Edditorial

I was searching for impact of noise to the health of baby when I found that people are actually creating noise to smooth their baby! There are happily relieved parents saying how much white noise is “helping” their baby with colic condition. So what is colic? According to MedlinePlus,

Almost all babies go through a fussy period. When crying lasts for longer than about three hours a day and is not caused by a medical problem (such as a hernia or infection), it is called colic. This phenomenon occurs in almost all babies. The only thing that differs is the degree.

That’s three hours out of a 24-hour day!

Colic usually strikes toward the end of a long day, when your baby is just about at the age when your sleep deprivation has really begun to set in. Your baby stops being the quiet, peaceful, miracle baby and begins screaming every evening. It is no wonder that parents can become frustrated, discouraged, and depressed.

About 20% of babies cry enough to meet the definition of colic. The timing varies, but colic usually affects babies beginning at about 3 weeks of age and peaking somewhere between 4-6 weeks of age.

I guess I belong to the 20% when I was a baby. No wonder my mom did not want a second child.

I was kidding. :)

I have seen way more than enough negative press about Apple and iPhone 4 recently. Being a proud user of Apple’s computers and electronics and happy about small surprises now and then, it does not feel good to see out-of-proportion report on everything negative about (not necessarily of) iPhone. For god’s sake, we don’t need a video tutorial to teach people how to make your phone to drop calls; it’s like we don’t need a code sample that purposely make your computer memory-hungry and crawl like it’s drunk. Apparently the old wisdom about there is nothing perfect still applies in this 21st century.

CNN Money reports that despite a very vocal group of detractors, most iPhone users love AT&T. It is noted that

77% of iPhone owners say they’ll buy another iPhone, compared to 20% of Android customers who say they’ll buy another Android phone

Statistics is a tricky thing, and I find it difficult to trust this statement. However, it is good to see a better depiction of reality. I particularly like MobileTatsu-NJG’s comment on this report

But… but.. but… the headlines on all the ad-supported news sites and blogs I read say that Apple phones don’t work, the factory workers kill themselves, no apps get approved, moisture sensors get tripped, there are useful features on the phone but you don’t really want to jailbreak it, and that the iPad is a clone of an unsuccessful device from the 90’s. Based on that, only millions of exceptionally stupid people would buy the phone!!1!

iPhone is never perfect. It might not even be good for some people. Yet it is good enough for millions.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet confessed that she bought an iPad. Considering that iPad is selling like crazy – it becomes Apple’s third-biggest business segment only after iPhone and Mac in just one quarter – it is not really a big deal. However, Mary is the author of the All About Microsoft blog. She is the kind that never see the value of iProduct (or iCrap for some). In her own words,

Well, for me it is a big deal. I’m a PC. I am not an early adopter or someone who rushes out to buy the latest/greatest gadget. This is the first Apple product I’ve ever owned. I never saw the need for an iPod (I bought a Sony Walkman MP3 player, and later a Zune HD). I never lusted after an iPhone (especially because I use my phone to make phone calls). And I never wanted or needed an iMac or a MacBook, as I had so many PCs from which to choose.

So is she buying an iPad? Simply put, there is nothing quite like it.

At Microsoft’s consumer showcase in New York in June, there were lots of Windows 7 PCs on display, but not a single slate. (When I asked one Microsoft evangelist why I shouldn’t buy an iPad, he retorted “You have five hundred bucks. Go buy one” instead of offering me anything concrete to convince me otherwise.) I say show me a Windows 7 slate with 10+-hour battery life, instant on/off (i.e., hibernation that really works), and an interface that is as fun and responsive as the iPad’s and I’d still consider buying one.

With all the negative news focusing on iPhone 4, iPad is quietly selling like hotcakes.

I am also not surprised to see her pointing out that iPad are making inroads into businesses. Two of the FAQs in an internal conference of a Fortune 500 is 1) when can I get a Mac; and 2) when can I get an iPad.

Ars reports that the Android-forked OPhone, blessed by the world’s largest wireless carrier, now competes head on with Google in the mobile space. How would this end?

Someone points out this is not the first time China creates an alternative to western-controlled technologies to avoid dependency on other countries and also licensing fees

China have repeatedly created alternatives to western tech, for no other reason then being in control. (S)VCD vs DVD, some chinese variant of wifi, and perhaps also a 3G alternative, iirc. those are just some examples that comes to mind at the moment.

However, it does not always end well:

Look at history. “Red Flag” Linux was supposed to be China’s “answer” to Red Hat (etc.) making beaucoup revenue in services. And they made significant early inroads.

BUT Chinese companies have historically been very reluctant to pay for external services, and Red Flag skimped on innovation, so they quickly fell behind, while other distros just kept coming with their Chinese-language offerings and support, and now Red Flag is limited to “guanxi sales” in the government sector, even though there is a booming Linux-on-the-desktop-and-in-the-server-room services market out there now being tapped by lotsa companies supporting lotsa distros.

The current “OPhone” hoopla reminds me very strongly of the early Red Flag hoopla. If I had a horse in the race, I would bet that the result will be the same. OPhone will make some early running, but will skimp on innovation, and their “fork” will rapidly become an app wasteland, as Google keeps clicking over significant improvements every time Android goes up dot release, and developers keep wanting to roll out the new hotness.

The whole Open Stack thing is getting interesting. The compute part is called Nova.

Nova is a cloud computing fabric controller (the main part of an IaaS system) built to match the popular AWS EC2 and S3 APIs. It is written in Python, using the Tornado and Twisted frameworks, and relies on the standard AMQP messaging protocol, and the Redis distributed KVS.

It seems to be highly influenced by Amazon cloud. The part I like a lot is that it is Python-centric. The other part of Open Stack, the object storage part known as swift, is also written in Python.

Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store.

A note on AMQP – Advanced Message Queuing Protocol.

The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for Message Oriented Middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subscribe), reliability and security.

Nova uses RabbitMQ, an implementation of AMQP (written in Erlang!), to support a shared-nothing, messaging-based architecture.

Nova is built on a shared-nothing, messaging-based architecture. All of the major nova components can be run on multiple servers. This means that most component to component communication must go via message queue.

There is a discussion regarding currying in JavaScript in HN. Currying, or partial applicaiton is an important concept in functional programming. According to Wikipedia,

In mathematics and computer science, partial application is the technique of transforming a function that takes multiple arguments (or an n-tuple of arguments) in such a way that it can be called as a chain of functions each with a single argument.

For example, given a function

f (x,y) = y / x

then the function

g (x) = (\y -> f (x,y))

is a curried version of f.

It is trivial to implement currying in Python using functools.partial.