Opgenorth.NET

Yeah, I’ve been kind of quiet as of late.  So quiet, I suspect that some people might be wondering if something happened.  I was a bit surprised to see that the last time I had blogged was after TechDays in Calgary.  Well, nothing significant has happened – just a bit of laziness augmented by a touch of tech-burnout compounded by the odd bit of single malt scotch.

So, now that one month is almost up on 2010, I figured that it was time to start blogging about something again.  The first trick to this, of course, was to figure out what I wanted to do in 2010.  It does seem like there will be a lot of interesting things, technically speaking, coming up this year.

A couple of new things I want to look at over the remaining 11 months:

Mobile development, particularly with a focus on Android.  For the latter half of 2009 I have been dabbling in Android.  I believe that it’s time to go out on a bender, and in a drunken stupor get some embarrassing tattoo and join the Android Army.  So far, I’m at two out of three.  Not bad, huh?

Ruby is another technology I’d like to explore – particularly Rails.  I can help but think that the opinionated view that Rails development has taken is the way to go for the bulk of web development.  A lot of websites are basically just forms over data, and Rails seems to address that concern rather well.  To bad nobody around here in Edmonton does much Rails development.

.NET 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC2.  I know there is a lot of debate between Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC.  Personally, I think MVC is the better way.  Probably best to keep abreast of what is going on in the ASP.NET MVC world.  And, of course, the DLR in .NET will come to maturity soon.  By maturity I mean widespread acceptance.  If this happens, then maybe developers won’t get so hung up on languages:  i.e. “I’m a C# guy so VB.NET sucks”.

And finally, a guy needs hobbies.  Now granted, my past hobbies of alcohol and guns (no, not together at the same time) have served me well for the past 20 years or so. However, they are hard hobbies to share with my sons at this point in time.  So, at the start of winter I expanded the geek factor of my sons (and myself) by getting back into Warhammer.  Now the last time I played was about 20 years ago, with the 3rd edition rules.  In fact, I still have some of the books in my basement from back then.  Anyway, picked up The Battle for Skull Pass boxed set.  My son rather likes the Dwarfs.  I suspect it’s because he’s similar in stature/height to the stunties.  Myself, while I find the Greenskins amusing, I suspect I might have to move on and get serious with Dark Elves.

Anyway, enough for tonight.

After a bit of tinkering, I managed to provision my ADP1 setup without a SIM card.  A bit of google, and here is what I did

1. Download the Android SDK.  In my case, I unzipped it to C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1.
2. Connection the phone via the USB cable to my computer.  When the phone asks for a device.
3. You’ll get the new hardware dialog, when prompted for the drivers, you’ll need to specify the location.  The Android SDK has the drivers, in my case they were at C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\usb_driver\x86.
4. Once you have the drivers installed cd to c:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\tools.
5. Type adb devices.  This should list all the Android devices that you have connected.  If you don’t see any devices listed, then you have a problem.
6. Type adb shell.  This will direct your commands to your ADP1
7. Now while at the adb shell, su to root, then : 
8. cd /data/data/com.android/providers.settings/databases/
9. sqlite3 settings.db
10. INSERT INTO system (name, value) VALUES (‘device_provisioned’, 1);
11. .quit
12. Reboot the phone
13. adb shell
14. am start –a android.intent.action.MAIN –n com.android.settings/.Settings

Once all that is done, you should be enable to use your ADP1 as if you had a SIM card in it (we’ll except for the phoning part).

Useful link:  FAQ: Unlocking/Activating a G1 or ADP1 Without A Sim Card.

(Note:  this article is pretty dated, and used IntelliJ 8.  I plan a follow-up covering IntelliJ 9)

So I have this semi-fancy Google Android Dev Phone 1.  Lately I’ve been devoting part of my spare time to learning about programming for Android (the OS of the phone).  Google (probably because they didn’t ask for my opinion and/or input) decided to use Java as the lingua franca for Android programming.  If you ask me – and I know you will – they should have used C# and Mono (I might be a bit biased here).  Luckily, years ago I had done Java programming, so I wasn’t that intimidated by the use of Java on Android.

The first big question that every developer faces is which IDE?  There are a few Java IDE’s out there, but if you ask me the only ones worth considering are Eclipse and IntelliJ.  The documentation for Android points you to using Eclipse.  Eclipse is a good IDE.  However, back in the day when I was getting paid for Java development, my employer got us all copies of IntelliJ, from JetBrains.  I liked it.  I like it enough that if I landed a contract tomorrow that involved Java, I’d buy me a copy of IntelliJ.

So, all that being said, I figured I’d give IntelliJ a spin as I travelled down the stack-trace of Android programming.  Here are my observations, in general:

1. There is an Android plug-in for IntelliJ.  Now, you might believe that development on the Android plug is dead.  Not true.  The plug-in is undergoing active development – it just seems to be kind of slow
2. I found the installation of the Android plug-in for IntelliJ far easier than for Eclipse.  Just download the most current release, and then unzip to your plugins folder in your IntelliJ installation.  With Eclipse, it is simple, but not when the documentation is wrong.
3. The IntelliJ plug-in is simple, and seems to get the job done.  It’s a bit to simple at this time, if you ask me.  The ADT for Eclipse provides a far richer dev-centric experience for Android coding.  For example there are designers to help you with laying out your form, a lot more control over starting up the Android emulator, and better tooling for hooking up the debugger to either the emulator or an app running on the physical phone.
4. Being a Resharper junkie, I found that IntelliJ was more natural for me to use.
5. I didn’t run into to many problems when I was trying to use/convert Eclipse project with IntelliJ. This is good, because the vast majority (all?) projects I’ve seen are all Eclipse based.

So, my conclusion at the end of the day, is that I’m going to stick with Eclipse for my Android development.  There just seems to be less friction at the moment if you’re using Eclipse.  In a couple of months maybe I revisit IntelliJ and see what’s new with it and Android development.  However, at this time, I’d like to really concentrate on learning the Android SDK, and it seems simplest to me right now with Eclipse.

Figured I was due to spend some time setting up a Linux VM and learning how to program my Android Dev Phone 1.  Eclipse is what is recommended, so I thought I’d give that a try first.  So, with the help of Suse Studio, I quick built myself a VM with Java 1.6 (Aside:  I love Suse Studio, I can provision a VM in minutes).  I figured it would be pretty straight forward.  The docs on the Android Developer site for installing ADT plug-in seem pretty straight forward and simple, and I remember Eclipse having a very rich ecosystem of plug-ins that were easy to install (something I wish Visual Studio had – hint, hint Microsoft).

However, I ran into some hiccups with the provided documentation.

The first annoying one was item #4 in the list for Eclipse 3.4.  You’re directed to enter the location https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ for the location of the ADT plug in.  This did not work for me.  The location I had to use was  https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/site.xml.  There is a chance https might not work for you, then use http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/site.xml.

After overcoming that hurdle, I tried to do the Hello World sample.  This did not work out so well – Eclipse crashed.  Turns out that the default packages for Eclipse provided by OpenSUSE doesn’t have the Web Standard Tools, which is a requirement for using ADT.  So, I went back and uninstalled Eclipse, and download the tarball from the Eclipse website.  Then I installed and setup the ADT plug.

After a bit of tinkering, I managed to provision my ADP1 setup without a SIM card.  A bit of google, and here is what I did:

1. Download the Android SDK.  In my case, I unzipped it to C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1.
2. Connection the phone via the USB cable to my computer.  When the phone asks for a device.
3. You’ll get the new hardware dialog, when prompted for the drivers, you’ll need to specify the location.  The Android SDK has the drivers, in my case they were at C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\usb_driver\x86.
4. Once you have the drivers installed cd to c:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\tools.
5. Type adb devices.  This should list all the Android devices that you have connected.  If you don’t see any devices listed, then you have a problem.
6. Type adb shell.  This will direct your commands to your ADP1
7. Now while at the adb shell, su to root, then : 
8. cd /data/data/com.android/providers.settings/databases/
9. sqlite3 settings.db
10. INSERT INTO system (name, value) VALUES (‘device_provisioned’, 1);
11. .quit
12. Reboot the phone
13. adb shell
14. am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings

Once all that is done, you should be enable to use your ADP1 as if you had a SIM card in it (we’ll except for the phoning part).

Useful link:  FAQ: Unlocking/Activating a G1 or ADP1 Without A Sim Card.

After an uneventful flight from YEG to PSP, I’m settled in with my family.  After spending some time with beer at the pool, I’m sitting down with my Android Dev Phone 1 that I ordered last week (ship to PSP).

First impressions:  it seems like a nice phone, and I like the fact it has a keyboard.  I don’t have a SIM card to help with provisioning the phone, so all I get is this message saying "No SIM in phone" and "Emergency call".A quick search on Google tells me that how to get around this and use WiFi.  So, that’s my task for tonight.

Tomorrow we’re heading to the farmer’s market at the College of the Desert where I hope to refresh my collection of quality shirts.