By now it’s a year that I have left my last employee job. (which was at Eurofunk, a company providing command and control centers for the public sector, airports, industry, etc).
Since then I have been running my own business full-time.
I started Mentorship for OPW.
A while ago I have volunteered as a mentor of the OPW program.
The internship of my mentee, Asal Mirzaeva (Asalle ) has started a few days ago, and so has my mentorship. (Although we have already test-driven the mentor-mentee cooperation during Asalle’s qualification task.)
Her job is:
- to replace manually written byteswapping code in the X-Server with code that is generated from the XCB protocol definitions,
- and to add proper checks to the incoming protocol data, to fix some security problems.
Asalle is currently setting up the build and debug environment for building and debugging the X-Server. (Debugging the X-Server is quite tricky as you can imagine.)
Asalle is very talented and she already has a good understanding of how the protocol handling and byteswapping works in the X-Server, after reading the relevant source code.
Recording Human-Machine-Interaction: API-Recording vs ATG-Recording
The purpose of recording human-machine-interaction is that we can identify and fix causes of past problems so that these causes cannot happen anymore. These causes may either be on the human side or on the machine-side or in the combination of both.
In mission-critical systems you cannot afford to repeat (near-)accidents and (near-)disasters. Therefore you need to identify causes of such problems reliably the first time they happen. For that it is essential to use sufficient recording and logging that allows you to correctly reproduce all information required for such an analysis. Due to the importance of this, it is crucial to do this recording and logging correctly.
Recording human-machine-interaction is an essential component of a complete logging solution. Therefore it is important to do this correctly, too.
There are several methods for HMI-recording. (HMI is short for human-machine interaction.)
In this article I’ll pick two of them: API-recording and ATG-recording. These methods are both used in practice for recording human-computer-interaction. I’ll highlight the advantages and disadvantages of both methods, and provide a conclusion that may be surprising.
How to Prevent Disasters in Mission Critical Systems
The definition of a mission critical system is that a failure can have disastrous consequences, including death, destruction, bankrupting entire big companies, economic crisis, …
Examples for such mission critical systems are:
- Air traffic control,
- Industrial processes, e.g. in chemical industry,
- Atomic power plants,
- Railway interlocking systems,
- Maritime control,
- Big stock traders.
Of course, such systems are usually designed in a redundant way, such that one mistake should not cause a failure of the whole system.
One of the most critical components of such a system is human machine interaction.
Why is this component so critical?
New Release of DemoRecorder-24×7: Added Mouse-click and Keyboard Recording
There is a new release of DemoRecorder-24×7 with version number 2.5.29.1.
DemoRecorder-24×7 is our screen recorder product for mission critical 24×7 recording.
It runs on systems using the X11-window system
which includes Linux and most Unix-like operating systems.
It is designed for use in areas like air traffic control and railway traffic control.
( see also our testimonials )
You can download the new version from:
http://demorecorder.com/download/download_trial_links.php?nn=1&releasetype=mc#TGZ
Entering the software project business on Dec 16th
Starting with Dec 16th I will concentrate full time on my business.
This enables me to extend the scope of my business beyond my product DemoRecorder:
I will reenter the software project outsourcing business, i.e, I’ll offer to implement software projects for customers who want to outsource a project.
You may already send me project inquiries: I may however take longer for answering them because my time until Dec 16th is already reserved otherwise.
I can offer quite a bit for the software project outsourcing business: