Ars Technica says the HTC 10 is the best Android phone of 2016. The new design looks very nice. I like how there’s a little room under the sides when it lays on a flat surface. IMHO, that makes it a easier to pick up, whereas with flat phones you sometimes have to slide them off a flat surface to pick them up.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 206)
I don’t have much of a bucket list these days, but one thing I’d really like to do is go back to Key West, Florida and take this Stargazer Cruise. I’ve only been to Key West once, and I saw this cruise, but didn’t take it. I guess that in general, a goal of mine is to see the nighttime stars as much as possible, and this seems like a great way to see them.
Here’s a link to the transcript of Jonas Bonér’s talk, Bla Bla Microservices Bla Bla.
When you go to install the Vivaldi web browser on a Mac, you’ll see their slogan, “A browser for our friends.”
Facebook just announced a tool named ReDex that can help make Android apps smaller and faster. Their blog post is here, and their source code is at this Github URL.
Strictly speaking, Amdahl’s Law isn’t only about speeding up serial programs by using parallel processing techniques, but in practice that’s often the case. Here’s a description from Wikipedia:
“Amdahl's law is often used in parallel computing to predict the theoretical speedup when using multiple processors. For example, if a program needs 20 hours using a single processor core, and a particular part of the program which takes one hour to execute cannot be parallelized, while the remaining 19 hours (p = 0.95) of execution time can be parallelized, then regardless of how many processors are devoted to a parallelized execution of this program, the minimum execution time cannot be less than that critical one hour. Hence, the theoretical speedup is limited to at most 20 times (1/(1 − p) = 20). For this reason parallel computing is relevant only for a low number of processors and very parallelizable programs.”
The image comes from this Wikipedia page. I just looked up that information after starting to watch this YouTube video about Amdahl’s Law, Ruby, and Scala, at Twitter.
If you ever want to learn more about Scala “types,” this page about Scala’s types of types is a good reference.
This article about the Redoubt Reporter on Hiatus is a great story about someone struggling to be able to afford doing something that they love doing, which in this case is being a reporter and running a small newspaper in Alaska.
If you wonder about the name, per Wikipedia, “Redoubt Volcano, or Mount Redoubt, is an active stratovolcano in the largely volcanic Aleutian Range of the U.S. state of Alaska.” You can see Mount Redoubt from Homer, Alaska, and various points along the Kenai Peninsula.
LionsRoar.com has Benedict Cumberbatch on their cover this month, and this little preview of an interview with him online. In it he states, “I’d always been fascinated by the idea of meditation and what it meant. It was incredible. When you’ve been that still and contemplative, your sensory awareness is heightened and more sharply focused.”
I learned about S.N. Goenka when reading a few books by Ram Dass. Interestingly, Goenka told Dass and many other followers of the Maharaji, “You don’t need a stinking guru” (I’m paraphrasing a bit there). Despite that, Dass and many other Maharaji disciples learned how to meditate from Goenka.
LionsRoar.com has this article, The Universal Meditation Technique of S.N. Goenka, which is a nice interview with Norman Fischer.
People wonder what makes Bill Belichick successful. As a Colts fan throughout the 2000s, I would have said that it was his willingness to bend, stretch, and break the rules, as every time Peyton Manning got a drive going, one of the Patriots defenders would suddenly have a mysterious injury and lay down on the field, completely unable to move. Then two plays later he would be back in the game. Then there was the whole thing about recording the other team’s walk-through in the Super Bowl.
But if you look past all those things, what Belichick says about his success is what we used to say when looking for great developers. We wanted to find the guys who had the “love of the game,” guys (or women) who wrote code in their spare time because they loved it. They didn’t just write code from 9 to 5, they were always thinking about it, exploring new languages and tools, etc.
(The image comes from the sportingnews.com.)
As a bit of an experiment, I’m trying a couple of RSS readers again. I got away from them for a while, but once you realize you have a series of interests that you want to keep up with, I think they make sense. They don’t give you the “discovery” aspect you find with other sources, but they’re good for consistency.
Important parts of a good RSS reader are being able to organize sources into folders, showing the RSS list and previews of each article, and being able to keep my lists in sync across multiple devices.
In 2011 Gartner predicted that by 2015, tablet sales would reach 300M annually, with half of those being iPads. IDC says that in 2015, 207M tablets were sold, and 50M of those were iPads. (So Gartner was quite a bit off on those numbers.) This re/code story says that the problem is phones.
