These aren't the droids you're looking for!

For the past few days, i've spent time dipping my feet in the Android SDK and generally building baby apps to get a feel and understanding of them. This is in preparation for a larger app i'm building as part of my side projects at work so its fun all around. In the past, i've dabbled with Symbian S60 and pre- BB OS 7 but when it comes to app development the ease with which one can just get a working app installed and tested is astounding. Definitely loving it so far! 

Spring cleaning or sorts...

Finally got round to rebuilding my musty mouldy repo a couple of days back and began to check in some patches albeit easy ones just to get back in the groove. Next stop for me will be upgrading to VS2013. As usual, i need to have the best tool out there to play around with although emacs & Eclipse will continue to be my main preference for development. What can i say? A dork gotta have his toy.

Catching up...

Well it's been quite a while. Okay, a year since my last post. I could have used the recent “polar vortex” as a reason for the incredible delay but no - it's not even a remotely plausible excuse. Briefly, a recap of that undocumented year. Beginning with the most major, i finally ditched using Windows as my main OS for both coding and “recreational” activities and switched entirely everything to Linux; long overdue, on my part. The reasons being multiple. Right off the bat, as there was no suitable Win-based open source alternative for ccache, mind you, my build times ranged anywhere from 55-71 mins for full clobber builds and about 30mins for incremental builds. Again the latter time was fully dependent on which parts for the tree i had made local changes to. Honestly, fiddling my thumbs during those periods, especially early mornings when i had to pull new commits and update my local repo just got more and more frustrating. Toss in the lack of full Intellisense support even while using Visual Studio made my code edits even slower. A refactoring attempt was the final straw. With brilliant work done by Eclipse CDT developer, Andrew Gvozdev, which in turn allowed an easier time setting up and using the IDE for Mozilla C++ development, it was time to jump ship. Of course, emacs or vim could've been handy but hey it's a new millennium and in my case only a memory hungry editor with all the bells and whistles will do. With the switch, it's refreshing to see build times cut down to ~25mins for full clobber and ~4mins - max i've seen so far- for the incremental ones on my core i5 6GB RAM machine. Obviously,  with *nix's less overhead in process creation compared to Win, it fits nicely with the build system Mozilla has. It's mouthwatering to think what it'll be under a machine with a greater processing speed, RAM and of course SSD type disk. Stupefying, one could say.

Overall, i did get some nice things done such as the LLVMpipe fallback WebGL renderer option for Win and *nix users with a somewhat obsolete hardware who attempt to access and play around with cool things such as the interactive demos seen at the Chrome Experiments. By default Firefox, will use whatever software renderer is available, that is, the existing native GL driver. To explicitly use it, the user must manually change the gfx.prefer-mesa-llvmpipe configuration to true, assuming there's such a pre-built library located on the system to begin with. For those interested in the nitty gritty on how to build one locally, see: https://sites.google.com/site/buildllvmpipe/. Currently, i've thrown in my lot with the implementation of the WebVTT format. A fellow contributor, Rick Eyre, has an excellent blog post on what's been done and aim to achieve in the long term so i wont go into details here but with Apple and few others already stealing a march on us, it'll be most welcome to have more contributors to get it all polished and ready for the public. All hands to the pump, i say! Again for the curious to test out what's been implemented so far, turn this config option: media.webvtt.enabled on and sample a few demos online or even better create your own!

Enough of the techie stuff!

The fun part was hiking some of the popular trails again -for the umpteenth time - of the wonderful Long Trail and attempting my best impression of a daredevil Lance Armstrong during the summer; just the cycling part and not the other unsavory bits....As a rabid Liverpool fan, one can only expect me to be equally passionate when i play football(fussball? futbol?)- loathe to call it soccer. A man of the match performance as a defensive midfield terrier with two assists and a highly rare goal was the summer highlight personally. There's nothing like hobbling off the field of play feeling like a Marco Materazzi-cum-Vinnie Jones rolled into one. Secretly, i think if opposing teams knew the reason for my admiration of players like Nigel “The Lawnmower” De Jong, i very much doubt they'd dribble in my direction. [Cue: insidious laughter]

Smartphone OS Wars, Nokia & CEOs

V-Day. Not that fateful day the Japanese decided to throw in the towel after seeing the horrors visited on Nagaskasi. No, not that one. Rather, valentine’s day. A day to spend with that special someone or in the case of quite a number of Finnish engineers for Nokia, a day to mull the impact of what that week’s seismic announcement of an alliance between their company and Microsoft means for them and their careers. To be honest, they’ll be gutted. Not only have they been told in not so subtle terms that their flagship OS, Symbian, is not good enough to take on the next generation of smartphone operating systems from major rivals but that they aren’t even trusted come up with a competing version. A double blow for the Finns; a champagne moment for those much maligned at windows mobile. For the latter,  seven is definitely the charm.

Before i delve into analyzing the deal, there’s a question which begs to be asked.  It often pops up in “water-cooler" conversations amongst techies. Do the suits upstairs know what they are doing? Simply, did Mr. Elop make the right call? It’s quite derogatory to describe non-technical staff members in that manner, i admit.  The recent move of Larry Page into a hands-on management position got me thinking about what makes one a success of an executive overseeing a product division or the entire firm itself. I limit myself to tech firms. Success here does not include maximizing profits by slashing the workforce and asking the remnants to equally share the workload to maintain quality. Nope, i apply a rosier(ideal?) definition: a situation where an executive presides over an increase in the revenue stream of existing products either by their improvement or the introduction of new products or services. Should that executive leave his/her post with neither a significant change for the better or worse, in my book that still qualifies as a quasi-success. How much change is significant? Finding an answer to that could be the subject of a thesis. Theoretically, every firm independent of size can be said to have  a “change-threshold” beyond which effects tend to be adversely manifested or send the firm on a upward trajectory. For the purposes of discussion, my definition will identify Microsoft’s erstwhile chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, tenure as a quasi-success. Eric Schmidt’s handling of Google from a startup to the 800 pound gorilla they are today is an example of a successful oversight. The litany of executive missteps and failures aren’t too hard to find. Managing people, making them interact and perform as envisaged is hard enough. Of that i am a realist.

So what’s the secret ingredient of success besides having the intellect required of the job? From my readings, it appears that those with a long history(read: worked with the bolts and nuts) in the sector they’re overseeing, a hint of narcissism,  possessing an unshakeable belief that they’re almost always right yet  can identify their own faults, adapt and step aside for a fresher smarter individual tend to experience success per my definitions. Does Elop tick the boxes? The Nokia board obviously thinks he does. However, using all of 5-6 months to arrive at a major decision of this magnitude raises an eyebrow. The other red flag-given his background- is settling on Windows Phone 7 as a viable solution to their woes despite having Meego in the wings. A damning indictment is the memo he sent to the staff. Was the last one utterly necessary? Not being privy to internal deliberations means that one can only make educated guesses.  Despite having a strong presence in every market, Nokia never really made inroads in the North American market. Could that have been due to a marketing issue? As of this writing, i am yet to see a Nokia phone advertised on TV for any major US telecom network. We’ll know if after shipping new handsets, the problem still persists. After all, Samsung and other Asian manufacturers seem to be doing well.

Depending on one’s view and interest with regards to Nokia, the range of responses to the deal centered mainly around profound optimism and pessimism. Vic Gundotra remarks and Elop’s response to them just frames the issue nicely. The deal obviously means that Nokia”s performance in the future will be beholden to the success of the Microsoft’s mobile OSes. This will ultimately reduce Nokia to being a handset manufacturer. RIM’s acquisition of QNX software which coincidentally does many of the things Meego hopes to do means that Elop will frequently be on the special hotline to his Redmond golf buddies to make sure they deliver. With Google slowly tightening their hold over Android and God-knows what Apple is brewing for the coming months, Nokia’s board will be hoping that the new fellow hired made the right call. The alternative? Elop unintentionally tried to put out the burning platform with…napalm.

2010: A Year in Review

With an ankle sprain and a sore jaw, i bade adieu to 2010 and welcomed the new one. In case one was wondering, i suffered a humiliating old-lady-like tumble down the stairs. When one’s back begins to creak from shoveling the snow off the driveway then i guess such falls are expected. Resolutions? Nada. When a state of equilibrium is attained, trying to perfect that is folly. However, the concept of having resolutions is to ensure that the mistakes, missed objectives and other failed aspirations of the old are not repeated in the new one. This well applies to individuals and corporations regardless of size. So with the start of the new year, i look back at the highlights, lows, blunders and eye-popping moments in the technological industry that some may not have been aware of. Resources such as PC World, NYTimes, Wired etc provide more than ample reviews of the tech sector for the last year.

Of all the engineering disciplines, software design and development is largely abstract. By that, before the product is shipped, a service implemented and rolled out; most of the prior deliberations about the kind of functionality that software will provide, and how its constituent modules interact in a predetermined orchestrated manner to produce the desired effects are mostly done in the mind. Although various software aids are used throughout from development editors, code testing and coverage tools to analyzers to check the logic as well as fine tune the software to the desired performance; at the end, it’s humans doing all of that. Homo sapiens, the root cause of almost all bugs. The ones we’re absolved of all responsibility are the typical ‘you’re-just-out-of-luck’ hardware failures. So bearing in mind that software might not work as specified, there’s also the insidious situation where it works so well that it actually does a bit more than intended…the stuff of nightmares! Like all good horror stories, a friend’s tale of his team losing part of the code repository brought to mind the T-Mobile Sidekick fiasco two years ago. It usually begins with a harmless event which with hindsight turns out to be quite a blunder.

There’s a reason why clients are regularly encouraged to get an upgraded or updated version of any software they’re currently using. Apart from the offering of newer features, the upgrade often offers a ‘safer’ option as compared to the previous version since all known bugs will have been thoroughly resolved.  So when bunch of criminals stole Google’s Gaia source code, the shock was palpable. After all, Gaia was Google’s single sign-on system that controlled passwords needed to access a particular Google application a user was interested in. As much as the sophistication of the attack mechanism is to be admired-from a purely technological viewpoint, of course- it was appalling to learn about the initial flaw which served as the vector for the attack, upon a forensic audit. Google had basically been hacked through a zero-day exploit via IE6. As incredulous as it sounds, yes Internet Explorer 6 of all the browsers available to Google in 2010! To be fair, they might have had a valid reason for hanging onto this browser but that begs the question of what legacy internal application was making them use it in the first place.  There’s a joke that a successful dealer doesn’t partake of his own product…for a resolution those in Google’s IT department might want to try any of these: sample what its team responsible for Chrome having been brewing of late; take a tour of Mozilla and download a copy of their renowned fiery resident or better yet get a couple of eager code-happy interns to drag that dinosaur app kicking and screaming into modernity.

Talking of code theft has just brought to mind another case of 2010 albeit this time with Goldman Sachs. Ah where would ol’  trusted Goldman have been had dear Uncle Paulson Sam not bailed out AIG? That’s another matter of course. When their talented VP of Equity Strategy, Sergey Aleynikov, who had been working for years on high frequency trading software for the firm decided to tend his resignation and leave for greener pastures, he cleaned out more than his desk alone. He nabbed a “few” source file copies as well. It’s one thing to save a snippet of an algorithm or a clever workaround one did code but to ‘back-up’ 32 MB of the accompanying supporting files is pure larceny no matter how one tries to belittle it unless of course the individual in question can afford the kind of lawyers O.J Simpson had.  Unfortunately his legal defense team’s arguments weren’t convincing enough to the federal grand jury. Incredibly, not to be outdone, 26 year old Samarth Agrawal of Societe Generale’s high frequency trading team had also decided to ‘share’ a few lines of the firm’s Distribution Quotation System’s code with  Tower Research Capital LLC. Upon being caught red handed, he spilled the beans and admitted he had been angling for a position with them-as if he was on minimum wages at SocGen. I would love to be the fly buzzing overhead when both men get to meet in the penitentiary yard. Oh, the giddy talk of algorithms. At the time of writing this, Oracle is facing a lawsuit for code theft….Once is an occurrence; twice, a coincidence; thrice, time to check the water cooler supplies for contamination.

The unluckiest guy of 2010 definitely has to be Grey Powell. Grey who? Well, he was that Apple engineer who had a few drinks in a bar mostly frequented by geeks and left an iPhone 4 prototype there just a few weeks before its scheduled public release.  The resulting saga between Cupertino and Gizmodo ranged from denials to a SWAT-like raid before Apple’s General Counsel’s letter finally got the prototype returned. Hollywood couldn’t have scripted it any better. I guess that old saying about finders keepers was made irrelevant once and for all. The episode just didn’t end there. Apple released the new version of the phone which subsequently brought to light the shortcomings of its in-built antenna and signal-strength indicator computing formulae. Both got somewhat resolved but not without the scrutiny of the media. When the dust settled, the executive in charge of hardware development for the iPhone needed a new employer. And Grey? It’s believed he’s still with them, after all it would have been a bad PR move to give the fellow a shove when the world is watching when it was something that could easily have happened to any other person.

Obviously, i could continue to drone on and on about the not too noticed bits of last year, but was there something-a new product, service etc..- that piqued my interest in the last calendar year? Two stood out for me. For someone who cut his teeth programming with Turbo C++ and CodeWarrior, the first time i switched to Visual Studio 2005 was so sweet.  Two iterations later, Microsoft’s release of version 2010 packed with goodies continued the fine work they had been doing. For now, my old 2008 Professional Edition is adequately serving its purpose although i have taken the 2010’s Express Edition out for a spin. It rocks! The other? Google’s Instant Search. When a newscaster  called it auto completion on steroids i was dumbfounded.  Although, the concept of having search results pop up on the fly as one types has been tried before such as Zheng’s attempt with Bing, Google’s implementation went way beyond using  just a couple wrapped APIs. Theirs was a sheer feat of scaling results and the guys that worked on their Caffeine search index certainly deserved more than the $10k pay rise they got to in order for Google to retain their talents. The ball’s in Microsoft Bing’s corner. I wonder what are they brewing for 2011?

A lot more happened that i haven’t mentioned. The whole Flash on iOS debate to the announcement by Canonical that the Ubuntu will be running Unity as its desktop manager in their next release are just a few examples of the meaty ones i left out. Perhaps i should have gone into details at the time. If 2010 is anything to go by, this year certainly seems promising.

A summer of bliss on the Long Trail

Watching the flurries land gently outside, adding another layer to the snow on the lawn, i finally realize that winter has returned after months of vacation.  Time really flies, but more so when one is in an entirely different world thinking up a solution to a set of intricate problems. There, dawn and dusk seem to be twins  and days blur into each other. Fall went by without noticing it and last week’s Thanksgiving didn’t do much to impress upon me that a season change was happening; seeing those cold feathery-like particles lightly descend from the heavens brought it home. Odd as it sounds, i do have the feeling that summer was just a few weeks ago…cue the Twilight Zone intro song.

Most people will probably have their own version of what la dolce vita entails. Mine is simply packing a backpack full of the necessary nourishments and gear for getting lost in the woods. Oh i forgot to add that all important durable dog tags just in case i end up being lunch for a bear or wolf pack.  That last item is primarily for closure purposes. I am of the belief that it’s absolutely cruel to leave a family with lingering hope of one’s return when in fact the individual in question is quietly working his or her way through some predator’s gut.  It’s the thrill of being disconnected from the “grid” and wandering off whilst seeing and hearing nature in it’s somewhat pristine self that draws me. Of course, the added advantage of having something to brag about to friends is another. I just cant resist making my colleagues feel like lazy bums.

The Long Trail stretching from the southern part of Quebec, right through Vermont up to its border with Massachusetts, offers many scenic and tasking trails for the avid hiker. In my opinion, the best thing about it are the smaller trails connecting it. So with the mercury hitting the nineties in the early part of the summer, i was already packed and yearning to be out there. Armed with the latest copy of the Green Mountain Club hiking book, my trusty hike partner and I attacked the Butler Lodge, Frost, Rock Garden, Maple Ridge and the  Laura Cowles side trails to name a few as well large sections of the Long Trail itself.  An exhilarating experience considering how many times we went “off course” attempting shortcuts. Admittedly, on hindsight, those were hare-brained and i was at fault since smarty pants insisted on being the navigator. Thank goodness i wasn’t a guide to those early explorers, they’d have been scalped! One of those moments where i suggested a detour ended with us almost being mauled by a farmer’s dogs, another with the skin on my arms  itchy, painful and bumpy from horse flies’ kisses. 

The best of these hikes was a 13 hour hike beginning at four in the morning if one counts the prior 45 minute drive to the side trail site. We aptly termed it the Insane Hike since we did it not on a typically clear blue sky summer day but rather in treacherous conditions: continuous  rain with visibility reduced to a few yards at higher altitudes, a not too gentle wind, wet rocks made more slippery by the moss on them….Try imagining being at almost 3700 feet clambering over those rocks with a sickening near 200 foot drop to the nearest ledge with the described conditions. Insane? I just love it when the adrenaline hits the bloodstream. I limped back that July day with a bloodied foot. Don’t ask how. In retrospect, i think i now understand why she never warmed up to the idea of us attempting skydiving together. I am still not sure whether the emphasis was on the skydiving or the together part.

I guess looking out now, what i am nostalgic for are those days when i returned with aching muscles, all dirty-yes i took a couple of tumbles-and disheveled but with a satisfied smile that i will be out there again doing something silly and..err…brave? Next summer, ah next summer…i keep telling myself.

I’m already reading about those famed Rockies.

Social networking & me

Often i find myself trying to come up with complex answers to this innocuous yet loaded question: “Are you on Facebook?”. At times, i do wish i was a geriatric or slightly more older looking-the daddy type with the beer gut- so i wont have to wind up in a conducive situation for that question to be posed in the first place. However, being a sprightly young and somewhat outgoing individual, there surely has to be some sort of cogent explanation as to why i am not swimming with the school like many of my contemporaries do. Obviously, I am one of the few odd ones out. Odd?How…odd?

Okay, let’s get this clear. I am not a sociopath with an abusive childhood history whose smile resembles a grimace; neither am i an anti-social  who grew up playing all alone in the sandbox at kindergarten and wouldn’t share his toys with others; nor a budding closet psychopath who loves to dream up dastardly deeds down in the dank basement or cellar and getting his panties all up in bunch just thinking of them.  I use the previous descriptions because when the first word of my answer to that question is a ‘no’, the range of expressions i get from my questioner starts from a subtly raised eyebrow to ones more pronounced such as the incredulously voiced: “No *#$!*&*#** way!”. The non-saintly reader is asked to insert an appropriate expletive for the last one. Good. Now that’s out of the way, on to more concrete plausible things.

First and foremost, i did have a Facebook account when it was at its nascent  and relatively exclusive stage-reserved for students of some certain colleges. Still do as a matter of fact. Back then i was just “trying” it out and being in the lab or library almost everyday with my close pals, the likelihood that checking for messages posted via Facebook from those same friends  and receiving something from them had slightly less than good odds to put it gently.  Using my all my fingers and toes, i can count the number of wall messages i did get from them. The problem today,however, is that i cant for the life of me remember which password i used to create it. Oh boo hoo, a lame excuse right… just a click on the “Forgot Password” and i will be emailed a reset link. Well, that only works if i still had my college email address up and running and could peek in its inbox from time to time. A little problem of graduation perhaps? So, effectively locked out of my account, why don’t i create another? Ah,the crux of the matter.

As with all social networking sites, an online presence must be updated frequently to stay relevant; from uploads of albums to constant updates about what one is up to or is planning to be up to? Being an engineer with a background in security, i naturally tend to see a lot of online stuff with a healthy dose of “danger”. Nope, i am not of the alarmist stripe. There’s a saying that the Internet is written in ink. It’s an apt statement. What i usually tell people  is that when they delete anything posted online, what they have done in reality is to deny themselves access to that data. Although something is “deleted”, a back up  may or may not exist somewhere for whatever reason and uses hidden in that never read yet agreed upon finely printed End User Agreement, Terms of Service or Use.

Contrary to what the reader may conclude at this point, the one overarching reason i did not create another account is that i don’t want to socialize via machines-servers, monitors etc- and have a firm define who a friend is to me. I already have a working one along with their qualifications: A good friend is one who bails me out when in jail, but the true friend is one who will be sitting next to me saying: “we really messed up”. I am an old fashioned fella who loves to travel to see, and chat with friends in person. Keeping in touch is okay. By that i mean the good old hearty gossip and reminiscing on the phone.  But keeping in touch and knowing their every single move exact to the millisecond is a turn off.

“Do you tweet?” usually follows…I am not of the avian species!