eInk Development Kit
Last year I nearly fell in love with the
Sony Libre eBook reader. But like most Sony products, it features really cool technology in a package that's almost guaranteed unusable. The Libre's major fault was it's DRM system. Or rather that the only reader it supported was a DRM reader. I'm not a Copyright Sandinista calling for the end of all intellectual property controls, but there's a way to include DRM in a product, and there's a way not to include DRM in a product. And I've got to tell you... if you make an eBook reader that I can't use to read my personal notes or writings that I produce, I just can't use it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that DRM is evil, I'm simply saying that a product that only supports a DRM regieme is, for me, unusable. I still felt this way, even after some
clever people started reverse engineering the Libre's file format and
developed a technique for getting regular PDFs onto the device.
But the one thing that made the Libre very cool was it's
eInk display. eInk is a Boston area firm that's developing a revolutionary new display technology for mobile devices. Yes, you hear words like "revolutionary" all the time in the technology industry and it rarely applies. But the eInk technology has some definite advantages in terms of contrast and power consumption. It's high contrast, high definition display matrix allows text to be viewed in lighting conditions and viewing angles similar to regular paper. Unlike other display technologies, the device uses power only when the image on the display is changing. So it's understandable why one of the first commercial usages of the technology we saw was an eBook reader. People don't expect eBook page displays to be especially dynamic, they like them to be sort of like paper and you tend to read a single page for a relatively long time.
For several months at the beginning of this year, I hounded some of the sales people at eInk asking when they would make developer samples available. "Soon," was about the only response I would get. My plan was to marry an eInk display with an embedded ARM system running Linux, maybe something like the
Gumstix boards mi amigo Charlie Lindahl turned me onto. So it was with great joy that I found out that eInk has made developer kits available to the general public and (get this) they're already integrated with a Gumstix running Linux. W00t!
They're going to be available on November 1st, but you can apparently order one on a first-come, first-served basis. Just click over to the
eInk Dev kit page for ordering info. The $3000 price tag is a bit steep, but heck, you'll be the coolest geek on the block with one of these babies!
Drang Nach Westen
It's official... I'm moving back to California. The lure of good weather, good friends and good jobs got the better of me. Judy, Sean and I hope to be in town ( in Sunnyvale ) in late September or very early October. We'll be living in temporary housing for a couple months while we prepare a more permanent nest.
We've got a heck of a lot of moving to do over the next couple of weeks, so if we're a little slow to answer email or phone calls, it's because we're up to our eyeballs in moving details. In fact... the computer I'm writing this blog entry on is about to go into a box in preparation for moving.
I'm happy to say I've accepted a position with PalmSource, Inc. where I'll spend a lot of my day applying what I've learned about the Smart-Phone industry to the next generation PalmOS offerings.
Avast ye maties!
I was recently surprised to find that there are people out there that don't know that today is "Talk Like a Pirate Day." So... click on over to
The Original Talk Like a Pirate Day Site and learn how to properly sprinkle terms like "ahoy" and "avast" into your daily chatter.
MacOS X 10.4 + Motorola V330 + T-Mobile = 115kbps
So I was just about to drop T-Mobile as a carrier... Their coverage at my apartment was abysmal, the GPRS service I was getting on my Sony-Ericsson T610 was no better than a 14.4kbps modem, and their "411 and more" directory assistance service seems to be using phone books from 10 years ago.
Then they put a new tower up somewhere around my house and I went from virtually no service to four-bars overnight. Sweet! Data was still pretty poor until someone reminded me that they were deploying EDGE in my neighborhood; I actually hear they've got EDGE in 90% of their network now. Again... sweet.
I've been out of contract for a couple of months so I gave 'em a call to see what I could get out of them. Over the summer I did a lot of traveling and a lot of business-related mobile phone usage, so I was consistently over my plan minutes each month. The first couple of people I talked to at T-Mob told me I "absolutely" had to sign a new contract to change my plan. "Huh?" says I, "I was told about four months ago that I could just call up and change my plan on a month to month basis." Which is, as far as I can remember, what I was told by the service reps earlier this year. "No," I say, "that doesn't sound right. Are you sure? Can I talk to your supervisor? Something's certainly changed in your service offerings if that's the case." The response from the next to the last rep I was talking to was, "NO SIR! YOU CANNOT TALK TO MY SUPERVISOR!" And yes... I'm using caps... this guy was practically yelling at me. Then after about 35 seconds of talking to the guy, he springs this, "I CAN'T CONTINUE THIS CONVERSATION IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO KEEP IT PROFESSIONAL!" and hangs up.
My guess is the service reps are graded on (among other things) how many times a supervisor is called in and how many contract renewals they sell. When this guy realized I wasn't going to renew my contract just because he said I had to
and I asked to talk to his supervisor, I'm sure he saw his monthly stats go down, so the best thing to do was to disconnect and take the next call; perhaps someone to whom he could sell a contract renewal to.
I called back and eventually got a guy... uh.. Tyrone I think his name was... Great service rep. I told him what happened and that I just wanted to find out what my options were. He explained that I could certainly get a better plan without renewing, but that if I did renew, I could get a slightly better plan. We chatted about usage patterns and so forth for a little bit, then I told him that I wanted a new phone if I was going to sign a new contract. I told him that EDGE was important to me, and get this... he was able to recommend a phone with just the features I needed. Because I've been a good customer, he threw in a free month's service and I got a slight discount on the phone over the original price quoted.
Tyrone needs a raise.
When I was using my GPRS on the T610 with my Mac, it worked "out of the box." I paired the Mac with the phone, and the Internet Connect app did the rest. Not so with the V330. Alas... it took me a couple hours of surfing and experimenting before I got the solution I was really happy with. Here's a brief note of how I did it..
The first link I found was one on the
Photoethnography.Com blog. Yes... it seems odd to me to find detailed technical information of this subject at a site that's supposed to be about photo-journalism, but hey, it's a strange world. The article and the comments led me to
Ross Barkman's Home Page. Ross has a collection of Internet Connect scripts on his site that make it quite easy to hook your Mac running 10.4 up to a Motorola V330 via bluetooth. If you want to use GPRS for a 30kbps connection, there's a description of how to do that on the Photoethnography.Com page referenced above.
If you're after a higher connection speed, try this... Note that this works with Macs with Bluetooth interfaces. I've heard mixed reviews about connecting V330's to Macs using USB cables. If you have experience with this... please leave a comment with some notes about how it worked out for you. I'm currently running an iBook G4 with the Cambridge bluetooth radio. I recently used an iBook G3 with a DLink DBT-120 bluetooth adapter. It seemed to work quite well; I got mine at the Apple store for just over $50. YMMV.
Step One First we want to pair the Phone and the Mac. If you've already done this... Great! skip to the next step.
Open the Preferences app. Click on the "bluetooth" item. Click on the Settings tab and make sure that the radio is turned on. Click on the Devices tab and click the "Setup New Device..." button. This should launch the Bluetooth Setup Assistant. I found it to be pretty easy to use so I won't go into a detailed description of how to use it.
About the only difficult part of this process is figuring out how to turn on Bluetooth for the V330 and make it discoverable so you can pair the two devices. Buried in the manual, I found the answer... Click on the menu button on the phone, then go through "Settings" -> "Connection" -> "Bluetooth Link" -> "Setup". You should see a menu with "Find Me", "Power" and "Name" items. My phone came with the Bluetooth radio turned off by default and a name of something like "V330." So I changed the name, set the power to "on", and selected the "Find Me" item to make the phone discoverable for 60 seconds.
Once you've made the phone discoverable by selecting the "Find Me" item, you should be able to complete the Bluetooth Setup Assistant process. At the end of this process, your Mac and your V330 should be paired.
Step Two Go to
Ross Barkman's Home Page, search for the text
"Scripts for Motorola 3G phones (17kB)". Click on the "
Motorola 3G Scripts" link to download an archive containing the connection scripts.
Once you've downloaded and unpacked the contents into the "Motorola 3G May 2004" folder, drag the "Motorola 3G CID1" and "Motorola 3G CID2" scripts into the "/Library/Modem Scripts" directory. There's a ReadMe.txt file in the 3G modem scripts archive that I got, so if things go awry, you can also read that reference...
Launch the Preferences app. If it has been running, restart it. Click on the "Network" item. You should see an overview of your networking hardware.
Create a new location by selecting the "Location" pulldown menu and selecting "New Location..." I named my new location "Mobile - GPRS", "Mobile - 3G" is probably more apropos.
With the newly created "Mobile - 3G" location selected, select the "Bluetooth" item in the "Show" pull-down menu (directly beneath the "Location" pull-down menu.)
Click on the "Bluetooth Modem" tab. This will bring you to a page which should have a "Modem:" pull-down menu. Select the "Motorola 3G CID1" modem. There will likely be a lot of modems listed in this pull-down menu, so look carefully. Fortunately the list is alphabetized, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal. If you don't see the "Motorola 3G CID1" entry, double check that the "Motorola 3G CID1" script was actually copied into the "/Library/Modem Scripts" directory and restart the Preferences application.
But assuming you were able to select the "Motorola 3G CID1" item, click on the "Apply Now" button and get ready to move on to the next step...
Step Three You should now see the dial-up icon on the menu bar. Pull down and select the "Open Internet Connect..." item in the menu. This should (no surprise) launch the Internet Connect application.
Select the "Bluetooth" tab.
Pull down to the "Edit Configurations ..." item in the "Configuration:" pull-down menu. This should bring up the configurations dialog box.
Click on the plus ('+') icon a the bottom of the Configurations list and supply the following values for the fields (do not include double quotes):
Description: "T-Mobile (v330)"
Telephone Number: "internet2.voicestream.com"
Account Name: "guest"
Password: "guest"
Prompt for password after dialing: Unchecked
Modem: "Motorola 3G CID1"
Manual dial to make this connection: Unchecked
Click "Ok"
Step Four Now you're ready to test your configuration. Assuming we did everything correctly, you should see the "Internet Connect" application on the Bluetooth tab and the T-Mobile (v330) configuration selected.
Click on the "Connect" button. Cross your fingers.
If it doesn't work, try using "internet3.voicestream.com" as the telephone number. You might also want to check out what's getting appended to the system.log file. This might provide some interesting information. Open a Terminal window and enter the command: 'sudo tail -f /var/log/system.log'. It will ask for YOUR password and after you supply it, you should see things appended to the system.log. If you know what to do with this info, then great. If you don't, you'll probably want to find someone who knows what to do with it...
You'll probably do yourself a favor by going back to the
Photoethnography.Com Blog Entry for Setting up Motorola V330 or T-Mobile PPP Dial-Up-Networking (DUN) and reading some of the comments. If you find something that should be here, please leave a comment or send me an email...
If it does work, check out how fast your connection is by going to the
Broadband Reports Speed Test Page. Post a comment here telling us what kind of upload / download rates you're getting along with what city you're in. I'm in the Washington, DC market and I'm getting about 30kbps up and 115kbps down. W00t!
Step Five If you have a blog, write an entry thanking Ross Barkman, NasuKaren, Mobile Mojo and the army of people who commented on the PhotoEthnography.Com blog site. Modesty prevents me from asking you to thank me, but if this HOWTO has been useful, I'd love to know, but keep in mind the heavy lifting was done by Ross and Karen. Also note... Ross Barkman accepts PayPal donations on his site, he asks for enough to buy a pint or two at the local pub. So what would that be? 5 pounds? 10 pounds? Any more than this and Ross has to seriously consider going to a cheaper Pub.
Building Secure Products : L-3 Announces the "Secure Treo"
I just saw a link to this over at
gizmodo and
TreoNauts. It looks like wireless communications gurus L-3 Communications got the nod from the NSA to build the SME-PED (Secure Mobile Environment - Personal Electronic Device.) You can find
L-3's press release about the project at business wire. The SME-PED is a "convergence device" with high-end information security features added; think of what the Treo might be if MI-6 or the CIA had slipped Jeff Hawkins a couple million to play with when the Treo 180 was being designed. In fact, if you look closely, you'll see the artist's rendition of the device closely resembles a thick Treo 650.
The announcement provides a datapoint for market researchers trying to navigate the murky waters of secure product development. L-3 is going to get $36 million to develop the SME-PED, which will basically be the NSA's version of the Treo. In 2002 I worked at Handspring and led the engineering side of the "Secure Treo" initiative. Some of our work on a "hardened" version of the Treo's operating system made it's way back into the company's mainstream products, but I can't help but wonder what we could have delivered given that kind of budget. From the sound of the press release, the SME-PED will be a platform for all sorts of interesting new communications hardware. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say there are few things on the software side of the house that are going to be truly bleeding-edge.
Operating System and Application security concepts have been fairly stable for a decade or so. The
Bell-LaPadula Model that forms the basis of classic computer system security for the US government has been around since 1973.
Capability Based Security, considered by many to be the "innovative" new security technology of the future was clearly documented in Franz, et al.'s 1979 paper "
GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990's". To be sure, there's plenty of need to research new security fundamentals, but
building secure products is no longer a research problem. (Give me $36 million and I'll be happy to show you how good the engineering response can be...)
So if we know how to design secure mobile devices, why don't we do it? To understand the answer to this question, you have to understand the product life-cycle and the entrepreneurial approach to product development.
But for a few enclaves of secure government systems, security for software products has traditionally been "lackluster." Before wide spread deployment of broadband internet connections and wireless data networks provided malicious attackers a ready path to your most sensitive data, commercial products depended heavily on physical security. Systems were thought to be secure because they were behind locked doors and only trusted users had access to them. Fast forward a decade or two and we're in the middle of not only an information revolution but an organizational management revolution as well. We no longer keep our data behind locked doors where only vetted corporate employees may tread. In the old days, our data was
our data. Our systems were
our systems locked in
our data center in
our building run by
our employees. The typical corporation now shares megabytes of sensitive information with off-shore partners, supply-chain "federations" and on-site temporary employees. To realize the efficiency gains promised by "just in time" manufacturing techniques, we're pushing more and more data out the door and hoping it's going to the right place. For most however, information security is still trying to get our users to select better passwords.
Our information security strategy continues to be framed in an outmoded "build a better gate for the castle" mentality. Despite an increasing number of high-profile computer security breaches, as an industry we're still talking about adding better crypto, making passwords harder to guess, and driving down the cost of firewalls and VPNs.
For $36 million, I'm pretty sure I could modify PalmOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BREW or iTron to include major new security features. A shrewd entrepreneur might even think that there's money to be made there. By adding security features that are traditionally considered the domain of government systems to commercial products, corporate customers could enjoy the same security benefits as the secure data centers run by the NSA, CIA and DoD. Government customers could purchase COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) products instead of expensive one-offs and get the same level of system assurance. But it doesn't happen.
As an engineer my understanding of product development was, "come up with a good idea, get funding, build a product and then retire early." This is the "build a better mousetrap" view of business. But one thing that years in the software engineering trenches has taught me is that the best technical products frequently fail in the market. To some degree it's bad luck, sure. But chance favors the prepared, and the way you prepare for having a killer product is by making sure your product addresses an
opportunity. An opportunity in this sense is a market with a need and the pre-disposition to throw cash your way to fill that need.
Defining security needs and the value of solutions has been an extremely tricky problem. In the absence of a good needs description, product managers and marketing executives will sometimes simply look at what products have attracted buyers. The reasoning is clearly that if one person buys a widget, there's a chance that someone else might want a similar widget. And that's why L-3's SME-PED contract is so interesting. It's essentially a consumer product like a SideKick, a Treo, or Tungsten smothered with NSA approved security-sauce.
When you're talking about the global security market, $36 million is chump-change. But if we (the commercial development community) do our marketing homework right, we might be able to create demand for secure products. Heaven knows we've spent decades working out how to build them.
Zombies: 6,598,114,312; The Living: 0
I just found a link to the
Zombie Infection Simulator. It's kinda fun; it's a little Java applet that runs in your browser and simulates a small city where zombies
and living humans walk about randomly. When they bump into each other hilarity ensues. The simulator shows the process of zombies taking over, turning us all into slowly shuffling brain-munchers.
And if you want to take an active role in escaping the undead, check out
Urban Dead, a turn-based MMP (Massively Multi-Player) web game where you must fight to survive in an quarantined city. If you're more a fan of story-telling role-playing, check out
Skotos.Net; they have a game based on the Lovecraft genre that sounds pretty neat. I found there enrollment and login process a little confusing, but if you stick with it it's a great way to spend a few hours (if you're a fan of the genre.)
For people who prefer a more live-action experience, the good folks at
EJBDotCom.Net have a pretty fun little flash based "shoot the zombies before they overwhelm you" type
Zombie Game.
And for giggles, perhaps you might enjoy Max Brooks'
Zombie Survival Guide : Complete Protection from the Living Dead; a how-to instruction manual for escaping the clawing, clutching, shuddering hands of the horrible undead.
And since we're talking about Zombies, I should probably mention that I was recently surprised to find that "Southern Zombie Independent Film" is a genre with more than one member. For instance...
Hide and Creep is a thrill-a-minute indy production that has rural Alabamans shooting out the brains of the undead before they can feast on the flesh of the living. Oh, wait, add a little kung fu and that's the plot of
The South Will Rise Again. So many southern zombie films, so little time.
So you're reading all the way to the bottom of this posting... must like horror flicks, huh? If you happen to be gay, there's even a film for you:
Hellbent. This film has a budget and an experienced team, so the production values are pretty high. I watched the trailer and it looks pretty scary. Though I be not gay, I might still be interested in seeing this one; it seems to have all the features of a good slasher film. Ya' got yer suspense. Ya' got yer foreshadowing. Ya' got yer bloody scythe-wielding maniac running about terrorizing couples just about to get it on.
Back to Blogger.Com
The problem with Blogs is there are so many of them.. I, in fact, have four or five. Including this one, which I forgot about for a year while I was away trying to get an MBA. (I'm not finished with the MBA yet, but I'm still hacking away at it.) For reasons I can't really elucidate, I'm coming back to blogger.com. So here are a couple of blogs I started and then abandoned...
Cryptonomicon.NetSort of a cross between a blog and a portal, Cryptonomicon.Net was my database of crypto related links sprinkled with a few original news stories... I think we were the ones that "broke" the story that Apple was using IDEA in MacOS-X 10.2 without paying MediaCrypt AG, for instance. But when I started my MBA, I found I just didn't have time for it. It's sorta sad, cause we got a pretty good little following. I think we had something like 20,000 - 30,000 page impressions per day. Not bad for a hobby. You go there now and you'll just see a few random notes I hobbled together to tell people what happened to the original site.
msh's diary at people.squeakfoundation.orgOne of the things I do in my off time is I try to build interesting "goodies" using Smalltalk. While I agree with James Robertson that if you want to do a commercial project in Smalltalk, CinCom is really the vendor you want to think about. However... I'm in love with Squeak. My personal projects all start off as Squeak Morphic or Tweak projects. If you're interested in what I'm doing with Smalltalk, this is the place to look.
Midlife CrisisSo I'm going through my midlife crisis. My hair is thinning, I'm getting fatter, I'm getting angrier about our politicians. What did I do? I bought a mini-van. And I started listening to more cool music. More info about that at my Midlife Crisis blog.
