The Class Awards are a yearly set of awards recognizing companies that have class. They have two different forms, the first form is an endorsement. Companies that rely on a great product rather than tricky marketing in order to attract and keep customers are eligible for it. The idea is that these companies, chosen from a large variety of markets have been vetted and consumers are encouraged to use them. The second form is an encouragement, and is awarded to companies that attempt to break into established markets where the leaders don't care about consumers. It will be associated with a large cash prize. Of course, the company that has enough money to give out these multi-million dollar awards will also be heavily lobbying congress to deregulate businesses.

I've been working on getting a particle system running these last few days. After throwing around a few ideas, I've decided to go with a multi-threaded model, with independent update and render threads. In this system, the update thread passes lists of particles to render as messages to the render thread. These messages are put into a queue, one message per frame, which allows the two threads to be speed decoupled. I'll hopefully post a video of a really simple demo soon, still working on it though. In the mean time, take a look at some videos which illustrate the effects I want to eventually be capable of creating.

OpenGL is insanely complicated. In the process of trying to make a game I first attempted to tackle both the ndk and OpenGL in one fell swoop, which wasn't a very good idea at all. I then narrowed my focus upon trying to render something using GLSurfaceView. I found that OpenGL comes with a core package, but each implementation can support any of many extensions to that core. Here's a good (incomplete) reference when trying to determine which phones support which extensions. I personally haven't come to a point where I know enough to even try to do something that requires this information, but here it is. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2093594/opengl-extensions-available-on-different-android-devices  The above-linked forum doesn't mention the DroidX, my development phone, so here is its list.

GL_OES_byte_coordinates GL_OES_fixed_point GL_OES_single_precision GL_OES_matrix_get GL_OES_read_format GL_OES_compressed_paletted_texture GL_OES_point_sprite GL_OES_point_size_array GL_OES_matrix_palette GL_OES_draw_texture GL_OES_query_matrix GL_OES_texture_env_crossbar GL_OES_texture_mirrored_repeat GL_OES_texture_cube_map GL_OES_blend_subtract GL_OES_blend_func_separate GL_OES_blend_equation_separate GL_OES_stencil_wrap GL_OES_extended_matrix_palette GL_OES_framebuffer_object GL_OES_rgb8_rgba8 GL_OES_depth24 GL_OES_stencil8 GL_OES_compressed_ETC1_RGB8_texture GL_OES_mapbuffer GL_OES_EGL_image GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays GL_OES_required_internalformat GL_IMG_read_format GL_IMG_texture_compression_pvrtc GL_IMG_texture_format_BGRA8888 GL_EXT_texture_format_BGRA8888 GL_IMG_texture_stream GL_IMG_vertex_program

There is precious littlle information on the internet detailing how to use OpenGL ES within the android environment, so I've spent a lot of time flailig around from website to website. There are, however, two incredibly useful references available. The first is the source code of the samples included with the android SDK, this is invaluable. The second is the book <i>Pro Android 2</i> chapter 10, programming 3D graphics with OpenGL. It doesn't cover more than a few api calls, but it helped walk me through all the terminology and crazy parameters. I highly recommend reading this chapter if you're new to OpenGL.

Also the apps-for-android SpriteMethodTest is apparently a good place to look for OpenGL help. http://code.google.com/p/apps-for-android/

In case you haven't noticed, most of what I'm posting here is a tab dump that I can look back upon later. In order to make that more explicit, here's a fun game that lets you play around with particle physics. Every time I move to this tab I lose about an hour of time. http://www.notdoppler.com/frame/639.html 

http://apps.facebook.com/mj-data-worm/

http://apps.facebook.com/mj-snake/

http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/flowing.htm

http://www.auditoriumhd.com/

Fl0w is apparantly the inspiration for the cell stage in Spore. Auditorium is just straight up great. The Reactable is similarly indescribable and enviably cool. I would love to incorporate some of these concepts into a game / mobile app.

This article talks about how math is horrifically mis-taught and how
that affects common perceptions of math. The author describes
reactions people give him when they discover he is a math major, and I
sympathize with him. I've never known how to answer these people
though, this article gives some great suggestions.

On a different note, here's another article (a post on reddit really)
on the beauty of math. It's written in a different tone, but it has
the same message.

http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/eo4e1/respectful_question_you_guys_actu...

tl;dr Math is not about memorizing formulas but about discovering truth.

I'm imagining a menu (a grid of options) using nothing but these
icons. Occasionally one icon will fade out to be replaced with
another. No clue what choosing one of them would do.