Mokka mit Schlag

I suspect someone’s going to give me an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, and someone already gave me an Android. What’s the best book for learning to develop or Android? There aren’t a lot of choices yet:

• Professional Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Reto Meier (Paperback – Nov 24, 2008) $44.99
• The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development by Mark L. Murphy (Paperback – Jun 25, 2008) $30.00
• Android A Programmers Guide by Jerome DiMarzio (Paperback – Jul 30, 2008) $39.99
• Hello, Android: Introducing Google’s Mobile Development Platform by Ed Burnette (Paperback – Dec 28, 2008) $32.95 $21.75
• Android Essentials (Firstpress) by Chris Haseman (Paperback – Sep 18, 2008)

Which ones are worth the paper they’re printed on and which ones are headed for the recycling bin as soon as the next SDK version hits the ether?

I’ve been compiling ghc from MacPorts on this 2.0 GHz MacBook, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s hung. I’ve been stuck on “Building ghc” for quite a while, maybe an hour:

--->  Cleaning perl5.8
--->  Fetching ghc
--->  Attempting to fetch ghc-6.10.1-src.tar.bz2 from http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/
--->  Attempting to fetch ghc-6.10.1-src-extralibs.tar.bz2 from http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/
--->  Attempting to fetch ghc-6.8.2-darwin-i386-leopard-bootstrap.tar.bz2 from http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.8.2/
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for ghc
--->  Extracting ghc
--->  Applying patches to ghc
--->  Configuring ghc
--->  Building ghc

Certainly it was long enough to answer a bunch of e-mails, and edit an article. Is this the point where it actually compiles the compiler? Is ghc self-hosting? That is, is ghc written in ghc? That may be what the bootstrap bit is about. Yep, looks like it is.

I do remember 2 hour gcc compiles, but that was 15 years ago on much slower hardware. How long does it take to compile a compiler nowadays?

Not having a Blu-ray player I hadn’t had reason to notice this before, but apparently the Blu-ray DRM system has been well and thoroughly cracked. Anyone who couldn’t see this coming is sufficiently detached from reality to qualify for a climate scientist job in the Bush administration.

Many moths are quite small, ranging into the microscopic. This unidentified individual from Santiago Oaks last weekend (2008-12-07) isn’t quite that small, but it is pushing the limits of what my camera can take with anything approaching publishable quality. For comparison’s sake, that’s the head of a nail in the lower right hand corner.

What’s special about the number 8.388608E06F? The answer will be in my next developerWorks article.

Read on for a hint.

Spotless Ladybird Beetle, Cycloneda sanguinea
Irvine, CA, 2008-11-01

I found these two busy beetles while walking my dog one morning.