Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

Super easy to gain root access to your A500.  Here’s the step-by-step guide to rooting your A500 with Honeycomb.

Acer Iconia A500 connected to camera via USB

The Acer A500 went on sale Monday and having been researching Honeycomb Android based options for a new tablet, I elected to pick one up $450 at Best Buy which is a heck of a deal on a capable tablet.

No amount of research and reading reviews can tell you what it is really like to use one of these devices and whether it will work for you so I thought I’d share my experiences for those contemplating a similar decision and compare this device / OS with the iPad2.  Lets see where both platforms shine.

Advantage Android:
Open – the platform really is an open book. This has pros and cons as we will get into here. But from hardware to software, the Acer A500 is night and day different from the iPad.  The Iconia has a full USB port, a mini USB port, SD card slot, and hdmi out. Want a file browser? Simply install one from the Android Market and gain access to all your files.  Apple refuses to let iPad users see their files, much less copy things to or from their device.

On vacation and want to copy your camera photos to your iPad2?  Good luck.  (Note: a friend has pointed out you that Apple is happy to sell you a $29 adapter to connect your camera) With the A500, just hook up your camera over USB, or even easier, take the SD card out of your camera and put it in the A500’s SD slot. One look at the photo here shows something we may never see an iPad do – connect directly to a USB device.  I now routinely move files between my Mac and the Andriod tablet via a USB Drive.

Browser – Google has built a great browsing experience into Honeycomb. Flash capable, tabbed, and beautifully done, you really feel it’s a desktop based experience – only better.  It was able to handle all the flash websites I visited, and you can even run Adobe Air applications.  If you think iPad browsing is good, you have to see what Google has done in Honeycomb.

Solid – both the Acer tablet and the Honeycomb OS have been rock solid. Honeycomb 3.0.1 came loaded on the A500 and in 3 days I haven’t really seen one glitch. The whole platform seems very solid. Honeycomb itself is a terrific platform, multitasking, gorgeous interface, and fairly intuitive. I was able to navigate the UI very quickly and understand how to access menus, etc.  In head to head comparison, the A500 also has better wifi range than the iPad2.

Power / Flexibility – If you are a power user or technophile then, it is hard to beat an android device.  You can build or install any app under the sun, and even change the kernel itself.  So far, I haven’t been able to find anything I can’t do with this Honeycomb tablet.  It’s impressive what is possible with an Open platform.  The OS is slick and the multicore device is fast.  And, you don’t need a PC  or a Mac, and no silly iTunes download or activation is required to use the device.  The device can standalone.  But…  with power comes less simplicity.

For example, playing movies on the gorgeous A500 screen – there’s just not a push button way to get movies on the device.  To take a movie with you, you would need to rip a DVD to a m4v or similar movie file format and copy it to your tablet.  Pretty straightforward, but out of reach of many people.  I haven’t found yet a good way to “rent” movies ala iTunes.  Netflix doesn’t yet have a app for the tablet (even though Google TV is also android and it works great there).

Advantage iPad:
iTunes music/movies – The Apple monopoly certainly makes it convienent to play movies on the iPad! You can rent movies and take them on the plane or other places where wifi may not be available.  At $5 a pop its not exactly Redbox.

Exchange email – like iPhone, the iPad has great built in connectivity to Exchange.  Incredibly, the Acer  Iconia Honeycomb OS based tablet doesn’t have a default Exchange connector as a choice for it’s built in Email application.  I found a thirdparty android app called Touchdown that works great, but this omission is silly.  One would have to believe that this is temporary.

Cisco vpn – Seriously Google? Both iPad and iPhone support Cisco VPN.  The Honeycomb tablet supports 4 other types of VPN, but since most of corporate America uses Cisco, you’re pretty much out of luck. There seems to be a way to hack the Android kernel to add this, but seriously Google, this is lame.

Apps – As Steve Jobs will be the first to tell you, there are more Apps for iPhone/iPad.  Still I found an App for everything I was looking for, and equivalent to everything I use on my iPhone: Evernote, Sugarsync, MochaVNC to name a few.  The price of Openness seems to be to have to put up with trashware.  Google doesn’t screen their apps, so you need to be careful.  Still, if something is trashware, it shows up in the comments with even a casual scan.  (if you like the term trashware in this context – feel free to use it.  it seems to fit).

Ease/Simplicity – There’s no two ways around it – the iPad and iPhone are jsut about the easiest to use devices every created.  Toddlers can learn to use them quickly. Hats off to Apple for this.  Of course, if Apple doesn’t want you to do something, like connect your camera and move files to the iPad, then you’re out of luck.  If you are not computer savvy, the iPad is the way to go, no doubt.  This could change as vendors build out more completely packaged Honeycomb based solutions for their tablets.  The Honeycomb OS is certainly capable of it.  I just haven’t seen any thing yet that can rival the simplicity of the iPad.

Toss Up:
Books – I just have to hand it to Amazon – with their cross application support of Kindle and the message of buy your books once and read them on all your devices, you just can’t beat it.

Coexisting with an iPad:
Honeycomb and iOS tablets can coexist, you just need a little creativity. Take facetime for example, it’s an Apple only thing. But free video calling between the devices is easy through other apps such as Fring. It has worked really well in my initial testing.

In a prior post, I wrote about the relentless pace at which our Agile development moves, especially as it is teamed with delivery of software as a service (SaaS).  One of the consequences of this speed of constant delivery is that there’s never time to go back and “clean up” any of those important but not urgent tasks that you just didn’t get to in the sprint.  You know the ones I mean – that last unit test you really should write, fixing a low priority bug, UI tweaks, or automating all of the QA tests.

We’ve found that at the core of this challenge is that the team may not all be engaged simultaneously on the same project.  As I work with other Engineering executives, many face the inherent conflict of QA sprints that lag behind development sprints.  On the surface, this seems natural.  After all, there’s nothing to test until it is written?

We know from test driven development practices this doesn’t have to be the case. Even if not following strict test driven development practices, with careful development story planning, the UI aspects or API stubs can be built first in the sprint, so by the time the QA team has spent a day or two planning test scenarios or preparing test data, they can begin automated test development.

We also find that we need for new code development to stop at some point in the sprint. From that point to the end, developers are only fixing bugs found by the QA team in the sprint, completing those final few unit test cases, taking on usability feedback, and otherwise driving to complete.

By taking this approach, the developers and QA engineers stay together, focused on one goal as a team.  That goal is sprint complete of a high quality and finished deliverable.  The result is far fewer lose ends, a higher quality product with less rework, and just as important a team that works together.

9:20 Marc Benioff has just taken the stage – quite a showman he is. Nice video overview of day 1. Benioff now talking about Microsoft as the evil empire – says they are trying to stop chatter, the sales cloud, and his new socks. Talking now about the Microsoft lawsuit – and Micosoft “protest” outside yesterday. (MS had seqway drivers out front with “Don get Forced” slogans.)

Benioff asks the crowd to help him get this customer back and ask Bernard to come on out…  Its the guy in the MS advertisements – on the trucks and seqways.  “Bernard I’m so sorry…. we want to apologize to you”  “We don’t want you to go back to software, the constant upgrades, waiting for new features…”  Crowd applauds and Bernard says he will come back.  Classic Benioff.

9:38 Benioff now talking about his donation of $100M for a children’s hospital at UCSF. Describing all the investment in a new campus at Mission Bay.  Today is UCSF day at Dreamforce. Working to raise $1.5B for the new hospital. Still waiting for the force.com announcements.

9:52 here we go with the meat of the keynote – “your platform is too proprietary” Benioff wants to open the platform further. Adding Ruby on Rails support. “Ruby is the true language of cloud 2” (talking about speed and agility of using the language). Salesforce buying Heroku!  Wow.

Heroku will be salesforce’s seventh cloud.  Will keep Heroku as an independent team. Heroku founded in 2007 to enable fast deployment/updgrade/delivery of Ruby apps. Fancy d- emo, but no details on how this will integrate with force.com yet.

Eighth cloud announcement: BMC Software – CEO Bob Beauchamp on stage now. Announcing Remdyforce now available on salesforce.com, IT configuration management.

Platform team announcements – “force.com 2” -going to build a killer product for each market:

appforce – departmental and collaborative applications. looks like a marketing repackaging of what force.com already provides. don’t see anything new here.  Improvements to sharing – new sharing model to be delivered in the Spring. Configurable Visualforce pages, Reduce governor limits by 70% in Spring.

siteforce – integrated cms, point and click editor, prebuilt components, social and mobile built in, 24×7 availability. Killer UI on the new CMS for content creation and publishing.

vmforce – accenture on stage talking about vmforce. Accenture is investing in vmforce – I don’t see anything really new here and the whole thing feels like a little bit of a false start.  With the new acquisition of Heroku, I would be dubious of a large investment in vmforce.

isvforce – packaged apps on the appexchange – more marketecture.  Didn’t see anything new here.

Now have CEO and CIOs on stage from Blackboard, Belkin, Avon, Kelly Services, and Deloitte talking about how the platform has helped them.

that’s a wrap.

Marc Benioff speaking now – 14,000 in attendance at the keynote, 30K registered for conference.  Emphasizing platform and database in the cloud.  Waiting to see where he is going with this, what new announcements he has in his pocket…

Salesforce serves “100,000 customers, running of 1,500 Dell PCs” Marc says. That’s a gross over simplification.  His point is that cloud computing is green because of more efficient use of resources 90% more efficient than traditional hosting.

Talking about salesforce foundation now – asked all non-profits attending to stand up and be recognized – applause.

Broad change in internet usage.  Social networking users surpassed email users last year.  Significant growth in usage via smartphones. Cloud 2 is the shift from easy fast and low cost (Cloud 1) to social and mobile (Cloud 2). Interesting that Marc positions Amazon, Google, and eBay as Cloud 1.

If half a billion people are on facebook, why aren’t we building software that looks like facebook?  Why isn’t enterprise software like facebook?  Focus on 6 clouds: chatter, jigsaw data could, force.com, database.com, along with sales cloud2, service cloud 2.

Major changes in salesforce.com will be annouced tomorow, and appforce to build apps, and site force for sites.

Demoing jigsaw – clean and update your contacts from jigsaw database, can also search for contacts at a opportunity.

CEO of Symantec on stage now. Arguing chatter is more efficient than email, claiming productivity going up. I privately wonder how this can be measured.  Is it just more information overload and more surface level communication without depth? I do get that it is useful to communicate very brief bits of info quickly.

“How do I get my whole company on chatter?” New product announcement – ChatterFree.  Whole company can be on chatter.  Great strategy – obviously trying to be the facebook of business. Admins have to enable it in the organization. Employees can be provisioned automatically or can be invited to join.  Includes chatter on mobile device.  Also, Chatter.com coming by end of year – free for everyone, generally available public site.

Demo of service cloud 2 – screen pop integrated with telephone system, integrated with knowledge base and a call script. Also demoed the availability of the KB via google search. Agent to web visitor chat is included in service cloud 2.  Demoed twitter integration showing how service cloud can monitor tweets and create cases, including photos and location information, and send answer via tweet.

force.com huge announcements coming tomorrow – vision of leading platform for cloud 2.0 applications – faster cloud 2 apps, including java. 185K force.com apps today.  Big emphasis on Open – make it open.

Database.com announcement: claim to have the most scalable cloud database – 25B db xactions through Q311, 200B DB records, 12B custom tables, response times falling to around 275ms.  When they released chatter,  they extended the DB model to include social data model (follow any entity) and recently published a mobile / REST APIs.

Announcing today database.com – “first enterprise database for cloud 2” open to any language / platform.  Full relational db, full text search index, user mgmt, row level security, triggers and stored procs, authentication, APIs.  Elastic, auto-upgrade, auto-backup, auto-disaster recovery. Trusted and secure, SAS 70 Type II certified.

Database.com demo: view of db instances after login. Create an db, graphical schema editor in nice UI, showing console running a select to show the db is online.  Showing VMForce java code connecting to db.com. demoing facebook app querying jobs database and uploading a resume to a open position. facebook app is a php app running on EC2. Demoing android app now pulling job data from db.com. Finally, showing recruiting app running on ipad.  Sharing and security of db.com restricts visibility of job applications to relevant departments. Showing collaboration in interview process attached to job application using chatter like social sharing.

Database.com will be available next year. first 100K records are free. $10/month per 100K records. Benioff promises even more announcements tomorrow. Will I Am and Stevie Wonder tonight.  Gnereal Powell tomorrow?  Wow.

Here waiting for keynote to start…. It is at least double the conference of 2008. I estimate this room can hold 10,000 people. Will be interesting to hear what Benioff announces today.

I am fascinated by this story released late in November describing a computer work aimed at altering the code in industrial control systems, specifically it seems, the uranium centrifuges running Siemens control software.  The theory continues that the worm was targeted even more specifically to  damage the centrifuges at Natanz, the Iranian enrichment facility.

Another good analysis of this story can be found on this security blog by Bruce Schneier (aka the man on cryptography).  Bruce provides a link to Symantec’s detailed evaluation of the worm.

As you read about this worm, you can’t help but to be impressed with the complexity and sophistication of the software and people behind it.  This was definitely not a one man job – this required the effort of a small team of people with very specific skills – PC vulnerabilities, network communications, coding for industrial programmable logic controllers, and sophisticated story boarding of the entire worm lifecycle. It required all of this, plus very specific knowledge of the centrifuges being targeted along with operational knowledge of how the facilities function.  to top it all off, the worm has sophisticated update and reporting capabilities as well as being able to hide itself from detection.  Really amazing to put this all together in one tidy nuclear-program disabling package.

On my day off today, I find myself contemplating how little time there is to smell the roses (and write blog posts).  We have so tuned our processes that really there is no downtime.  It turns out that when you add Agile development processes to delivering software as a service (SaaS), what you achieve is a relentless pace of innovation.  That’s good right?

Well, it does have a few consequences that are important to manage.  First is that there is never time to go back and finish that unit test, test automation, or UI tweak you really wanted to do last sprint.  You need to be complete and ready to move on to the next project.  We’ve been working on ways to improve here which will be part of a follow up post (really it will).

This post is about another consequence – we deliver innovation so quickly while also working on the way we deliver that it is easy to lose sight of how far we come.  As I overheard on a flight yesterday, “the days are long and the years are short”.  So true.

To combat this in my team, we try to be as rigorous about our celebrations as we are about our delivery.  We deliver somewhere around 10 times a year (even more with minor updates) and this will only grow as our product line continues to expand.  Still there are certain deliveries that stand out as larger accomplishments and 3 times a year as a team we will take a day and celebrate.

Often these celebrations include a team engineering event – we’ve built tinker toy towers, water balloon launchers, and aqueducts.  We’ve played kickball, laser tag, and cruised the lake on a party barge.  Once a year in Dec/Jan, we will take stock and as a team, share what we feel are our largest accomplishments as we also layout how we want to raise the bar for the next year.

It can be exhausting at times to be a part of the relentless pace of Agile delivery, and at those times when the release is rolled out to clients, maybe the last thing you want to do is plan a celebration. But every time we have one of these events, I am reminded what great people we have on our team and how much they deserve (and need) these times together.

Anticipation is high for big announcements this morning. People literally we running to seats when the large garage style doors opened! Never seen anything like it at a conference…

Big announcement: “the future we don’t want” one company (apple) controlling the platform and choices. Google promoting “innovation from everyone”. Android – daily activations have passed 100k a day!

22 demos of the platform …
Announcing release of android 2.2. 2x to 5x increase in app performance from just in time compiler. Added Exchange support. New messaging API cloud to device. Example shown sending a navigation route from desktop browser to an android device. And… Teathering plus mobile hotspot support! Lots of applause here. Major browser improvements – 2-3x JavaScript improvement. Another demo showing android better than ipad. Claim the worlds fastest mobile browser. HTML5 sneak peak of things coming in the future with access to phone tilt, accelerometer.

And… Just announced flash capable browsing and Adobe Air in android. Jabs at apple for not being open and not meeting needs of users. Demo of moving apps from phone to sd card and searching data in apps. Added update all to update apps and auto update. Complete bug reporting from phone viewable in the dev view of the android marketplace.

Now demoing buying apps AND music from a browser on a pc and pushing both directly over the air to the android device! And now showing moving all music from iTunes streaming to the android device.

Adsense for mobile ads – contextually relevant ads on android – banner ads and expandable ads within an app, including rich media in the expanded ad. Also click to call ad, uses location and allows user to directly call for a special offer.

Wow – they are going to give a htc evo 4g phone to everyone here! What am I going to do with all these phones?

Announcing google TV today! full search of tv programs and seamless transition between tv and web. Includes picture in picture to allow live tx viewing while browsing at the same time. Can bookmark tv channels like web pages. “less time finding, more time watching”. can use android phone as input device to control tv, including speach recognition and pushing a video selection from phone to the TV. Built on Android, includes Chrome browser incl Flash. So will be able to run Android apps on TV and can push apps from web app store to the TV. can choose to build apps on android platform or the web app platform using Chrome.

Google has clearly painted a bullseye squarely on Apple.

Whole Google TV platform will be open source next summer, and will be available in Sony integrated TV and via Logitech accessory box thru best buy this fall.

Eric Schmidt now on stage, with the CEO of intel, Sony, Logitech, dish network, best buy, and adobe. Wow. I think only Google could pull this off.

Google VP of Prod Mgmt – HTML 5 is all about giving desktop app power to web apps – access to all local hardware. Demo of MugTug Darkroom using local storage while disconnected from Internet to edit phtoto, very impressive.

Invested $120M in buying On2 to offer an open video format. Believe this is best format for streaming as well. Google just announced they are totally open sourcing VP8 format. YouTube will be supporting. Mozilla Firefox on stage now announcing support. I think it is really great that Google has the Firefox on stage. CEO of Opera now on stage too from Norway. Tag is video 🙂

Adobe now on stage, showing dreamweaver support for html5, and previewing simultaneously for mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers. Announcing flash will play VP8 video. Hinted at a device announcement with google and flash tomorrow! My guess is a ipad competitor, ala the gpad I predicted early this year.

Demoing now the Chrome Webstore. Can add apps to your new tab page in chrome. Can buy apps for browser like iPhone apps. Demoed a star wars Lego game running in a browser based on a gaming platform that allows porting of complex games to HTML5.

Sports Illustrated Editor showing HTML5 prototype of SI. Rearrange your magazine, video and more. Very impressive preview of the future of publishing! The advertising in the magazine is very compelling and immersive.

Chrome being used by 70M users. Google Wave update: wave now open to everyone – making it part of google apps. Any apps domain can now enable Wave! Salesforce is embedding waves into Chatter. Open sourcing their in browser editor today.

Building web apps for work: announcing Google and VMWare:
Cloud Portability based on Spring framework. Bringing together Spring and GWT as an integrated backend and frontend. Power of HTML5 integrated with powerful backend of spring. Very nice demo of a bunch of auto generated spring persistence plus GWT front end generated from the java persistence classes. Eclipse plugin offered of course. Also demoed complete performance tuning with Spring Insight and SpeedTracer. Also demoing GWT 2.1 data presentation widgets working with 20million rows of data across 3 or so tables. Paging thru 5 million records is very fast, and sorting fast as well. Built very quickly an expense report application as a demo.

Mobile ready apps: gwt widgets just demoed also work on mobile apps. Very cool! Demoed on both ipad and android.

Cloud Portability: deploy same app to Google, VMWare vCloud, and VSphere. I wonder if this will work with VMForce?

Just announcing now Appengine for Business – see and manage all apps in your domain, support, SLA, SSL and SQL (bigtable or a standard SQL db). Simple pricing, $8 per user per app per month, max $1000 per month.

Sitting here on a bean bag with the laptop waiting for the keynote and I have to say this is the most excited I’ve been to attend a conference since the old days of COMDEX.   There are so many interesting sessions on Google’s Android movbile platform, cloud computing with appengine, HTML5, and more.  This is a great view of all the leading edge technologies that will be common place in a year.

I’ve activated my Andriod phone Google generously sent me ahead of the conference. It auto assigned a number, so now I have a California mobile number.  Oh well, its free for 30days.  I have to say the browser borders on sucking compared to the iPhone.  I’m forever hitting the wrong key, and my first task for it utterly failed – setting my out of office in Outlook webmail.  The Google browser on the Android phone couldn’t pick a radio button in the outlook web interface to set my out of office.  Switched over to my iphone, no problem.  The email client on the android phone is not nearly as easy to use either, and I make many more typing mistakes with the full keyboard than I do with the iphone on screen keyboard.

This is going to be an awesome 2 days, already I’ve picked out sessions on:

• Open social web
• Google cloud
• Developing with HTML5
• Data migration in appenge
• High throughput data pipelines
• Next gen queries
• And more

One more thing – on the Android phone, you unlock it buy drawing a pattern on the screen.  Cool huh?  But, then the outline of your finger motion is on the screen, so pretty much anyone could see your “password”.  The actual Google phone is probably better than the motorola version I have.  The Google I/O Android App is awesome though – full conference shcedule, maps, build your own agenda, etc.

More to come!

It’s been a busy week as usual this time of year, but right in the middle of the week appeared my very own shiny Droid phone.  I’m still just  a little in awe that Google has offered a new Android based phone to everyone at the conference.  Wow, what an impressive display of financial clout.  I feel it is a smart move – to get the people that obviously care most about what Google is doing to get interested in building Android apps.

I’m very interested in any announcements that might be made at the conference.  I feel relatively confident that Google is working on a tablet to compete with iPad as predicted in this blog in January. (Oh, that was my last post.  Like I said it is very busy this time of year!)

Will they follow Apple’s move and push a table based on Android?  Seems like a plausible move.  With the wood they have behind Android application development, this seems the logical course.

I can’t wait to build an app for this phone.  Yep, tech bribery works.  Good job Google.

This week’s announcement of the new iPad seemed to have been lost in all the middle school humor directed at the name and its association with feminine hygiene products.  That’s really too bad because after thinking about whether this is a novelty or really a revolutionary device for a few days, I think I’m on the side of the latter.

Here are a couple of factors why:

• People are tired of complexity
• More and more sophisticated applications are available in the browser
• Most people don’t need a lot more than email and what is built into the iPad

When compared to the netbook category of mini laptops, the iPad seems more performant – and that display is really gorgeous. The UI is a proven winner in the iPhone, and I can only imagine it is going to be awesome in a larger format 7.5×9.5 screen. A netbook’s only really attractive feature is their price. With a slow Atom processor and tiny screens, I think I’d grow old and blind using one. Of course all of this is a little speculative until we can get our hands on an iPad to see how that virtual keyboard works.

The most interesting move to me is that the iPad runs the iPhone OS. (By the way, it seems that A4 chip Jobs is so proud of is not from Apple after all). I mean, Apple could have built a version of MacOS for the iPad. They went with iPhone OS though, I’m speculating mainly to gain simplicity. Millions of people around the world instantly know how to use the iPad because they have an iPhone. Clearly, they give up a lot on the lack of multitasking, but they gain the hand gesture interface and simplicity.

Recall last year, Google announcing the Google OS – a combination of a lightweight Linux and the Google Chrome browser? At that time, they said to expect this to be available in netbooks in 2010.  My guess is that the iPad is no surprise to the bright folks at Google and that they are working on a compelling device.  So, will they follow Apple’s lead and base a iPad like device on their Andriod Phone OS, or the new Google OS?  I think we’ll see a Google answer to the iPad before Christmas. gPad anyone?  What a fun time to be alive!

The devastation and human suffering in Haiti is truly overwhelming.  A country and a people with so little had everything taken away in a few moments on January 12th.  The stories of survivors still emerging from the rubble 10 and 11 days after the earthquake are simply amazing.

At this time, I truly feel fortunate I can help in just a small way.  In the software development and other technical fields, you often feel so removed from any substantial positive impact that can come of your efforts.  No so in this crisis.  I feel incredibly privileged to work with the great people of Convio who are working hard through this tragedy to help relief organizations raise money to rescue, aid, and rebuild Haiti.  It is in the most difficult circumstances that greatness often emerges.  I see the greatness in the commitment of our clients, and I am blessed to work with great people everyday.

Please join and help with your support of The Red Cross or  one of these quality relief organizations.