A tourism platform on an open-source cloud stack
Technical notes on an open-source IaaS stack — OpenStack, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus — for the requirements of a tourism and cultural-heritage platform.
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Articles on AI governance, cybersecurity and systems architecture.
2014
2013
MISP: sharing indicators of compromise between CERTs
MISP grew out of Belgium's CyDefSIG in 2013 and is maintained by CIRCL: an event-and-attribute data model, export to Snort/Suricata and OpenIOC, and synchronisation between instances. Notes on the emerging STIX and TAXII formats and on the limits of trust between organisations.
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Arduino YÚN: an AVR microcontroller and a Linux on the same board
The Arduino YÚN pairs an ATmega32U4 microcontroller with an Atheros AR9331 SoC running OpenWrt. Technical notes on the serial bridge between the two chips and what changes for anyone prototyping connected objects.
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What Docker adds to the Linux kernel primitives
Docker, open-sourced by dotCloud in March 2013, puts a uniform interface over cgroups, namespaces and a union filesystem already present in the Linux kernel. What changes is not the kernel but the distribution format.
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DICOM beyond the file: interoperability lives in the network services
A technical reading of DICOM in 2013: the object model, SOP Classes, DIMSE services, transfer syntaxes, and the move under way towards the REST services WADO-RS, QIDO-RS and STOW-RS. What you build with the Open Source toolkits.
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BeagleBone Black: the two PRUs next to the Cortex-A8 for deterministic I/O
The BeagleBone Black ships in April 2013 at $45 with a TI AM335x SoC, 512 MB DDR3, 2 GB eMMC and two 200 MHz PRUs. Next to the core that runs Linux sits a real-time subsystem few same-price boards offer.
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Vagrant: the development environment as a versioned file
Vagrant describes a development virtual machine in a Ruby Vagrantfile and recreates it with vagrant up. The 1.1.0 release, out today, decouples the workflow from the VirtualBox backend through its provider system.
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Article 12 of Decree-Law 179/2012 and the Electronic Health Record
Decree-law 179/2012 gives Italy's Electronic Health Record a national statutory basis while deferring its operational content to a Prime Ministerial decree that has yet to be issued. What Article 12 establishes, how it rests on the Digital Administration Code, and which technical questions remain open.
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Putting a machine learning model into production
Training a classifier is the easy part. Keeping it in service — serialisation, data drift, retraining, accountability for the decisions — is the bill you pay every day.
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The Raspberry Pi Model B as a teaching tool
The Raspberry Pi Model B, on sale from 29 February 2012 at 35 dollars, is an ARMv6 single-board computer built for teaching. What makes it suitable for teaching computing, and which layer stays closed even on a board this cheap.
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Anatomy of a hospital HL7 v2 message
How an HL7 v2 message is built: pipe-delimited encoding, segments, message types, MLLP transport, and why the variability between implementations is the real cost of hospital integration.
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OpenCDS: clinical decision support as a queryable service
OpenCDS exposes clinical logic as an HL7 DSS web service that takes a virtual Medical Record and returns structured recommendations, with Drools as the execution engine. A technical note on the architecture, the authoring bottleneck and the limits as of 2012.
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Frame masking in RFC 6455 WebSocket
RFC 6455 standardised WebSocket in December 2011. The least obvious detail is the mandatory XOR masking of client-to-server frames: a rule born from a real attack on transparent proxies, not a stylistic choice.
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Arduino 1.0: what changes in the sketch format and the core API
Arduino 1.0 (30 November 2011) freezes the sketch format and core API: .ino extension, Arduino.h replacing WProgram.h, Stream return values, rewritten String and SoftwareSerial. Notes on the compatibility breaks.
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Reading a solar inverter's data without going through the portal
In 2011 the production data of a photovoltaic plant lives behind proprietary protocols. The state of open formats and free software that try to make it readable.
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A document repository is not enough for multi-channel publishing
Why digitising an editorial catalogue is mainly a problem of metadata and content typing, not of storage alone: the role of CMIS, SKOS, DITA and EPUB on top of an Alfresco core.
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OpenStack Cactus: notes on running an in-house IaaS
OpenStack's third release, Cactus (15 April 2011), brings live migration to Nova and static serving to Swift. Technical notes on the compute architecture and on what is still missing before production.
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Kafka: the log as a messaging primitive
LinkedIn open-sourced Kafka in January 2011. Instead of a queue with single-consumption delivery, it builds messaging on top of a persistent, partitioned log.
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Who really controls an open source project: the Jenkins fork from Hudson
On 29 January 2011 the Hudson community voted to rename the project Jenkins. The code's licence was free; the name and the infrastructure were not. Where the real control of a project sits.
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LibreOffice 3.3: the first release after the OpenOffice.org fork
The first stable LibreOffice release (25 January 2011) gathers OpenOffice.org 3.3, the Go-oo patches and the Linux distribution patches into a single tree. A technical note on import filters, build and governance.
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