Snapdragon running Flash 10.1 on 3 devices with 3 different OS platforms

The Lenovo Skylight, the HTC HD2, and the Google Nexus One, each using a different OS (custom Linux, Winmobile 6.5, and Android respectively) all running Flash 10.1 on live websites. Very impressive.

Apple may not be in the Flash camp, but flash still runs many many web sites and video content. Flash will continue to do so for many years. I’m glad Snapdragon devices support it.

Bonus - the Skylight has a wireless USB mouse plugged into it. Looks great using standard equipment like that.

Can't wait for your own ipad, make a demo unit

Need to know if the iPad is right for you? Can't wait 60 days to find out? Make a 1:1 model. Don't forget to make it the correct weight. Like so:

Also, don't forget the apple logo on the back, orientation is important here:

Now carry it around everywhere you go and see how it fits in your life style. Here it is in the car:

My impression? It feels pretty heavy. Seems like for a book it is on the heavy side. For video and web surfing it is far less weighty than a laptop.

Screen size is huge. Likely just right. I'd really like to see it in person.

Thanks to Brandon for modeling.

Becoming an activist

During the last major election, when Obama was elected, I did some work for democrats. Phone calls and such. Actually I did some calls for move on four years before that as well.

Recently we moved to Carrboro. We chose our house, in part, because across the street is a huge forest with no paved trails in it. We've been in there a lot. I've marveled at some vines larger than my thigh climbing up some very large trees. It's an impressive place. It's also a place with impromptu to steam crossings, steep hills (some difficult), and my favorite: rope swings. 

Where we moved from (Cary) there is almost nothing like this. All the trails there are nicely paved and manicured. We got claustrophobic there and marveled at our good fortune at finding a place where things are just not like that.

So it was with great shock and sadness that I learned late last year of a plan to pave a trail next to Bolin Creek all the way from one end of the forest to the other. To be sure this would make it easier to get from point A to point B. But when I saw the consultant's report, with only one alternative given, with the black and white before vs. color after photos (complete with Disneyfication), I got angry. Then I got active.

I helped form Save Bolin Creek. We have a blog, a facebook group, Yahoo groups for email, and an online petition. Never having done anything like this I have no idea where this will go, or what will happen. But I'm willing to find out.

Mentoring sometimes means peeking

Just heard of a netlist extraction script that took 3 hours to complete. If you’re not familiar, we’re talking about removing 10k or so of text from a 50-100 megs of text. Should this take 3 hours?

Lets see, search all the lines for the module in question, remove lines until the end of that module.

No, that should not take 3 hours. So why does it? The answer we got is that an intern wrote the script and its performance, due to algorithm choice, degrades exponentially with file size. Huh? How did that get released to the general population? Sure it works, but 3 hours for something that should take minutes is a glaring error in algorithm choice.

This tells me that this intern’s mentor didn’t do a good job. Mistakes in algorithm choice are common with green engineers. Mentors need to look out for that and need to pay close attention to an intern’s work. Algorithm review, code review are all required to ensure a good final result.

In this case the result was not good. I blame the mentor.