Android phone rocks

Recently I upgraded my worn Blackberry Curve to a new Samsung Captivate from AT&T.  Here are a list of positives and negatives based on my initial use.

The Good

1. Android rocks.  I can't wait for 3.0
2. No iTunes to synch with!  (I hate iTunes)
3. Brighter than my Wife's iPhone.

The Bad

1. I respect the Samsung design aesthetic, but the smooth symmetric thing is taken too far.
1. The menu, home, return and search buttons should have some sort of raised nipple like the home keys on your keyboard to let you know that your finger is placed correctly.
2. Because of the symmetric look of the phone across the vertical axis, I find that half the time I am holding the phone upside down.  With my black berry I could position the phone for use without looking.
3. The buttons for the ringer volume end up being placed in the wrong position for horizontal usage. I find my finders accidentally pressing them as I use the application.
2. Tasks don't shutdown automatically, so I have to use ATK to zap 'em.
3. If I don't use ATK then the battery gets drained fairly quickly.

 The Ugly

1. AT&T bloatware that I will never use, that cannot be removed. uggghh.  

I am very impressed by this phone.  I think it was a steal through Target Mobile.  I got mine for $49 when the AT&T store had it online for $199.  I can't wait to dive deeper in to the app store and see what goodies are waiting.

Java Mutithread my I/O

So the age of the multicore cpu has been here awhile.  Many tech pundits had always predicted that the software would have to change dramatically to utilize the extra cores.  Now that we have them what are we waiting for? 

On my Java Christmas wish list is a class similar to GZIPInputStream that would handle files compressed by pigz. Not really sure that a replacement of GZIPInputStream is in order since obviously it is designed to read from FileInputStream. Perhaps FileInputStream needs to be altered to be multithreaded.  Or perhaps a new PIGZInputStream that can directly read from the file instead of the FileInputStream is in order. 

Understand that I am not looking for max improvement on multicore PC. With it's single drive the heads would do more seeking then the single threaded implementation of GZIPInputStream. What I want is the ability to use multiple threads to access a file striped across multiple drives.  So when I apply this to a server environment, then each thread would end up directing each disk to get it's particular portion of the file.

More than likely what I will get out of Oracle will be a big lump of single threaded coal.  But we can wish can't we?

Smart Phones make stupid users

My son lost his phone (Samsung) the other day and when found it had been stepped on and snowed on.  Big bummer.  Oh well, these things happen.  What he seemed to be concerned more about was the loss of his contact list.  We extracted the micro sd card from the new phone and dropped it in his old blackberry and got nothing.  My guess was that broken phone saved it in a format that the new phone could not read...   Any ideas?

Anyway we got to discussing how the rise of smart phones means that most users will rely on the contact list to call and text people they need to communicate with.  Really smart phones make stupid users.  Just think if I told you that all the DNS servers were down and that you could surf the web but you would have to type in the IP addresses to get there.  Some of us could probably get to one or two sites but after that it's a shot in the dark.

As we use more technology we get more dependent. At some point that dependency comes back to bite.