NFC vs Acoustics, Mobile Payments and HopOn

NFC (Near Field Communication) is an industry standard for communication between mobile devices as well as between mobile device and peripheral hardware, for tasks as mobile payments or controlling mobile functionality by area, or by proximity to some other device (see Samsung TecTile sticker for a cool use case by Samsung).
Note that NFC and Bluetooth are not the same technology (see the difference between the two here).

While it seems as a promising standard, adopted by most new mobile devices, iPhone still doesn't. Which makes it a bit difficult if you want to implement a generic application with communication between devices, or between device and hardware, and the device might be iPhone. Applications in that domain might be games (e.g. a bingo game that invites all devices in the room to participate, without a need to "register" or "know" the arranging server domain), broadcast communication in a closed environment (bus, train, airplane) and of course mobile payment.

As an alternative to NFC, some companies have proposed the interesting idea of using un-hearable, ultrasound, sound waves communication, companies like Brazilian startup NearBytes, Microsoft and others more. Idea is to use modern mobile device abilities to receive and to play inaudible signal (>18kHz), supported for example by iOS and Android.
(Read more about NearBytes here).

I came to this recently while following Israeli startup HopOn, presenting a working system for transportation mobile payment based on acoustic signal broadcasted by a small hardware device on the bus. Their technology seems promising and is already working in some bus lines in Tel-Aviv. See their marketing piece here, it's in Hebrew but you don't really need to understand Hebrew to follow it.

The success of iPhone

Three years back, I explained why Nokia is not supporting external applications.

Well, since then Apple has AppStore and Nokia has followed with OVI. And Samsung has its Internet@TV portal.

It appears that focusing on the appliance itself is not enough nowadays.

Thoughts following 2010 FogBugz and Kiln World Tour

I was attending yesterday Joel Spolsky world tour for FogBugz and Kiln.

I must admit that till yesterday I thought that Joel has a great blog about SW development, but I didn't quite understand - who needs yet another bug tracking tool... is there still a real market for that, when you have today so many good free tools!?

A few thoughts following the event:

1. Joel's presentation skills do not fall from his writing. The gathering starting with a projected countdown analog clock, Joel went on stage right at the moment when the countdown reached its end - with a pre-planned bug on the clock finish resulting with some fake errors and blue screens, which led Joel to open a bug, start his presentation, then get a response on his newly opened bug "poping accidentally" while in his presentation (interestingly enough, while his Outlook is closed :-) , which led to getting into the code itself using Kiln, comparing versions and eventually "solving" the bug and checking in. A full bug detection and solving cycle in 10 minutes. With a few jokes here and there, and while going quickly through the products' abilities and strength points.
   
   


2. The traditional tools for bug tracking and source control are OK. But even in this "already solved" domain, there is still room for improvements and for new players, either open source or commercial. When we have an idea to develop something we usually tend to check who already done that and how good it is. And when we see that there are already several reasonable solutions we assume that the market is closed for us on that. Well, Joel shows that there is always a market for realy good products, you don't have to invent a new big thing, you may need however to invent many small things.
   
   


3. Distributed Source Version Control - GIT, Mercurial, Kiln - disconnects the developers own copy from a repository, while preserving full history and repository context. This concept has several significant advantages:
   (a) You do not postpone your check-ins, being afraid of hurting the main repository, check-ins are made into your private copy. When you are ready you push your copy back to the main repository. Your check-ins preserve full history during your development! This is also important when you perform a merge and realize that your original file was overriden by a wrong change - you don't have to worry as you have your full history at hand and you can get back to your last check-in.
   (b) You can push your developments to another repository, e.g. to a QA repository, thus allowing to push relevant fixes quickly, without releasing them yet to the development repository.
   (c) Upon merge, it's easier to see for each change the exact origin of it. Managing several customer releases you can see which changes in the main release where merged into the customer release and which not.

Thoughts on Open Source licenses, Patents on Software and such

I'm dealing with Open Source usage approval cycle, which is an important task in any company, last thing that you want is to have your developers use whatever they find on the web.

Few insights and thoughts from my experience:

• Developers in genral are mostly ignorant to legal issues. If not controlled they may use a free 30-days evaluation copy embedded in their system, just because the word free appeared somewhere in the site. In most cases they don't bother to read the license.
  
• With Off-Shore developers problem is even bigger. They tend to be much more open with open source, without seeing the risks. Even if they do follow the company policy, submitting usage requests for open source usage, you may find inside their code much more "embedded" un-approved snippets and libraries. I tend to think that the reason is the distance, they believe that even if caught the maximum you could do is yell at them over the phone or in e-mails, but you cannot beat them physically and they use it.
  
• For above reasons and others, usage of open source must be controlled. There are scanning tools in the market that help you find un-reported usage of open source and commercial external software. Usage of such is helpful in finding the disobedient developers who still drop in whatever they like, fix that on time and beat them while the felony is still hot.
  
• Scanning tools also point at many usages that are a very small snippet of something that looks like might be taken from an open source or even from an un-licensed example on the web. To some it seem a problem that should be fixed in the code, I personally believe that the rights on how to perform quick sort do not belong to anybody, even if part of some open source or are published on the web somewhere. Taking two notes from a melody doesn't harm its rights.
  
• Same goes for patents on software. Publishing a patent on algorithm is problematic, but many patents are on "a method and a system". I have such one myself. Does it really prevent anyone from creating a new similar development? Should it?

... and the UI is also going back

Following my last post on concurrent processes, my good friend Effie Nadiv noted that the UI is also getting backwards.


Back in the old days, Lotus 1-2-3 had a menu line that was not opening to overlay your main screen but was instead changing the menu line each time you make a menu selection. One can argue that this is not optimal, but I remember it as something very useful. Today in some cases you find yourself struggling to open the sub-sub-sub-menu to select something, trying not to close the entire thing before you make your selection.

It becomes also a common practice that any new dialog or window may hide previous ones, extra info may hide the main data etc. Effie argues that it all becomes from the philosophy that the application may do whatever it wants. Restrictions would heart creativity and we don't want that. So you have creativity in the new versions: my new version of Babylon has a fancy UI, ignoring the fact that it is not working, and the old one with the standard Windows UI was OK, it's a real charm. The new office is a nightmare, after you got used to something. Any new version of a SW tries to justify itself with a new fancy visual design which you don't want. You just want it to work.

Process Concurrency - are we stepping ahead or backward?

The first version of Apple's iPad allows only one running process. A bit limited, but most people reported high satisfaction. On the other hand, my OS allows for multi processes to run in parallel and it starts to turn me crazy.

Why process concurrency is a BAD THING

• You are showing a presentation and suddenly some pop-up from another process pops
• Doing a critical debugging task, you are all focused and sharpened, but then your machine starts being sluggish as some background process decides to take CPU time or memory
• You open your task manager to understand why your machine is so sluggish and see a list of so many processes. What's all that? I don't need half of it. Though, the first "terminate" that you try shuts down the system.
• Any utility today can decide to run in your background, to really control what runs in your background you need to be an expert, otherwise you lose your background to all sort of things you really don't know much about.

How often do you click Ctrl+ALT+Del?

I find myself at least once a day using the Ctrl+ALT+Del to check what's holding my machine. How about you?

So, how was it back then, in the good old times?

In DOS, you could have only one process running. If you wanted to jump to another without closing your application you could use TSR but you could have only one TSR pop at a certain time, and when it was at the background it took NO resources, it just set there waiting for an interrupt without making any sigh.

The un-responsiveness that we get today from our systems is unbearable. Applications decide to go at the background to update themselves, or to index the file system, or to do other non-critical task. The feeling is that the resources of the machine are not yours. You are lucky if the machine throws a bone at you giving you some resources.

The user experience you get today on a quad core, xGhz CPU with xGB fast RAM are worse than what you got on an old old x8086 machine, 1000 times weaker. The difference is that the old applications were much more focused on being lean and mean, never went to the net during their operation (the web was BBS and gopher), and they didn't run in parallel.

We need to go back to the old approach, giving the stage to one application at a time - all other would be HALTED and would not take any system resources. It sounds so limiting, but this is how DOS used to work. And this is how the first version of iPad works.

Cisco new router deliverring 322 Tbit/s

Cisco announced a new core router, named CSR-3, delivering 322 Tbit/s:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=188914&

My brother-in-law is part of this project. I'm not sure whether his part is the extra 22 Tera bits beyond 300, but he is there inside for the past years and has a major role there.

Whether this is a world shocking event for the internet world or not we will see, but for sure this is a landmark, comparing to the 56K b/sec not long ago (well, this is not an honest comparison, comparing home pace to core, but still the rate at the core level got from gigs to teras - factor of 1,000).

It's a very happy declaration for companies doing video services, IPTV etc. Of course there is still the need to propagate these paces to the homes, with fiber to the home, but this is already happening at some countries and will expand (Hong Kong, Hague, more Europe, and it happens that Kansas city even changed its name to get fiber).

With 322 Tbits/s it sounds that someone needs to really start working on teleporting.

Technology Optimism

At the time of massive cutoffs, transition of positions to low-cost centers and the sour smell of pessimism in the air -- I feel the spirit of Technology Optimism.

During the good times, the finest people with the brilliant ideas are sucked into the big corporations, tempted by nice salaries and all other perks. In many cases what they do in such positions is to work hard on projects that are later being shutdown. Let's admit, the big corporations are good at raising the money and selling the product, but when it comes to innovation, best innovative trick is to find the right startup to acquire. And this goes also for great innovative companies like google (GoogleMaps, GoogleVoice and many more are based on external acquisitions, see Wikipedia - List of acquisitions by Google).

There is a great advantage in a crisis, being a tool in reforming the market back to an efficient structure. We need more innovation and much more efficient companies.

Many brilliant people who have been back into the market lately are fed up working for giant dinosaurs, and start working on their own new startups. It may be hard at this point to raise the initial capital, but these startups are thin and efficient. And in a year or two we will start seeing the results with new technology domains that we couldn't imagine before.

JavaDay, JavaOne - Java Thoughts

I was attending Sun's Java Day this week, here in Israel. The main themes Sun is pushing are JavaFX and MySQL.

Some thoughts on both, as well as other topics.

JavaFX

Sun's interest here is clear. Every handset or any sort of device running JavaFX means more licensing fees for Sun. In fact, JavaME is one of the only Java environments which Sun's really see money from, at least for now. This would probably change in the future with much more agressive sell of JavaSE licenses for extra features and support, but still handsets is a very important addressable market, competing with others technologies such as the simple browser, Android, iPhone Objective-C, etc. Sun interest is to have as many applications as possible running on top of JavaME, JavaFX and LWUIT (the last two are a bit competing on the same square). More applications means more consumer power (consumers who want to run these applications) thus more pressure on the handsets manufectures to have JavaME and JavaFX on the handset, droping the required license fee at Sun's pocket.

All fine till this point. But now it comes to JavaDay event, or JavaOne conference in SF. These events shall reflect what interests the Java community, be judgmental, compare competing technologies. But instead it becomes more and more a marketing event for what Sun is trying to push. Thus, JavaFX catch very high percents of all sessions (even a session on Maven had to be called "Deploying JavaFX apps with Maven" or something alike to get in...) And it is totally lacking the critic perspective, comparing with other competing technologies such as Android, GWT, zool, YUI, Adobe AIR etc.

Is JavaFX interesting? probably yes, but not at the amounts poured at us.

As for the judgmental perspective, I'm missing in JavaFX the separation between content and style, without that this would be a step back. Does JavaFX work with CSS? not that I know of. Is there a similar alternative? The declarative approach of JavaFX is good, but why the choice of JSON-like declarations and not XHTML? The language is very close to Groovy, but not exactly the same (Groovy is from Spring creators), is there a path to consolidate these two new scripting languages? And why should we go with a propraietary environment and language, and not with W3C standards adopted by the browsers running on mostly all handsets? ... Yes, I know there are answers for some of the questions above, but in the huge time dedicated for JavaFX, alternatives, as well as known flaws and drawbacks, were not discussed.

Which brings me to the thought that independent Java events, such as Devoxx, are a better meeting place for the community.


MySQL

This was another theme at the event. MySQL is a powerful tool, the regulator shall take it out of the hands of Oracle to preserve competition.


Java Reference App

Together with Ronen Perez, I was presenting a session called "Java Reference Application - putting all the buzzwords together" focusing on our selected libraries and tools.


Java Community and New Technologies

It's good to see all these smart people together. Being smart, people follow the trends and new technologies carefully, asking "what is it for me? how does it make my life easier?" In the past you could see people enthusiastic about any new thing, today you see people much more careful and reluctant. It's either that we are fed up with disappointments from previous "innovations" or that the pace of things require us all to be more cautious and conservative. This, together with the competition between technologies, requires new technologies to be well cooked and invest much more effort in getting us in.

Sun's Future

Rumors on IBM about to acquire Sun has taken Sun's stock up recently. The idea of Sun being acquired were running around already for some months when Sun's stock was dropping to 10$ (e.g. here, from August 2008). Today Sun is traded back at about 8$, after jumping more than 60% in the past two weeks.

When Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, announced the change of Sun's ticker from SUNW to JAVA, at August 23rd 2007, that was the beginning of the end. The price of the stock was around 19$ then, after visiting 253$ (!!!) seven years earlier. The main problem is that unlike Microsoft or IBM, Sun never succeeded in making money out of software. They had a history of starting software products and then shutting them down, and they never really cashed the success of Java. Sun is a company with technical excellence and innovative spirit, but for the benefit of itself and of the software market, it shall find its place within a company that knows how to cash out these qualities.

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May 2009:
Well, by now we all know that it was Oracle eventually to buy Sun. Still keeping the above relevant. I'm surly wishing all the best for this couple. And for IBM as well of course.
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Software Factories

Before the industrial revolution most of the products were made by hand, crafted. Is software manufacturing today more like a confection (ready made clothing) or more like "haute couture"?

The term "Software Factory" was created for describing the possibility of getting software requirements and sending them into a "factory" for manufecturing. (Do not mix that with a Microsoft technology with a similar name).

The challenge is that with software, customer needs may be very complicated. Can we just send the requirements into a "Software Factory" and get it done? (This in some way contradicts the idea of constant communication embedded in Agile Development.)

Think of airport control system that needs to address all kind of airports and equipment. Think of banking software that shall address different banks and communicate with all sorts of external interfaces. Can we create modules that are generic enough so that customization for specific customer needs can be done by cheap work force and without too much complications and investment?

Most software projects cannot be cloned. There is no customer that resembles another, requirements are different and the "physical" legacy environment is not the same.

Closets are also not all the same. Each customer may have different specific requirements. Nevertheless, most carpenters manage to stay scalable and address specific requirements by setting standards, such as several available sizes (you can order a closet of 2.0 or 2.4 meter height, however, 3.0 meter height would be a special order, would be processed uniquely and priced accordingly) and several available woods.

To achieve the ability of creating software as in "Software Factory", we shall:

1. Narrow the options and alternatives. State clearly what can be built as a standard and what is a special order.
   
2. Externalize a clear API
   
3. Insist on always getting clear requirements before starting (did you see a carpenter starting to work on a closet before having all measurements?)
   
4. Have core modules, easy to customize for very specific needs, with hooks and plug-ins for adding specific functionality
   
5. Create a very strict and close way of customizing the product, allowing it to be done by cheap work force. Always prefer customization techniques which require less thinking. Customization shall not be art, it shall be very technical and strict, preferably with clear instructions.
   
6. Both the core module and the customizable product shall be easily testable, each on its own.

I had a debate recently on whether the preferred technique for rendering raw data into HTML is JSP with Taglibs or XSL. Though XSL is very powerful and can do anything with raw XML at hand, I argue that a set of strict Taglibs with the instruction not to use Java code inside JSP makes it much easier to make this task in the mode of "Software Factory". In oppose to XSL, which is in some way an "art", using a strict set of predefined Taglibs is something that is much more narrowed, cannot handle all cases and special requirements, but can certainly provide most needs and most importantly, can be done by almost anyone, given clear requirements.

We are already in a period in which most organizations cannot afford having their software be "haute couture", they must settle on confection, ready-made, with some adaptations. Most software companies who would still manufecture their organizational software products as "haute couture" would not survive, unless in very specific and unique domains. When software becomes a commodity, like a cheap chip, the only way to produce it is in a "Software Factory" model.

Google open sourcing their new browser, Chrome

Google new browser, Chrome, is the talk of the day. And the comics are indeed great.

Some were enthusiastic about Google opening this vast project as an open source. Noble indeed. Google themselves are feeling virtuous about it, or at least want us to feel that way. After all, a great tool like this (no one really seen it yet, but they do know how to create a buzz and I guess it will be indeed a good browser) – by releasing this great, superb, new-era browser as an open source, anyone can take it and adapt it to his needs, even Microsoft can, and maybe will even do.

So why did they do it? Why to open source? You can give it for free without opening it...

Slide 37 lists the noble arguments.

But could they really?
Do they have the option the ship a proprietary browser?

NO, because they don’t have one.

This new Chrome browser is said to be built upon WebKit and Mozilla projects. Both projects are open sourced and require derived work to be open as well (section 3.2 in Mozilla Public License and 2 of the LGPL).

They could have find a way to keep some of the code closed, like maybe the V8 javascript VM. But it would probably be too risky legally. And they might need their lawyers ready for Android issues (or for buying Sun).

Bottom line:

No need to be too cocky about open sourcing. As nice as it is that you open it, you probably had no other choice, other open source initiatives worked hard on writing parts of your code.

Google, on the way down

I host my blog at blogspot, as you can see. Today I was editing the draft of the post "ChangeLightBulbWindowHandleEx" when suddenly, between one automatic save to another, the draft just disappeared. Vanished. Gone. I was left with the title alone, no content.

There is no versions saving in blogspot, so I couldn't go to the previous version. Then I thought maybe I can turn to blogspot support and ask them to recover my draft, they might have it there somewhere. Long shot, but worth trying.

I started to look for the e-mail of the blogspot support.
And, after a while I found the link saying Contacting Support. Great! So I followed it, to a nice page. And another nice page. And another. None of which offered an e-mail or a submission form. All tried to suggest advices for all sort of problems. There was a link leading to Blogger Help, but there again, no e-mail or decent bug report form. BLAH!

Then I started looking maybe someone already bumped into the same problem, maybe there is a hope somewhere. And I got to this mailing thread at the Google Blogger Help Group.



It could have been funny if it wasn't sad.

Don't you care about your bugs?

I know it doesn't really say something about the business model of google. But it says that they lost it somewhere down the road. Don't you have enough resources to care about your quality?