dinkatron

This Xmas thing isn't getting any easier.

2009-11-03T12:02:00.001Z

Sony Android Xperia - long rumoured and teased it's now official. Sony releases an Android powered X10 (wait a minute what happened to X3-X9?) for the discerning buyer who walks straight past the dumphone with apps Satio. But not in time for Xmas - grr.

I like Sony phones - the call quality is excellent and the hardware is usually pretty slick and reasonably rugged. Now it's Hero vs Milestone vs X10!!

Xmas Androidicus

2009-11-02T17:19:00.001Z

With Hallow'een over the thinking turns to xmas pressies and finally a decent Android 2.0 phone arrives (Nov 9) in Europe Motorola MILESTONE (SlashGear).
Terrible name (I suppose it's better than calling it 'RC1') - and it is replacing my current bias towards the HTC Hero.

Yes I know HTC has announced the HTC Hero will support Android 2.0 and that the ROM update improved the original slowness.
HTC either put a faster processor and bigger screen in the Hero or drop the price in Europe (a la $99 Droid Eris) and we'll talk, k.

Can't wait to see some real reviews of this thing and the unlocked pricing.

Alestic - encrypting ephemeral storage

2009-10-23T17:48:00.001+01:00

Encrypting Ephemeral Storage - handy for me since there will be potentially sensitive data being processed by my slave EC2 nodes.
This data is transitory, the slaves delete it as it is processed. Amazon also wipes it when you are finished. Still someone, somewhere could break into Amazon and physically steal the disks / SAN or wherever Amazon puts your data. So to follow the "encryption-at-rest" principle, even this must be encrypted. So I'm very happy to see a very simple how-to from Alestic.

Swarm - Scala distributed processing

2009-10-03T10:34:00.001+01:00

Google code project to distribute processing over the grid. Built on scala. Swarm uses Scala's portable delimited continuations to efficiently allows code to migrate across nodes as it accesses the data. This is not a new idea - it was first touted in the AI community as mobile agents.

This kinda seems at odds with current map-reduce style distribution - as popularised with Hadoop and the excellently elegant Gridgain. With these the focus is on problem decomposition - map your problem down into independent computational blocks and transport to the data / access the data at low-cost. The aim is to speed up processing by distributing the computation problem over the grid.

Swarm while an interesting use of Scala technology, seems only really applicable to problems where the data cannot migrate / relative cost of transporting the data is too high. In such problems we simply want to execute some kind of operation on a local system/data set. It also seems to be targetted at computation which is effectively traversing a set of heterogenous data nodes. If there were identical, or there is only one node, we could just use Gridgain today to achieve the same thing.

iPhone and O2 and the abuse of position.

2009-10-02T20:45:00.000+01:00

If your spidey senses were tingling uneasily about the exclusive deal O2 had with the iphone here, it turns out that O2 weren't even going to unlock your iphone when your contract had expired. WTF? Over-priced gouging contract expired - give me my phone! Another case of not owning what you pay for. O2 says they will review this now that they no longer have an exclusive.

Amazon ate my homework kid - wins settlement and establishes a kind of precedent

2009-10-02T14:34:00.001+01:00

Amazon settles lawsuit over deleted Kindle copy of '1984' - nice - you now own your digital content. But what will it mean for DRM - remember Walmart threatening to shutdown the DRM server and then backpedaling. Or indeed for remote kill switches in general? What happens when what Amazon/Apple/Microsoft wants to remove something from their content delivery network, but the customer disagrees?

Acer Android phone

2009-09-28T18:28:00.001+01:00

Acer A1 Android Phone: 768MHz CPU, 5-Megapixel Camera, Wi-Fi, GPS - Acer A1 Android Phone - Gizmodo

Having a bit of a thing watching Android phones arrive - I'm not getting an iPhone - O2/18-month contract/Paddy tax/too stingy/etc. There I said it. Presumably I can now get free counselling / govt. cash / free iphone - seeing as I'm now on the wrong side of the digital divide. I'm also waiting for a wee bit more commoditization of the market.

This one looks interesting why? Well faster processor - slightly slower than the iPhone, faster than HTC Hero, bigger screen than both of them, but interestingly marked as Android 2.0 - why so interesting? Well this AFAIK is the first version of Android that will make multi-touch part of the O.S. Currently HTC Hero patched their own impl onto Android - which works nicely (they stuffed up the initial release but have since released a ROM update that fixes the issues), but not all apps from appstore will support it. There were some reports on the net which reported that the Motorola DEXT/Cliq would be Android 2.0 - but not according to motorola. Seeing as Android 1.0 was beta and the G1 won't support 1.6 - I think I want to wait for a phone which definitely supports 2.0 before I kick my current dumbphone.

And here's where I flick the image over to the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!

2009-09-24T11:40:00.001+01:00

Courier - looks nice, really nice. Continuing the current vibe where Microsoft get tech stuff mostly right (Zune HD, Windows 7, shocker I know - but hey there's this). Microsoft's movement of Surface from eye-wateringly expensive installation for sales drones to wow the cash away from gullible rich people - to (if it works) pretty revolutionary tablet (sorry booklet) style product.

Allegedly in late production stage. I would definitely want to play with one.

Ferrofluid

2009-09-24T10:52:00.001+01:00

Props to PopSci for making me wish I was more nerdy than I currently am - Ferrofluid looks like a lot of fun - can't wait to see it pop-up in some over-designed bar / science installation.

Passing startup script to Amazon AMI image using Alestic goodies

2009-09-23T18:09:00.001+01:00

Alestic.com images allow you to run a startup script that is passes as a parameter to ec2-run-instance.
Fantastic. This couple with the handly runurl command (also from Alestic) allows me to nominate which S3-hosted Java JAR to run.
Allowing me the flexibiility to run mutliple different versions of a java-based runtime on top of a base AMI image.

Wait a minute... isn't multiple-runtime version support something that goes away when you move to the cloud... sadly not always.

Comparison of Android handsets

2009-09-14T12:39:00.001+01:00

Here's a nice comparison of android handsets via Phandroid.

All have the same speed processor (slower than iPhone 3GS). Screen size of Cliq approaching iphone (plus real keyboard!).

Fox News in homage to Onion

2009-08-18T11:37:00.001+01:00

National Healthcare: a breeding ground for terrorism? via Bad Science - and you thought the Death Panels that would exterminate Stephen Hawking were bad enough.

distributed key-value stores

2009-07-03T14:29:00.001+01:00

NOSQL rallycry for the distributed key value stores a.k.a distribute cache a.k.a. big hastable in the cloud. Didn't you know RDBMS is sooo last century? Not that the DB-vendors are going to be shaking in the boots anytime soon. RDBMS is going to be around for a long long time, but lets face it they just aren't sexy and there is lots of interesting technical stuff going on in the grid world.

Kohsuke fuses lego and nerd (as if that crossover needed more attention)

2009-06-09T16:47:00.001+01:00

Lego project - I'm not sure why I find this so fantastic, it's not the way he causually applies the Miller cylindrical projection to lego, it's that in my mind, there's a small bored child wandering away, muttering Daddy's gone all mental again.

YAAR (android rumour), but a juicy one

2009-06-08T16:01:00.001+01:00

Rumor: Sony Working on an Android Walkman - makes a lot of sense, pmp's don't compete on just hardware anymore, these days its all about the software. Sony's current walkman beats the iPod on hardware terms, but I would rather an iPod touch for two reasons both software:

web-browser - Sony's Netfront just doesn't quite cut it.
app-store - I travel a lot, so time-wasting is a high on my list.

Android provides a route to both - this would be great!

First law of computer science fires again - SimpleDB

2009-05-21T16:43:00.001+01:00

We like SimpleDB, we could get started with it quickly. What we didn't like were the usage restrictions, putting attributes up one at a time, we have a lot of attributes to fire up there on a continuous basis, but while we were getting to grips with the basics, the first law of computer science "wait long enough and the requirement will go away or someone else will do it" fired and we got batchput (25 records per request) - which is a lot better (but hey what about 1000). This was critical for us, since uploading records is something that needs to happen quickly - there's a timeliness requirement for us.

The next part of the problem was querying. We are limited to 250 records per select. So larger returned data sets which for us can be common given the current limitations of the select expression language, mean multiple requests. So we were very happen when the law fired again and the Amazon Web Services Blog: New SimpleDB Goodies: Enhanced Select raised the limit to 2500 items per request.

So our faith the AWS will keep putting some investment into SimpleDB is well placed!

Now if they can only add some operators to their select language: distinct, avg, min, max, sum we would really be cooking.

Emergency satire

2009-04-23T10:47:00.001+01:00

The sat. morning newstalk political satire has started blogging. Excellent. Check out this parody Johnny cash song: Lenihan Comes Around | The Emergency

Sayonara Ruby, Bonjour Scala

2009-04-02T11:25:00.001+01:00

The Register reports that the public ruby-shaped road accident that has been continuing twitter outages has finally led to the ejection of ruby in favour of functional JVM-hosted scala. The real winner here is the JVM and access to pre-existing Java API's. Must start looking into Scala - the Java Posse are always going on about how much they like it and being hosted on the JVM is a big win for them, as it clearly is for Twitter.

Twitter doesn't talk about why moving to JRuby was not an option for them (which is JVM hosted), but presumably the functional aspects of Scale w.r.t concurrency. Functional languages are extremely suited to this at a programming level - one of the reasons behind choosing Erlang for facebook chat. Plus Scala's type-inference is a real boon for programmers used to the static-typing support in IDE's.

So time to get a book and have a look-see.

Open Cloud Manifesto

2009-03-30T10:01:00.002+01:00

The Register just put up details of the Open Cloud Manifesto. This document can be summarised as "clouds are great, clouds with open-standards would be better". Common standards for security, data interoperability and portability, metering, monitoring and management. This is obviously a good idea "lets vote for open standards", but it is a tall order. Microsoft is miffed because (a) it wasn't invited to the manifesto-drafting tea-party and (b) because it is early to be drafting standards. It may have a point on (b) certainly for the M3 part (metering, monitoring and management). However two concerns are so critical to cloud-users that they deserve special accelerated attention:

Data portability ("Your cloud is useful, but I want to be able to get my data back!") - there's a working group dataportability.org that has already garnered some support (Google, Microsoft, etc) mostly driven by the social networks. Myspace, Google and Facebook are attempting to be the central-site that maintains the "record" of your social graph (who you know, what you like, what groups you join, how you communicate). They want your data to sell advertising plain and simple. For this, they provide some neat services, but lets be clear your data is the crown jewels and they are interested enough in allowing other sites to access your friend graph, but in a kind of hands-off way - no caching - kind of way. This isn't really portability. So this concern is still very much valid.
Security - how do I control access between me and the cloud and between the clouds themselves that manage my data. Luckily OAuth is now effectively a de facto standard here and so it is ready to be blessed as the official cloud standard.

However, the cloud manifesto goes further than open standards. It its section "Principles of an Open Cloud" point 2 is:

Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limiting their choice of providers.

and pigs might fly.

SimpleDB

2009-03-24T13:02:00.001Z

Started playing around with Amazon's DB. It's still in beta and there are a few niggly restrictions, but it is usable and "does what it says on the tin". It's a simple cloud-based storage mechanism for storing single rows of arbitrary data. The emphasis is on simple - single table stuff. So this is not going to be a replacement for your well structured database. However, one of the things that you notice when your system starts getting a lot of traffic is that there is an awful lot of data that is simply flowing over your servers that you would really like to store, report on and build some new cool things with. If only you had somewhere to collate and store this information. Enter Simp[leDB. Sure I could invest time and energy in bringing a data warehouse on line (if I could get it into the production setup) - which would certainly address some of simpleDB's usage restrictions, but this sort of task is exploratory. I want the freedom to start instrumenting and collecting data basically on a whim without incurring significant setup costs. Some stats will definitely be useful, plugging holes for current decision-making, others are more of the "suck-it-n-see" variety. Using simple DB solves two basic problems for me over just using one of the (many) mysql db's available to me:

There's an overhead with storing information in a production database. It needs to be properly setup in terms of disaster recovery, this needs to be tested. It needs to have a pruning and archiving schedule negotiated with the support people. Then there's the testing. This is a lot of pro-forma setup stuff which really is not what I need to have to invest in upfront. Sure if this thing takes off or outgrows SimpleDB's restrictions, then I can revisit this, but for now I don't want any roadblocks.
Neatly sidestepping organisational boundaries. We have many environments where I would like to gather data, but if I have to negotiate with each environment for storage, then I'm going nowhere fast, but moving the problem outside the network neatly sidesteps these issues. It also provides a natural place for me to centralise the information, something which for network partitioning issues would also be problematic to gain approval for.

In my mind these are both agile issues (start prototyping quickly and not having to get too much organisational buy-in to get started) which having an external cloud-based mechanism neatly solves.

Minority report UI video

2008-11-18T12:47:00.001Z

Pretty amazing video about the g-speak system that does the whole Minority Report gloves and computer interaction thingy. Microsoft surface - pah!

Nice graphical overview of US Spending

2008-10-26T10:22:00.001Z

Via Gizmodo fantastic images on how US spending breaks down for the main categories (defense, health, etc). You can see the interactive map on wallstats. And it looks nice to boot. Puts the 60 trillion CDO's somewhat into perspective (approx 20 years of US total tax-receipts).

Transactions, SOA and Asynchrony

2008-10-08T18:17:00.001+01:00

Gregor Hohpe is currently thinking about conversation patterns, this is excellent news. His book Enterprise Integration Patterns is really a excellent work on categorizing the different ways we have been connecting systems together. It is one of those books that you go, "of course, why hasn't someone done that already?". EIP is reallly about the kind of ways that we pass messages between systems (message-oriented processing), for example router-patterns, queuing patterns, etc. Conversation patterns are a higher-level and represent sets of exchanged messages.

From this point of view, they should be entirely specifiable in BPEL, since BPEL can be used to specify a sequence of exchanged messages. Now BPEL is normal used to implement a Business Process which just happens to exchange messages between peer systems, but it can also be used to verify that a set of exchanged messages between peers conforms to its specification - e.g. that message A was received before message B. In fact, this is how we test our own BPEL engine, we use BPEL to implement the conformance tests for the BPEL 2.0 specification.

The conversation patterns emerge from work on "Your Coffee Shop Doesn't Use Two-phase Commit". Which makes the point that most human systems don't use two-phase commit, possibly because humans don't support a XA-Resource API :-). We should remember that ACIDity and 2-phase commit are artificial inventions which stem from a centralised planning viewpoint. The real world doesn't use them. The internet mostly doesn't use them for peer-to-peer interactions. Of course, this isn't really news, BPEL as a language is built around the notion of compensating actions, effectively dropping transactions as a concept for loosely-coupled SOA systems. And BPEL is on version 2.0.

So what kind of conversation patterns could we dream up? Well Intelligent Agents came up with quite a few:

Dutch Auction
Contract Net protocol

Though these are quite complex protocols, so maybe too much. Some simpler ones are:

Subscribe to Events (subscribe, receive event, ...., eventually unsubscribe or go missing).
Submit Job ( submit job, get job ID, poll job ID, or recieve notification or job, cancel job, etc).
Submit Task (submit task, transfer task, take task, relinquish task, complete task, abandon task).
etc, pick your favourite peer-to-peer protocol and generify it, e.g. Ask a question, expect an answer -protocol

So what do we hope to get for this. Well if we can generify some of these protocols, we can make them interoperable. Does this mean they have to be SOAP-based. Nope it doesn't. But notice that they are all services (i.e. realisable by a single entity), for example the event service, the jobs service, the task service. So they are specifiable in BPEL.

However, there are a range of conversation patterns that cannot be specified in BPEL. These are true peer-to-peer protoocols. BPEL can only specify the message exchange semantics for one peer (typically the service provider), but if we have true, peers and there is no central authority, or entity realising the service, then it cannot be specified in BPEL.

Cloud computing and iPhones/iTouch

2008-09-19T16:52:00.001+01:00

Currently I'm often in the US for work, which is handy because work is close to an AppleStore and invariably I just have to go there and buy an iPod. In fact, given the exchange rates, I've had to go there every single time I've visited the US this year - there's a lot of people in Ireland that need cheap iPods.

So the current crop of pre-Xmas iPods arrived two weeks ago. Now I'm not sure I'm tempted - I have a 2nd-gen Nano and given that 4th gen are going back to 2nd gen form-factor and unusally for Apple kit, my 2nd-gen Nano is still going strong with battery life despite being used (and dropped) continuously.

But there is the new iTouch. It is pretty. I kinda want one - they are cheaper and slightly better than the old ones. I reason to myself that I want one for browsing the web (regardless of the fact that I'm pretty much connected to the net for at least 8 hours a day). I reason that I could have the holy grail, ubiquitous, fast, hassle-free access.

A lot of people are moving as much of their life (mail, docs, etc) onto cloud computing platforms (e.g. google/gmail/gdocs), meaning they can ditch the luggable and get a new sub-notebook / netbook. But I would go further. Why can't I pretty much do most quick tasks on an iTouch like formfactor.
email
banking
government services
messaging
light web-browsing
reading docs / pdf's.
social networking
We are about to reach the point where the majority of new data generated daily will not be generated by corporations, governments and businesses, but by individuals, primarily using social-networking sites. Will there be a similar tipping point where most of this data is coming not from PC's, laptops or subnotebooks but from iTouch / blackberry devices?

If so, doesn't this mean we have a lot of work to do? In the last wave of mobilisation, when the dangerously oversold WAP technology was being pitched as the 'mobile internet'. A number of banks put some part of the banking systems online. But the limitations of the technology really hampered solutions and most were failures. The limitations nowadays are not about the protocol, the hardware or the bandwidth. They are about the screen and the input mechanism. This is where a lot of the thought of the second-wave of mobilisation needs to happen. Using the limited screen space to maximum effect. Any application that I habitually use today online in a web browser should be possible on an iTouch. Not some limited feature set. The whole thing.

This means no long HTML forms, but paged forms are okay. I should be able to partially save information (park it while I answer a phone call). Pre-filling / guessing information would be useful. Providing standard information from my iTouch to supply information (hint semantic tagging) as well as have my learn information I provide to my various sites, to help me when I'm filling information on other sites.

Cool printer meets waterfall

2008-08-14T11:44:00.001+01:00

This Cool Waterfall in Japan naturally mixes dot-matrix style printing with waterfalls, to allow design messages to be scrolled onto the waterfall. The next obvious step would be to get a gamepad hooked up for some "downhill-skiing" waterfall game-action.