Life is Good!

Well, I met my shortened deadline and have a little bit of time to breath again, so I visited my son and grandson yesterday - while both of their mothers were working. (My son and I are both night-owls: working while everyone else sleeps.) It's good to take a break from work and experience the more important things in life -- so long as the work does not suffer in quality of course. After all, growing boys and girls need to eat, and they don't eat unless we work. (Pictured here is my grandson Jacob "riding" on top of my son Michael - it's one of my favorite pictures, by the way.)

But in keeping to the main theme of my blog, I have recently used my T-Mobile G1 phone to make several phone calls and I am honestly amazed at the quality of the calls. It really is a cell-phone FIRST and then after that the best gosh-darned hand-held Linux computer in the world!

As I turn my attention to other near-future, work-related events (I never thought retirement would have so much work involved in it!) I've been writing a series of ARM assembler routines, collectively operating as a resident daemon in Android, that assist me in exploring the metrics of the system. They are written in ARM assembler so as to run as quickly as possible, for when you are writing code whose whole purpose is to gather performance metrics, you are actually going to degrade performance a bit while doing the gathering. This code MUST be as fast as possible in order to minimize that effect.

There is an old saying that by the simple act of observing something, you are also changing it too. In the world of subatomic particles, this effect is far more pronounced than it is in say, observing the behavior of a pride of lions, but the effect is there nonetheless.

So since I have no desire to be bombarded by stray DNA-altering particles or be looked upon as "potential prey" either, I feel quite comfortable in adding a little bit of performance-degrading code to my Android phone in order to see just what this thing is capable of. And so far as I can tell, this machine is FAST! (It has to be since Java, a notoriously slow but securely implemented language, is the primary development language for applications that run on it.)

Another noteworthy thing to post about is that I just received my 2600 mAh battery for the G1 and it's charging right now! I will spend most of the day (after charging) trying to discharge it as I reorganize the icons on my Android's "Home" page and in the folders that reside there. While doing that, I'll have all of the radios turned on (Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, Cell) as well as auto-sync running, and will be listening to some Mozart and Andrew Lloyd Webber (along with a little Heart or Kenny Chesney too) and see how long it takes to drain this monster battery! Stay tuned for the results in a subsequent blog post.