PotD: Raoul Hausmann (December 12, 2009)

ABCD (Self-portrait) by Raoul Hausmann (1923-1924)

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Administrativia (2) (December 8, 2009)

This blog will undergo some mutation. I started it two years ago as a part of the efforts of promoting myself as JAIN SLEE telecom consultant. This worked and I got some of the most useful contacts via this site; but I am not pursuing this goal any longer. Instead, I am focusing on becoming a better software engineer in the most general sense of this word, a person who could solve large-scale real-world problems in more efficient, elegant and concise way. My updated CV is where it should be, content of the relevant permanent sections of the site (see sidebar) is reworked too.

If you’re subscribed to this blog’s feed expect more entries of general interest soon; “100% telecom” mood has been left behind.

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5th Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop 2009 (November 23, 2009)

A few days after this year’s Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop has been closed, let me tell about my impressions. This was the last year of the IMS Workshop in its current form; as FOKUS’ head, Prof. Thomas Magedanz has put it, “conference scope grows and ‘IMS’ start being just an umbrella term”. It is very likely that the event will continue further as a series of conferences showcasing FOKUS work.

Just like the last year, the conference has attracted participants from top telecom companies and standardizing organizations from all over the world. Interesting enough, the main focus of the conference has shifted. Instead of the walled garden, as some critics nicknamed the IMS architecture, most of the discussions were about open APIs of different sorts. From Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden (this very interesting and ambitious project aiming to provide paid access to DT’s infrastructure for developers has been rolled out in just around a year) to BONDI (attempt to standardize device API to give developers unified access to the device’s resources): different projects showed a great amount of interest in acquiring third-party developers. This trend clearly shows that the future of the telcos’ NGNs and the set of services they are to provide will be determined by community of developers or by ecosystem of startups supported by telco, and not by a telco itself.

Not only the openness was the hot topic. Over the years FOKUS shows the ability to respond to the industry needs in a very flexible manner. For example this year among the technical demos was the full-blown IaaS/PaaS solution. The virtual slices hosting FOKUS’ OpenIMS were moved around, resized, and reconfigured on the fly. As IMS itself (I will cite Prof. Magedanz again) became “vintage in regard to real research challenges, although there are still a lot of open deployment and integration issues”, the mentioned FOKUS solutions are capable of providing the base for necessary “openness” and “flexibility” of the future telecom.

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The real reason behind Apple’s restrictive AppStore policy (November 17, 2009)

Have just came back from 5th Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop in Berlin. The conference program was great this year (I’ll post the detailed overview of the event later), and I had a chance to have a lot of conversations with colleagues from telecom industriy and standardizing organizations, both peers and higher-level decision makers.

One of the interesting discussions sparkled after a presentation on BONDI, a device API which allow mobile applications of the future access device capabilities in a standardized way. The question being discussed was “Why do we need a way to restrict the application’s access in any way, be this AppStore review process or standardized API policies?“ Indeed, web and desktop applications ecosystem is able to survive and flourish without any external intervention and in majority of cases it’s the end user who (successfully) chooses good applications over malicious ones.

The very interesting answer being born in the lobby discussions included two major players in the AppStore game: telcos, who play directly, and government, who plays indirectly. Telecom industry is huge when compared to the internet industry. Just look at Google’s 2008 net income of $4,2 Bn, compare it with AT&T’s $10,5 Bn (data is from Wikipedia) and remember that Google is one of a kind, whereas companies comparable with AT&T exist on every continent. Telecom industry is also highly regulated, so the biggest fear for the telcos is the government intervention. I can easily imagine the situation where government closes GPS for public use after some criminal has stolen the victim’s GPS location and was able to commit a crime. For telcos this means complete loss of the revenue from location-based services, and to avoid that they in advance force the control over assets that may potentially compromise the end user’s security, hence the whole AppStore approval process story.

Note that none of similar regulations exist in internet, because there’s no easy way to enforce the control over it. This also explains why Android Market is review-free and Palm App Catalog is not (I consider those two as AppStore’s competitors): Google, unlike Palm, does not manufacture any phones subsidized by telcos, and will not suffer should government intervention happen.

Up to now market shows that AppStore protected by approval process could still be a success. Looking at the situation under this angle I may only guess whether developers will ever have a non-restricted access to AppStore.

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Mythical Man-Month revisited (July 27, 2009)

University professor who was teaching me computer science during my first year in the university often said that every developer should of course read Brooks’ Mythical Man-Months and in addition re-read it every year. I am not fully following this advice, but yesterday finished re-reading MMM for the third time. No Silver Bullet and later follow-up, No Silver Bullet Refired (NSBR) included in my edition of the book took most of my attention this time.

NSBR divides companies participating in any stage of the software development and getting profit from that in four broad categories (examples are mine):

• Companies manufacturing hardware and included software like operating systems (Microsoft, Apple, Palm and some less known ones)
• Companies manufacturing software for internal use (most of the banks, insurance companies, etc)
• Companies manufacturing software to be sold to the end users (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk and others)
• Companies manufacturing custom software for someone else (any outsourcing company falls into this category)

What is very interesting about this division (note that NSBR was written in 1995) is that it completely unaware about the software service market — it hasn’t existed yet. You cannot place Google in any of the categories, just as you could not do this for zillions of small profitable companies flourishing in the Internet. This fact was so surprising for me because Brooks made a lot of predicions in NSB in 1975 of which almost all became true but even in 1995 he could not foresee this huge niche. The obvious observation that commodization of Internet lead to overwhelming results, just as commodization of computers did the same earlier become striking when you see that with the angle of the software engineer with the experience of Brooks’.

I recently asked in the programmer’s community whether there is any post-MMM influential book on the process of software development and it seems like it is yet to be written. Probably, will have to re-read Mythical Man-Month next year.

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