In general I’m very pleased. I don’t like the fragmentation in the Android handset market, but that’s maybe just me. On Android the Alarms still work when the phone is muted. The options that are provided are pretty nice and I especially enjoy the fast switching of input-locales, which switches keyboard layout and dictionary between German and English.

So what’s annoying?

• When contacts are joined and the names differ the one that is selected to be joined will be ignored. This is a reasonable behavior and was only fixed in froyo issue 6067. What’s still annoying is that to do this with Facebook contacts you need to go into the Facebook app to import all friends into your contacts because otherwise the names you don’t have in your address book will not be displayed and later turn it back off. Is that a workflow I want to tell someone how to do? This is crazy.
• Graphical emoticons in the messaging and gtalk apps can’t be disabled. Not sure if there are any plans to fix that or when.
• Integration with Flickr is lacking and is much behind Picasa. Still, I like Flickr much better than Picasa.
• Miles/KM usage is confusing in Maps and other applications and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to configure it.

Apps I installed and plan on using:

• Adobe Reader
• CheckMyTrip
• Facebook
• Goggels
• Maps
• Talk
• Shazam
• Twitter
• Calendar and Gmail
• Finance
• Mein A1

Missing for me:

• Public transport timetable app. ÖBB (Austrian Train Agency) made the stupid decision to no longer provide timetable data for public transport to Google, so this is not available in Google maps anymore.
• Billig Tanken (as available for the iPhone) or a similar application to find the nearest & cheapest gas station.
• Movies app to find what movies are on and to book tickets. – Movie Finder and the Flixster app look cool, but don’t support Austria.

Interesting apps I’m not currently using:

• Yelp – very US-centric, but might be interesting when on vacation there
• OpenTable – too limited in Austria; maybe useful in other countries
• cab4me – interesting idea, but I didn’t ever have the need for something like that
• Astrid – the ultimate todo app, but I’m currently trying not to use todo lists anymore :-)
• NewsRob – I currently don’t really see the point in reading RSS feeds on a mobile device
• WordPress – Yes, you can blog from your phone, but why would I? Maybe for getting alerts for comments and replying to them, but I already get e-mail notifications anyway.
• ConnectBot

Mobile web sites I bookmarked:

• Gmail Tasks
• Dopplr mobile
• Flickr mobile

Want to know more about my life on Android? Do you have any other questions about the N1? I’ll be more than happy to answer any of your questions about Android and the N1 in the comments.

While many things are new I believe the most important change was that for the first time ever we bring the management of the IBM System z down to distributed workloads. zLinux was already a great way to run Linux workloads on System z, but with this capability we make it possible to manage workloads through a single system and use the capabilities of System x blades to extend mainframe capabilities and their associated management capabilities into distributed CPU-intensive workloads.

I find it highly interesting that a major enabler for this integration was the wide adoption and availability of a key mainframe technology on x86 systems – virtualization.

The introduction to zOS course I’m taking is getting more and more timely by the day :-)

You can read more about the hybrid support of the zEnterprise in Jim Porell’s guest post on our Smarter Planet blog.

Update 7/9: Andrew posted that the download is now fixed and he also included some helpful links to get started with trying the beta.

On a modern multi-issue CPU, running at some gigahertz clock frequency, the worst-case loss is almost 10 million instructions per VM page fault. If you are running with a rotating disk, the number is more like 100 million instructions.

What good is an O(log2(n)) algorithm if those operations cause page faults and slow disk operations? For most relevant datasets an O(n) or even an O(n^2) algorithm, which avoids page faults, will run circles around it.

Besides being an interesting article, this is the first time I read about Varnish. I know lighttpd, but haven’t heard about Varnish before . Anyone ran into that before? Maybe even used it?

In addition they’ve also been demoing their solution as part of the Google I/O 2010 Sandbox this week.

btw: Lombardi is an IBM company.

The product is still in beta and developers can currently sign up to be placed on a waitlist. Given this has been released more than two years after Amazon S3 I would’ve expected that it would not be limited to US developers and US data centers. In comparison to Amazon S3 it is also missing CDN integration, which I think would be very interesting for many, no matter if they also use AppEngine or not.

This was announced hours after Amazon S3 continued to innovate; announcing their Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage.