I just got a development kit with some cool toys in it, which is way cool.  However, it did come with a not so nice surprise. You see, up until now I already knew there were a few different kinds of USB connectors

• USB A - the big boxy looking one


• USB B - the wide narrow one


• USB mini B 5 pin - the one we use on Sun SPOT


• USB mini B 4 pint - I know about this one because there are 400 of them sitting in a cupboard in the lab, due to my screwing up in thinking that ordering a USB mini B cable would be enough to get the right thing

One of the projects I've been working on, PlaySIM, used a new USB connector I had not seen before, it seems to be a

• USB To Go mini B connector - scratch head to see what the functional difference is between the mini B and the togo mini B?

So when I got this dev kit I started with on this blog entry, I was not surprised to see this mini B connector again.  What DID surprise me, was

• USB To Go mini A connector

Why?  I dont get it?  Is there really a need to have a USB A & B type connector?  What do they diferentiate? Is it actually physically required?  Is is a scam by cable sellers to get another round at this?

What makes me really laugh is the couple of blog entries I've seen where all the mobile phone manufacturers, including Apple, are supposedly going to use "micro" USB connector as a standard.  So does this mean

• Yet another USB A & B pair of connectors coming out?


• Which connector will they all use?  You think they will use the same actual one, or use different ones as they get as confused as we do with all these different seemingly useless connectors

If someone can help me understand this I would really appreciate it.  Will be more than happy to post an update including extra information.

Now, let me go to my USB cable bin and see if I can find the right one to get this board working

It has been way too long since I last blogged and forget how easy it can actually be.  So here is a thought I wanted to share with all, what is a good interview question.  Well this article seems to like "What do you do in your spare time?"

The Interview Question You Should Always Ask

Even if you had learned about all of Captain Sullenberger's activities, you might have considered his obsession dysfunctional. Wouldn't you rather hire someone well rounded? Someone who has interests beyond the particular? Someone who might be a better communicator?

But people are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them. Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a person's obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. The thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.

Maybe its due to the fact that I am  somewhat obessessive that this rings true to me, your mileage may vary

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a next-generation public-key cryptographic technology that is more resource efficient than RSA (learn why) and was recently endorsed by the NSA for protecting sensitive US Government Information (see The Case for ECC and Suite B).

Sun Labs has played a major role in promoting wide-spread industry adoption of this technology by:

1. Leading the standardization of ECC within SSL/TLS, the dominant security protocol used on the Internet (see RFC 4492 and its earlier versions).
2. Contributing ECC technology to OpenSSL (version 0.9.8 and later) and NSS/Mozilla (version 3.8 and later) -- two cryptographic libraries that power the world's most popular open source web server (Apache) and browser (Firefox), respectively.
3. Initiating and leading a cross-vendor ECC Interoperability Forum (with participants from Apache, Certicom, Microsoft, Mozilla, OpenSSL, Red Hat, RSA, Sun and Verisign) to ensure seamless interoperability between ECC-enabled offerings from different companies.

ECC has been part of Firefox since October 2006 when version 2.0 was released but isn't yet included in the default build of the Apache web server (see Bug 40132). I recently updated the patch and corresponding instructions to create an ECC-enabled version of Apache 2.2.11 with OpenSSL 1.0.0-beta2. If you happen to try out the patch, I'd love to get your feedback.

In case you are wondering "why should I care?", think of this as another step in reducing the computational cost of security so service providers like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Yahoo can turn on HTTPS by default for all user interactions (not just the login phase), thereby boosting privacy on the Internet.