Rockbox on the SanDisk Sansa Clip v1

I’ve been fascinated by the RockBox project for a while now. It is an alternative firmware (i.e. OS lite) for music players with a bunch of extra features. It is being ported to a range of different devices and it is becoming the Linux of sorts of MP3 players. (Soon to be replaced by actual Linux, one presumes…)

The first device for which I had a RockBox port was an old iPod, the ones we would call “classic” these days. I loved it, since it have me the freedom to play games, read OGG Vorbis files, and play with the interface – all things that the original iPod stubbornly refused to do. The installation process was painful, but it was worth it. It was a tinkerer’s dream.

R.I.P. Kindle

The disturbing trend of electronic gadgets dying earlier in their life span continues. My Kindle gave up yesterday. I turned it on, and the e-ink display was broken, showing me weird streaks on the top right portion. It looks like blunt force, but the reader was not exposed to any force.

Well, I was kinda happy with my Kindle – loving the wireless connectivity, long battery life, and clarity of the display. I didn’t like a great many things, either – the lack of display formats (no native PDF?), the one-shop-only policy, the DRM (including remote deletion), the lack of apps, and the unusually unfortunate hardware choices (no touchscreen, terrible keyboard).

Open Source and Interfaces

One of the things that complicates the development of software in the open source world is the enormous variety of different interfaces you have to deal with. This is eminently an architectural problem: interfaces need to be defined ahead of coding, and if you just start developing your own project, you have no need for uniformity across projects.

Initially, of course, there is no standard and hence no interface. Later, separate projects come up and they make a point of having different interfaces to better spread and create incompatible ecosystems. That was the whole enmity between KDE and Gnome, or the many different brands of SQL server implementations.

Developing for Maemo - Fremantle VirtualBox Image

So I’ve been playing around with the Fremantle VirtualBox image that Maemo.org provides on their web site. The idea is great: you get the image, run it in a virtualization environment, and you don’t have to set up anything.

Great idea, poor implementation. First of all, the image doesn’t come pre-loaded with instructions. I would have expected a big icon to show on the desktop after launch, telling me what to do next. Instead, there were icons for the VM native software, as well as for the development environment.

The Suicide of the Kindle

Who remembers the time when Amazon deleted a bunch of books from Kindles? It was the dark ages of e-ink, Amazon was the undisputed master of ebooks, its marketplace was teeming with “publishers” that sold books in the public domain. One of those publishers offered a book whose copyrights had not expired. Understandable, given the absurd length of copyright extensions.

In any case, what Amazon did next was completely horrifying to any book lover. They used the Whispernet connection with which the Kindle communicates to the “mothership” and instructed Kindles with this particular copy of the book to delete them. There you are, reading your purchased copy of Orwell’s 1984, and then on the next morning, it’s gone.

Healthy Yummy Breakfast Recipe

I am realizing now that I’ve been concocting this recipe for years, improving the ingredients over time, and I finally have something I absurdly like and that is actually pretty good for me – and I have never shared. Here’s the deal – it’s so good that I sometimes fancy it up and serve it as a dessert for dinner guests (hint at the end).

It all starts with what I like for breakfast: something crunchy, sweet, plentiful, but not weighing down; something with good balance of nutrients, with lots of proteins, healthy carbohydrates, fiber, and a good amount of water; and of course something that can be made quickly and without fuss. Here is the recipe:

NoSQL - No: NuSQL

There is this whole motion afloat, trying to declare SQL bankrupt and do without. Instead of SQL, one hears, there are going to be much better databases in the future. Dozens of projects are floating around, each with a different notion of what “better storage” mean, all aiming at being better data stores for the Internet.

Now, it is clear that SQL databases have their supreme annoyances, and the need for reform is clear. What pretty much all NoSQL project have in common, though, is that they look at the wrong problems and try to solve them with a more theological than philosophical or architectural approach.

MVC I: Hierarchical Views

I thought I’d start this architecture blog with a post on one of the things that, traditionally, have given me the most heartburn: the implementation of view in MVC architectures.

As a refresher, MVC is by now the standard architecture for most applications, web or not. It stands for Model, View, Controller. Model is the abstract representation of the data you are handling (for instance, invoices). The view is the particular representation of the data (for instance, the invoice edit screen). The controller is what ties the two together and add user input. The controller fetches the data by instantiating the model, and passes it to the view, which can take the data and make it into a page.

printf(“Hello, World!”);

I’ve been working on the architecture of Internet systems since 1994. It’s been a wonderful time, one that has seen software architects move collectively from obscure geekdom to running the development departments of the biggest Internet juggernauts. The best of times and the worst of times, frequently very close to each other, sometimes even coinciding.

I find that the world of software needs a lot of architectural attention. You won’t agree with all my ideas of how things should work, but I guess you’ll always have an opinion about them. The more people think about architecture, the more they actually do architecture, and that can only be a good thing.

Enters Starvation Mode

One of the things calorie counters like to say is that if you don’t eat enough, then your body enters “starvation mode.” I held that to be a bit of hyperbole, akin to the notion of ketosis in Atkins Diets, but I could finally watch that happen in real time.

For that, I have to thank a combination of habits I’ve developed:

• I wear my heart rate monitor at every workout
• I perform some workout every day
• I started calorie counting after my accident and the resulting loss of exercise and gain in weight

What happened? Lately, the weather turned really nice in San Diego. I mean, summer in March kind of nice. And when the weather turns for the better, I lose (temporarily) all interest in food. So I would get to the end of the day with sometimes 1,000 calories to spare – almost half my daily intake. I wasn’t trying, I wasn’t going for it, it just happened.