I was talking to a couple of Qualcomm folks over the weekend and they were telling me I can do mobile apps right now with Brew. I looked at Brew a couple of years ago, perhaps I should look again. The certification process and dealing with carriers is the big turn-off.

More exiciting in the immediate term is mologogo. I took a brief look at this earlier and intended to try it out, but never got around to it. I see Popular Science has a howto article on using mologogo, and it looks real easy and costs only about $120.

I hope I find some time to try this out.

I recently found out a friend who I had assumed was of Indian decent is actually mixed Korean-black, while another who is prima facie Asian is actually Brazillian. The world cup can bring out interesting information.

The surfacing of stereotypes I didn’t know I was holding for them is fascinating. My perception of each shifted as I found out their actual ethnic background. I didn’t realize I carry so much streotypical baggage.

Much has been made of Bill Gates’ reduced role in Microsoft. However, the real story that everybody missed is that my brother has just joined Microsoft. Who needs Bill when you have Pooya?

I continuously forget the syntax for this (doesn’t help that it’s different in every database engine):

select table_name from user_tables;

Shows all user tables. You can also do:

select owner,table_name from all_tables;

which shows all tables.

To see what a particular table looks like, you can do:

desc sometable

The amusing thing about this is that I know someone building a framework on top of Spring, while not 30 feet from him somebody else is writing a non-blocking high performance epoll based socket server in C, because lighttpd is not high-performance enough.

It takes all kinds, I guess.

Misery. Iran lost their opening match of World Cup 2006 to Mexico.

A tale of two halves and Jekyll and Hyde. Iran played beautifully in the first half and had much better opportunities on goal than Mexico. The missed cross and the deflected header were heart-breaking. They defended well but gave away a lot of free kicks, one of which inevitably resulted in Mexico’s first goal.

The second half is typical of what little I’ve seen of Iran’s international play against quailty opponents: they played not to lose instead of playing to win. There was almost no offense – Iran had something like 6 shots on goal in the first half, but only 1 most of the way thru the second half. Reminiscent of the US-Iran friendly from a few years back where Iran dominated, got the go-ahead goal, and then basically stopped attacking.

Time for my rant – Branko Ivankovic (Iran’s coach) has done a fantastic job of making the team a professional outfit ready to do well on the international stage. Before Blazevic (Iran’s former coach, for whom Ivankovic served as assistant coach) Iran’s major tactic was the Rambo: each individual would attempt to dribble around the entire opposing team and score by themselves. Now they’re even too unselfish at times.

However, I don’t think Branko sees the team for what they are now, which is a good team ready to take the next step. I’m convinced he plays for the tie in far too many situations, favoring a good showing over the risk of more aggressive play leading to loss. In short, it’s painful to watch Iran play so well for part of the game, only to suddenly put on the brakes and drop back only to defense.

Mexico played poorly in the first half, but came to life in the second. I was disappointed in their play after hearing so much about them, but I’ll be rooting for them in future matches.

Tim mentions:

did anyone else think the Iranians looked just great? Hawk-faced, pale-skinned, raven-haired, with the brilliant red uniforms?

Tim, you were not alone, the ladies watching the game unanimously commented to the effect of “Iran may have lost, but they sure do look good”. Also heard: soccer players are the best looking athletes. No consolation for this loss though.

It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. It happens every 4 years. It can make or break entire coutries’ days, months, even years. It’s the World Cup.

After not qualifying 4 years ago, Iran is in. The first match is in 12 hours against Mexico. It’ll be broadcast in HDTV on ABC, and I have abunch of friends and a beautiful 65″ TV to watch it with. Couldn’t be more excited.

Today I watched a couple of matches, and, oh my god, this is just plain horrible. It’s amazing how bad the US announcers are. Uche said it, but I didn’t realize the extent of the problem until I watched a couple of matches.

I don’t even know where to start. First off, it’s not golf. You’re allowed to get excited. Watch a broadcaster from any other country for god’s sakes and take a few hints. Turn on the Spanish speaking channel for one second to get a sense of the appropriate phrasing and tone.
Second, just because the team playing is not the US it doesn’t mean the players are robots with no history. All we get in the olympics is personal stories and history. Here, it’s a roster call “X passes to Y. Y passes to Z”. Tell me something about the player, at least what country and club he plays in, how long he’s been on the international roster, something. You really get the sense the commentators know less about the players than you do.

But more than that, these guys are just killing the game. If you can’t get excited about what’s going on on the pitch, please, find a job other than announcer. The viewers are very excited, probably losing their voices and their hair yelling. Don’t meander on with your downer voice….

Anyway, anybody know a good way to get alternative audio for the games? Are there any radio stations or audio net casts that can be plugged in instead of this nonesense?

Daniel Lemire points out PyX, a python graphics package for creation of PDF and Postscript. The output is quite attractive.

This is a bit like gnuplot with Python as its interaction language. In fact, there’s even a guide for gnuplot users. Worth checking out.

Interesting papers on search, ranking, and classification technology (if you’re a search or AI geek) here: http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/06/web-search-presentations-from-workshop.html

Greg Linden posts some commentary as well.

As I’ve written before, “parsing” XML doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of use cases. The right answer is to specify the fields you’re interested in via XPath and have your XPath engine do the work for you. It’s simpler, less error prone, and offer more opportunity for automated optimization.

XPath 2.0 is at Candidate Recommendation stage moving towards approval. This article at DeveloperWorks talks about some of the changes in the 2.0 edition. Worth a look.

Very interesting article on the use of pattern matching for multiple dispatch and domain specific languages in Ruby. I could tell Ruby would be good for this type of hacking, but this article takes a couple of steps beyond what I could think of. I have to read it again when I’m less sleepy….

Via Stefan Tilkov.

Check out the demo for this AJAX based spell checker for plain text areas in forms. Looks quite good and usable. Someone please integrate this with Wordpress so I don’t mispells o mcuh.

Paul Graham’s keynote from XTech is available as two essays on his site: How To Be Silicon Valley and Why Startups Condense in America. Interesting reading, I recommend them both.

Only one nitpick: Paul talks about US immigration policy:

US immigration policy is particularly ill-suited to startups, because it reflects a model of work from the 1970s. It assumes good technical people have college degrees, and that work means working for a big company.

If you don’t have a college degree you can’t get an H1B visa, the type usually issued to programmers. But a test that excludes Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can’t be a good one.

I agree that immigration is key to success for breeding startups, but the particular point he make here isn’t valid. As a foreigner trying to immigrate to the US you optimize for what gets you here. If it takes getting a college degree you get a college degree.

Gates, Jobs, and Dell were able to have very successful startups despite not having college degrees because a college degree was not required in their situation. I would bet if it was a requirement they’d have tackled it easily and it wouldn’t have hindered them. In that same way it doesn’t hinder immigrants, to the extent a college degree is available to them.

I think Paul would agree that you do want a filter in place to select for the types of immigrants who would yield startups. A very powerful first order filter is the fact that the person wants to immigrate. The type of person who’s willing to leave familiarity and start from zero in a new country is the same type who’s willing to take risk and put in obscene amounts of time and effort into the pursuit success and riches.

Beyond that, a college degree seems like a very reasonable second order filter.