Planet Android summer cleaning

Blogs come and blogs go, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a fast changing technology area such as Android. Today I removed 12 feeds from PlanetAndroid that haven't had updates in a while (some since 2010). If you feel your feed was removed in error, let me know.

In a reply to a recent post, one reader said they'd like to see fewer app reviews and news articles here, and more development diaries, tutorials, and community activities. What do you think? What are your most favorite and least favorite feeds? Let me know in the comments.

New PlanetAndroid feed policy

Starting today I'll be removing most feeds that include embedded ads. Currently, I pay for PlanetAndroid's upkeep out of my own pocket, with no revenue coming in from ads or donations at all. When an ad appears in one of our feeds, it takes space away from the other articles and gets clicks based on the drawing power of the whole site, including feeds with no ads. That didn't seem fair.

I grandfathered in a handful of feeds for various reasons including new sites that need the extra juice that PlanetAndroid brings to help them get started. Some sites report that being listed on PlanetAndroid has doubled their traffic! If you feel your feed was unfairly removed, or if you make a new feed without the ads and want to re-join, just let me know. Thanks for your support.

What is this blog?

I'll be using this old blogger blog for PlanetAndroid announcements that I don't want to post on my regular ZDNet blog. Don't worry, there won't be too much traffic.

Wow, blogger has changed a lot since I last used it. The UI is completely different. Looks more "Google-y" if that's a word; more like GMail and Google.com.

Have fun at EclipseCon!

It's chilly this morning in North Carolina (28 degrees F) so I'm a bit envious of all of you folks out in California for EclipseCon 2007 this week. I expect you all to keep the rest of us informed with lots of blogs and pictures of your experiences!

I have three special requests:

1. If you take any pictures be sure to upload them to flickr and tag them with 'EclipseCon 2007'. Please indicate whether or not it's ok to use the pictures elsewhere (for example I might put together a gallery for ZDNet if there are enough pics). Here are the pics for last year if you'd like to reminisce.
   
2. I'm a huge Dilbert fan so if somebody could get Adams' autograph for me I'd be eternally grateful.
   
3. If the new Ambassador has a party this year, be sure to go and get to know a few new people. Last year's party was a blast. The best thing about Eclipse is its community, and that means you. (Just be careful not to stand between Steve and the beer cart, that could be hazardous to your health. :) )
   

Have fun!
--Ed

If I'm going to screw up, why does it have to be so public?

Grrr. And... Yargh. That's my reaction to seeing a story I wrote get picked up not only by Digg but by ZDNet's "Must Read News Alerts".

Normally that would be a good thing, except the title used for the story was "How to get 66.6 TeraFlops for $600". If you go to the link, it says "How to get 520 GigaFlops for $600". Just a tiny difference.

While the original title was much cooler, it was wrong. I didn't discover the error until about a half hour after hitting the 'Publish' button. The 66.6 TFlops number was based on two sentences in the GeForce 8800 Architecture Technical Brief. The first says:

Teraflops of raw floating-point processing power are combined to deliver unmatched gaming performance, graphics realism, and real-time, film-quality effects.

Teraflops, plural. Later it says that the card has 128 stream processors and that:

Each stream processor on a GeForce 8800 GTX operates at 1.35 GHz and supports the dual issue of a scalar MAD and a scalar MUL operation, for a total of roughly 520 gigaflops of raw shader horsepower.

Hmm, so if each stream processor gets 520 GFlops and there are 128 stream processors that works out to 66.6TFlops, right? Well, that's what it looked like to me. But if you look closely, 1.35 GHz times 3 flops per cycle = 4.05 GFlops per processor, not 520. The 520 number was for the whole card (128 * 4.05 = 518.4).

Doh!

Since ZDNet's blogging system doesn't let me preview my articles, I do my final editing pass after clicking 'Publish' so I can see the article in context. It was during this pass that I saw the numbers didn't add up and I went back to double-check the figures. I corrected the article, but by then the damage was done. People were starting to comment on it, and it had been dugg. One poster said that a card that delivered 66.6 TFlops "gives new meaning to 'fast as Hell'". Heh.

To make matters worse, when I got the ZDNet email alert several hours later it also had the wrong title. It's really too bad because it would still have been noteworthy with the smaller number. I sent a note to digg's feedback address to see if they could fix it there, but got no response.

Mea culpa. Sometimes, the internet is a little *too* fast.

All I can say is, "The devil made me do it".

Is this thing on?

EclipseCon 2007 is weeks away so you'd think that the buzz it generates would be showing up in O'Reilly's Buzz Game. But it's not - why not?

Hmm... it's interesting to note that 15 people buying stock in Eclipse could close the gap with NetBeans on market capitalization.

Phear my bandwidth

Who says Eclipse is big?

Resume pruning

Inspired by Kevin Donlin's article on "Clearing deadwood from your resume", and illinidk's succinct review of Peter Norvig's resume, I decided it was time for some housecleaning. I don't remember when I started a resume for the first time, but it must have been more than 10 years ago. Since then it had grown into an 8 page monster! Using Kevin's advice, I was able to cut it down to 3 pages. Have a look and let me know what you think.