Another Tech Blog

CNET is reporting that ARM, the company responsible for designing the architecture behind most mobile comuting CPU’s said  that mobile phone makers will be delivering devices that run on ARM”s latest dual core CPU’s as early as next year.

They are referring to the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore application processor.  According to the ARM site, the new chip deisgn will provide faster processing with lower power consumption for all but the most CPU intensive applications.

“The Cortex-A9 MPCore processor is the first ARM processor to combine the Cortex application class architecture with multiprocessing capabilities for scalable performance and provides enhanced multicore technology that includes:

• Accelerator Coherence Port (ACP) for increased system performance and lower system power
• Advanced Bus Interface Unit for low latency in high bandwidth devices
• Multicore TrustZone® technology with interrupt virtualization to enable hardware based security and enhanced paravirtualization solutions
• Generalized Interrupt Controller (GIC) for software portability and optimized multicore communication“

source: AMD product description

White paper on the Cortex-A9.

There are already phones on the market that make use of the ARM A9 single core chip, namely the LG Renoir shown at CES in January (video here).  The phone looks great in the video; the ARM Mali-55 GPU really makes the user interface smooth, with Vista like windows features.  Without the phone in hand I can’t comment direcltly, but I imagine streaming video would look very nice on this phone.  Of course, this phone is not available in the US (why would it be?) but it has some amazing features – 8 Megapixel camera, touch focus, several still shot modes, Dolby Mobile, DivX playback, Slow-Mo video recording, GPS, 3G, WiFi and will play Flash.  It is so irritating the the US mobile companies are just shamefully behind the curve with mobile devices.  I have to believe that most people don’t know what they are missing, so they don’t know to complain.

Since ARM is just the chip designer and not the manufacturer, it’s difficult to tell exactly when these chips will hit US phones, but if CNET is correct, we could see the chips in new phones next year.  If true, then I will NOT buy a iPhone 3GS until I know what Apple is doing with regard to the new ARM design.  Why would you invest in another 2 year contract when you know that the new chip is out there?  If they combine the CPU with the updated GPU chips, then the iPhone’s sluggishness could go away completely.  Now that might be worth $199.

What is this?  Tools.  Space tools.  Some of the tools that are being used in space to repair the Hubble in fact. 

eWeek is reporting that Google is releasing software for BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) that will allow GMail to be routed to blackberry devices.  The software is in beta now, but will be available to users of Google Apps Premier when it is fully released in July.  Right now, the application syncs mail and contact information between the mobile device and the web application, but for calendar, information transfer is one way – from the web to the device.  Google says two way calendar sync will be an enhancement for later release.

According to Google’s release, Gmail will sync to the device in 60 seconds.  In field testing by eWeek, contact and calendar “do not get pushed to the device like e-mail does, but instead they piggyback with push mail.”  According to Google, this is to save on battery life.  Sounds like a nonsense explanation to me, but who am I to question.

I like the sound of this, but coming from a financial technology background, I don’t see it as being adopted by any finance firms because of the email retention and compliance rules.  Google Apps does have Postini for retention and compliance customization, and for legal searches, but I’d be surprised to see a finance firm releasing email control to any third party.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Gmail, and I think there are huge advantages to Gmail for the enterprise.  I have, in fact, recommended it to a client of mine.  That said, there is just no replacement for native MS Exchange.

Tesla’s Model S debuted in Manhattan on April 30th.  If only I had $50k that I didn’t need, I’d love to pick one of these up.  Electric cars have been around a long time, but Tesla really gets it right.  There is no reason in the world that electric has to equal boring.  Both Tesla cars are incredible pieces of technology that are changing the way people think about electric cars.  The Roadster does 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds,  tops out at 125 MPH, and will go 244 miles on a charge.  Although I’d like to see more range, 244 miles is a little less than a standard tank of gas on most luxury cars so will do.

The Model S is a little slower 0 to 60, (does it in 5.6 seconds) but is no slouch.  It has a 300 mile range, seats 7, and has a new “quick charge” mode that can recharge the battery in 45 minutes (at 480v – it will charge slower at 120v).  It also has a 17″ touch screen with internet access and streaming audio in addition to what you would expect from an on board computer.

The Model S is a beautiful car to – very sleek looking – looks like a Maserati or an Aston Martin.  I’m mostly a 4×4 guy, but both Tesla make me want to go back to 2WD!

I don’t know why this is not getting more attention.  VMware and Landesk‘s Thinstall (now called ThinApp) has been out for close to two years now and I continue to be surprised that it is not more widely adopted. It is a great product that really lives up to the hype.

Application delivery to multiple devices is always a challenge for organizations.  An enterprise with 1000 machines will, without proper controls, have 1000 different configurations.  With IT resources stretched to their breaking point in the current ecconomic environment, it is not practical to sneaker-net software delivery.  What can you do?

You can package applications to create installable MSI’s then use a delivery tool like Landesk or Alteris.  This should be part of the solution, but packaging to MSI’s is not always easy, and done correctly takes lots of time and energy.

For smaller applications you can use auto delivery tools like ClickOnce.  These are great tools – they allow the application to check its version against a “gold” copy and if it is out of date, the new version will be delivered to the desktop automatically.  The problem with these types of tools is if an app has other software dependencies (Adobe, Office PIA’s, whatever) a simple upgrade via ClickOnce will not be enough.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply copy an executable (a la Linux)  to a machine that contained everything an app needed?  Well, you can with Thinstall.

ThinStall puts a shell OS and whatever components you want around an application then compiles them into a single executable that you can copy to any machine.  When you run the executable, it starts up a VM with its own registry and virtual C drive located in the user’s profile space (no worry about admin right here).  The target machine’s OS can be different than the OS the application needs.  This can be great for legacy apps that are not compatible with newer OS versions.  Also, since the executable runs in  it’s own space, you can run differing versions of the same applicatoin on a single machine.  For example, you can run IE6 and IE7 side by side.

The advantages of this technology are many.  In a Citrix environment, if you run standard installs and have to upgrade MS Office for example, you will have to go through the install on every machine in the cluster.   This can mean downtime and is time consuming.  If you ThinStall the Office suite, upgrades are just a file copy away.  Another advantage is that you can have the executable on a file server and just put shortcuts  on desktops.  Do that, and you only need to update a small number of copies to upgrade large numbers of people.

There are downsides, of course.  The executables are huge when compiled.  Half a gig for a single executable is not uncommon.  There are quirks to the software too – not all applications will work, especially those that require interaction with other applications on the desktop.  For example, if you have an application that uses Excel or Word components, it is difficult to get them to work right.  Also, if you have an application that contains code that can be used by another application on the desktop (think spreadsheet addins included with many market data applications) these too are difficult to get right.

Most applications are a breeze though – use Vmware to run a clean OS, start the Thinstall capture, install the components and the application you need, run the post capture and compile and you are done.  Many apps take less than 15 minutes to complete the package.

This is seriously good stuff.

I’ve been looking for a way to sync my Google Calendar to my iPhone using the native iPhone calendar app.  Google has come out with (I have no idea when this came out, so I may be late to the party here) a calendar and contacts sync to the iPhone native calendar and contacts apps using Microsoft ActiveSync.  Cool!

I set up the Calendar as a test – ActiveSync is a proven technology, so I expect this to work well.  So far it does.

Detail instructions on the setup are here http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html.  The setup is very simple, just set up an exchange account on your iPhone, give it your google credentials and sync to m.google.com.  

Only contacts and calendar are available at the moment – it will give you an error if you try and choose to sync your email.  That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see google turn up  activesync for email too.

This is the kind of thing I love about Google.  Most other mail providers would not go the extra mile to allow contacts and calendar sync without a cost.  This is totally free and works well.  Score!

Twitter is taking off like wildfire – you just can’t get away from it.  I’m still not a huge buyer of the technology, but as the number of people I follow increases, I’ve been having a hard time sorting through the posts.

Until now.

Enter TweetDeck, “A Simple and Fast Way to Experience Twitter”.   TweetDeck organizes your tweets in a simple columnar format so that you can run through posts quickly and easily.  You can also group people you follow into categories so that you can, for example, separate friends from colleagues.

Replies are also separated into a column so that you can see them easily.  This is really neat – a friend of mine replied to a tweet I posted a month or more ago and I missed it.  Once I loaded tweetdeck, the reply was right there and I was able to respond, belatedly, to him.

Additionally, the application will post an on screen notification (similar to outlooks new mail notifications, when a new tweet arrives.  This is helpful if the application itself is closed but you want to know when new tweets are posted.

Overall I’m really happy with the application – it makes browsing through my tweets much more efficient.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we love and hold on to technology gadgets when they are not necessarily all that great.  I can think of several things I’ve bought or used at work that were “the next big thing” or just new and cool that turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.  Did I stop using them?  Sometimes, but more often than not, I’d keep plugging along, being frustrated and annoyed by something that didn’t quite do what I wanted it to.  Why?

I guess I, like a lot of tech guys, love technology.  When something new comes along, you want to believe the hype and be the first one in the pool.

Take the iPhone 3G for example.  I wanted to get an iPhone for a long time, but didn’t before active sync was available – I needed to be able to use the device for work in order to justify the expense.  When I got it, it was clear in the first couple of hours that the phone was no match for my Blackberry for email, and the phone was noticeably worse.  Since I was evaluating the device for use at my firm, I put together a list of probably a dozen or more issues any one of which was enough to prevent me from recommending we adopt the device as a blackberry replacement.  I told lots of people NOT to get the phone as a business device, and to this day I don’t think it is an enterprise class device and that Blackberry is much better at corporate service.  But I kept the phone.  And I love it.  Why, why why?

Because it almost does what it needs to.  Because it almost gets it right.  And because I’m hopeful that over time the issues with the device will be worked out.   That has already happened for many of the early issues (dropped calls are not the issues that they once were, battery life is better) and I’m hopeful that more software improvements are coming.   We will see with 3.0 what happens, but I’m hopeful.

Office 2007, IE7, IE 8, Vista, Windows 7.  All are things I beta tested or installed as soon as the release candidates were out.  Some were huge disappointments (Vista, IE 8 ) and others were really neat, but a big pain in the rear (Office 2007).  I still kept using Office 2007 even though I had to have a separate machine to run things that just didn’t work with ’07.  Why?  Again, the promise of improvement and the cool features that did work outweighed the problems.  As a tech guy I can overlook/tolerate stuff that others can’t because I can find a way around the problem.

It’s like the girl who dates the bad guy even though she knows it will end badly.  Or the guy who dates the really hot girl who treats him like crap.  You hope for the best and ignore the immediate problem because you think it will eventually get better.

Hope lives!

How cool is this?  This is the Eye-Fi wireless memory card for your camera.  It wirelessly transfers photos and video from your camera to your computer and/or to your favorite photo site whenever you are in range of the wireless network you specify.  No more cables, no more uploads, just turn your camera on when you get home and….poof….photos are uploaded.  It comes in 2Gig and 4Gig, and a version that will geotag your photos.  I can’t wait to pick up the 4Gig card, will post my experience with it when I get it.