Android versus iPhone

Red Sweater Blog – Pain Is A Gift

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/1292/pain-is-a-gift

The risk to Apple is not in losing the masses, but in losing the faithful core. In their unchallenged position, Apple made a lot of right decisions, but they also made mistakes, particularly in the form of political moves that limit what developers can distribute on the platform. These restrictions are done in the name of quality control, but anybody who has browsed the App Store knows that all this autonomy has done little to stem the flow of trashy, embarrassing apps.

What they have done is alienated developers, and ultimately deprived users of software they want to see on the platform. My fear is these botched decisions are hurting Apple, but they aren’t feeling it. Pain is a gift: the signal that prevents a burned finger tip from becoming a body engulfed in flames. Apple is numb from success, and I hope the emerging competition from Google and others will re-sensitize them to the threat of failure.

Google’s Android is the best challenge yet to the political and technical decisions made by Apple for its iPhone and related products. I welcome the challenge, and look forward to Apple’s scrappier, revitalized retaliation.

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Alternate LOST Endings

Pretty funny:

Personally, I was hoping for a Gilligan's Island inspired ending.

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What are your favorite programming-related academic papers?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/358033

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HTML 5 Asteroids

http://dougmcinnes.com/html-5-asteroids/

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access the Google App Engine datastore from Clojure

http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2010/05/dsl-to-access-google-app-engine.html

This is all you need to know to write code to access the datastore. If you are new to Clojure (and any other Lisp language), than you might get a feeling why Paul Graham once said: "Lisp's power is multiplied by the fact that your competitors don't get it." Use simple data structures. Create powerful functional abstractions. Write less code. If you want to give our mini-languages a try, you can find the code here. You will find features for :pre-save and :post-load functions on entity level, transactions with automatic retries, query by key, return only keys from a query, automatically resolving parent/child relationships between entities and automatically resolving entities from attributes that contain keys.

See also:

http://github.com/smartrevolution/clj-gae-datastore

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Guy Steele: Organizing functional code for parallel execution

http://labs.oracle.com/projects/plrg/Publications/ICFPAugust2009Steele.pdf

> The Big Messages
> • Effective parallelism uses trees.
> • Associative combining operators are good.
> • MapReduce is good. Catamorphisms are good.
> • There are systematic strategies for parallelizing superficially > sequential code.
> • We must lose the “accumulator” paradigm and emphasize > “divide-and-conquer.”

> The Parallel Future
> • We need parallel strategies for problem decomposition, data > structure design, and algorithmic organization:
>
> The top-down view: Don’t split a problem into “the first” and > “the rest.” Instead, split a problem into roughly equal pieces; > recursively solve subproblems, then combine subsolutions.
>
> The bottom-up view: Don’t create a null solution, then successively > update it; Instead, map inputs independently to singleton solutions, > then merge the subsolutions treewise.
>
> Combining subsolutions is usually trickier than incremental update > of a single solution.

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History of St. Christopher's Parish in San Jose

Someone should write a history of St. Christopher's Parish in San Jose.  My grandmother, Aileen Miner, was a founding member of the parish, but I don't know much about the early days in the 1950s.  There's a page for the history of the school, which gives September 1955 as the opening date of the school.  The current church was finished in 1957.  The original church building was taken over by the school at that time.  I believe that Msgr. Healy was the original priest.  He was the longtime pastor when I was growing up.  Msgr. Norman Allen took over as pastor after the death of Msgr. Healy.  Msgr. James Walsh has been pastor for many years.  He is planning to retire this summer and return to his native Ireland.  Fr. Walsh had been an associate priest at St. Chris when I was a student there in the 1970s. Everyone loves him and wishes him all the best in his retirement.  He will be missed. I have been informed that the next pastor will be Fr. Wifredo Manrique, known as "Fr. Willie".  I look forward to meeting him on my next visit.

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iPhone wireframe stencils for Google Docs

http://mortenjust.com/2010/05/02/iphone-wireframe-stencils-for-google-docs/

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