Apple has kindly awarded me a WWDC Student Scholarship for the second consecutive year. Needless to say, I am very excited to to learn even more this year. Thank you Apple!
It’s funny, I know several of the student developers in the above photo. Phillippe, whom you can barely see the glasses of on the left, founded and runs TreeInspired.
Today Ze Frank ended his absolutely awesome year of “The Show”.
Thanks Ze, we’ll all miss you!
I’m sure remaining fluent in a second language when you are not immersed is as difficult as learning a new language in the first place. I’ve been back from southern Japan for four years as of last month, so this is a challenge I am dealing with personally. Although I studied Japanese briefly in high school and as an exchange student for a few months, I attribute the entirety of my ability to speak Japanese to living there for 25 months uninterrupted and speaking to people in Japanese every moment of every day.
When I returned I tried watching Japanese movies and listening to Japanese music, but neither helped me retain the language. I made room for Japanese in my University schedule and was catapulted all the way to the fourth year level. Thankfully an entire year of daily Japanese helped me to not only maintain my prior vocabulary but also enabled me to learn to read even better.
Yet sadly I couldn’t find time forever to take Japanese classes, also I’m not aware of any more I can take beyond Japanese 402, so my Japanese ability began to shrink once more… at least until about a month ago. The only thing unusual that happened a month ago, to begin this linguistic revival, was a strong feeling of homesickness for Japan. I get that a lot, I really loved Japan, the people, but this pang of missing the islands was stronger than I had thereto experienced. Thoughts of life in the southern islands, the old apartments and neighborhoods, local foods and friends began to invade my thoughts and even my dreams. All of a sudden I started forgetting English words, only remembering their Japanese equivalents just like when I lived in Kyushu. Cravings for Nattou, Nanjakora Daifuku, Chikin Nanban, Hamakatsu, Onigiri and Hoka hoka took over my mouth. The only practice I had had in a year was talking to my friends Hasegawa-san and Isamu-san at WWDC, and suddenly I was feeling ‘pera pera’ again… It was weird.
I’m back to ‘normal’ now, but I’ve recommitted to use this boost to get me motivated to continue onward with Japanese. I haven’t figured out a great method yet but for now I’ll listen to as much Japanese conversation as I can in the incredibly simplistic JapanesePod101.com podcast, it’s nice to hear some native Japanese speakers… if I can stand that Peter guy. Further I’m trying to get Megan excited about learning Japanese, nothing’s better than having a secret code language with your mate!
With only about a month and a week of classes left, two of my friends, Andrew, Dave and I have begun considering doing some casual development together over the summer. We are currently in the ‘getting ideas’ stage of planning. Some of the better ideas include a physics game, an online marks calculator and planner and finally a music analyzer and playlist maker.
Naturally I want to develop in Mac OS X so I’ve got to work hard to get these two on Macs before the summer. Whether it’s together or alone I’ve got some cool ideas of my own I’m going to build in OS X once I have a bit more free time too…
Edit: April 20, 2007 - Well it turns out this time I was way off. What can I say, if you’re going to have an opinion, you will be wrong sometimes.
First I should point out I personally have no inside information about any prerelease builds of Mac OS X Leopard, future features nor any persisting bugs that may or may not exist. I am an ADC member, attended WWDC06 and have briefly tried the 10.5 preview I received there, but have nothing to say about my own experiences with the Leopard preview. My opinions here are entirely speculative.
I don’t think it is in Apple’s best interest to repair user experience bugs in prerelease versions of Leopard seeded to developers, and especially this far before the final release of 10.5. I’m talking about usability bugs - user data loss, kernel panics, application incompatibilities, not underlying functional problems in new technologies like Core Animation, Time Machine or any of the other APIs developers are feverishly implementing.
A key thing to remember is that Leopard is not a public beta, unless one has an Apple Developer Connection membership and has paid for the Leopard early starter kit there is no legitimate way for an end user to get their hands on the Leopard preview. This is Apple’s way of doing things and it has been that way for some time. Developers I know who have the early starter kits have separate installs of Tiger and Leopard. They use Leopard for only development, Tiger for mail, web browsing and everything else. Usability bugs are not critical to these developers, but they mean a lot to those users who want ‘in’ early.
Some may recall the last major release of OS X, Tiger, and some of the controversy surrounding it’s “leak”. A young student, David Schwartzstein, among two other John Does, were sued by Apple for the sharing of a WWDC preview of OS X Tiger. I remember hearing about this torrent shredding across the internet and many school-mates installing it. These weren’t beta-tester wannabes, nor were they hoping to develop code in their pirated copy of the OS, they wanted ‘in’ for free and they wanted ‘in’ early. In-short they wanted a great new user experience ‘from the future’, right away. Many of them more or less got what they wanted, the Tiger preview seamed to provide them with a satisfying experience in which they could show off the new features and feel ahead of the game until the official release.
If Leopard is as ‘buggy’ as has been claimed it can only work in Apple’s favor:
Not just win-win, ‘win-win-win’…
The amount of Macs I see being used on campus since the Tiger release has at least tripled, and still I am yet to run into one person using an illegal copy of Leopard. To me is seems this “strategy” is working, at least on university campuses.
I just got the trackback to this Applesfera (a Spanish blog) posting about the Hipp Store back in November. The comments are a bit funny…
We Got Blogged?!, originally uploaded by tylermhawkins.
Just a few reasons to feel good (and maybe a bit smart) even when stuff sucks at school:
I became fluent in Japanese after living in southern Japan for only 8 months!
When I entered university I challenged fourth year Japanese and excelled.
I’ve helped dozens of other students to pass CompScie assignments and final projects they otherwise would have failed and asked for nothing in return!
The blood I have donated has saved many lives!
I was top of my class in my university critical reading and writing class.
I make my wife happy.
I was awarded a Apple Developer Connection student scholarship to WWDC06 in San Francisco!
I make friends everywhere I go.
I am an honest person.
My beta testing and Japanese localization of Delicious Library contributed to their outrageous success and Apple Design Award victory.
I am undefeated at Wii Boxing — I’ll accept any challenger!
I am nice.
Six weeks ago, I began what has become a huge obsession of mine. It is called the “Wii Sports Experiment”. I outlined a 6 week game plan for myself, the idea being that I would continue All normal activity and eating habits, and simply add 30 minutes of Wii Sports to my day. I kept to that plan meticulously, here are the results…
Sorry for another random Wii anecdote but I found this endlessly interesting… I should probably hop on the bandwagon.
The University and I are unreconcilable enemies.
They hate me, I hate them. Our mirrored hatred is, though, not a completely perfect reflection. For you see, I try, the University does not.
It’s like a really bad relationship were one person has all the power and it’s always used to benefit themselves. They don’t (or do very grudgingly) communicate with you but that’s your fault not theirs.
How can you expect them to care about you?
You mean nothing to them.
Nothing.
Many are in this relationship out of pure necessity but instead of making the best of it they take us by the throat and squeeze. They are in it for our money, as bright as we may be, as nice as our professors might treat us, if it weren’t for the money there would be no relationship. Extremely few people get into this relationship and get out with what they wanted. Many get out with something but realize that it’s not worth as much as they thought it would be.
The University’s hate for me is a passive one, the worst kind, they hate me because I am me, an individual, one person.
One person means nothing to an organization with all the power and little accountability.
I hate them because of their robot-like rigidity and devotion to a stale, bureaucratic and elitist concept of education. Here everything is business; true growth of the human mind, spirit and race is secondary to numbers. I know and understand the necessity of giving students a way of qualifying their learning (marks) but never in an education system should dividing up and classing students into A’s, D’s and the like be more important than the learning behind those marks! I understand the necessity also of money but never should that interfere with the education.
Is it not a conflict of interest for a professor, who has the power to control the text book purchases of thousands of students to be a paid advisor to the publisher who happens to provide the classes’ text?
How is it forgivable for teacher’s assistants in a given lab to openly admit that the lab assignments that the students devote so much time to are, at their fundamental level simply a waste of time, teaching nothing, testing little but only engineered to provide enough busy-work to weed out some students and provide some sort of a mark? Do the T.A’s carry the blame? No, they are only the messengers.
Is it so unreasonable and damaging to the University as a business or an educational institution to let one student, deeply interested in thinking machines and artificial intelligence, to Major in and learn both Computer Science and Psychology and pay for more classes?
I’m really trying University, why won’t you stop impeding me?
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