Steve Deakin's Weblog

The Apple iPad is finally here with a custom 1GHz processor, HD ready display and multi-touch screen in a very clean uncluttered form-factor.

The Apple iPad has a decent 10-hour battery life which will make it useful for reading books, documents and watching movies. The charge-daily mantra of the iPhone is well established so the iPad could be a viable alternative to Kindle/Sony e-Ink platforms which have longer batter life but much less functionality.

The high performance wireless 802.11n networking will help with downloading performance on home networks although public hotspot performance will need to catchup. The impact of the Apple iPad on already overloaded 3G networks must be of some concern for the potential carriers of the 3G version.

If the browsing experience is as responsive as the Iphone/Touch then it will be a great browsing platform only marred by the missing Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight support.

The price is in the luxury end of the market and I’m sure the memory will quickly seem very tight when loaded with videos. However, this the first generation of Apple iPad and capacity will grow with every new model. The lack of space could be offset by syncing to videos/music/documents over the intentet to remote iTunes libraries on home networks. A future feature could include selectively syncing to Apple’s subscription based Cloud services.

What is going to be really interesting is what app developers will do with this greatly expanded screen real estate and slightly faster processor.

Will I give up my netbook, iPhone and laptop – no – but I think my Sony Reader may be in jeopardy.

[Disclaimer: I recevied no inducements from Apple]

[Update: Fixed typo in cloud sentence]

A recent Mashable.com article highlights Google Wave use-cases from the labs of various software companies including, most notably from an enterprise perspective, SAP, SalesForce.com and ThoughtWorks.

http://mashable.com/2009/11/14/google-wave-use-cases/

Business process modelling, customer service management and project collaboration are interesting innovations if they make it out of the lab and into the enterprises that use SAP, SalesForce and ThoughtWorks services.

A key dependency for the more conservative enterprise is whether Google will offer Wave as a packaged solution (like the Google Search Appliance) to be hosted in the enterprise’s private cloud or will Google enhance their overall security model to protect data in the public cloud.

Google Wave continues to be an interesting emergent technology and seems to have sparked interest from those technologists looking for the killer application of “Enterprise 2.0″

Barrelfish is a research project being jointly undertaken by ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research Cambridge to develop an operating system that can scale across many processor cores.

The issue with current operating systems is that they only scale to a few high speed cores because the fundamental design over the last thirty years have focused on optimising single threads of execution over mutiple processors using common shared memory structures.

The CPU manufacturers have been focused on increasing the processor performance through clock-speed, cache-memory and pipelining enhancements. This was never going to last because getting the processor die smaller was getting more challenging to put more transistors on the chip and also getting rid of the heat generated by the semiconductors was reaching practical limits.

The solution has been to step back on clock speed and put more processor cores on the die to still improve the performance of the CPU overall which now creates a challenge for developers and operating system designers alike.

The ETH Zurich and Microsoft teams are working on challenging the design of the fundamental design of operating system which relies on too many central structures that are shared by all the cores creating coherence and consistency problems. Their model proposes using replicated state and using message based models to turn the cores into isolated islands similar to the design of GUI based systems and large scale Event Driven Architectures. The messaging architecture in the proposal in fundamentally messaging over RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

The fruits of this work on Barrelfish make take some time to develop into production ready code but this should go some way to address the problem of being able to use the many cores in future processors.

This work is being published at Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on OS Principles in October 2009.

See http://www.barrelfish.org for more details.

This is very cool software for Microsoft Windows that allows you to create, edit, and publish PDF files without the need for the expensive Adobe Acrobat which is priced for high usage professional and not for occasional user.

I’ve found the software ideal for filling out official forms and also reformatted PDF documents ready to read on my Sony Reader.

All the usual composition features are present including printing to PDF, signing, stamping, adding bates numbers for legal documents and document security. In addition the PDF-to-Word conversion is one of the best on the market for retrieving text from a PDF document in a form that is high-fidelity from the original (document security permissions permitting)

There is a download for free trial version that works for 14 days.

Nitro PDF Professional 6.0 – Free Download

SSH (Secure Shell) is a remote adminstration utility typically for UNIX systens that provides secure access to the command line.

The service is provided by the UNIX deamon SSHD which listens on TCP/IP port 22.

A popular utility for providing SSH on BlackBerry is midpssh ( http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/ ) which is now maintained at http://ota.deltatech.com.mx/ and most importantly now digitally signed to allow low level features.

Recently midpssh this has stoppped working due to RIM BlackBerry Internet Service only allowing HTTP and HTTPS traffic through their proxies.

The solution is to change the SSH listener port on the SSH server to listen to Port 443 (HTTPS) instead of Port 22.

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