"I've wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that Google navigation might finally make a phone useful," Torvalds said. "And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I'm dragging a phone with me 'just in case' I would need to get in touch with somebody--now I'm having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone, too, is kind of secondary."

Google's Android operating system used in the Nexus One is built atop a Linux foundation, but the applications typically don't run on the Linux. Instead, they run atop Linux on a Java-like layer, Google's Dalvik virtual machine and accompanying software libraries.

More recently, though, Google issued a Native Development Kit for software that runs directly on the phone's Linux operating system.

The phone has GPS, a good camera w/LED flash, accelerometer, WiFi, Bluetooth, removable battery, mini-SD card, and supposedly haptic feedback on the 800x480 touchscreen.

I felt some haptic feedback screens in cars at the auto show, and it was really cool.

Allahpundit: "You want to put a guy in a sheep costume with red robot eyes and have him crawl around a pasture for awhile? Sure, I'll link it."

This has nothing to do with software development, but at least it will give Gail Collins something good to write about, and that's important.

Unfortunately the video is 3 mins long -- all you need is the first 30 seconds and the part starting around 2:25 where the demon sheep with red eyes comes on camera. Truly wacky.

Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher for Pew and the lead author of the study, told the Associated Press that the ability to do status updates had "kind of sucked the life out of long-form blogging".

More young people - 55% of 18-29 year-olds and 27% of 12-17 year-olds - were also accessing the internet from their mobile phones, increasing the need for brevity.

One student said teenagers had lost interest in blogging because they needed to type quickly and "people don't find reading that fun".

But teens are not using Twitter in large numbers. While teens were bigger users of almost all other online applications, Twitter was an exception, the study found.

For some reason the question that comes to mind is, "Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?"

I've started reading BBC News more often, since the NY Times has announced they will go behind a web "pay wall" within the year. BBC has surprisingly good coverage of US news topics, although to be fair this particular story comes from a Pew report that anyone at all can probably read online.

Nexus One, a GooglePhone - we like the term gPhone, by the way -- comes to Verizon in the Spring. By which time perhaps the cultural significance of this tiny ninja unboxing will have become more clear. Multi touch indeed. Hai!

A couple of months ago, I reviewed Barnes & Noble's Nook e-book reader. I confess, I didn't love it much. It's slow and buggy, the battery lasts one-third as long as the Kindle's, and the bookstore prices are generally higher than Amazon's.

But this week, I discovered something that's sort of shocking, when you think about it: Barnes & Noble has been claiming that the Nook weighs less than it really does.

OK, not by much. The company says the thing weighs 11.2 ounces. In fact, it weighs 12.1 ounces. (I discovered this when my daughter set it on a home postal scale. Later, I confirmed it with a fancier scale at the actual post office.)

I'll think differently about Barnes and Noble -- funny I never gave them much thought before, and now this!

But still, lots of developers are picking up Objective-C, learning from books like ours (thank you!), and putting their own time and money into writing their own indie apps. Even if they don’t expect to become iPhone millionaires, they’d at least like a shot at being, as Dan Grigsby aptly put it, warm, clothed, and fed with the proceeds of their iPhone work.

It’s possible the door has already largely closed to this too.

When I say that iPhone development is a bubble, I welcome you to interpret that in very literal economic terms. A developer who puts time and money into learning iPhone development does so in hopes of realizing a significant return.

And if you’re well off, well then I’m happy some for you.
But I’d rather not celebrate my defeat and humiliation here with you.

Personal case study: I put about two months of full time work into RoadTip… actually, three when you account for the month spent on the nightmare of implementing in-app purchase. That was time that I lived off a credit card, meaning I used a high-interest loan from Capital One to fund my development. I also put fixed costs, like artwork for the icon (from a former CNN colleague who used to work in the graphics department) and trademark registration on my card. So this is serious skin in the game.

After two weeks of sales, it is clear that I will never make back this investment. Not even close. I may never even make back the fixed costs, to say nothing of paying myself.

Looks like the iPad/iPhone is not really the 1984 revolution at all.

So, I recommend version control for any coding project bigger than a few lines of code. I used Subversion for a while and have now moved onto git.

My tips for version control success:

• Make small commits – don’t commit a whole day’s work if you wrote 2 features and fixed 8 bugs. That should be at least 10 commits. For sure, commit every-time you complete something – a bugfix, a feature, fixing a typo, a formatting change. It’s makes it much easier to find regressions and other issues later. Oh, and try not to work on many things at once especially if the changes overlap in the code.
• Compile before commit – each commit represents a known state of your code, so make sure the code compiles correctly without warnings or errors before committing.
• Diff before commit – before each commit, look over the diff of your current code compared with the last commit. Then you’ll know for sure what you are committing. If you don’t like part of the proposed commit, change it, diff it again, repeat until you like it and then commit.
• Write useful messages – When you commit a message is required is usually. Make sure it makes sense to you and to others looking at your repository.

Diff before commit -- a practice that promotes thoughtful progress. V. nice.

HipHop started as a skunkworks project two years ago as Facebook realized in 2007 it needed to make some fundamental change to its server architecture if it was to keep growing while avoiding the cost - and systems management pain - of simply adding more servers to its already large server farm. Among the options under discussion were re-writing the site in a completely different language, optimize the Zend PHP engine it uses from Zend Technologies, or work on PHP caching in the applications server

Facebook ruled out a language re-write as it would never be able to keep up while engineers did submit changes to the Zend engine, but the changes didn't go far enough Recordon said.

The plan for HipHop now is to support PHP 5.3 in the next few months - it's currently on version 5.2. Aside from that, Recordon said Facebook wants community feedback.

He noted HipHop would not create a fork in the PHP community, as

Always something new under the sun ...

The Desk, Revisited
Dr. Levine and his colleagues have re-examined and completely redesigned the desk. Their version stands vertical and can be used with a treadmill, exercise bike, standing or regular chair. It is modular and mobile, so persons can work where and how they wish. It costs half the price of a cubicle, is more flexible and can easily be personalized. It can also be used at home or in school. The see-through panels let in the light and allow a person to stay visually connected with the rest of the room.

How many calories will the walking desk burn? Using the desk at 1 mph will burn about 100 calories per hour. So, walk-working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. burns 800 extra calories per day. If food intake stays the same, this could be a loss of more than fifty pounds a year. However, Dr. Levine recommends starting slowly, walking 15 minutes every hour and during all phone calls. For the rest of the time use the desk while seated and increase the walking portion gradually.

Scoring Points with the Boss
Clearly a believer in making work fun, Dr. Levine's NEAT desk stands near an elongated space. When his assistants want to discuss an idea with him, they both grab hockey sticks and fire rubber balls at a wall target as they talk.

I have never seen an office like this, but it certainly sounds like fun. I imagine that Francesco Cirillo can find a way to incorporate this plan into the Pomodoro Technique (tomato-timer method) of software development.

Concurrent Programming

The QtConcurrent namespace provides high-level APIs that make it possible to write multi-threaded programs without using low-level threading primitives such as mutexes, read-write locks, wait conditions, or semaphores. Programs written with QtConcurrent automatically adjust the number of threads used according to the number of processor cores available. This means that applications written today will continue to scale when deployed on multi-core systems in the future.

QtConcurrent includes functional programming style APIs for parallel list processing, including a MapReduce and FilterReduce implementation for shared-memory (non-distributed) systems, and classes for managing asynchronous computations in GUI applications:

My first reaction was "what, hundred-CPU chips within two years?" This is something I had heard at a local meetup, and it was news to me; I guess I'm just not as much of a futurist as I used to be. But it IS 2010, the year of Intel's 32-core processor. So, concurrent problem solving on the desktop looks to be a happening thing.