Pictures, Thumbnails, and the MediaStore

One of the cool feature of the Android SDK is the MediaStore ContentProvider. This is basically a database with metadata about all of the photos on your device. If you are going to display some or all of the photos on a device, you will probably want to show a thumbnail version of the photo. Once again Android's got you covered. The MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.getThumbnail function can get you a thumbnail for a given picture. But the devil's in the details here. This method will create a thumbnail if one does not already exist. That's a blocking call, but it will return quickly if the thumbnail has already been created. This is an API that any app could call, so if another app has called it for a particular image, then that thumbnail will (probably) already exist. In addition, some phones automatically create thumbnails when you take a picture. However none of these things are guaranteed, so it made me wonder just how many pictures on my phone already had thumbnails made for them. So I wrote a little app to determine this. Here's a screenshot showing the result.

Tapping the first button causes all of the pics in the MediaStore to be counted. Tapping the second button causes all of the thumbnails in the MediaStore to be counted. Tapping the third button causes the thumbs to be counted and put into a HashSet, then iterate over all pics and see if they have a corresponding thumb or not. You can find all of the code on GitHub.

The results on my phone were a bit surprising. First, the biggest number on the screen is the number of thumbnails. There are more thumbnails than photos! My guess is that photos get deleted but their thumbnails persist. Going back to the original question, it looks like about 90% of the photos on my phone have thumbnails already. So any app that uses the MediaStore thumbnails (as opposed to creating their own) will probably be very snappy. At least on my phone. I'm curious what the results would be on your phone. So here's the APK, you can install it on your phone and let me know what are the results.

Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party

The Occupy Wall Street movement is an interesting one to me. I have a lot of empathy for the people involved in the movement. They make a lot of great points. They are correct that the wealthiest 1% have an incredible amount of influence with our government. This is particularly true of corporations in the top percentile. The amount of influence (control) wielded is obviously disproportionate and flies in the face of a country that has a republic style of government.

The Tea Party movement is also interesting to me. I have a lot of empathy for the people in the movement. They make a lot of great points. They are correct that the government is too powerful and in so many cases does much more harm than good. The amount of power wielded by the US government flies in the face of a limited government as described by The Constitution.

Both of these groups are outraged by the status quo and for good reason. However these two groups seem to be at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Most consider OWS to a be "radically progressive." I've heard some people call them communists or anarchists. On the other hand, the Tea Party is considered to be "radically conservative." I've also heard people call them anarchists.

As you've probably guessed by now, I think both groups have way more in common than they would care to admit. Now demographically they are probably quite different, but that doesn't have to matter. However we have seen the Tea Party get eaten up by the Republican Party. Similarly we are already seeing the Democratic Party eat up the OWS group. President Obama wasted no time getting in on this, just as an incumbent President coming up on an election year should.

So in the end these two groups will be consumed by the very powers that be that they oppose. This is part of how the two party system works. In the end both of these groups just become instruments of the divisive, "rally the base" politics that have been the norm for decades.

I'd love to see an alliance between the two groups, which would be a nightmare for both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Of course there is a fundamental difference between the two groups. As I see it, the OWS folks think that government can be fixed and can "do the right thing." They seem to want to use the very instrument of their misery as its own remedy. The Tea Party philosophy is that the government cannot be fixed, so the only way to lessen the damage that it inflicts is to limit its powers. One could say that the OWS folks are optimistic and the Tea Party folks are pessimistic.

Personally I don't totally agree with either group (surprise surprise!) My philosophy certainly leans toward the Tea Party. I think that in a republic or representative democracy, those with the most wealth will yield more influence. I don't think this can be prevented without either undermining democracy, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press. So you are best off by limiting that power. Further, I think that if you make the power of government less attractive (eliminate corporate taxes, subsidies, tariffs etc.), you will also decrease the corruption. It's sort of a chain reaction. Government is corrupt, so make it less powerful. A less powerful government in turn attracts less corruption. It doesn't solve the problem because this problem can't be solved.

However I don't prescribe to the "no new taxes" mantra of the Tea Party either. I do think that taxes are too high, and no I don't care that taxes were once higher or that taxes are higher in other countries. Both of those argument are logical fallacies. However we have built up a huge debt. If we don't pay down that debt, then our children will have to. We splurged, it's our debt. We should pay it down. And please don't tell me that I can pay extra taxes if I choose to. That's a classic prisoner's dilemma, only on a much larger scale.