Aart's Blog

Work has been a lot of fun, but very busy. As a result, I had not worked on my Android games (or other hobbies) for a very long time. This Thanksgiving break, therefore, I decided to take a few extra days off, and add some long overdue new support in my games. For Checkers for Android, I finalized the support to connect an electronic board (just as was already done in the chess app), in particular for Certabo. The Certabo boards , mainly intended for chess, ship with 34 identifying chips that can be attached to any piece set, typically a full chess set with two additional queens). However, due to the flexibility of the chips, these boards can also be used for other 8x8 games, such as American checkers (enabling a full checkers set with ten additional kings). Version 3.1 brings this support to Google Play . For Chess for Android, I added timer support for the DGT3000 chess clock . Up to recently, I only used the clock to prompt the most recently played move (with a beep to alert the pla...

For my first smartwatch, I couldn't decide between the Samsung Galaxy Watch3 and the Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro, so impulsively I bought both, which puts me in a good position to make some comparisons. Both watches look beautiful and provide excellent health features, like tracking heart rate and SpO2. The Galaxy can even record an ECG and blood pressure, although (at the moment?) this only works when paired with a Samsung phone. The rotating bezel control of the Galaxy provides pleasant navigation through the menus. Both watches have wireless charging. The battery life of the GT 2 Pro is amazing! Both watches provide solid default apps, mainly focused around fitness tracking. The GT 2 Pro can also show the rising times of the moon and sun, tidal information, air pressure, and moon phase. The Night Wish face nicely displays the moon phase on the watch together with a star map (I still have to figure out if that rotates though). The Galaxy provides many third party apps through the Galax...

Our paper "Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing" (authors Grzegorz Malewicz, Matthew H. Austern, Aart J. C. Bik, James C. Dehnert, Ilan Horn, Naty Leiser, and Grzegorz Czajkowski) won the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award for its impact over the last decade. I am proud of having been part of that team, and this brings back good memories.