Confessions of a coding addict.

During the course of the last week myself and a college came across an exception in our logs. The exception was from JSON.Net complaining of an unexpected character in the JSON string.  The character in question was the ^@ symbol.  A Google search for this symbol shows up very unhelpful results , you could try Carrot @  or Carrot At . We went looking for ways to search for symbols in Google, in our searches we came across  http://symbolhound.com  a search engine for developers. It doesn't ignore symbols so a search for ^@  yields much more useful results and reveals that its a null character. It's a useful tool for debugging and development questions, you can even set it as one of the search options in Firefox.

The first IoT topic I want to look at is Identity.  Identity is critically important when selling an IoT product. It doesn't seem such a big problem when playing with half a dozen Raspberry Py's in the back room of your house.  But when customers start sending back error reports and/or hardware knowing exactly what they're talking about becomes very  important. This problem starts with the what is Identity ? Consider the example of a taxi management system.  We've all been in a taxi lets make the meter a smart meter.  It knows all about the taxi, speed, distance tally, fair total, etc and can be tracked at via a web service.  What the problems the system solves is not important for the example, what is important is that the system is installed into the car as an after market component and that it provides data about the taxi to a central service. And now we come to the question of identity. The first question to ask is "When do you need to identify ...