Today (Friday, Oct. 20) is the last day for discounted registrations to the Software Test & Performance Conference — tomorrow, the full conference passport price increases by $200. We’ve got a great conference for development and test/QA professionals, Nov. 7-9 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. There are lots of timely classes, including new tracks on test management, performance management and security. There’s a keynote from Rex Black. Plus, the second annual Testers Choice Awards. Don’t miss it.

After Red Hat purchased JBoss and created an integrated offering with Linux and a commercial-grade open-source Java EE app server, it was only a matter of time before Novell did the same. The answer has a singularly uncatchy name of “Integrated Stack for SUSE Linux Enterprise,” and launched this week out of a Novell partnership with IBM.

The Integrated Stack combines IBM hardware (such as blade servers or standard x86 boxes) with SUSE Linux, WebSphere App Server Community Edition, DB2 Express-C, and the Centeris Likewise management suite (which I’m not very familiar with). The system is sold by both Novell and IBM.

Red Hat, by contrast, offers several versions of its Red Hat Application Stack, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss App Server, JBoss Hibernate, MySQL and PostgreSQL, and the Apache Web Server. No management tools.

The Novell/IBM pricing starts lower than Red Hat’s, at $349/year for the software. It’s unclear how much support Novell/IBM provide at the entry-level price point. Red Hat charges from $1,999 to $8,499, depending on the number of CPUs in the server, and the desired level of support services.

Sun has a comparable open-source stack, which can be run on Linux or Solaris. The Solaris Enterprise System, which consists mainly of Sun’s own software plus the PostgreSQL database, is a strong offering that doesn’t get as much exposure as it deserves. That’s largely because the tightly controlled Solaris operating system isn’t as popular with the “Anyone But Microsoft” crowd as Linux. Watch for the new Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite, coming soon.

My column in today’s edition of SD Times News on Thursday discusses two new subsets of the Rational Unified Process — OpenUP, which is implemented in the Eclipse Process Framework, and EssUP, developed by Ivar Jacobson for use with Visual Studio Team System.

I’m anticipating that some people will ask, “Why didn’t you mention the Enterprise Unified Process?” That’s not an oversight. Scott Ambler has done a tremendous job with the EUP, but its goals are different.

OpenUP and EssUP were designed as simplifications of the heavyweight RUP: functional subsets that retained the principles of the Unified Process framework, but which were streamlined for agile development.

By contrast, Scott’s EUP is an extension to the RUP, bringing the production and retirement phases of the software development lifecycle into this well-defined process. If anything, the EUP makes the RUP even less agile — but leaves it more complete, and better suited for serious requirements-driven development.

Evans Data, citing poor attendee registration numbers, has cancelled its first-ever Development Products Conference. The conference, scheduled to be held in San Jose this Thu. and Fri., was billed as “If your job involves planning new technology products for developers to use, or positioning and marketing those products, this is the ONE conference you can’t afford to miss.”

This is unfortunate: I’d been looking forward to attending, and BZ Media was a sponsor of the event. Ted Bahr, president of BZ Media, was a scheduled speaker on the program, along with folks like BEA’s Bill Roth, TIBCO’s Ram Menon, IBM’s Bernie Spang, Programmer’s Paradise’s Jeff Largiader, Telelogic’s Brian James and Red Hat’s Bryan Che.

You won’t find any mention of the DPC on the Evans site; the company has scrubbed it away.

Last spring, my good friend Andrew Binstock and I agreed upon a simple wager: Would we be able to purchase a terabyte hard drive, in a 3.5-inch form factor, by the end of 2006? At that time, 500GB drives were readily available at places like Best Buy and CompUSA. I believe that the 750GB drives were just coming out as well.

Forget Moore’s Law: The pace of innovation in hard drives is incredible. As I write this, there still aren’t 1TB drives commercially available, but the price of 500GB and 750GB 3.5-inch drives is falling fast. You can also get a 160GB laptop drive (in a 2.5-inch form factor) for under $200, which is equally amazing.

Twenty years ago I’d not have predicted this… the future belonged to optical media, remember. When the CD-ROM was introduced in the mid-1980s, a typical hard drive had somewhere around 30MB of storage capacity. An ISO-9660 CD-ROM, by contrast, had 650MB capacity, or about 20x that of the hard disk.

Imagine if 12cm compact disc technology had kept pace with magnetic media: we’d have 15TB discs! But optical didn’t keep up, and capacity has grown very slowly. The first move, in the mid-1990s, was to the 4.7GB DVD, and then the 8.5GB dual-layer DVD. Now, finally, there are 20-50GB optical discs in the Blu-Ray spec coming out in lte 2006.

Given the pace of change, the future clearly belongs to magnetic hard disks.

The OSDL has released Portland 1.0, its set of common interface for GNOME and KDE. Because Portland will be found in many Linux distros, such as Debian, Fedora and SUSE, it could help solve some of the forking problems that we’re seeing on the desktop. Let’s hope that the Linux community embraced Portland, and that other distros climb on board — because that, in turn, will encourage third-party app development.

I spend a lot of time on airplanes — not as much as many of my colleagues, but it’s plenty. My default carrier is United Airlines, which has a hub in San Francisco, and which also has an e-mail flight notification system, called EasyUpdate.

(A digression: At SFO, United promotes the service by boasting, “Only United Offers EasyUpdate.” Well, EasyUpdate is a trademark of United Airlines, so of course only United has a service with that name. Is that a lame slogan or what?)

EasyUpdate sends two e-mail messages to you, your loved ones and your administrative assistant about each flight segment:

* Before takeoff, it confirms the projected departure time and gate
* Before landing, it confirms the projected arrival time and gate

But, interestingly, the EasyUpdate system is not updated if you change flights, and therefore, information transmitted by the EasyUpdate service can be obsolete.

To wit: Sometimes I arrive at the airport early, and squeeze onto an earlier flight. More rarely, sometimes my flight is cancelled, and the airline places me on an alternative flight.

EasyUpdate never knows about any of this.

To use a real-world example, today I was scheduled for flight #931 to LAX, but arrived at SFO early enough to hop onto flight #1171 instead. Before that, I had already received the first EasyUpdate e-mail, that flight #931 was scheduled to depart on time from SFO’s gate 84.

However, EasyUpdate never knew that I changed flights. So, half an hour after my flight #1171 had landed, EasyUpdate dutifully sent me and my loved ones (alas, I have no administrative assistant) a message that flight #931 was scheduled to land on-time at LAX’s gate 69A:

** UNITED AIRLINES ARRIVAL MESSAGE **

The following flight is scheduled for arrival:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Flight Number: 931
Departing From: San Francisco California (SFO)
Traveling To: Los Angeles (LAX)
Date: October 10
Gate: 69A (Gate information is subject to change)
Estimated Arrival Time: 8:12 p.m.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Flight times are subject to change. Please check the flight information monitors at the airport.

Thank you for choosing United!

No message was ever sent about flight #1171. That’s pretty worthless for a proported travelers’ real-time information system. From an altitude of 30,000 feet, though, it sounds like an easy problem to fix. Web services, SOA, real-time database orchestration, all that sort of thing.

Let’s see how long it takes.

Colin L. Powell, Gen. (Ret.), U.S. Army, former Secretary of State of the United States, is a very funny man.

Gen. Powell had the audience in stitches during his keynote address at Dreamforce 2006, the user conference held by software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com today in S.F. The general riffed on a number of themes: he mocked President Bush’s “When I looked in [Russian president ] Putin’s eyes, I saw his soul” statement, pined after his government-issued Boeing 757 aircraft, laughed about his BlackBerry, and shared his wife Alma’s advice on working with the government.

The keynote address, which lasted about an hour, meandered. The general shared his views about the benefits of corporate philanthropy, the state of the world, conflicts in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He reminisced about his training as a young lieutenant, and his first days at the State Department. He talked about looking into Mr. Putin’s eyes, and seeing the KGB. He talked about the economy, about terrorism, about security, about war, about peace.

I took a lot of notes and photographs during Gen. Powell’s talk (that’s my own picture above), but what struck me most were his comments regarding leadership.

Leaders, he said, don’t merely motivate their followers. They inspire their followers — and inspiration makes them motivate themselves, which is obviously desireable. In fact, he said (repeating advice given to him early in his career), if you’re a good enough leader your followers will follow you if for no reason other than curiosity about where you’re going to take them… with trust that the journey is worthwhile.

Gen. Powell talked about the attributes of a good leader. A leader, he says, has to have vision about what the enterprise is doing, and why it’s doing it. That doesn’t just mean the CEO’s overarching vision. A department head, a business-unit manager, a shop steward, even a team leader within a workgroup, all need vision if they’re going to lead.

But the leader needs more than vision (and the ability to communicate that vision). A leader has to be able to give his followers the tools they need to do the job, as well as the training needed to use those tools. Why? Because it’s the followers who get the job done.

A general might know that the army needs to take a certain hill, or protect a certain city, or set up camp in a certain valley. But it’s the troops who take that hill, protect that city and set up the camp.

A leader also needs to be willing and able to discipline the followers when they need it. Why? It’s important for morale and inspiration. If the good followers see that someone is being a bad follower and nothing is being done, then the good followers will say ‘why should I bother?’ and then it all collapses. “If you’re not doing that, you’re not a good leader,” the general said.

And finally, you need to do the right thing. “Everyone wants to be part of an organization that has high standards,” he said. I have no doubt that any organization that Gen. Powell is involved with will have the highest standards possible.

But would someone give this guy an airplane?

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On Tuesday, October 3, 2006, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a new record high – the first since January 14, 2000, more than six and one-half years ago.

In the United States, the Dow (as this 30-stock index is popularly known) is the arguably the most widely quoted stock-market index. However, many people, myself included, believe that it’s not the most accurate assessment of the condition of the U.S. economy. Other indices, such as Nasdaq, survey a much wider array of stocks, and use a better algorithm – and haven’t fared as well. The Nasdaq, for example, is at less than half the value it had in January 2000.

If we take a step back, however, it’s not all as doom-and-gloom as the stock prices would indicate. Back in early 2000, we were at the peak of a technology bubble. Prices were unnaturally high in those heady days, with price/earnings ratios that exhibit the irrational exuberance that U.S. Federal Research chairman Alan Greenspan warned about in 1996. He was right, and the market came crashing down… to where it belonged.

So, forget about the stock market, forget about the Dow Jones record. Look at the fundamentals: The computer industry has changed, and the software development industry has matured. Software is central to every aspect of corporate life, and thanks to Web portals like Amazon.com, YouTube and MySpace, it’s central to our personal life as well.

Yes, your stock options might still be underwater, and your retirement fund may not be back at its bubble values (mine certainly isn’t). However, take solace in the reality that our industry is growing at a reasonable pace, and a healthier one.

My colleague Larry O’Brien has weighed in regarding Borland’s moves to rename/reposition/rejigger its Core SDP products into a new set of application life cycle suites. One upon a time, Larry was one of the biggest and most loyal Borland supporters imaginable, but his faith has waned, and waned and waned, and now it has waned some more.

His current blog posting is “Borland Gives Up On Core SDP: I Wonder How Much That Cost ‘Em?”, and it references one of his older SD Times columns from 2004, “Only Nixon Would Go To China.” Both are worth reading.

The ongoing drama at Hewlett-Packard has me rapt with attention. Beyond its involvement with Mercury (which HP is in the process of buying), the corporate-spying scandal doesn’t have much immediately relevance to my own world of software development. However, it is a fascinating tale, and it’s interesting to watch it unfold.

Certainly friends who work at HP are equally focused. Morale at the company is bad, like when Carly Fiorina was laying off people left and right in the wake of the Compaq acquisition. Not good, not good at all.

Within this broad story, there’s room to enjoy what (to me) is a perennial issue: What do you call the company?

Legally, the firm keeps changing its name. It used to be the Hewlett-Packard Co. But nowadays, it’s the Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.

What about shortening the name? There we have lots of options. I use HP, as you can see. That’s also the company’s preferred usage. However, others also use H-P, H.P. or my personal favorite, simply Hewlett.

Nobody, but nobody, in the tech industry calls Hewlett-Packard, “Hewlett.” That’s reserved for out-of-touch mainstream journalism, such as the New York Times headline for today’s story about the hunt for the leaker. The Times also uses the abbreviation H.P.

The Wall Street Journal likes the abbreviation H-P, even in headlines, but calls the company Hewlett-Packard Co. on first reference within the story.

Our style at SD Times and other BZ Media publications is to follow a company’s own preferred usage, whenever possible; we only make occasional exceptions, such as when companies have gratutious punctuation as part of their name. We drop the exclamation point (which in journalism is called a “bang”) from names like Yahoo!, for example, because it’s disruptive when you’re trying to read.

But I still get a kick out of seeing the first ref to HP written as simply “Hewlett.” It always takes a moment to figure out who the NY Times is talking about. C’mon, guys. You can do better than that.

My first exposure to microprocessors came through the use of the Zilog Z80 chip. It was hard to do any work with small computers in the late 1970s and NOT use the eight-bit Z80; they were relative cheap, easy to build circuits with, and simple to program. Many hardware and software engineers, including myself, cut our teeth on Z80 assembly. Early microcomputers, like the Radio Shack TRS/80 and numerous CP/M boxes, used the Z80 before the IBM PC came out and redefined the landscape around Intel’s x86 family.

But Zilog, what have you done for us lately? Not much, given the company’s recent financial woes — millions of dollars of losses every quarter. While the company still sells variations on its newer eight-bit Z8 microprocessor, it also offers other stuff like infrared controllers. Even so, the breadwinner is the Z8, which includes onboard flash memory, perfect for embedded microcontroller applications.

Zilog has lived in an eight-bit world for 30 years. Yes, the company has attempted to break out of the eight-bit box before, such as with the short-lived 16-bit Z280 and 32-bit Z380 processors from the early 90s. But they just didn’t go anywhere.

Flash forward (so to speak) to 2006. One month ago, the company dumped its chairman/CEO, Jim Thorburn, who had been in place for five years, appointing an interium CEO while beginning a search for a permanent replacement. And now it has released a new 16-bit platform, called ZNEO.

ZNEO looks like an interesting chip, and a possible upward migration path from the Z8 microcontroller. It has fast zero-wait-state internal flash memory, in a variety of sizes ranging from 32KB up to 128KB: that’s a lot of space in the embedded market. Plus, it has a math engine that can do 8, 18, and 32-bit operations.

Clearly, the ZNEO project is going to be critical for Zilog, as the firm struggles to survive. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation: Zilog needs new customers and design wins in order to get its finances in order. But will embedded developers, who perhaps rely upon the company as a provider of tried-and-tested commonity chips, want to base their future products on an unproven platform from an trouble supplier? Time alone will tell, but I have my doubts.

My 9/21/06 “Zeichick’s Take” about automotive security brought several letters-to-the-editor, one of which made an excellent point that applies well in the physical security world, but which in my opinion falls down in cybersecurity.

Steve Brewin wrote,

“Apparently the vast majority of crime is committed by amateurs chancing on an easy opportunity. The simple lock removes the easy opportunity, amateurs will look elsewhere. Professionals play for much higher stakes and while they can easily bypass such simple security mechanisms, the probability of an attack from them is massively less. Most targets are not worth their time. For most, the cost of installing systems capable of thwarting their attacks is disproportionate to the risk.

The insurance assessor explained that while most viewed their offer as a marketing exercise, their statistics told them that the discount they were offering was small compared to what they expected to save in the cost of claims alone.“

That’s very true. Professionals can unlock cars, remove The Club, jimmy house doors open, even break a laptop security cable with a small bolt cutter. So can a determined amateur, who can pick up the right tools, or practice simple techniques. But what about the casual amateur? The kid walking through the parking lot who sees an brand-new iPod sitting in a car? For that kid, a locked door may sufficient to make him move on.

In other words, if someone is bound a determined to steal YOUR things, locks probably won’t help. But if they’re just looking to steal SOMETHING, they’ll pick the lowest-hanging fruit. Your security system simply ensures that your fruit isn’t the lowest-hanging target.

But that falls down when it comes to cybersecurity — because of the shotgun approach. Even the most casual script kiddies use sophisticated ports scans, SQL injection, worms and other automated techniques. Those are the equivalent of trying to break into every car in the parking lot simultaneously. I’m not sure that hoping that someone else’s computer is a lower-hanging target is enough. It’s unfortunate, but our neworks, servers, desktop AND applications have to become fortresses. At every layer of the stack, we’re being targeted.

One of the challenges for any software development project — whether enterprise or for-sale, open source or not — is what to do about all those pesky defects that nobody’s going to fix. Why aren’t they going to be fixed? It might be that they’re not a show-stopper, or that there are other priorities, or there’s no easy fix, or simply that nobody wants to do it.

Every non-trivial software project has bugs that won’t be fixed. Sometimes you know that it’s not going to be fixed, and at other times, everyone has the best of intentions, but it just never gets done.

One of the benefits of most open source projects is transparency. Take Eclipse, which uses a public bugzilla feed to let users and contributors report defects. When defects are reported, often they’re resolved, but sometimes they’re marked RESOLVE LATER. Does that mean that the issue truly will be resolved later, or as some people suppose, is that a polite euphemism for RESOLVE NEVER?

Let’s face reality: Not every bug is going to be fixed. Yes, it would be nice to have less ambiguity, and to know, for certain, that a specific bug is going to be (or not going to be) addressed. But at least with a system like the RESOLVE LATER system, you can see if action is being taken or not. With non-open-source projects, or OSS projects that take place with less transparency than Eclipse, bug reports go into a black hole.

By contrast, with commercial software, a bug will only be fixed if the software owner sees the business value of fixing it. While I agree that RESOLVE LATER is suboptimal, it’s easy enough to see that a bug that’s been ignored for months or years isn’t going to be addressed. And that’s valuable information.