Whitenoise

Nokia puts QT on Symbian series 60 platform: After Trolltech was acquired by Nokia ,it was widely anticipated that they may port QT libraries to Symbian platform. The first pre-release of QT for Symbian (called the ‘pyramid’) is now available.  As per the developer blog, to start with the Qore(QTCore),internet(QTNet) ,GUI (QTWidgets) and the GUI testing framework would be available.

With this release, QT now has support for the 3 major smartphone platforms today.

WiFi at 1Gbps: Yes, that is what Quantenna, a start up wants to achieve with its new chip!

WiFi standards, has come a long way and the latest standard 802.11.n (still in draft) has added support for multiple-input multiple-output  devices (MIMO) . In layman terms that means 802.11n allows devices with multiple transmitter and receiver antennas.

This inclusion enabled WiFi to achieve speeds upto 600Mbps .This has made the standard quite attractive and many devices already support the standard even though its still a draft.   Quantenna takes the 802.11n draft standard, and has improved it by  using four antennas each for sending and  receiving and 4 radio’s for each band. (a 4×4 array). This MIMO system makes it possible to achieve 1Gbps on WiFi.

Value of open source: The Linux Kernel is worth $1.4 bn!! That is the conclusion from a study done by the Linux Foundation. The figure was derived based on the number of lines of source that is calculated using a tool called SLOCount and then using an estimation model called ‘Intermediate COCOMO’ .

I remember COCOMO from my Software Engineering course at college. Now here ,is a nice example of how it is put to use   As acquiring small open source software companies by large companies increase, this model may help them in estimating the value of their product.

Microsoft’s new patent – real time censuring of audio :   Microsoft’s PDC2008 is on the way and many are expecting announcements on their next edition of Windows (Windows 7) and their road map on cloud computing. Before that ,here is a new patent from Microsoft that caught my attention.  PN/7,437,290 is about a method to analyze the phonemes in live audio streams and replace a F*** or M****** with a bleeps,other noise or silence.

Earlier , there used to be a 7 second delay during which the content is scanned by an editor who adds the bleep.  MS plans to use it in filtering audio exchanged between players using their XBox 360 along with some voip solutions like Teamspeak.

I was listening to a talk last week on what is happening in the mobile phone business. It was by a person closely working with higher officials of various players in this space.  Here are some excerpts from that ‘talk’.

Apple’s iPhone has truly changed the game in this industry. Though many were talking about a ‘Mobile internet’ experience on phones, no one gave that business a compelling device,and a nice browser to use. (I think our ideas were seriously crippled due to over use of windows internet explorer). With the advent of iPhone, this area has finally caught attention.

Impact on modems:
A very important component in the mobile phone is its ‘baseband’ or the ‘modem’.This component is
responsible for managing the various connectivity options in mobiles. Mobiles were advertised
for their connectivity (like 3G /GSM/GPRS etc). But the future modems would be supporting a plethora of connectivity options like GPRS/3G/HSPA/WiMax etc  and most of this would be integrated into a
single silicon. In other words connectivity cannot remain a USP for a phone. And competitors could easily bring in phones with all that you have in 6 months.

Usability ,the real USP (at least for now):
Though many were talking about Usability and user experience..it has now become THE most deciding factor. This was the example that was cited to explain how  usability matters:   Few years ago Motorola launched its RAZR a groundbreaking design and made lot of money. But other operators and OEM’s were able to quickly come up with similar hardware and better designs. So the niche was gone and RAZR was no longer unique.

It has been almost a year now and no one has been successful in getting an iPhone killer.You may have touch,you may have connectivity but there is something unique with the device that’s not easy to replicate/reproduce. There is TMobile G1 (based on Android) .But  apparently ,its finesse is not even close to version 1.0 of the iPhone software.

So,what does this mean to mobile phone business:  The market is no longer about technology. Its more of ease of use and ‘feel good’.Technically, it also means that traditional OS’s, traditional frameworks with minimal attention to Usability may go away. This market will be populated with more and more of what is called as ‘High Level OS’ or HLOS. High Level OS’s are complex operating systems ,with support for most if not all of the functionality that a desktop OS would support.

97things : A public wiki was created late September to collect the 97 things every Software architect should know. The response has been good and OReilly has agreed to publish the contents of the wiki as a page a book ,early next year.
Software architects around the world contributed content to this. The first phase of the book is now done and the 97 things that every software architect should know has been selected. The list is quite pragmatic.Have a look ..its quite insightful.

Google’s new Application Logger:
After releasing the C++ unit test framework ,the company has now open sourced a C++ library for application logging.Glog is a application level logging framework that uses streams for data logging. From the documentation,its looks  quite easy to use. Here is the link, if you want to bookmark it.

Yahoo’s new Calendar service:   After revamping its Mail UI ,yahoo has now come up with a re-designed calendar  service.I was not able to open an account (beta subscriber limit exceeded ) ,but
this review says of many good things with this service. Yahoo is known for  its rich UI and I hope this new service brings in some new ideas into the calendar app (one such is the combination of month view and day view in single  screen). A review on this upgrade here.


Linux turns 17: 17 years ago,on Oct 5th 1991 Linus made his historic announcement at comp.os.minix about Linux.  Linux has come a long way from there. Today  Linux has replaced Unix and even Solaris in their respective markets and has been the de facto OS of most platforms that claim to be open source.
There are many good things that has come through Linux.. Here is a nice review about this at one of my favorite websites : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/09/linux_at_17/.


iPhone drops NDA: On October 1st Apple  dropped its controversial NDA on its iPhone SDK,that prevented users of the SDK to share details on using the SDK. The NDA was widely criticized and some books planned  on the SDK were dropped. But Apple has given up finally and a slew of reviews and tutorials have popped up.  Here is a gentle introduction on writing a simple iPhone touch application.  By the way, the iPhone Tech Talk is coming to Bangalore on Nov 24th. Considering success stories of developers earning to the tune of $ 250,000  ,learning the SDK is a good thing to do


Wall.E and Apple: Like many I liked  Wall.E. A good  movie with a nice message. If you thought that the design of heroine Eva looked ‘iPod’ like, then there is reason for it. When Pixar wanted a ‘futuristic’ design for  Eva, they contacted Jonathan Ive, Apple’s product designer ..and the rest is  what you see as Eva in Wall.E



Linus launches his personal blog: After so many years Linus starts his own family blog mainly to put
stuff related to his family.  But one can still get some geeky stuff as this ‘tracker’ tool that keeps track of web usage by his kids and a writeup on the latest 2.6.27 release.

[OFF topic] personal gripe:  In the blog one could see  most people replying ‘for him’ and starting the philosophy thing. (may be i am just looking at them ). But would be nice to hear his opinion on the comments and not change his personal space into a discussion forum.

This is a very short primer on the various licenses used for open source software.  Its intended as a quick look for those in hurry . For elaborate stuff, refer wikipedia.

Historically, there have been three license types or families :
Academic license (MIT Athena ,Berkley and Apache).
Free software licenses(General Public License and the LGPL).
Mozilla-style licenses(Mozilla and the IBM licenses).

Here are some salient features of each of them.

The Berkley license essentially:
*  Enables the software user to do anything with the software,including extending and selling it.
*  Does not require any derived software be licensed under the same license of that the changes
be published. This enables proprietary products to include such licensed software safely.
*  Requires that attribution be given for the work, and copyrights maintained.
*  Disclaims any warranties (express or otherwise) just as a proprietary EULA does.

Free Software Licenses(GPL and LGPL)
Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation and his definition of software freedom ,where a
program source code was always available and a user could always fix and extend t he software without
restriction. The GPL defined this particular sharing foundation.
*  If the user distributes a modified version version of code released under GPL,they can do so ,only by
sharing their changes through the same license (i.e. their changes to GPL code shall be available under GPL).
*  If a user make use of any of the GPL code in her program and distributes the program, the entire program
including its source code becomes subject to GPL. (i.e. users’ application that make use of GPL code should also be
licensed under GPL)
*  The GPL disclaims any warranties just as proprietary EULA’s.

The LGPL:
The LGPL was developed later to account for software libraries.Many developers who shared utility libraries
under GPL did not want to force the user of their libraries to share their ENTIRE source code (as in
the case of GPL),but only the changes that is done to the library.

The Mozilla License:
In the late 1990’s ,Netscape published the source code of their browser and built a community of developers around it.
This project was called Mozilla project and a new license viz. Mozilla Public Licence was created.
*  Derivatives of an original MPL work to be licensed under the MPL similar to the GPL.
*  Enables MPL licensed works to be combined with other software and re-licensed to a “Larger work”. This enables
development of closed proprietary software using MPL softwares (similar to the academic licenses).
*  Discusses patent rights relevant to the licensed work.
*  Disclaims any warranties just as a proprietary EULA does.
There are several derivatives of the MPL that is being used by various companies that wish to develop
collaborative software .

One more term that’s associated with all these licenses is ‘dual licensing’.
Dual licensing:
It is an attribute of the intellectual property law,that the property owner can license their property to
as many people as many times ,and in as many ways as they choose.
This clause allows companies distributing open source software to sell the same software under an OEM license.
Dual licensing helps clients of open source software to embed the code within their works,
without a need to redistribute their works.

Popular OSS that are released under Dual licensing are MySQl from MySQL AB and QT from Trolltech Nokia.

TiVoization and GPLv3: TiVo is a Digital Video Recorder that uses GPL software and the Linux kernel. To comply with GPLv2 conditions, TiVO did release their code . However it was alleged that TiVo prevented modified software from running on their hardware by running only the programs that used valid digital signatures  from the manufacturer.This way,though the code was released, modified software would not run on the hardware.  This behavior was declared as ‘Tivoization’ and one of the goals of GPL Version 3 was  to prevent this .

The OSS community was divided in their support for GPLv3 . Finally some modifications were made to the GPLv3 license so that the anti-tivoization will not be applied when the software is distributed to a business.
Wikipedia has a well written summary on Tivoization and GPLv3 .Have a look for more on this.

Nokia’s Tube : Nokia has been hinting on a touch screen phone based on success of the iPhone.  Now they are here with the company’s first touch based phone based on S60 (they launched a  S90 based touch phone in 2005), codenamed ‘Tube’ the phone would debut in markets as 5800.

The phone is not targeted at  iPhone. Its USP would be Music based services, an area which Nokia is pursuing seriously with the launch Ovi suite of web services.

Following this Nokia has also launched version 3 of its Series 60 platform.  Series 60 has been updated with a host of goodies ,notable would be the support for touch and ‘motion based’ (accelerometer kinds) applications. The framework also adds support  C++ Standard Template Library and demand paging in the OS!

Ubuntu Intrepid : The October release of Ubuntu (Ubuntu Intrepid) is out for  beta testing.   I’m quite happy with Ubuntu Hardy ,and the memory usage has been pretty good. From this ‘first look’ by Life Hacker ,it appears that the release has some new features like Guest mode ,enhanced network manager etc.

This release packages Gnome 2.24 and XOrg 7.4 ,among other things. I am waiting for the performance benchmarks  from Phronix before switching to this release.    One can download the latest version from here: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/beta

Microsoft into Cloud Computing: After getting hands on the Desktop and the servers,Microsoft
wants to develop an OS for cloud computing now.  Steve Ballmer may unveil a new Windows operating
system suited for a cloud computing environment and can run .NET based applications during their annual  PDC event.

Lets see if Microsoft is able to catch up with the players already in this market (Amazon’s EC2
and Google’s App Engine .

2008 Ig Nobel Awards: Winners of the 2008 Ig Nobel awards were announced. The awards are given for
the weirdest scientific research done in each of the fields for which a Nobel prize is given.
This years list has some pretty interesting and hilarious ideas that have won this award.

I wanted to watch Paruthiveeran for quite some time..and last week ,I managed to watch it at home.
The movie did not disappoint me.

The movie is set in rural Tamil Nadu (probably near Madurai, one could guess from the accent)

Paruthiveeran is a ruffian who leads quite an adventurous life along with his uncle.  Mutthalagu is very much in love with Paruthiveeran .. an affection that starts early in her life when Paruthiveeran saves her from a well.  But Muthalagu is from a different caste and there is lot of opposition to marry her lover. Finally they decide to leave the village and move ahead..but things have gone too  bad to have a good ending for this movie. The ending is quite gruesome and abrupt. It reminded me of scenes from movies like Hannibal.

Priyamani’s role as Muthazaghu was exceptional. Her National award for ‘Best actress’ award is well deserved.  The movie is quite realistic, though at some places there was an ‘overkill’ of the rustic effect. Also, it was a bit lengthy and could have been shorter..nonetheless, its a fine ‘village movie’ that I have seen in a while.

Now I want to watch the other movies from this director (Mounam Pesiyadhe ,Raam ).

FOSS.in is an annual open source event that happens in Bangalore. I’ve not attended the event anytime,but I go through the presentations of the speakers. There were several presentations on many topics like OpenMoko ,OpenSolaris,etc last year which were quite informative.

The event will happen Nov 25-29 this year. The CFP announcement was done quite some back  . Yesterday I received an email on what has  changed and whats the focus. This year’s focus would be ‘Talk is cheap.Show me the Code‘.The bar has been raised now and its more of a ‘developer only’ event .The organizers want to keep the noise low and concentrate on what matters most..RESULTS… Way to go!!

Some thoughts: As the post says, much of it sounds idealistic… I really don’t know if coding workouts could produce ‘results’ as the post suggests.

I may be quite wrong but in my opinion ,summits/conferences are for ideas and not for writing code..not many would come to a   room and start coding…I may not be able to attend the meeting (I don’t want to stand on the way of  smart people).

I wish good luck for FOSS.in to be a grand success.

Here is the original Omelette post: http://foss.in/2008/10/fossin2008-the-omelette-post/