Device Software Development Platform

The Internet Will Be Paid…

2009-06-11T12:54:00.001-07:00

Or so some guy named Barry Diller says. I beg to differ.

Unless you've been living in a cave for a while, you've noticed that there's an ideological war underway around content. By content, I mean software, music, tv programs, movies, books, and any other piece of information or entertainment you can package. The war is between paid and free, closed and open, restricted and unrestricted. Did this war start with open source software? I'm not sure, but open source has definitely helped arm the conflict. Let's consider the content categories.

When you look for a software application or you need to perform a task with software, you can almost always find free software to do just about anything. In many instances, the free stuff is nowhere near as good as its commercial counterpart (e.g. GIMP vs. Photoshop). This reality keeps us software types employed for now. But the free stuff is still there, and sometimes it's good enough.

Then there's entertainment media sites like hulu, youtube, pandora, last.fm, and countless others that are supplying us with endless time-shifted and (mostly) free entertainment. Sure, it's not always in HD on your giant flat panel or in CD-quality through your audiophile stereo, but often it's good enough.

Switching to books, you can find lots of online material in Google Books or in any number of free audio book libraries. If you're looking for open college materials, check out MIT Open Courseware or the excellent collection of CC-licensed college lectures at Academic Earth. Wikipedia, The New York Times, and many other excellent sources of information are all open and free. Google alone is hell-bent on ensuring all content is in the open, whether people want it to be or not.

And this is all of the legal stuff. For everything else, grab a torrent client, search a database, and (in some cases) break the law to find what you're looking for. DRM? Forget it. For every smart group of engineers that implements DRM, there's another smart group that cracks it. It's a waste of money to even bother implementing it. Perhaps this is why Apple is dropping DRM from much of its iTunes library and why Amazon MP3 never had it in the first place.

Now consider Diller's claim: "people have always paid for content," and once this "accident of historical moment" passes, people will again be paying for it. Are you kidding me?! Um…you know that point in your life when some teenagers drive by in their car blasting music, and you think it's too loud…and then suddenly you feel really old? (Well, it hasn't happened to me yet, but I've heard of it.) Anyway, this is what it looks like when it happens to someone else. And at a Web 2.0 conference no less!

The open content ship has sailed. This content war is about a more fundamental question: the accessibility of information. And the challenge for all of our businesses—software, music, entertainment, publishing—is not about restricting access to content, it's how to support open or very inexpensive content while still making enough money to keep producing it. This is what progress looks like. Diller, you'd better crank up your stereo.

State of Eclipse

2009-05-01T12:04:00.001-07:00

I've enjoyed reading Bjorn's State of Eclipse series, and I find myself almost schizophrenic (using the incorrect definition of the word) in my response. So I'd like to comment in three different voices that are my own and one that probably should be.

Project Lead and Committer

+1 for the IT infrastructure and support staff. I'll admit to having a lot of man-love for the webmasters, despite Denis' grumpiness about VCS systems (wink, wink).

+1 for the Dev Process. It's verbose, but it gives me a place to start when mentoring new projects.

0 for the IP process. I get the criticality of this for the adopter community, and how more adopters = more project success. But when I'm just trying to get sh*t done, it's frustrating.

-1 for still not having a way to get GPL pre-reqs into Eclipse packages. This is a killer for the embedded community.

Employee of a Member Company

+1 for the IP process. Wind River does use GPL-licensed toolchains, but man do we love vetted EPL code!

+1 for the Release Train. Having dates on the calendar for getting Eclipse drops…priceless.

0 for the bragging rights of being "built on Eclipse". In the embedded space, Eclipse is used as the base IDE by almost all competitors.

Elected Eclipse Board Member

+1 for Industry Working groups as a way to focus Eclipse strategy in specific verticals.

-1 for Bjorn's departure.

+1 for the Foundation's relentless campaign of Eclipse branding.

User

+1 for free beer.

-1 for API contracts that live forever in lieu of improving the @#$% performance and footprint.

-1 for complex and confusing downloads.

-1 for relegating us to second class citizens in favor of adopters. F*** it, I'm going to one of the forges.

EclipseCon 2009 and git

2009-04-01T12:24:00.001-07:00

As in past years, EclipseCon 2009 was fun, interesting, and exhausting. Thanks to Darin for organizing 4 days of early morning 3-5 mile runs to offset the food and beer!

I'm please to have made the top 10 tweeters for EclipseCon. Unfortunately, my friends on facebook (a) know without a doubt I'm still a geek and (b) do not know what the hell I do for a living. I think perhaps the twitter app in facebook is a bad idea….different community, different friends, different etiquette.

A quick summary of the conference. I owe the committers my notes from the Board Meeting on Monday and a hearty "thanks!" for re-electing me to the Board for a second term. I remain obligated to do your bidding for another year.

Speaking of which, a large part of my time at EclipseCon was focused on Version Control (#$%# campaign promise). The VCS panel was large and well attended. We needed more time, and it wasn't quite as controversial as one might have hoped. The VCS and git BoFs were much more effective, though. In the notes, you will find a raw summary of our discussion including a couple of funny webmaster quotations, and next steps for git at the Foundation. Follow Bug 257706 and all of its red-headed step-children to keep up with the developments.

Finally, I gave a sponsored talk on the Future of Mobile and Embedded in Eclipse. If you're looking for slides, you'll have to email me because I made liberal use of images from Google that surely don't fall under EPL or CC. The Pulsar folks tell me they didn't learn anything new, but for the uninitiated the slides are a good summary of the state of the industry, the projects in eclipse, and what's coming down the pipe.

Finally, there was the little matter of a certain "power point karaoke" presentation on Monday that may have left folks with mistaken impressions about me (and Scott). I can assure you that I don't grow anything, and therefore my second piece of advice to the audience doesn't apply.

Version Control at EclipseCon

2009-03-12T11:31:00.001-07:00

Following up on my previous post, we have organized an excellent group of panelist for our EclipseCon panel: Controlled Chaos – Version control in the Twenty-first Century. We'll be in the Theater on Tuesday at 2:30, and we'll be using twitter for questions with the hash: #eclipsecon-vc.

If you can't get enough of Version Control, check out the VCS BoF on Tuesday night and the git BoF on Wednesday night. See you there!

Board Elections & VCS Enthusiasts

2009-02-24T11:32:00.001-08:00

The problem with campaign promises is that some people expect you to live up to them. Anyone familiar with U.S. politics knows that campaign promises are what you say to get elected, not what you actually intend to do in office. I guess we hold ourselves to higher standards in Eclipse. So back to my (shameless) "Can we deploy git? Yes We Can!" initiative.

Scott Rosenbaum (EclipseCon 2009 Program Chair) asked for a volunteer to organize a panel on VCS technologies. I've volunteered, and I'm calling all VCS/DVCS enthusiasts interested in this panel. I already have a pretty good list of potential panelists, but if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

And yes, I am running for my 2nd term on the Eclipse Board of Directors. Truthfully, all of the candidates are great, so please vote! (You should have an email in your inbox with instructions.)

Eclipse Board of Directors

2009-02-18T14:03:00.001-08:00

After attending an all hands meeting with my Board of Directors Exploratory Committee, I'm pleased to announce my candidacy for the 2009 election.

My first order of business will be a Committer Stimulus Package, the details of which will be fleshed out after I announce my Committer Czar. In the meantime, you can influence my position with the purchase of foamy beverages. Hey, I'm in open source, and I was promised Free Beer. Where is the beer? Oh wait…I just reread that article. It's says "Free as in speech, not free as in beer." Dammit! Anyway, I'd like to announce my campaign slogan (and the subsequent loss of Denis and Karl's votes):

Can we deploy git at the Foundation? Yes We Can!

In all seriousness, I have actually accomplished a few things this year on the Board, and I'd like to continue to represent you. I'd appreciate your vote when the virtual polls open on Feb 23.

E6500 Suspend Problem Solved

2009-02-11T11:02:00.001-08:00

I've had a breakthrough on my suspend issues. It seems that the Dell Connection Manager Service was causing the suspend problem. As a reminder, I have the 5530 HSPA AT&T card. When you install Dell Control Point (DCP) and the associated drivers, you get Dell Connection Manager, which is supposed to help manage all of your network devices. Mostly it's redundant with the Network Center in Vista, but you do need it to connect to the Internet over the WWAN card.

As I've complained before, I don't like DCP. It's Dell QuickSet gone horribly wrong. So I've been actively trying to replace it. In my searching for something else to manage the WWAN card, I found an alternative utility called Dell Wireless Manager. It's bundled with the 5530 drivers, but if you poke around on Dell's FTP site, maybe you can find it for the other WWAN cards, too. It's a nice little app for enabling/disabling the card, connecting, looking at bandwidth usage (very important now that AT&T's data plan is 5GB / month), etc. It doesn't work right away when you install it, though, saying that it can't detect a WWAN card.

Quite by accident I got it to work by uninstalling "Dell WWAN ???" (can't remember the exact title) using CCleaner. I was trying to remove this utility since it wasn't working, but instead I uninstalled something from Connection Manager. Suddenly this nice little app found the my WWAN card and connected to AT&T. The Dell Connection Manager service stopped working, and Suspend has been flawless ever since. I guess I killed two birds with one stone.

Here are some tips if you go this route. In BIOS, set the Wireless Switch to not control the WWAN card. The Dell Wireless Manager turns the card on when you start the utility and off when you close it. Also remove "DellConnectionManager" from startup (via msconfig or WinPatrol). It won't start up correctly anymore, and you won't miss it anyway. BTW, the rest of DCP is still working. DCP only gives you an error when you click Connection Manager. Perhaps next I'll try getting QuickSet to work and then blow away DCP for good.

Windows 7

2009-01-19T12:25:00.001-08:00

The blogosphere is all atwitter about Windows 7. (Sorry…bad mixture of metaphors.) I must confess that I've installed it, but not on a mission-critical system. For a "Ballmer Beta" (TM Doug Gaff), I'm surprised at how well it works. Truthfully, it feels like a very nice Service Pack for Vista, which I think is the intention. Unfortunately I'm sure I'll still have to pay for it when it's released. Attention Microsoft: how about a "we're sorry about Vista" free upgrade coupon for us early adopters?

Lifehacker has an excellent rundown of Windows 7 features, and their coverage is on-going. Of particular interest is a very technical presentation from Mark Russinovich, father of the awesome sysinternals tools. Mark's presentation covers some of the intricacies of the Win 7 kernel, including multi-core scalability (256 cores), startup time optimizations and tricks, legacy app compatibility, Vista driver compatibility, MinWin, and virtualization. Clocking in at 45 minutes, this is a time commitment, but it's geek worthy.

My employer Wind River builds several embedded operating systems. Even though I'm in the Tools Group, most of us in Tools are intimately familiar with the intricacies and challenges of operating systems. Mark's presentation reminded me of many internal discussions. It also reminded me how hard it is to maintain and improve a large, legacy code base.

E6500 Part II & Cutting the Cord

2009-01-14T10:39:00.001-08:00

Update on my E6500 post. Things are improving in the driver department. Since that post, Dell has released new apps/drivers for: Sound, DCP, Fingerprint Reader, Embassy, and the Webcam. I'm no longer having most of the problems I reported, except suspend is still flaky when the mobile broadband card is enabled, and DCP still really sucks. As soon as I figure out how to run the mobile broadband card without DCP, I'm uninstalling that app. Many thanks for the numerous helpful comments and the commiseration.

On my recent post about Celine's Tech Support, the other cable provider showed up today to disconnect my old cable. It's funny that they still have to send someone up the pole to do this. This cable switchover got me thinking. The only thing I really want is a fat, unregulated pipe to the internet. From such a connection, I can get all of my communication and entertainment needs. Of the very few TV shows I do like to watch, they are all available online. And there are many cheap VOIP solutions. Maybe once I wean the 4-year-old off Sprout and PBSkids…

The telecoms have unified the delivery TV/Internet/Phone over a single cable. What I wonder is when the services will truly merge into a single box using TCP/IP. Sadly, I'm sure it will still cost > $100 per month.

Twitter vs. Facebook

2009-01-07T07:49:00.001-08:00

I'm looking for some advice on microblogging etiquette and usage. I have both twitter and facebook accounts, but I haven't figured out when I should use twitter vs. facebook status/news feed.

For a while, I had twitter and facebook connected via the facebook twitter app. This app allows your tweets to automatically update your facebook status. It's interesting, but it's one-directional. Updating my facebook status directly doesn't produce a tweet, and tweets from others don't show up in my facebook news feed.

I often wonder if I need both services. On the one hand, twitter is far more dynamic and instantaneous, and certainly the folks I'm following on twitter don't exactly match my friend list in facebook. On the other hand, in most cases my posts to twitter are equally applicable to my facebook feed (with the notable exception of @friend twitter posts that would be confusing for others on my facebook feed.)

So my question to you: how do you use facebook status vs. twitter? Do you connect the two with the twitter facebook app? Would you also like to see these technologies merge?

Tech Support for Geeks

2009-01-05T07:22:00.001-08:00

Over the holiday break, I waited on the phone 30 minutes to hear a tech support person sing Celine Dion in my ear while telling me to reset my cable modem.

Ok, let me back up a bit.

I switched to a new Cable/Phone/Internet provider last week. You know the drill – the promotional period expires on your current plan and your monthly bill goes up 30%. Fortunately, there are two Cable providers (Comcast and RCN) in my town, and Verizon FiOS is coming this year. Hooray for competition, although would it kill these companies to just make the promotional price the regular price and keep me as a customer? Oops my bad. I forgot that Capitalism = bilking money from as many customers as possible for as long as possible.

Anyway, post-install my internet kept dropping for a couple of seconds every few minutes. This "feature" really upset my Software VPN client. Plus, I was nowhere near the peak bandwidth provisioning for my new service. So I placed the dreaded call to Tech Support. After 30 minutes, I get the aspiring American (ahem) Idol contestant singing Celine under his breath while telling me to reset my modem. Um, thanks dude. Can we try something else? He says I have to call back when the connection is down. I reply that hitting a 2 second window might be tough with a 30 minute call wait time. Long story short: threatening call to salesperson, visit by computer-savvy tech, removed hardware, and things are working.

<sigh.> I hate Cable companies, perhaps even more than I hate Cellular companies.

Attention service providers of the world: I, and vast numbers like me, know more than every single one of your first line tech support people. I will pay you extra money to let me talk to a real engineer when I have a problem. Save Celine for my grandmother.

I’m addicted to information

2008-12-28T19:05:00.001-08:00

Over this lovely holiday break, I have decided to catch up on {everything}. Starting next year off with a clean to do list seems like a good idea. Before I left work for the holidays, I managed to get my inbox down to 3 or 4 items. (If you think you're one of those 3, you'd better remind me via email.) But email is just one of my problems, an antiquated one in fact.

Most of the good stuff comes in through RSS feeds. I counted them a couple of days ago: 97 feeds. They breakdown roughly into the following categories: Business, Culture, Humor, Software, Technology, Work, odds and ends. Unfortunately, many of these feeds have high update rates, like BoingBoing, LifeHacker, and the collection of work-related feeds. Even PlanetEclipse, my first RSS feed, has become a challenge to follow in my expanding list. I've already dropped several others because the signal-to-noise ratio was too low.

But I can't let go of my current list of 97. Every day I think, maybe I'll drop this one or that one, but then I pick up a new software utility, laugh at a good cartoon, find out about a cool tool, or learn something new about art/politics/technology/photography/music/whatever. And almost every day, I find YAF (yet another feed) that I think maybe I'll subscribe to…just for a little while…just to try out it. Dammit.

We have reached information saturation: Email, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, podcasts, blogs, RSS, …. (I don't even turn on my TV anymore.) Either someone needs to install one of those Matrix ports into the back of my skull, or we need to move way beyond reddit, delicious, and digg to get useful, personalized information.

Oh well. Here's to a New Year and another 100 feeds.

Dell E6500 – good hardware, but lots of software problems

2008-11-24T18:02:00.001-08:00

I recently found myself in the market for a new home computer. I have a D820 at work, which has been working fine for a while now that I'm past the Vista pre-SP1 headaches, so I decided to look at the new Dell Latitude E series. The E series is the next generation business line, and the hardware specs on the E6500 I ended up buying are excellent: Core2 Duo T9600 2.8GHz, WUXGA screen, 250G hard drive will free fall sensor, 4G RAM, and lots of goodies that are part of the base platform. Additionally, Dell has completely redesigned the packaging of their Latitude line, and it's much more solid and streamlined that past versions.

A laptop is only as good as how well it travels, so I decided to take the E6500 on a business trip to Europe last week (Eclipse Summit Europe for those following on the Planet). I only put the basics on the laptop before my trip, because I wanted to prove out the system before loading it down. Sadly, even with only the basics installed, I had a ton of problems that all point to unstable drivers and some lousy software from Dell. Here's my review:

Dell Control Point (DCP) is disappointing. DCP is sort of a replacement for Dell Quickset. It displays brightness, volume, battery life, and other on-screen indicators when you press the Fn+ key combinations. Beyond Quickset-like features, DCP provides a dashboard for managing power settings, network/wireless connections, display settings, and the security settings. This is where it fails to impress. I'm ok with the duplication between DCP and the Windows Control Panel, but DCP is slow and buggy. The worst aspect is the network connection manager. There are 5 network devices on the laptop: a gigabit Ethernet port, dial-up modem, Bluetooth, WiFi, and WLAN (cellular internet access). DCP is used to enable, disable, and switch between the various devices. WiFi isn't supported yet (coming soon!) and WLAN is just plain flaky, with multiple clicks required to establish a cellular connection and no progress indication along the way. Added to that is that the WLAN driver crashes regularly. DCP needs a few more software revisions before it's ready for general use.
The Embassy Trust Suite is even worse. The Trust Suite is used to configure the TPM (the hardware security chip) and the associated security devices: fingerprint reader, smart card readers, and hardware passwords. It's confusing, clumsy, and unreliable. The setup steps required to take ownership of the TPM, establish all of the various passwords (TPM, Admin, BIOS, hard drive), register your biometrics, and then tie this into Windows security are not for the faint of heart. The Trust Suite doesn't do much to explain all of this either. At one point during setup, I was certain I had locked myself out of the TPM for good.
Speaking of biometric, the FPS fingerprint reader works about half the time coming out of suspend. (Cold starts are more reliable.) Biometric identification plugs in at two levels: pre-boot (BIOS) and windows login. First, at the BIOS level, the pre-boot authentication module fails to read a fingerprint about half the time. Normally, pre-boot will default to asking for your BIOS password if you fail to supply the correct fingerprint, but in this case, it doesn't even give a failure message on fingerprint reading. It just hangs. This really sucks coming out of standby when you're forced to do a hard restart and lose your open applications. If you get past this, then there's the windows logon, where again the fingerprint reader works about half the time. Fortunately in this case, it tells you that it's not working, and you can just enter your windows password. Looks like I'll be turning the TPM off for now until Dell and Embassy can supply some decent drivers and software. I truly shudder to think of an IT group trying to deploy full TPM and biometric security with this laptop. I can just imagine the flurry of help desk calls.
Suspend is flaky. Stop laughing! I know conventional wisdom is to blame Windows for suspend problems, but the problem is almost always third-party application software or drivers that don't deal with suspend/resume events properly. This single issue makes the E6500 virtually unusable for travel. On my D820, I suspend and resume between home and office several days in a row without reboots (and this is with Vista!). Not so with the E6500. I've had to do so many hard restarts after failed resumes that I've given up on suspend for now. Given how little I have on this machine, it really points to the weakness of the Dell-supplied drivers.
Some other annoyances: The IDT audio driver installs a service named stacsv.exe that occasional goes open loop and takes up 100% of one of the CPU's. I have to kill it regularly. The integrated webcam, while extremely handy for skype, doesn't come with a basic recording app similar to the Logitech Quickcam software. It comes with a control panel from CreativeLabs for brightness, face-tracking, etc., but this app has no recorder. (UPDATE: Dell/Creative released new webcam software on 11/26 that includes recording.) Finally, there's the nvidia video driver. The video card in this laptop is great, but Nvidia seems to think their control panel settings are more important than the Windows settings. I have a monitor color calibrator, and I installed a custom color profile for the laptop screen. Unfortunately, the nvidia driver overrides the windows custom color profiles, and I haven't yet figured out how to tell the nvidia control panel to stop screwing with the settings. Fortunately, the calibrator has a utility that diligently keeps forcing the calibrated profile to load. The datacolor tech support folks said they get a lot of complaints from nvidia users about this.

It's a shame that all of this nice hardware has been paired with such lousy software. I suspect a Linux install wouldn't fare much better, since Linux is even worse at device support on laptops. (Anyone ever configured a fingerprint reader in Linux?) I can hear the fanboys now…why don't you just buy a Mac?

Tags: dell, latitude, E6500, DCP, embassy trust suite, IDT, creativelabs, nvidia, datacolor

I am not a Web Designer

2008-10-17T10:42:00.001-07:00

I always feel out of my element when I have to design a webpage. Sure, I can use an HTML editor just as good as the next person, but designing site usability and flow is another matter. Recently I came across an inexpensive product called Mockups, which as its name suggests is a mockup program for designing websites. The product is ridiculously simple to use, and it produces conceptual mockups of pages:

I like the whiteboard look because it keeps you from stressing about the details (fonts, colors, icons, etc.) and helps you concentrate on the big picture. You can try it out online. It runs on Adobe AIR, and you can use the desktop version offline. The main feature I wish it had is the ability to make the links in a mockup jump to other mockups. This would be very helpful in making a dynamic mockup of site flow. Still, it's a nice tool.

Tags: website mockups, balsamiq

FIRST Robotics

2008-10-15T13:13:00.001-07:00

A colleague of mine pointed me to this very positive review of Wind River Workbench, our Eclipse-based environment for device software development. This customer was thrilled to use a product that "just works" after it's installed. He's also a big fan of Eclipse. The most humorous part of the review:

The good people at Wind River allow you to download a trial version of Workbench, after you fill out a form about a mile long and agree to give them your first born child.

(Actually Roger, we don't require that you give us your first born. However, we do ask that you rename your child. You may pick from our convenient list of executive names.)

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an awesome not-for-profit organization created by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, the "Luke" Prosthetic Robotic Arm, and several other cool things. Their mission is:

to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.

The FIRST Robotics Competition is one of the programs run by FIRST, and Wind River supplies students Workbench and VxWorks. In grad school, I dabbled in robotics while working on my thesis, and I love reading their mailing lists--sensors, actuators, algorithms, oh my! I'm also thrilled to see groups like FIRST spurring interest in Science and Engineering in the US.

Tags: FIRST, workbench, vxworks, robotics, luke, segway, robotics

I love OCD

2008-08-06T17:41:00.001-07:00

No, I'm not talking about locking the front door exactly 3 times before going to bed or using a new bar of soap each time I wash my hands à la Jack Nicholson. I'm talking about On-Chip Debugging – using JTAG tools for device software debugging.

I got my start at Wind River working on JTAG-based debuggers. A couple of years ago, my team integrated Wind River's JTAG emulators into our Eclipse-based product, Wind River Workbench. It was quite a challenge connecting hardware debugging to a debugging framework focused on application development, and the Device Debugging and Target Management projects spun out of that effort.

Today I manage our Eclipse open source contributions, but I still sit next to my OCD buddies. When they're not nervously clicking their retractable pens, they're writing firmware for our JTAG emulators. Today, they released a cool new emulator that blows away their previous products:

If you're a "desktop refugee" who's just started writing software for devices, you're likely only familiar with agent-based debugging. A debug agent is the hidden software app that runs with your OS and helps you debug your application. But to get that OS running on a piece of custom hardware, you need JTAG. JTAG allows you to stop the entire system by stopping the processor itself, to directly debug kernel code/ device drivers / ISR's, and to directly configure processor and peripheral registers.

However, JTAG is great for application development too. I personally think its coolest feature is the ability to trace every line of software executed on a running system without any instrumentation in the code. Modern embedded processors, in addition to supporting JTAG-based debugging, also support JTAG-based trace. Software crashing? Turn on trace and see exactly when the code went out to lunch. Getting a hardware exception? Turn on trace and see what code was executing immediately prior to the interrupt. Need to profile a specific set of routines or examine code coverage? All of this can be done with JTAG Trace.

This is "god mode" access to your hardware, and it's why I love OCD. Still using printf? As Nelson would say:

Virus (Scanner) Infestations

2008-07-22T11:26:00.001-07:00

Returning to the two recent themes of bloated software and fixing broken computers, I spent this weekend with my in-laws for a family reunion. Unfortunately for me, visits to family members almost always include family computer maintenance. On tap this time was the usual problem: "my computer is running slowly". But in this case, the problem wasn't spyware. The computer in question is a P4 1.6 GHz with 256 MB of memory running XP. Not smoking by today's standards, but certainly capable of running XP and one additional app as long as the background crapware is kept to a minimum. My father-in-law runs a small business, and he's been using the same apps for several years to keep the books and manage his customer interactions.

In this case, the background crapware was the virus scanner. This machine was running a fairly recent version of Norton Internet Security. Norton Antivirus was on the computer when it was purchased several years ago, and at the time, the version running was commensurate with the resources and capabilities of the system. But software never gets smaller and faster, does it? It only gets slower and more bloated, and that's what's been happening to the Norton products for years.

So why did my father-in-law upgrade to a newer version? Because the software told him to. Virus and spyware scanners are notorious for dire warnings to ill-informed and fear-stricken users that they have to upgrade to the latest version in order to be "fully" protected. "You're one click away from having your identity stolen!" I'm not talking about keeping virus definitions up-to-date (always important). I'm talking about full upgrades of the software to get all of the latest "features". In the case of Norton, the task of virus/spyware scanning has morphed into an entire suite of products that plug into everything you do. This means more background processes, more memory consumed, and more strain on system resources…or on my father-in-law's computer: massive hard-drive thrashing.

This is an out-of-box experience problem. Norton (and other software packages like it) should check the current system specifications before suggesting a massive upgrade. A simple message like, "you really need more memory and a faster hard drive before you upgrade to this new version," would really be welcomed. An even a better solution would be to write better software. Just because computers have more cores, more speed, more memory, and faster and bigger hard drives doesn't mean software should expand to fit. The entire software industry, Eclipse included, needs to take a step back and take a hard look at this problem.

I really feel for computer users like my father-in-law. Outside of my "geek circle", everyone else I know is in the same user category as he is. They need us to make life easier for them. My advice to the fear-stricken: keep Windows and your browser up to date, install AVG Free instead of Norton or anything else, use Firefox with the NoScript add-on, and then use some common sense when browsing the web and reading emails.

P.S. If you find yourself in this situation with Norton, be warned that there are compatibility problems between Norton Internet Security Suite and XP SP3. In our case, internet browsing stopped working completely. Norton's uninstall was not successful removing all of the Norton stuff, and the only thing that saved the day is a nice removal utility on Symantec's website that appears to properly clean up everything. I was mere moments away from losing another entire day with a system reinstall.

tags: norton, avg, firefox, noscript, xp sp3, software bloat

Is Vista another ME?

2008-07-01T13:10:00.001-07:00

I have an ongoing lunchtime discussion with some of my coworkers about Vista. We've covered the usual topics: the hardware requirements, the OS footprint, the driver challenges, comparisons to Ubuntu and Mac, etc. Lately we've been drawing parallels between Vista and Windows ME.

Windows ME (Millennium Edition), as you old timers will recall, was the last version of Windows on the 9x kernel (Windows 95, Windows 98). Microsoft had already released Windows 2000, based on the NT kernel, and Windows XP came less than a year after ME's release – supposedly unifying 2000 and ME (NT kernel + nice UI).

There were many unfortunate souls, mostly home users, that bought computers with Windows ME during the year before XP came out, and they suffered mightily with a buggy product that didn't at all improve the 9x product line. Many never upgraded to XP until they finally bought new computers. Friends and family members are always asking me to fix their computer, and back then, I avoided Windows ME like the plague. Even tackling a computer riddled with spyware today ("I swear I never visited that site") is more palatable than ME maintenance was back then.

As an early adopter of Vista, I've felt a lot like a Windows ME customer, living through the "Vistaster" as Fake Steve calls it. Those feelings have been further exacerbated by the talk of Windows 7 and the prolonged life of XP.

But wait…is that a light I see at the end of the tunnel? Yesterday marked XP's last hurrah on OEM machines. It's all Vista now. SP1 (the real first customer release of Vista) has fixed a lot of performance problems for me. Most of my driver problems have gone away, except Cisco's software VPN client, which remains crippled at best. I've tweaked Vista in several ways (goodbye Windows ~~Offender~~ Defender). I've found a replacement Flip 3D that works like a Mac. And I've added more RAM. There are still some annoying quirks for me—docking with multiple monitors continues to be a problem…I think nVidia is to blame—but for the most part, my system is finally running well.

It remains to be seen how well Microsoft will support Vista moving forward. Vista could still follow the path of ME. Many companies, including my own, are still shying away from Vista adoption. Yet I suspect that Windows 7 will be a long time coming, and Vista will improve simply because of its extended shelf life. Still, you can't help but chuckle when you see a crazy guy throwing eggs at Ballmer. Can I get in on that?

Tags: vista, windows me, vistaster, windows 7, ballmer, microsoft, nvidia, fake steve

Android will be open source…eventually

2008-06-04T08:31:00.001-07:00

It's been a few months since the initial buzz of the Android SDK release, and the technology itself continues to look great. Ed Burnette recently posted a blog indicating Android will be 100% open source. In it he notes that Google says they fully intend to open up all of their code using appropriate open source licenses (including EPL!), but they're not yet ready because some of the API's aren't done. They're afraid of having to support bad API's forever. Yes, that sounds familiar, and of course the Eclipse response is: maybe if they opened up their API's, others could then help them evolve those API's to a point where the overall community was happy. We have provisional API's in Eclipse for exactly this reason. ~~At a minimum, I wish Google would publish a timetable (gasp!) for getting this code opened up.~~ Ed says Google will open (most) everything by the end of 2008. Please see the comments for details.

I want to revisit the two requests I made in my original post.

I call on Google to fully embrace an open development model, with diverse contribution and full transparency.

They're getting there, sort of. There's still no word on exactly how the development model will work after they open the code up. Those who know me know that I'm passionate about how Eclipse projects run, and I want to see Google follow a similar process. I believe it's their only real hope for creating a developer community to evolve the base platform, rather than just having an adopter community to consume Android. In Eclipse, we specifically differentiate between developer, adopter, and user communities for precisely this reason.

I call on the OHA alliance members to pony up some engineers to augment Eclipse with additional Android tooling.

This is a chicken-and-egg problem. The Eclipse ADT (Android Development Toolkit) plug-in code needs to be opened up before others will start helping with it. My bias is that ADT becomes an official Eclipse project, of course, but the open source development model Google decides to use for Android overall is the bigger problem to solve.

Maybe I'm just impatient. It certainly takes a while before young Eclipse projects figure out how to maximize the benefits of the Eclipse Development Process, and they already have plenty of examples of what good projects should look like. I wish Google would ask for some help.

Tags: Android, Eclipse, Open Handset Alliance, OHA, gPhone, Google

Business of Software Conference

2008-06-02T14:16:00.001-07:00

Mike recently announced that he'll be speaking at Joel Spolsky's
Business of Software conference this September in Boston. I'm excited about this conference, because it's an intimate size (like Eclipse Summit Europe), it's right in my backyard, and I'm a big fan of Joel's philosophy of running a software company. Plus the speaker lineup looks really good, especially now that Mike's name is on the list.

Thanks to Neil Davidson, the program chair and co-organizer, I have 2 free tickets to raffle off to the Eclipse Community. So if you're in the Boston area during this conference and you'd like to attend, please send me an email or leave a comment. I'll randomly pick a winner based on who buys me the best beer.

Tags: joelonsoftware, business of software, joel spolsky, eclipse summit europe, neil davidson, eclipse

Finally a Friend

2008-05-01T13:02:00.001-07:00

I know, I know…shame on me for taking so long to become a Friend of Eclipse or FOE. I've paid my dues to Eclipse in a lot of ways, and now I can add Pay Pal to that list.

What prompted me to do it? Altruism, love, sense of obligation or duty? Nope…bandwidth. I'm working from home today, where I have a very fast Internet connection (unlike work). But the download from eclipse was really dragging. So I became a FOE, used the FOE mirror, and got some very nice download speeds. Totally worth the money. Hey…at least I'm honest.

You know what they say: "Keep your friends close and your FOE's even closer."

Software wants to be free…

2008-04-16T12:46:00.001-07:00

…to run on the hardware of your choice. Or so Psystar wants you to believe about the Leopard OS. In case you haven't been following this story, Psystar has created a Mac computer clone and is selling them pre-installed with Leopard (or Ubuntu, XP, Vista, or nothing). It's called an Open Computer. According to Apple, this is a violation of Leopard's EULA. I don't use a Mac, and while I am occasionally wowed by these bright and shiny objects, I prefer to be voluntarily water-boarded by Vista. So this particular offer doesn't appeal to me.

However, I do find it both comical and a little scary. In the Operating System space, be it host OS's or real-time OS's, the name of the game is running on as many platforms as your customers can dream up. Wind River's operating systems have been doing this from the beginning. Like many others, we affectionately call this our "Matrix of Pain". PC vendors are no exception, of course. In fact, many of the critical problems people run into with Vista and Linux have to do with hardware driver problems (or non-existence) and not the OS's themselves. Apple is certainly lucky to have such a small set of platforms to support.

What's more disturbing is the in your face reminder that just because you pay a lot of money for a piece of software doesn't mean you own it. You merely own a license to use it, and that license may be more restrictive than you realize. Leopard's EULA says you are only allowed to run it on Apple-branded hardware. Most EULA's give you the right to install the software on one computer only, and in many cases moving that software to a new machine requires jumping through reactivation hoops while contending with subtle accusations by off-shore tech support personnel that you are pirating. Sure makes the software market feel utterly broken sometimes, doesn't it?

I wonder if I'm allowed to run Vista on Apple hardware. Do I own my hardware?

Tags: psystar, leopard, mac, wind river, apple, vista, ubuntu, xp, open computer, open pro

EclipseCon 08, we barely knew ye!

2008-03-20T23:28:00.001-07:00

It's a surreal experience to spend 8 months planning a conference only to have it over in the blink of an eye. Now I know how the Foundation Staff feels every year!

First, let me highlight a few of my favorite presentations: Diversity, Eclipse 4.0, RTSC, C++ GUI Builder (NAB), and p2. The Eclipse 4.0 presentation gave us a peek into some ideas for the next platform. I really like the presentation model changes, but to be honest, I'm not sold on the "Eclipse over the Web" concept. I'm sure it will be useful to some in the community, but probably not for the core tools of the device software development market. That being said, the platform team appears to be responding to our concerns about diversity and transparency, and I'm looking forward to Wind River helping with the effort.

The Realtime Software Components (RTSC) talk was an excellent technical outline of an exciting new project proposal in DSDP, and the NAB short talk included an amazing music player demo built on top of the MWT libraries (the run-time side of NAB). Finally, the DSDP BoF was an excellent discussion about creating off-Foundation packages, a la Wascana, for the embedded and mobile markets. We'll follow up with some notes soon.

Second, I want to reflect on the keynotes from yesterday and today. Fake Steve was a tough act to follow, but even so, Sam Ramji's talk left me wanting more. Sam was certainly honest about Microsoft being at the beginning of the open source learning curve. He outlined Microsoft's engagements with open source, starting in 2005. The dominant focus has been on interoperability, and the Open Source Software Lab, which Sam directs, has engaged in the following areas over the past few years:

Linux – Interoperability between Hypervisors
Mozilla – Firefox on Vista, open source windows media player 11 Firefox plug-in.
Apache and Subversion – better performance on Windows
MySQL – integration to Visual Studio through VSIP
PHP – running on Windows Server
Samba

He went on to outline new initiatives between Microsoft and the Eclipse Foundation:

Higgins and CardSpace – protocol collaboration and documentations and interoperability testing
SWT for WPF – Collaboration for improved SWT support on Vista (fixing things that bug Steve)

As a collection, these are great signs of progress, and perhaps if the talk had ended there, it would have been enough. But things didn't go quite as smoothly in the Q&A session. Sam punted on questions about when Microsoft would join Eclipse, what other Eclipse Projects they might want to get involved in, and whether C# support in Eclipse is something in which Microsoft would invest. In all cases, the answer was essentially, "we're still investigating." The biggest faux pas was Sam's answer to why Microsoft wasn't pursuing commit rights on any projects. His answer focused on the importance of interoperability over putting specific engineers into Eclipse development, but it left a bad taste in many people's mouths based on conversations I had afterwards.

In Sam's defense, I suspect he has a very challenging job promoting open source technology within Microsoft, and all evidence is that he's making excellent progress. Still, the indicators of true Eclipse support will be Membership in the Foundation and committers on Eclipse projects. I really hope we see that in the future. In the Community Spotlight panel, I predicted 2010 as the year when Microsoft joins Eclipse. But then I also predicted anti-gravity shoes and telepathic communication for that year, so it's probably best to ignore me.

Moving on to Cory Doctorow's keynote today. You know, there is a pattern emerging around Day 3 keynotes: they are sleeper hits! Cory's talk centered around the Information Economy and the fact that attempts to restrict information for profit have either failed or are in the process of failing. He talked about copyrights, open source software, music, movies, web collaboration, net neutrality, the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge, and Creative Commons. I have 2 pages worth of notes that I won't bore you with, since I doubt I'll do his talk justice. But he repeatedly illustrated the battle between information that has essentially become free and those who would continue to restrict access to information in the name of profit. Whether or not you agree with his thesis, it was certainly interesting and enlightening. My favorite quotation (slightly paraphrased): "When you hit Ctrl-R to reply to an email and the original email is copied into the new email, you have committed an act of copyright infringement….Imagine if lawyers had designed email."

Tags: EclipseCon, e4, RTSC, NAB, MWT, Wascana, p2, Fake Steve Jobs, Sam Ramji, Microsoft, Cory Doctorow, Higgins, CardSpace, SWT, WPF, Linux, Mozilla, Apache, Subversion, MySQL, PHP, Samba, DMCA, EFF, Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, Open Source Software Lab

EclipseCon Goodness

2008-03-18T14:15:00.001-07:00

It's great to start each day of a morning-to-night conference with a community run. Props to Darin for organizing the event. I may be slow, but at least I'm out there.

Monday brought my first Eclipse Board Meeting. Many thanks to the committer community for electing me to the Board! It's going to be a great learning experience and an interesting challenge. Once I get properly trained in my new duties (sometime in the next couple of weeks), I'll write more.

Monday also brought my tutorial, "So you want to run a project in Eclipse". I was pleasantly surprised by the excellent attendance and also by the number of folks in the community trying to start something new. You can find a pdf of the slides here. If you want the PPT version, please email me or leave a comment.

Also on Monday, we learned that Wind River won the Best Commercial Developer Tool award. As someone who has been working on this product for several years now, I'm thrilled by this community honor and proud of what the Wind River Workbench team has accomplished.

Tuesday started with the Fake Steve Jobs keynote, and it was hilarious and surprisingly poignant in a couple of spots. Dan is a humble, funny, and engaging speaker. My favorite picture in the presentation was the Cat and Mouse, aka Microsoft and Open Source. The photo cranks on the blog don't have the bubbles he used, so here they are.

Cat: "Let me show you my API's".
Mouse: "B*tch, I will cut you!"

Sam Ramji from Microsoft will have an opportunity to rebut tomorrow.

Tags: Fake Steve Jobs, EclipseCon, Sam Ramji, Dan Lyons, Eclipse

Running an Eclipse Project

2008-03-12T10:27:00.001-07:00

Well, the debate around e4 has showcased that we continue to be a vibrant and lively community. And I really want one of those "Evil Eclipse Platform Lairs" that Chris Recoskie talked about! The closest thing I could find online is a "Web Lair" from a band called ECLIPSE. Check out those mp3's and lyrics! I had an unexplainable urge to bite the head off of a bat. Nick, I challenge you to go Weird Al on one of their songs. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the e4 demos and discussions at EclipseCon.

And speaking of EclipseCon, I have to make a plug for my tutorial: So you want to run a project in Eclipse? It's at 4pm in Room 206.

This tutorial will cover the entire project lifecycle, eclipse philosophy, infrastructure mechanics, and some (hopefully) interesting advice on keeping project sponsorship relevant to your company. In other words, it's a collection of the mistakes I've made.

Please note: The printed program has me in the Theatre, which is wrong. I had to bump myself (I am the scheduler) from the Theatre to Room 206 because the event staff needs to setup the Theatre for the awards ceremony and game show. So please show up at 4 pm in Room 206 if this tutorial topic interests you.

Tags: eclipsecon