Dawn: What do you like about working on open source projects at Intel?

Daniel: The level of impact one has. Mentioning Intel here opens doors and raises eyebrows. Of course this raises the bar, but it is always an interesting challenge to find out how Intel and the open source ecosystem can work together.

Also, I like the way Intel participates in open source with regard to having its hardware work with Linux while engaging the community in it.

Dawn: You are planning a Moblin Day Roadshow in December. Can you tell us more about it?

Daniel: Oh, sure. Moblin is the fine tuned open source stack for Intel Atom processor-based computers, and we found that awareness in the Latin American region is low with ISVs, OEMs, and the community at large.

With that motivation, and building up from a similar event held in Brazil in February 2009, we will be holding the roadshow the 10th of December in the "Buenos Aires Auditorium" at Buenos Aires, Argentina. It will cover topics from Moblin-based technologies to the Atom Development Program, as well as having guest speakers on board from major OSVs. Wishfully thinking, the event will allow us to measure impact towards having a yearly edition. You can register for the Moblin Day Roadshow if you would like to attend.

Dawn: What are some of the things that make open source work in the Latin American region unique when compared to other geographic areas?

Daniel: Well, for one open source in this region has a more political / philosophical component that in other regions. This has to be taken into account when one approaches the community so that our efforts are perceived as what they truly are, which is contributing to have a strong and healthy ecosystem.

Having said this, there are a large number of developers and small companies which have not yet reached their full potential in developing a business around their open source products or their contributions to open source projects. By having a presence in the region, and particularly a software development center in Córdoba, Argentina, we can take on the challenge of addressing those companies and work together.

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't at work?

Daniel: Try to get away from computers? Seriously, Córdoba City is near a mountain region and is always an open opportunity to get in touch with nature there. And lately I'm working on making my 1-year old nephew believe he has a cool uncle. :-)

In this video from the Intel booth at OSCON, Paul Cooper, Moblin Apps and UI Engineering Manager at Intel, talks about the user experience on Moblin. The netbook as a mobile device with a smaller screen size, keyboard and trackpad provided particular challenges that had be considered when designing the user experience for Moblin.

You can read an interview with Paul for more details about the improvements they have made to the Moblin user experience, and we have many more open source videos on the multimedia page.

To get answers I think you have to think outside “typical” PC gaming development. The opportunity is in how people use, work, and interact with these devices differently than say a traditional laptop or desktop systems. You don't have to stretch the imagination too far to understand the growth market and new gaming opportunities in the mobile space. Just look at the iPhone. Many of the most successful games on that platform are not your traditional polygon pushing games.

My last post looked at how casual games could be enhanced with “relax” modes; allowing gamers to have stress free casual gaming experiences. Similarly here, the message is good game play is not defined by to hardware specifications. Good games can be derived from the state of mind, tasks, & environment of gamers when using their device. As with the iPhone, Atom based devices are used in unique situations where there are unique gaming opportunities. If you consider how, when, where and why gamers use a companion PC device like a Netbook you can find new market opportunities for gaming.

Here’s my list of things developers should consider when creating new Atom based games:

• Quick and convenient game play:
  

  Zen Bound is a beautifully simplistic game for the iPhone that exploits how that device is used

  
  Your Atom based device is likely traveling with you, and the user will consider playing a game when they have down time between other activities while on the road. This doesn't mean games need to be short but they should accommodate gamers jumping in an out quickly
• Location aware:
  Because the gamer will be mobile, location aware features in games can add another dimension to games. There's a lot going on with augmented reality these days, and clever games can make use of locations and environments that mix with the game play to make interesting gaming experiences
• Focused tasked:
  Smaller screen sizes, can also lend to more focused tasks in games. Consider UI designs that are minimalized & focused over providing a swiss army knife of tools and tasks. Often focused game play can lead to stunning graphics and great gaming experiences. A great example of this is Zen Bound for the iPhone.
• Social play:
  Mobile computing devices are becoming popular because they allow you to easily stay connected with your network of friends. Beyond multi-user play, consider how to involve sharing and status updates with integration of email, Twitter & Facebook
• Asynchronous online play:
  With mobility being more connected, it may not mean always connected. Consider games that allow you play immediately then connect with the network between levels or games.

Additionally more than just creating new games, developing games for Atom provides these additional opportunities.

Mobile mini games could allow you to customize aspects of your PC games such as upgrading & modding vehicles, characters, & weapons

• Companion mini games of existing game titles:
  Often the same software will run your PC as will run on a gamer’s Intel based portable device. Consider levels, mini games, tasks, puzzles and vehicle configuration tools that a gamer can take on the road with them, then upload a status of their portable play to their PC game for experience points, level ups, weapons etc
• Component development:
  With Atom Developer Program, you can develop and sell game components for other developers to use. Many of the above items can be consider areas of component development. As well there will be many flavors in the hardware, some with multi-touch, some with webcams, etc. All opportunities to create components that will be valuable for developers

I’m sure there is much more to consider than my short list, especially when you look at various hardware options, but the point is we have an exciting time in front of us. If we focus on how people uniquely use Atom based devices we can find new opportunities to; create new exciting gaming experiences, extend the value of existing titles, and create gaming components that enable a marketplace of cool new game.

In other words Bring It!

Relevant Links

• Atom Developer Program
• Atom Developer SDK
• Follow Intel's Bob Duffy on Twitter

I’ve been tracking mobile operating systems for a few years now and one of the questions I’m always asking is ‘how does a developer choose a platform.’

At the Mobile Dev Camp in Munich last week I had another chance to drill down into the mind of the mobile application developer. They’re a driven, intelligent bunch of people that, when in small teams, don’t worry too much about the programming language used to create apps. After all, if you’re intelligent enough to learn one language, you can learn another. I did it with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesil">CESIL</a>, Basic, Assembler and C back in the 80’s and 90’s and if I can do it, so can most developers I'm sure, so what results is a very dynamic, forward-looking, creative mass of intelligence looking for a new idea. Obviously it helps if teams can position themselves around am existing skill-set and this is an important factor but Mobile Dev Camp Munich underpinned my belief that mobile developers are very light-footed.

<a href="http://www.umpcportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/mobiledevsatmdc09.jpg"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; border-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; border-right: 0px" title="mobiledevsatmdc09" src="http://www.umpcportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/mobiledevsatmdc09_thumb.jpg" border="0" alt="mobiledevsatmdc09" width="495" height="372" /></a>

Earlier this year I attended MDC in Amsterdam where <a href="http://www.umpcportal.com/2009/04/mobile-dev-camp-what-drives-a-developer-and-how-does-it-affect-mids/">I noted</a>:
<ul>
<li>Developers are creative people that don’t enjoy being bound by rules so an API that allows or even stimulates creativeness by exposing hardware and features is a big advantage. New hardware with new or advanced features, stimulates developers.</li>
<li>Developers will balance the cost of development (ease of API, cost of developers, stability of platform) with perceived customer base / earning potential.</li>
<li>Developers want a platform (or are stimulated by a platform) that allows them to utilise existing or easily-available skillsets – Java for Android, Objective C for iPhone for example.</li>
</ul>
In Munich I encountered another sub-set of developers too. It’s a group of developers that are looking much further into the future than many others I've met. It’s a group of people that are watching the hardware and operating systems closely with one eye and with the other, they’re watching the browser.  Advances in browser technology, web standards and, of course, platforms, means that there’s an interesting junction coming up. If the number of platforms increases and the operating systems splinter as a result, the browser becomes a way to side-step all that hassle. We’re talking about 4 years in the future here at a time when our handhelds are likely to be processing Javascript faster than on the laptops we’re using today and when HTML 5 allows video, audio and drawing operations to happen directly in the browser and the web standards allow more access to computer hardware but it’s certainly something to think about.

Improvements in browser and platform technology was at the core of the first talk I attended in Munich. Stefan Zaunseder and Christian Schilcher from <a href="http://www.giscad.de/">GISCAD</a> who have both spent a lot of time researching the best technologies to use to present detailed mapping information via <a href="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/">SVG</a>. Should they use a client application or should they use a browser?

From the statistics they presented it appears that we’re already reaching a crossover point where, on phone devices, in-browser performance is finally reaching levels that can satisfy an end user. In-browser applications have a long way to go however and more processing power and browser performance is needed in order to be able to do really cool stuff on a mobile device. There’s also the other issue. The application stores have made it nice and easy for developers to get paid for their apps. That needs to happen for browser applications too and could be a big hurdle.

Attending a mobile developer camp means you’re talking almost exclusively about smartphones but it was interesting to see the response from developers as I made my own presentation about device categorisation.

I tried to highlight the changing crossover point between devices on ARM and Intel ultra mobile platforms and to show how small the current X86 devices have become using a <a href="http://www.midmoves.com/2009/10/preparing-for-my-session-at-mdc09-video/">big set of devices I took with me</a>. I also highlighted some applications that I think don’t really fit onto a smartphone very well. Media playback, ebook reading, navigation and high-end web browsing were my main examples. I also highlighted where Intel are moving to, the expected sizing of Moorestown devices and how the Moblin platform could cover hardware from smartphones to netbooks. When I highlighted the numbers involved I couldn’t help but notice a few people taking notes!

It’s certainly something to think about because as Moorestown and Medfield platforms feed-in with heaps of performance and Moblin develops into a mature OS you get an interesting hardware platform, a single unified OS that spans multiple device categories and of course, an <a href="http://www.midmoves.com/2009/09/more-details-on-the-intel-atom-development-program/">application development program</a>. Again, we’re not talking about tomorrow or even 2010 but as we look beyond and consider the <a href="http://www.umpcportal.com/2009/05/intel-investor-presentation-highlights-smartphone-push/">roadmap</a> and <a href="http://www.umpcportal.com/2009/10/netbook-market-forecast-and-other-interesting-stats-from-the-idf09-content-catalogue/">numbers</a>, I'm sure some of those developers will be on the move again.

The Mind of a Mobile Developer is dynamic.

Thanks to Intel for sponsoring my visit to the <a href="http://www.software-dev-blog.de/mdc09-alle-wichtigen-fakten-auf-einen-blick/10/2009/">Mobile Dev Camp in Munich</a> under the Intel Insiders program.

Combining these capabilities with the Eclipse RCP based fully GUI driven Intel(R) JTAG Debugger and the whole Intel(R) Embedded Software Development Tool Suite available at http://www.intel.com/software/products/atomtools delivers a concise yet complete solution for Linux* hosted Intel(R) Atom(TM) processor targeted system development.

Please feel free to check it out :-)

If you are doing Atom and Mobile focused work, check out the site and join us as a developer.

Here’s the 4 blogs you might find useful:

Connectivity concerns for Netbook applications

http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/blog/2009/09/16/connectivity-concerns-netbook-applications

Developing for power and performance on a Netbook

http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/blog/2009/09/16/developing-power-and-performance-netbook

Adapting your application to Netbook hardware

http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/blog/2009/09/16/adapting-your-application-netbook-hardware

Creating a Netbook UI for your application

http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/blog/2009/09/14/creating-netbook-ui-your-application

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.

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