What do Odin, 5 hours of my life, and one surprisingly horrendous and anti-user friendly firmware update have in common? A lesson for SaaS!

"Odin sends them to every battle [the valkyries].  They allot death to men and govern victory." - From "The Gylfaginning".  Available online at: http://mikespassingthoughts.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/interesting-quotes-concerning-odin/

"Odin can't see JACK!  And even if he could, there's so much adware around these kernels there HAVE to be 100 codemonkeys throwing malformed javascript at your browser extensions for every one that will actually download.  Forget uncompressing one, I'm too busy killing random tabs!!!!" - Me, approximately two hours into the second burst of activity trying to unbrick a Samsung Galaxy III that got bricked because I follow best practices.

"Aargh!  I need pie!  One of us - me or the phone - will not survive to see tomorrow!!!  This is why people root phones!  I play by the rules, and don't root one, and still get technorubble!"  - Me, approximately another hour later


By now if you are still with me, you are probably wondering where this is headed.  For your interest, this is a cautionary tale, as well as what tripped me to one of the most glaringly bad design decisions and deployments I've ever seen.  And now I share it with you, for better or for worse (hopefully not the latter).

It is pretty much considered a best practice to maintain your computing equipment at the most recent stable release. We've all done those update cycles for our Windows machines, or had them done on us even though we said to let us choose (don't get me started on THAT!) but they exist for every system there is, including our cell phones.  So, this morning, being a responsible computing professional, I initiated a system software (firmware) update from the AT&T system.  It is a standard process, and generally only non-harmful software is located on their servers.  To foreshadow, the service professional I spent a while on the phone with actually said, "It's the safest thing to do, and I do it all the time.  I've never seen it do that."

After downloading 680+ MB of code over my handy dandy home wireless pipe, my phone acted like a system in that scenario normally does.  It blinked a bit, put out a message about rebooting to complete the process, then underwent a process known as brickulation.

It turned into a brick.  When the system tried to come back up, it stuck at the splash screen.  For the remainder of its normal life.  Battery pulls, resets, even what is known as a factory reset - none of those things could revive it.  It would boot to the same spot, then die right there, heating the battery so rapidly that I had to actually put it in the freezer while I was on the line with tech support to avoid a diagnosis of brickulation with advanced iBatteryfirehazarditis.

We tried everything, and I do mean everything.  I took it to the Samsung tech at Best Buy (first time I've walked out of there without having spent some serious coin) for a wizardly stab at fixing it. I tried the Kies updater, I tried every permutation of the reboot sequence, and nothing happened.  It always froze at the same spot.  I wiped the device.  I plugged and unplugged, everything.

I eventually even moved to trying Odin 3.7, which is the name given to the kernel loading system for Android.  With that you should be able to insert an operating system kernel onto an Android device, but it couldn't see the phone, and getting a true version of the kernel code instead of adware riddled garbage left the pursuit empty.  Nothing worked, and so a new phone will arrive via delivery sometime soon.

So I'm frustrated at what happened, but am very happy with AT&T and how they handled the situation, and are getting me a replacement phone, so kudos to them.  BUT... a pox upon the coders and system wonks who came up with the updater system, and here's why.

As someone who works often with problem resolution for computing technology, I'm a fan of the clarity that comes from well-documented reporting of issues, so while I was on the line, using my wife's phone, which is identical to mine, I walked step by step through the update process (there was a fair amount of confusion on the call at the beginning, and it took a while to get beyond the concept of updating an app to the reality of an approved firmware update that went toes up).  I reached the point where you click 'Continue' to actually start the upgrade, and figured that since her phone is identical to mine, and the update bricked mine, my luck was too thin to go any further.  However, at that moment I noticed there was no cancel button.  NO CANCEL BUTTON!

Figuring that this was just sloppy code engineering - and it truly is - I hit the back button.  There was no result.  A reboot of the phone brought it back to the same point, where the update was demanding that the Continue button be clicked.  Every trick I know how to do, except for randomly killing processes, resulted only in the insistent presentation of the screen demanding I press Continue so that it could proceed down the same road I'd been down with my new brick.

Yet another phone call with tech support provided me with the unbelievable answer that, though there had been nothing downloaded yet, when you click on 'Check for updates', it commits you to a process from which there is no recovery, except to go through it.  There is no stop, killing processes will brick your phone (apparently so will the update, but I digress), and if you accidentally click Continue, you have to stay inside your WiFi coverage, or unknown, bad, bricking things will lurk (apparently, they lurk within the update as well).

I maintain that coding up a firmware update process without the ability to stop it before it even downloads anything, or does anything, is a deplorable and inexcusable violation of good coding practices.  I don't know who would be the one responsible for that - the carrier, Samsung, Linus T. (though I'd bet a large amount of cash that Linus would be just as appalled as I am, so maybe not him) - but whoever it is should have to compress 1 TB of video files using only a 486-based system running only Windows ME as a punishment.  We are now going to pass off the risk of finishing the upgrade that cannot be stopped to the AT&T store, because if they run the update, and it bricks the phone, then they broke the phone (I want to be clear that was the support suggestion - I don't really go for the slick passing of risk, preferring instead to work together to get solutions, rather than play hot potato with device warranties - I MOSTLY prefer intelligent code practices, though, and since I don't get my wish there...).

WAIT!  I promised a lesson for SaaS, didn't I.  Here it is: If you are providing an assertion to a customer that an update is approved and okay for them to use, then it truly needs to be okay, and safe, and needs to contain sufficient reversibility, as well as proper design and a stepped approach, with appropriate user-optional choices to end the process.  Consider designing software to be used in an update scenario more along the lines of how you plan updating of a database.  When you update a database, there is a process that changes the value being used, and at the end of whatever process runs, there is what is called a commit, which then makes the change permanent.  If you do not plan for that kind of update process, and there is not sufficient attention to making sure that the user can decide not to carry it out, then you are asking for an issue such as this, occurring to someone like me, with enough knowledge of the guts of the systems to handily dismiss the front line of OS defense - it wasn't us, and it is out of the warranty period - to entertain your service staff.  As I end this, I humbly submit that success in the SaaS arena will come from changing your internal interpretation of the abbreviation from 'Software as a Service' to "Service applied as Software'.  Now to rescue the remainder of the evening, while simultaneously placing the turkey into much peril.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and may your updates always result in a good reboot.

Piles of Bits

" I don’t think enough people study the measurements that have already been made. Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change the life of a patient, or change the world. If I don’t analyze those data and show others how to do it, too, I fear that no one will.”–Atul Butte, Stanford, available at http://whatsthebigdata.com/2012/07/13/big-data-quotes-of-the-week-13/

I'm at IOD 2013, waiting on the start of the morning General Session, and on the screen are various stats - #of Tweets sent, etc.  It brings home what situation we're in as we try to make our way through the forest of data.

Without inferring anything (and please don't,  because coffee #1 isn't yet halfway gone) I'm reminded of the old scenario of taking a large number of chimps and putting them in a room filled with typewriters, with the result being that one of them would write a best seller.

What I mean by that is we are beyond the days of carefully crafted communication,  as well as the mysterious art of divining tone and undercurrents from a small piece of communication. We stand in front of a data cannon, loaded with birdshot (large numbers of small projectiles).

That isn't a bad thing.  Instead of worrying about nuances, those are fairly gone (as are grammar, spelling, and civility filters), so we only need to gather the right pieces in front of us and see them where they are.

This is the butterfly effect writ larger - larger because of the potential financial impact, which is the driver of most everything. 

I could write the same again, instead here's an earlier post reflecting what's up here.  http://www.cicsworld.org/blogs/ctuite/2013/10/edward_tufte_and_samuel_morse.html#

The Most Useful App Ever

I love the Instamatic application on my iPhone, it takes the coolest photos.
Carolyn Murphy 
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/application_2.html#52DOUw4rZwBkkxPP.99

I have now been a smartphone user for the last half a decade.  I began of course with the Blackberry, and then expanded to the Android system.  In all that development there has been a tremendous amount of development of power and data manipulation ability.  It's even such that I now can almost replace my laptop - almost.  Blogging is something that I have done using that keyboard form factor, but if you have attempted to type more than a text message, you can see the futility.

So there was one thing which hadn't been done until about a year and-a-half that was thoroughly surprising.  Up until that point in time, there was really no way to print anything from the phone.  I have to wonder why.

What is it about the process of replacing the computing devices with more mobile computing devices that left an dearth across the entire platform?  Every portion of the computing experience was duplicated, from the ability to use a word processor and a spreadsheet to the ability to mindmap and plan.  There have been applications to organize appointments and to manage finances, yet none to get anything useful out of them.

In the 'good old days', there were these things called printer drivers, and whenever software was written, it was written to be able to send data to the printer, no matter what it was.  It was useful if you needed to take information off of your computer and share it with someone easily, even if they didn't have a computer handy.

Enter the best of the technological advances, and suddenly the useful pieces of technology went away.  Screenshots and printing (though screenshots are now available on the Galaxies III and IV, and possibly other devices) were suddenly gone.  I'm not really sure if they were gone because the technology didn't exist to make it happen, or because nobody who was writing the apps took into consideration that they might be good for more than social media and Angry Birds.  

The problem has now been solved with an app to print to wireless printers - incidentally the highest price app I've purchased (not even $15, but with the general free-ness of the app store...) - but that still leaves the overall issue of the loss of functionality it what should be an evolutionary step forward.

My point with all this is that as we move forward with what we do, we need to be able to keep the things that we need to be able to use before we get to the new stuff that we might want to use.  This isn't to say that we need to always do things the old way, but consider this: what would be the point of a word processor without a way to print the output?  Spellcheck is already everywhere on the phone, and there are much simpler things that can be done if the text will remain mostly on the screen.  The purpose of a word processor is to produce things that will eventually be printed out (or converted into a PDF, which is actually similar in function), yet that feature was the laggard among all the others.