fidzu : smartphone

Boris Valusek, Design Lead, Google Play

The Google Play Store has over two billion monthly active users coming to find the right app, game, and other digital content. To improve the overall store experience, we're excited to roll out a complete visual redesign. Aligning with Material design language, we're introducing several user-facing updates to deliver a cleaner, more premium store that improves app discovery and accessibility for our diverse set of users.

To make browsing faster and easier, we've introduced a new navigation bar at the bottom of the Play Store on mobile devices and a new left navigation on tablets and Chrome OS. There are now two distinct destinations for games and apps, which helps us better serve users the right kind of content. Once users find the right app or game, the updated store listing page layout surfaces richer app information at the top of each page as well as a more prominent call-to-action button. This makes it easier for users to see the important details and make a decision to install your app. You'll also notice our new icon system with a uniform shape, helping content to stand out more over UI. If you haven't done so already, make sure to update your icon following the new icon specifications as soon as possible.

If you're looking for best practices to make a compelling store listing page, we have several resources to help. To ensure your page resonates well with Android users, use store listing experiments to test for the best app icon, images, video, and descriptions on Google Play. You can also tailor your marketing messages to specific user groups based on their country, install state or even pre-registration by creating custom store listings. For even more, try our free e-learning resource, Academy for App Success.

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21 Aug 2019 5:00pm GMT

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Have you ever wished that Android Studio was faster, more performant, and more memory efficient? If so, then download Android Studio 3.5 today. This stable version of Android Studio is a different kind of release where the Android Studio team took a step back from large feature work for eight months and instead focused on product quality to further accelerate your day-to-day app development. We called this initiative Project Marble, and it focused on making the fundamental features and flows of Android Studio & Emulator rock-solid by looking at three core areas: system health, feature polish, and bugs. Working on Project Marble was in direct response to feedback from you and we continue to welcome any further feedback you have.
To improve system health in Android Studio, we first created a new set of infrastructure and internal dashboards to better detect performance problems. We did this to establish a safety net to catch issues that are typically difficult to catch with regular unit testing. Then, the team addressed a range of issues from fixing over 600 bugs, 50 memory leaks, 20 IDE hangs, and improving XML & Kotlin typing latency. Additionally, for the Android Emulator, we decreased the CPU and memory impact on your development machine. Project Mable was a focused period to work on the IDE and Android Emulator system health but it also uncovered a set of quality areas we will continue to work on going forward.
On top of memory and performance, we spent time polishing and fixing core user facing feature areas. For example, we took a look at the app deployment flow to a device, and completely re-architectured and replaced Instant Run with Apply Changes so that it's more reliable and trusted. With Apply Changes, we no longer modify an APK during your build but instead, we use runtime instrumentation to redefine classes on the fly. If you want to quickly edit code and see code changes, you should try Android Studio 3.5 today.
Lastly, over the course of Project Marble we fixed bugs which landed in Android Studio in 3.5. We are thankful to those who filed bug reports and engaged with us on social media. We are especially thankful for the over 40 external contributors in the Android community that diligently worked with us in filing and resolving critical quality issues in Android Studio 3.5. Project Marble is not the end of quality work for the Android Studio team, but this latest stable release is a major milestone of our on-going quality investment into the IDE. With the quality work and new infrastructure put in place during Project Marble, we hope that you are even more productive in developing Android apps when you download and use Android Studio 3.5.
There are many quality changes we made to Android Studio 3.5. To see the full list of changes, see the Android Studio 3.5 beta release blog and release notes. But you can dive into some of the highlights of the changes below:

System Health

System health improvements during Project Marble was a combination of memory performance, typing & user interfaces freezes, build speed, CPU usage, and I/O performance. For each of these areas we created new ways to detect issues during development and a better process to analyze your feedback both from opt-in analytics and bugs that you file.
Our system health work has many under the hood improvements but a few notable changes include:
Auto-recommend Memory Settings
With Android Studio 3.5, the IDE will recognize when an app project needs more RAM on a machine with higher RAM capacity and will notify you to increase the memory heap size or you can adjust the settings yourself under Appearance & Behavior → Memory Settings.

Memory Settings

User Interface Freezes
During the Project Marble development timeframe, we found in our opt-in product analytics that XML code editing was notably slower in the IDE. With this data point, we optimized XML typing, and have measurably better performance in Android Studio 3.5. You can see below that editing data binding expressions in XML is faster due to typing latency improvements.

Code Editing Before - Android Studio 3.4

Code Editing After - Android Studio 3.5

Build Speed
For Android Studio 3.5 we made many speed improvements but a significant change is the addition of incremental build support to the top annotation processors including Glide, AndroidX data binding, Dagger, Realm, and Kotlin (KAPT). Incremental support can make a notable impact on build speed. Learn more here.
Disk I/O File Access Speed
For users on Microsoft® Windows®, we found that disk I/O access times were notable higher on average than other platforms. Digging into the data, we found the default configuration of anti-virus scanners did not optimally exclude build output folders. In Android Studio 3.5, we detect this situation and help guide you through the optimal setup.

System Health Notification - Anti-virus Check

Feature Polish

In addition to improving system health we relooked at a few critical users flows to address bugs and user friction. The areas we looked at ranged from data binding, layout editor, ChromeOS support to project upgrades. One notable area of improvement to highlight is the app deployment flow:
Apply Changes
During the Project Marble time period, we removed Instant Run and re-architectured and implemented from the ground-up a more practical approach in Android Studio 3.5 called Apply Changes. Apply Changes uses platform-specific APIs from Android Oreo and higher to ensure reliable and consistent behavior; unlike Instant Run, Apply Changes does not modify your APK. To support the changes, we re-architected the entire deployment pipeline to improve deployment speed, and also tweaked the run and deployment toolbar buttons for a more streamlined experience.

Apply Changes Buttons

App Deployment User Flow

To recap, Android Studio 3.5 has hundreds of bug fixes and notable changes in these core areas:
System Health

• Memory Settings
• Memory Usage Report
• Reduce Exceptions
• User Interface Freezes
• Build Speed
• IDE Speed
• Lint Code Analysis
• I/O File Access
• Emulator CPU Usage

Feature Polish

• Apply Changes
• Gradle Sync
• Project Upgrades
• Layout Editor
• Data Binding
• App Deployment
• C++ Improvements
• Intellij 2019.1 Platform Update
• Conditional Delivery for Dynamic Feature Support
• Emulator Foldables & Google Pixel Device Support
• Chrome OS Support

Check our the Android Studio release notes page for more details and read about deep dives into several areas of Project Marble in the following Medium blog posts & Google I/O talk:

• Project Marble: Apply Changes
• Improving build speed in Android Studio
• Android Emulator: Project Marble Improvements
• Android Studio Project Marble: Lint Performance
• Android Studio Project Marble: Layout Editor
• Google I/O: Project Marble - What's New in Android Development Tools

Opt-In & Feedback

The specific areas and the approach we took to optimize Android Studio for Project Marble were all based on your feedback and metrics data. The aggregate metrics you can opt-in to inside of Android Studio allow us to figure out if there are broader problems in the product for all users, and the data also allows the team to prioritize feature work appropriately. There are are a couple pathways to help us build better insights. At a baseline, you can opt-in to metrics, by going to Preferences /Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Data Sharing.

IDE Data Sharing

Additionally, throughout the year, you might see user sentiment emojis in the bottom corner of the IDE. Those icons are a lightweight way to inform the Android Studio team on how things are going and to give us in-context feedback, and the fastest way to log a bug and send to the team.

IDE User Feedback

Getting Started

Download
Download Android Studio 3.5 from the download page. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio.
To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v29.1.9 downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager.
As mentioned above, we appreciate any feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Follow us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on Twitter and on Medium.

20 Aug 2019 5:00pm GMT

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20 Aug 2019 2:39pm GMT

Posted by Ian Stoba, Program Manager, Accessibility Engineering

With billions of Android devices in use around the world and millions of apps available on the Play Store, it might seem difficult to drive change across the entire ecosystem, but the Accessibility Developer Infrastructure team is doing just that.

Every time a developer uploads an APK or app bundle to the open or closed tracks, Play tests this upload on various device models running different versions of Android and generates a pre-launch report to inform the developer of issues.

One year ago, the team added accessibility suggestions to the report based on industry best practices and Google's own experience. These tests check for common issues that can make an app harder to use by people with disabilities. For example, they check that buttons are large enough to be comfortable for people to press, and that text has enough contrast with the background to be easier to read.

Since launching in July 2018, more than 3.8 million apps have been tested and over 171 million suggestions have been made to improve accessibility. Along with each suggestion, the developer gets detailed information about how to implement it. Every developer, from a one-person startup to a large enterprise, can benefit from the accessibility suggestions in the pre-launch report.

We are already seeing the real-world impact of these efforts. This year at Google I/O, the number of developers signing up for in-person accessibility consultations was four times the number from 2018. Googlers staffing these sessions reported that the developers had specific questions that were often based on the suggestions from the pre-launch report. The focused questions allowed the Googlers to give more actionable recommendations. These developers found that improving accessibility isn't just the right thing to do, it also makes good business sense by increasing the potential market for their apps.

Accessibility tests in the pre-launch report are just one way Google is raising awareness about accessibility in the global developer community. We partnered with Udacity to create a free online course about web accessibility, released our Accessibility Scanner for Android on the Play Store, and published iOS Accessibility Scanner on GitHub, allowing iOS developers to easily instrument apps to accessibility tests. Together, these efforts support Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Learn more about developing with accessibility in mind by visiting the Android Developer Guidelines and the Google Developer Documentation Style Guide.

15 Aug 2019 11:00pm GMT

Camera calibration just got even easier now. The pose calibration algorithm mentioned here is available as web-service now.

This means that calibration is no longer restricted to a Linux PC - you can also calibrate cameras attached to Windows/ OSX and even mobile phones.
Furthermore you will not have to calibrate at all if your device is already known to the service.
The underlying algorithm ensures that the obtained calibrations are reliable and thus can be shared between devices of the same series.

Aggregating calibrations while providing on-the-fly calibrations for unknown devices form the calibDB web-service.

In the future we will make our REST API public so you can transparently retrieve calibrations for use with your computer vision algorithms.
This will make them accessible to a variety of devices, without you having to worry about the calibration data.

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09 Aug 2019 4:13pm GMT

When using Nextcloud it makes some sense to host it yourself at home to get the maximum benefit of having your own cloud.

If you would use a virtual private server or shared hosting, your data would still be exposed to a third party and the storage would be limited as you would have to rent it.

When setting up a server at home one is tempted to use a Raspberry Pi or similar ARM based device. Those are quite cheap and only consume little power. Especially the latter property is important as the machine will run 24/7.

I was as well tempted and started my self-hosting experience with an ARM based boards, so here are my experiences.

Do not use a Raspberry Pi for hosting

Actually this is true for any ARM based board. As for the Pi itself, only the most recent Pi 4B has a decent enough CPU and enough RAM to handle multiple PHP request (WebCAL, Contacts, WebDAV) from different clients without slowdown.
Also only with the Pi 4B you can properly attach storage over USB3.0 - previously your transfer rates would be limited by the USB2.0 bus.

One might argue that other ARM based computers are better suited. Indeed you could get the decently equipped Odroid U3, long before the Pi 4B was available.
However, non-pi boards have their own set of problems. Typically, they are based on an Smartphone design (e.g. the Odroid U3 essentialy is a Galaxy Note 2).

This makes them plagued by the Android update issues, as these boards require a custom kernel, that includes some of the board specific patches which means you cannot just grab an Ubuntu ARM build.
Instead you have to wait for a special image from the vendor - and just as with Android, at some point, there will be no more updates.

Furthermore ARM boards are actually not that cheap. While the Pi board itself is indeed not expensive at ~60€, you have to add power-supply housing and storage.

Intel NUC devices are a great choice

While everyone was looking at cheap and efficient ARM based boards, Intel has released some great NUC competitors.
Those went largely unnoticed as typically only the high-end NUCs get news coverage. It is more impressive to report how much power one can cram into a small form-factor.

However one can obviously also put only little power in there. More precisely, Intels tablet celeron chips that range around 4-6W TDP and thus compete with ARM boards power-wise. (Still they are an order of magnitude faster then a Raspberry Pi)

Here, you get the advantages of the mature x86 platform, namely interchangeable RAM, interchangeable WiFi modules, SATA & m2 SSD ports and notably upstream Linux compatibilty (and Windows for that matter).

As you might have guessed by the hardware choice above, I made the switch already some time ago. On the one hand you only get reports for the by now outdated N3350 CPU - but on on the other hand it makes this a long term evaluation.

Regarding the specific NUC model, I went with the Gigabyte GB-BPCE-3350C, which are less expensive (currently priced around 90€) than the Intel models.

Consequently the C probably stands for "cheap" as it lacks a second SO-DIMM slot and a SD-card reader. However it is fan-less and thus perfectly fine for hosting.

So after 2 Years of usage and a successful upgrade between two Ubuntu LTS releases, I can report that switching to the x86 platform was worth it.

If anything I would probably choose a NUC model that also supports M.2/ M-Key in addition to SATA to build a software RAID-1.

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09 Aug 2019 3:45pm GMT

A small brain dump of topics that currently fascinate me. These are mostly pointers and maybe it is interesting to follow it.

Books/Reading:

My kobo ebook reader has the Site Reliability Engineering book and I am now mostly done. It is kind of a revelation and explains my interest to write code but also to operate infrastructure (like struggling with ruby, rmagick, nginx…). I am interested in backends since… well ever. The first time I noticed it when we talked about Kolab at LinuxTag and I was more interested in the backend than the KDE client. At sysmocom we built an IoT product and the backend was quite some fun, especially the scale of one instance and many devices/users, capacity planning and disk commissioning, lossless upgrades.

It can be seen in my non FOSS SS7 map work on traffic masquerading and transparent rewriting. It is also clear to see which part of engineering is needed for scale (instead of just installing and restarting servers).

Lang VM design

One technology that made Java fast (Hotspot) and has seen its way into JavaScript is dynamic optimization. Most Just in Time Compilers start with generating native code per method, either directly or after the first couple of calls when the methods size is significant enough. The VM records which call paths are hot, which types are used and then can generate optimized code (e.g. specialized for integers, remove type checks). A technique pioneered at Sun for the "Self" language (and then implemented for Strongtalk and then brought to Java) was "adaptive optimization and deoptimization" and was the Phd topic of Urs Hoelzle (Google's VP of Engineering). One of the key aspects is inlining across method boundaries as this removes method look-up, call stack handling and opens the way for code optimization across method boundaries (at the cost of RAM usage).

In OpenJDK, V8 and JavaScriptCore this adaptive optimization is typically implemented in C++ and requires quite some code. The code is complicated as it needs to optimize but also need to return to a basic function (deoptimize, e.g. if a method changed or the types passed don't match anymore), e.g. in the middle of a for loop with tons of inlined code (think of Array.map being inlined but then need to be de-inlined). A nice and long blog post of JSC can be found here describing the On Stack Replacement (OSR).

Long introduction and now to the new thing. In the OpensmalltalkVM a new approach called Sista has been picked and I find it is genius. Like with many problems the point of view and approach really matters. Instead of writing a lot of code in the VM the optimizer runs next to the application code. The key parts seem to be:

• Using branches taken/not-taken as indicator how hot a path is. The overhead of counting these seem to be better than counting method calls/instructions/loops.
• Using the Inline Caches for type information on call sites (is that mono-, poly- or megamorphic?)
• Optimize from one set of Bytecode to another set of Bytecode.

The revelation is the last part. By just optimizing from bytecode to bytecode the VM remains in charge of creating and managing machine code. The next part is that tooling in the higher language is better or at least the roundtrip is more quick (edit code and just compile the new method instead of running make, c++, ld). The productivity thanks to the abstraction and tooling is likely higher.

As last part the OSR is easier as well. In Smalltalk thisContext (the current stack frame, activation record) is an object as well. At the right point (when the JIT has either written back variables from register to the stack or at least knows where the value is) one can just manipulate thisContext, create and link news ones and then resume execution without all the magic in other VMs.

Go, Go and escape analysis

Ken Thompson and Robert Pike are well known persons and their Go programming language is a very interesting system programming language. Like with all new languages I try to get real world experience with the language, the tooling and which kind of problems can be solved with it. I have debugged and patched some bigger projects and written two small applications with it.

There is plenty I like. The escape analysis of the compiler is fun (especially now that I know it was translated from the Plan9 C compiler from C to Go), the concurrency model is good (though allowing shared state), the module system makes sense (but makes forking harder than necessary), being able to cross compile to any target from any system.

Knowing a bit of Erlang (and continuing to read the Phd Thesis of Joe Armstrong) and being a heavy Smalltalk user there are plenty of things missing. It starts with vague runtime error messages (e.g. panicslice not having parameters) and goes to runtime and post-runtime inspection. In Smalltalk thanks to the abstraction a lot of hard things are easy and I would have wished for some of them to be in Go. Serialize all unrecovered panics? Debugging someone else's code seems like pre 1980…

So for many developers Go is a big improvement but for some people with a wider view it might look like a lost opportunity. But that can only be felt by developers that have experienced higher abstraction and productivity.

Unsupervised machine learning

but that is for another dump…

25 Sep 2017 10:11am GMT

02 Sep 2017 10:00pm GMT

01 Sep 2017 10:00pm GMT

Shopping for 3D TV (again), few findings:

• There are no non-LED 3D TVs for sale in this part of world anymore (in particular, my older favorite, LE40C750 is no longer available)
• Samsung D6xxx series (the cheapest) were caught red-handed not providing FullHD resolution in 3D: via Samygo. (Note from myself: Samsung was caught because lots of people actually buy their stuff, what one can think about other vendors?)
• LG goes out of line of vendors with 3D shutter glasses technology with their FPR ("Cinema 3D" in marketing speak) technology. It uses passive (no power needed) polarized glasses, like RealD cimenas. Announced April (on these longitudes), already in local shops at not-so-indecent prices. FPR is Film Patterned Retarder, and I hope the last word is spelled right, because I have high hopes for this tech. It shares the same issue as Samsung D6xxx: there won't FullHD here for sure, but at least it's official and there're other benefits.

12 Nov 2011 6:55pm GMT

I finally going to get Arduino, and while I'm choosing flavor and waiting for it, I can't help but disassembling all devices I have at home, each time speaking: "This must have Arduino inside!" (meaning of course that I expect it to be based on general-purpose MCU). Gosh, I usually get "blob chip" (uncased chip with blob of epoxy on top).

Well, I finally had my expectations fulfilled - Luxeon SP-1 voltage stabilizer/cutter features ATMEGA48V-10PU (Flash: 4k, EEPROM: 256, RAM:512). Not only that, it is installed in DIP socket! Buy from Luxeon, they're hacker-friendly ;-).

I bought the device actually for a wattmeter it features (which fact is hard to figure out from common specs found in the shops, I accidentally read somebody mentioning it on a forum). The wattmeter is of course not bright - for a lamp rated 100W it shows 88W, and for more powerful equipment (like perforator) understates wattage even more (maybe it's difference between real and apparent power factor).

Still, for $17 you get Arudino-alike with voltage/current sensor and hacking possibility. Woot!

BOM:
High-power board:

• Relay: Coil: 24VDC, 5A/240VAC
• 7805
• Coil transformer LR-019B

MCU board:

• ATMEGA48V-10PU
• 2 buttons
• 2 LEDs (red & green)
• 3-digit 7-segment LED indicator

12 Nov 2011 5:58pm GMT

Kindle:

• Amazon Kindle official GPL source code
• Kindle keyboard shortcuts and other reference
• Latest jailbreak appears to be one from NiLuJe (forum). It's known to work with firmware 3.3. Hacks/updates should be copied to Kindle USB drive root.
• SirAlex's page
• Intro for writing kindlets
  

Linux kernel module tricks:

• How to bind Linux driver to device whose IDs it doesn't know (yet), without recompiling
• Building a kernel module separately
• (build module from a kernel source tarball using currently installed kernel config)

10 Nov 2011 3:21pm GMT

In Debian Unstable the transition to Gnome 3 is taking place; when Gnome 3.0 firstly came out some unnamed geeky users complained loudly about the design decisions of the development team to push strongly towards gnome-shell as a new default UI; gnome-shell was designed focusing on usability (usability is a metric relative to a certain target audience BTW) and simplicity, hiding a lot of details from the users. Obviously you can never make everyone happy so some of us simply happened to be "out of target": you know us computer people (*cough cough*), we like to be in charge and control The Machine... I must admit I still don't have a definitive opinion about the gnome-shell concept, for now I just know that it does not suit me; I am going to try it eventually, maybe I'll get used to it, but in the mean time I need my desktop back just like I shaped it through the years; can this be done without loosing all the good Gnome technologies (Empathy over all of them)?

To be completely fair I have to say that there is little to complain about with Gnome developers, we can still get our good old GNOME desktop fully back by using the fall-back mode based on gnome-panel and live happily ever after, let's take a look at how this can be accomplished.

NOTE: GNOME people state that the fall-back mode is meant for systems with older graphic cards which cannot run gnome-shell, however it can very well be seen as a good opportunity for those who do not want to run gnome-shell just yet.

Getting back to the topic: some minor touches are needed to make the panel look more like what we are used to, maybe some of these settings could even become default for fall-back mode, we'll see.

First, enable fall-back mode (on Debian there is a dedicated session you can choose from the Log-in Manager for that) and change some desktop settings, in a terminal type:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session session-name 'gnome-fallback'
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'menus-have-icons' true
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'buttons-have-icons' true
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background 'show-desktop-icons' true

gnome-tweak-tool can be used for some of these settings like shown in the attached images.

Then rearrange the applets on the panel as you please (use Alt-RightClick to access the panel properties), and fix the theming using this patch to have a light panel again (against gnome-themes-standard=3.0.2-1):

$ mkdir $HOME/.themes
$ cd $HOME/.themes
$ cp -r /usr/share/themes/Adwaita Adwaita-fallback
$ cd Adwaita-fallback
$ patch -p1 < $HOME/adwaita-fallback-panel-theme.patch
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'gtk-theme' 'Adwaita-fallback'

Some final touches for the Metacity window manager and to the clock applet, and we are all set:

$ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode mouse
$ gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true
$ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel3-applets/clock/custom_format '<span color="#333">%a %d %b</span> <b>%H:%M</b>'
$ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel3-applets/clock/format custom

Ah, in the new gnome-panel based on Gtk3 there are still some details to take care of, I hope issues like that will be addressed and that the panel will be supported for quite some time.

Attached images:

Attached files:

Adwaita theme patch for fall-back mode

19 Oct 2011 9:37pm GMT

After letting us wait for a bit longer than scheduled (13 days), the hospital initiated the contractions. For the first couple of hours, everything went just perfect, but then the little one got stuck on the way and we had to resort to a cesarean section. Lara Marie Lauer was born 8th of June at 04:41 (AM) with 3460 gramms and 49 cm.

Mummy was still on intensive care and so they gave her to me. I can't express the feelings I had in this very moment. I'm still kind of overwhelmed every time I see her. Thanks for all of you who waited anxiously with me and those who prayed for us. The most important tasks for the near future is getting Mummy to recover and Lara Marie to become accustomed to us and the rest of the outside world.

Please bear with me if in the next time I'm not as responsive as usually

09 Jun 2011 4:06pm GMT

And now for something completely different… while we are all waiting for my baby to arrive (who was scheduled for 25th of May), she just received her first greeting card - together with a personalized bib and a towel (with integrated hood - pretty fancy!) from my good friends at #openmoko-cdevel.

Guys, seeing this card was very heartwarming - it means a lot to me that you share my anticipation, thanks a lot! And I'm 100% sure she will appreciate her gifts… now let's cross fingers it won't take much longer… waiting is the hardest part of it

Yours,

Mickey.

30 May 2011 8:54am GMT