Year: 2019

USB Power Delivery (for Set top Boxes) - A dream so close and yet, so far away

Consumer Electronic DevicesLeave a comment

I’ve designed this diagram  on the eve of the approval of the USB Power Delivery standard. It drew on the EU’s Common External Power Supply’s motto: one power supply to rule them all. It took us 7 whole years, and we’re not there yet, but we’re now so close. Well, it’s also a bit weird, but I’ve worked on Set Top Boxes for most of my professional life, and my whole goal has always been the same: get rid of set top boxes. Now, it’s tremendously obvious for everyone that I’ve thus far failed. Yes, there have been some attempts …

Boeing 737 Max – The illustrated example of technical debt

Aviation / EngineeringLeave a comment

What happens when Product Management, Finance and Engineering all seat at the same table and decide not to pay their debt? 346 lives are taken as collateral. How Boeing got to this point ? Ryanair gave a hand… The Boeing 737 Max is the 4th and latest interaction of the most successful airliner of all times, having sold more than ten thousand units since its introduction in 1968. That’s right, this airplane has its roots on a 51 year old base design, when airports and passengers were a lot less and jet engines were and a lot different, and smaller. The very …

DRM 101 – Introduction to DRM systems

DRM / OTT / Television SystemsLeave a comment

It may seem silly, but it’s so difficult to find proper information about a DRM is, what it isn’t, and broadly, how it works. What is not a DRM Most people associate a DRM with content protection, a way to protect the content. However, stricto sensu, it isn’t. A DRM system is not about how contents are protected or encrypted. In fact, most current DRMs use exactly the same encryption methods to protect content, and again contrary to most DRM way of thinking, these methods are public and vary between AES-CTR and AES-CBC. If you find those names too familiar, it’s …

Linking to a specific Confluence page version

Decision Support SystemsLeave a comment

In short, linking to a specific Confluence page version is not possible by simply copy pasting an existing link, but it needs some manual URL editing. Here’s how to do it. EDIT: Finally Atlassian added this feature by changing the page links on page history. Unfortunately this is only valid for the cloud version, or versions 5.x onwards, whereas most hosted installs still don’t offer this option, this simply isn’t possible on version 4.x. It’s pretty obvious I’m not the biggest supporter of confluence as the enterprise knowledge management platform, but denying it grabbed the largest chunk of this market …

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