Humor4u

With the world awash in liquidity i.e freshly printed fiat money pouring forth from various elitist instigated TARP, tax payer funded corporate/banker bailout and a seemingly endless succession of Quantitative Easing scams.. errm schemes, one begins to wonder where it is all going and what will happen when the chickens come home to roost? For my part, non of it seems to be seeping my way, so I know the cash osmosis must be selective, If not to you or I, where then does the torrent wick to? Not being a fiscal expert I tend to cut through the industry "cashanese" and try to stick to the short plain words of reality. The gloriously expanded money supply is obviously not dispersed equitably or evenly, there are no air-drops of cash to the hapless strapped citizens, the loot is funneled directly into bank vaults and corporate coffers. In theory this bonanza is supposed to leak out and distribute itself across the spectrum. It is obvious it does not. If banks would or...

In my too many decades here on the planet, there has never been a time when the "Rich get richer..." adage has not held true. I suspect it has been true since the dawn of time. It is, or so appears to be an immutable truism. Rich getting richer: Richest 400 Americans’ net worth jumps 13% The net worth of the richest Americans grew by 13 per cent in the past year to $1.7-trillion (U.S.), Forbes magazine said on Wednesday, and a familiar cast of characters once again populated the top of the magazine’s annual list of the U.S. uber-elite, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and the Koch brothers. This is of comfort to the rich I suppose but the underlying question is, upon who's back? That part has never changed either, it is always at the expense of the regular folks who diligently strive yet never seem to break out of the tender traps set for them in the the "rich designed" climate we know as the economy. The "contrived" economy is about...

If you are like me you are probably jaded by current economic news the likes of  which reminds me of the movie "Groundhog day." In the movie the main character awakes to the very same day, no matter what he does that day, he is returned to the same starting point... the next day. The premise offers unlimited potential to have a different day, yet offers nothing in the way of a continued life experience. It is possible that the seemingly endless stream of band aids applied to the hopelessly wounded global economic prospect have at least one definable effect, that of desensitizing and introducing stasis into the awareness of citizens at large, i.e. they have long ceased having an interest in the pantomime of successive false hopes. No matter how many TARP, bail-out, or QE sequels are announced, the effect of them seems only to benefit the elites and power-mongering scourge that created the situation to begin with, while penalizing innocent citizens at large with higher unemploy...

Photo by Cleo Phas August till about mid-October is the time of the year when I enjoy a bit of a lull at work and all my usual students (I teach small groups) are on holiday. It’s also the time of the year when I get approached by some really peculiar one-on-one students. For example, this year’s summer assortment includes the following characters: an adult beginner who wants to speak perfect English by December and yet doesn’t want to do any out-of-class work; a high-powered business woman who needs help with her presentations in English an IELTS candidate who wants to practise speaking You will say: what’s so unusual about it – isn’t it the kind of students we normally teach? Yet there is a difference. My usual, longer-term students are both familiar with my expectations of them and realistic about the process of language learning and therefore willing to work hard. In contrast, my August students are less process-oriented and, for most part, are looking for quick fixes. As a result...

INTERLUDE Stay tuned...

Let's just say, for the sake of argument... the Fukushima nuclear disaster is indeed leaking and dispersing noxious, toxic radiation fallout all around the globe, even as you read this!  Many background sources, as opposed to mainstream sources certainly posit that indeed is the case and Fukushima is slowly but surely contaminating everything with potentially lethal doses of nuclear radiation, the kind that seeps into the soil, water and hence the food-chain forever altering the stuff of life, even the air we must breathe. Unless one has a radioactive counter of some sort we are totally reliant on the authorities to keep us informed and warned about such a hideous proposition. However, history shows us that when the threat is large enough or must be sequestered intelligence information, that quite the opposite has proven true and said information has been withheld, usually, as they say, for our own good. Out in the world there...

(This tip and anecdote is specifically about Android, but the same technique applies to every platform I've ever worked on , which at this point is quite a few. In fact, it's a technique that Romain and I have stressed in our book and in most graphics/GUI talks that we've given over the years, such as this one from Devoxx in 2008 ) . I was debugging an application recently (names withheld to protect the completely and utterly guilty) and discovered that the source of a serious performance bottleneck was simply the size of the bitmaps involved. The application's job is to display lots of pictures, so using bitmaps is a given. And the size of the bitmaps being loaded and displayed is signficant, so there were going to be issues around memory and performance anyway. But it was the way in which the application was treating the source and destination sizes that was at the root of the problem. In particular, the application was loading each image into a bitmap of size X x Y...