On the one hand, the blockchain area is currently one of the most promising in technology. On the other hand, it also shows how quickly the lofty plans can be brought back to reality — even if the whole world and its best minds have created these plans.
At the end of the day, it’s always about scalability, i.e. how software behaves when it is put under heavy load, preferably by many simultaneously active users. When that happens, it’s always the moment of truth. …
Peer-to-Peer is a term from network technology, but its implications go beyond that. Peer-to-Peer could have a strong impact on how collaboration in the world works.
In computer science such networks consist of nodes (peers) working together based on equals rights. This is different to today’s predominant paradigm in networking, client/server.
In the client/server-world, the client is consuming a service provided by the server, and so there is a big difference between the two as they simple have different roles. This somehow reflects the way societies are organized today: You have big companies or organizations who presumably provide services to…
If you program a lot in Scala, some patterns occur over and over again. For me it was a combination of a Future and an Option, plugged together as Future[Option[T]]. That type corresponds to something that might be happening in the future, but it might also not happen under certain circumstances that I as a programmer can potentially control. Only in the case of an unexpected exception, the Future will fail. Under certain well defined circumstances nothing will happen and the Future will complete with None.
Both Future and Option are Monads, so it is straightforward to use map(..) and…
Summary
This article is inspired by the proof of concept application
Eternitas. It demonstrates a new way of storing, encrypting and signing documents. Both this article and the application present these concepts.
The first part of the article is about general reflections and topics related to the subject. The second part describes the application. (You may follow the link, if you keep in mind that a proof of concept is not a ready and bullet proof application.)
There are some striking benefits coming with the concept: Your data will never get lost and can be shared among different parties without today’s…
It is very easy to publish a complete website with IPFS. If you have a local IPFS node installed, you just need to run:
ipfs add -r webappHere webapp needs to be the directory in your local file system, where your complete web application resides.
But is this really a useful way to publish websites?
Yes, it is, if you can handle it!
The pros and cons are widely discussed in the net, and you have to be aware that it is completely different from ordinary web publication. …
Last night I did not sleep very well. After a short slumber, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a shining triangle in the dark above me.
I often see triangles, when I have sleepless nights, but this one was special. — You can see what I saw in the picture on top of this page.
I could hear a dark and solemn voice talking to me:
If you are in possession of all the three edges in this triangle, you will make an awful lot of money.
Fine!, I answered. I will write that down…
Thursday, March 7, 2019
Dear Diary,
I am happy, because yesterday I could finally finish my Wizard. I even published it on Github. This is how I proceeded:
After I had finished that Deviation-Topic, I just wanted to add some basic bookmarking, in order to polish things up a little bit. This implies storing the number of the current screen as a cookie, so that a returning reader is always been shown the page he has left.
My solution does not need to be universal all failsafe, so I have just chosen window.localStorage, which is part of the pretty much standardized web api. …
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Dear Diary,
I always knew that humility is indispensable when working in IT, most of all if you are a programmer. You never know enough, and if you think you know enough, you are most certainly wrong.
This morning I told you how I have set up IPFS — and how I failed. Now this should have been the right moment to have intuition jump in. Intuition — and I also tend to forget that — is the second most important virtue when working in IT. But more than often I do not trust my intuition. Today it would have told me…
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Dear Diary,
This morning I decided to try out IPFS once again. It is such an intriguing project with a seemingly limitless potential.
It is broken!
I do not know how many articles on it have been written, quiet some of them on Medium. But there is such a gap between whats going on in your visions and dreams, and what is happening in reality. I doubt there have been many people who write sophisticated stuff about IPFS and at the same time try to do something really useful with it. …
Monday, the 4’th of March, 2019
Dear Diary
Last time I started telling you about the wizard that I dreamed of. Here is more:
Imagine you have a story to tell, and the story is somehow split into sections. A simple wizard would just allow browsing through the story forward and backward, section by section.
But this is not how my mind works! There is always something that distracts my attention, that might drive me off the main road. Let me call it a deviation.
It is not a good solution to just call any deviation “off topic” and ignore it in order to stay focused. Deviations may…
