Years ago I worked on a product called InfoCentral.  It was a wonderful database that gave as much power to the connections as the objects the connections were between.  You could manage your connections, including possibly multiple connections of different types between objects.  It gave you the ability to realistically map life’s complex realities into a software metaphor.  I really enjoyed that program and have been unable to find anything even close to its power in the years since.  Hopefully something like that can evolve from the successful roots of Facebook.

Currently there’s a way to avoid seeing news from specific people posted to your main page, but even that nice start needs to be improved.  Here are a couple of suggestions that would really help in connection management.

1.      Be able to prioritize, perhaps with as few as 3 levels you could group people into for news you would rather see first… priority level A, B and C.

2.      Be able to block anything having to do with, showing or related to specific individuals (without them knowing)

3.      Be able to “drop” someone from your relationships and yet have them continue to think its still there.  A stealth mode.  Someone you don’t want to offend but perhaps this relative posts updates a little too frequently for your tastes.

Small changes add up to big differences in what you see and experience when using social networking software.

If you are going to the event next week in Berlin then let me know about it. Maybe we can meet face to face and if there are enough of us perhaps even a gourp community meeting. This can be a good opportunity to meet the experts.

In any case, you are all welcome to join my session titled "Parallel Programming for Embedded". I will be presenting on Friday 10:45 - 12:00.

At the basis of this presentation is the fact that the hardware has always been parallel. This also caused the kernel drivers to live in a parallel environment, so even though embedded devices were late to adopt Multi-Core CPUs, the people who are working with the lower levels have always been working in parallel environments.

The session speaks of parallel systems in general side by side with embedded systems and infrastructure environemnts.

The goal of this session is to open the eyes and show the systems that have always been working in parallel and name the principles used with these systems.

You can read my previous blogs to learn more about this approach. For example these:

is dos the ideal parallel environment part iv

stateful programming a case study

Here are a few slides from this presentation.

Parallel Programming for Embedded TechEd 2009

USB Ping Pong

Hope to see you all there,
Asaf

var t = device.thermometer.temperature;

or, it might look like this:

var t = device.get('thermometer', temperature);

If the accelerometer event and error handlers looked like this:

function handleMovement( accleration ) {
//do stuff
}

function handleError( accleration ) {
//do stuff
}

subscribing to events could either be

var watchId = device.movement.watchMovement( handleMovement, handleError, options);

or

var watchId = device.watch( 'movement', handleMovement, handleError, options );

In other words, You can either have a concrete API that has specific JavaScript syntax for each sensor's properties and events, or you can have a generic, dispatch-like API that is tied to a very specific ontology, vocabulary or list of acceptable values that can be used as parameters. Considering the vast range of sensors that might be included in the foreseeable future, the size of the API could be quite large and complex; alternatively, the API could be simple and the ontology could be complex.

The W3C Geolocation API uses the former; the W3C DCCI API and BONDI use the latter (here are the links to the DCCI and BONDI vocabularies).

All other advantages and disadvantages aside, which API style do you prefer?

Performance per Watt is pretty straight forward when you first look at it. Then you begin to sink in the quicksand you’ve blithely walked into. The panic sets in as you sink lower and lower. Eventually you decide to ignore the whole complicated mess and go back to saying to yourself how straight forward it is. Of course, deep within your heart of hearts, you know that it’s not.

For most of us, performance per Watt is nothing more than how much our computer can get done on a given battery charge.

Let’s dissect this a little further and try to get down to something a little more concrete. The real problem with the above very general description is that it makes intuitive sense but not engineering sense. We need to take it apart and put it in more engineering terms.

A Watt is how much energy you’re using per second. It’s the rate of energy consumption. Why is this important? Well, are we asking about how much our computer can get done given so much energy (Joules)? Or are we asking how much our computer can get done when fed energy at a certain rate (Watts)? What’s the difference? The first is easier to understand. Let’s say we’re using a laptop. Then the first asks how much can we get done for a certain battery size.

So what’s wrong with the second? It’s a rate. You might say that to get performance per Watt, all we have to do is to divide the number of cycles executed over the life of our battery with the energy in the battery. Even neglecting the fact that we haven’t quantified what “performance” is, we run into a problem. Rates are good when considering steady state situations, but typical client usage – servers are different – is anything but steady state. This means that performance per Watt is dependent upon a whole lot of factors. These are things like the type of user / application suite you typically run, the OS you use and its power policy, your processor architecture, the peripherals you have, etc. It gets messy fast.

And we haven’t even tried to figure out what “performance” means in the context of power.

So what’s the conclusion? Do we forget performance per rate of energy usage (Watt) and just go with how much we can get done given so much energy (e.g. how big of a battery you have)? Unfortunately not. If we can quantify the rate of energy consumption then we can theoretically calculate the energy consumed by a whole host of different users, e.g. business vs home users, nerd vs coffee shop users, etc.

Next: A high-level look at performance

This next series of articles is a case in point. I’m going to talk about performance per Watt. Why? Because I’m thinking about it. And I’m working on setting up some experiments. And I want to exploit…uh, I mean take advantage…of all you wonderful people out there to figure out what the heck I’m doing.

In this first article, I’m going to provide motivation on why performance per Watt, or something equivalent, is important. And I’m going to write it even if many (or most) of you think it’s obvious.

This brings up the flip side of blogging. A big advantage of being a blog reader is that you don’t have to listen to me repeat the apparently obvious or the boring.

So let’s have at it.

code used to hide the cursor

As you can see, I create a pointer to a Graphics Window object and I set the “useCursor” option to false. This hides the cursor so the user can focus on where the cannon is positioned, rather than the cursor. Another bit of code I added sets the starting position of the cursor to the middle of the screen. Because I start the application with a window that is 800x600, the beginning position is (400, 300). I originally set this position to (0,0) since when you are setting angles, the center point is (0,0). However, it turns out that this is not correct for setting this function. Here’s the line that sets the cursor:

code used to center the cursor

One thing I discovered is that you have to set this cursor position AFTER the window is realized, even though you hide the cursor previous to this.
Now that I have the cannon moving with the mouse and the camera following the cannon, I want to be able to move the cannon to the right and left as well as backwards and forwards. Although the cannon will move to the “right” or “left”, the actual movement I want to generate is a circular movement around the central object which is the castle. So the center of this circle is (0, 0, 0). The cannon is originally positioned at (2000, 9000, 180). At first I was thinking that the radius of the circle would be 9000. Remember, in OSG the ‘z’ axis is up, so the ‘y’ axis is the “distance” direction (for lack of a better description). The actual radius of my circle, then, is found by use of the Pythagorean Theory. The equation is below:

The radius then turns out to be approximately 9219.544. Using the radius as the distance from the Castle leaves me with the following code:

Moving the Cannon Right and Left

The change in location around the diameter of the circle with a radius of 9219.544 is determined by dividing 2PI by one less than an arbitrary number (g_scnNumCircleDivisions). The sin of this value is then multiplied by the radius found in the global “g_fDistanceFromCastle” . The height above ground is retained from the original position of the cannon. This vector is added to the circle center vector to obtain the correct position around the circle. I use “g_v3TerrainPos” as the center mark because it is centered on (0, 0, 0). To circle right, I add the delta amount to the total angle and to circle left I subtract it from the total.
The code for moving forward and backward is pretty much the same as above except that the changing value is the distance from the Castle (g_fDistanceFromCastle). This section also clamps the distance value so that the cannon cannot get too close or too far away from the castle. The code follows:

Code used to move the Cannon Forward and Back

For those of you who missed the previous blogs, here are some links:

Blog 1: "Threaded Graphics to MID: A New Journey"
Blog 2: "From DirectX to OpenGL - Wheels Up"
Blog 3: "OpenGL Graphic Formats and Conversion"
Blog 4: "Scene Graphs and Instancing"
Blog 5: "Load, Follow, or Get Out of the Way"

One of the demos I saw, which really made an impression on me, was an app that used twitter to make phone call with some text to speech tech, and then allowed the person who answered to say/record something that was then posted back to twitter as an audio file.
During the demo, Travis Spencer (his blog post here), had his app call his cell phone, he left a message, and then played it back to the audience when it showed up on twitter (here).

Aside from the fact that it all just worked (and we all know how demos can go wrong), this was cool to me because of the connection between social media, the twillio APIs and the *mobile device*.

Smart people are spending time making the web - the social web - do really cool things with our devices.
Exposing capabilities of the device to web developers will help that kind of innovation flourish.

Wow! I’m still counting the number of technical press articles, blog posts, forum posts, and tweets we've received since announcing the Intel Atom Developer Program at IDF on Sept. 22 in Paul Otellini's keynote. The Intel Software Network Article, "New Opportunities for Software Developers" went live during Renee James 9/23 keynote which featured a deeper dive announcement of the program.

Here is sample of quotes from major tech press:

ArsTechnica said that our announcement of the Atom Developer Program to develop apps for Atom-based devices was good news: “It's great to see that Intel is attacking this important problem head-on. It's just too difficult to use normal desktop software on a mobile device, so any move that encourages developers to develop applications specifically for mobile screen sizes and input methods is a step in the right direction.”

Tom’s Hardware added, “With the lines separating smartphones from MIDs from netbooks becoming increasingly blurry, it makes sense that someone thought to launch an app store for netbooks.” “Intel doesn’t plan to operate the app stores itself, but it will provide what it calls a technology framework to help Atom customers create stores under their own brands,”

The Wall Street Journal said. “Intel … hopes developers will create simple, downloadable apps—likely starting with netbooks, but later for cellphones, consumer electronics devices and other products.”

“Clearly, Intel as a company is morphing,” wrote BusinessWeek, “Once, it used to make chips that went into computers and other devices. More recently, with the acquisition of Wind River, Intel has been moving to offer software and services, some of which it may offer to consumers directly.”

Some detailed articles came from bloggers after a special briefing with Intel Atom Developer Program Director, Peter Biddle, on Wednesday 9/23:

MORE DETAILS ON THE INTEL ATOM DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM |  Mid Moves.com

Get In Early with the Atom Developer Program. (And win!) | Mid Moves.com

Sascha talks to Intel about Netbooks and the Atom Developer Program (Video) | UMPCPortal.com

Sascha Pallenberg on the Intel Atom Developer Program (Video) | Netbooknews.com

Downsizing Multicore Programming Skills to Take Advantage of Intel Atom | Dr. Dobbs

Atom Developer Program: Infos rund um die Webseite | Software-Dev-Blog.de

INTEL ATOM DEVELOPER PROGRAM (APP STORE FRAMEWORK) ANNOUNCED | MIDMoves.com

SiliconANGLE: Live Blog from IDF | SiliconANGLE.com

Lifting the Lid on the Intel Atom Developer Program | SoftTalkBlog.wordpress.com

King Kong and App Distribution | SGEntrepreneurs.com

IDF09: (Video-)Infos rund um das Atom Developer Program |Software-Dev-Blog.de

IDF09. MID NEWS ROUND-UP. | MIDMoves.com

VODCAST FROM IDF09: MOBILE ROUND-UP. | MIDMoves.com

Several videos were published on YouTube during IDF. Still more to be posted with Steve "Chippy" Paine (MIDmoves.com and UMPCportal.com) and Sascha Pallenberg (netbooknews.com): http://bit.ly/AtomAppVids

And here is a sample of more blog coverage…over 6000 blog posts (from blogsearch.google.com) and still counting!

Intel Atom Developer Program for Mobile Devices ~ EDA Blog

Intel Atom Developer Program launched

Intel Atom Processor Developer Program For Mobile Devices To Spur ...

The Intel Atom Processor Developer Program - x86 Processor Endgame

IAC at Intel Developer Forum | IT Knowledge Hub

Computer Upgrade Guides Reviews Howto Hardware Database

IDF 2009: Intel's Priority: A Total Mobile Computing Experience ...

Intel Kicks Off Atom-Centric Software Development Program ...

Software ottimizzato per netbook con l'Intel Atom Developer ...

Intel offering good perks for App Developers : GadgetMix.com!::..

100 netbooks offerts pour les 100 premières applications ATOM ...

News für Kommunikationsprofis -

Un Appstore chez Intel ! | Le Journal du Geek

<and over 6000 more…!>

For the latest Google Blog search on this program, click here. 

It is exciting to see the media coverage and interest in the industry and especially from developers. Stay tuned as we continue to roll out this opportunity for developers and launch the App Stores.

]]> http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/10/02/initial-press-and-blog-coverage-of-intel-atom-developer-program/feed/ http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/09/29/idf09-being-inside-and-ultra-mobility/ http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/09/29/idf09-being-inside-and-ultra-mobility/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:59:50 +0000 Steve 'Chippy' Paine http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/09/29/idf09-being-inside-and-ultra-mobility/ As someone that writes about ultra mobile computing for a living, the Intel Developer Forum is quite simply the highlight of my year. Sure, CES brings shiny gadget goodness every January but nothing allows me to analyze or predict the ultra mobile future like IDF. This year was even more exciting as Intel brought me into their Intel Insider program.

In an interview with Dave Gravelines of the Into Tomorrow radio show at IDF, he asked me what the Intel Insider program was. With just 24 hours of experience under my belt it was difficult to give a full answer but having spent quality time with some of the other Insiders and many of the bloggers you will find here on the Intel Software Network, I can now give a better answer. The Intel Insider program is a process for  bringing Intel news to additional internet 'channels' where people can find it, talk about it and act on it along with a back-channel where I can advise Intel about better ways to bring that information out to the web media and social networks that many of us use.  In my case, I help Intel by using my MIDMoves website to break down and present information from Intel's ultra mobile and MID product ranges. I feed back to Intel through videos and one-to-one sessions with technology experts like Pankaj Kedia, Ajay Mungra and the people running the Intel Insider program. It's a process that works very well and I'm very pleased to be part of it.

So what did I say about IDF? You can take a look at the 20 posts I made at MIDMoves or the 9 videos for details but if you don't have time for that, let me give you a summary of the top three announcements from IDF 2009 relating to ultra mobile computing and the MID category of devices.

'Power gating.'

Intel is taking the battery-powered PC into an area it's never been before - Always on. Moorestown and Moblin will work together to turn off parts of the PC that arent being used like audio, 3D, video decoding hardware and radios. The result is a huge power saving in idle modes. We're talking about going from hours to days standby which opens up new doors in the connected mobile world.

Moblin

For the last year or so the teams have been laying the foundations but now we're finally seeing the results. Moblin 2.0 for netbooks was launched. Moblin 2.1 for handhelds was announced and the biggest news of all is that a new developer program is being launched to enable developers to distribute their apps across Moblin and Windows platforms.The Intel Application Developer Program.

ISN readers might want to read these two-posts for more information on IADP

Moorestown.

With size, efficiency and battery life improvements, MID and intel-based smartphone designers have more flexibility than ever. The issue of battery size vs keyboard or screen size becomes less of a problem so we can expect smaller, more pocketable MIDs or smart internet-connected devices with keyboards that could stay online for days. With Moorestown having architectural and operating system similarities with other platforms too, you can see why Intel like this word 'continuum.'

The internet is a demanding, dymanic beast that grows into areas that no-one can really predict. Having general purpose processing power in your hands will become more and more important as time goes on and Intel are well positioned to be enabling devices that 'decode' the real web, in your hand, faster and more accurately than anyone else.

Note: My work at IDF was sponsored by the Intel insider program. You can see all my written content on MIDMoves.com

We have talked about this IT game in previous posts (here and here), but much of the renewed interest on the game comes from its newest feature: Crisis!
"...the management suddenly slashes your department’s budget. Your mission is to make the business case for upgrades..."
Nothing like a game that accompanies and simulates reality :)

you play the IT manager of a small company with global ambitions. Part of your job is ensuring that everybody’s desktop PCs, laptops and servers keep running smoothly, and the skills your characters acquire during gameplay include knowledge on virtualization, manageability and security. In case you didn't sign for the game yet, go to IT Manager 3: Unseen Forces and start having fun while you learn.

Here is the game trailer:
IT Manager 3: Unseen Forces on Intel's YouTube channel

It was a pleasure to meet Gaston in person, and have the opportunity to ask him a few questions and hear his responses, which I've summarized below.  Watch the full video on YouTube or here on ISN Take Five Videos.

1) What opportunities does the Intel Atom Developer Program offer to software developers?

It is a very interesting program for developers. The netbook market is developing, and the program provides an opportunity to reuse code.  Most applications only require small changes to target netbooks and MIDs.  Great opportunity to create applications with visual effects -- you can use hyperthreading to work with asynchronous code, and give the user another experience using these devices.  And, you can make money.

2) What about the community experience provided by Intel?

Intel has a great relationship with developers.  When you work with Intel tools, or the Intel Software Developer Community, you find a lot of people who provide information in forums, blogs, SDKs, and documentation that is important to develop an application.  The community experience at Intel is adding value by helping you find solutions and answers quickly, to spend more of your time on writing the apps. That makes a big difference for developers.

3)  What about the opportunity to sell components through the developer catalog?

This is even a bigger opportunity.  If you want to use a component in your application, you have to search in different communities and websites.  If you go to a community you can browse the components and libraries.  You can chose your components, taking into account reputation, and find documentation. Plus it is Intel creating this program so it is different.  I can use the components to create compelling applications.  Not just the simple components, but ones optimized for the Intel platforms. There is no other place for developers to sell components. This will create developer -to developer (or D2D) community.

4) What was your experience developing your application for a netbook device?

It was really a great experience.  The first thing you must target for developing an Atom-based device is to take one, and think about the different ways you would use this new device.  You have a different device, different screen size, resolution, battery life.  The Intel Atom processor is a powerful microprocessor, has hyper-threading.  Get the mobile device first, then design, then write code.  Or, adapt your existing code from desktop computers.  For my application, I changed it, and made it work with Moblin, and to take advantage of the power of the Atom processor.  I used many Intel tools, VTune to tune and check for hotspots.  Mobile internet users don't want to wait.  Tune the applications.  It doesn't matter if you remove filters, if it helps.  And, everything works, on Moblin or Windows.

5) Any final comments?

Netbooks changed the market.  Intel Atom processors changed the market.  This new developer program provides developers with a unique opportunity.  And, this is a big day for component developers.  They can create components and libraries, and get revenue from that.

Thank you Gaston, for taking the time out of your busy schedule at IDF for the interview with me.

If you missed Gaston onstage during the keynote, be sure to watch the replay of Renee James' keynote on the IDF site.  The Intel Atom Developer Program starts at ~40:00 minutes, with Gaston onstage starting at ~45:00.

More details are also in the article Maryann & I just published:  New Opportunities for Software Developers Start Now.  Join the Challenge.

Don't forget to follow the program on Twitter: @develop4atom and/or on Facebook and see our videos on YouTube.

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