2007 Portland Street of Dreams data...

recently, a few friends and i were talking about the street of dreams. we were wondeirng if the homes for sale last year had sold yet in portland. here is the data. apparently, one of them has sold, the others are still on the market!

Joyous iPhone SDK is released!

Downloaded the iPhone SDK a few days ago and i've been playing around with it. had to scrounge up a macbook and download mac os x 10 to get started, no windows development capability (yet). the SDK is very cool, and apple has lots of great information on their website including some demo apps and extensive documentation....looks like they've done this before :). just playing right now but have a few proof of concepts of cool new things to do with an iphone i wanted to try out. ran into a few things i wish they would have spelled out right away on the site that i've learned:

you can use a simulator to do development (the Aspen Simulator), very nice with identical in look/feel to the iphone EXCEPT for the things that are not yet completed. a few of those details i've learned so far:

the accelerometer is not yet simulated. this was mentioned in a document buried somewhere deep in the SDK. at least provide us with a left/right button to simulate sending events along a specified x,y, or z axis ASAP please :)

there is no OpenGL ES simulation yet. i confirmed this later with some documentation, but i originally poked around for a few minutes to determing that this wasn't possible. the documentation also points out that rendering a transparent EAGL surface (alpha blending w/ the framebuffer) is 'very intensive for the GPU and not recommended'.

SDK developer vs. the developer program:

when i attach my iphone it asks me to have a newer version of firmware. since i do have the latest version i conclude that downside of only registering to download the SDK is that you cannot develop for a real device with just the SDK, you have to be in the developer program, and that was a very limited subset that i am not a member of.

for now, i'll workaround these limitations, plenty for me to get used to in the apple development world, including objective C, XCode, and i'm sure i can dig up an OGL simuator for my PC somewhere's on opengl.org if i need it. i can put the pieces together when i get access to the developer's firmware update.

for the OGL ES simulation, this should be easy enough, just compile into the simulator an OGL ES .dll that supports all the API calls into OGL ES via emulation on x86. this shouldn't be more than a week's worth of work provided the source code is already developed for an OGL ES software simulation, but i can understand it not being the top priority this early in the game. later they can connect it into the real GPU hardware on the platform you are running Aspen for acceleration, but this gets complicated with various IHVs hardware needing OGL ES drivers or wrappers around the definitely existing OGL drivers, etc.

just wanted to capture these notes for anybody else joining the revolution.

Nihzny Novgorod

Spent the week in Nihzny Novgorod. This time I was with a few folks from work who had been there before. My experience this time was much better than the previous trip, and I’m motivated to pick up more Russian. We’ve eaten at some great places and I’ve had a good time with the team here but inside and outside the office for the week. Jet-lagged and weary though at 4am in the morning. we leave in about 24 hours for the Nihzny airport.

Staying at the Nikolai House near the main pedestrian walkway and the kremlin. Its not as nice as Alexandra (place I stayed last visit, which had a river front view, big room, individual controlled thermostat, and I believe better channel selections including CNBC). However, Nikolai’s location is much much better because you can walk right out to the city area. Also, doesn’t feel so crazy in the winter. Summertime there were a lot of kids drinking out in the streets and such, cars were going by really fast all around and music blaring around every corner. Fewer cars, more pedestrians and tons of snow! It has snowed every day since we’ve been here, and I’m glad I came prepared with a couple coats, hat and gloves.

Travels to Frankfurt

On my way to Nihzny Novgorod I had a 7 hour layover in Frankfurt. Took the time to head to the main shopping area/downtown area and wandered around with co-workers. Kinda cold this time of year but wandered around, found the Zara and some cool churches and such.