GOLD from Gustavo Lopez Mañas
“It Takes Two”, photos by Steve McCurry.- ‘The Hobbit’ will usher in a new technology at movie theater
Some more from Sam Kieth
monsieur Qui • Work in progress
That Will Be The Day- FACEBOOK MAKES IT OFFICIAL: YOU HAVE NO SAY
Bungie’s Destiny detailed in leaked document, official art
“Private Moon” by Leonid Tishkov and Boris Bendikov- JOBS Act crowdfunding is unlikely to help most startups
- iPad Mini Comixology Comparisons
- Explore the stellar neighborhood with your browser
Roundup #17
Roundup #16
Photos by Bryan Schutmaat- Terry Cavanagh and the Heart of Super Hexagon
Jeremy Miranda
Tower Studio- Apotheon Makes Ancient Art Work in a Modern Game
- Modder’s Attempt To Recreate Descent With Unreal Looks Pretty Sweet (Descent was an old favorite of mine)
- Windows 8 Learnings
Benoit Paillé- Magic keywords on Google and the consequences of tailoring results
- The Tip of the Iceberg: Storytelling and Reactive Design inCanabalt and Capsule
Todd Cole
Roundup #15
- Photos by Noah Kalina
- Comic Sans logos
- Cringely – What Americans don’t know about H-1B visas could hurt us all
- Browser Game Pick: Sun Hop (GamesFree)
- Photos by Simon Nunn
- 1968 Mexico Olympics
- The rise of the “successful” unsustainable company
- Zynga lays off 150 workers, closes studio, ends 13 games
- Photos by Kyle Thompson
- Paper Bird Sculptures By Diana Beltran-Herrera
Roundup #14
Link roundup from my RSS feed:
The week’s past tweet pics
From 9/23/12 to 9/30/12:
Taken while waiting for the train in Hoboken.
My desk at work, taken with the Paper Camera app.
Waiting for a delayed train in Hoboken.
Finished up the latest Daniel Suarez’s latest book at the beach.
Categories: Pictures.
To Project Or Not Project
While writing a ContentProvider the other day I wondered, when I call query() on a ContentProvider, should I start specifying a projection? One of the parameters to ContentProvider.query() is an array of Strings, called the projection. Each element in the array should be the name of a column you would like to have returned by the query.
Now most times my own use of a SQLite database in an app is pretty basic. I want to persist an object that is more complex than what SharedPreferences would allow, or I need to store multiple objects. I’m really limiting the use of the database to CRUD operations. So generally when I call ContentProvider.query() the projection is null, meaning all of the columns in the database are returned. That’s what I want, but maybe there was a performance hit I was taking by not specifying a projection? And then I thought, well what if I only want a couple of the columns? I should provide a projection in that case, right?
Turns out no to the first and yes to the second. I ran queries on database tables with a column counts ranging from 5 to 16, with the number of rows in the table ranging from 100 to 5000. Compared to calling query() with a null projection, passing a projection that passes all of the columns of the table actually performs worse! On average specifying all of the table columns resulted in a query that took 16% longer. But when you want select columns, specifying those columns always results in a faster query than passing null as the projection. As the number of columns in the projection increases so does the query time.
The take away, specify your projection if you want less than all of the columns from the table you are querying. And if you want all columns pass null as the projection.
Response to Square’s Chasing a Cunning Android bug
Over at the The Corner, Square’s engineering blog, they like to post about various topics related to Android development. Yesterday there was a post about a NoSuchMethodException being thrown. The code tried to override an Activity method that wasn’t introduced until API 11 (Honeycomb). No problem, except their min sdk value was 8 (Froyo) and when the code was run on a Froyo device a NoSuchMethodException was thrown.
Normally NoSuchMethodExceptions are thrown when you try to call a method that your target sdk supports, but your min sdk does not. A good example is String.isEmpty(). This method was not introduced until API 9, so if are target is 15 but your min is 8 then your code will throw a NoSuchMethodException on a Froyo device.
A great way to catch this is to use Lint. Lint was introduced with ADT 16, and can perform a number of checks on your code to help catch issues that Eclipse might not catch when building your project (like unused resources, hard coded string values, potential issues with images across multiple densities, etc). It will also mark errors in your code where ever you reference a class or method that is above your app’s min sdk.
In the example on Square’s blog post they tried overriding onActionModeStarted() and onActionModeFinished(), two methods not introduced until API 11. If they had used lint they would have caught this error, but only because the parameter of the methods uses a class that was introduced post API 8. The fact that @Override was used on a method that was greater than the min sdk was not caught by lint. If they had tried overriding recreate(), which has no parameters, no lint markers would have been created and the NoSuchMethodException would have been thrown on a Froyo device.
The take away is that even though lint won’t catch everything, it is still a pretty good tool to help you catch potential problems before they get the chance to be reported as bugs.
Categories: Coding.
Short Palisades Hike
Here are some pictures from a short hike along the Palisades.
Listening to some Records
I got my hands on a Dual 1219 turntable a little while ago, and I gave a bunch of records a listen to tonight. Here’s what the turntable looks like:
The Dual 1219 (gotta love that Atlantic Records label, such a classic look)
The Dual 1219 was made between 1970 and 1972. I have it hooked up to some Bose computer speakers, and it sounds okay, but there is no power. The next thing to get is an amp.
Here’s what I was listening to tonight:
Bob Dylan, Joan Jett
Billy Joel, Crosby Stills Nash and Young
Billy Joel, Chicago, The Police
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