Hash Star

a hardware hacker or a software hacker

2008-04-04T23:16:00.001+11:00

When was young and was just introduced to work of computers, I was fascinated by the fact that I was able to command a machine to things. I was able to get the computer to do simple and complex calculations (well, complex for a 15 year old), wrote a simple lottery prediction program etc. Now that I have been a practicing engineering for the 16 years, I was wondered if the way I do my work has been influenced by my upbringing.

Looking around at the people at my work and others who I have worked with in the past, it appears that the one with the strongest engineering process are those who have not been introduced to a computer at an early age. I think that this falls back to fact that I have develop some habits and some of these habits are rather bad.

Some of the bad habits that I have tend to use is try to jump into coding at a stage that is much too early in the development process. I do some analysis, some design, some prototyping of code, however I feel that I don't do enough of it before actual implementation.

What are some of your bad habits?

daylight savings debacle

2008-03-31T21:13:00.001+11:00

For most of the computers, mobile phones and PDA in Melbourne, this weekend that just went past was suppose to be weekend that the daylight ended for the summer of 2007/2008. When I turn on mobile phone on, it asked if I wanted to changed the time twice, once for original time, and the second time for the new time. It finally set itself to the correct time.

I have a proposal, extend the NTP services so that it provides daylight savings information, not just timing information. When my computer, or mobile phone or any other electronic equipment that requires the current time, daylight savings information could be returned, particularly the date when it starts or ends. The NTP server could easily work out where the request coming from based upon its IP address, and respond with the correct information.

Standard or not?

2008-03-18T23:46:00.002+11:00

What the main purpose of a standard? Joel Spolsky just wrote about the troubles brewing between Microsoft and the others about web standards. From an engineering perspective, there are really two type of standards, one that everyone follows and one that is created for the rest to follow. Essentially, I am saying that most standards have a time frame clause. Typically, the time frame clause is not part of the standard it self. The time frame clause is usually dictated by the market forces and engineering advances.

For example, take the USB standard. It started with an idea of replacing the myriad of serial and parallel ports on a PC with a port that is universal and simple to connect. So the Universal Serial Port was invented, rubber stamped at version 1.0 and deployed. It quickly become version 1.1, by quick I meant in 3 years time. Then in 2002, USB2.0 was rubber stamped and deployed with great success. The succession in the USB is driven by the technology advances and market demand of digital products and convergence. This IBM article has a nice history of the USB and how it evolved.

In my daily work as an embedded engineer, I am faced with the same decision at the start of most projects, do I adopt a current standard, or do I burn a blazing trail by defining my own standard? You know, I usually choose to adopt an existing standard. Firstly, if the standard is matured, it does not have to be debugged. Secondly, the bit of work I am doing will usually have to be interfaced to another component, or module or widget. So by adopting a standard, some define way of interface is available off the bat.

Unless the project is trivial, defining your own standard is usually a bad idea. It eats up the time that is used for the standard definition, and also the errors in it will have to be removed before it stablised.

SongBird

2008-03-12T00:06:00.002+11:00

I came across a fantastic opensource Music/Web mash up application after reading about in on LXF the other day. It is build upon the Mozilla platform, same as Firefox. Quoting from their songbirdnest.com website,

Songbird is a player and a platform. Like Firefox, Songbird is an open source, Open Web project built on the Mozilla platform. Songbird provides a public playground for Web media mash-ups by providing developers with both desktop and Web APIs, developer resources and fostering Open Web media standards, to wit, an Open Media Web.

I was curious, so I downloaded and installed in my Fedora 8 machine as well as my Windows XP machine. I instantly liked it when I started in up on my Linux box, but it went down a couple of notches when I started it up on my Windows box. Why? Well, it seems to take forever to load up on my Windows box, but a great deal quicker on my Linux box, not too sure why.

So what is so special about Songbirdnest. Well, first of all, the team at songbird nest are a mashup of developers that were previously involve in the Winamp projects and Yahoo! Music Engine. With such predigree, and an audacious name, the Pioneers of the Inevitable, I am sure that great and innovative things are going to happen.

The other thing I like about it is that it is open source, so if I want to tweak just a little bit or re-engineer it, I can. Not that I would do that, the pioneers are doing a great job.

The one thing that strikes me is that Songbird looks iTunes. It has the three control buttons on the top left hand corner, a list of folders/categories along the left hand side and the mashed up content taking the majority of the window. However, as it is an open source and a great new feature known as feathers, this is changeable. Feathers allows the appearance and behaviour of Songbird to be altered or tweaked.

I am going to check Songbird out further. It may even take over Winamp or xmms as my default music player.

Woz, the iPhone and the MacBook Air

2008-03-05T21:53:00.002+11:00

Steve Wozniak visited Sydney a couple of days ago, and had some interesting comments about the latest products from Apple. In an article from The Age, he has some harsh words on two of Apple's star products, the iPhone and the MacBook AIR.

It also a surprise me to hear that Apple when with EDGE technology rather than a fully fledge 3G technology for their phone to conserve battery life. I would have thought that Apple is never to take a step backward, and it is always on the leading edge (almost).

From an Australian perspective, the push is for 3G to be a technology of choice with CDMA and 2G being phased out soon. So getting an iPhone in Australia is probably not a wise choice, unless you are after the Wow factor.

Now, the Wow factor is definitely going for with the MacBook AIR. Come on Steve, what are you guys on when you came up with this one, some hippie beans? It may look cool, light to carry around, but it is hardly expandable. To me, it is just an extemely big PDA. Perhaps it is the latest incarnation of the Apple Newton.

Photo Credit: Bob Pearce

Graduate Engineers

2008-02-27T22:08:00.001+11:00

Today I looked around my office and noticed that there were a distinct lack of graduate engineers, for any discipline. My company is quite large, and employ engineers from a wide variety of engineering streams, however I can only see one graduate engineer from a staff of about sixty engineers. This is a trend that I have noticed with a number of companies that I have worked in the past. So my question, where are all the graduate engineers?

One company that I worked for did have a number of graduate engineers, the company was provide designing services to the consumer electronics and biomedical industry. Perhaps these industry are more "in" than the automotive electronics industry that my company is in currently.

I have been a long timer reader of Joel Spolsky's blog and Joel has an unbelievable way of hiring graduates. Joel aims to get the best graduate in the country the work for them. He published a great article on their way of getting great software developers to work for them, with a nice spiel on their internship program.

Google has also great work conditions as well, and I also believe that they also try to attract the best graduate to work for them. With Google's perks and benefits, it is no wonder that the graduates are immediately attracted to them. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about this back in 2005, and I don't believe that the culture has changed that much today.

From an employer perspective, would you want to hire a graduate? It all boils down to you business model.

If your business process needs to be tightly controlled and products that you product are human critical, like transport or utility, graduate engineers are probably not the prefer option. Unless you are prepare to mentor them and ensure that the correct process are followed.

If you business process are not too tightly controlled, and the focus is on getting the job done quickly. Graduate engineers would probably be the one to go for as they are usually the more creative. Creativity tends to get the results and able to provide solutions to the problem much quicker than the more experience engineers.

Flame wars: vim vs emacs

2008-02-26T22:28:00.004+11:00

One of the great flame wars on the internet is the on-going debate between VI and emacs. Both camps has its supporters. Doing a google search on the term vi vs emacs brought up 6020 hits.

There are even a site that are trying to unify VI and emacs, in some ways this is a good thing.

In many ways, wars is a very appropriate term for the discussions that occur on the internet about which is better, VI or emacs. Real wars where people die don't really solve any problems, it does bad things such as people dying and many other people becoming homeless and great suffering.

These flame wars just waste energy on the part of the participants.