Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

Wow.

Still, I have to say that I’m not terribly surprised, given that Borland has made similar bone-headed moves in the past (who can forget the more-innocuous-yet-still-stupid “Inprise” name change?). Having said that, perhaps their selling of the tool-sets will help those products. They’ve seemed to be faltering in their IDE focus in recent years, so perhaps things will improve under another owner. I sure hope so, since I’ve been a devotee’ of their various products for a lot o’ years.

I love C++ builder and was a Delphi user for a long time. And I can’t tell you how many different products I developed using Turbo Pascal… I truly, truly hope that this move doesn’t end up killing either Borland OR their IDE development tools. I kinda still have a soft spot for Philippe Khan…

I’ll be in Kansas City most of this week. I’ll be travelling with a co-worker to a customer out there to begin field-testing a package I’ve developed to allow them to do bulk firmware downloads to the many test heads they’ve purchased from the company I work for.

It was my first significant experience developing a scripting language. I built an interpreter that has a number of purpose-built features and a variety of general-purpose features. It was a blast, since I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. It isn’t the prettiest language, but it fits the bill and helped me to learn a ton about language internals and some of the issues surrounding the things that separate various programming languages.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the tool helps the customer accomplish what they need to…!

Turth be told, I’m glad the Embedded Systems Conference has ended. I’m worn out and I miss my wife. Still, there’s a little bit of wistful sense of loss. Perhaps it has something to do with the 70+ degrees and Sunny weather that we’ve had out here all week long! Hah!!!

Anyhow, the last day proved to be pretty interesting. Not so much in a direct technical way. We attended (I keep saying “we”. That’s ’cause I’m out here with Tim, a co-worker and friend) a session this morning on the so-called “Triple Play” and the challenges associated with it…technical and otherwise. For those who may not know, the “Triple Play” refers to the delivery of voice, video and data in a converged package of network services. It’s what the providers are drooling over as the technologies are starting to coalesce. The truth of the matter is that there are a *ton* of challenges that need dealing with and it’s no small matter to get it all plahying together nicely. Not that it can’t be…it’s just a large set of challenges.

The other session of significance was the discussion of WiMax. That subject plays nicely with the other session, ’cause being able to deliver ubiquitous broadband has become quite a holy grail. I’m glad I attended because I was most certainly influenced by the media in what I thought it was capable of versus what the truth is.

What’s become ever more clear as the week has progressed is that there won’t likely be a truly dominant delivery vehicle for consumer broadband. Cable, copper-based DSL, wireless and fiber will all have their place and there will very likely be overlaps for a long time to come. Getting 25-20 Mbps to your residence will be a challenge for many folks. That’s about the data rate that appears to be required (today) for the kinds of services that people are shooting for today. Notice that though the phrase “triple play” seems only to refer to those three items, in reality there are many more applications that will be in the mix as this stuff moves forward. Managing it all and getting satisfactory performance amongst them is going to provide some nice business opportunities.

“The future’s so bright, you’ll need sunglasses!” — ok, that’s overstating it. But the kinds of things that these companies are dreaming up are gonna be pretty cool…if un-necessary. That remains to be seen. The “killer app” still ain’t been dreamt up yet!

So the week was both good and bad. I had some very useful sessions and some total losers. Was it worth it? Overall, yes. However, the next time I attend I should have a better notion of how to select what I want to learn about and what to expect when I choose. Overall, I’d say that what I learned most was how much I have to learn…

And yes, it was still cool to have met Steve Ciarcia…

So yesterday was a mixed bag. The morning looked very hopeful, with the topic of two classes seeming to be right up our ally. The first one seemed to be introductory by its description and the second one seemed to be more in-depth…wrong. Both were introductory and not very helpful. So, that shot the morning…

The afternoon was another story for me!

The first class of the afternoon was a panel discussion about XML accelleration via hardware. I have long wondered whether something like this would make its way to the surface…it has. There are now dedicated XML processing chips (ASICs and FPGAs as well as dedicated processors) and these things can reduce the parse and search aspect of certain XML messages up to 400%. That said, it appears that they focus on:

a) Rapid parsing
b) Fast tag location
c) Hardware Schema validation
d) Compression/Decompression
e) Encryption/decryption
f) Starting to do transformation

There was also a discussion about “Binary XML” — which to me seems to make XML *not* XML but what I know about all that is absolutely minimal and so I need to learn more before I begin critique too much.

The last class was a very good description of the SIP signalling stack and protocol. Very cool stuff. I’m glad I took it because it helps to explain a lot. Gotta be looking more into it!

So it was the best day of the conference so far… Spent more time on the show floor and got more very helpful contacts.

Today’s the last day of the conference. I’m a little bummed but I’m also ready to be home.

he Embedded Systems Conference started yesterday at 9:00 am. This year (and perhaps in other years, but I think this may be the first), there were a series of about 8 different all-day tutorials. We selected the “Embedded Linux Jump Start” one. The thinking was that we’d end up with a good foundation for starting to bring Linux into our products. It wasn’t so much…

Mind you, I don’t think the presenter did a bad job. But I guess I was looking for more of a series of steps that one needs to take generically in order to get started with the process. Instead, this seemed to be targeted at a specific SBC and glossed over a large number of items that I would like to have known about.

I suppose that in a 6+ hour class, it’s fairly hard to get that kind of data into folks hands so the presenter has their hands tied in a manner of speaking.

Today was again another all-day tutorial. We chose the embedded TCP/IP class. Our mistake on that account was selecting a class that was introductory. I’ve done a fair number of TCP/IP-based products that support everything from Telnet, to FTP, DNS, HTTP, etc. The presenter was good and he got into a good amount of detail. That said, I didn’t get a whole lot out of the class…my fault.

So, tomorrow begins the primary short-form sessions and the exhibits. I’ll be moving around a lot and with any luck it’ll be a productive day. I’ll let y’all know.

That’s right. You heard it here first! I’ll be in San Francisco all next week at the Embedded Systems Conference.

So, presuming that my hotel has some kind of method of connecting to the Internet, I’ll be updating daily from there, with observations about what I’ve learned (or not!) and perhaps about anything that I inspires me from the conference.

So, stay tuned for another exciting week of blog-topia from the the left coast!