These are my own personal views and those of my company Phaedrus Systems. www.phaedsys.org which is where the full version of this column resides under the Technical Papers button.

 

Last month I mentioned the petition on the PM’s web site to have the term “Engineer” protected, not just Chartered Engineer as it is now. See http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Engineer-Status/ since last month the number of petitioners has jumped 10,000 which is good but it is still nothing like the 2 million that signed up for the road tax.

I looked on the IET forums to discover some arguments about the petition. Some didn’t like it because it did not mention I.Eng others because they thought it poorly worded and others because they did not want to be linked to Mechanical Engineers who had also signed up. Most were arguing amongst themselves over the minor details. I find this disappointing.

Every engineer should be backing this initiative, even those who are not currently Chartered Engineers. This is for several reasons. Partly because it will raise the status of Engineering in a similar manner to doctors, lawyers and architects but also because when the requirement for Professionally Qualified Engineers on many projects becomes a reality it is better we have designed and implemented our own system than the government does it for us

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Ask any electrician or gas fitter about the systems they have to labour under. Whilst they like the idea in principal most do not like the actual systems they are landed with in practice. The Doctors, Lawyers and others implemented their own systems and the government took them as read.

This petition does not mention I.Eng or Eng Tech but once the work of protecting the word “Engineer” starts the IET and BCS along with the other engineering institutes will be the people building the system. Engineer will be protected as it is in much of Europe and the terms Chartered, Incorporated and Technician will be part of it.

The other more important point for many of you will be that many projects in the embedded world, being safety or mission critical, will start to require “Professionally Qualified Staff”. Though I am sure many will shrug their shoulders and say it doesn’t affect me.

I still don’t understand why software is one of the few professions where people are trying to demote it to a trade rather than promote it to a profession. It is as far as I can see the only profession committing suicide, well in the west any way. As I pointed out last month the Far East has cottoned on and they are moving in to be far more professional. Many of you could find that the reason why work is now going out to the Far East is not because they are cheaper but because they are Professionally Qualified and working to all the standards like ISO 9K, CMM, 61508 etc . In fact as I mentioned last month there is a major Indian automotive R&D company that is competing on 61508 projects and now I see that the major global aviation and defence consortium, European Aviation, Defence and Space company (EADS), will invest in an engineering centre in India to develop aviation software and aircraft designs for its planes and other systems. This is proof that it is not just the cheap stuff that is going East.

You can be certain that the other European countries with the rules already in place are not going to relax them for the UK. So today, now would be best, vote on-line for Engineer to be protected http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Engineer-Status/ , join the IET or BCS http://www.theiet.org/membership/index.cfm and start your C.Eng or I.Eng application, TODAY. It’s either that or look for a new career because the embedded engineering market in the UK will shrink over the next decade unless we do something NOW!

Despite this being the April edition there are no April fools gags in the column. That said there were a couple of good ones namely a “Microsoft Press Release” stating that they were placing the Vista code under a GPL license, something to do with needing many programmers to help find the bugs and an absolutely brilliant offer from Google for broadband that is well worth a look: See http://www.google.com/tisp/index.html If it is still there do delve around. It is extremely well done and I wonder how many it fooled.

One announcement that many thought was a wind up was actually serious was that Red Hat was behaving like Microsoft! I got the details from the eWeek news letter see

http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-5933-8-85-160091-663531-0-0-0-1 It turns out that RedHat are getting all corporate and are trying to protect their IP just like other commercial companies. Redhat is trying to stop people offering training in the RedHat H***** platform (apparently the word is their trademark). They have told various people offering training in various RedHat systems that they can not mention the name in course advertising. This has caused some interesting comments in the OS community it seems that there are cracks in paradise and that Linux is starting to become commercial in the same way Windows or Solaris is… and you can get free versions of both just like Linux. eWeek was reporting from people they interviewed at the TheServerSide Java Symposium, most of whom declined to be named. These people were making comments that are starting to sound like some of the anti MS rhetoric we used to hear from the Open Source brigade about MS. It seems like the big winners in the Open Source world are in fact as commercial and corporate as the nasty commercial and corporate companies who sell pay-ware.

Now this might be a storm in a teacup or it might be the beginning of the end of the Open Source party. Whilst digging around on the Redhat item I discovered that the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group merged to form the Linux Foundation on March 27th, http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5616022499.html the point worrying many was that Linux Foundation's new 15-member board is made up mostly of executives from multi-billion dollar companies including many Fortune 500 executives from around the world. For example, a senior VP of the Bank of America, IBM's VP of Open Systems Development; and a Hitachi section manager who oversees workstations and mainframes. The board doesn't include representatives from community-based Linux organizations such as Debian. So the Linux Foundation is basically a commercial corporate organisation.

One of the more interesting comments came from Eric Raymond, one of the great initiators of Open source when Freespire said it aimed to include legal support for every proprietary format and program that is available to Linux. Examples include: MP3, DVD, Windows Media, QuickTime, Java, Flash, Real media, etc Eric said, "If that means paying licensing fees to the Microsofts of the world so that people can watch Windows media files, then so be it."

So Linux may now contain licensed proprietary and commercial code. Most major users and a lot of others now use commercial shrink wrapped paid for Linux installations. It may have been a free lunch once but now the tables, chairs crockery and cutlery have to be paid for. I think the party is over.

Whilst we were on April fools and Microsoft: Microsoft was claiming C99 compliance for their C++ compilers….. Many thought this was a joke too but it turns out that that the new C++ TR (or ISO Technical Report) places the whole C99 library into the C++ library. See http://www.dinkumware.com/tr1.aspx which says that the "C99 library, including all the numerous functions added to the C Standard with C99, properly blended into the C++ environment".

This means that many C++ compilers will contain the C library. However, as some parts of C99 do not behave the same as C++ even with the same syntax. C++ came from ISO C90 and diverged one way as C99 went another way. I think we can expect a few teething troubles. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Many desktop C++ users are migrating to C#, Java or C++/CLI. It does seem that we may end up with a merged C/C++ language again in the future such that one is the sub set of the other.

For those of you who want a complete C 99 standard with annotations that are accurate, unlike a well known annotated book that whose annotations aren’t that accurate you might want to try this one http://www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/cbook.html it is 8MB and really should be on your reference shelf or rather on your hard disk… it is around 1500 pages and a bit much to print.

Whilst we still have C and C++ as separate languages; MISRA-C++ is progressing though a little slower that had been originally hoped but should be out on time for review in May-June I believe. If any one is interested in reviewing it let me know and I will forward your details on to the MISRA-C++ team. You will have to sign a reviewer’s agreement and you can’t distribute the copy. These are more tightly controlled than the ISO committee drafts. It always surprised me how many people used Committee Drafts of the C standard rather than pay the 18USD for a legitimate copy. They usually say the draft is “close enough” to the published standard…. I just hope they don’t work in critical systems. As the old saying goes “close enough is OK for horse shoes and hand grenades!”

The MISRA-C example suite is having it’s final run through for consistency and cross checking. That is the examples have been done we just need to make sure all things are consistent. All the comments have been completed and that we only break the rule we are intending to in the way we thought, though in some cases in order to illustrate an error of one type, we also have to break other umbrella rules.

One thing this exercise has shown is the amount of work that goes into this sort of thing is a lot more than you would think. It has also given us a taste of our own medicine as we actually have to write code to MISRA-C standards but with correctly formed errors... which has given rise to a few more comments in the TC.

I have had some interesting responses for my call for donations to academia which has revived my faith in humanity and common sense.

To end on another high note most of the tools companies I have been talking to over the last month tell me that sales are up for the first quarter this year. That is nice for us we can afford to go on holiday (Barbados looks nice!) but it also indicates that some of you at least are working on new projects. The UK embedded industry in general appears to be doing OK and not just the defence sector. So the End Of The Industry As We Know It is not this month and the sun is shining.