Soap Box – Page 4 – Roo's View

Earth Hour

The idea of Earth Hour might seem a little gimmicky due to the media attention, but it is an effective demonstration that little things add up and can make a big difference. The 8:30-9:30 pm timeslot wasn’t going to work with our kids who needed to be in bed well before then, so we decided to observe the hour from 6:30-7:30pm (you should see us on New Years eve, doing the count down at 9pm!).

At the top of this posting is a graph from the TED 5000 over the time period. The red line is voltage, which ideally would be a flat line at 120v. Today it seems the voltage varied from 121v to 123v. The blue line is the power in kW being consumed. Today was a laundry day (seems to always be laundry day lately) and while we have energy efficient appliances, the dryer still eats a lot of watts.

So after dinner, we took a reading using the Ted-O-Meter on the iTouch we saw that our consumption was around 1.9kW. On the graph this would be roughly above the word “Data” in the “Real-Time Minute Data”. We then went around the house turning off lights, and powering down stuff that didn’t need to be on (computers, PVRs, etc). On the list of non-essential items were the stereo, pretty much anything with a wall wart, and night-lights too. When we looked again we had dropped down to 0.9kW. After that it was bedtime for the kids, and we left things “dark” until 10pm when it was time to start up the dryer again and do a few things before going to sleep. (Ok, I was sitting in the dark surfing on my new G1)

The TED 5000 combined with the Ted-O-Meter is a great way to bring awareness to you and your family about changing little things to make a difference. To be able to turn off the lights in a room, and see the needle drop is very motivating. You can see from the screen capture on the right that we managed to hit a consumption low of 0.770kW at 7:15pm today.

The computer industry has embraced “green” as there is a direct correlation between energy costs (primarily cooling) and profit. We’re not quite there for the home, but I suspect it will come once more people can easily measure their usage and effect change.

Beware the Browser

I tend to use my browser state (and plenty of tabs) as lightweight bookmarks. This means leaving a couple of browser windows open perpetually. Often my machine is configured to sleep after about 20mins, but in the case of my work laptop it doesn’t sleep if plugged into the wall (intentional on my part). I don’t think my usage is atypical – I would not be surprised if several of my friends have similar usage patterns.

A picture tells a thousand words:

This graph is from DD-WRTv24. You might think “Ah, Roo’s just been doing some torrents” – but the truth is that almost all of the traffic from June 10th-16th and then the June 21st spike are due to a couple of open browser windows on my laptop (overnight). This was my conclusion last night at 2am when I closed 3 browser windows on my laptop and watch the bandwidth on my WAN port drop to zero bytes.

Let’s look back a bit to some more typical usage:

You might have noticed the scale is vastly different. In fact, the usage for the entire month is basically the same as what I was pulling down in a single day.

Granted – I’m claiming it was the browser (some page auto-refreshing?) doing this. Checking my web logs indicate that visitors to the websites hosted on lowtek hasn’t massively spiked this month. It could have been something else as well, but the coincidence of my closing the browsers and seeing the traffic drop is good evidence. [Edit – I may have been wrong (yes, it happens) see comments]

Consider the possibilities here. If you wanted to be evil, and you were say an ISP – you’d ensure that your customers default home page was a nice friendly AJAX enabled launchpad linked to webmail etc.. and you’d put something to cause a slow trickle download cost as long as the user has that page open. This would likely cause a fair percentage of your customers to consume more of their bandwidth cap sooner.

Future of Java Embedded VMs

I’m writing about this topic based on a request made by Artur Lojewski back in November last year, it has taken me a while to collect my thoughts on this topic as well as find time to sit down and write a posting. Artur attended Eclipse Summit Europe where Dave Thomas (Big Dave) gave a talk entitled “Next Generation Embedded Software – The Imperative is Agility!” and asked what my opinion was.

Unfortunately I didn’t attend that Eclipse Summit Europe, so I didn’t hear what Dave had to say. Talking to some folk that I do know who went – their impression was “Vintage Dave“. I have made reference to this in the past – but I did work for Object Technology International and my university education was heavily influenced by Dave Thomas – myself and my classmates were some of the first to work our way through learning datastructures etc., in Smalltalk. So a lot of my opinions of what Dave says are going to be coloured by my past experience (and his influence on the start of my career).

Almost any talk given by Dave will get people to sit back and think – he’s also not afraid to stand in front of an audience full of Java programmers and tell them that they’ve picked the wrong language. In my experience he always has some good points and is worth listening to, but to interpret his talks as a set of black and white statements (or out of context) is dangerous. There were two other bloggers that gave some in person accounts of his talk – I’d encourage you to read those. Another reasonable reference is to read about Dave’s thoughts on JavaScript – and if you go back to what got Java started (the browser plug-in) and where Java is today, it is clear that the language didn’t fulfill the original promise.

There are others who are predicting that embedded java is dead, even James Gosling has suggested that J2ME is done. However, if we take a look at embedded Java today – you’ll see that the Blu-ray format is a new niche for this technology. As well, even low cost phones such as the Nokia 2760 support the J2ME profile. This means that as a platform, there are actually billions of devices out there – how is this not success?

I think it depends on what the original goals were, and the future of the platform. Among the various J2ME enabled devices, there are differences. This isn’t really a lot better in the browser / javascript space, but Web2.0 holds the spotlight at the moment. Probably the biggest threat to the J2ME space is the new generation of smart phones: iPhone, G1 and Palm Pre – none of these have embraced Java as the path forward.

Looking at embedded hardware, we’re starting to see more and more capable hardware in the palm of your hand. For example – iPhone is a 400MHz ARM cpu compare this to a hot desktop circa 1998 (PentiumII 400MHz), the very definition of what embedded means is changing. In the near term J2ME will continue to be an expected feature in cell phones, so there is still a market which will continue for several (5?) years. As the smart phone market sorts itself out we’ll see which new (or old) technology rises to the top. It is probably safe to say that J2ME will have an impact on the outcome, but to bet on it as the winner is probably long odds.

Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.