Opening Entry.
Star Date: 20260124.
Some time in the afternoon. Complete with a nice cup of tea.
At Aliniant, we started out doing OSS tools. We just didn’t like any other tools. The old mantra – written by engineers, for engineers. You know those ominous words that are engineer speak for “clunky as hell”. That was the pain point we tried to fix.
Along the way we just happened to become technical expert witnesses for government, accidentally discovering a time-variant naming convention for Radio network equipment, similar to 3GPP32.300 except for OpenRAN, and learnt the hard way what IP games the big boys play – you suggest, they laugh at it, say no, tell everyone else to laugh at it too, and without a hint of irony, reintroduce it not one month later, polished up a bit, but I was like “hey, that’s my idea” (I wasn’t dumb enough to say that), but I did give my mates down at IPLytics a call and they laughed their collective arses off at me. A couple of them had been patent attorneys at the 3GPP plenums, where the research engineers were (get this) running for the doors to get the papers into the hands of their patent attorney to be the first to file. I’m not quite sure whether to believe that being the slightly gullible chap I am, (although these days my cynical side reminds me of the various wounds I have gotten from being a tad too trusting), but even if a corner of that story is true, the world of IP is a battleground, and its hard for the little guy to win. A couple of companies who shall remain nameless used to offer prizes for “sharing ideas” – and if the sources of those ideas just happened to be a competitor, well done you!
Anyway, we here at Aliniant try and see things a bit differently. We have also been on the receiving end of some of the most brilliant and helpful people and bits of advice – and to try and be as open as possible – sure, protect the core IP and assets, but those that didn’t quite make the cut – they may not be useful to you anymore, but they may be the spark for someone else, the final Lego brick they couldn’t find that helps them build the castle.
That is what this blog is about – to share ideas, and some of those ideas are fairly meaty – there will be slides, explanations, and of course a test at the end of to see if you were paying attention. No, there really will be a test. Claude and his buddies Grok and Ollama helped me turn the slides into a test. You will be entertained. Its not multichoice, and Claude and co will grade you. Hows that for interactive!
Interspersed in our catalogue of near misses, and “good idea, wrong timing”, will of course be some war stories. They do still seem to happen, although not as much as when I was a fresh engineer with no family who Joe Recruiter could call up and say “can you be in Haiti on Monday” upon which I would throw my life into a suitcase, rock on up to the airport and off I’d go. I used to be OneWorld Emerald (another story for another day – and damn those filet mignons washed down by some filthy expensive red at the first class lounge at Sydney airport were good. In the last 10 years however I have been on one business trip only – having kids is like having the brakes seize on the Bugatti. Expensive, and maybe the Bugatti needs to be passed onto one of the younger engineers – you now need a wagon for the groceries and the kids. On the flip side, I have a proper data centre in my house, complete with a 5G network (RAN and Core) that works. Beat that. The power company loves me, although I am kindof off gridding myself these days – massive solar installation and backup diesel. Its called a “business continuity plan” – although its probably just another outlet for my rampant OCD.
We welcome interested parties to get in contact with us – we’re ISO27001 and CyberEssentials accredited – that should maybe give you an idea that for a tiny organisation like we are, we take our responsibilities extremely seriously. We think outside the box natively, we’re at home in the world of AI, the scary beast that it might be – just like everyone else we’re not sure if it’s an angel, demon, or mirage. There will be plenty said by us in these blogs are we have LLMs deployed here and keep well abreast of all of the latest happenings – and try to see how these can be integrated into what we do. In the OSS world we’re working on a couple of ideas that would allow the OSS to be completely vendor agnostic, you can plug any vendor you like in, it will take a day or two to learn the Object Model and then you’re set. No bullshit. Currently its not working great, but we can see the green shoots and we improve every time we try. Will it reach 5 9’s reliability – lets see.
Thank you for reading.