Naturally, given the white-hot hype, most want to see what the big deal is. Emerging web technologies often require that you either have a Linux box available (either a physical box or a virtual instance in a product like VirtualBox), however with just a couple of minor config changes and deviations from the docs, you can do a trial run and kick the wheels on Windows as a first class host, even if any possible production use would almost certainly see it deployed to Linux.

Cassandra is layered over Java, and of course a benefit of that platform is that it is inherently cross platform.

1. Download and install the latest Java JDK. Ensure, post install, that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is pointed at the root of your JDK install (which on a 64-bit machine might be C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_18).
2. Download Apache Ant. Uncompress to the folder C:\Apache\Ant (giving you files like C:\Apache\Ant\bin\ant.bat).
3. Download Cassandra. Given that you're probably going to be playing around for a while, go with the 6.0b2 copy, downloading the bin version. Uncompress the package into the location C:\Apache\Cassandra.
4. Open a command prompt and navigate to the cassandra directory (e.g. after running C:, do a cd C:\Apache\Cassandra). Run the command C:\Apache\Ant\bin\ant ivy-retrieve. This will download Cassandra depedencies.
5. Edit C:\Apache\Cassandra\conf\storage-conf.xml, updating lines 188 - 193 to replace each instance of /var/lib/cassandra/ references with C:\Apache\Cassandra\Files\.
6. Copy the files from C:\apache\cassandra\build\lib\jars (which are the files that ant downloaded) to C:\apache\cassandra\lib. It isn't the most elegant solution but it's the most concise in point form.
7. In a command prompt, after running C: and cd \Apache\Cassandra, run the command bin\cassandra. Cassandra should start up successfully (and if applicable the Windows firewall will ask if it should make an exception). If it doesn't start successfully you likely didn't follow one of the prior points correctly.
8. In another console window navigate to C:\Apache\Cassandra and run the command bin\cassanda-cli. At the prompt run the command connect localhost/9160 and you should connect. You can now try out some of the simple set and get commands you can find in the README.txt.
9. Start reading up on the Thrift API, the basics of data storage, what a "super-column is", and so on.

I've been playing around with various NoSQL (a better name is desperately needed. Backronyms and revisionism history don't solve the problem that the name is incendiary, inaccurate, and a little ridiculous. KVDBMS works for some of the products, but isn't quite applicable to richer solutions like Cassandra) for some time, however given the incredible hype — which is strangely coupled with a complete lack of any objective measure — I've decided to put it to the test. In the next couple of days a high-performance SSD will arrive and I'll gather some metrics for objective purposes, because the message being sold doesn't technically pass the B.S. test.

Cassandra is a very, very cool product, and I immediately see lots of very interesting uses for it, but what is most striking is what is missing from the product. It is so intensely bare-bones at the moment, which is exactly how MySQL made inroads: When it first became the first-love of many of the same people and sites that now herald NoSQL (the same people who almost without fail rallied behind PHP which...well...enough said), it was almost comically deficient as a database product, but as it grew those features it grew away from its core contingent.

Exciting times regardless. There are many niches in the technology space, in which the appropriate solutions should be applied, so it is always worth keeping an open mind.

Digg recently started transitioning parts of their platform to the Cassandra open-source, Facebook-originated NoSQL solution.

They're the perfect customer for NoSQL: The value per user and transaction is very low, demanding solutions that allow them to scale at minimal cost; some data loss or inconsistency can be accepted; and a lot of the data can be effectively siloed into islands.

Nonetheless, the article they posted about the move is filled with the sort of thinking that has littered the web with misinformation about the relational database.

The fundamental problem is endemic to the relational database mindset, which places the burden of computation on reads rather than writes

The relational database "mindset" imposes no such burden.

It's All About Finding Balance

Indexes, for instance, are a rudimentary tool of every competent database user. Each additional index adds an expense to every write to the table, forcing row changes to update every index in addition to the base table, in return easing certain read scenarios.

You apply as appropriate, striving for the perfect balance between read and write performance.

I posted parts I and II of a very simple "introductory to databases" article back in 2005 (never getting around to finishing part III), and I strongly encourage it for anyone who doesn't understand how indexes work, or how important concepts like covering indexes are (which I'll touch upon later in regards to the Digg scenario).

Many relational database users make heavy use of triggers and cascade activities that slow writes while lubricating reads. While many are wary of triggers in general (especially where business logic gets embedded in the data layer), this is common in the relational database world and makes an appearance in most solutions.

For Digg's particular scenario, however, the RDBMS analogy to their NoSQL approach is a basic materialized view (aka indexed view), which is a feature of most RDBMS products, from big to small.

Implementing materialized views adds a sometimes substantial cost to writes in return for supercharged reads. If I have a particular set of joins and functions that are queried often, I can materialize the view with the appropriate indexes and every change to any of the source tables automatically, as an added cost of the DML, updates the materialized view as well.

Some RDBMS systems support deferred materialized view updates where it automatically queues up the view changes without adding cost to the origination tables.

This is very old hat for virtually anyone competent with relational databases, though real-time materialized views need to be used judiciously because they fall under the auspices of ACID and can front-load write operations significantly.

Digg Don't Do Indexing (properly)

Ignoring that obvious solution of materialized views (which, to be fair, aren't natively supported by MySQL despite being a basic feature of most other database products), it is revealed that they aren't using the database in the appropriate manner — or that MySQL is simply a broken platform and is turning people against the RDBMS when really they should be against MySQL — when they note that they are manually performing the joins in PHP, claiming that the join takes too long to run as a simply query.

A likely contributor to their poor performance is that while they've made the artificial key "id" their clustered index, their userid/friendid index is only a unique index, and I suspect, from the operation of their site, that they are likely making use of the denormalized friendname column in their consumer as well, forcing a full row lookup for every match.

If they retrieve columns outside of a non-clustered index (the most common mistake is doing a "SELECT *" when you don't actually care about all of the columns), on every lookup match the database server pulls the row id (in this case the primary key) and then has to do another lookup for the actual row data. In their case — given that the relationship is unique — they should have made the compound key of user_id/friend_id the clustered index and eliminated the id column altogether.

This oversight means that instead of doing a simple partial index scan by user_id and pulling the limited set, the query engine is forced to pull the list of rows, and then lookup each and every row individually. So someone with 400 friends yields 400 IO cycles, versus 1 with a proper index.

The same problem exists in the Diggs table, but is made worse. The userid index is of limited value given that again it only helps them look up the surrogate record key (again, why not a primary key on itemid/userid with a secondary index of userid/itemid? Surrogate keys are usually a mistake if there's another unique key on the table, though of course it depends upon the scenario: foreign-keys or numerous secondary indexes might make such a simple key the best choice). The query engine is forced to lookup the records by either the itemid or the userid (by the friendid) and then lookup the root record, and then compare the corresponding value.

So many developers are so blissfully ignorant of how databases work, quick to ascribe their own shortcomings to the platform. Most will wave their hands and talk about how hard to come by a "good DBA" is, which is akin to pushing brutal bubble-sort algorithms and just distributing them across a MapReduce deployment, claiming that a good "sort algorithm guy" is hard to find and "scaling out" is what the big boys do.

So they could see a major performance improvement by indexing properly (I'm allowing that maybe they just gave a bad example, though their atrocious query performance seems to validate its accuracy), but even then looking up hundreds of seemingly randomly distributed records can be a costly exercise.

Change Is In The Air

Let's step back for a minute and ignore materialized views and appropriately created and used indexes and look at the core performance issue that Digg faced — looking up several hundred rows in the Friends table, and interrogating the Diggs table by userid/itemid for the same. Presume that the dataset is very large and it can't be cached in memory, which should be a normal design assumption.

Why is looking up several hundred randomly distributed records such a big deal?

That's why. Most hard drives can only manage to seek to different locations on the disk about a hundred times per second. If you're relying on Amazon's EBS you have it even worse, with an esimated 72 IOPS per second.

That's slow.

Imagine that the query engine has a hundred row locations in hand; It would take it a full second to jump over the disk to gather up the data necessary to retrieve the contents of those rows. That's a best case scenario because in the real world it usually has to walk the index b-trees, find the matching data, and in Diggs' inappropriately indexed table case do yet another lookup to find the actual row itself.

This is why database systems often completely ignore indexes if the estimated match count exceeds a relatively small percentage of the data, anemic storage systems forcing them to do expensive operations like full scans because in the end it's a cheaper choice. Why it often just reads and filters a burst of MBs of data rather than select a few sparse records from an index.

It's why it's desirable to have the data in RAM, and why database servers should be loaded with copious memory. [Sidenote: It's also why denormalizing can paradoxically slow down a database in many scenarios because it grows a database beyond RAM unnecessarily. In the Digg case note the username and friendname fields in the Friends table]

The IOPS weak-point is why most enterprise databases add SANs with ranks and ranks of hard drives, ganging them together in such a way that many seeks occur simultaneously, vastly increasing the I/O rate.

A more attainable and far more disruptive advance is moving into reality, however, and that is SSDs.

Take a look at the Anandtech review of the OCZ Vertex LE 100GB MLC SSD. In particular look at the 4KB random read - MB/s results on page 10. Near the bottom are a couple of magnetic disks, including the esteemed VelociRaptor, which are absolutely decimated by the SSDs.

That is the test that is most applicable to the Digg scenario, and it is clearly evident how big of an impact it would have on their situation.

Instead of 100 IOPS, they would be looking at 15,000 IOPS. Put 6 of these in a RAID-10 array and you'd have a yield of 45,000 IOPS and reliability. Even without learning how to properly index they could see an easy 5000x performance improvement in that class of RDBMS queries. Add a materialized view and...the speed would be so obscene it would get banned from the App Store.

Those units are just $400 a piece, and the technology keeps getting bigger and faster and cheaper. SSDs are a deeply, deeply disruptive change, especially to the large-scale database world.

The drive I mentioned is an MLC unit that isn't intended for the enterprise market, but in some ways it fits the same role as NoSQL — less reliable, but it gets the job done. The nature of the Digg table (that it is largely an additive table with likely little churn) is the perfect use-case for an MLC SSDs.

And really, 100GB is a lot of space for an operational database, even for a social media site. While it isn't appropriate for Facebook's 25TB "figure out how to sell you junk you don't want" daily activity log, it is certainly adequate for all of the Diggs and Friend relationships Digg would need, especially when removing denormalization that was put in place because of the poor IOPS of magnetic disks. And of course with the magic of RAID you can scale it up to whatever heights you'd like.

For $400.

Soon we'll have even faster, larger drives that are cheaper, and so on. The nature of flash technology is that they can keep making it more and more parallel, so the IOPS are going to keep going up and up and up.

Optimizing against slow seek times is an activity that is quickly going to be a negative return activity. Many who embrace NoSQL are seeking a solution to yesterday's problem. Digg, for instance, yields their entire NoSQL benefit from optimizing data locality — that all data for a given need is nicely bunched together, which of course is what materialized views do as well.

There Are Incredible MPP Options in the RDBMS World...But They'll Cost You

The people who really demand high levels of database performance usually have a lot of money. Which is why many of the products that deliver options like column-oriented storage (an implementation detail of a RDBMS that is primarily suited to very large-scale column aggregations. It isn't suitable for a OLTP DB), or MPP (Massively Parallel Processing), cost absurdly high amounts.

Greenplum, Vertica, TeraData, parAccel, Oracle RAC, Sybase ASE, DB2 MPP...these things are often priced out of all but the largest enterprise's reach.

Look at the pricing of the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 R2, in particular the Parallel Data Warehouse product that brings MPP to that server. $58K per processor, which obviously excludes it from contention for the vast majority of applications.

Come on.

If there is one thing that I would like to see come out of the NoSQL advocacy movement, it would be that mainstream databases feel the pressure to push down the functionality that they currently limit to the people with the biggest bank accounts (which they sell using the "how much do you have?" pricing model).

I work in the financial industry. RDBMS’ and the Structured Query Language (SQL) can be found at the nucleus of most of our solutions.

The same was true when I worked in the insurance, telecommunication, and power generation industries.

So it piqued my interest when a peer recently forwarded an article titled “The end of SQL and relational databases”, adding the subject line “We’re living in the past”.

[Though as Michael Stonebraker points out, SQL the query language actually has remarkably little to actually to do with the debate. It would be more clearly called NoACID]

That series focuses on NoSQL as the challenger to the throne.  It isn’t alone as the past year has yielded a bountiful crop of articles and blog entries declaring the imminent death of the decrepit relational database at the hands of this new innovation.

Most get posted with incendiary, absolute statements against the RDBMS.

The ACIDy, Transactional, RDBMS doesn’t scale, and it needs to be relegated to the proper dustbin before it does any more damage to engineers trying to write scalable software.

And they usually see later edits that blunt the original euphoria.

postnote: This isn’t about a complete death of the RDBMS. Just the death of the idea that it’s a tool meant for all your structured data storage needs.

Indeed.

Few hold the RDBMS as the only tool for all of your structured or unstructured data storage needs, though that strawman makes an appearance in many NoSQL advocacy pieces, adding some unintentional comedy (“irony”) given that the same entries usually call for the death of the RDBMS, with NoSQL declared the one true way to store and retrieve data.

Page 493 (as labelled by page) of the article “The Paradoxical Success of Aspect-Oriented Programming” includes a fantastic quote and graphic from an IEEE editorial by James Bezdek in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

[I quote indirectly given that the original source isn’t publicly available]

Every new technology begins with naive euphoria — its inventor(s) are usually submersed in the ideas  themselves; it is their immediate colleagues that experience most of  the wild enthusiasm. Most technologies are overpromised, more often  than not simply to generate funds to continue the work, for funding is an integral part of scientific development; without it, only the most  imaginative and revolutionary ideas make it beyond the embryonic stage. Hype is a natural handmaiden to overpromise, and most technologies build rapidly to a peak of hype. Following this, there is almost always an  overreaction to ideas that are not fully developed, and this inevitably leads to a crash of sorts, followed by a period of wallowing in the depths of cynicism. Many new technologies evolve to this point, and then fade away. The ones that survive do so because someone finds a good use (= true user benefit) for the basic ideas.

In the case of the NoSQL hype, it isn’t generally the inventors over-stating its relevance — most of them are quite brilliant, pragmatic devs — but instead it is loads and loads of terrible-at-SQL developers who hope this movement invalidates their weakness.

Some sort of Fight Club ground zero wiping of the records, rewriting the rules of the game.

It doesn’t.

Nonetheless there is indisputably a lot of fantastic work happening among the NoSQL camp, with a very strong focus on scalability.

So what is scalability, anyways?

Scalability is a poorly-defined concept that, more often than not, is twisted to suit the speaker’s agenda. Scalability is often the excuse to engage in absurd hypotheticals to sell a particular blend of fanaticism.

Putting aside wordplay — or perhaps to engage in some of my own — scalability is pragmatically the measure of a solution’s ability to grow to the highest realistic level of usage in an achievable fashion, while maintaining acceptable service levels.

Imagine the scenario that you’ve built an internal help ticket tracking system for your branch office of Money Bags Corporation. If you had to describe the data needs in three points, they would be-

• Data is highly interrelated (relational)
• High-value users and transactions
• Data consistency and reliability is a primary concern

You decide to go against the hype and build it on a classic RDBMS system.

Will it scale to the real-world requirements?

There are some real scalability concerns with old school relational database systems. Adam Wiggins does a pretty good job of covering the techniques to scale a SQL database, though I strongly disagree with his end assertion.

You face those concerns on that glorious day the CEO calls to tell you that the board is super excited about your team’s help ticket system, built on SQL Server, and they want you to deploy it corporation wide. For data consistency purposes they want a single instance, instead of alternative deployment scenarios like pushing out an instance (“shard”) for each division.

Can you make it work?

When Money Is No Object

Of course you can. Even on the maligned Windows platform.

From a vertical scaling perspective — it’s the easiest and often the most computationally effective way to scale (albeit being very inefficient from a cost perspective) — you have the capacity to deploy your solution on powerful systems with armies of powerful cores, hundreds of GBs of memory, operating against SAN arrays with ranks and ranks of SSDs.

The computational and I/O capacity possible on a single “machine” are positively enormous. The storage system, which is the biggest limiting factor on most database platforms, is ridiculously scalable, especially in the bold new world of SSDs (or flash cards like the FusionIO).

Such a platform can yield very satisfactory performance for tens or hundreds of thousands of active users in most usage and application scenarios (where generally clients talk to a farm of middleware servers).

Of course if you index poorly or create some horrendous joins you can screw it up, but with competency it will be good times for all. Even with billions upon billions of help tickets.

For the purposes of the application, the scalability requirement is completely satisfied — total scalability is achieved in the context of the application.

But it doesn’t end there.

From a horizontal scaling perspective you can partition the data across many machines, ideally configuring each machine in a failover cluster so you have complete redundancy and availability. With Oracle RAC and Sybase ASE you can even add the classic clustering approach.

Such a solution — even on a stodgy old RDBMS — is scalable far beyond any real world need because you’ve built a system for a large corporation, deployed in your own datacenter, with few constraints beyond the limits of technology and the platform.

Your solution will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions) to deploy, but that isn’t a critical blocking point for most enterprises.

This sort of scaling that is at the heart of virtually every bank, trading system, energy platform, retailing system, and so on.

To claim that SQL systems don’t scale, in defiance of such obvious and overwhelming evidence, defies all reason.

And you don't need to spend a million dollars. A mid-level Dell server can easily handle the vast majority of real-world database needs: No, your project likely isn't going to have the needs of Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook. You can grab a four CPU Dell server hosting a total of 24 cores of latest-tech computing power, with 128GB of RAM, for around $15,000. That is beefier than the systems that ran many enterprises just a few short years ago.

Artificially Limited Scalability

Imagine that you’re a start-up building your big new Social Media site

Obviously you don’t have your own datacenter, but instead you’re going with cloud servers to host your solution.

You don’t have the option (much less the finances) to buy and install a Unisys 7600R, or even a loaded Dell R905. You don’t have TBs of memory or massive I/O at your disposal.

Instead you have to go with the options available on a host like Amazon’s EC2, where the most powerful choice available is the High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large (!) option at $2.40 / hour (at writing), or about $21,024 a year, which is a fairly reasonable rate given that an equivalent purchased server would run you about ten thousand dollars up front.

This is very powerful compared to their historic maxed-out image — the puny large image that used to represent the top end — and is large compared to the max of many other cloud hosts, yet it is entry level in the RDBMS database world.

I/O on the EBS has been measured with a throughput in the 30MB/second range  with about 72 IOPS per volume, which is one-half the speed that my Atom-based home NAS achieves. You can stripe multiple volumes into a software RAID array, but you quickly limit the I/O available to your instance.

For comparison we’re currently looking at an entry level $8K 36TB iSCSI device that would offer our database a dedicated 400MB/second throughput and about 1500 IOPS, and this is for a pretty humble low-criticality need with low-end magnetic drives.

As a speculative start-up you don’t want to commit $20K/year to have a single instance hanging around, especially given that your traffic is extremely variable and most of the time it will sit idle. You want to run the smallest database layer possible, ramping up if the need (fingers crossed) arises.

In an ideal world you could float along on a small instance economically until that big day when you get mentioned on Digg, at which point you spool up ten extra large instances, turning them off when the need passes.

These financial and artificial limits explain the strong interest in technologies that allows you to spin up and cycle down as needed. It’s why the old guard has largely remained quiet (because it solves a problem that they don’t have, notwithstanding any manufactured “my friend has a super-duper 512CPU Sun box and it is always overloaded!” scenarios), while a million hopeful start-ups with their small EC2 instances are loudly bleating about the limits of scalability with SQL systems.

The Needs of a Bank Aren’t Universal

The world of financial firms and retailers and other RDBMS users is very different than the popular social media scenario usually played out.

If you had to describe your social media data needs in three points, they would be-

• Largely unrelated islands of data
• Very low value user/transaction value
• Data integrity is not critical. If you lose a Status Update, or several thousand of them, it will likely go unnoticed, or at least won't cause a major situation.

MySQL originally lacked many traditionally mandatory RDBMS elements, such as transactions, without which it is extremely difficult to maintain a high level of data integrity. That didn’t dissuade many of its boosters who declared that it was an unnecessary cost for the purposes that they used it.

They were right.  As MySQL has moved towards the values of traditional databases, it has moved away from its original bag-of-data values.

The truth is that you don’t need ACID for Facebook status updates or tweets or Slashdots comments. So long as your business and presentation layers can robustly deal with inconsistent data, it doesn’t really matter. It isn't ideal, obviously, and preferrably you see zero data loss, inconsistency, or service interruption, however accepting data loss or inconsistency (even just temporary) as a possibility, breaking free of by far the biggest scaling "hindrance" of the RDBMS world, can yield dramatic flexibility.

This is the case for many social media sites: data integrity is largely optional, and the expense to guarantee it is an unnecessary expenditure. When you yield pennies for ad clicks after thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of transactions, you start to look to optimize.

The same efficiency applies to highly relational schemas — if you can just serialize object graphs and that’s all you need, why bother normalizing? Many would argue that it’s a premature optimization, but if it’s all you need it might be the best choice.

Both of those decisions would be outrageously negligent in many other industries, but the rules that apply for a banking system have woefully little applicability to a social media site.

SQL is Scalable and NoSQL Isn’t For Everyone

The point is one that I think all rational people already realize: The ACID RDBMS isn’t appropriate for every need, nor is the NoSQL solution.

A social media site is not an inventory system. A banking account management system is not a social news aggregator.

Picking and choosing database terminology from the Wikipedia entry on RDBMS’ doesn’t equip the speaker with an expert level of knowledge to declare the truth about the database industry.

Scalability noise based upon the limitations of a cloud vendor’s offerings needs to be put into context: They don’t apply to most of the users of relational databases.

MySQL isn’t the vanguard of the RDBMS world. Issues and concerns with it on high load sites have remarkably little relevance to other database systems.

And of course the SQL/RDBMS world is changing (sidenote: Few love SQL, but I’ve yet to see a viable replacement). Wouldn’t it be a grand world where every desktop (platforms that spend about 99% of their time completely idle) in a corporation was a part of the corporate cloud, all seamlessly acting as a part of the corporate information system in a reliable, redundant way? A simple SQL statement silently and transparently fulfilled by hundreds of distributed systems?

We’ll get there.

Aside: I'm currently building a solution (to fill this space) that significantly leans on Project Voldemort. I have somehow managed to remain rational.

Postnote

This is one of those rants that strangely gets attention, with several taking it as anti-NoSQL, or even pro-RDBMS, I assume because positions so often seem to be polarized. It is neither, which is quite evident if read with an unbiased mind: Defending the real world practical scalability of the maligned RDBMS merely brings accuracy to the debate. Several have asked if I'm merely attacking a strawman: Aside from several specific links that I gave above (I am remiss to add more as I've engaged in the blog-to-blog arguments too many times before), I find it hard to believe that these people take part in any technology discussion forum or group, where NoSQL is being quite widely, and often without question, held as successor to the RDBMS...the new evolution of database systems.

The motivation of the post is that the discussion is, by nature of the venue, hijacked by people building or hoping to build very large scale web properties (all hoping to be the next Facebook), and the values and judgments of that arena are then cast across the entire database industry — which comprises a set of solutions that absolutely dwarf the edge cases of social media — which is really...extraordinary. It's a bit like moving to the bottom of the ocean and declaring that everyone should start using submarines to commute.

There have been edge conditions in the database world for as long as there has been an industry. High performance logging/data acquisition (often distributed), for instance, has always been a case where traditional RDBMS systems aren't suited, and thus should be jettisoned. The industry didn't rewrite the rules because of those fringe cases, however, for good reason.

I have so many things I’d like to write about – topics having nothing whatsoever to do with Apple or Android, like IoC, ARM assembly, rational NoSQL, and of course pragmatic software architecture – but various mobile issues keep mentally demanding that I hop up on a soapbox about them for a bit. I have to get this out of the way.

Mobile computing is absolutely the most important realm for this industry over the coming decade, so pay attention to what is happening because it really, really matters.

CIBC – Leader and Innovator, or Me-Too Wannabe?

The CIBC Platinum Card

CIBC, a large Canadian bank, just launched a nationwide advertising campaign to promote their newly released iPhone banking application. You can see the video on YouTube.

It's notable that CIBC isn't targeting iPhone-only venues with these ads, which they could easily and cost-effectively do, but instead they are promoting this during primetime Olympics coverage. They're putting it front and center on their website.

If you caught the commercial you might have mistook it for an Apple ad, given that the strongest takeaway is a subtle "there's an app for that" message, followed by the implicit declaration that iPhone customers – a small minority of CIBC customers – are the elite, their walled garden needing its own special flowers.

Maybe Apple subsidized the ads and the product itself. It’s a little surprising for a large and profitable bank to look for ad subsidies, but it’s the only conclusion I can draw.

It’s either that or CIBC has an Apple fanboy wreaking havoc from the executive level.

In any case, big deal: CIBC makes an app for the iPhone (first bank in Canada to do so, they proudly boast). Just serving customers, right?

Consider that CIBC has never offered a rich-client Windows application for banking, which is a statement that is true for every Canadian bank as far as I know.

They will let you download data to Quicken or Money or what have you, on whatever platform you’d like, but if you want to bank electronically as an end-user the cross-platform web browser is and has always been your electronic banking tool, even when it limited them to a very simplistic interface.

They knew not to fall into the ActiveX quagmire like, say, South Korea. The banks have always supported just about any modern client equally.

Think about that for a bit: They have never directly supported the rich interface of the overwhelmingly dominant client platform for PCs.

And for very good reasons.

Yet now they have special, premiere support for one far-from-dominant Smartphone.

Given that history of device and platform treatment, it’s natural to presume that they have some fantastic and compelling reason for making this change: Maybe they’re using amazing 3D graphics of money flow or something on the device. Maybe a breathtaking augmented reality experience that allows you to visualize your debt load increasing when the camera is pointed at that new must-have device you really want at the electronics superstore, a virtual banker sternly shaking his head no.

There must be something that they just couldn't do without "going native", right?

Nope.

Their iPhone app features shockingly basic functionality. The single place where it could use something even remotely client-rich – to get the user's location to find the nearest branch – they screw it up and force you to type your location in.

This Is What Web Apps Are Made For

This Is An HTML5 App on the iPhone

This application was made for HTML 5, which humorously would easily allow them to use the Geolocation API to get the user's current location for richer and more intuitive mapping.

And let’s give credit where it is definitely due: The iPhone features excellent web app support, arguably best of class, likely because that was originally the only way to create applications for the device.

Jobs’ original vision was that the phone would offer a native Apple experience enhanced by a rich and robust web application ecosystem. That was the phone that they originally delivered.

That web richness allows you to make apps that look and act just like an iphone application with some simple targeted styles and scripting, offering rich and robust functionality and features.  It also allows you to avoid going hat-in-hand through Apple's app review process for every update, as is demanded when you publish via the App Store.

So imagine a world where CIBC decided that they didn’t need to kneel in worship before Apple, trying to suck some Apple-idolizing droppings from the dirty ground, and they’d release this as an HTML 5 app.

It would feature the same look and feel, could easily support all of the same functionality (without breaking a sweat). It would almost certainly be far more maintainable, and could function like a minimized version of the web app they already have for PCs, without necessarily demanding new public-facing web service APIs.

Win all around, right? Well that’s just the start.

If CIBC did it the correct way – as an HTML 5 app – it would also work on Android devices (including crazy features like local databases and geolocation and all of the snazzy dynamics), such as the hot new Milestone coming to Telus, and the anticipated Acer Liquid and Sony X10 coming to Rogers, and more importantly – this is the land of RIM – it would work on the newly revamped Blackberry webkit browser coming shortly, which is worthwhile given that Blackberry remains atop Apple in the “smartphone” category, especially here in Canada.

Remember that Apple far from dominates the Smartphone category, and competition is only getting fiercer. Canada has never been as iPhone-crazed as the US, and a number of compelling non-iPhone smartphones are just hitting our shores.

So if they went the HTML 5 route, they could offer a rich experience on all capable devices, easily stylable and feature-scaling to optimize the platform experience. Anything would be better than the WAPishly rudimentary "everyone else" dumpbin interface they currently support for every other mobile device.

Didn’t They Listen To Steve Jobs?

Juxtapose Steve Jobs telling us that the iPad doesn't need Flash because HTML 5 makes it irrelevant – a premature statement, but the time will come when his words will seem prophetic – with organizations like CIBC porting absolutely rudimentary web functionality into native apps, wasting time and resources and cash, primarily benefiting Apple, while undermining marketplace choice.

Very backwards move, CIBC. It doesn't make you look hip and on-the-ball, but instead makes you look like Apple-salesmen hoping for your little bit of me-tooism hipster credibility.

Given how boastful CIBC is about being the first bank to feature an iPhone interface, it would be delightful to see another Canadian bank, such as my old workplace RBC, take the high road and come out with rich and robust mobile web apps that don’t favour one walled garden without cause.

They could show it running just as richly on a Blackberry, gaining benefit from the glow of Canadian patriotism.

A Place for Web Apps and a Place for Native Apps

While Jobs is quick to declare the end of Flash in pitching the iPad, the reality is that there are serious gaps in what HTML 5 web apps are capable of.

Graphical games, for instance, aren’t a web app reality without either adding Flash to the equation or going native (e.g. OpenGL on Android or the iPhone). Some day down the road it will be possible, but that isn’t reasonably the case right now, aside from some tech demos that make a high-end desktop grind to a halt.

Apps that exploit special features and functions of the hardware generally can’t be web apps either, at least until the feature is so common and prolific that it gets baked into the shared standards, as geolocation has. I’m sure at some future point we’ll have “camera” and “webcam” and “DSP” APIs to access from JavaScript, but for now those are native app domains.

Mr. Jobs’ statement could more honestly be worded as “Flash isn’t necessary when you have HTML....and apps from the Apple App Store”.

Platform specific apps are needed for a lot of solutions. That goes without saying.

Still, porting absolutely rudimentary functionality to native apps is a backwards repeat of mistakes made in the past, walling the garden off for no logical reason.

CIBC is hardly alone in making this foolish, foolish move, but given that they seem to be so proud of this mistake they deserve particular criticism.

So You Own An iPhone and You Don’t See The Problem

My Youngest Doesn't Have an iPhone...yet

Even if you own an iPhone, and you happily imagine a world where your children’s children will have iPhones, you should still view moves like CIBCs with intense cynicism.

Not only are they limiting your choice unnecessarily if you ever decide to consider alternatives (as everyone should always be doing), even if you’ve declared fealty to Apple forever and ever the movements of organizations like CIBC are diminishing Apple’s need to be competitive.

Recall what happened to Internet Explorer after so much of the web (outside of Canadian banks, notably) decided that they would treat IE users as first class citizens, everyone else ignorable chumps. Once that lock-in was established Microsoft had little incentive to work on their browser and they took their users for granted. We’re still trying to pull ourselves out of that mistake.

Apple isn’t Microsoft, but by the end of 2010 they will likely exceed Microsoft’s market capitalization, which is absolutely shocking. Corporate sludge is inevitable at some point. If something happens to Steve Jobs, for instance, and they recruit Ballmer to run the place, you might decide to consider alternatives only to find that you're tied to the platform in a thousand seemingly minor but cumulative ways.

Competition is good. Building up the walled-garden of the iPhone undermines competition, and encourages a foolish Windowsification of the mobile world.

I passively monitored Apple’s much anticipated announcement yesterday via a TechCrunch live feed. Apple makes a lot of brilliant products, and their announcements have a big impact, so it's beneficial for anyone in this industry to keep interested.

The TechCrunch show consisted of a couple of people monitoring the twitter feed of someone actually invited to the event while incompetently dealing with technical challenges like “show a graphic” or “don’t abruptly inject a floor audio feed without warning”.

One of the hosts demonstrated why so many of us have an automatic skepticism about the critical reception of new Apple products: As the picture of the product came onto their feed – carried down from the mountain by Jobs – her reaction was “Uhhhhh....it’s gorrrrrrrrgeous!”

Her observation is only shared by the truly faithful, though surely the rest of the Apple herd will inevitably come around. You can be sure that going forward this nondescript rectangle will become the new benchmark of product beauty.

Everything that follows will either be ugly in comparison, or declared a rip off. I just discovered a digital photo frame beside me which I sadly must report is a rip-off of the pure, blessed genius of Apple.

Early Prototype

A Big iPhone

We now know that the iPad is essentially an iPhone with a larger (low resolution, 4:3 ratio) screen, minus voice. Clearly it runs an ARM-derived processor, with performance likely very similar to a Snapdragon 1Ghz. Apple is talking a big game about the A4 system on a chip (saying things like “Intel is looking to do this with their Atom”, ignoring all that came before to pretend that they lead the pack. It's like coming in last in the marathon yet talking about how you finished before next year’s winner), so it would be interesting to see it put to the test against, for instance, the Tegra 2.

One other feature of the iPad is that you can change the background. Apparently that’s a pretty big deal.

The iPad seems to be the continuation of Apple’s platform royalty play, and may be subsidized in the same way that Microsoft or Sony sell their consoles. With this device Apple is going upscale, moving beyond the repackaged web pages and novelty water cooler apps that overwhelmingly dominate the app store. Getting a cut of magazines and books and even more media will surely pad their pockets.

To repeat what I said before, Apple and Sony would be a perfect union. Their modus operandi is virtually identical. Aside from the common quest to act as the troll under the bridge collecting a toll, they share a profound propensity for endlessly reinventing things that came before, cluttering their devices with proprietary plugs and connectors and cards and slots.

The iPad puts into focus why Apple has been so vigilant about maintaining their strict ecosystem command and control of the iPlatform. While some points were debatable with the iPhone (and were cause for much stupidity when otherwise intelligent technical commentators made ridiculous excuses for the restrictions and limitations of the platform, trying to sell some piss water as lemonade), with the iPad it’s clear that it’s for the same reason that the console makers lock down their platform, though the lame excuses are already being doled out.

It certainly isn’t to benefit the consumer. We had shades of this years back as Microsoft built out the trusted-computing platform, and one feared possibility at the time was that we'd end up with a dominant platform where software had to pay a fee and pass a gatekeep ("DENIED! Competes with Excel!"). Thankfully the massive chill was unfounded, or the objection was so loud that it discouraged that initiative.

Alas, the iPad is real. The faithful are pouring forth to tell us that it’s the end of netbooks. It’s the end of eReaders. It’s the future of computing! While usually it’s the Mac faithful that preach the message, in this case it’s the tech media that is pouring on the unabashed praise with no critical perspective. They’re all afraid of posting something negative, only to be mocked when Apple inevitably succeeds. They point nervously at the Slashdot summary of lore.

As Jobs creepily says during his demonstration, “It’s that easy.” Then again Jobs also told us that it will be the “best browsing experience you’ve ever had”, while showing us the device rendering websites like the NY Times, sans Flash or other accoutrements, much slower and less usably than it takes for virtually any PC, including higher resolution, vastly more capable $400 netbooks, to do the same.

“Flash is so yesterday! HTML 5 is the future!” you say. I agree with you, at least if you’re talking through a wormhole from about two or three years in the future, and with a vastly more powerful device. JavaScript and the canvas element can almost yield usable Flash similes on a PC many magnitudes more powerful than this device. Even just for video it’s grossly premature, though Apple will be overjoyed if you’re restricted to their little ghetto, paying your toll while thanking them for it.

Alas, such is the pure innovation of the sort that only Apple can bring us.

A Blog Exclusive!

As a reader-of-my-blog exclusive, I want to let you all into some secret iPad specifications I stumbled across.

http://www.tabletpc2.com/Review-HPTC1100.htm

I knew I couldn’t fool you. That’s actually a tablet PC from 6 years ago. It’s a follow-up of tablet and hybrid PCs that existed since the turn of the century (and of course supermarkets and science centers have had touch screens, including the revered multi-touch, for much longer. Am I the only one who finds that people endless pinching and unpinching on the screen look positively ridiculous?)

Of course it was far more expensive than the coming iPad. It weighed more too, and had a much shorter battery life.

Then again, it was probably faster than the iPad. It was completely open and could run hundreds of thousands of very rich applications (applications not gimped to a smartphone). It also had lots of standard expansion ports and capabilities.

The market generally didn’t care for it or its ilk because the only people who really wanted a screen like that are inventory takers at Home Depot. Most of the demonstrations of it were laughable.

Despite all of Bill Gates’ prayers before he went to bed, the format floundered. They're trying once more to make it stick.

Of course that device used a screen technology that required a stylus. Apple is into the capacitive touch screen technology, so maybe that is super new and innovative for a device like this?

No, it isn’t unique. That touchscreen device came out before Apple’s very first iPod (you know the one. It was the “me too” music player that saved Apple from dying at the hands of a failed computer business — though some gimmickry with the iMac kept it on life-support for a while longer — which they’ve since rebirthed by rebadging PC components, amazingly fooling the faithful into believing that these somehow came from the premium bin).

Where is the Innovation?

The iPad isn't innovative. Everything it does has been done many times before. Claiming that its restrictions are a benefit are like saying North Korea has a more refined sense of freedom.

Executing well is not innovation. Apple executes very well indeed, and they put incredible care and attention into their products. That is hugely laudable and worthwhile, but it isn’t innovative.

As to predictions that the iPad will take over the eReader market, while it may come to pass it ignores precedent.

People don’t read books on LCD screens for the simple reason that people couldn’t accept that as a substitute for print when they wanted print. That led to the creation and adoption of e-Ink, mirroring how actual reflective print works. I have no doubt that a lot of teary-eyed iPad adopters will tell us that it’s the cat’s meow, but we’ve been down this path many times before. Yes, even with IPS screens.

That’s Apple innovation for you. If standards change for your product, how can you fail?

Of course, all of this is for naught. Apple has a precedent of going into markets with products that cost more while doing less, and achieving remarkable success. So this is my final cry before I smile and nod politely as told about how Apple invented IPS display technology, the ARM reference processor, flash memory, and so on. The leader is truly wise and great.

In March of last year I wrote about replacing the home NAS with a custom-built Linux box.  

Almost a year in and the device has served the purpose well, providing a solid foundation for a connected home. I’ve been very satisfied with the change.

The only downsides of the unit are the higher power consumption (averaging around 38W), and the groan of the two fans inside: the power supply and chipset fans. The audible part isn’t really an issue given that it’s stashed away, but considering that a probable failure point on most new electronics is the fans, it becomes a reliability concern.

I junked a laptop because of an impossible to repair broken fan. I’ve lost several video cards for the same reason.

I can even hear the irritating whirring of my blu-ray player’s fan (do not buy the Samsung BDP1600. The thing is complete junk even without factoring in the noisy fan trying to upstage the even noisier optical unit. Speaking of junk, the Sony alpha-200 is another garbage product that made me regret ever turning my back on Canon).

As promised in the original entry, I got around to replacing the power supply with a PicoPSU 90W unit, which was basically a plug and play swap.

In my original entry I estimated a 4-8W power reduction, which turned out to be an underestimation. With this PSU the power consumption dropped a whole 10W, going down to a constant 28W (only slightly spiking under load), making me feel a little less enviro-guilt. There’s still the noisy chipset fan, but that’ll be another project.

The case was built around the expectation of a power supply fan exhausting heat, so some extra natural ventilation was required. With that the sensor readings now hover at low operating levels.

Economically this is a change that will not pay off. From NCIX the new PSU cost me $73.49 all in. Given a savings of 0.01kWh per hour, and a fully loaded electric cost around $0.16/kWh, it would take 5 years for the 10W to pay for the change.

It would be nice if all power supplies were mandated to be efficient (they aren’t for most devices because they know it plays zero part in your purchasing criteria. It’s unfortunately one of those areas where legislation is really the only effective solution), because right now inefficiency is the standard. Of course environmental choices don't always yield the expected results.

The Dream is Over...Wake Up With New Phone

In July of last year I wrote about choosing a new smartphone to replace the MotoQ that I had been using. While the MotoQ served a good tour of duty, it was seriously showing its age and was falling behind in the empowering mobile revolution.

While I’d been using variants of Windows CE since before the turn of the century, Windows Mobile was obviously lost in the wilderness. Not only was each equipped device essentially abandoned right after being released, the clearest sign that Microsoft lost the plot could be seen in PocketIE, where the preloaded bookmarks to various Microsoft Mobile pages led to 404 errors.

The team moved onto something new and shiny and had no concern at all for the existing base. Microsoft has a very short attention span to products that don't earn them Windows Office type revenue numbers, so it wasn't a surprise.

For various reasons I did not want an iPhone (we don’t need another restrictive and innovation crushing Microsoft scenario playing out, and I want to develop for the device without embracing the whole cult), despite it being the easy choice. I opined in the first entry that Android seemed to have a very bright future ahead, which is a prediction that seems quite obvious now given that it is the platform of so many incredible devices recently released or on the horizon.

The future is so bright for Android that the robots have to wear shades.

The options in Canada were (and remain) limited, so I went with an HTC Dream (G1) given that it had a keyboard and otherwise had largely the same specs as the newer HTC Magic, aside from what seemed like a minor difference in memory capacity.

 I have to confess to being disappointed with the device.

Functionally it is amazing, and even with Android 1.5 the platform is simply brilliant. When everything operates correctly I am over the moon with the device.

The problem is that everything didn’t operate correctly. For whatever reason the device seems to be horrendously overloaded, so even with virtually no apps installed and nothing beyond the base system running, most actions are plagued by obnoxious pauses, even on a fresh start-up.

I hate pauses.

I stopped using brilliant apps like Weatherbug because they seemed to make the situation worse.

Alas, my long term plan was always that I would buy one of the newer, faster phones when they came to market, while using the starter device for development purposes until that time. If an unlocked Nexus One or Droid/Milestone worked on Rogers’ wireless band, I’d grab one of those when it was a possibility.

Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised recently to find that Rogers was offering all HTC Dream owners a free HTC Magic for $0, with the caveat that your term length pushes out. Given that Dream owners can only possibly be 6 or 7 months into their term, that isn’t that tough of a demand. I am on a very reasonable family plan that allows me 5GB / month (which I seldom use more than 1% of), so I feel fairly future-proofed with that foundation and for me it was all win.

So the next day a Magic arrived in the mail and moments later I was up and running with it. With the SIM card removed my existing Dream still works on wifi, where it can browse the web and play media and respond to emails and take pictures, and I can of course put another card in it and continue using it online. I’ll likely install Cyanogen on it now.

Quite pleased about that.

The most shocking thing, though, is that this Magic is much more responsive. It has the same processor as the Dream, so that doesn’t explain the difference. If I had to guess, I’d point to RAM, which on this device comes in at 288MB, compared to the 192MB in the Dream. For comparison both the Droid and the iPhone 3GS feature 256MB of RAM.

The extra headroom over the base OS seems to make all the difference in the world. On the Magic I can see that the free memory is usually less than 90MB, even on a fresh start-up, which notably would put it over the limits of the Dream.

HTC and Rogers claim that they’ll release Android 2.1 for this device in the near future, which makes me especially pleased.

Great move, Rogers. The new HTC Sense update and free month of data is icing on the cupcake.

Firefox 3.6 Released – Web Worker Performance Remains the Same

Back in June I wrote about Web Workers, a fantastic new method to move processing out of the UI thread. To support the entry I posted a variation of the SunSpider benchmark I named Moonbat.

Safari kicked Firefox around in this benchmark. I just tried it with the just released 3.6, and it doesn’t look like much has changed: FF 3.6 does 10 iterations with 4 threads in ~11 seconds, Chrome does it in 2.6 seconds, while Safari leads the pack at 2.3 seconds.

Alas, web worker performance isn’t a critical factor in choosing a browser (my favourite browser remains Firefox), but it would be nice to see it moving in the right direction.

Celebrating My First Home High Speed Overage

Got the cable bill — a bill that pushes into the $250 range per month these days — to find a surprising $11.25 "internet overage fee". Apparently I used 67.5GB last month, while my limit is 60GB. The Steam sales, several purchased HD movies and a couple of on-demand games for the kids on the 360, added to the normal internet usage apparently really added up to a very atypically throughput-intensive month.

I'm not going to cry many tears about it, even though I do think $1.50 a GB is a bit absurd (in an average month I doubt I use 10GB, so now I almost feel obligated to max it out), given that I think by usage pricing would lead to a far better, more open, more honest system for everyone.

On Slashdot, news of this was submitted and accepted as “London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET for Open Source”, with the statement that “The switch is a pretty savage indictment of the costs of a complex .NET system.” The Digg submitter went with the title “London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux” — which they took directly from the linked article — with the description “Fed up with Windows' failures, one of world's major stock exchanges is joining many others in making the switch to reliable Linux“.

The heavily-linked columnist in both cases is a guy who has been riding this "LSE dumps Windows!" horse for a while now. It has certainly provided him with lots of quality incoming visitors, drawing in those looking for validation, and angry hordes baited by his trolls. Encouraged on he seems to be accelerating the unsubstantiated hyperbole.

Let’s take a moment to go back in history for a bit.

Microsoft made a Really Big Deal about the LSE originally switching to this custom, Accenture-built, SQL Server 2000/.NET-based solution. This was sort of Microsoft’s coming out party, in a way saying “look, we’re big boys too! No more pull-ups for us”.

When the LSE had a very public failure on one of the biggest trading days in history, the detractors were screaming “I told you this would happen!” until their throats were sore, despite the cause of the failure never having been publicly detailed.

Failures have happened on every platform, most commonly as a result of application failure. To automatically assume the worst of a novel solution simply because it is atypical is the thought process of annoying simpletons, anxiously and eagerly hoping to try to pin any fault on anything that doesn’t fit their vanilla perspective of how things are supposed to work.

“The software must have failed because Bob went with HP instead of IBM!”

“The payroll system miscalculated. It must be because they moved it to Linux from Solaris!”

So what really happened with the LSE?

Accenture built a very expensive, custom solution for the LSE, purportedly costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 million dollars. To operate this custom in-house (albeit designed by Accenture out-of-house) system the LSE built up a considerable technology workforce.

The worldwide recession hits and the LSE takes some financial hits. A swarming mass of competitors in Europe, many running off-the-shelf, superior systems that they’re paying less for, go live.

A new CEO takes over and immediately starts to swing the axe. He makes specific comments in the press about the high IT costs of the organization; both of the large number of technology workers in London, and the continuing significant payments to Accenture to finesse the TradElect platform.

He undoubtedly observed that all of this custom work hasn’t gained them any unique advantage in the relatively commodity task that they performed. In some ways it’s like writing and maintaining your own in-house operating system – if it doesn’t give you some advantage, and actually puts you behind as everyone else pools resources on a solution, then why would you do that?

So they go on the market for a replacement, eventually deciding to go with the product of a Sri Lankan company. The price is right, and the lure of low-priced Sri Lankan talent is enticing enough that they buy the whole company.

In the end they have switched from an extravagant, custom-developed solution built by a notoriously expensive consulting company, and a workforce of expensive talent in the West, to a basically off-the-shelf solution that has been subsidized to its current state by other organizations, in the process getting some low-paid talent in South-East Asia.

The new product isn’t open-source, and it runs on a range of non-open-source UNIX platforms. The Oracle database system it uses is the antithesis of open-source.

What about this story has anything to do with open source?

The LSE doesn’t think it has anything to do with open source, or even necessarily Linux.

Where this story gets legs among the zealots is that the LSE plans to deploy the new product on Linux, given that the underlying operating system in many cases has been commoditized. Who wouldn’t?

Zealots cheering on trolling columnists like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols do the profession harm. Now this nonsense is going to be parroted by people who don’t know better, making them look worse for it, for years to come.

I love Linux. I love open source. And you know I also am even quite fond of .NET and SQL Server. I detest fanatics, fanboys, and hysterical columnist that distort or invent reality to get themselves hits.

The game is a stunning technical achievement, and it is amazing what they squeeze out of the almost half-decade-old era hardware of the device.

What makes the game spectacular isn't specific to some mystical art of console gaming, however, but is simply great software design and execution. While many in "mainstream" development (business processes, websites, etc) consider game development foreign to what they do, it's all just algorithms and code: One person does financial projections and another does particle effects, differing less than many imagine

The game was so excellent that I decided that I'd try to find who the talent behind it was, my quest thwarted because this game, like many recent releases by large game studios, has an apparently anonymous development team. My search for credits has yielded only a listing of artists responsible for the songs in the game.

It would be great if there was an industry credits site similar to imdb, where you could find out the people responsible for games and applications: I can easily discover who did the foley mixer work on Joe Dirt, but can't discover the team behind Dirt 2 after a lot of digging. Maybe I'll make one.

I did find a "studio tour" video, in which the only person deemed worthy of naming was the "Senior Executive Producer". Maybe if I finish the game I'll discover who did the magic to make this game happen. I'd like to read how these guys operate and do what they do, because they are clearly successful at their craft, and I imagine they'd have interesting things to say.

Are they just cogs in the gears of CodeMasters? Crank it and a great game pops out, quality determined only by your Senior Executive Director in charge of North American Marketing?

Are we past the era of superstars like John Carmack? Are we into an era where everyone is nameless "team players"...unless of course they're in senior management/marketing, in which case their contributions and name will be heralded everywhere.

As a mostly unrelated aside, the "all contributors are equal, but some are more equal than others" policy reminds me of a conversation I once had with a peer, during which they bragged about how their workplace followed a policy that strongly discouraged fancy-pants work titles (e.g. no lead architect, senior developer, etc). My appreciation for that egalitarian workplace dissolved, however, when I learned that the speaker had granted themselves a lofty, important sounding title, as did the other senior members, and they failed to see the hypocrisy in it.

Sidenote: The website for the game is mildly offensive to Canadians. They decided that the landing page would require you to first select a country, with the options being the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the UK, Italy, France, and the USA.

As a Canadian I'm left not knowing which I'm supposed to pick. Maybe I'm supposed to pick the UK to get words with superfluous 'u' still intact. Maybe I'm supposed to pick the US just because of proximity? Two of those countries (the Netherlands and Belgium) are significantly smaller than Canada, so I have to guess it's a hybrid language/proximity thing.

Lots of websites pull this cheap navigation technique and it's lame. Often a US flag really means "English", other times a Union Jack means English. Nationality and language aren't the same thing, so it's a lazy tactic, made especially confusing when both appear together.

Then again, if I recall correctly the old Codemasters site worked by having you select on a world map, where all of North America was labeled "United States of America". Us Canadians get accustomed to it.

Embarrassingly it got picked up by Slashdot and was put up as the awkward counterpoint to an earlier article by Clay Shirkey, in which the author competently, with research and everything, argued against the concept.

Arguments were had and forgotten, and we all moved on. Lots of great content disappeared from the web, advertisers got more and more desperate, often malicious, and a long and horrible content drought ensued.

Eventually Google came onto the scene, bringing advertising to the little guy, and the content market was reborn on the back of Adsense.

Clay was held up as the victor, or more correctly was considered the only contender, and has been used for citations countless times since, unquestionably proving the non-viability of any small-transaction system. I came across just such an article moments ago, as I do several times a month.

Was Clay right? Are people really psychologically unable to handle small payments? Is the idea of small-cost subscription packages for websites an unworkable model, or do people just say that because they like imagining that they're having a free lunch?

Lots of people seem to think so.

Then again, lots of people thought the Earth was flat, terrible things would happen when we passed the speed of sound, it would be impossible to full-text index the internet or to search it economically, and so on.

Take a moment to consider that there have been 2 billion iPhone apps sold, with a current average price hovering around a dollar. There are predictions that the average price will rise in the coming years, to a magnificent $2.37 by 2013.

This is for generally small, disposable apps that often do little, but because the cost is small and the transaction surprisingly well lubricated by the iTunes process, a lot of people just click "buy" and enjoy the experience. Look at Atwood himself — using him as an example given that he comes into play in the article I referenced earlier — who said:

My total bill for 3 screens worth of great iPhone software applications? About fifty bucks. I've paid more than that for Xbox 360 games I ended up playing for a total of maybe three hours! About half of the apps were free, and the rest were a few bucks. I think the most I paid was $9.99, and that was for an entire library. What's revolutionary here isn't just the development ecosystem, but the economics that support it, too. At these crazy low prices, why not fill your phone with cool and useful apps? You might wonder if developers can really make a living selling apps that only cost 99 cents. Sure you can, if you sell hundreds of thousands of copies:

That's impossible! Clay Shirkey says so! Or at least that's what people often interpret him as saying.

iTunes doesn't just service the iPhone app market. Aside from its start selling music (usually sold by the track), countless people are avoiding advertisers and buying network television content via the services. Marginally small amounts, but low transaction costs, technology, and the ease of purchase makes it a viable market.

iTunes doesn't own this nickle-and-dime market, though.

I enjoy the occasional bout of gaming on the xbox 360, and it takes every opportunity it can to try to get me to partake of tiny little purchases, some as low as $0.40. Want a game-specific theme? Want some bling for your avatar? Want that car before you've "earned" it? Want this amateur community game? Come on, it's just a couple of points from some nebulous points pool that you can spend simply by pressing A a couple of times, and when it empties you just add a bunch more.

Of course, all of this naturally leads to the semantics of what a "micropayment" is, and inevitably people will argue that a micropayment must be paying sub-pennies by the page, or the KB, or the image, or whatever. That isn't the spirit of it at all, however, and instead the origins of micropayments were easy to accommodate payments of amounts that were traditionally uneconomical to gather. In my mind iTunes absolutely supports micropayments the theory, because prior to that service it simply wasn't possible to sell applications for $1 or less. There was a fairly lofty minimum threshold below which it wasn't worth your time.

That is no longer the case within certain spaces.

Which again brings us to the possibility of micropayments for websites that hold actual value: People need to quit pretending that micropayments are some disproven, unworkable theory. There are a lot of us who simply abhor advertisement or economic coersion in all its forms (as you saw in the prior entry, the moment someone adds commission links to what is purportedly a subjective review, my opinion of their credibility drops precipitously, and I'm suddenly wondering if they actually liked the product, or if they just fumbled around for something and pushed the first thing they found, using it to effectively tax the readership indirectly and terribly inefficiently), and who aren't cheap bastards. If you have a site of value, and if there were a trustworthy, credible and lubricated system like iTunes for Websites, the idea could have legs.

In an earlier, more naïve era of my career, I had three software development “heroes”: Jamie Zawinski , John Carmack and Joel Spolsky.

Jamie Zawinski grabbed my attention because he was at the center of the internet revolution, right in the bowels of Netscape from the outset, and had established a pattern of posting surprisingly pragmatic comments that defied convention.

It was extraordinary to read someone openly critical of their own organization, especially without it being retracted or redacted the sobered-up or calmed-down next day, and where the author didn’t hide behind anonymity.

Jamie let us commoners see the sometimes ugly mechanics behind the curtain. He also revealed a very interesting workplace that was foreign to the gray-walled cube world that most of us lived in.

This was at a time when Microsoft really had almost unthinkable dominance over the industry, so to hear Jamie discuss the travails of cross-platform development was like going out of bounds at a tourist resort. Seeing what the brochure didn’t show you.

An SGI box? IRIX? How exotic!

Another of the kings, John Carmack, was blessed with “F-you money” from the incredible success of some of his earlier projects, along with a proven abundance of intelligence and skills, so he too had the luxury of entertaining a surprisingly realistic and pragmatic perspective. He was a principal driver of the evolution of GPUs and gaming hardware, and you can owe thanks for some of the capabilities of your console or dual-GPU rig to his desire to make shooting things in first-person shooters hyper realistic.

Carmack was also one of the original “bloggers”, regularly posting lengthy “blog entries” by repurposing the UNIX finger facilities.

Joel Spolsky is a bit of the odd-man out in this trio. While he did have the requisite first-initial, he wasn’t known for extraordinary technical acumen (beyond having worked on Excel in some earlier life), but hear me out, please.

Joel ascended to Kingship – at least in my personal hierarchy of industry royalty – just after the dot com crash, when CMM factory-line initiatives started to become the mythical silver-bullet: This was an era awash with articles gushing about the amazing adoption of CMM5 among offshoring firms.

Many organizations were striving to reduce software development to an assembly line of easily interchangeable cogs, both of code and people, achieving a utopia where the process would become perfectly predictable and repeatable if only you filed enough forms.

Joel spoke up for developers when most were absurdly blaming the .COM collapse on dual-monitors, Aeron chairs, and inflated developer egos, as if taking developers down a notch and having them sit on a cold rock would have made selling kitty litter online a good idea.

He was essentially an enlightened pointy-hair blogger, and while I wouldn’t look to his blog for technical advice (Wasabi!), he really understood developers and the process of getting software built. And he was willing to risk his own nest egg and put his money where his mouth is, having since built a reasonably successful company in Manhattan that most of us should be envious of.

Unbound by Convention

What made these three really stand apart in a sea of cheap advice-givers and pundits was that none of them were writing to get a job or even necessarily to keep one. Joel made his own bank while the other two were of such technical esteem that they had little to worry about professionally regardless of what they might say.

They weren’t coerced into railing off the latest buzzwords and best practices, deferring to the latest silver-bullet best practice pattern-based UML diagramming system 3NF data warehousing factory built on a n-tier service-oriented, aspect-oriented, polymorphic framework so that they can get the approving nods from the nervous masses and clueless PHBs.

They didn’t worry about offending a boss who held some sacred cow that if only you did it the way she read on some best practices blog, everything would be fabulous, at least until that initiative fails and you move on to the next cure-all.

The three kings were just saying it like they saw it, which was and still is rare.

Eventually Joel ran out of things to talk about and switched his blog to mechanically regurgitated repeats; Carmack got lost endlessly perfecting the noble quest of simulating head shots when he wasn’t reaching for the stars; and Zawinski decided to engage in endless battles with the city of San Francisco over his money sink of a late-night dance club (if you read his blog about DNA Lounge early on, you could almost smell the contractors taking this dotCOMinaire for a ride).

Maligning Metaphors

I was delighted to see Joel return from effective blogging retirement, and my enthusiasm exploding when I saw that it was a post about Zawinski!

A royal duet!

Okay really Joel was selling a book – like his partner-in-crime Atwood, he seems to be motivated to post by Amazon Affiliate bucks these days, credibility undermined by that kickback – however he chose the Zawinski chapter as his pitch, talking admiringly about how practical and “get ‘er done” (paraphrased) jwz was about his craft, doing so with a present tense that betrays a certain blissful ignorance about Jamie’s career path since.

Joel labeled Jamie the “Duct Tape Programmer”, which was a description that Jamie took as “damning with faint praise”. Joel has long been against architectural astronauts, so he seemed to excitedly hold up Jamie as the successful counterpoint.

Perhaps “duct tape” is a bit of a metaphorical overreach, causing many to envision some Tim the Toolman ‘Ar ar ar’ hack.  Pragmatic or practical probably would have been more accurate, though it would have made for a less contentious entry.

Never mind that Jamie worked within extremely tight timelines, using technology far less advanced than what we have now.

Joel’s entry raged across the social news sites, with the regular suspects popping out of the woodwork to declare it a grievous offense to all that is all that is good in the world of software development. Lots of blog replies parroting the standard best practices appeared, their authors clearly hoping that their boss and any future employers will see how studious and diligent of worker bees they are.

Who Decides on Best Practices?

The people who are the most certain about software development patterns, practices, and technologies are usually the people who have the least reason to have such certainty.

I’m going to be a bit trollish while I go to the extreme and say that many of the oft-quoted leaders of the field, responsible for much of the unquestioned wisdom-bites, have little to demonstrate why they’re in a position to preach.

The revered Fred Brooks, author of the Mythical Man-Month, came into a position of considerable influence largely by leading a project that was by most accounts a massive failure. That would be fine if there was but one way to fail and he found it for the benefit of all, but there are an infinite number of ways that a project can fail.

Of course you must learn from failures, but my experience has been that the explanations for failure are often a worse-than-useless distractionary tactic: When a team technically fails to accomplish what they set out to do, expect the post-mortem to be full of nonsensical misdirection about how everyone and everything else is to blame.

How many post-mortems include the statement “I grossly overestimated my own capabilities”? I suspect few.

Steve McConnell is another well-known author in the field, revered for his software development books (though many strangely overlook After the Gold Rush, where McConnell knee-jerk responds to the dot COM collapse by advocating an ill-considered licensing system for software developers), but his professional experience seems to be limited to working on TrueType at Microsoft, and some nebulous software development at Boeing, after which he took on the role of telling the world how software should be developed. Now he consults with pointy-hair bosses to unknown outcomes.

Don’t get me wrong, I have both of them in the bookshelf behind me, and read and greatly enjoy their opinions (Brooks’ observation about second systems is more profound and important, I think, that the over-quoted man-month snippet), but really, let’s keep some perspective and stop using it like they’re the incontestable word of truth.

I read them critically and with an open mind, not taking it as the voice from an all knowing deity, but instead the perspectives of a couple of guys drawing from their experiences.

Of course, the esteemed Fred Brooks and Steve McConnell exist in a realm far above most silver-bullet cheerleaders in our industry. These successful authors actually dirtied their hands with actual software development, refactoring their opinions over the years into refined perspectives. I select them merely as “absolute best case” examples.

More commonly the people who most ardently advocate certain practices and approaches have achieved little, usually having nothing to back their conviction but self-interest and a desire to look like they know what they’re talking about, having associated their id with “correct” approaches.

They just clutch onto whatever they hear is proper and start repeating it like a novelty birthday card repeatedly opened. They’ll tell you that should develop like an ecommerce site, despite not being an ecommerce site; like you’re NASA, despite not being NASA; like you make the software for a pacemaker, despite actually making an ebay auction sniping tool.

Why do I hear the word “pattern” from mediocre or non-developers more than I hear about it from experienced developers, always stated as some sort of conclusive statement?

Why do we accept that a chimp-level of software development skill is acceptable for maintenance programmers, capable of understanding only the most infantile code that is carefully decorated with “Coding for Dummies” comments?

Why is “We should use UML” the desperate last-ditch fallback of failing teams everywhere?

Unit testing, or the more early-loaded TDD, can be great, but it isn’t a panacea and is an extremely poor substitute for actual craftsmanship.

Moving beyond the non-developers giving their unwanted opinion on how software should be built, the other class of destructive noise is the advocacy of silver-bullet methodologies during the honeymoon period.

Great, you built a sample app on RoR/Haskell/Scheme/python or whatever else is the cure-all platform that profoundly changed your world view.

Here’s a nickel. Go build a real app then tell us how revolutionary it is now. I don’t discount the advantages, but advocacy based upon toying around is of little use to real projects. Extrapolating it up is foolhardy.

Oh look, another guy telling us how switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout made him regular and makes his code smell like cinnamon. Here’s someone saying that they slept 4 hours a night by taking 20 minute catnaps, proven out over their two day sample period. This guy says that having a 400x200 single-app screen on a netbook made him a perfectly focused coder. Here’s a dieter who is certain that they’re onto an incredible, beats-the-laws-of-thermodynamics diet now that they’ve followed it for a whole six hours.

The Emperor Has No Clothes!

The fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” has significant relevance to the software development field. To quote the plot summary from Wikipedia

An emperor of a prosperous city who cares more about clothes than military pursuits or entertainment hires two swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or unfit for his position. The Emperor cannot see the (non-existent) cloth, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing stupid; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime. The Emperor then goes on a procession through the capital showing off his new "clothes". During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, "the emperor is naked!" The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth. The Emperor, however, holds his head high and continues the procession.

Too often the software development industry suffers for lack of someone crying out. We often just go along with it, listening to the declarations of non-developers and maintenance programmers as if they speak unquestionable truth, all while discarding any counterexamples as mere aberration (“Well not every team has superstars you know! We aren’t all John Carmack!”).

Everyone withholds contrary, pragmatic “Well it isn’t quite so cut and dry…” opinion lest they look like a “hack” to a present or future employer or nervous, cargo-cult embracing peers, smiling politely while the never-coded, overconfident guy acronym drops about things he doesn’t understand in the daily stand-up.

The more you know, the more you’ve experienced, the less obvious the world becomes, and the more hesitation before offering up opinions. The less ease there is to criticize the path of others when it has yielded obvious success.

Opinions come quickly to experts and morons. Few of us are experts.

Jamie Zawinski had unique conditions under which he unquestionably succeeded. Many, with the seeming clarity of hindsight and the ability to project whatever imaginary timeline one desires, will look back and comment on how the codebase got rewritten, purportedly twice, and how eventually the product was squashed, stomped out of relevance by Microsoft (before being reborn as the game-changing Firefox), using that to draw the absurd conclusion that if it were produced “properly” at the outset, today we’d all be using Netscape 9. Then again, maybe it would have followed the disastrous arc of Chandler.

The road that leads to most successful apps is often an ugly, brutish affair filled with compromise and folly, risk-taking, detours-followed, and shortcuts pursued. That isn't to justify them, or to diminish alternative approaches, but we should always keep our minds open, being less quick to defensively guard whatever we're selling as the cure-all this week.

A Call Out For Success Stories

What I’d like to read more about are the success stories, and less about the professional pundits telling everyone how it ought to be done.

Of course here’s where we get into a common paradox that exists in most industries: The successes are usually off enjoying their success and wealth, less inclined to toil away their days writing blog entries extolling their "dart toss" method of architecture. We’re left with the conversation being dominated by the people who don’t actually make software at all, telling us how grand they could make software, if they ever actually did, by following their sure-win magic formula. The conversation boards are overrun with the people who actually have so little to do that they spend their time describing the ideal way that everyone else should write software.

Parallels can be drawn with the financial world, where the snake-oil salesmen pitching the ways to make money are usually doing so because their only way of making money is pitching how to make money (Want to know the secret to making big money? Send me $5, and I’ll tell you that it’s to get people to send you $5 to learn the secret of making big money). The guys actually making the money are off making the money.

This brings us full circle back to Joel’s recommendation of the book. A book that serves as one of the few opportunities we have to really read how projects succeeded, straight from the source.

It’s good if only to let the successes have a voice in the conversation.

One improvement that has gone largely unnoticed is that 3.0 brings Web Workers to Chrome (of course it already had it in Google Gears fashion, however now it's in the standard, cross-browser form), so you can run the web worker benchmark I previously put up and see Chrome 3 blazing a path. I'll update the comparison charts to include this browser shortly.

This means that web apps using Web Workers for enhanced performance on multi-core machines, or more importantly for better GUI responsiveness, now function on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, leaving just Internet Explorer and Opera as the hold outs.

Quiet Upgrades

I really appreciate how quietly Google updates their browser when you already have it installed. No user-disrupting fanfare or attempts to use the opportunity to push new toolbars or side products on you (which, I suspect, drives the frequent updates to many products. I uninstalled NoScript way back after having the update notice seemingly every other day for what seemed to be the most trivial extension possible, each update bringing you to the advertisement riddled website where it incidentally told you that they made some sort of irrelevant non-update. That was before the notorious battle between NoScript and Adblock, where the former again was motivated primarily by ad impressions). Of course this model gets much more debatable once changes include major functionality changes, or breaking changes, however as is it's a seamless way of delivering updates, where each version simply improves and adds to what is there.

However you feel about Stallman, he should be thanked for eliciting this position declaration and finally helping to legitimize Mono. .NET / C# developers should rejoice at this development.

The first Android-based phones available in Canada are the HTC Dream and Magic, both recently introduced by Rogers Canada. The Dream is better known in the US as the G1 under its T-Mobile guise, where it has been available since October of last year. The Magic is a newer phone, known in the US as the G2, offering a bit more internal memory and flash storage, and a sleeker, lighter design made possible because it doesn’t have the physical keyboard that the Dream sports.

The phones are a bit late to the moose party, but at least they finally made it. We tend to get these things a little slower here in the Great White North, as we’re a lucrative enough market that these companies want to pursue some sort of strategy to aggressively monetize us, yet we’re a small enough market that they’re in absolutely no rush to do so. We’re often stuck in a bit of limbo, embargoed out of play until some grand strategy is developed.

Alas, the Android finally got their landed immigrant papers and moved in.

Apple Goes and Spoils the Party

The Android launch has been rumored to be a big disappointment for Rogers, and they've already resorted to slashing prices. The phones aren’t nearly as sexy as the iPhone, and their release in Canada came right as anticipation for the 3GS started swelling, exploding into a tumultuous wave of gooey pro-Apple fanaticism.

The poor reception isn't all that surprising. For many end-users the iPhone really is a better product, an assessment made even truer with the release of the 3GS. It was a close race with the 3G, but there seems to be a clear winner now that the 3GS is available.

The Dream, its 528Mhz processor purportedly underclocked to 384Mhz* — presumably for thermal reasons — fell behind the iPhone 3G, and is easily kicked around by the 3GS. The HTC’s design is comparably stodgy, and the app support isn’t as robust or polished (especially here where inexplicably there is no access to the commercial Android market apps. Instead we’re restricted to the free software). The hardware saw no upgrades at all over its year-old G1, so there’s still a restrictively small amount of on-phone storage, and yet Android 1.5 — the “cupcake” version installed on the Rogers phones — has yet to support installing to the SD card while they iron out the inevitably futile DRM efforts, so that remains a very real concern.

* - Note that the statement about the underclocked processor is based on information I discovered online while researching the phone, repeated across many sites, not that repeated assertion gives it any further truth. However I can say that when playing around in the shell on the phone with the excellent and free connectbot app, the scaling_max_freq is set to 528000, implying that the Rogers build of the phone will clock all the way up to the limits of the processor.

Rogers made the situation for the Dream worse by crippling the one meager advantage it holds over the iPhone (in my opinion a huge advantage, but subjective opinons differ), which is that it has a real keyboard. For reasons that are hard to understand — I have a strong suspicion that it relates to bilingualism, which is the reason why we also don't have voice search, a feature really sorely missed given how valuable it is in the latest Google maps update — the Rogers build of the Dream variant of the phone has no onscreen keyboard, forcing you to pull a Transformers routine on the phone every single time you need to enter so much as a letter. This turns the physical keyboard into as much a liability as an asset, and if it ended at that I would recommend that people go for the Magic and steer clear of the Dream. Not only does it make it a pain to do quick interactions with the device, but I'm sure the endless opening and closing (often in situations where you shouldn't be trying to open and close a device) isn't optimal for the long term reliability of the unit.

Thankfully this terribly stupid decision can be easily overcome, and you can get the incredible utility of both the software keyboard and the physical keyboard, as each best fits. When you just want to punch in the start of a business name to look it up in Google Maps, there’s no need to pull out the keyboard.

The HTC Android phones came to Canada with excellent Exchange ActiveSync support, so for corporate users it supports their Exchange installations with no unnecessary middleware software or services.

Enough about the HTC phones, I recently had the desire to upgrade my smartphone, and as you can see above I firmly believe that the iPhone 3GS is the superior phone. It is impossible to argue otherwise.

The choice is clear.

So I went and bought an HTC Dream, signing up for the 6GB / month data plan. Given that I'm usually around a WiFi point, I doubt I'll ever use even a fraction of that, but I'd rather not even have to worry about it.

It's All About Potential

I simply believe that the Android platform has a very bright future ahead. That it is poised to be unstoppable. I am of the belief that gaining the developer knowledge and comfort with the product now beats using the faster, slicker (and definitely cooler) iPhone 3GS. And I like having a real keyboard.

I am convinced that in the next two years we'll see the release of a variety of compelling and powerful products based on the platform.

And while it isn’t an iPhone 3GS, and I wouldn’t recommend it to my sister in-law, it’s still an amazing little phone in its own right. It is far from perfect (there are Windows Mobile-like interface delays throughout, and several apps have outright crashed on me), but it’s very decent and technically amazing.

The Google integration of the phone is a nice benefit of the device. A few years back I predicted the emergence of Satvertising, in particular as satellite imagery became available on navigation devices, so it's interesting to see it become a real possibility with Google maps on the Android. It’s pretty bizarre to pull up the map while sitting on the deck out back to find that Google maps had me literally at the table that I was sitting at.

The deep Gmail integration, especially for Google Apps users (including "Standard Edition"), is excellent. The Exchange integration is close to perfect, and it certainly beats what the MotoQ, a Windows Mobile device, offers. Using both on the same device is painless, with excellent integration (e.g. calendar events drawing and saving to either) and no confusion.

Several videos I encoded with h.264 AVC (one of the best codecs around) played brilliantly, and I've read that it's comfortable with a number of other video formats. The included player is a little buggy, so occasionally things like update spinners would get orphaned on the screen, overlaying your video for the duration, but its easy to get around. The unit plays MP3s well enough, so not much notable there. On WiFi some better YouTube videos look amazing, though some arbitrary limits of the software has the quality declining to somewhere between atrocious and terrible when you fall back to 3G, not because 3G can't feed the data quickly enough, but instead because the YouTube app starts sending a "mobile" bit, telling the server to send the degraded version regardless of the capacity of your pipe.

The onboard camera stinks, but so does the onboard camera integrated into any cell phone (yeah, I'm talking to you iPhone users as well. The lowest-end P&S camera does a much better job than your phone does). It works in a pinch to document some random taserings, but I wouldn't convince myself that it replaces a real still or video camera. It does allow for some pretty cool uses like ShopSavvy. The GPS-like integration of Google Maps is very cool, and again works in a pinch (and offers some really dramatic functionality like overlaid satellite imagery, and is great when walking in a big city), but I wouldn't depend too much on it, or imagine that it replaces a dedicated unit. Given that it's downloading on an as-needed basis, a weekend trip to a conservation area outside of town had it drawing a blank, and despite having a GPS lock, it had no context to know where it was (having the constant need for a data connection). Maybe there are full-out GPS apps with real maps you can store on your SD card, making it usable for off-the-pipe usage — I've heard that BigPlanet is just such an app — however just a warning for those thinking that this phone alone replaces the need for a real GPS.

The short battery life of the device is well known, and is similar to most other high-power smartphones. I grabbed a 1400mAh battery to replace the included 1050mAh unit, and hopefully that makes it a bit less of an issue.

The wireless speeds seem decent enough, but despite signing up for a 6GB/month plan (which was a closely-held secret that you could get for $30 up to June 30^th), it goes out of its way to ensure that it pretend that I’m on dial-up. YouTube, for instance, has spectacular quality when connected to WiFi, but the moment you’re on the supposedly 7.2Mbps 3.5G network, it unnecessarily degrades to a garbage quality level (maybe there’s a “quit skimping on the bits” setting somewhere, but I’ve yet to find it, beyond ridiculous workarounds including downloading videos fully first and then viewing locally). This is one of those consequences of illusions about throughput.

Other potential services like VoIP are simply servico-non-grata (err…), with vendors like Skype providing terse statements that they’ll never support pure VoIP, careful not to open that can of worms. I’ve heard such a use of the service has even been made they-come-and-cuff-you illegal in some countries, which is extraordinary. You’ll pay for those minutes and you’ll like it, damnit!

Developers, Developers, Developers!

Alas, what really compelled me to choose the an Android-based smartphone is my software developer urges. What incredible hacker fun the platform provides!

Getting started developing for the platform is surprisingly easy (I think I’m going to post a little “first steps” post about what it’s like for a non-Java, non-Eclipse developer to get started developing for the Android), and the free development ecosystem is remarkably robust and feature rich. The normal complexities of software development present themselves as you try to build something “real” — no magic bullet there — but there isn’t the demotivating waste of time dealing with the typical nonsense when starting on a new platform. And you don't have to go and buy a Mac or agree to let Apple name your firstborn (iConsumer) just to develop for it.

And you don't have to stay in the stratosphere of the Davlik virtual machine, but instead you can create native code, or even alter that base platform itself. The whole thing is open source after all.

Excuse me, is that 600 million Dhrystones in your pocket?

It really is a powerful little computer in your pocket. In just a few more years I’m sure such a device will be central to a user’s computing reality, on a need basis wirelessly connecting to keyboards, displays, mice, and so on.

What an amazing time. To have such a remarkably powerful device with accelerometers, a compass, GPS, a very powerful little processor, 3D hardware assists, WiFi, WiFi-like cellular network speeds, all targetable by anyone using extremely rich, yet free, development environments (the Eclipse integration is spectacular)…the potential is truly limitless.

Amazing things lie ahead.

If you're running Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 [EDIT: Or Chrome 3.0], take a look at the "benchmark"/technology demo I just put up. [Safari 4 compatibility added based upon the great comment submitted by Oliver]

It's a modified variant of the SunSpider benchmark that I've written about before (in less than flattering terms), which I heavily altered to utilize the remarkable new Web Worker functionality you can now explore in Firefox 3.5. If you're really analyzing performance, be sure to disable Firebug as it significantly impacts the results.

Web Workers, a standardization of a feature of Google Gears, are a remarkably simple method of multi-threading JavaScript, not just to get it out of the UI thread — where it can be very detrimental to the user experience as the interface freezes while a script runs — but also to scale across multiple CPUs and cores on modern PCs, which while seemingly a ridiculous notion ("but it's just JavaScript! Multithreading?") is becoming a real concern as the JavaScript engines continue to advance and the usage and scope of the language and related technologies continue to expand.

Through a simple, synchronized message passing system and a minimalist API, the Web Workers model lends itself to robust, elegant code that isn't as prone to classic multi-threading pitfalls. While not a part of the current instantiations, in a theoretical implementation there is no reason why web workers couldn't be located on entirely different machines, given that each worker is essentially an isolated runtime, sharing very little (the navigator properties and some basic security info for things like enforcing XmlHttp restrictions), communicating via serialized messages.

Understanding the Benchmark

The benchmark/technology demo is operational in Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer, but only if you change Web Workers to 0. In that case it is sequentially running the set of tests in the main thread, as JavaScript has traditionally been run. I didn't intend for this to be used for cross-browser comparisons, even if I resort to presenting just such a comparison at the end of this entry, and instead the focus is really on the technology, so the real "power" is seen once you start to turn up the web worker dial, all the way to 11.

Web worker multithreading isn't limited to Firefox 3.5. Oliver left a comment pointing to a Safari-ready variant he threw up, so I modified the test accordingly (the difference being that when Safari implemented it, it didn't intrinsically include JSON encoding, so your caller and receiver had to do that themselves). I didn't realize that Safari had covered this ground, though it isn't shocking given how rapidly that browser has been advancing.

With one web worker, the UI remains fully responsive to user interaction, which is an experience quite unlike what was seen at 0 (where the browser essentially locks up during the run), and the actual run itself suffers little for the isolation. On a quad-core CPU, the CPU usage during the duration of the test cycle fluctuates around approximately 25%.

At two web workers, the individual tests take slightly longer to run, however the actual completion and pace of the tests in the whole is greatly improved. Not quite a halving of the runtime, but not too far off. Two cores are saturated during the duration of the test.

At three web workers, three of the cores are filled with work, and the total elapsed time improves somewhat, albeit not by the ratio that correlates with the 50% increase in computation power.

At four web workers, we've tapped out the parallelism and despite all four cores being saturated for most of the duration, the total runtime actually suffers slightly. Going above four doesn't cost much, but it also brings no real gain (beyond possible algorithm gain isolated various parts of the application).

You can also run a mode where instead of running a modified js directly in the worker thread, the code is passed as a string parameter, eval'd into a function reference, and the function is run. There are some interesting observations to be observed by this test, such as the lack of tracemonkey loop optimizations on eval'd code (see bitwise-and in particular. It suffers dramatically when run as an eval'd function relative to running as literal JavaScript). This surprised me as the eval merely instantiates a function in the current context, but doesn't run it, yet the performance penalty remains because it was sourced from an eval.

Here are some results for 1-8 threads, running 10 cycles of each test, gathering the total elapsed time in Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5 RC2. This was run on a quad-core Q9400 machine, and of course your mileage will vary. While it is evident that Firefox 3.5 is using more of the available processing power as you move past 1 thread, with it increasing from 25%, 50%, 75%, to 100% at 1, 2, 3, and 4 threads respectively, it doesn't fully benefit from the additional resources, yielding a greatly diminished rate of return. Safari, on the other hand, already started with a considerable lead, and it pulled away with each thread up to the optimal 4, really hitting its stride.

I'll add some charts and the like to this entry later, but just thought I'd drop a line on that demo of a very promising technology that will soon see fairly robust deploymet (one huge benefit of Firefox -- shared by Chrome and Opera -- is that the uptake rate for new versions is extremely high).

Firefox 3.5 – You Should be Trying It

Have you tried out Firefox 3.5 yet? It’ll happily install side-by-side, so there’s very little risk giving it a spin.

While currently a Release Candidate, it is already supported by most popular add-ins, such as Firebug and Adblock Plus, and brings a bounty of new functionality, more comprehensive emerging standards support, all while improving performance.

Performance has never been Firefox’s strong suit. While some incorrectly believe that Firefox has just recently been overtaken by upstarts like Webkit and its bastard child Chrome – the lore being that Firefox’s creaky “old” legacy code is not as nimble as the newer projects – the truth is that Firefox has always been a performance laggard compared to all but Internet Explorer.

It has always used more memory, done things more slowly, with benchmarking and resource consumption metrics that seldom earned it praise. The history of Firefox (aka Mozilla Suite, Phoenix and Firebird) is a tortured legacy littered with complaints about slow start-up times, a slow page layout engine, massive memory consumption, and middling JavaScript performance.

These are the costs of building on the XUL abstraction, along with some expensive add-on scaffolding. The ability for an add-on to dramatically change the behaviour of the browser (all from within a world of JavaScript and chrome) isn’t just an accidental happenchance, but instead is the result of considered, pervasive design choices.

The EU Fines Opera for Their Monopolistic Browser Stranglehold

If a small footprint and snappy response were the keys to success, Opera would have taken the market by storm given that it’s been evangelizing and focusing on that pursuit, to a great degree of technical success and leadership, for well over a decade now. Yet most users care more about a slightly better bookmark manager than they do about even magnitude differences in JavaScript performance.

But performance does matter. As web applications grow richer and more elaborate, the weakest of the contenders will get pushed out of the race. Already web applications like Slashdot and Facebook are getting unpleasant with a few of the current contenders, yet some of the new features of standards like HTML 5 promise dramatic new functionality that will completely blow the top off of the domain restrictions of the browser world.

So with recent releases the Firefox crew has reduced the toll you have to pay for these architectural choices, and through a lot of hard work it’s getting to be a memory lightweight, as far as web browsers go, and performance has improved across the board, sometimes dramatically.

Your Browser Is a Remarkably Complex Software Product

And to sidetrack for a moment about a personal peeve, let me kick down the frequent whiners’ complaint that it’s “just a web browser”. Every time someone make such an ignorant, misinformed statement -- usually during some entitled complaint about resource consumption on their obsolete PC -- I think a universe blinks out of existence in some alternate reality.

There is very likely nothing that you do on your PC that is as rich and complex as the things that you’re doing right now just browsing the web. It’s isn’t “just a web browser”, it should be “I can’t believe how much is happening for me to loll around on the web for a bit!”.