Do you remember, in the ‘before’ times, when the phone would ring? Are you at the age where the phone was a plastic thing with numbers on it, which was connected to a special socket in the wall? So it rang. Ring. Ring ring. Who is it? Wait! Skip a few years later, and this other plastic gadget-thing which dad bought showed us the number that was calling us. Nope, we don’t know this number. Ring ring. Sync A few years later, a few years ago, I got a car-phone. It was a horrid thing, slow and stupid. In addition, ...

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Windows Mobile 6.5.3 is actually a decent piece of software. I would not have been able to reach this conclusion without the good people of XDA-Developers, and especially @NRGZ28, who cooked the EnergyROM I’m now using. Let me explain: with most of the phones that you buy today, you are not limited to the OS supplied by the manufacturer and any updates released for it – courtesy of your friendly internet hacker. You can download tools to hack your device and flash any ROM on it – and it might even be legal. That is, if you’re ok with voiding ...

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I’ve been working on several things since my last post. After all, the work of a wise developer never ends (for job-security reasons). The team and I had to evaluate some new RFCs for effort estimations, we had to read some PRDs and MRDs, and of course produce our share of documents to be added to the general pile of documents that no one ever reads once they get approved. While doing all of that, from time to time, we still need to address issues that we receive from our Customer Support department, cases which they cannot resolve without help ...

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Story hour came early this week, when a colleague stuck his head in my office and asked why we wait before reusing an address on Windows Server 2003. So began a most harrowing tale, the strange case of the mysterious closing connections. It came from the beyond Once upon a time, in a protocol stack far, far away, H.245 sockets were dying inexplicably. Packet captures on both sides saw the other side as closing the connection immediately after it was opened, causing the call to fail. It only happened during high load, and after further inquiry we discovered that it ...

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Here are a few conversations that went on (mostly in my feverish imagination) illustrating the consequences of our diminishing attention spans, and their exploitations. Google offices, a few months ago -       You see, the process is very streamlined. -       Is it? -       The user clicks ‘buzz’, gets a screen of privacy options, then a screen of his contacts to choose from. -       You say?! -       Ok, maybe it’s not that streamlined. -       Is it. -       I guess we could just start up with some defaults. -       You say? -       And pick all contacts as defaults, it will be ok for ...

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[Ofer Goren is the pen name I choose... no, he's the guy I hired... you see, I'm on hiatus... (Sigh) I should really start writing in my blog. This time we get a glimpse into the process of turning simple code into the products we all know and love.] We’ve just released a new version of the SIP Developer Suite. In the following post, I will try and describe the different steps required for such a miracle to happen. After you’ve finished reading, I hope you will have a better understanding of what we’re doing here, while waiting for our ...

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[Ofer Goren really needs no introductions, does he? He writes here more than I do, lately. Anyway, this time he shares a harrowing tale of Android OS and job insecurities of a completely different kind.] The Android OS is out for quite some time. Recently it was decided that we should bring our SIP Stack revolution to this uncharted world It was a challenging task, which only a few can take: .  a new operating system, to add to the many that our stack already works with. I boldly took the responsibility on myself, and I emerged triumphant. Well, kinda. ...

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[Ofer Goren is a frequent guest in this blog. He has posted here on his experiences with multicore optimization, as well as a follow up post to that. Today's treat is of a frequent developer problem - backwards compatibility.] As mentioned in one of my previous posts, we do have customers. Some of those customers do have special needs (don’t they all?). Lately, one of our customers asked us to update our workspaces, so that they can use our product with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008. The Whole IDEa Up until now, we had two types of solutions for the ...

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It’s been a (long) while, but I’m finally back to continue my discussion of Dan Teasdale’s Design Lessons Learned From Rock Band. Dan brings up issues of design, re-design, software development cycles, management, communities and dealing with the unexpected that are much more universal than just game design. I discussed the One Question Principle in the previous post, and in this one, I’ll consider the second principle he discusses – the Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). The What What What? If you’re wondering what, it doesn’t really matter. You can read the Wikipedia page , but Dan only refers to a ...

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[By now, you should all know Ofer Goren.. He has guest posted here on his experiences with multicore optimization. Well, he's back, along with the aftershock effect of the work he did.] At the last Intel seminar I participated in, James Reinders, the Chief Software Evangelist & Director of Software Development Products at Intel, made a great comment when asked a question. “Intel has no opinion yet on that matter. I’ll give you my opinion, which usually becomes Intel’s”. I love this statement for it exemplifies our differences: I keep my opinions to myself, his ...

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