Sunday, 22 June 2014
Solas
Solas 2014: Common Ground
There's no doubt about it: Solas is currently my favourite festival.
This year's highlights:
- Film: Bridge Rising, a documentary that on the surface is about the Skye bridge tolls, but underneath is a searing critique of PFI
- Music: Jo Mango, Marit and Rona, Stanley Odd, Genesee
- Ideas: Andy Wightman and Lesley Riddoch
- Comedy: Josie Long
- Food: Aye Coffee's ridiculously delicious "luxury muffins"
- Encounters: a long chat with Alastair McIntosh who we'd last seen on Iona
- Friends: too many to enumerate, old and new
Above all that though was the feel of the place. This was a wonderful weekend, and well worth the rather long journey from the far south of England. Roll on next year.
Tuesday, 10 June 2014
Books , O'Reilly Reviews , Tech
Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy
An Inspiring Introduction ★★★☆
I've worked a little with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) before, getting the bulk of my information from programming guides.
This book presented an opportunity to go back to basics: to review the protocol stack from top to bottom and patch in the gaps in my knowledge. On that account it succeeded very well.
There are many components to BLE, and a seemingly unending vocabulary to learn (care to distinguish profiles, procedures, protocols, or ATT versus GATT?). "Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy" does a tremendous job at guiding the reader through the scenery, pointing out subtleties and traps along the way.
In particular, the tour of the protocol stack presented in Chapter 2 is wonderful, describing everything from the application down to the low-level radio components (and how those lower levels necessarily impact the behaviour of frameworks and apps).
In places I would've liked a little more detail (I'm a sucker for packet traces, and there's scant information about specific profiles built on top of GATT), but the book has inspired me to dig deeper and continue learning about BLE elsewhere. And that's the key point: I was expecting to learn, but in addition to that I was energised. While I previously had in mind one application for which I could use BLE, I now have dozens of ideas.
[Note: I received a free copy of this book through the O'Reilly Reader Review Program.]