| Tired of rants? Here's some links! |
[May. 24th, 2012|05:30 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | gay, links | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  cheerful | ] |
- Since Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, support for same-sex marriage in Maryland has gone up 12%, almost entirely from blacks. One word: wowowowowow! Minds have been changed!
- If you're at all interested in Windows 8, the Building Windows 8 blog is full of juicy content, like this ridiculously long post about the Windows user experience, past and present. For developers, the Windows 8 app developer blog has a lot of good posts, too.
- I feel like I've posted this before, but here's a good summary of how to spend your money to make yourself happier (buy experiences instead of things, help others instead of yourself, etc.)
- An interesting-looking new book says 20 minutes of being active provide a ton of benefits.
- When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed - wow, could Vioxx really responsible for that??
- Interesting look at Microsoft's "Signature" service to clean off a bunch of crapware the PC makers include. It's nice that you can buy computers from Microsoft Stores, and although some people are making fun of the fact that you can pay $99 and bring in a PC you bought elsewhere to get cleaned off, I think it makes sense. Presumably the PC maker got kickbacks for including that AOL (or whatever the modern equivalent is) software and that made the PC cheaper, so you're just paying more to offset that.
- Iran photoshopped a missile test image...but forgot to take Jar-Jar Binks out. (the image they posted was a joke created after the last time they photoshopped an image of a missile test!)
- An algorithm to help you play the perfect game of Battleship - looks neat, but I'm skeptical about this. His analysis only holds if you assume the position of the ships is random, and if you know your opponent is using Berry's new algorithm, couldn't you deliberately try to place your ships in "unlikely" places? (thanks Jessica!)
- A good discussion of the ESPP tax rules, which are pretty complicated. There are graphs!
- Polarization is real, and mostly on the Republican side.
- Check out this crazy non-stick coating invented at MIT - it makes ketchup flow out of a bottle like, well, a liquid!
- For Eurovision fans: a look at which countries tend to vote for each other.
- Why People Loved webOS - so true. |
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| Windows Phone 7 App Hub - my complaints |
[May. 16th, 2012|07:52 pm] |
In the wake of complaining about background tasks in Win 8 (that was later rescinded), here are my complaints about the Windows Phone 7 App Hub, where you submit new apps and look at download numbers, etc.
Before I begin: I rant because I care :-) I'm still very happy with Windows Phone 7 (and Windows 8!) development, and plan on sticking around it for a while, unless of course Microsoft pulls a webOS like HP did. (dear Microsoft: please don't do this!) But there is some serious need for improvement here.
(Had I been writing this a few months ago, my number one complaint would be that the page itself was dog slow, but Microsoft seems to have fixed that. Yay!)
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When I load the App Hub page, 95% of the time I have a simple question: How many copies did my app sell today? For webOS and Android, their consoles answer an equivalent question: how many copies has the app sold over its lifetime? Let's count the number of clicks it takes to answer that question:
First I load the page (I won't count this as a click), and I see something like this:
You might think the answer to my question is right by the word "FlightPredictor": 101. Or at least you might think that's the total number of sales. Sadly, it is the number of downloads in the last 30 days. This is interesting information (as is the graph at the bottom), but it doesn't answer my question. So click 1 is to click on the "101" number, which by the way does not do the same thing as clicking "FlightPredictor".
That takes us to this screen:
Here we can see a nice pretty graph, which is again interesting, but it only covers the last thirty days. So clicks 2-4 are setting the Start date to March 1, which is before FlightPredictor was released. (for bonus fun: this will take one more click every month!) Then click 5 is clicking Refresh Report, which shows me the full graph. But the numbers include trial downloads, which I am interested in, but I don't get paid for. To see the paid numbers, click 6 is clicking on Details, which takes me to this screen:
and then click 7 is advancing to page 2, where I can see the paid downloads for the US. If other countries had any paid downloads, I guess I'd have to add those up.
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So...yeah. In theory I could get by with not resetting the date range and use the "export details" button to look at an Excel spreadsheet and look at just the most recent daily numbers that way, but most of the time I'd much rather be able to see the numbers in a browser, rather than firing up Excel. It would be really nice if this information was more easily accessable! |
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| Windows 8 Metro: everything is fine re background tasks, nothing to see here |
[May. 14th, 2012|09:17 pm] |
After kvetching a bit about Windows 8 Metro background tasks, Jared Bienz set me straight.
The right way to do this is to either use push notifications to update the tile, or a TileUpdateManager to have it poll for tile updates. In both cases the difference is that you're not actually scheduling a background task - you're just providing a way to get a tile notification, which is a bit of XML that describes how to change the tile.
Now, this isn't ideal for me the programmer, since I need to set up an extra server, but it does scale better with lots of different apps and preserves battery life, etc. So it's all good, and hopefully lots of Win 8 apps will take advantage of one of these two ways to get power-efficient live tiles that update! |
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| Penguin pictures! |
[May. 14th, 2012|01:55 pm] |
We saw a penguin at SeaWorld! Here is proof:
(and yes, the penguin is adorable!) |
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| Imagine: How Creativity Works review |
[May. 13th, 2012|10:08 pm] |
 Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book! It's all about creativity, how it works, and how you can become more creative. It's very much in the style I like, where they talk about a lot of different studies and case studies, and try to make sense of it all. So, some interesting things:
- Daydreaming is important for creativity - one important function seems to be to search for relationships and notice new connections. People who consistently daydream more score higher on measures of creativity. But the trick is to be aware that you're daydreaming - if you unconsciously daydream, the creative thoughts will be lost.
- On the other hand, being able to be focused and persistent is important after you have an initial inspiration. Apparently having depression "helps" one persevere. And having bipolar disorder is doubly "helpful" - during the manic stages you can erupt with new ideas, and you can polish them during the depressions. In one study, ~40% of the successful creative people had bipolar disorder, which is twenty times higher than the general population.
- Some problems require a flash of insight to be solved (see: daydreaming), and others don't and just require hard work. It's important to know what kinds of problems are which, and it turns out we're relatively good at telling whether we're making progress or not.
- Like daydreams, dreams are also an important source of creativity. In one study they gave students a task to do, which had an elegant shortcut that required insight to see. 20 percent of the control group got the shortcut, even when given several hours thinking about it, but 60 percent of those who slept and went into REM sleep found the shortcut.
- Changing one's environment seems to help creativity - traveling is especially good for this. But it doesn't even take that much - in one study one group was told a particular task (listing as many modes of transportation as possible) was conceived by people at Indiana University (which they attended), while another was told it was from Indiana students studying abroad in Greece. The second group came up with significantly more possibilities!
- Brainstorming (having a group come up with ideas with no one allowed to criticize any) doesn't really work to stimulate creativity. It's even worse than just having one person come up with ideas on her own! Encouraging people to honestly discuss mistakes/bad ideas is the way to go. Another trick is to deliberately give a bad idea to get people out of their comfort zone.
- Urban environments are good for cross-pollinating ideas. And Austin is specifically called out as being more creative (at least in patents per capita) than Houston. Bam!
- "Weak ties" (i.e. not close friends) are essential for creativity - the more you have and the more diverse they are, the better. (advantage: extroverts?)
- There's no substitute for face-to-face contact when it comes to generating ideas - in one study groups that met in person were able to solve a task quickly, while groups that were only allowed to communicate with email and IM weren't able to solve it.
View all my reviews |
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| Windows 8 Metro background task restrictions are way too strict (even versus Windows Phone 7!) |
[May. 8th, 2012|01:43 pm] |
Edit: See the followup post on why this isn't a big deal, and the right way to do updating live tiles in Windows 8 Metro.
I've been working on porting FlightPredictor to the shininess of Windows 8 Metro. One of the key features of FlightPredictor is the ability to pin a live tile for a flight, and have that live tile update periodically in the background.
On Windows Phone 7, there are a lot of restrictions on background agents like the one in FlightPredictor that updates the live tiles. The agent can't run more frequently than every 30 minutes (and when it actually gets called is not that regular), if it runs longer than 25 seconds it gets killed, and most importantly there's a limit to how many you can have active on the phone - Microsoft says phones must allow 6, but my Lumia 900 allows a maximum of 9. I've actually hit this limit, because live tiles that are always up to date are cool.
So, I've started to work on this for Windows 8 Metro, and I found this whitepaper about Metro background tasks. There are a bunch of new ways to trigger running tasks (when you have internet access, for example, or when a user logs in), but you can also trigger them every 15 minutes, which is nice. There are also CPU requirements (now they're measured in CPU-seconds instead of wall time that the task runs) as I would expect.
Unfortunately, you can't use the TimeTrigger unless you display information on the lock screen. This requires extra user permission, which is OK enough, I guess. I wasn't planning on looking into showing flight info on the lock screen, but if that's necessary for my app to work the way I want it to I'm fine with that.
But here's the kicker: a user can only have seven apps show information on the lock screen. And three of these (Mail, Calendar, Messaging) are builtin! So this leaves four slots for apps to run based on a TimeTrigger in the background.
Now for the rant-y part: this is crazy. I have a bunch of apps that run in the background on my phone - as I said, having auto-updating live tiles is one of my favorite features of Windows Phone. To drastically cut the number of apps that can do this on an OS that's designed for a tablet (so presumably better battery life, etc. than on a phone) is way too strict and a step backwards.
It is possible I've missed something here, and I'd love to hear feedback on it. This is just a policy decision - what I would really like is the ability to run based on a TimeTrigger even if my app isn't on the lock screen, with reasonable limits.
Addendum: one way around the limit on Windows Phone 7 is to use push notifications - then your app doesn't have to run in the background and doesn't count against the limit. But it looks to me from reading the Metro whitepaper is that even apps that want to run based on a push notification have to be on the lock screen. Or is there a way to use a push notification to update a tile without having an app run? I'm not sure... |
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| Mitt Romney's neoconservative foreign policy spokesman resigned for being gay |
[May. 2nd, 2012|05:50 pm] |
Set the wayback machine to last week. The Romney campaign hired an openly gay foreign policy spokesman, and as the linked article mentions, some saw it as a turning point that someone openly gay (and a public support of same-sex marriage!) could work in a public role on a Republican presidential campaign.
Well, that didn't last long - he resigned this week after an anti-gay backlash in the Republican party. To be clear, the Romney campaign didn't ask him to resign, but they didn't let him actually make any statements for fear of angering the base.
Keep in mind: nobody doubts his conservative credentials, as he was John Bolton's spokesman (as Andrew Sullivan points out). The objections were all because he supported same-sex marriage, although part of me wonders if they would have objected if he was straight and supported same-sex marriage. (of course, then he probably wouldn't have been a Republican anyway. Zing!)
Just a reminder that, even though neither Romney nor Obama support same-sex marriage, there's still a huge difference between the parties when it comes to gay rights. That is all. |
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