Blog de Joe Freeman

Hear my cautionary tale, I fed an OSS project 14 years ago. This article was published in 2018.  It followed me home and I've been keeping it on life support since that time.  OSS is great but  know this  about small or slow moving projects: "it may follow you home if you feed it"  We needed a patch for a project back in 2004. The original author wasn't interested in the project any more. I became a contributor and pushed out that release and 10 more with ever slowing rate of change.  The last release was mid 2015.  You would think the project was dead, given that the last release: migrated to Windows 7 APIs, added mostly stable 64 bit support, compiled against java 6 and used Visual Studio 2013 for the MS integration. Soruceforge dropped the project version control system, CVS, in 2015. Two folks recently (2018) submitted a couple new fixes. A quick site check showed the project still has over 900 downloads per week! That was a surprise. That c...

Big pieces of the 2018 Microsoft Build conference were about applied machine models and secure IOT. One of the keynote demos was called "Scott or Not" where a Raspberry PI used a machine learning vision model to determine if the person in front of a camera "looked like Scott". Some of the most interesting parts of the demo were not obvious without a both demo later in the day. Hobbyist are often ok with a hand crafted build using manual script instructions. That approach doesn't work in a commercial environment with 100s or 1000s of units. Microsoft took a more enterprise approach by creating a modular demo that supported easier automation. The demonstration code is organized in a modular fashion using Docker images. Individual functions of the pipeline are isolated to their own containers. This makes it possible to update tools, languages and code without any updates to the core system. Demonstration Flow The diagram on the right shows the flow for the vi...