From an apple’s fan boy point of view:
1. It’s not an iphone.
2. It doesn’t have a name that starts with I
3. It was not designed in California, and MIC
4. It is a death star against the good people in infinite loop.
5. (In first order logic/predicate logic syntax) For all things that are not available from Apple Store is bad.
(x AvailableAtAppleStore(x) -> Bad(x))

Couple things from my side
a. Although the Android Operation System is not branded as a game platform, we can definitely see there are more gaming application that are available on the App Store than the App Market. Given casual gaming has become part of the daily routine, I think android requires more time to catch up (With more OpenGL integrations, better API design, better API demo, ready-made game engine etc etc.)

b. The variations on hardware makes it very hard for developers to unify all the application in terms of user experience. Let’s face it, segmentation has been a problem and will be a problem. Part of the root cause of the problem relies to the frequency of the system OS updates. It’s not often to see OEM had a hard time catching up the latest branch of the android source code when they were still working on the UI layer for the last update iteration.

c. Stock Android UI is good but still far from iPhone’s.

d. Deep integration with Google/Facebook becomes a problem when the integration becomes toooooooo deep in which users can no longer pull the plug by their will.

e. Android machines need better touch screens.

Exam is coming up and I have no choice but to put my development life on hiatus and focus on my text books. ( CS 245 Logic and Computation is actually fun) Anyway, here is a list of stuff that I have worked on and planning to finish them up during the semester break after exam until the start of next school semester in September.

Iron-Cook.com
Iron cook ’s main objective is to provide a portal for anyone to randomize their meal plan for the week and have the grocery list generated on their mobile devices. It’s the CS446 course project that me and my group mates have been working on since May 2010 and currently we have the back-end web service and android client cores ready.

HKGolden Samurai
Another web service for exposing HK Golden API to native clients. As of now, the caching mechanism has been implemented and more UI work has to be done. The final product will be consumed by HKG maize, which is the first (and only) client for HK Golden on android devices.

University of Waterloo Login
A simple portal for passing the username + password when logging in the uw-wireless network. (Credentials are needed everytime a client joins the network and Firefox/Chrome doesn’t allow users to store their credentials on the browser)

GuruOnFire
After working on iron-cook.com extensively for the past 3 months I noticed a rewrite is required to follow the django/python/app-engine convention.

StudyTimer
StudyTimer is a small utility I wrote for myself. Basically it’s a timer that switches between “study period” and “break period”. Currently the skeleton of the client application is there and I have yet to implement the server side stuff.

Haskell + OpenGL ES/DirectX – I have always wanted to learn functional programming and do some geometry work with openGL/DirectX (XNA on Xbox360, windows phone 7) , hopefully the 30 days vacation is enough to learn these stuff.

Just a quick note, I was playing around with Google App Engine 1.3.5 with PIL 1.17 installed on my Windows 7 machine. Django Framework was complaining that the PIL module cannot be found from the system path when I was trying to resize an image using the Image module from Google App Engine. Since we call the Image module from Google App Engine and not using it directly, the only way to fix it is to uninstall PIL 1.1.7 and install 1.1.6 instead.

I’ve just got back from the io2010 conference and I must say this is one of the best conferences i have ever been. (not to mention free food + freebies + free phones)

All participants of the io conference received a new HTC EVO 4G handset as a compliment from google. I took mine for some test tonight and I’d really like this android handset. Compare to nexus one it has a larger screen and better social integration ( HTC Sense UI). However, it is not a GSM phone, which means it won’t work on Roger’s network.

Hopefully HTC will bring a GSM version sometime later this year.

A small update from my side.

Work has been going pretty good so far. I was assigned a new project and I am aiming to do a terrific job. I haven’t made up my mind on what tool to use but I am expecting the end product will be very python/java/jython orientated.

Work aside, since I have started this blog I didn’t get time to upload some of my pics. I am currently in the stage of redesigning my photo gallery so to make it more “portfolio” styled. There will be nice pics I promise

As for GuruOnFire, the project is still alive  but it will take more time than I expected. I  hope a very early preview will be ready before mid-May.

Long story short, back in CS 241 and 251 I was using google groups to access the newsgroup from waterloo. (uw.cs.cs241/251). However, searching for cs350 on google doesn’t do the trick and I was forced to setup a newsgroup client to serve my purpose. During my adventure, I stumbled upon this website from loo and basically they ask you to setup putty as a tunnel so that your thunderbird can pass thru this tunnel and grap the threads from the newsgroup. Of course, this is not a very smart thing to do because you need to fire putty up every single time and I don’t think that’s feasible for anyone who goes on to the newsgroup on an hourly basis.

Here’s my solution.

Follow the Configuring Thunderbird tutorial to the point where you enter name of the news server. Put “news.uwaterloo.ca” instead of “localhost”. (localhost is a unique keyword which means looking for on itself, since the tutorial uses putty to establish a connection to the server, pointing thunderbird to “itself” will utilize that connection and allows you to fetch stuff thru the tunnel).

After you’re done there should be a subscribe window pops up and asks you to subscribe certain group. In our case, we want uw.cs.cs350. Click done and you’re good to go.  In case it’s not working, you can always verify it from thunderbird -> Tools -> Account Settings -> Your Account Name -> Server Settings and make sure Server Name is “news.uwaterloo.ca” and the Port is 119.

P.S. I found using the thread tool very useful to follow a long discussion. You can do that by clicking on the top-left button in your thread view.

I was hampered by Apple’s rejection of Google Voice application. On average I made calls to Canada 30 – 60 minutes per day and switching to Google Voice from Calling Card not only saves me money, but also gives me flexibility so that I don’t have to look up to the calling card and enter my pin and run into people recklessly on the street.

Long story short, I was under the impression that you need an internet connection to make a call, and this is NOT the actual case. A quick dirty way of making a call without any internet connection is to call your Google Voice number from the numbers associated with your google voice account (e.g. my cell phone) , press “2″ after you enter the voice catalog and enter the number you want to call.

I stored my google voice number on my iphone and that makes my life 200 times easier, what’s more, the rate of calling to Canada from the States is 0, which is free =)