This article provides an insight into the factors you may need to consider and the steps you may have to take to do that. By pulling together some of the experiences of current WITS device manufacturers on the PSAC, it also provides a glimpse into the types of issues that others in your position have found important.

To explain a few terms before we dive in to the article, the protocol is called WITS-DNP3 as it is based on DNP3, for the remainder of this article we will just refer to it as the WITS protocol. The PSA is the Protocol Standards Association, set up to manage the protocol and any other protocols developed. The PSAC is the PSA Committee, a group of six users and six vendors of the PSA who are voted onto the PSAC by the members of the PSA every two years.

The majority of the article is presented in an informal and anecdotal style giving you an unordered list of things to consider, together with why they should be considered. The article ends by pulling together a roughly ordered list of the things you will need to do during planning and development. Remember though that each vendor organisation is likely to have a different experience depending upon their exact situation, so please treat this in the advisory sense in which it is written.

We’re a two-man software consultancy that started up, from scratch and with bootstrap funding, in the spring of 2014. Like most businesses, and indeed many business people, we’ve used an array of different software products in the course of starting up and keeping going over the last 18 months. I thought it would be useful to share with you the highlights – software that helps us do our business and has proven to be more than an install-use-once-then-delete experience for us. Poorer products that have been tried and discarded have not been mentioned – hopefully this list will help someone make some shortcuts to finding the right piece of software to do a job for them.

I debated what to call this article. Some of the tools I mention are cloud-based services, either accessed through a browser or via an app. Some tools are apps that live on the computer itself. Some are just very useful websites that I find myself going back to, time and time again. However, all have the same thing in common: the service they provide is either free or low cost, and using it has made an appreciable difference to the business.

Earlier this year Mark took part in our first hackathon. In this case it was a Football Hackathon, where teams of like-minded football fans tried to put together novel applications related to football. The whole event kicked off on Friday night with a social meeting with the organisers and sponsors at The Counting House pub near Bank in London. The sponsors, including Onefootball, X8, Pusher and WIP presented at the social and it was a great chance to get to know the other participants prior to the main event.

Terzo Digital, a software engineering consultancy, was founded in 2014 and is partly based in the borough of Reigate and Banstead. Reigate & Banstead Borough Council is active in promoting and supporting locally-based businesses and operate a number of schemes to help support this vital part of the local economy.

Terzo Digital are pleased to announce the release of their first app on the Android App Store. The puzzle game, "Make Tracks" was released by Terzo's game brand "Minelark" on 17th December 2014 and is freely available from the link below or by searching the App Store for "Minelark".