The Kindle Firmware Hero

Amazon's Kindle software version 2.3 increased battery life from 4 days to 7 days; quite an improvement. Only the Kindle 2(*) model using HSDPA saw this improvement, the Kindle DX uses an EVDO radio and still lists a 4 day battery life.

It seems likely that the Kindle 2 shipped with incomplete radio power management to meet its shipment deadline, and this update represents the completed work. Nonetheless its fun to instead contemplate the moment when some firmware engineer poring over register settings utters a prodigious "WTF!?!" upon finding something completely bogus. A few keystrokes later and voila, huge battery life improvements...

(*) Amazon Associates link

Mayor For Life on Foursquare

foursquare is one of the early entrants in a coming wave of location-based web services. Foursquare catalogs a huge list of venues in 100 cities around the globe: restaurants, movie theaters, museums, bars, etc. You checkin with the service as you visit these places, and the system tells you tips that other foursquare users have suggested about that location. It also (optionally) broadcasts your checkin to your friends, so you can arrange meetups or just learn about new spots by watching their activities. Currently you set up your friend lists on the foursquare web site, though it does provide a way to check whether any of your twitter, facebook, or GMail contacts are using foursquare.

An interesting aspect of foursquare is the gaming angle. Badges are awarded for a huge range of activities, for example four checkins in one day earns the "crunked" badge. It looks like a drunk happy face, though in my case no alcohol was involved: Children's Discovery Museum, a local park, Fry's Electronics, and a restaurant. As with stackoverflow, badges provide a way for the developers to reward proper use of the site which doesn't cost them any money.

Finally, there is Mayorship. The person who has checked in to a venue the most in the last 60 days is declared to be the Mayor. You can steal the Mayorship away from its current holder by visiting more often, which gives the site a competitive feeling. Apparently the competition for Mayorship of hot nightspots is intense, complete with accusations of cheating. An old saying about academia springs to mind: "On foursquare, tempers run high because the stakes are so small." Nonetheless, the Children's Discovery Museum Mayorship is mine. Don't even think about trying to take it.

A small number of business owners offer rewards to their foursquare mayor, typically on the order of a free drink. This hints at a route foursquare can take to monetize the site, by allowing businesses to reach out to patrons. The challenge will be to do this in a way that isn't creepy: a leaderboard to see how close I am to becoming Mayor would be fine, actively bugging me to visit more often would not be.

About SMS...

The best experience using the service is with a GPS-enabled smartphone. There are free apps available for iPhone and Android, and there is a mobile-optimized website for phones with a reasonable browser. Finally, there is SMS. As I still use an ancient DumbPhone, I use SMS. One of these years, I'll buy a new phone.

foursquare is clearly aimed at people with better phones. You have to type the venue name exactly, there is no fuzzy matching. If your checkin is not recognized, there is no way to correct it after the fact on the foursquare website. This can be very frustrating. Fred Wilson wrote about the importance of including SMS support in mobile apps, both to allow someone to try the service without having to install an app and to have an answer for the entire market. Certainly in my case, I wouldn't otherwise be able to use it.

Quackulum-310

Scientists today announced the creation of a new isotope in the "island of stability" beyond Bismuth in the periodic table. It has been christened Quackulum, owing to the somewhat odd arrangement of its nucleus.

24.855134809027 Days

There have been issues with the autofocus on the Motorola Droid phone, which suddenly resolved themselves this morning and led to speculation of a stealth update. There is a fascinating comment in the Engadget forums by Dan Morrill (and noted in a tweet from Matt Cutts):

There's a rounding-error bug in the camera driver's autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it'll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.

I suspect it is exactly 24 days, 20 hours, 31 minutes, 23 seconds, and 647 milliseconds, the amount of time for a millisecond quantity to overflow a signed 32 bit integer. This is a relatively common programming error, and one which can slip through a compressed QA schedule. In the case of the Droid, the camera was working fine while the QA team tested it and then stopped working slightly after the product shipped.

The Point of the Exercise

Setting up a phishing site:	$25
Hiring a botnet to deliver spam:	$0.0008/recipient
Forgetting to attach the malware:	priceless

Cavium Buys Montavista

A bit of news got buried by other massive acquisitions this week: Cavium Networks acquired MontaVista Software for $50 million. The offer was comprised of $16 million in cash plus $34 million in stock. It has been reported that MontaVista raised somewhere between $90 million to over $100 million from investors, but browsing the SEC Edgar Database shows $68 million. As I have no idea what I'm doing, its possible I simply missed another $20-30 million in fundraising which isn't so easily discoverable via Edgar. In particular a $3 million C round is awfully small, but that is what the paperwork shows.

• A round: $31 million from USVP, Alloy Ventures, and James Ready (the founder) closed 5/2002. From the amendments it looks like Alloy put in $5 million of that.
• B round: $9 million from existing investors, closed 4/2004
• C round: $3 million from existing investors, closed 1/2005
• D round: $21 million closed 12/2006, with Siemens Venture Capital joining as a new investor
• also $2.7 million in 8/2009 and another $1 million in 10/2009, presumably lifeline funding leading up to the Cavium acquisition.

Why would investors agree to sell the company for $50 million? Presumably, they're just accepting reality. Software support businesses rarely attract venture capital, but Linux was a major buzzword for investors earlier in the decade. The trouble with support as a business model is that expenses grow linearly with revenue: as you add customers, you have to grow headcount to handle them. Expenses for a product company grow at a far slower rate, one can increase sales by 2x while increasing expenses by less than 2x.

So far as I can tell adoption of Linux in the embedded space is still growing robustly, displacing commercial RTOSes. The economic benefit of avoiding a per-unit software royalty is compelling. The expertise to bring up Linux on a new board is quite common now, companies can beef up their own teams rather than pay for support from MontaVista or Wind River.

Update: In the comments teich points out Business Review Online shows a somewhat different funding schedule:

MontaVista   9.0   Series A
MontaVista  23.0   Series B
MontaVista  28.0   Series C
MontaVista  12.0   Series D
MontaVista   3.0   individual investment
MontaVista  21.0   Series E

After the $21 million round, MontaVista appears to have taken in another $3.7 million. Altogether this matches the $100 million quotes elsewhere, though I've no idea why some of these funding events are not in Edgar.

Ethernet Integrity, or the Lack Thereof

Have you heard any variation of this claim?

We don't need our own integrity check. The TCP checksum is pretty weak, but Ethernet uses a ludicrously strong CRC. Even if you don't trust the TCP checksum, Ethernet will detect any errors.

Let's dig into this a bit, shall we?

A modern switch fabric chip is designed for both L2 ethernet switching and L3 IP routing. The additional logic for IP routing adds relatively little area in modern silicon technologies, while not having a routing capability would put them at a competitive disadvantage. Essentially all ethernet fabric chips, even those inside relatively cheap L2 switches, have the design features to route IPv4 traffic to at least a basic degree.

When a packet arrives at the input port (A) its CRC will be checked and the packet discarded if corrupt. If the packet is destined to the router's MAC address, its destination IP address will be looked up for L3 routing (C). An L3 router modifies the packet as part of its function, by decrementing the IP TTL and replacing the L2 destination with that of the next hop. Therefore a fresh CRC has to be regenerated at egress.

Even if the packet is to be switched at L2 (B), there are cases where the packet is modified. For example server machines and switch uplinks often handle multiple vlans, so their ports will be configured for tagging (D). Addition of the vlan tag requires the packet CRC to be recalculated on egress (E).

The point of this description? There are numerous cases at both L2 and L3 where a packet CRC cannot be preserved through the switch and will need to be regenerated at egress. ASIC designers hate special cases, as they add logic and test cases to the design. Because there are cases where the CRC must be regenerated, modern switch fabrics always regenerate the CRC at egress. Even if the packet has not been modified, even if the ingress CRC could have been preserved, it is discarded at ingress and regenerated at egress.

It bears repeating that this is a function of the chip, not the specific product. Even the tiny ethernet switches sold for practically nothing at retail use chips which contain basic vlan tagging and IP routing features (even if that product doesn't use them), and regenerate the CRC on every packet. The fabric chip they use wasn't specifically designed for such low cost switches, there is not enough profit to justify the effort. In addition to simple L2 switches those chips can be used to build NAT appliances, as the ethernet fan-out for small wireless access points, in DSL and cable routers, for low end WAN routers, etc. When only basic L2 switching is desired these fabrics can function completely standalone without a management CPU, reducing BOM cost to the bare minimum. Addition of a CPU allows the basic L3 functions to be used in the more featureful (but still low end) products.

 
Impact

What does this mean? The internal memories and logic paths within the switch are not covered by the ethernet CRC, it does not provide end-to-end protection. The switch might implement ECC over the whole path, but this is not common. The packet buffers are generally large enough to justify ECC, but miscellaneous FIFOs are more likely to have simple parity and logic elements often have no protection at all. It only takes one soft error to corrupt the packet contents, and then a fresh CRC will be calculated over the corrupted data.

If you care about the data you send over the network, you should include your own integrity check at the application level. This is another good argument for using SSL: not only do you protect privacy by encrypting the data, you also get a strong end-to-end integrity check.

Knight Rider GPS

You mean my GPS unit can sound like the authentic voice of K.I.T.T? Sign me up!

Delivering Apple TV Around the Planet

I am a long time Macintosh user, and though I don't generally write about Apple products I'm going to branch out a bit this time. These observations are rather obvious, but I'm going to do it anyway. Pppffftt.

1. Apple is reportedly pitching a $30/month subscription for TV via iTunes to content producers, to be offered sometime in early 2010.
2. According to the iFixit teardown, the LCD in the recently announced 27" iMac is an In Plane Switching (IPS) design by LG. This provides a very wide viewing angle compared to the Twisted Nematic (TN) LCDs typically used in personal computers. IPS LCDs are generally used in television sets, as one wants to see the TV from the entire width of the couch not just one narrow section.
3. The iMac LCD has an unusual native resolution, 2560x1440. It is exactly double in each dimension as the AppleTV, making it straightforward to optimize content for both devices.
4. There is no TV tuner in either AppleTV or the iMac, though of course external USB tuners for broadcast HDTV are available. Nonetheless, HDTV broadcast is yesterday's technology.
5. Apple is spending $1 billion to build a massive datacenter in Maiden, North Carolina. Certainly Apple's current MobileMe and iTunes services demand significant capacity to host them, but with such a large investment it seems likely that Apple is looking to expand into new areas and not just continue its existing services.
6. Altogether Apple is budgeting $1.9 billion for capital expenditures in fiscal 2010, an increase from the $1.1 billion in 2009.

So, Apple is preparing to do to video distribution what it did in music, providing a complete solution including content, delivery, and customer device, right? Apple already provides selected video content on iTunes, and can expand from there.

Though there are a lot of clues, there is a big piece missing. If one is looking to spend billions to develop the infrastructure to become a big player in video distribution, a single massive datacenter on the US east coast is not the way to do it. It leaves you beholden to others to carry the bits around the planet, which becomes the dominant cost of the business.

The modern Internet consists of a series of interconnected backbone networks, generally referred to as "Autonomous Systems" following the BGP terminology. Packets leave the datacenter and traverse the backbones on their way to their destination. The final telecom facility before the packet reaches its destination is called the Edge Point of Presence. Delivering media streams all the way across the internet to thousands of individual subscribers incurs significant bandwidth costs. Content Delivery Networks reduce the bandwidth costs by scattering small caching servers across thousands of POPs, serving each subscriber from the closest cache.

Apple currently relies on both Akamai and Limelight to deliver its iTunes content. Apple could certainly expand its current relationship with those vendors to carry substantially more video traffic... but for the kind of investment they are making, it seems like the money would be better spent scattering a number of smaller facilities across the planet. Peer to peer between end users seems like an ideal way to distribute video by offloading the bandwidth costs, but in practice it has not worked very well. Content distribution at scale is something which requires significant investment.

Apple has $34 billion in liquid assets, and an economic recession is a great time to buy. I'll be watching for indications that Apple is bringing this solution in house either by building lots of smaller facilities, perhaps with their own fiber network between them, or by building or acquiring a CDN of their own. Massive investment at the endpoints while remaining completely dependent on others for the connection between them doesn't make sense.

Lotus 123 for Macintosh

Which is more pathetic?

• That I actually purchased Lotus 1-2-3 for Macintosh in 1991?
• That 18 years later, I still have the manual?