iPhone SDK, Leopard and 1.1.2

As I suspected, Apple plans to release an SDK for native apps on the iPhone next year. The official word is on Apple's Hot News site. They appear to have pre-announced the SDK which is likely to have its official announcement at MacWorld in January, and they say it will ship in February. I'm sure that this was the plan all along, and the developer frenzy has managed to flush out a pre-announcement to give some guidance to the market, which I think is a good move at this point.

There has also been speculation that the iPhone "runs Leopard". I think that the truth is likely to be a bit more subtle than that. There has to be a master code base for MacOSX, and efficient engineering management practices should try to minimize branches in that code base. The master code base has a release branch called "Leopard" and another one called "iPhone", but the differences between them should be as small as possible. Bug fixes and features get checked back into the master code base whenever possible. So the work put into Leopard is leveraged for the iPhone, and we should see some of the feature set that was announced for Leopard transfer to the iPhone.

I think there is a good chance that Apple will release iPhone 1.1.2 immediately after they release Leopard, and that some Leopard features will be included. One obvious feature would be localized versions of Mail and other apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, bringing the iPod Touch more in line with the iPhone's application set. There is a new and upgraded iChat in Leopard, and it would also make sense to release this for the iPhone/Touch.

I also noticed that the DTrace analysis/monitoring framework from Solaris 10 is included in Leopard. This is very cool, it provides a huge upgrade in observability for performance analysis of both desktop and server applications.

WWJD - What Would Jobs Do...

Somewhere in Apple there is a product team with a plan. We now have observed several steps unfolding in this plan, so I'm going to put myself in their place and try to make sense of the plan so far and where it could be going.

I have *no inside knowledge* of anything going on at Apple, this is all conjecture, OK?

Product teams have four big things that can be traded off against each other to some extent.

1. The release date
2. The available resources
3. The feature set at launch
4. The product quality at launch

For the iPhone, they waited until they had working prototypes in January, and set a release date for June that they kept to. The product quality at Apple has to be very high, and I think they did a great job with the iPhone at launch. However, products always take longer than planned, and we know that Apple delayed the launch of MacOSX Leopard so that they could put extra resources into the iPhone, so it was probably slipping at that point. The one thing that I think they were able to trade down to get a high quality product on the release date was the feature set. This is why I regard the iPhone as an unfinished product. To get a high quality product, you can simplify testing by having fewer features and fewer options in those features. This is the Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) approach I have mentioned before. Some simplifications at launch:

• US Market Only - no internationalization
• Basic camera support, no video capture (not even demo'd at the launch event)
• Relatively few preferences and options

Apple appeared to schedule bugfix and minor features releases shortly after launch (1.0.1 and 1.0.2), while concentrating development and testing to include internationalization for the worldwide rollout of the sister product, the iPod Touch and the international iPhone with 1.1.1. The Starbucks feature of the iPhone music store has its own roll-out issues, so it makes sense to add that feature as a major update rather than on initial launch.

I expect that Apple thought they had locked down the phone well enough in its first release and were surprised by the speed and extent of application and SIM based hacking. Adding digital signatures to prevent hacking in the initial launch version would have also made the final stages of debug and testing harder, so it makes sense that they didn't do it. Once Apple realized that they needed to lock down the phone to take back control of their product feature rollout plan, they  had to find extra resources to develop and test the extra security features. This had to steal resources from something else, so I expect that some features originally planned for 1.0.2 and 1.1.1 have been delayed.

Opening up a product for developers is a lot of work if you do it right. There are developer specific tools, APIs that need to be stabilized, extended and documented; training classes and developer support organizations to put together. We already know that Apple was pulling resources from Leopard development just to get the iPhone out of the door. We also know that Apple already has a developer support organization, but that organization already has its hands full trying to get Leopard out of the door as a high quality product with a lot of new features that need to be documented etc. Leopard ships this month, so Apple's developer support organization should now have some spare resources to focus its attention on doing the work required to do proper high quality iPhone developer features and documentation. Based on this analysis, the earliest I would expect to announce developer support is MacWorld in January, and that plan could have been set over a year ago. I also think Apple underestimated the demand from iPhone developers, but had no spare resources to do anything about it other than emphasizing Safari based applications.

The iPod Touch has a smaller set of applications that have been fully internationalized. The extra applications on the iPhone are the US specific ones. I still think this is a transitional problem, and I expect that a minor update in October or November will upgrade the iPhone to have more extensive internationalized support, and that the non-phone-specific applications will all end up on the iPod Touch as well. If I was planning the release calendar, I would bring out one new application in each release, along with a set of less exciting upgrades like internationalization.

There are three empty slots in the iPhone user interface. I think they will all be filled by the time we get to January's release. One will be the Finder, so that users can store and browse files and applications, one could be an iWork launcher to highlight some of Apple's own business oriented applications, and January's icon could be related to installing and managing third party applications, hopefully including Flash and Java.

Its possible that iChat could merge with the SMS tool, and I would expect video support to be a feature of the camera tool. I would like a terminal with ssh support, but that's not mainstream enough to get its own icon....

Of course, Steve calls the shots, but what do you think the three remaining icons will be used for? Let's collect some suggestions in the comments.

iPhone 1.1.1 and the iBrick

This blog just got mentioned by a Wired News posting about the iPhone. Other than some random spellings of my name I think it picked up on my points quite well.

I haven't hacked my iPhone, and it upgraded to 1.1.1 cleanly. The new features and upgrades are welcome, but the upgrade process didn't clear out the ever increasing amount of "Other Memory". I had resorted to removing videos from my iPhone to make space and avoid out of memory errors. You can see 1.6GB in the display below.



I went through the settings, cleared out deleted mail and safari history and it made no difference. I deleted all the content and it made no difference, so I re-loaded the iPhone from scratch, and it dropped to 14MB after I had put my content back.



There are some posts on the iPhone support forums about this problem, but no mention of an official fix from Apple. One user claims that it could be related to Google Maps, which I use quite often. I'm going to watch this "other memory" usage to try to figure out which apps are increasing it.

I haven't seen a clear explanation of what is going on inside the iPhone that makes hacking applications very different from hacking the carrier, and from my experience building myPhone I can hopefully clarify this issue.

There are two CPUs inside just about all phones of any type. One is part of a GSM modem module that interfaces to the phone network, the other is the application CPU that runs the user interface (e.g. OSX on the iPhone). For the Gumstix Goliath a Siemens MC75 module interfaces to the SIM card, and the GSM antenna directly, and has USB, serial and audio interfaces. The way all these GSM modems are managed is by sending it command sequences that would be familiar to any old-timers, its a derivative of the Hayes AT command set. Inside the iPhone is a similar module. The GSM modem has a low speed low power CPU with its own flash memory. The service providers don't like having people mess with this firmware, because it controls the wireless signaling, power levels and cellular communication protocol directly, and they have to be certified for connection to the GSM network. For our homebrew phones we buy Telit or Siemens modules off the shelf and don't mess with their internals, and they just work. Thats why we can build usable homebrew phones.

Since this firmware interfaces directly with the SIM card, it can contain code that locks the phone to a particular service provider. The iPhone's GSM modem firmware is locked to AT&T. In order to modify this firmware the unlock applications such as iPhoneSIMFree had to take advantage of a debug feature or security flaw to load modified firmware into the GSM modem. Since the GSM modem is a standard component, hackers were probably able to find out its supplier and part number and get hold of a lot of documentation on how it works.

With the 1.1.1 release it appears that Apple closed off some security holes that were being used to hack into the iPhone, but also digitally signed the code inside the phone. This means that any attempt to modify OSX or the GSM firmware breaks the signature, and since the CPUs have hardware support for digital signatures, its extremely difficult to get around this form of protection. Its now several weeks since 1.1.1 was released on the iPhone and iPod Touch and it hasn't been broken into yet. The hackers have to find and exploit a completely new security flaw to get into the application CPU first, then find a way into the GSM modem. It is then easy for Apple to figure out how they are getting in, and fix it in their next release. With Apple releasing monthly updates, there isn't a viable business proposition based on hacking iPhones.

I still think Apple has a lot of unreleased iPhone software in the pipeline and will open up to developers when it has pushed out a few more updates. I think the ideal audience for an iPhone developer launch is MacWorld San Francisco in January. The highest density of startups and developers is in the Bay Area, and its the anniversary of the iPhone launch. Thats as near as I'm getting to a prediction....

In the meantime, the developers who want something to do could join the OpenMoko project, help build applications for it and maybe even port the Linux based OpenMoko to the iPhone hardware. Thats what I will be working on when I get myPhone up and running....

What happened to the iPhone, and what comes next...

After the launch event last January, there was a lot of repetitive and shortsighted commentary about the iPhone, and I wrote a blog post about the way I thought Apple's strategy made sense and what the next few moves would be.

I think I got it broadly right, their strategy did make sense, and still makes sense to me. The iPhone was launched with features designed for the consumer marketplace, and redefined the smartphone category, ignoring the pundits who said it couldn't succeed as a smartphone without a business oriented feature set, it outsold all the other smartphones by an order of magnitude, and the competition is now scrambling to come up with products that bear any kind of comparison with the iPhone features and ease of use. The hardware is relatively easy to duplicate, but the software is years ahead of anything else.

One prediction I made was that Apple would release an iPod version this summer, and that just came true, with the iPod Touch. The hardware omits the phone features, adds more flash memory and uses a slightly smaller form factor, but it completely leverages the software investment which is the most important part of the iPhone. This WiFi based iPod is also completely internationalized, which is its primary software advance on the iPhone. It's also clear to me why the software updates for the iPhone haven't delivered much yet, the team was working hard on the iPod Touch, and it takes a lot more work than you may expect to internationalize and test a worldwide product. This foundation also sets up the iPhone for its own worldwide rollout. The iPod Touch will create clear consumer demand for the iPhone around the world that will get better deals for Apple as it works its way around the world's Telcos.

The iPod Touch omits Google Maps, Stock Quotes etc, which are USA market specific. I expect that when you sync an iPod Touch in a specific country Apple will install whatever unique applications are available in that country, so US consumers could get a quick upgrade to match the iPhone application set. The Mail application is also missing, while it could be provided in a generic form, the iPhone version is setup to make it easy to connect to US based mail providers, so it could be part of a localized application bundle.

Another prediction I made was that a 3G iPhone would follow for the European market. The cut in price of the original iPhone creates an empty price-point at $599, which could be filled by a 3G capable iPhone with 16GB of flash and possibly GPS. Some commentators have suggested that this could be announced at Apple Expo in Paris on Sept 25th, and I think that makes sense. The 3G phone could be thicker to accommodate a larger battery, in the same way that the iPod models vary thickness in the product range.

The iPhone is a *platform* which is in its infancy. I'm looking forward to a lot of software upgrades which will broaden its market appeal. As an unfinished product, it also makes complete sense to me that there is no encouragement for developers. For many platform based products (from Windows to eBay) the developers go into business to extend the feature set, but the platform vendor ends up competing with their developer community as they bundle more features into the platform. It makes sense for Apple to release the bulk of the applications that they are working on in-house and do deals behind closed doors with major vendors such as Google (and I suspect Adobe and even Microsoft), where they can build a coherent set of features into a roadmap that completes the basic platform. *Then* open up the platform to the developer community to innovate from a much richer baseline.

The current hacker based developer community knows it is living on the edge, so expects to be disrupted each time Apple releases something. I'm sure they will hack the iPod Touch within a few days, but the key for Apple is to carry this initial enthusiasm into a real developer program, while keeping the number of hacked systems to a minimum. One way that Apple could make life difficult for the hackers would be to release software updates very frequently.

Some more predictions - what would a completed product look like?

1) Flash and Silverlight - I'm sure that Adobe has come under intense pressure from all sides to get Flash onto the iPhone. It's a matter of time. We are also seeing Microsoft take on Adobe with Silverlight, and if Microsoft could establish Silverlight as a viable platform on the iPhone, then they would also be in a better position for Windows Mobile platforms and any future Zune based iPhone competitors. Either way, this would provide a much more open way (compared to the bundled YouTube application) to stream animation and video to the iPhone and iPod Touch from any web site.

2) Camera - the current iPhone camera looks barely finished. The viewfinder ripples if you move, has few features and takes a long time to grab a picture. Its clearly a software based camera, and the ARM based hardware used in the iPhone usually contains a lot of accelerators for image and video capture and compression which do not appear to be in use in the current version. My guess is that a future software upgrade will move to a hardware accelerated camera with video capture support and features like digital zoom.

3) Instant Messaging/VOIP/Video - current solutions use a web page or hacked application to do call-back to the iPhone over the regular phone network. This requires centralized hardware resources that cost real money. The free way to do chat, voice and video over the network is on a true peer to peer basis, and I expect Apple to produce iChat for the iPhone, and eventually perhaps iChat AV to include video. A call from an Apple laptop or desktop system with a camera could show up as video on any iPhone, but a new iPhone model with a forward facing camera would be needed to act as a true portable two-way video phone. I also suspect that a faster CPU would be needed so this is likely to be a longer term prospect. It should also be possible for developers to port other messaging applications such as Skype.

4) Business Applications - the most requested being Microsoft OutLook/Exchange support at the same level as we have come to expect from RIM Blackberry's. I don't think full integration will come directly from Apple, but there is likely to be a food fight amongst third party developers to win this market. Business orientated smartphones are going to suffer. The main casualty will likely be the Palm Treo in the short term, and the RIM Blackberry and the Windows Mobile based systems in the longer term. I doubt that any of these players will be able to get their platform software into the same space as Apple fast enough to hold onto this market. If RIM is smart, they will do an iPhone port of their application and hold onto their dominant position with the backend infrastructure for corporate messaging, while gradually losing ground to iPhones in the handheld device space.

In January I said I would wait before I got an iPhone, but it was too good, I wanted one, and my wife bought me one when they first came out. It redefines the market, and the US based phone market was ripe for a serious upgrade. I also have a work-provided Verizon based Blackberry and I carry both. When better business oriented email and calendar integration arrives, I'll return the Blackberry.

Some of you may be wondering about my homebrew phone. Its still a work in progress, and I expect to have it up and running shortly. It took a few turns to get everything on the Gumstx Goliath board working properly.

Gumstix Goliath - myPhone system board

The Gumstix Goliath open phone hardware is now available for order. There are versions with and without the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) support.

Features:	GSM/GPRS/EDGE, GPS, analog audio in/out, LCD, touchscreen controller, USB host port, 3D-accelerometer, NiMH battery charger (batteries not included) Provides full- speed USB access to the Siemens MC75 GPRS/EDGE module, the u-blox NEO-4S GPS module and one external USB device.
Connection:	60-pin Hirose connector to verdex motherboard only
Dimensions:	105.5mm x 67.3mm

I've placed my order (I already have a Gumstix Verdex CPU board), and I'm still working on myPhone case design for this board and its 4.3" touchscreen LCD. Unlike the iPhone, the hardware and software is completely open, you can do anything you like with it, and thats also the problem, the software is extremely basic at the moment. However, its about the journey, not the destination, I'm going to have a lot of fun as we build this device.

iPhone, the good the bad and no ugly bits

I got my iPhone in the mail after 10 days, beating the 2-4 weeks delivery estimate. I've used it for a week and have some opinions I'd like to share.

The biggest suprise is just how good video looks. Everyone I show it to goes "wow". This is something you have to see in person. The video quality for "video iPod" mode and for "WiFi YouTube" mode is basically perfect. When running on EDGE, YouTube downloads a lower quality version of the video that has visible artifacts, and looks more like typical video on a PC quality (e.g. similar to my Slingbox). In any case this is a seriously good video player, and I happily watched several complete TV shows on it.

The built-in speaker is also surprisingly good, considering the limitations of a mobile device. I left the iPhone lying on the table and used it as background music.

The user interface is easy, no-one has any problem using it immediately, and typing on the keyboard is much easier and more accurate than I expected.

My main disappointment is with Email. It works, but I've got used to the Gmail client application on the Treo and Blackberry. The generic pop client just doesn't work well enough since it doesn't understand archiving and threading, and the safari browser version is inconvenient and slow when using EDGE. I really hope that the Gmail application is in the works for a future update, it seems likely, given the relationship between Google and Apple, and the Google Maps application that is already included.

For use at work, it can't yet replace my Blackberry. The iPhone VPN doesn't work with the VPN where I work. The LEAP security mode we use for wireless is also unsupported, although it works fine on my MacOS laptop. Using a simpler guest wireless setup I did see over 3Mbits/s in a speed test which is very impressive for a mobile device.

I can use Safari to get at Outlook Web Access, and http redirect based secure access to internal web pages worked fine. I have had no crashes or problems with Safari, trying it out on several sites.

For Netflix, heavy use of "mouse-over" in the user interface design is an issue since the touch screen doesn't generate mouse-over events. Although Safari on iPhone supports JavaScript, some work is needed to figure out how to use JavaScript effectively given the different input behaviors. In the meantime, the basic operations of browsing for movies and adding to the queue work fine, but rating a movie doesn't work since the star-setting method uses mouse-over.

For detailed insight into the iPhone, go read RoughlyDrafted, its by far the most thoughtful and interesting blog on the subject.

Global Classified Ads - Kijiji

eBay recently took the final step with their Kijiji classified advertising brand of launching it in the USA. There has been quite a lot of commentary, most of it fails to point out what matters about Kijiji. eBay also holds a small stake in Craigslist, which also has sites around the world, but there is one very significant difference that no-one seems to have commented on:

Go to http://rome.craigslist.org - there are a handful of entries, but the most important thing is that the site is still in English. Check out http://paris.craigslist.org - same thing.

Now try http://roma.kijiji.it and http://paris.kijiji.fr - notice the difference? Its localized and there are a decent number of items listed. Now see how many times you can figure out http://[city].kijiji.[country] (remember to use the local name) and see just how many cities and languages there are. Remember to try http://shanghai.kijiji.cn too... There are also a few countries where eBay bought a local brand - http://www.gumtree.com for the UK, and http://www.loquo.com for Spain.

So its clear that eBay has spent the last few years building up a global localized classified advertising business that has wide coverage and a lot of listings. They have had English-speaking Canada for a while (they also have French Canadian), so adding the USA must have been a small amount of extra work and cost, and there was a well crafted and debugged product ready to roll.

It may take a while to catch on in the USA, but its not likely to go away. Its free for the users, and can generate revenue by using services like banner ads and Google Adsense to monetize the page views. Kijiji is already doing quite nicely in my opinion....

[Disclosure: I used to work for eBay, I know some of the people who created Kijiji, but I have had nothing to do with Kijiji since it launched in 2005, and this is all public information]

Must. Buy. iPhone. Must. Buy. iPhone....

OK, I give in. Its Apple at their best, insanely great, detailed craftsmanship and "it just works" usability. However I didn't want to get in line at a store, so I logged in to the Apple online store and made sure my one-click ordering was setup right and enabled, and at 6pm when the store re-opened I got my order in as fast as the site would refresh. It was a little slow, but as far as I could tell, the store was up and running and handled the peak load, so some extra congratulations to the team that runs the store. Delivery was stated to be 2-4 weeks, I should be near the front of the queue, so we will see what happens.

What about the open phones? Well, OpenMoko is running late, but is just about to ship developer phones for real, however the version that will have WiFi is their second revision that is months away, and their software is still being developed. However Gumstix are also very close to getting their new "Goliath" phone kit out, and that is a much more flexible design, where I can add WiFi etc. without replacing anything else, and I can wrap my own case design around the 4.3" LCD. The software is rudimentary, but we intend to port the OpenMoko packages to the Gumstix based "myPhone", and tinker with it to do whatever we want. In the meantime, I will soon have a phone that "just works" better than anything else....

Updates: AdSense, FON and Millicomputing

The Ads are making a bit more sense now...

There is a global commercial WiFi service that has good coverage in places like Hotels and Airports called Boingo. They aggregate services that are not branded under their own name, but if you have a Boingo account you can use the service. Last month they announced a deal to include FON in their network, more than doubling the number of access points to a few hundred thousand. This month they announced an annual flat rate plan for $39 per month. Very cool! Global WiFi access at a low flat rate.

I'm posting a series of updates at Millicomputing.com that describe a detailed design for an Enterprise server Millicluster. Its a radical improvement in terms of performance per watt and performance per dollar for some kinds of applications.

What the iPhone doesn't do, why not, and why I still want one...

There is a very nice posting on the iPhone at RoughlyDrafted, taking a thoughtful look at all the coverage, and pointing out double standards in many of the negative commentators who are putting down the iPhone for not being "enterprise ready".

Back in January, I wrote a summary of thoughts on the iPhone from the perspective of typical product development practices. That post got a lot of traffic, it seemed to be very popular in Germany, where there is a great tradition of quality product design (I can't think of a German designed product that isn't well engineered).

Overall, with the additional advance information that has been released so far I don't think I was too far off the mark. I did expect that support for Adobe Flash and Java would be included, but they both appear to be missing. This is going to be the biggest pain, as there are a lot of web sites that use Flash or Java applets. Given time I expect these issues will be addressed.

I talked about Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) which are described in a book called Software by Numbers, written by my good friend Mark Denne. Its a philosophy of development that optimizes product features by releases over time. Many of the iPhone's shortcomings are explained by an initial focus on the needs of people who have never used a "smartphone" before, (rather than a focus on the business market) and a close integration with other Apple products that support an "insanely great" combination of product features.

For integration with non-Apple products, there is a two pronged strategy. One is to provide basic file viewers for Microsoft Word and Excel documents that are common email attachments. The other approach is to leverage Google's web based application suite within the Safari browser, which now includes Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Gmail etc, and also integrate with the Google maps application on the iPhone itself.

For the question of whether the iPhone can be used in corporate environments, there are two issues - virtual private network (VPN) access to get at internal web sites, and email integration with Microsoft Exchange. There have been some hints that the standard MacOSX VPN functionality is included, and Apple states that syncing is supported with Outlook/Entourage contacts and calendars. For actual Exchange email access, the Exchange server would have to support IMAP or POP (most aren't setup this way) or the Outlook Web Access client could be used in the Safari browser on the iPhone.

Safari is key. It is not only the way to manipulate documents and corporate email, its also the designated "API" for new iPhone applications to be developed. Apple stated that Safari will have access to many of the internal functions of the iPhone, so that the primary programming language for developers becomes Javascript. For all the people with existing mobile applications this is a pain, as they want to have J2ME to get them ported quickly. However, the iPhone is a huge leap forward in user interfaces, and to provide the consistent look and feel that magnifies the ease of use, Apple are enforcing Safari as the only framework for extending the iPhone. This makes perfect sense as a product strategy. It has upset many developers, but the laser-like focus on ease of use greatly increases the iPhone's perceived value and total addressable market. More users will be willing to pay more, increasing Apple's sales. Later on, perhaps Apple will focus more on the "traditional" smartphone market, but for now they are simply going to redefine what that market is.

How many people have both iPods and cellphones in their pockets? This fall, how many students will turn up at college with an iPhone in their pocket?

My work machines are a MacBook Pro and a Blackberry. I'm building the homebrew myPhone design (more on that later), but I think I'm getting tempted by the user interface, I want an iPhone....

FON: World WiFi Domination?

Now if there ever was a company working on world domination, it would be FON. They aim to build a global network of Wifi hotspots by selling subsidized routers that have custom firmware. The routers have a private secure WPA based network for you to use, and a public network that has a signup page, for anyone else to use. There is also a control that limits how much bandwidth the public can use. They have a few hundred thousand users, and are now the largest WiFi network by far, but the location of their base stations is much more random and less useful than T-Mobile HotSpots.

The incentive in the short term is that you can get a high quality router at a very low price. FON has been giving routers away to seed markets and to surround Starbucks stores. The incentive in the longer term is that if you have a FON router at home, you can use any FON router you find on your travels for free.

I've had a FON router for some time. I met CEO Martin Varsavsky when he gave a talk at eBay last year, and got one of the initial Linksys units with custom firmware. When their own hardware solution came out it had a much nicer feature set, so I upgraded to La Fonera as they call it. I've been using it as my primary home router for about six months now, and its an excellent design. Its been much more reliable than the other low cost routers I've owned (Netgear and Linksys) and works as well as the much more expensive Apple Airport Express that I've had for a long time.

FON just released a booster antenna "La Fontenna", it is designed to give 6.5dB of extra signal strength and project further out than the standard antenna. The idea is that you mount it on the window facing the street, and it covers a larger area. I just got one, and while it seems to work fine, it doesn't appear to be giving me as much signal strength or range as I expected. I wandered around outside with my MacBook using iStumbler's WiFi monitoring widget to track signal strength, and it showed a bit more gain than my Airport. I think I need to experiment a bit more with positioning La Fontenna.

So next time you need a router, don't just buy a normal one, join Fon and support world domination!

Ads that don't make sense

For some reason the ad bar on this site has a fixation about the b-word. I just removed the word bl*g from the template in two places, and I'm avoiding saying it in this posting. I really think Google should be able to find something more interesting to show ads about, so lets see if this makes any difference....

Jobs at Netflix: Capacity/Performance and Storage Admin

Netflix is a great company to work for, there are lots of clever friendly and happy people here.
I just hired an engineer for my own group, but we have a lot more openings:

We are looking for a performance and scalability oriented Java/Oracle developer
Senior Performance and Scalability Engineer
http://jobs.netflix.com/DetailFlix.asp?flix1651

My good friend Ed Wustenhof just joined Netflix to manage the System Administrator group, he's got two open positions, a storage oriented one:

Sr Unix Administrator - Storage Focus
http://jobs.netflix.com/DetailFlix.asp?flix1699

and a Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning one that I've copied the full info for below.

Senior Unix Administrator - Capacity Planning & Performance Tuning

http://jobs.netflix.com/DetailFlix.asp?flix1698

RESPONSIBILITIES

Design, Plan, Deploy and Support all aspects of Netflix's server and storage environment with a focus on Performance Tuning & Capacity Planning.

The SA team at Netflix is a crucial component to the success of the day to day operations of the company. We are a highly motivated and capable team that is seeking a new member that can take a key role in the provisioning and support of our unix/linux servers while ensuring performance stays within thresholds.

Being the second line of support and subject matter expert, you will take individual responsibility for resolving system, storage and application issues reported via the Netflix Operations Center. You will be expected to resolve tactical issues while providing structural solutions. Your area of expertise is performance tuning and capacity planning.

Part of the position will require travel to and from the data center (15-20min or ~10 miles), sometimes multiple times/week. On-call responsibilities, night and weekend projects are also to be expected.

The candidate will often be the technical lead on short term projects. They will be the Subject Matter Expert with its associated responsibility. Some level of project planning and coordination of resources is to be expected. This includes vendor and contractor coordination.

We are looking for someone with the following technical experience:
•Deep experience of Unix with at least one of the following operating systems: AIX, Linux or Solaris.
•Expert in capacity planning and performance tuning.
•Strong experience in web based environments and supporting such architectures such as Java, Tomcat, Apache and other web applications.
•Knowledge of IBM enterprise/midrange systems and storage virtualization is a plus.
•Strong coordination and analytic skills.
•Project planning experience and the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
•10+ years IT experience with at least 8 years as System Administrator.
•BS or MS degree in Computer science or equivalent experience.

Exposure to the following highly desirable:
•Experience with Symantec/Veritas product like VxVM and Netbackup
•Strong expertise with SAN-based storage/application required.
•Large Scale (5Tbyte +) Storage solutions deployment experience.
•Unix shell and Perl programming.

Using Occam to Simulate p2p Web Services

About a year ago I gave a paper at an IEEE E-Commerce conference that described how I used the latest pi-calculus enhanced version of the old Inmos Transputer language Occam to build a very efficient massively threaded simulator for large scale p2p web services that ran on my laptop.

I blogged this at the time, but The paper itself is subject to the rules IEEE sets out for peer-reviewed conference papers and you need to be a member or pay a fee to get it from http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CEC-EEE.2006.81

However, I wanted to share this more widely and have just posted a pdf of the presentation slides for my IEEE paper. Here are the first few slides, and a description of the Tools section:

Simulation of Skype Peer-to-peer Web Services Choreography Using Occam-Pi

Abstract
Complex web services are very difficult to test and verify before deployment on a large scale.
A semantically equivalent in-memory simulation can be built using Occam-pi that runs up to 100,000 nodes about a million times faster than real life.
Rapid protocol development and detailed behavioral analysis using simulation supports the development of robust services that can scale.
The implementation of a simulator that models centralized web services and application to application messaging over the Skype Peer to Peer network is described.

Overview

• The Landscape
• The Problem
• The Tools
• The Solution
• Implementation
• Running the Simulation
• Conclusion
• References

The Tools – Pi Calculus

• WS-BPEL, SSDL and WS-CDL are based on Pi-Calculus
• Pi-Calculus is based on Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP)
• Pi-Calculus provides a formal model of parallel message based computing
• Occam-Pi
• The Occam language is based on CSP, and has been extended to add the Pi-Calculus extensions to form the Occam-Pi language.
• The primary implementation of this language is known as KROC, the Kent Re-targetable Occam Compiler
• KROC is freely available from the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
• Runs on Intel architecture Linux, MacOS X, and Microsoft Windows/Cygwin platforms. Older versions exist for SPARC, PPC etc.

The Tools – Occam Language Constructs

• The constructs that are used in Web Services choreography map directly to Occam language constructs
• The Occam language has direct support for sequential, parallel and alternate processing blocks, complex protocols, and channel based communications
• Occam-Pi adds more dynamic constructs to the language
• Mobile channels - pass a channel end over another channel
• Mobile processes - suspend a process, pass it over a channel and resume it in a new context
• Dynamic process forking with barrier synchronization
• Rigorous Occam-Pi Compile-time Checks
• Processes or expressions are not allowed to have any “side effects”
• Syntax and usage of all protocols, data and constructs is checked
• Occam is designed to allow very comprehensive static analysis

The Tools – Occam Runtime Characteristics

• There is no need to use XML message encoding or namespaces
• since the compiler can check that a protocol is being communicated correctly
• At runtime, the Occam-Pi language is fast small compiled code
• with its own threading model, in a single process
• The Occam-Pi runtime detects and reports deadlock
• including the line number in the code at which each process was stalled
• Occam-Pi is very efficient
• All communication takes place in a single address space at memory bus speeds
• Basic process creation takes 20 nanoseconds on an 800MHz PC
• Basic channel communications takes 70 nanoseconds
• Compared to typical web services transactions over the internet these transactions are about a million times faster
• The language is also very compact, and one hundred thousand to one million threads can be created within a 2 GByte address space.

Works Cited

• [Cygwin] “GNU + Cygnus + Windows”, http://www.cygwin.com/
• [GraphML] “Graph Modeling Language “, http://graphml.graphdrawing.org/
• [Hoare78] C. A. R. Hoare. “Communicating Sequential Processes.” Communications of the ACM 1978.
• [Hoare85] C. A. R. Hoare. Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall, 1985.
• [KROC]. “Kent Retargetable Occam Compiler” http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/kroc/
• [Occam2] Inmos Ltd, Occam 2 Reference Manual. Prentice Hall, 1988.
• [Milner99] Robin Milner, “Communicating and Mobile Systems: the Pi-Calculus”, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• [Skype]. “Skype Developers API” https://developer.skype.com
• [SSDL] Webber et al. “Asynchronous Messaging between Web Services using SSDL.” IEEE Internet Computing Vol10, No1 2006.
• [WS-BPEL]. “OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language” http://www.oasis-open.org
• [WS-CDL] “Web Services Choreography Description Language”, http://www.w3.org
• [yEd] “Graph visualization and editing tool”, http://www.yworks.com/

Aftermath is finally released...

After many years of listening to this song evolve from an initial concept to its final released form, its now time to share it with the world and find out what everyone else thinks of it. Its a moving reaction to the events and aftermath of 911, sounds like nothing else, and has an odd but catchy hook.

Its available on Fractal's site at fractal.bebo.com and via the iJigg widget below.

Orb Swarm Rolling Robot Video at Maker Faire

Update: this is part of the Orb Swarm project. They intend to build several orbs and take them to events like Burning Man.

Workplace Myths - Career Advice

Some very good career advice on Guy Kawasaki's blog today. The Nine Biggest Workplace Myths, by Penelope Trunk. I've spent a lot of time mentoring people and helping with career development and this is pretty much what I've been telling people for many years.

Its not easy to follow the advice, but it does give a clear vision of what to aim for, and how to know when you get there...

See you at Techshop at Maker Faire this weekend

I've been using Techshop to make cases for my homebrew phone on their 3D Printer, and I signed up for annual membership since I have a few other projects to work on (e.g. TIG welding some modifications to my Fiat 124 Abarth Rally replica :-)

I'm going to be at Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend, helping explain the 3D printer to attendees at the Techshop pavillion, and hanging out with Matt on the SVHMPC booth. I'm on duty from 2pm onwards both Saturday and Sunday for Techshop so I should be easy to find and I'd be happy to chat about how to make mobile phone cases or millicomputing or whatever.

I'm hiring a senior engineer at Netflix

In my new role, I manage a small group and I have an open headcount for a senior engineer

The full job specification is at http://jobs.netflix.com/DetailFlix.asp?flix1642

Here's what we are looking for:

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Designing and developing the Netflix web application and middle-tier architecture focused on personalization software.
  
• Full software life-cycle ownership of key strategic business logic from inception through production.
  
• Conceiving, articulating and implementing projects in coordination with technical and non-technical coworkers for product enhancement and improvement.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experience with high-traffic, highly scaling, multi-threaded software design.
  
• 7+ years of web application development experience. (Java a plus)
  
• Experience with Oracle or equivalent database system.
  
• Flexibility to shift priorities based on changing needs of the business.
  
• A Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science or equivalent engineering.

Characteristics of Success at Netflix:

• Strong customer orientation, both internally and externally.
  
• Strategic thinking both technically and business-wise.
  
• Ability to execute successfully on business strategy.
  
• Self motivated / self starter.
  
• Personal drive to achieve world class software development.
  
• Desire to work in a fast-paced, evolving, growing, dynamic environment.
  
• Love of technical challenges and the sense of pride it brings to solve them.
  
• Ability to work well in a cross functional environment.

Netflix and Silverlight and Joost

Very interesting demo of Microsoft Silverlight as a Netflix application from MIX07.

This seems like a nice, high performance multiplatform way to build web based user interfaces. It should give Flash some competition...

I'm handing back eBay's Dell D600 with Windows XP and getting a MacBook when I start at Netflix, it will be nice to have XP running only when I need it, and when the Silverlight version of Netflix web video ships, it will support Mac.

Joost has also released a new beta build, however I don't have a machine I can run it on during this transition. They don't support my old PowerBook G4 yet....

Jobs at Netflix

A few people have asked me if there are interesting jobs available at Netflix. I haven't started there yet, but they do seem to be looking for senior developers who have a clue about performance.

Here are some job descriptions, let me know if you apply to them...

http://jobs.netflix.com/DetailFlix.asp?flix1449

http://jobs.netflix.com/DetailFlix.asp?flix1576

http://jobs.netflix.com/DetailFlix.asp?flix1440

Leaving eBay to join Netflix

I recently gave notice to eBay and start at Netflix on May 7th. I've had a lot of fun working at eBay Research Labs, but I'm making a strategic move to a smaller company (about a tenth of the number of people as a technology organization) which makes it easier to take a broader role and develop skills and experience in new areas. I will be directing a few senior engineers who develop part of the Netflix web site as my primary role. Its an exciting new challenge!

Mobile Phones at Maker Faire

The Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club is going to be featured at Maker Faire this May 19/20th. One of my phone design pictures was used on the site :-)

I've also been continuing to develop the general purpose millicomputing concepts and have been documenting them on my companion blog. I have bought a Gumstix module for use in a phone, and I'm working on benchmarking it at the moment.

Load Average Differences Between Solaris and Linux

A lot of people monitor their servers using load average as the primary metric. Tools such as Ganglia colorize all the nodes in a cluster view using load average. However there are a few things that aren't well understood about the calculation and how it varies between Solaris and Linux.

For a detailed explanation of the algorithm behind the metric, Neil Gunther has posted a series of articles that show how Load Average is a time-decayed metric that reports the number of active processes on the system with a one, five and fifteen minute decay period.

The source of the number of active processes can be seen in vmstat as the first few columns, and this is where Solaris and Linux differ. For example, some Linux vmstat from a busy file server is shown below.

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 4 43      0  32384 2993312 3157696  0    0  6662  3579 11345 7445  7 65  0 27

The first two columns show the number of processes that are in the run queue waiting for CPU time and in the blocked queue waiting for disk I/O to complete. These metrics are calculated in a similar manner in both Linux and Solaris, but the difference is that the load average calculation is fed by just the "r" column for Solaris, and by the "r" plus the "b" column for Linux. This means that a Linux based file server that has many disks could be running quite happily from a CPU perspective but show a large load average.

The logic behind the load average metric is that it should be a kind of proxy for responsiveness on a system. To get a more scalable measure of responsiveness, it is common to divide the load average by the number of CPUs in the system, since more CPUs will take jobs off the run queue faster. For disk intensive workloads on Linux, it may also make sense to divide the load average by the number of active disks, but this is an awkward calculation to make.

It would be best to take r/CPU count and b/active disk count then average this combination with a time decay and give it a new name, maybe the "slowed average" would be good?

SEtoolkit and XEtoolkit releases

The SEtoolkit was developed in 1993 by Rich Pettit, and I used it as a way to prototype many new tools and ideas over the years. Its a Solaris specific performance tool scripting language that supports very rapid development of new tools. The SEtoolkit has been widely deployed as the Solaris collector for the popular system performance monitor Orca. Rich gave up development of the SEtoolkit a few years ago, put the code into open source under GPL, and its now available via sourceforge, where it is being maintained by Dagobert Michelsen. A bug in the SEtoolkit was causing it to crash when used with complex disk subsystems, and this has now been fixed in the SE3.4.1 release (April 10th, 2007).

Meanwhile, Rich has been trying to make a multi-platform (Solaris, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, HP-UX, AIX) version of SE for a long time, and finally gave up trying to implement his own language, and based his latest development, the XEtoolkit, on Java 5. The first full release XEtoolkit 1.0 came out on April 15th, 2007. The code is released and supported under both open source and commercial licenses, by Rich's new company - Captive Metrics. The GPL license allows full free use of the provided tools, and development of new and derived tools that are also contributed to the community. The commercial license allows custom XEtoolkit development for proprietary tools, with a higher level of support.

The XEtoolkit 1.0 release doesn't support HP-UX or AIX, but AIX support is coming soon. I encourage you to try it out, give Rich some feedback and make it worth his while to continue. He's one of the very best programmers and performance tool architects I've ever met....

myPhone 2.0 Case comes off the 3D printer

More pictures of the latest myPhone 2.0 case design.

This version has a deeper case, and was printed at a simple angle, the previous attempt ended up warping, so I hope these changes will keep it flat. It also has a slot in the bottom end to take an iPod connector, which carries power, USB, stereo line level output etc. an antenna mounting hole at the top, and a retaining clip design to hold the LCD in place.

This contains 2.6 cubic inches of ABS plastic, and used 1.4 cubic inches of support material, which costs about $40 in materials and took 8 hours to print at Techshop.

Low Power Microprocessors for General Purpose Computing

While researching devices for my home brew mobile phone, I've realized that the current generation of CPUs for mobile devices are actually seriously powerful, very low cost and use almost no power. The performance per watt and per dollar seems to be an order of magnitude better than the PC-class CPUs that are common in commodity servers nowadays. The absolute performance and memory capacity is lower, but is comparable to common PC hardware from a few years ago, and could be useful for more than running a high end phone or portable games machine. Devices such as the Marvel PXA270 and Freescale i.MX31 run at over 500MHz, some include floating point units, they support at least 128MB of RAM (a single chip), and a myriad of I/O interfaces, with Linux 2.6 support.

While the current mainstream CPUs were driven by the development of the home PC market, this generation is driven by the development of the mobile, battery powered device market, which is a very large. For example the worldwide cellphone market is something like a billion devices a year.

I think that there could be some interesting general purpose computer systems built from low power devices (CPUs that use less than one watt). I looked around but wasn't sure what to search for... I do know about the systems that are sold for embedded use, but they are typically configured using lower speed and lower memory options.

Does anyone know of vendors selling general purpose systems, or a category name for this space?

[Update: I asked around, and thought a while, and decided that this is interesting enough to have its own name "millicomputer" and its own blog "millicomputing"].

The OpenMoko Story

Here is a link to the OpenMoko slide set presented at ETel. Worth a read, there is a lot of activity building around this platform at the OpenMoko community site.

Picture of myPhone

Here are the CAD pictures of the phone, I made the rear case cover translucent so that some of the parts inside can be seen. The big dark block is a Treo650 battery, the block in front of it is the Telit 862 GSM/GPS module that does all the phone stuff... Its 130mm long and 75mm wide, quite big, but thats a 3.7" 480x640 LCD, and its easier to fit off the shelf parts inside :-)

MyPhone Making Progress and ETel Conference

I'm at the O'Reilly ETel conference this week, lots of new and interesting things happening. I've met the OpenMoko people and held the phone (nice hardware, quite compact).

Several people from the SVHMPC are also attending, we have been showing off the cases I made a few weeks ago, and I've been spending way too long on a new and much cooler case design. I've posted my design including all the cad files (this is a completely open source project, including hardware designs) to a page on the Homebrew Mobile Wiki.

Thats the main reason there have been relatively few postings in the last week...

Joost sends out a batch of beta invites

I only got two, they are both already take and I don't have any spare, but several people are selling Joost invites on eBay for a few bucks...

Skype downloads approach 500 Million

In the next few days, Skype will pass the 500 million downloads mark. I seem to remember someone saying that Kazaa was the most downloaded program ever, and looking at the Kazaa home page, they currently show 389 Million. Skype is at 498 Million as I write this, and is downloading at almost a million a day. The download rate was over 1M a day when they made a new release available and existing users were getting updates. Compared to Kazaa, Skype is downloading every day, what Kazaa is downloading every week.

How are the competition doing? Vonage added a few hundred thousand users last quarter. Thats a few orders of magnitude away from being a competitor!

Of course, Kazaa is based on an earlier version of the P2P technology that powers Skype, and which is about to come to the world again via Joost. Joost just released a new beta for Windows, and their first beta for Intel based OSX. I still can't justify upgrading from my own Powerbook G4 (it just works) so I'll have to wait for them to backport to the older systems, and use my work laptop.

AMD Enhanced Power Now - Variable Cores and Clock Rates

There is an interesting article in The Register about the latest variant of AMD's enterprise power management system.

As I've mentioned before, in the interests of saving power, some enterprise server systems are varying their clock rates so that they end up showing a higher utilization at low load levels that you would expect. This non-linear relationship of load to utilization is one of the things I highlighted in my CMG06 paper called "Utilization is virtually useless as a metric".

The latest twist: in AMD's upcoming four core systems, individual cores will be stopped completely if there isn't enough work for them to do.

The effect on utilization metrics will depend upon how each operating system interacts with the power management capabilities...

For Solaris the so-called "idle loop" is actually quite busy. An idle CPU watches its neighbors to see if they have too many jobs on their run queues, and gets work by migrating processes that won't get to run soon to itself. Interrupts are also bound to individual CPUs, so that data structures don't have to migrate between caches at high interrupt rates.

It will be interesting to see how these technologies interact.

Adrian

Embedded songs from iJigg

This is a very nice embeddable player from iJigg, below is Continuum from my friends in Fractal, and also Smuggled Mutation by Estradasphere, which is from Palace of Mirrors, one of my most-played CDs in recent history. Its so varied and well played its impossible to get bored by it.

Fractal on iJigg

Another music website, where users tag and vote for songs they like - kind of Digg for music. Worth a try, so I created an account and uploaded Fractal's title track from their first CD - Continuum.

What do you think?

Adrian

New Joost Beta

They just released a new build, it fixes some problems and has some minor user interface enhancements. I left it running for a while and now I'm starting to run out of content that I want to watch... There are about 30 channels for beta testing. probably the most demanding are live music videos, Joost has fine sound quality and keeps up with very rapid on-screen action better than I would expect in full-screen mode on my Dell laptop. It becomes a bit more pixellated when its working hard to keep up, and the sound glitches to repeat a sub-second fragment now and again if it gets behind due to network slowdowns. On low action images, its very nice and clear.

In comparison, I've noticed that on my Slingbox TiVo, it does constant pitch sound stretching to slow down the display at the start of a show, thats how it sneakily builds up a buffer without making you wait.

The Joost folks are promising new content, an OSX version and an expansion of the beta program soon. I've had a few comments requesting beta invites, and I haven't had any to give. If and when I have any spare invites, I'll post it, so hold your comments...

You can help search for Jim Gray

I met Jim last year when he gave a talk at eBay. His sailboat went missing, and a lot of people have collaborated to allow up to date satellite images to be posted on the web for anyone to take a look at and see if they can see anything that might be his boat.

My (ex-Sun DE) friend Geoff Arnold now works at Amazon, he blogged that they have configured a web service called Mechanical Turk to support parcelling out the work of looking at images. If you already have an Amazon.com account, then sign up for the service takes a couple of clicks.

I hunted through images for a while, and found a cargo ship, that's all :-(

Geoff's blog
Werner's blog
Search for Jim

Please take a look yourself and pass the Mechanical Turk search for Jim URL on...

Who needs a custom built Myphone?

The mainstream phone manufacturers are looking for hits in the mass market, and looking for large niches to broaden their market. However if you take a "long tail" viewpoint, everyone wants a slightly different phone, and many people have phones that are the least bad one they could find.

How about phones for people with poor eyesight? If you are over 50, can you read the small print on your phone's screen without reading glasses? I have a friend who has a medical condition that causes very poor eyesight, and sets her 17" laptop screen resolution very low so she can read it. She would like a phone that has just the applications she needs, big easy to find icons for them, and big fonts on a large screen for the address list and other applications. Hard to find in the shops, but easy to custom build.

Making a case for Myphone

I mean that in both senses of the phrase "making a case". I have produced a lump of plastic, and I have good reasons why I want to build my phone.

Here are the first parts I made, two copies of an LCD bezel with a rounded outside surface and a cutout to locate the LCD. The standing part is as it was made in the 3D printer, sideways on to get a smoother finish, and with additional "support material" that holds everything in place while the "model material" sets. The part lying flat is the same, but is face down and has the support material removed. The size is about 5" by 3" and the bezel is 0.1" thick. It took about 7 hours to print the pair of bezels, each contains 0.6 cubic inches of model material and the total including support material was about 1 cubic inch. The bezels cost $10 each to make at Techshop in Menlo Park ($100/month for membership, $10/cu inch to use the 3D printer).

This experiment went quite well, and the next step was to extend the design to form a complete top and bottom case that fit together. This was kicked off using black rather than white plastic, and lying flat, face down. This prints more quickly, but uses more support material to create the base. The base will give the phone a textured surface, which can be made shiny by dipping in acetone, and I'm hoping it will look cool, like a carbon fibre finish. Pictures of the design, cad files, and a photo of the 3D printer in action can be found at the SVHMPC Wiki, I'm updating them as work progresses. The case walls are thicker than they need to be, so the final design will use less plastic and cost less than the $40 I was charged to make this complete case.

The purpose of this build is to figure out where to put the contents, so I can mold support brackets into the design and make an attempt at a working prototype.

Why am I doing this? Some of us are attending the Emerging Telephony conference in March, and I want to have something to show. Also its fun to make things, fun to hang out at Techshop, I'm learning a lot from the 3D printer instructor, and in the end I will have a phone that evolves rather than being thrown away every few years. If I want more memory, a bigger LCD, or different trade offs in features/size/battery life, I don't have to start from scratch or accept someone else's set of compromises. That's why I call it my phone.

myPhone will be a TuxPhone

There is lots of interest and activity in the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club right now centered around building a phone with a large touch screen. I'm calling it "myPhone", and TuxPhone is the generic name for the open software and hardware components we are using. The hardware design is based on components that are openly available with freely available spec sheets, we will make our schematics, design details and cad files freely available, and its quite likely that no two phones will be built the same way. If you want it thinner and lighter, go for fewer features, a smaller battery and tweak the cad file before making the case.

The size is driven primarily by the screen, and we've settled on the screen that is used by the Sony PSP, with a touchscreen overlay added. Its a 4.3" diagonal, and is widely available, low cost. We will include a standard GSM/EDGE module, so I can just pop the SIM card from my Treo into it, and we can add GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, Accelerometer, SDcards or hard disks, whatever custom mix we feel like. The CPU and other parts will be based on Gumstix modules.

More on Open Phones

Thanks to a comment on my previous open phone post, I am reminded that I forgot to mention OpenMoko. This is a neat looking touch screen Linux phone that should be available in February 2007. I haven't seen one yet, although I have played with the Greenphone and I know someone who has ordered and received a Greenphone, so they are ahead by a couple of months.

In the homebrew mobile club, we are talking about making something with a physically bigger (perhaps 3.7" VGA) touch screen than the OpenMoko (2.8" VGA) or Greenphone (smaller QVGA), big enough to show a more usable keyboard. The existence of multiple open phone projects is great, since the nature of the open source community is that we can all share and reuse code for device drivers, user interface components and applications. We aren't building from scratch every time we want a new feature. In the meantime several of us will have Greenphone's, OpenMoko's and TuxPhone's to play with.

The big screen is pretty much the most expensive part. I like the concept of building a phone, keeping the screen and CPU for a long time, but do upgrades like replacing the GSM modem with a 3G one by performing electronic surgery inside the case.

Joost and The Venice Project Beta Testing

I signed up for TVP's beta program a month or two ago, and got accepted recently, so I've been playing with it. A few days ago they launched under the name Joost, which I find amusing since I have a very good Dutch friend called Joost (pronounced yoast) and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say it as yoast or juiced....

I've had a TiVo for years now, and Joost has a very nice user interface that works for me like a TiVo that I can run anywhere, and which has tens of terabytes of stored programs, not just the 30GB or whatever that I have inside my TiVo. The other thing that is better than TiVo is the finding experience. I was able to type "Lotus" into a search box, and find two episodes from "5th Gear" where they were track testing my favorite car. The content is largely European TV at present, and they have enough programs to keep beta testers happy for a while, but are going to need a lot more as the program launches.

The display quality is good, and there is a short delay when a program is first selected, especially if its one of the more obscure programs. The networking is something like a securely encrypted in-order bittorrent. You don't have to wait for the whole program to load before you start watching it.

I posted last year on disruptive innovation as it applies to the moving pictures industry, discussing the concept of a maturity model for innovation, evolution from the cinema to thepiratebay, and a more abstract maturity model. In the final part I made this statement:

The final phase in the evolution of a market occurs as the cost of replication and distribution of the product approaches zero. There is no end user cost to use the Internet to download a movie. A central utility such as YouTube can use a mixture of advertising and premium services (for a minority of power users) to offset their own costs. Peer to peer systems distribute the load so that there is no central site and no incremental cost in the system. The only service that is needed is some kind of search, so that peers can find each other's content to exchange it.

I was talking about how bittorrent based video is inevitably going to dominate over centralized services like YouTube, and there have been reports that most of the traffic on the internet is bittorrent. The inconvenience of bittorrent is that it is basically an overnight batch job to get a program. Joost fixes the problems of bittorrent, while staying as close as possible to free distribution. Joost inserts a small number of short adverts that the Joost client figures out how to target to your interests. These are intended to be enough to pay for the central seeding servers, and to pay the content owners so good programs become available, without becoming intrusive enough to switch off the users.

Based on my own maturity model, Joost is nicely setup to be the end game for this market. That doesn't mean that we stop going to the cinema or watching YouTube, just that Joost could end up being "bittorrent for the masses", and be an order of magnitude bigger than everything else.

Template Update

I just realised that my blog wasn't displaying properly in Internet Explorer. I couldn't figure out why, so I upgraded to a fresh new Blogger.com template that has a lot more configurability, and dropped the ads etc back into it. The formatting is still a bit off, and it looks better in Flock/FireFox but at least the basic blocks are all in the right place now.

The archive of old posts is also easier to navigate with the new template.

Build your own phone, any way you want it!

As an antidote to all the grumbling about the lack of an open developers approach to the Apple iPhone I'm going to talk about some projects that are building open phone platforms.

I'm a member of the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club, and there are several projects in existence to create a free, open source, software stack and applications for mobile phones. The hardware parts are available off the shelf, so you can buy a complete open phone or use whatever parts you like. All you need is an enclosure, and you are on your way to whatever spec you wanted, with whatever applications you wanted.

Actually, if someone out there knows Autocad and wants to help design some enclosures, the assistance would be appreciated. The SVHMPC often meets at Techshop, where they have a 3D printer that can make anything that can be described by a CAD file in ABS plastic.

The phones use off the shelf GSM modems, that take a SIM card and deal with the network. They operate like any unlocked phone would work, and the GSM modem module prevents anything bad from happening to the network. The command set looks a lot like the old hayes modem AT codes, and Linux device drivers exist to manage some of the common ones. Some of the GSM modems include GPS location services as well, most of them are based on the relatively slow GPRS/EDGE standards for Internet connections.

My own ideal phone starts with a 3.7" VGA resolution touch screen and includes WiFi, bluetooth GPS and a 3G network, but I may have to put up with GPRS for now. The CPU is based on 400MHz ARM chips from Gumstix, and the parts list from the OpenCell project gives you some idea of what's available.

Its going to cost more than an iPhone, won't be as thin, and as cute, but I will be able to make it do whatever I want, and it will be runing as much of the standard Linux 2.6 distribution as I feel like.

I built my first three home computers up from bare PCBs, I still have my soldering iron, and I'm not afraid to use it :-)

What the iPhone doesn't do (yet) and thoughts on why not.

There has been a lot of commentary, complaints and opinions on the iPhone. I haven't seen much discussion of its features and strategy from the perspective of the realities of product development. In my opinion, what Apple have done is the right set of strategic and tactical moves for the first product in a new family. What was announced and shown is not the final feature set for the initial device and it does not include the full vision of the product.

Lets look at the timing of the announcement. As a new entrant in the mobile phone marketplace, the correct strategy is to pre-announce. There is no existing product from Apple to cannibalize, and there is only partial overlap with the iPod market. The announcement was made after the holiday shopping season, and the timing is setup to get a volume ramp in place for the 2007 holiday shopping season. The initial launch is based on the minimum marketable features (MMF) required to address the Apple oriented consumer marketplace. Rather than wait until the full feature set is ready or create low quality solutions for a wide feature set, the Apple strategy is to develop a small number of features to an extremely high level of quality and integration, and focus on the needs of their core market of existing OSX and iPod users.

Lets look at disclosure related issues. For a phone to be released as a product it has to go through FCC testing that takes a month or two, and the FCC process is relatively open. All the new phones are scooped by Engadget Mobile before they turn up in stores. For the big splash product announcement, it needed to be scheduled before Apple turns over an iPhone to the FCC test process. In order to keep details on the product quiet for as long as possible, it is also much easier to do the initial launch before completing negotiations with key third party application developers like Adobe and Microsoft. I've heard that there is no Adobe Flash support in the device at present, and there is a clear need to support Microsoft Office at some point in the future. These omissions are easily fixed, its just a matter of time.

New models in the iPod range are announced when they are basically in stock in the stores. If you take the iPhone package, and remove the phone parts, keeping the iTunes music and video functionality, and WiFi/web connectivity, you are left with a very nice looking wide-screen networked iPod. Its main issue would be the relatively small capacity flash, so that could be increased, or a hard disk could possibly be crammed into the package. I would not expect anything like this to be announced until it is completely ready and in-stock, but if it exists, it could end up being released this summer around the same time as the iPhone actually ships. Since it isn't a phone, its outside the Cingular agreement, but adding a WiFi only VOIP client like iChat or Skype would create a product that competes with the Sony Mylo.

During the demo's no-one tried to show the iPhone's camera, this indicates to me that it isn't finished, and I hear elsewhere that they are still working on video capture. For use as a video-phone, the camera is on the wrong side, you can't see the display while you are on-camera. This makes it seem less likely that a full iChat function will be included in the initial package.

Apple is getting a lot of criticism for its locked down and controlled approach to third party software on the iPhone, and lack of a developers program. Developer support falls outside the minimum marketable features required for initial launch into the consumer marketplace. By taking full control of the product, Apple can make sure that very high quality standards are in place, and that applications integrate with the iPhone experience. The reality of product development also makes it hard to build a stable developer API until the product is finished, so I fully expect a phased developer program. The initial phase included applications like Google Maps and Cingular Visual Voicemail from development partners (and I expect some kind of GPS location service to appear in the product soon - perhaps even in the initial release). The second phase will be a closed private developer program including big partners like Microsoft and Adobe. The third phase will start to open up to the Apple developer community, with stable public APIs and developer tools. Extensibility is a MMF for the professional/consumer (prosumer) and enterprise marketplaces, along with Microsoft Office support. This may take a year or so to arrive, its inevitable, but I can see why its not a feature of the initial product launch.

There has also been a lot of grumbling about Cingular and the lack of 3G service. Apple have dropped hints that they will support 3G sooner rather than later. My guess is that 3G is considered an MMF for the European and Asian markets, so I wouldn't be surprised if the models launched in those markets in late 2007 and 2008 included 3G support, and as Cingular's own 3G network continues to roll out over the USA the timing would make sense here as well. The real alternative to Cingular for Apple would be to setup their own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) like Helio or Virgin Mobile. This is a big complicated thing to do without any experience, so my guess is that they decided that the highest priority was to get the product launched with a big network partner like Cingular, and to decide later on whether it is worth creating an MVNO for a less compromised product. So when the exclusivity arrangement with Cingular expires, they may well focus on their own MVNO services.

So thats my opinion, as someone who has developed products and strategies in the past and understands the compromises, but with no inside information on their actual plans. My own plan is to avoid the initial release, and see what the product looks like for the Xmas 2007 shopping season.

iPhone and Treo at MacWorld

I went to MacWorld to check out the Apple iPhone. I think that it is even more impressive in person than I was expecting. Its smaller and much thinner than I imagined from looking at pictures, and watching the live on-stage demos made it clear just how much of a step forward in usability this is for a mobile device.
I took the picture above using my Treo650 of someone else taking a picture with a Treo650, so the size can easily be compared. I was embarrased to get the Treo out anywhere near the iPhone, it just felt wrong. The overall width and length of the device is similar, but the Treo is about twice as thick. I tried to take a picture edge-ways to show how thin the iPhone is, but the Treo camera is a crappy low resolution one and the iPhone is so thin it effectively disappeared in the photo.

Apple iPhone Unanswered Questions...

Like everyone else, I think it looks great. The big difference between Apple and other vendors for just about everything they make is craftsmanship, everything else looks sloppy in design and execution in comparison.

So the questions, they really are around whether this is really a pocket OSX machine or a locked down phone that happens to use some parts of OSX.

• What CPU does it use? Can it run unmodified OSX applications, or do they have to be downsized and ported to a new CPU (Xscale/ARM is what Treo's use)
• How much memory is there for running applications? The 8GB Flash is basically filesystem space, so there must be some RAM as well.
• Is it open for more applications to be loaded? For example Firefox, Skype, Slingplayer, OSX Terminal, whatever..... or is it locked down?
• What is the model for developers to extend the platform?

I'm sure this will become clearer fairly soon, but all the commentary I'm reading is just going "oh wow" and no-one is asking or answering these fundamental questions that have big long term implications...

Anyway, next year's Xmas present request list will have one of these on it!

[Update...]
As an existing Treo650 user, the discussion on the iPhone at TreoCentral is very interesting. They imply that the CPU is an ARM architecture with an additional graphics processor, and that the iPhone is closed and controlled so you can't add applications to it. We'll see how long that lasts, either Apple will open it up or the hackers will have a lot of fun working out how to crack the design, just like they did for the games consoles, TiVo etc.

Going Solar? Get a weather station...

There's nothing line a 36 hour power outage (a tree fell and took the power lines with it) to make you think about where your energy comes from. We could get a generator, but it would only be used for a few days a year. If we get Solar power, it pays for itself over time and we would get daytime power at least....

We have a very sunny high altitude microclimate, on top of the Santa Cruz mountains with a south facing roof. It seems ideal, but the economics are quite dependent on how much Sun we actually get. We called up some local solar power companies to get an idea of what would be involved, but in the short term we decided that it would be good to measure our local weather.

I've been using the Weather Underground web site for a while, to track actual local conditions such as wind speed at a station a few miles away. This site contains all you need to know about setting up your own station, and there is plenty of low cost hardware and software to do it.

I think the amount of technology available for the price is amazing. I picked the Oregon Scientific WMR100 wireless weather station. It comes with a full set of sensors for temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, wind speed and direction, that connect to the base station via wireless. It has a USB connection for uploading to a PC. List price is over $200, but I bought it on eBay for $129.99+18 shipping, which was the best overall deal at the time.

I plan to add the optional UV sensor to get an indication of Sunlight (the UV sensor for this model is not yet available, I got an answer that it should be out in a couple of months), and monitor two temperature sensors, one in the shade, and one in full sunlight. I should be able to figure out which days are clear and sunny, and for how long.

[Update]
It arrived, I corrected a few details about the product features above, and I've assembled it and got the sensors to connect over the wireless, ready to install outside. Its nicely made, everything seems to work fine.

Slingbox-ing my TiVo

As I mentioned before, we got a Slingbox AV this Xmas, and I'm quite impressed. It was easy to setup, has been no trouble since, and now we can watch and control our TiVo from anywhere. The main use we have is to watch programs we have saved on our TiVo from anywhere in the house, and it runs a full TV resolution feed that uses a few Mbit/s to support this on our WiFi based laptop's. When running on a work PC laptop (Dell Inspiron with XP) the performance was very smooth, however on my three year old Apple Powerbook G4 I'm down on CPU power and running a beta-version of the Sling player that seems to need some more tuning. If I kill just about everything else on the Mac, it plays fairly well, but the picture keeps stalling if anything else is running.
I'm hoping that they will do some more tuning to fix this in the final release for the Mac...