Intel® AMT DTK - Answer to "Hair Loss" or is it the "Antichrist"

By Gael Holmes (Intel) (91 posts) on August 19, 2008 at 10:50 pm

Ok so I'm at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco and I'm sitting at an Intel Software Network sponsored dinner. All sorts of things are being discussed from "I can't believe I didn't get fired after that one blog" to "Hair Loss. " I then asked our very upper management if it would be OK to use the word "Antichrist" in a blog title and he said "Of course." So I got to thinking....

Is the Intel® AMT Commander A.K. A. Intel AMT DTK a cure for hair-loss or is it the Antichrist? I thought to myself, what a great question. I need to write a blog.

What makes one wonder such nonsense , I asked myself. Well, as most of us know, we took the AMT DTK off of our Manageability site for quite awhile. Why is that? I refuse to say. Anyway that is not the point here. Having removed this tool from our site, we have had all kinds of horrible comments. Developers are not happy. They are really annoyed, to put it kindly. When things go south, you really find out who are your friends. Haha. So that got me thinking. Prior to coming to Intel, I was a Senior Softtware Engineer and I wrote all my code from scratch; without a debugger, without an Integrated Development Environment, without multiple windows, and without a nice OS (OS-32 to be precise.) YUCK. Yeah. It was like walking to school in 3 feet of snow, uphill, like our Grandparents did.

For a while we have given everyone a copy of the Intel AMT DTK, ALONG WITH THE SOURCE CODE. So that means that companies who wish to write Intel AMT management consoles can actually just take the AMT DTK code and repackage it. What a great deal. It's a great use of "re-use," the term object-oriented programmers love to use. So is this a good thing, or a bad thing? We have all these folks who are mad at us now becauese they can't get to the latest source code for the DTK, which means they may actually have to write their own code. At this point I need to remind folks that the Intel DTK has never been an Intel supported product and our purpose for making the source code available was mainly for reference use, to help developers get started. We have never stated that it was bug-free or 100% correct (although it's pretty darn close....) So as a prior software engineer (who had to write my own code,) I would not base my company's release on it, but I would use it as a starting point and if it were to disappear, I would simply build on it with my own code. Sigh..... It's tough to be so old in such a young world.

We have given developers all over the world copies of the Intel DTK source code. Were we doing them a favor? Has this great tool simply become a crutch? Has it made software developer's too lazy to write code? Or is Intel AMT just too difficult for which to write code?

Where is my ranting and raving going? I think that we should Open-source the Intel DTK and I think the developers who have benefited from it should be the ones to improve it. They should submit improvements to Ylian and there should be a committee to approve the changes. This would make the development community part-owners of this great tool and in that it could continue to be a tool, rather than a crutch.

My $0.03 (inflation....) (NOT AN INTEL SPONSORED OPINION!!)

Categories: Intel SW Partner Program, Intel® Software Network 2.0, Manageability, Open Source

Comments (7)

August 20, 2008 7:19 AM PDT

Maria Camila Gomez-Silva
Total Points:
1,130
Status Points:
630
Brown Belt
 Great Blog Gael!
As a matter of fact we due our first AMT capable software initiative to DTK, I am pretty sure that without DTK our Senior management would have thought twice before going ahead with AMT. Intel needs to give tools to the ISVs in order to encourage development!
I think an open source initiative for DTK is a wonderful idea we will be for sure be part of it.
August 20, 2008 10:10 AM PDT

Ajay Mungara (Intel)
Total Points:
7,582
Status Points:
7,582
Community Manager
 Hi Gael,
I think open sourcing Intel AMT DTK is where we are headed. I also think DTK served a very important purpose .. using DTK developers did not have to reinvent the wheel every single time. Developers could use the DTK and innovative on top of this base code. I am a big fan of open source tools like DTK and I think we should have more of such tools on the community.
Although, the SDK has some really great samples, the DTK had demonstrable code with UI and the whole nine yards and it was really easy to use. :)
August 20, 2008 12:08 PM PDT

Ajith Illendula (Intel)
Total Points:
949
Status Points:
0
Green Belt
 Darn it! $0.02 are not worth anymore? I gotta dip into my kiddy bank now to catch up with the inflation. You brought up a great point Gael. DTK was meant to be a reference code to begin with with no formal support. Ylian, the developer of DTK, has done a favor by supporting it all along and listening to his customers for additional features and fixes to the tool. Have a nice time at IDF :-).
August 22, 2008 1:00 AM PDT


Jonathan		 Although I am probably one of a very few people I have a home file server that I would love to be able to use SOL on. The problem I have is all the management apps available right now are far too expensive for me to justify purchasing them. The DTK would be great for me and if I had it to experiment with and I liked what I saw I would probably recommend getting AMT systems if/when I wind up in a position to do so.
As far as open sourcing it goes if it can get pushed through management then I think it would be a great idea.
August 25, 2008 3:30 AM PDT

Aharon Robbins (Intel)
Total Points:
1,030
Status Points:
0
Brown Belt
 Hi Gael. This is a great post (I’m reminded of the old "It’s a dessert topping!", "No, it’s a floor wax!" fake commercials on Saturday Night Live). Personally, I think open sourcing the DTK and building a community around it is a great idea. The truth is, I’d like to see similar community input for the Intel AMT SDK also.

You asked, what’s the big deal, do people just not want to write code, or is Intel AMT too hard to write code for? I think there are several related issues, some of which I see just from my own experience as a new Intel Software Engineer trying to learn about AMT.

First, Intel AMT is complicated. There are just a lot of amazing capabilities there, as well as all the stuff that’s involved in getting AMT up and running. It’s a lot of learning curve to climb.

Second, many of the Intel AMT technologies are "bleeding edge," – either based on still changing standards (e.g. DASH), or on technologies that are so new that there aren’t well developed de-facto standards for working with them (such as WS-Management). This makes them both harder to learn and harder to work with. It also discourages development, I think, since people probably prefer to wait for things to settle down, instead of investing in writing software that will just have to be changed later.

Third, the DTK does a lot of stuff pretty well, but it’s not so easy to just dive in and pull out bits and pieces to use in your own code. There aren’t lots of comments, for example. It’s much easier to treat the whole DTK as a black box, perhaps relabellling it, and to use it as a standalone subsystem, than to really learn from it all you need to know about working with AMT. After all, if something doesn’t work the way you want, Ylian is very responsive about fixing it, and that can be easier than fixing it yourself.

Fourth, I have to share your wondering about the expectations of modern developers. Having grown up with line editors on 110-baud paper teletypes, as well as doing without source level debuggers in my formative years, and still preferring Vim over IDEs, I know where you’re coming from. Developers who expect to have everything handed to them on a silver platter aren’t going to accomplish as much as those who roll up their sleeves, dive in and just get things done. I think that in general, people are less willing to dive into source code than they once were. (I wish I knew what to do to change that, but that's a whole different discussion.)

In short, releasing the source code to the DTK is doing the world a favor. But the world has to be willing to work for what it wants: TANSTAAFL.

My additional $0.03. :-)
August 25, 2008 6:46 AM PDT

Gael Holmes (Intel)
Total Points:
14,403
Status Points:
14,403
Black Belt
 I totally agree with you, Aharon, on all points. And you know, another thing that we are lacking with AMT, because it is a relatively new technology are some good books. :-) All the developers have right now is the SDK, the DTK and the limited documentation associated with them. If a company is trying to evaluate whether or not to go with AMT in their product, they have to find the Manageability site and try to pour through tons of papers and hopefully find the SDK and DTK and then try to digest the documentation about the APIs. And often in a language that is not native to them (ask MariaCamila Gomez-Silva about this one!) One point that Ajith was making over email was that our SDK is API focused and what our Community developers really need is something that is more focused on the Use Cases, more GUI samples (like IMRGUI), etc. Developers who are new to a technology need good hands-on examples and GUI driven samples that they can bring up and "see" the different possible parameters that the Use Case or the API can use.
February 16, 2009 1:05 AM PST


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Hair fall is a common phenomenon in everyone's lives. Though aging is one of the major causes of hair fall, stress, medication and hormonal imbalance can also cause loss of hair.Here are some tips beneficial to prevent hair fall-
Long hair is more prone to fall. So if you have long hair and are experiencing excessive hair fall then you could consider wearing your hair short. Select a hair cut which suits your face.

Shampoo your hair as often as required to clear the dirt. The grime and dirt may clog your pores stimulating hair fall. Remember to select a shampoo that suits your hair type.

Massage your scalp when you shampoo. Use a conditioner after a shampoo to bring back the luster.

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