Go Go Gadget Google Currents!

Last week Google introduced Currents, a publishing and distribution platform for smartphones and tablets. I decided to publish this blog as an edition, and wanted to walk through how it works.

 

Publishing an Edition

Setting up the publisher side of Google Currents was straightforward. I entered data in a few tabs of the interface:

Edition settings: Entered the name for the blog, and the Google Analytics ID used on the web page.

Sections: added a "Blog" section, sourced from the RSS feed for this blog. I use Feedburner to post-process the raw RSS feed coming from Blogger. However I saw no difference in the layout of the articles in Google Currents between Feedburner and the Blogger feed. As Currents provides statistics using Google Analytics, I didn't want to have double counting by having the same users show up in the Feedburner analytics. I went with the RSS feed from Blogger.

Sections->Blog: After adding the Blog section I customized its CSS slightly, to use the paper tape image from the blog masthead as a header. I uploaded a 400x50 version of the image to the Media Library, and modified the CSS like so:

.customHeader {
  background-color: #f5f5f5;
  display: -webkit-box;
  background-image:  url('attachment/CAAqBggKMNPYLDDD3Qc-GoogleCurrentsLogo.jpg');
  background-repeat: repeat-x;
  height: 50px;
  -webkit-box-flex: 0;
  -webkit-box-orient: horizontal;
  -webkit-box-pack: center;
}

Manage Articles: I didn't do anything special here. Once the system has fetched content from RSS it is possible to tweak its presentation here, but I doubt I will do that. There is a limit to the amount of time I'll spend futzing.

Media Library: I uploaded the header graphic to use in the Sections tab.

Grant access: anyone can read this blog.

Distribute: I had to click to verify content ownership. As I had already gone through the verification process for Google Webmaster Tools, the Producer verification went through without additional effort. I then clicked "Distribute" and voila!

 

The Point?

Much of the publisher interface concerns formatting and presentation of articles. RSS feeds generally require significant work on the formatting to look reasonable, a service performed by Feedburner and by tools like Flipboard and Google Currents. Nonetheless, I don't think the formatting is the main point, presentation is a means to an end. RSS is a reasonable transport protocol, but people have pressed it into service as the supplier of presentation and layout as well by wrapping a UI around it. Its not very good at it. Publishing tools have to expend effort on presentation and layout to make it useable.

Nonetheless, for me at least, the main point of publishing to Google Currents is discoverability. I'm hopeful it will evolve into a service which doesn't just show me material I already know I'm interested in, but also becomes good at suggesting new material which fits my interests.

 

Community Trumps Content

A concern has been expressed that content distribution tools like this, which use web protocols but are not a web page, will kill off the blog comments which motivate many smaller sites to continue publishing. The thing is, in my experience at least, blog comments all but died long ago. Presentation of the content had nothing to do with it: Community trumps Content. That is, people motivated to leave comments tend to gravitate to an online community where they can interact. They don't confine themselves to material from a single site. Only the most massive blogs have the gravitational attraction to hold a community together. The rest quickly lose their atmosphere to Reddit/Facebook/Google+/etc. I am grateful when people leave comments on the blog, but I get just as much edification from a comment on a social site, and just as much consternation if the sentiment is negative, as if it is here. It is somewhat more difficult for me to find comments left on social sites, but let me be perfectly clear: that is my problem, and my job to stay on top of.

 

The Mobile Web

One other finding from setting up Currents: the Blogger mobile templates are quite good. The formatting of this site in a mobile browser is very nice, and similar to the formatting which Currents comes up with. To me Currents is mostly about discoverability, not just presentation.

Ada Lovelace Day: October 7, 2011

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. Last year it was in late March, but it is moving to October 7, 2011.

For Ada Lovelace Day in 2010 I wrote an article describing the guided torpedo patent issued to Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil. The research for that article was quite interesting, and I plan to do a similar writeup this year.

The Programmer's Paradox

I wrote a guest post today at The Programmer's Paradox, on open sourcing of personal coding projects.

Paul Homer is a great observer on software and engineering topics, I highly recommend subscribing to his blog.

Favorite Posts

This is the 173rd article posted to Coding Relic, spanning almost 3 years of writing. As the end of the year is a time to reflect, I combed back through the archives to select a few favorite posts. These were chosen because they were interesting to research or particularly fun to write. There is some coding, a smattering of social networking, a smidgen of assembly language, a musing on marketing, and a bit of ASIC architecture.

The articles listed here were not chosen based on traffic numbers or popularity. In fact, the post on this site with the highest traffic (by a very large margin) is the one technical article I ever wrote about Android: The Six Million Dollar Libc, a tour through the source code of the Bionic library. I haven't included it here because I don't feel I really did justice to the topic, being a fairly thin survey of the code. It is a sign of the popularity of all things Android that people keep coming here to read it.

As this is the first such retrospective published I've included sections for each of 2010, 2009, and 2008, plus a separate section for the jokes which run on this site on mondays.

2010
Toward a Faster Web: Increase the Speed of Light
x86 vs ARM Mobile CPUs
Uncanny Friending
Player Piano Torpedoes
2009
AMD IOMMU: Missed Opportunity?
Soft Errors are Hard Problems
Plummeting Down the Chasm
DRY and the DMV
2008
Ode to Enum	typedef enum {    OP_FOO,    OP_BAR,
Aliasing by Any Other Name	li v1,0xa1fa move a0,zero sh v1,26(sp)
The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Gizmo Construction
The Secret Life of Volatile	lw v0,0(gp) lw v0,0(v0) bnez v0,8
Jokes
More Halloween Scares for Google Fans	<BLINK>
Zeus SCM
This!Would!Be!So!Awesome!
Odd Calendar Behavior

Reflections on Three Years Blogging

This blog has evolved into an outlet for creative expression, for attempts at humor, and for technical writeups on various topics. Though originally focussed exclusively on embedded software development and networking, after a few months this proved too limiting. Postings have broadened to include aspects of social media, meta discussions on life as an engineer, plus a smattering of space exploration and other mostly-technical topics. In late 2009 I also stated posting vaguely technical jokes, taking some liberties with the definition of "humor." Broadening the topics meant the frequency of posting increased from twice per month to twice per week on average, with a joke on monday and meatier post later in the week.

One thing this blog has not evolved into is a direct source of income. Initially there were Adsense units on the page, but the math just doesn't work for a site like this. As each technical article can take quite a while to research and polish I found myself computing the hourly rate for time spent writing. This is a highly negative train of thought. Advertising works well for a variety of web sites, but not this one. I removed the ads in late 2008.

 
Writing Resolutions for 2011

In 2011 I plan to make a few changes in regards to writing.

Writing Resolution #1: Write a Guest Post. I wrote an article on April Fool's Day 2009 for crankypm.com, which was a very enjoyable experience. I'd like to write at least one guest post in 2011, to get out of my comfort zone. I haven't yet picked a topic nor identified a site willing to run it; all in good time. As a practice accepting guest posts seems to be less common now than once it was, but it does still happen.

Writing Resolution #2: Stretch further for technical articles. Since late 2009 I've maintained a pace of one joke plus one in-depth article per week, notwithstanding the occasional missed week. Writing a technical post each week means they're in areas where I have at least a passing familiarity already, and only demand incremental research to finish. When publishing at a more relaxed pace I was able to write articles which required more of a stretch, like spending time working with the Google App Engine. I learned a lot from those experiences and would like to get back to it, even if it means publishing less often. Having a publication schedule is good as it helps maintain focus, but given a suitably difficult topic skipping a week in order to make it happen is an acceptable tradeoff.

I also plan to publicize a bit more, though I don't have a specific plan to phrase it as a third resolution. Tomorrow I'll highlight some of my favorite posts from the past three years. You have been warned, unsubscribe now if you can't stand it.

 
Other Outlets

Not everything gets posted here, I do try to stay on topic. There are a few outlets where I post other stuff:

• I follow a large number of technical and coding blogs, and share the posts I find most interesting.
• I stay active on Buzz. Native Buzz posts are used for brainstorming and discussion, while shared articles from Google Reader and tweets are also imported.
• @dgentry on Twitter is for short quips and links.

Hiatus

For the next month or so expect postings here to be infrequent. I'm more likely to post short snippets on Twitter or Google Buzz during this time.

Sun Microsystems, 1982-2010

I was a summer intern at Sun Microsystems in 1991, working on Verilog test cases for a 155 Mbps ATM adaptor. I still have the T-Shirt, shown here. Only after we had the shirts made did the intern coordinator really look at it and notice the Sun logo was orange instead of purple, a bit of a gaffe. On the back are shown the companies who we, the interns, perceived as competitors. I've no idea why Apple is there while SGI is not, chalk it up to the exuberant misinformation of youth.

I returned to Sun as an ASIC designer (eventually transitioning into software) and worked there from 1992-2000. The first few years in that span were rough for Sun: the market was just beginning its transition from Unix-based CAD and graphical workstations to Windows NT on x86. Sun managed the transition pretty well, moving the bulk of its business into large SMP servers which the Intel boxes of the time did not scale to. Then came the dotCom boom, which were heady days for Sun.

Sun had a tradition of elaborate April Fools jokes. One year a complete hole of miniature golf was constructed in Scott McNealy's office. Another year a platform was built submerged 1" under the surface of the campus lake, with Andy Bechtolsheim's Ferrari parked upon it. I have the T-Shirt from the 1993 joke: the SHARCStation with superSHARC processor. A complete workstation was submerged at the bottom of a pool, with a scuba diver operating it. I don't remember whether it worked while underwater, but given the culture of Sun at the time I suspect they had come up with a way to waterproof it. Amusingly, I just searched for superSHARC: its now the name of a real processor, a DSP from Analog Devices.

I left Sun 10 years ago... but I've missed it. In the mid 1990s it was a heady place, a company at the top of its game with extensive resources to push the industry along. Its corporate culture valued engineers highly, which showed up in lots of little ways but one big one: enclosed offices. Sun would use cubicles if necessary, but the corporate preference was an office with a door. MTS level positions would be doubled up in an office, Staff Engineers and above were allocated a single office.

After the dotCom bust, Sun's fortunes changed considerably. The way is now clear for Sun to be purchased by Oracle. Rest in Peace, Sun. These last few years have not been kind.

Introduction

I've developed embedded systems software for a number of years, mostly networking products like switches and routers. This is not a common development environment for most of the software blogs I've seen, so I'm writing this to show how the other half lives.

Years ago these type of systems would run a realtime OS like vxWorks, if they used an OS at all. Nowadays they frequently run Linux. Programming for an embedded target, even one running Linux, is a bit different from writing a web service or desktop application:

• The target is likely using an embedded processor like PowerPC, MIPS, or ARM. Everything is cross-compiled.
  
• The target may have a reasonable amount of RAM, but it will probably not have any swap space. Memory footprint is an issue.
• The target is likely using flash for its filesystem. Image size is an issue.

This leads to a different set of trade-offs for development. One has to ask questions before pulling in a library or framework: can it be cross compiled? Is the binary small enough to fit?

In this blog I don't expect to say much about Ruby on Rails, web services, or functional languages of any description. This is a blog about the dirty business of building systems. I hope you enjoy it.