There are basically two models of mobile software distribution: access controlled such as iphone and symbian and community rated such as android.

Given the popularity of iphone, developers have sought to bypass Apple control -- also needed for such things as background processing beyond Apple's sandbox for communications transport -- via Jailbreaking. Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF, the ACLU of software developers, had filed exemption request to jailbreaking from DMCA to enable applications obtained from sources other than Apple Appstore.

http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/dmca_2009/RM2008-08.phoneunlocking.exhibits.pdf

Last week, Apple strongly came out against jailbreaking and the ...

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Just got back from a day at the UCSD/LANL institute in Los Alamos where UCSD maintains a research facility onsite in Los Alamos. We have a number of projects ongoing with them including one on plume detection and structural health monitoring. The latter is hosted in Room 6210 in the Atkinson Hall. Drop by and take a look at the fun stuff David Mascarenas, Eric Flynn and his team are doing in the lab.

As a part of the SHM effort, we also do field demos -- Alamosa Canyon bridge near Truth-Or-Consequences in New Mexico. This year was the Rev 2 of the health monitoring demos with new hardware and multiple sensors. I am sure more reports will be forthcoming.

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I chanced upon the Live* project at Sunlabs when reading through a presentation (Live_-HypervisorToGo.pdf ) by my son, Anand. While this is a remarkable work by a high-schooler, the vision behind the Live* is quite interesting: make software delivery and composition "as easy as in embedded systems." Well, perhaps easy is not the word that comes first to mind when thinking of embedded software, but shorting the installation path through firmware is an interesting way to look at SW on a stick. We do something similar in our Somniloquy effort, shown by the firmware added via gumstix in this picture. The contraption allows us to take over the network presence and identity of the laptop and allow ...

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I have been playing around with Chrome, Google's web browser since its release a week ago. Technically it is built on WebKit (same as safari and in android), but with an improved Javascript execution engine (garbage collection, JIT). One of the interesting features of chrome is "application windows": that is, you can specify application launch from the web browser.

This is advertised as an 'application shortcut'. But it really is more than that: it gives an insight into how Google is approaching OS, and sort of a rev 2 on google applications. Clearly, not all applications can be sourced by Google (nor does it likely want to), and there must be an 'offline' context to an application (saved in ...

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This is my first post. So let me share with you my recent experience with COSMOS program on embedded systems. We were very nervous when planning this course since it required quite a bit of EE and CS, and we were targeting it to high-schoolers. So we spent a month just going over the lab exercises -- initially created by a freshman student in CSE, Lynn Ngyen. Choon Kim picked these up, changed and added to create a polished set of six exercises.

Our thinking was that the students would do one exercise a week and then we will have a couple of challenge exercises for the selected few to show off as projects. The exercises were non-trivial: from generating PWM signals to drive LEDs, to sampling ...

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