Author: Cem Paya

Cem Payahttps://randomoracle.wordpress.com/Building & breaking systems.
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Upcoming conference: She’s Geeky

An unconference that my colleague Kaliya, aka the Identity Woman, is helping organize:

She’s Geeky (http://www.shesgeeky.org)

A Women’s Tech (un)conference

October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.

 

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

 

Not coincidentally perhaps, She’s So Geeky is the title of a collection of essays my friend Annalee Newitz edited. Here is the video of her appearance at Google’s Mountain View campus in July.

 

On another tangent and speaking of identity, Digital ID World 2007 is going on right now.

cemp

R.I.P. Marcel Marceau

Marcel Marceau passed away at the age of 84 on September 22nd.

This blogger had the incredible opportunity to watch Marceau performing the character “Bip” as well as the signatures routines the mask-maker and ages-of-man at Moore Theater in Seattle in 2000. The image of the man stuck with the smiling-face mask on his  head, struggling to desperately to remove it, all the while emoting only that silly grin is not one you will soon forget. From the Wikipedia article:

Of his summation of the ages of man in the famous Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death, one critic said, “He accomplishes in less than two minutes what most novelists cannot do in volumes.”

Google video search has movies about his life and news reports.

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Auto manufacturers discover “vaporware”

“Some day soon our new software will enable you to…” <insert marketing fantasy>

This has been a consistent tagline in the software business: product announcements couched in the vocabulary of insurgent revolutionaries, extravagant promises and lofty ideals. What follows after several years and multiple apologetic post-scripts to the original press release, is a shadow of the original vision or more likely: nothing.

Recently in the grip of a bad case of the environmentalist fever (finding its way into lame advertising slogans along the lines of “most efficient V8 in its class“) automobile manufacturers are taking up this ancient art and perfecting it for mainstream appeal For example, there is the Chevy Volt from General Motor, an electric concept car with 40 mile range that promises to eliminate fuel consumption for majority of commuters. While still boasting two engines, the Volt improves on the hybrid concept: instead of having both engines drive the power-train, only the electric motor is hooked up to the wheels and the internal combustion engine is run only to charge the batteries. On the website it is described in glowing terms:

“Off-the-line torque is instantaneous, giving you responsive acceleration. Plus, this four- to five-passenger sport sedan still maintains the passenger and cargo capacities of a production car.(2) You’ll also enjoy the benefits of features you’ve grown to expect — driver and front passenger air bags(3) and the StabiliTrak Stability Control System, for instance — as well as new convenience features allowing you to charge certain small electronic devices without plugging them in.”

There is only one problem with the car: it does not exist in production. There is no way to walk into a show-room and experience that much vaunted low-end torque.

Volt represents another fantasy taking flight for GM, an attempt to recast an old-school traditional company heavily dependent on trucks and SUVs as some type of environmental pioneer. It is in the same vein as the yellow-washed ethanol campaign ads bragging about the number of E85-compatible vehicles GM has sold. (And how many of them are actually running on E85 outside the Midwest? Never mind questions about the long-term viability of a biofuel program that takes away more farmland to grow crops.)

Not to be outdone, BMW joins the fray with its own hydrogen vehicle. TV commercials featuring CGI animation show the car dissolving into water, to emphasize that the only output of burning water is pure water. Fair enough and at least this one can be seen on the roads because it’s based on a production model, a conversion of the 7 series to run on both regular gasoline and hydrogen. But as the German Spiegel magazine points out, the car is not particularly efficient in either mode. Currently being leased to celebrities, it remains at best a test platform for developing the necessary infrastructure for hydrogen refueling. As it turns out, the BMW 745h is true “vaporware” in a different sense of the word: due to challenges of  confining liquid hydrogen long term, its massive 45 gallon tank is slowly but continuously leaking hydrogen vapor.

No reason to let these details ruin a good PR campaign.
Next up: Lexus as the worst offender for exploiting “hybrid” technology for marketting.

cemp

On the fence with nuclear energy

There is a strain of schizophrenia running through the environmentalist movement. Long the favorite whipping boy for green-blood tree-huggers, nuclear energy is enjoying a resurgence thanks to global warming concerns. Along with solar, wind, geothermal and  tidal energy sources, fission is also free of carbon emissions– and unlike the others, already has a proven track record for providing significant fraction of energy in many regions.

The British scientist James Lovelock is no stranger to controversy with his Gaia hypothesis, but in his recent book The revenge of Gaia, he has also “gone nuclear” and came out swinging in favor of nuclear energy. First it paints a very optimistic view of fusion and calls for greater investment even though not a single controlled fusion reaction on Earth has yet been self-sustaining. (Controlled is the operative keyword, since weapons do not qualify as “renewable energy sources”) There is an interesting parallel with the fuel-cell mania taking place in the automative world here. Aside from the fact that both use hydrogen as fuel, they are both long-term, high-risk, reach-for-the-moon investments which amount to business-as-usual in the short term until some undefined magic development arrives.

More perplexing is his argument for increasing the share of conventional nuclear energy based on fision. At the heart of the issue is a very complex risk management problem involving industrial systems on large scale.  Unlike deciding between an SUV and small-car, this one is greatly complicated by the apples-to-oranges nature of the comparison, weighing the risks from dramatic accident in a reactor that unfolds within seconds to the slow, gradual build-up of climate altering chemicals in the atmosphere that leads to irreversible climate change over decades.

No room for such fine points in the book. Lambasting the critics of nuclear energy as misguided urban romantics operating out of fear, Lovelock issues a dramatic personal challenge on the subject of waste disposal:

“I have offered in public to accept all of the high-level waste produced in a year from a nuclear power station for deposit on my small plot of land; it would occupy a space about a cubic metre in size and it safely in a concrete pit, and I would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my home.”

Not-in-my-backyard residents of Nevada can take comfort here. If only more people were willing to offer their own backyard for storing radioactive waste, the ongoing debacle of Yucca mountain could be finally put to rest.

cemp

Walt Mossberg on Ubuntu

This is not exactly new but Wall Street Journal’s influential columnist reviewed Ubuntu in a Personal Technology column last week. Regardless of what the review says (and it is not very harsh in assessing the weaknesses) this is another important milestone for open-source software, right up there with Dell’s decision to ship machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu out of the box. Mossberg after all has made a name in writing about technology for non-technophiles. So begins this particular review:

This column is written for mainstream, nontechie users of digital technology. […] So, I have steered away from recommending Linux, the free computer operating system that is the darling of many techies and IT managers, and a challenger to Microsoft’s dominant Windows and Apple’s resurgent Macintosh operating system, OS X.

Notwithstanding that caveat and inspired by his own readers to give Ubuntu a shot, Mossberg takes out a factory Dell machine loaded with Ubuntu for a spin.  Even this most user friendly version of the alternative OS is not enough to change his opinion:

My verdict: Even in the relatively slick Ubuntu variation, Linux is still too rough around the edges for the vast majority of computer users. While Ubuntu looks a lot like Windows or Mac OS X, it is full of little complications and hassles that will quickly frustrate most people who just want to use their computers, not maintain or tweak them. 

For good reason, because the Dell laptop had significant problems including faulty/missing drivers. But in all fairness a laptop is also a more capricious device compared to a desktop unit. Internally Google has a Ubuntu variant dubbed “Goobuntu” but it is only intended for desktop machines. (Read: tech support will have no mercy for users who install it on a laptop and then show up at the door for trouble-shooting.) For example, one problem cited was lack of sensitivity control on the track pad. This is the same problem that confronted this blogger when he upgraded a Dell 710M to Vista. Without the specific device driver for the track-pad, Windows will assign it a generic trackpad driver which has no control over pressure sensitivity. That means any contact with the area, even so much as a thumb glancing the surface while typing away will be interpreted as a mouse click. End result of clicking on random buttons or having the cursor jump around while typing is extreme frustration. By contrast, the typical desktop set up would have an ordinary USB mouse and the generic driver will do just fine. At worst some of the fancy functionality such as wheel-scrolling will not work, but none of the downsides of phantom mouse clicks.

This was not the only device-compatibility issue. Apparently the machine also struggled with recognizing a digital camera and an iPod. (Sync never worked.) Device drivers are a tricky subject because their presence/absence often entrenches market share and enforces lock-in. It’s difficult for the vendor to justify investing in writing drivers for an operating system with small market share. That means it is up to volunteers, assuming the vendor made necessary documentation available, to enble support. As a result fewer devices work on Linux and *BSD variants, which reinforces the marginalization because rational buyers will take into account device availability when making their choice.

Other challenges Mossberg encountered had to do with half-baked software. For example, the built-in media player can handle MP3s but the codec is not present out of the box. This has long been cited as one of the caveat emptors in defining what is possible with Linux or OpenBSD.  It is always possible to say that X is possible in Linux because chances are there is some graduate student somewhere in the world who hacked together a piece of code that does X– approximately. (That stands in contrast to say what is possible in Windows being tied much closer to MSFT’s pace of innovation.)  Putting aside the question of quality, this means that what is “possible” vastly exceeds what is ready out of the box. The article also cites the lack of commercial DVD playing software– open source advocates would point to DeCSS and its manifold descendants but as with Ikea furniture, “some assembly required.”

Most surprising part is the cost difference: the same laptop installed with Vista costs only about $100 or 8% over the open-source variant. Long-term pricing trends were supposed to favor open-source.  There will be greater pressure to adopt free software as hardware prices drop, the argument runs, because the operating system and applications will become the lion’s share of the cost. 8% is hardly that and considering that Ubuntu can be installed dual-boot with Vista (or better yet inside a virtual machine using VMware or Virtual Server) the savings may not justify the productivity hit for many users.

cemp

Commoditizing the exploit: iPhone saga continues

The release of the iPhone July and its tie-in to one particular wireless carrier set in motion a sequence of inevitable events:

  • Interest from the security research community in finding ways to defeat the system. If the device actually provided a semi-officially supported way to unlock, this would have taken out all the fun/challenge out of it. But by tying the device to AT&T, Apple was throwing down the gauntlet– an especially attractive target given the strong emotions (generally of hatred) inspired by any telco.
  • Simultaneous discovery and release of an exploit that unlocks the phone hitting the news.
  • Much discussion over how Apple/AT&T would respond and whether the cease-and-desist letters would start flying.
  • Commercial version of the “exploit” available for sale online from iPhoneSimFree. This is one click hacking-for-the-masses.
  • True commodification arrives with a free version of the same software.

Next steps one can extrapolate from here:

  • Apple responds by “fixing” the vulnerability that allowed unlocking in software. This will likely get pushed out as a forced update to all devices. Because it is a closed network and interacts with servers in the cloud, updates can become the offers that a customer can’t refuse. Users are  denied service unless their phone is running the latest and greatest version of the software. (There is still one catch here: it is difficult to remotely verify the software run on a device on the other side unless the device itself has trusted hardware. This is the so-called remote attestation problem that Palladium/NGSCB tried to solve with TPMs. But for most purposes relying on the device to report its own version works; non-compliant devices would have to be tweaked to consistently report bogus configuration to pass this basic check.)
  • Arms race in full swing: now that the first exploit stopped working, there is fame and glory again in releasing a new one that can unlock the patched iPhone.
  • Apple responds, issuing another fix. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  • And perhaps optimistically: sanity prevails and Apple realizes that this is a waste of corporate resources. Much the same way that Apple finally realized DRM is a waste of time, one can hope they will reach the conclusion that tying users to one particular carrier is an outdated business model made possible only by the archaic nature of wireless networks in the US and lack of proper competitive dynamics in the marketplace.

cemp

Reliability in the cloud: hidden dependencies

The much discussed outage of Skype last month and its eventual attribution in part to Windows Update— which itself was functioning perfectly normally as designed– leads to a number of interesting observations.

  • Distributed peer-to-peer systems were heralded for their reliability, owing to the lack of any SPOFs, or single-point-of-failure. Skype routes calls using a P2P network of machines owned by its own members (although authentication is centralized) and if there is anything in plentiful supply on the Net, it’s machines with idle time/bandwidth. The outage suggested that the parts were not quite as loosely-coupled as classic distributed systems theory would have one believe– they could fail in quite coordinated manner because they all sport the identical configuration.
  • Diversity fans will probably jump at the occasion to point out the evils of software uniformity. If some larger fraction of the Skype clients were running Linux or Mac, they may not have rebooted at the same time and spared the outage, the argument runs. But this is unlikely to make a quantitative difference as even the egalitarian market divided three-ways between Windows/Linux/Mac would have substantial number of nodes of any variant. Also it is possible to get diversity of behavior on the cheap without diversity of platform– in this case, randomly spreading apart the patch installation/reboot will do the trick.
  • This was a completely unexpected interaction between 2 cloud services, one for VoIP and one for software distribution. It’s taken for granted that two client applications  installed on the same machine can have allergic reactions and blow up the machine. (This is the well-known DLL hell problem in Windows.) But the dramatic demonstration that WU, a service hosted “out-there” in the cloud could impact another completely independent service hosted elsewhere is news.
  • What does this mean for those engineering services? Keeping Skype up and running was not in the design criteria for WU. If anything getting security patches out to vulnerable machines ASAP would have increased the pressure on Skype by rebooting all machines quickly.  A lot of software these days has auto-update capability, mostly poorly designed and not even giving the users chance to consent. It’s not a stretch to assume that one could initiate a forced reboot of most  Windows or Mac machines in quick succession. Is Skype at fault then for depending on the uptime of  machines that it has no control over? The architects did the right thing and hedged their bets statistically by requiring some fraction of their nodes to be operational. Is that more of a gamble than building a giant data center stacked with wall-to-wall racks of servers?  (It’s certainly cheaper and more efficient, and environmentally friendly considering the power usage of the modern data-center. And redundancy would have required multiple DCs, geo-located around the world.) Until now the gamble worked correctly but one day WU pushed the system beyond its  critical threshold.

cemp

Firefox and the IE tab: a lesson in inter-operability

During the browser wars of the late 1990s, Internet Explorer edged out Netscape Navigator as AOL’s choice of browser. Discounting any business reasons, many people attributed this to a design choice made by IE: it was componentizable. While the Department of Justice focused exclusively on the extent the browser itself could be decoupled from the operating system, developers worried more on whether the individual pieces (networking, HTML rendering, user interface, …) could be pulled apart, modified and reassembled into different configurations. This was key for AOL and many other vendors who wanted to create a branded web browser by slapping a different “skin” on top of the same pieces under the hood.

In fact the ease of integration for IE helped spread the web-capability into all Microsoft applications. That Outlook could host HTML email or Excel easily import tables from a web page using point-and-click process (simplifying the problem of screen scraping, before the idea of semantic web could take off) was not a far stretch. But the fact that Visual Studio doubled as a full-fledged web browser suggested things were going too far– a contemporary twist on the joke that every application written at MIT grows until it can read email. Soon every application contained a tiny embedded browser somewhere, a tradition that continues with MSN/Live Messenger today for example.

Firefox has co-opted this capability in a very interesting way, to its own benefit. The IE-tabs extension for Firefox allows viewing one or more tabs as an embedded IE page by hosting “Trident” (aka mshtml.dll) the HTML rendering engine. Net result is an option for 100% compatibility with IE.

This is very interesting because interop in a competitive market always helps the small fish. In a world where network effects are significant, being compatible with the market leader is often essential for survival– and raising the cost of interoperability is very much in the interest of the market leader. This is why OpenOffice spends a lot of time trying to reverse engineer and implement Microsoft Office document formats, but not the other way around. Web browsers are not like telephones, instant messaging clients or productivity software in this way, because the concern is not about pairwise interop. But there is an indirect effect: when most users have Internet Explorer, most websites will be optimized for IE. This is a completely reasonable business decisions for a vendor, not a conspiracy. When 90% of users are on platform Foo, the efficient web designer will focus his/her resources on making their service function well on platform Foo. There is a point where investing in the others is justified, but it will always take a back-seat to the primary revenue generator. This is the benefit of enjoying the market leading position: other software has to emulate the leader, not the other way around.

Granted the existence of standards such as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, DOM etc. simplifies this somewhat. In principle it is no longer a moving target because all clients are trying to implement the same specification, instead of one group making this up as they go along and everyone else a passenger along for the ride. In reality, this vision fails because:

  • HTML standard gives plenty of leeway for conforming implementations to create different user experiences based on the same document
  • Web browsers are far from perfect in their conformance to standards
  • Each browser defines a different extensibility framework such as Flash, Java, ActiveX controls etc. some of which are highly dependent on the underlying platform, eg the operating system.

Outcome is compatibility problems. Large websites often have the resources and expertise to develop and run Q&A cross platform, so they have no problems. It is often the smaller scale operations, hobbyists or niche audience hang-outs that have spotted history of browser compatibility. By a stroke of luck they could work just as well in Firefox, Safari, Opera etc. Equally like they will have minor visual blemishes, missing functionality or flat out not function at all. This is where the IE Tab add-on comes to the rescue for Firefox.

[continued]

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MacBook develops “short-term memory” personality disorder

Apparently blogging about a new laptop is the way to jinx it. (Either that or alluding to botched business decisions by Apple Inc. Conspiracy theorists would argue that Windows took offense at being virtualized and sabotaged the system.)

After working through the weekend, on Monday the XP SP2 image in Parallels refused to boot. Corrupted VM images are not uncommon but then Parallels itself started acting up, claiming that the image file itself can’t be opened because it is in use. Back at MSFT it would have been easy enough to grab another copy of any Windows flavor from an internal share and reinstall the operating system. Even simpler: PXE-boot and remote install over network. In principle that also works here but the BIOS emulated by Parallels apparently does not implement PXE boot. No problem– quick visit to the friendly support folks revealed the missing piece required to get PXE boot working. Being optimistic, this blogger assumed the OS install can be done on self-help basis and there is no reason to bother the support team already busy with irate users stopping by with more mundane problems than trying to get 2 rival operating systems working together.

Wrong. PXE boot worked and XP install would succeed partially before it would complain about corrupted local images. Even more bizarre, after stopping/restarting the VM there would be no trace of the installation at all– no formatted disk, no copied files. Back to clean slate. After a few more tries in the hope of non-deterministic success, it started to get bizarre: Parallels errored out a couple of times complaining that the VM can not be started because it is already in use. Each time a new image was created, installation would proceed

Next steps would have been a return trip to support and ask for help with the XP install from scratch. But MacBook started acting up for good and this time it was not Parallels to blame. After 3 days of constant use, Firefox started up with the first-time experience– as if it had never been run before. True to form, it complained about not being the default browser and asked if Safari should be demoted from that distinction. Meanwhile all the bookmarks were gone, history erased etc. This is not exactly what users have in mind when they want privacy-enhancing features.

The amnesia proved to be a recurring phenomenon across the board. Attempting to change the desktop pattern lead to more mysterious behavior– restarting the OS lost all customizations. Same with any changes to the browser, icons on the desktop, shortcuts added to the dock etc. All too reminiscent of the infamous patient Henry M case in psychology, about a man who undergoes surgery to remove parts of the temporal lobe. After the operation, his short-term awareness is intact but he can not commit anything to long term memory, the world frozen permanently in an instant before the operation. (He would routinely have to be explained everything over and over again.)

The mysterious behavior could have been caused by a subtle corruption in the file-system that prevents write operations from being fully committed. OS would simply reconstruct previous state on each reboot and disregard changes. But some experimenting showed files can be saved under Documents at least and running a disk-scan did not reveal any problems.

Outcome: yet another visit to the friendly support team to get OS-X Tiger reinstalled from scratch. This sets a new personal record for time to bring a brand-new machine to its knees to the point that the only recovery option is flatten/rebuild. (In fairness, rendering a PC inoperable is surprisingly easy when one is trying, but in this case the only objective was learning about Mac OS-X.)

cemp

Electric vehicle rally in Palo Alto today

Observations from the EV rally sponsored by the Silicon Valley chapter of the Electric Automobile Association:

  • Required  background reading for the event is Plug-in Hybrids by Sherry Boschert. Mandatory movie is the documentary Who killed the electric car? which premiered last year.
  • There were a couple dozen different EV cars, as well as random other eco-friendly conversion projects which appeared to have nothing to do with electric propulsion, including a diesel Benz converted to run on vegetable oil.
  • The vehicles spanned the whole range from bicycles assisted by lightweight electric engines to fully electric scooters and motorcycles, a toy car modeled after a Hummer H3 chassis to several flat-bed trucks intended for hauling weight.
  • Similarly the state of the EV technology ranged from brand new Camry hybrids off the dealer lot still carrying the stickers, to production spec Sparrows to home-brew projects with their guts spilled out, resembling a Rube-Goldberg contraption, high-voltage wires going all over the place etc. No fuel-cell vehicles in attendance as far as this blogger could see.
  • CalCars had a significant presence with their plug-in hybrid conversions. There were two different examples, one a relatively “incremental” modification with additional lead-acid batteries and another with the all-out lithium-ion overhaul. Toyota being the conservative company it is, would likely view them as equally damning when it comes to voiding the warranty.
  • On the one hand, it’s great to see the tinkerer spirit well-and alive. Modding cars is part of American tradition, and if the 50s were about muscle cars, the contemporary frontier is making electric vehicles a reality well ahead of the mainstream automobile producers.  (It turns out one of the plug-in conversions was done in ~2 days by a group of amateurs during Maker fair.)
  • On the other hand, inquiring about what it takes to convert a Prius to plug-in shows that for the most part, EV still remains something of a hobbyist project. Most of the pure electric vehicles have serious limitations to their range, top speed or safety, by virtue of low curb weight in relation to the bloated SUVs they will be surrounded by on the road.
  • Similarly the conversion projects remain beyond the realm of feasible even for those willing to void their warranty in creative ways. Two extreme ends of scale are represented by an “open-source” DIY additional battery kit under $6K or full-service replacement by the more advanced lithium-ion cells similar to those powering laptops  for >$25K. (NiMH is in between according to one of the reps.) That this latter number exceeds the cost of a new Prius ought to give anyone a pause for concern. Add to that rumors of plug-in Prius in the works from Toyota for 2011-2012, it’s difficult to justify being an early adopter on this front.

cemp