I struggled to come up with a more imaginative title for this post and I’m not very good at writing this sort of thing so you’ll have to bear with me.

After close to three years with the group my last week at Osmosoft has just drawn to a close. I’ve accepted a new position with the part of BT responsible for designing customer premises equipment (CPE) and the associated operational infrastructure, where I’ll be working on standards strategy and with a particular focus on open source software.

It was not an easy decision to leave Osmosoft but I’m reasonably confident that it was the right one. I’ve hugely enjoyed working as part of the team and consider myself extremely fortunate for having had the opportunity. I’ve learnt an awful lot, got to work alongside great and exceptionally smart people and been granted unprecedent freedom. The value of this last point must not be understated; in having the freedom to pursue objectives that I feel passionately about I believe it has resulted in a greater return for my employer and whilst, I can state categorically, leading to significantly increased employee satisfaction. Which has thus served to reaffirm my belief that micromanagement and restrictive corporate culture are poor strategies indeed, and that work/life balance is largely a nonsense and the secret to a happy life is simple: do something you love doing. This is of course much easier said than done, but here’s another clue: don’t look to the middleman. I recently came to realise that, with no exception, all of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve had came about through direct relationships and a mutual understanding. Let me me clear: I do not mean nepotism, but unmediated relationships that are based on reputation and visible demonstration. Whilst external recruitment agencies and internal functions may be neccessary for the time being, they tend to be far from effective. However, I digress and this is a whole other story.

So, all good things must come to an end? Well, not exactly. Whilst I look forward to this new challenge I very much doubt that I’ll cease to work with Osmosoft, and believe that simply the nature of the relationship will change. I plan to fully apply myself in this new role and my mind is already brimming with ideas, aspirations and grand plans. However, I know that I’ll remain in close contact with most if not all of the team, as has been the case with those who have left before me. My new role will see me continuing to work with the open source governance part of Osmosoft, I’ll continue to co-lead the Open Source Hardware User Group with Paul, I’m confident that opportunities for employing TiddlyWiki technology will arise and I’m hoping to soon start work on the TiddlyCubed project (subject to having free time of an evening/weekend).

I could go on (and on) but I wanted to try and keep the post reasonably short (and appear to have failed) – this is not an epilogue and instead simply marks a milestone in a continuum. If like me you are the curious sort or nostalgia is your one weakness you could read my (typically poorly written) account of my personal Osmoepoch, or if you’re terribly bored you could even digest the various ramblings on here which have attempted to provide an insight into a small selection of related preoccupations of the last three years. If you’re more the visual sort they say a picture is worth a thousand words (or in the case of this blog a far greater exponential).

So, a final thank you to those I’ve had the immense pleasure of working with at Osmosoft, and of course a special thanks to Jeremy for the opportunity. As to the future, more on that in future in posts.

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Linux Collaboration Summit 2010 from Kenny Moy on Vimeo.

This was my second time attending a Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and, as with last year, FOSSBazaar work group meetings were my reason for attending. The first day was taken up with keynotes, a kernel team panel discussion and developments of interest to the Linux community. Mostly topics that alone would not warrant my attendance – but it was great to be present and to be brought up to date on such matters.

Linux: quietly getting on with business

What became clear from the keynotes is that Linux adoption continues apace. There may or may never be a discernible “Year of the Linux Desktop”, however, just as happened in the data center space, adoption will simply continue to grow and with Linux taking an ever increasing share. Currently, the most rapid growth can perhaps be seen in the smartphone/MID area.

Intel and Nokia have joined forces and brought together the Moblin and Maemo projects to create the MeeGo platform, and this will be targeted at not only MIDs, but in-car computing systems, TVs, netbooks and media phones etc. You are unlikely to see a MeeGo brand on the high street, but consumer products will increasingly use this as the operating system substrate upon which Internet enabled devices are built.  Economics will drive the adoption of a common embedded platform that encompasses kernel, package management, media libraries, graphics toolkit and so forth. Thus leaving manufacturers and service providers free to concentrate on developing products and services, rather than frameworks and foundations.

It was reassuring to hear Nokia’s Ari Jaaksi and Intel’s Imad Sousou state that this was not a Nokia/Intel land grab, and that MeeGo was purposely positioned under the Linux Foundation so as to help build a truly open community. It remains to be seen what will happen with similar but currently separate initiatives such as LiMo, but I hope that they might eventually join the MeeGo effort and thus serve to further build momentum. And if they choose not to, some diversity in the embedded/mobile Linux space would not be the worst thing.

Amongst other presentations on the first day we also heard “Why Your Life Might Depend on Your Code”, from the German air traffic control, DFS. As someone who has an irrational fear of flying I should probably have skipped this presentation. However, I’m glad that I didn’t, and it brought home just how far Linux has come that it is now being used in the most undeniably mission critical applications. And I was also interested to hear how DFS bought from one of their vendors the rights to the source of a proprietary application, for a fraction of what the vendor wanted to charge in maintenance costs alone. This is interesting to me as I despair at the commonly held belief that large organisations can achieve innovation agility and operating cost base efficiency through large COTS proprietary software procurement deals. To me these are akin to being overboard in a storm and thrown a boat anchor instead of a life-preserver, when the seas are getting increasingly choppy, vessels more susceptible and boat anchors heavier.  However, I digress and this is a whole other story…

So, what I took from the first day is that although you might not be constantly hearing Linux in the news, adoption continues to march on unabated. From smartphone to air traffic control system, it’s in the background, quietly going about its business and delivering innovation combined with dependability.

FOSSBazaar comes of age

At last year’s FOSSBazaar face-to-face meetings it felt a little like we were still finding our feet, whereas one year on from this we now have a number of clear, significant deliverables. I got particular value out of this year’s meetings as I’d fallen behind somewhat with work group activities. BT colleagues have more recently joined the effort and started to contribute, whilst my primary focus has shifted to other engagements. So it was great that I was able to get up to speed with the efforts of the sub-work group engaged in the creation of Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) – data exchange standards to enable organisations to share licence and component information for software packages. We also spent some time going over the F/OSS governance best practices work that TI’s Jack Manbeck and BT colleague Steve Barnes is leading on, and this is something I’d like to give more attention to moving forward.

Following on from these meetings I also plan to solicit views from Osmosoft colleagues on approaches to encoding SPDX data. XML and RDF have been mentioned, but as far as I am aware no decision to use a particular encoding have been made at this point. Furthermore, I’d like to ensure that once TiddlyGuv development resumes it is able to fully support working with SPDX formatted meta-data.

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It’s reassuring to know that the British Government considers it their duty to ensure that in the event of an international emergency subjects are provided with safe passage home. This is something that we – certainly in the West, at least – take for granted and give little thought to. As we complain about the levels of taxation, and idly consider the merits of emigrating to somewhere where this is lower and the climate perhaps warmer, we should consider this little used but invaluable benefit, alongside things such as the much-maligned but wonderful-and-amazing-it-works-at-all National Health Service.

As it happens my repatriation was neither government-assisted nor particularly exciting. All credit must go to my boss’s assistant, who must have spent an awful lot of time on hold to AMEX travel. Since I was traveling on business my extended stay was not physically uncomfortable either. I wish I could say it were not mentally so, and that I were able to heed the suggestions from friends, family and colleagues that I should relax and make the most of it. However, it meant that I missed an event that I’d spent some months organising and a rather important and impossible to reschedule meeting for an out of work project. Add to this that it looked as though I could have been delayed for a number of weeks and missed the inaugural Open Source Hardware User Group meeting and a short family trip, and that I find it very difficult to relax when I find myself restricted by a situation over which I have no control and limited insight.

Volcano-related inconvenience aside, my trip to San Francisco was both productive and, overall, enjoyable. More in forthcoming posts.

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When I made the move from being an electronics engineer to working in computing full time, I was still quite young – around 20 years old. My new line manager’s boss was a woman, I joined a team of six people where two were women, and had female colleagues in adjacent teams. This was all in contrast to my previous place of work, where engineers and management were all male and with women limited to administrative roles. I remember noticing this difference at the time, but not paying that much attention to it, and thinking that it must be commonplace to have a more healthy male/female mix in IT.

I came to realise that this was most certainly not the case when I moved to another company, where the situation was much like my first place of employment. As with anywhere, I had colleagues I got on well with and others perhaps less so. However, the atmosphere was very different. The environment was not particularly high pressure, we were treat well and management were capable, and yet at times there was a palpable and somewhat disconcerting sense of aggression. I’m cautious of suggesting that the presence of women might have softened the environment, as I’m not sure that this is a particularly helpful stereotype and women are just as capable of being as fearsome as men. In short I think that the problem was that we live in a diverse world and the workplace needs to reflect this. Without balance, extremes can manifest and stasis and valuable perspectives are lost.

At my next place of work I found myself once again in a team with two girl geeks. Whereas previous colleagues – male or female – would not have identified as geeks, my new colleagues did and the girls in the team particularly. Out of everything I learnt from them perhaps the most important thing was to embrace my inner geek. They taught me that as a label it’s an accolade and not a insult, and as a character trait it is not something to be apologetic about. It took me some time to realise just how important this is. We are generally conditioned to regard a pathological passion for science or technology as deviant behaviour – something for an individual to be ashamed of, and that their peers are free, obliged even, to poke fun at and discourage. When in fact such behaviour can, and often does, lead to personal fulfilment and, sometimes, great things that benefit many.

I’ve learnt an awful lot from female colleagues and associates over the years. I’ve been welcomed into a new profession, shown patience, given support and provided with inspiration. I’ve been taught to celebrate geekiness and I’ve been presented with invaluable opportunities. This post is dedicated to all the women geeks and techies I have known – to those who identify as a geek and to those who do not. To those who I have worked alongside and lost contact with, and to those who I have met in more recent years and who continue to inspire me. I’m not going to name people for fear of missing someone out or causing embarrassment.

Finally, to women working or considering working in science or technology: I hope you realise how important your contribution is. Government quotas, political correctness and warm fuzzy feelings do not come into this, and it’s not simply a matter of personal fulfilment or claiming your right to do a particular job (both of which are, of course, important). I firmly believe that scientific and technical progress are dependent upon diversity, and firsthand experience suggests that this can lead to a far more harmonious and effective workplace, and one which is welcoming and better supports personal development. So, when faced with prejudice or daunted by a mostly or all male working environment, remember that your contributions may have numerous unforeseen positive implications, and that there will be many who will benefit from your efforts and be grateful that you have rose to the challenge.

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Late last year the Electron Club’s Roy Mohan Shearer sent an E-mail to the list asking if people would be interested in testing a small FM transmitter he was developing. Whilst at first this might not sound that exciting, this was an exercise in open source product design, rather than just putting together a simple circuit. Radio and open source ticked two big boxes for me, so how could I resist…

This blog post serves as my own notes on initial experiences with the Niftymitter and as a vehicle for feedback. To date my use has been limited to basic testing, however, I have a few hacks in mind and hope to find the time to try these out over the next month or so.

Testing

First of all I hooked the Niftymitter up to my laptop, played MP3s via Songbird and tuned in via a radio in the bedroom next door. The distance was probably about 10 feet, and with the signal having to penetrate a set of densely packed shelves carrying vinyl records and an interior wall. Somewhat surprisingly, given the obstacles in the path, the received signal quality was excellent.

Next up I connected the Niftymitter to the output of my record player, or to be more precise, to the attached “phono stage” (pre-amplifier). By this point a pirate radio station had surfaced on the frequency the transmitter was originally tuned to, and so I had to find a clear spot on the radio dial and re-tune it. Following which I experienced another small problem: overmodulation, resulting in distortion, due to the signal from the phono stage being too high.

This was quickly addressed by connecting a passive volume control (attenuator) into the path between the phono stage and the Niftymitter. The volume control could then be set to achieve the best sound quality at the receiver. The radio was situated some 20 feet or so away in my workshop, and again the sound quality was excellent.

Wish list

There will be use cases where a signal source has no level control, e.g. a HiFi ’seperates’ CD player. If the signal level happens to be too high it will result in distorted reception. So, an input level control on the Niftymitter might be handy, i.e. a small preset variable resistor, that like the tuning control is normally hidden.

I’d also quite like to see an AM version of this, although I’m confident that I am in the minority. The reason for this is that most of my radios are old valve sets that don’t have FM, and commercial low power AM transmitters are massively overpriced for what they are, despite being just as simple as a similarly sized FM transmitter. In fact, I quite like the idea of a Niftymitter sized FM -> AM transponder (re-broadcaster), that integrates a simple mono, tunable FM receiver and tunable AM transmitter. This would be great for listening to FM-only stations on old valve sets.

Conclusions

On first impression an open source FM transmitter project seems like an odd thing to do, when you can buy them ready made for probably less, and with digital tuning and stereo encoding. Furthermore, many fun hacks that immediately spring to mind are likely illegal, e.g. attaching an external antenna or boosting transmitter output. However, as a product it is something that is of immediate utility to most, employs a circuit that is not too difficult to grasp, should be easy to make and costs little to acquire the parts for. Furthermore, there is something fun about radio and setting up your own little transmitter, even when you have to comply with radio licensing laws which severely limit the amount of transmitter power you have on hand.

I think a radio in a matching or even interlocking case would be a fun companion. Together they would be great learning aids, and with an AM variant of the Niftymitter you could also then make an FM -> AM transponder. And I really like the construction of the enclosure – it not only looks smart but means that you can nicely house the transmitter without the need for tools to drill the case etc (although the laser cut labels were a nice touch).

More to come as I get the time to try out a few hacks…

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I’m just about old enough to remember the tail end of the “downsizing” craze where IT departments became obsessed with the idea of distributed computing and cheap, commodity hardware. This followed the shift from mainframe to mid-range, where the former was deemed terribly uncool and ushered out in preference of a diverse collection of largely incompatible and still somewhat expensive proprietary minicomputers. Many of the later minis purported to be “open” and offered some promise of interoperability/portability, but they rarely delivered much in this sense. Similarly, commodity – typically x86 – hardware promised to be cheap, but for medium to large installations its use often results in unmanageable sprawl and underutilisation, all as part of a wider spectrum of general inefficiency that contributes to hidden and unanticipated costs.

Fast forward to 2009 and you’re lucky if as a geek in gainful employment you can exist a single day without hearing yet another tale concerned with the wondrous Cloud. There are those, myself included, that have likened the Cloud to the fabled (I’m not that old) mainframe computer bureau service of years gone by. Of course very little is actually new, and when people got excited about the advent of UNIX clustering I couldn’t help but think “(very) poor man’s VMScluster”. More recently with the virtualisation frenzy I was immediately minded of the IBM hypervisor technology, VM, that has been quietly managing heavyweight workloads such as banking systems and keeping them out of the news for the last 30+ years.

Of late there have been a growing number of reports that the mainframe is making a comeback, that sales are on the up, and you can pick up a brand new system – an entry level IBM z/10 – for around $100,000. They’ve also shrunk in size, and as far back as the late 90s deskside systems were available that would happily run from a domestic power outlet. But aren’t they slow? Well, no, not any more,  as a current z/10 CPU packs 4 cores and clocks at speeds upwards of 4.4GHz.

One of the biggest breakthroughs, however, has been the availability of Linux on IBM mainframe. Making it finally possible to leverage the wide ranging benefits of not only Linux but an immeasurably large ecosystem of F/OSS tools, middleware and applications etc all running on top of monotonously reliable, highly consolidated and dynamic infrastructure.

They are smaller and cheaper than ever, have legendary reliability, can consolidate like nothing else and now run Linux. Perfect, right? Well, I still had some concerns and needed convincing of the overall mainframe value proposition. Fortunately on Wednesday I was able to make it along to a Linux Live workshop at IBM Bedfont Lakes, where some of these concerns were addressed and I got to learn more about the practicality of running Linux on mainframe.

Ease of management

Isn’t the mainframe environment arcane and hard to manage?

At the hands-on workshop we were given access to a mainframe over in New York, taught z/VM (current version of the IBM hypervisor) basics and how to install Linux within our freshly created VM. In one day. Yes, z/VM is somewhat arcane and how could it not be when you consider VM has been around for over 40 years. However, once you get used to IBM parlance (e.g. a disk is called a DASD and you don’t boot, you “IPL”) it’s actually quite simple [1]. Possibly even elegantly simple. Of course there is more to z/VM than the very basic administration skills we were taught, but I’m reasonably confident that the more advanced features would be easy enough to get to grips with. And once you have the distro installer running it’s Linux from that point on – no different than if you were running Linux on your PC or netbook etc.

More recent z/VM developments include facilities such as virtual network switches that are implemented in memory, thus offering extremely low latency virtual network links between VMs and physical network interfaces. Combine this feature with possibilities such as firewalls that are implemented via z/Linux VMs and the mainframe is starting to look like a data centre in a box. Making the efforts of others who are trying to build exactly this via commodity hardware in shipping containers appear somewhat clumsy. That these in-system virtual network switches are managed via the same interface as VMs themselves can only serve to reduce management complexity.

Lock-in

What about vendor lock-in?

Well, this depends on how you view the composite platform and I’ve come to regard z/VM as a toolset for managing the underlying hardware. The fact that this combination is completely proprietary and there is, as far as I am aware, no direct competition means that you are to some extent at the mercy of IBM when it comes to pricing, support, upgrades and discounts etc. However, if your workloads run on top of Linux and you treat z/VM as simply an extension of the hardware your switching costs should be kept at a minimum.

This is a very different situation to 10, 20 or 30 years ago where mainframes would be running applications on top of an O/S such as MVS and built using CICS etc. Then your non-IBM options were few, if you had any at all. Whereas now, through running workloads on Linux it should be relatively easy to migrate to a different architecture, providing don’t make use of proprietary Linux applications that are only available for z/Architecture or dig yourself a hole by investing heavily in z/VM-specific operational support systems and processes.

Cost

They may have come down in price but don’t mainframe CPUs still cost orders of magnitude more than commodity processors?

The cost consideration is perhaps not so simple… I’ve seen some great TCO figures from IBM in support of the mainframe, but cannot help marvel at the simple cost of a single mainframe CPU. Although I am coming round to the idea that the mainframe in many cases may still work out cheaper than commodity hardware, and here’s why:

RAS

You’re going to be hard pushed to beat the mainframe in this respect, and reliability, availability and serviceability all contribute to the total cost of ownership. You can engineer for this with commodity hardware but the costs soon add up… Whereas this stuff is built into the mainframe’s foundations and doing things like swapping CPUs whilst booted and running workloads, or clustering multiple machines into a single system image is business as usual. And when you purchase a mainframe you are not just acquiring a system, but rather instead a commitment to a guaranteed level of service. The cost model and support framework is not the same as when you acquire commodity kit and go about bolting on support, and the opportunity for vendor finger pointing born out of the associated relationship complexity is much reduced.

Consolidation

It’s hard to compete with hardware and hypervisor technology that has enjoyed a very close relationship and evolved together over 40+ years. Intel and AMD may be adding instructions to their CPUs to better support for virtualisation, but z/Architecture and z/VM have been designed to fit together hand-in-glove. Something that is made apparent when you hear of single image systems playing host to tens of thousands of Linux virtual machines.

Performance

The “general purpose” CPUs may be damned expensive, but the mainframe is not constrained by a Jack of All Trades CPU that must service every aspect of the system. Instead it benefits from assist processors that handle things such as I/O and cryptographic operations, thereby freeing up the mainframe’s main CPUs to concentrate on the meat of the matter. How else do you think an early 80s mainframe managed to service 500+ concurrent users with its single CPU and 16Mb of RAM? Oh, and with current hardware you need to take into account things such as the masses of cache available and hardware support for SMP. Performance does not equate to simply the number of cores multiplied by clock speed…

Conclusion

As you step back and look at the bigger picture Linux on z/Series + z/VM starts to look increasingly attractive. The industry’s eventual acceptance of F/OSS and widespread moves to standardise on the Linux O/S, coupled with a shift to service-oriented IT, increasingly constrained budgets, a heightened sensitivity to green issues (power consumption) and a ceaselessly growing dependency upon on-line services all serve to strengthen the case. We may be about to witness the mainframe’s second coming.

I still need convincing that the mainframe can offer best price/performance for everyone, and suspect that it will be most attractive to traditional IT departments that often have demanding SLAs, multiple environments which will benefit from rapid cloning and deployment and roll-back agility (e.g. Dev -> Test -> QA -> Live, and Live -> Upgrade Test etc), and perhaps where many VMs will be running at lower utilisation. I would be hard pushed to imagine it to be cost effective to host, say, a farm of high transactional volume web proxies and static asset servers all running under Linux on mainframe. Although I’m happy to be proved wrong.

There is still room for improvement, and I for one would like to see the mainframe proposition evolve further to the point where it truly can replace a data centre filled with servers, switches, firewalls, other network devices and operational support systems. But doing so through leveraging F/OSS and implementing as much functionality as possible on top of Linux running inside a VM. Leaving z/VM to provide virtual hardware and virtual links between these instances, and to manage the underlying resources appropriately. Here re-use is key to both lowering development costs and doing the right thing and not, whether by accident or by design, locking the customer into the mainframe platform. Trust is critical.

I also believe that in order for Linux on z/VM to gain widespread support it must be accessible to the wider F/OSS community. Why restrict this technology to customers who have already signed up else have a large budget and are about to? If you want geeks to get excited about your technology and to work with you to foster adoption you need to give them the opportunity to play with it and to build on it. IBM used to produce a PC card that turned a desktop into a tiny System/390 – the P/390. It would serve IBM well to build a similar product and that is affordable, e.g. a single z/10 processor, or cut down version of, on a PCI card. It ought also to allow the community to run z/VM via the F/OSS emulator Hercules. Neither of these routes to operating z/VM is going to result in lost sales. These configurations would not be eligible for support, nobody in their right mind would run a production workload on them and only a fool would attribute the inevitably poor performance under emulation to IBM’s technology. IBM and the z/Linux community could only stand to gain.

[1] Disclosure: I’d previously done limited tinkering with the public domain IBM VM/370 running via the Hercules emulator.

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Where Tomorrow’s World served to inspire by demonstrating what was possible and by highlighting that which was just within our reach, shows such as Take Nobody’s Word for It demonstrated key scientific principles via simple experiments that we could often easily repeat at home.

Now we have the likes of Scrapheap Challenge, but this is little more than a dumbed down and less ingenious version of another 80s classic, The Great Egg Race, and a pale imitation at best and that is pitched primarily at petrol heads. OK, so we also have Braniacs, but whilst science features much content is far from being educational or serving to inspire (unless you aspire to carry out research into which foods if eaten often will make you odorous, or plan for a career in caravan demolition), and what is worse it’s frequently sexist, and is often padded with laddish humour that is of little merit in terms of either education or entertainment.

Putting TV aside, in the days before the common domestic availability of the Internet if you wanted instant, free, long distance communications about your only option was amateur radio. If you wanted to get your hands dirty with computing you typically had the choice of a multitude of 8 bit micros which fostered the hacker ethic, encouraging you to write programs in languages such as basic and to get more intimate with the operation of your computer than most will ever get in the current day. With many people going as far as building their own computers from kits as they were simply unable to afford an off-the-shelf machine, and the BBC taking it upon themselves to build a standard, and by some measure affordable machine for the British nation, and which was widely adopted across its schools: the BBC Micro.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t for a moment wish the Internet away or suggest that we all go back to using a wide spectrum of primitive and frequently incompatible, and costly, home computers. But it’s sad to see hobbies such as amateur radio becoming largely the reserve of those in their later years, and home computing to become represented by a homogeneous, beige in colour and in experience, disposable and all too frequently hermetic platform.

However, my concern goes beyond nostalgia and a sense of loss for that which I held dear, and is for the future of a nation that is increasingly putting less value on science and engineering.  A little while ago I attended an open evening at the Culham research facility and was saddened to hear that there is a desperate shortage of people studying physics at university level. This was by no means the first time I’d heard that our universities were producing insufficient numbers of scientists, and have also heard it said that computing is becoming a much less popular area of study.

It is not that the 1980s were particularly a golden age, either in terms of research and innovation or the public’s interest in such things. There has been a healthy scene for amateurs who wish to tinker and experiment with electronics, radio and mechanical engineering etc. since the very genesis of such disciplines. Up until now, that is. The fact of the matter is that many, if not most technical topics are now widely regarded as “uncool”, and also tend to feature much less in the media. Generally speaking nobody fixes their car any more, or builds their own radio or computer, and very few have even a basic understanding of how many of these things work. Science is not for TV unless it is a spectacle of some sort — it has to be weird, whimsical or else just plain old dumbed down. And children don’t get Meccano, Technic Lego, model aeroplanes, chemistry sets or electronics kits for Christmas any more.

We want technology. But we don’t want to bother ourselves with how it works.

It is natural for technology to evolve to the point where the user need not concern themselves with the details of its operation. It is reasonable for people to desire automation, ease or lack of a need for maintenance, and for technology to increasingly encroach less on their free time. However, whilst we seek to wash our hands of the details who takes care of them? A desire for leisure and convenience taken too far will lead to an ignorant nation of incapables.

I don’t claim to have all the answers to this problem, but would suggest that a good start might be:

• The BBC recognising the problem, taking appropriate action and bringing back programming such as Tomorrow’s World, Take Nobody’s Word for It and The Great Egg Race. Not necessarily the same shows, but programming of a similar quality and which will serve to educate and inspire whilst entertaining.
• Recognition from the Government that this is a serious problem, and a commitment to a comprehensive and holistic plan of action to address the matter, e.g.: work with schools, increased investment in research and action to bring it most visibly into the public eye, national technology programmes a la the BBC Micro and support for amateur science, technology and engineering groups.

We are a nation of hobbyists, tinkerers and experimenters at heart, and the sciences, technology and engineering are long overdue a renaissance amongst the British public!

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Similar to the Azul Java compute appliance the secret is in the bespoke silicon which has been developed to do one thing and to do it well. When a job can reasonably be targeted to hardware and in doing so will execute much faster, why burden a general purpose processor with it and an associated software stack? Frankly, I think it is nothing short of ridiculous that we have data centres across the globe with millions, if not billions, of general purpose processors executing, with relative inefficiency the same tasks. It might be good news for hardware manufacturers and ISVs, but it’s bad news for the environment, CFOs and the armies of poor souls that have to manage spiralling complexity.

Of course there is nothing that new in the Kickfire and Azul appliances, nor in virtual machines and storage area networks and virtual LANs etc. And in fact many of these extremely popular and frequently hyped technology approaches of more recent years have their roots in the mainframe:

• ICL Content Addressable Filestore –> Kickfire
• IBM VM –> Xen &VMware etc
• DEC VAXcluster –> Veritas, Sun and F/OSS Linux clustering
• The Computer Bureau –> Cloud Computing

One of the major differences between then and now however is that we have a much greater degree of interoperability and with applications and data being much more portable. We are not, or rather we have the choice of not being locked into a single vendor.

I would suggest that to get round imminent scaling issues (SMP has effective limits and not everything works well across many cores) and to drive costs and energy consumption down we must do more research into what might be considered novel computing architectures. We need to stop saying “Oh, yeah but CPU is cheap”, and instead to think how we can optimise. It’s obvious that writing everything in assembler is not the answer, and it would appear that many of technological approaches that were displaced by the PC are now making a serious come back, and so we know roughly where to look.

So, let’s have more application-specific silicon, but which supports open applications. Bring back ancillary processors. Off-load the main CPU(s). Accelerate common functions. Put DES and AES etc on the die. Execute Java btyecode natively. And so on…

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A few weeks ago I was very fortunate to be able to make it along to the Linux Foundation’s annual Collaboration Summit. Fortunate not only because it is invite only, but due also to the financial crisis making travel somewhat trickier and transatlantic travel extremely difficult. Plus a few weeks later and it would have most certainly got the kaibosh due to the H1N1 influenza frenzy we are currently experiencing…My reason for attending the summit was of course down to work with the Linux Foundation FOSSBazaar work group, of which BT is a strategic partner. However, on the first day I did get treated to a bunch of keynotes and panels all related to the kernel, and whilst Linus himself couldn’t make it we were graced by the presence of leading figures such as core kernel maintainer Andrew Morton and Debian founder Ian Murdock. It was fascinating to get a brief insight into how a project the size of Linux is managed, and I tip my hat to the Linux Foundation for doing such an excellent job of bringing key people from the community together in order to facilitate collaboration around the kernel. We heard about Moblin from Intel’s Imad Sousou, and the move to bring the initiative under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation, had updates on kernel developmen, and were treated to a highly entertaining rountable entitled “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along” and featuring the Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin, Microsoft’s Sam Ramji and Sun’s Ian Murdock.

Interesting general factoids gleaned included IBM’s approach to engineer reward. When they embarked upon their open source journey back in the late 90s they apparently discussed, for a number of years, whether to link developer performance to the number of accepted kernel patches, or to simply objectives being met. After some time they decided on the latter. I can see such an approach having the potential to be unpopular with human resources, but I completely agree with that decision. I also spent some time chatting with a kernel hacker employed by a major Linux vendor, who wore their shirt but made it perfectly clear that he scratches his own itch and is not owned by the vendor. A relationship he claimed was well understood by both parties and with both meeting their respective objectives. Of course I’m fairly confident that the vendor receives great value for money and that this can be largely attributed to both parties sharing a common itch. If this sounds like some kind of fairy tale world, where you are measured simply on meeting clear objectives as opposed to your performance in a convoluted HR-crafted gymkhana, and where you get to retain your own identity whilst simultaneously being passionate about your work and delivering for an employer, then it is. A glimpse of the future perhaps…

The FOSSBazaar work group meeting was spread over two half days, with one of them spent discussing items of general strategy and organisation. Key priorities for the next year will be raising awareness of FOSSBazaar, driving engagement with the forums and providing more focused material, e.g. tailored for the various enterprise stakeholders and possibly use case based too. We also hope to build a wiki for use in facilitating collaboration amongst partners and to aid the production of authoritative documentation. We believe that governance is critical to effective enterprise adoption of F/OSS, and without it adoption will be at best impeded and at worst has the potential to lead to holes in support, license violations and legal action. Therefore now that we have a group of very capable people assembled together who share the common goal of accelerating enterprise adoption, and a growing body of material and expertise to support effective governance, it is our duty to ensure that we seek to connect with those who are embarking on their F/OSS journey, whilst striving to advance the state of the art in governance.

At the FOSSBazaar work group meeting Michael Mahemoff and I (although Mike mostly!) presented TiddlyGuv — a BSD-licensed tool for supporting F/OSS governance that is based on TiddlyWiki and TiddlyWeb. The tool is still in its early stages and currently provides the capability for managing F/OSS license text and company policy information, along with commenting and access control (e.g. to ‘lock-down’ official text). Next up will be to add the capability to manage data associated with project engagements, e.g. results from due diligence process that we take groups wishing to incorporate F/OSS in a product through. Beyond which we hope to develop automated workflow and possibly even integrate to some extent with the FOSSology F/OSS licence (source code) scanning tool. Rather than go into any more detail I’ll link-off to a post on Mike’s blog since he’s leading development and can speak with a great deal more authority.

Lastly, I’ll be looking to this year further develop BT’s relationship with the Linux Foundation. We originally joined via the OSDL and an interest in Carrier Grade Linux, much later becoming a strategic partner of the FOSSBazaar work group in support of BT’s goal of exercising “governance in the clear”. However, it would appear that there are other Linux Foundation initiatives where we may be able to make a contribution and in return benefit from doing so, e.g. in terms of learning or strategy development etc. I hope to be able to post more news on this in due course.

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Two weeks ago it was once again time for the Society of Computers and Law’s Annual Lecture. I made it along to my first of these events two years ago. Well, to the SCL Scotland’s Annual Lecture to be precise, and this was given by none other than Free Software legal expert and key driving force behind GPL v3, Eben Moglen, who turned out to be an incredibly powerful speaker. The following year I attended the SCL’s Annual Lecture in London, where we were treated to an address by Stanford professor, lawyer, founder of Creative Commons, enemy of “Corruption 2.0″ and general protector of digital freedoms, Lawrence Lessig.

In keeping with their theme of hosting talks by world-leading protectors of the commons and legal system agent provocateurs, the SCL secured the services of Google Senior Copyright Counsel and general copyright nut (and I mean that in a good way) William Patry, whose lecture was entitled Crafting an Effective Copyright Law.

The lecture was given as a tribute to Sir Hugh Laddie QC, Patry quoted him on numerous occasions and I became increasingly sad to learn that he is with us no more. Sir Hugh sounded like he brought a sense of much needed sober reason to an increasingly out of control world of copyright absolutism.

A few of the key messages from the lecture:

• We need not weak/strong, but effective copyright
• …not based on public feeling, but empirical evidence!
• Copyright problems are analogous to recent banking system problems: free market fundamentalism and a belief that actors will self-regulate and act in their own and public best interests
• Copyright is based on a belief of private ownership, however there is no natural right – it is simply statute…
• Regulation in public interest must be a pre-condition to copyright
• Governments have a responsibility to ensure copyright programmes are effective (argument that copyright is simply a government programme and thus they are responsible)
• Not copyeft! Copyright is valid…
• Policy makers are not demanding accountability, and are ignoring advice, e.g. the Gowers Report, where they did not dispute the evidence and instead chose to turn it into a vague question of human right (again emotion/public feeling over empirical evidence)
• We must reject any system that restricts learning
• Creators are consumers too – there is no black/white hat
• Copyright should be tort, as property comes with too much baggage and is based on exclusive rights and thus puts a huge burden on public to overcome

Apologies for any inaccuracies introduced due to either my poor transcription efforts or lack legal education! But, I think you get the idea… I think we are all getting the idea. Noises are increasingly being made in connection with the ineffectiveness of copyright, and it’s encouraging to note that it’s not just us Net liberals, but recognised legal giants and copyright experts.

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• Backup the old source build area from within scratchbox so that I had the hand customised Debian packaging files for packages I’d built under SDK 3.x.
• Shutdown scratchbox, remove all scratchbox Debian packages and delete /scratchbox.
• Follow the installation instructions for scratchbox, the new rootstraps and closed Nokia binaries.
• Copy back any potentially handy debian/control, debian/rules and debian/copyright files from my old source tree.

All this went very smoothly, and after which I downloaded the source to Hercules and followed the current build instructions for making a Debian package. This appeared to go well until I ran into a bunch of undefined references to pthread_*. I don’t recall any such problems with the same source under Maemo 3.x and a quick Googling suggests I may need to link with -lpthread. This sounds reasonable, however since the magic of dpkg-buildpackage, configure and friends does literally everything for me I’m not quite sure where to add this option. Perhaps configure should have guessed this is needed, or maybe the environment isn’t set up quite right. I suspect that the most likely cause is novice error, but in any case don’t anticipate it being too difficult to resolve.

More on this once I have the answer!

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A little while ago I registered for Nokia’s N810 device programme and yesterday I received an e-mail to confirm that my application had been accepted. Which means that I will soon be able to purchase an N810 at the heavily discounted price of €99.

I’ll more than likely leave the N800 running OS2007 and that way I’ll have devices running both that and the new OS2008. This will mean setting up a build environment for the new release, and I’ll have to decide whether I want to continue maintaining packages for OS2007 as well or just focus on OS2008. I’m hoping it won’t prove too arduous to maintain builds for both, and suspect this will be the case given that so far I’ve only done builds for curses applications. That said I really should soon take the plunge and have a go at building X11 apps.

And given that I already have two decent spec laptops with WiFi built in, and soon two internet tablets, it could be time to start playing with ad-hoc mesh networks via olsrd.

Fun times ahead!

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In the photo you can see c3270 running in one xterm tab whilst connected to Hercules running in another. Although there is no reason why you could not use this to connect from an internet tablet to your corporate IBM mainframe if you have one.

Disclaimer: This is provided as-is, without any warranty of any kind, and don’t blame me if this bricks your device or you realise after all these years of working with GUIs that text is better.

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Disclaimer: This is provided as-is, without any warranty of any kind, and don’t blame me if this bricks your device or you find yourself addicted to vintage IBM mainframe operating systems.

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