Everyone's allowed a little self-promotion once in a while!  Here's a video of me showing off a new QNX CAR feature:  iPod Out Video

I don't think I'll be moving to Hollywood anytime soon!

I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.  Android gets big enough and it'll attract lawsuits... Oracle is suing Google over some of the contents of Android.  Google's reimplementation of Java through it's Dalvik VM and Android's success obviously makes Oracle want a piece of the action.

The specific patents involved: 6,125,447; 6,192,476; 5,966,702; 7,426,720; RE38,104; 6,910,205; and 6,061,520.  Oh, and they also claim copyright infringement to boot.

Is this a legitimate lawsuit?  Is Google going to have to retract portions of Android or Dalvik?  I could see Google trying to out-technology Oracle to solve the patents just out of spite, even if that has a big slowdown to the growing Android community.  I don't know, and I'm not a lawyer.  But I did read through the patents involved, and it seems that there are three groups of complaints.

One is on security mechanisms and resource protection of Java.  That one seems like it will be hard to defend against, since Dalvik mimics much of the Java mechanism.

The other is on how class files are processed and packaged.  My guess is that Google could probably get around this one without too much trouble by redoing their tools.  You already have to recompile Java anyway for Android, why not redo how class files are handled?

The third area is around how the VM optimizes instructions. Parts of the claimed patents seem easy to avoid, but others do not.  This could be a difficulty to work around, but I'm not certain.

Of course Google's other option is just to pay Oracle off.   Would Oracle ask for an injunction on shipping Android devices to spite Google?  Don't know.  Either way, I suspect there will be interesting times ahead for the Android ecosystem.

Phones and cars don't mix, right? I mean, everyone knows that handholding a phone while driving is distracting, dangerous, and just plain dumb.

But what if your phone could warn you of potentially dangerous traffic conditions? What if it could emit an alert when your driving behavior suggests you are distracted?

For Roger Lanctot of Strategy Analytics, those aren't academic questions. He believes that the smart phone is "rapidly becoming a platform for delivering safety systems into vehicles..."

In case you haven't noticed, QNX has hired Derek Kuhn to take over the post of VP, sales and marketing.

Derek is that rarest of birds: An engineer who totally gets marketing and PR. He groks that, to succeed, a technology business must do two things: 1) build the best mousetrap, and 2) ensure that everyone knows it. Emphasis on the everyone.

If you want evidence of Derek's marketing savvy, you don't have to look far...

A colleague of mine pointed me to this blog from Dave Kleidermacher, which, although hosted on the EE Times website, sounds suspiciously like a GreenHills ad:
“Hello, I’m a VxWorks device. Would you like to own me?”

By definition, Heisenbugs are sensitive to being observed: They appear sporadically during normal operation, but disappear when the developer attempts to track them down in debug mode. The very act of debugging eliminates the subtle timing interactions or other conditions that trigger these bugs into action.

It's no surprise, then, that Heisenbugs are often difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate. Nonetheless, developers can create applications that are resilient to these maddently elusive defects. They can, for example, use virtually synchronous replication...

While Canada was sleeping (yesterday was the Civic Holiday in Canada), the GenIVI Alliance released a report that "predict[s] QNX will withdraw from the IVI market eventually. Questionable future is also due to lack of a consortium (such as GENIVI) to drive the architecture."

Seems a little self serving for GenIVI to state that we won't be successful because we're not GenIVI.  It's news to me also that we're withdrawing from the market, especially since we're hiring more people every day in support of the business we're continuing to grow.

Apparently the report doesn't hold water with independent analysts either.  Roger Lanctot in his Strategy Analytics blog disputes quite a few points in the GenIVI report as simplistic or overstating the facts.  He shows too that the report attempts to bolster the GenIVI point of view without providing any real evidence.  Interestingly enough, the GenIVI report claims that it interviewed people throughout the industry, including QNX.  I'd be interested to know who exactly they interviewed at QNX and what they contributed to that report.

The GenIVI Alliance publishes the summary report, but of course you can't read the full version of the report without joining GenIVI.  (No wonder they have so many members!  Maybe I should publish a slanderous white paper about GenIVI, but you have to join QNX CAR to read it :-)

Every month, QNX publishes The Source, a newsletter that provides the skinny on the latest QNX BSPs, product releases, whitepapers, webinars, and blog posts. It's a quick read -- virtually no marketing fluff -- and you can scan it in about 20 seconds. To subscribe, click here.

In case you missed the July issue, here it is...

I've posted a number of articles on the LTE Connected Car, which helps automakers, service providers, and content developers explore what happens when cars connect to the cloud over wideband wireless networks.

But here's the thing: people often assume that a cloud-connected car is simply about pushing more social media, more music, more video, more games, and, in short, more entertainment into the vehicle. Nested within that assumption is another assumption: that cloud-connected cars will lead to more driver distraction.

I'm not convinced...