• Sleep is deadly and love is lethal. The combination is so powerful that it leaves you helpless, forcing you to sleep later.
• A sleepless night is a lover’s right
• Restless nights, drowsy mornings, confused afternoons, lonely evenings…
• Eyes are like prostitutes – they reveal more than they can conceal.
• I laughed, she laughed. Problem solved.
• I smiled, she smiled. All problems could wait.
• You pose a great competition to sugar for its characteristics of deadly sweetness and mixing quickly and easily in unknown waters.
• I wasn’t superstitious. It was just… love.

In case they don’t make sense to you, you need to read the novel then coz they all are situational, though you can identify the situations from the statements itself for many of them.

Until next post, have a peaceful life (great would be great, though)…

Anyways, let me tell what I’m doing in learning. I’m using ADT on Eclipse Helios and using the Emulator for testing purposes. Currently focusing on the samples present along with Android SDK. Gone through the Application Fundamentals available along with the SDK.

Interesting Things:

• Most importantly, its good to see myself learning the things I’m interested in from the start (FYI, I always have that thing for Web & Mobile Development)
• Very clear & highly helpful documentation (and, also downloadable). And the docs are developer-focused & also lays emphasis on good practices at every step, like i18n, using resources instead of hard-coded strings etc. etc..
• Separation of layout of the app and the application logic (supports XML files for layout). I get the feeling this is inspired from Flex (mxml & as), but I don’t know.
• Provides a very good mechanisms for interoperability between various applications. Simply said, I can use the capabilities of other applications installed, and also I can expose my app’s capabilities to other apps. Also, Android search also integrates good with any application’s search.
• Application Development is done in Java, which is said to be a very developer-friendly. I can utilize this to brush my skills in java, as I have other plans to work in Java in some not-so-far future.

Annoying Things:

• Tabs are NOT simple to use. I’d prefer a way to declare tabs and its contents in the XML itself.
• In TabHost, mandatory referencing of elements to’ tabs’ & ‘tabcontent’ doesn’t look like a good programming feature.
• Missing the tabs & tabcontent id referencing in the TabHost would give no error / warning by Compiler, but fails at Runtime, without any proper information (even while debugging)
• Emulator takes very long time to start. So, its preferred not to close the emulator after every run. (start along with eclipse and close it before closing eclipse)
• Emulator keyboard shortcuts – Not too easy to remember (like, Ctrl + F12 for Toggle Portrait / Landscape modes). I’d have preferred if the emulator itself has a help button, to show the shortcuts.
• Nothing to do with Android, but the bug in Helios (Eclipse Web tools plug-in) has become a pain, forcing me not to us any features while editing resources. Bug – https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show-bug.cgi?id=318108
• Again, may not be related to ADT (frankly, I don’t know), but the auto-complete context is very slow, taking 30-60 seconds (which is tooooo long, btw). Here again, I’m forced to disable Auto-Activation of context Assist at ‘Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Editor -> Context Assist -> Enable Auto Activation’
• I  can’t run the application when my focus is on layout files (on resource files, for that matter). I always need to switch to a java file, to run (Ctrl + F11) the application
• The layout filenames cannot contain uppercase letters. If it contains, the error shown doesn’t help in identifying it

Unclear points for me:

• In Android XML, for TabHost, @android:id/tabhost works ( i.e; referencing other element with tabhost id ). How can access this element from my Activity class? (since, no reference is created in R.id )
• Is XML compiled ? Or interpreted at Runtime? If compiled, how can I see the generated Java (?) files? (something similar to -keep compiler option in Flash Builder)
• And many other things (like, working of Intent, i18n, logging), but these are somethings I need to learn as I dive further in android..

Tasks for coming days:

• Finish the Tutorials in the resources, and then go to the samples folder available with the SDK.
• Try to make a couple of simple *usable* apps, so that I get enough practice with the SDK APIs

Also, attaching the projects HelloAndroid.zip and HelloViews.zip I made during my learning.

Wish me that I gain pace in learning Android over the next few weeks…

Let me start with what happened during last few months. Actually, many of them I wish they didn’t happen or they happened other way..

• I tried to get a driving license at Noida, but failed because of lack of local address proof. Seriously, going back to my hometown just for getting a license – doesn’t it sound stupid?
• With no license, my dream of a getting a bike got wiped away !
• I’m getting bored (read as vexed, irritated and so on…) of Noida ! What a stupid place it is !! Isn’t it?
• Laptop is troubling me a lot…. Currently under repair. Wish I get it back soon!
• Lost all the contacts from the mobile!

And the good part: Google I/O 2010 brought back my interest in Web & Mobile development, due to which, I decided to spend atleast 40 hours in the coming couple of months learning Android. I’ve also decided Learning is going to my major focus area for a couple more years!!

So, wish me luck in putting things into execution !

So, whats in the video?

• It has some humor in it, especially the first 150 secs. I’m sure a few smiles you’d certainly escape from your tender lips..
• She talks how ‘being poor’ influences (or atleast attempt to) your life and all in it including career, passion etc. etc.
• And the core part – The benefits of failure. I think she had put this part in action in a great way, or else, after watching this video, why did I desperately want to fail in a big way despite my fear of failure??

Now that I mentioned I fear failure, let me tell what my mind tells me right now. “You do not fear the failure itself, but your fear its after-effects. Its capable of taking everything fro you !”. But my heart is encouraging me – “When you had done everything from scratch, why do you fear to do it again? It’d easier this time.. !!”

I know it sounds funny, but really can’t help. Perhaps, this is why people call – “An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop”

• Language: C++, Operating System: Windows
• Target Audience: Programmers
• Sub Area: Reading ASCII / UTF-8 files from the disk using C++ streams.
• Trouble: How to handle files whose file names contains non-ASCII characters?? (coz ifstream takes a ASCII file path )

Solution:

• Use _wfopen_s(), the safe version of _wfopen(), which takes a wide-character file name & gives a FILE pointer i.e; FILE*.
• Use the obtained FILE* to create a stream, like ifstream in(fp);
• We used wide-character file name & are reading the file byte-by-byte (actually, its char). DONE !!

BTW, I got help from here ! Hope this saves  time for someone out there…

1. http://www.vertor.com Its the home for verified torrents. Hence, you need not worry about fake torrents. It also have screenshots and an audio sample. And the best thing, it does not need any registration and almost ad-free.
2. http://www.telugutorrents.net As name suggests, its dedicated for Telugu, a regional language in India (and also my mother tongue). Good part about this site is: Only good quality (dvdrip) videos are allowed to be posted here and no place in here for camrips, which is a good feature as far as I’m concerned. Also, downloads happen with a very good speed. Sad thing is it is open for registered users only, and registrations are closed now !!
3. http://www.tollytorrents.com Again, a telugu only site, but contains all the entertainment stuff (like, music, dvdrips, camrips, wallpapers etc.) . Though requires registration, registrations are free & open. Downloads happen at a good speed. By the way, I started using this site today only
   

Update 1: One of my browser addon blocks all the ads on webpage, and hence can’t assure the *ad-free* I announced for Vertor.

Update 2: A little clarification: ‘tolly’ in tollytorrents refer to tollywood which refers to movie industry of Telugu.

With a small program, you can make the cradle (baby rocker) of your baby swing, without your presence. Shocked? Well, do you recognize you PC has a CDROM and also a program can also open & close a CDROM drive? Continuous opening & closing of CDROM can help in your baby rocker’s harmonic motion.

Check this link for similar innovative ideas: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/linux_baby_rocker.html

Some points that come into handy while developing in HTML:

• Always use XHTML tags. meaning that, your HTML should be well-formed XML (closing  & ending tags should be present). Like, for example, use <br/> instead of <br>
• Try to use XHTML 1.0 strict as much as possible. But, this mode doesn’t support target attribute on anchor (<a>) links. If you need to specify ‘target’ on links, they you should be using XHTML 1.0 transitional doctype.
• Always specify the doctype of your HTML page. Also just run the validator test available at w3c.org to know where are deviating from the standards specified. And fix as much as possible to make it closer to standards.
• IE doesn’t support *.ico [Icons] files as Images in tags. So, make sure that your images are NOT ico types.
• Are you developing site in non-English language? Then, knowing about Dynamic Fonts is a must before implementation. Try to find more about it from Google ( I have no experience with them to tell you )
• A common bad practice among beginners: Uploading a large image to the server (like, 1024 * 768) & then set required image & height(200 * 150)  in HTML. This would cause unnecessary bandwidth waste which can be easily avoided by uploading the resized image of the desired dimensions.
• You should learn about ‘Alternate Style-sheets’ if you wanna provide multiple themes to the webuser. Basic usage of this can be found at: http://javascript.about.com/library/blswitch.htm
• One important, yet highly ignored practise, is providing a Print specific stylesheet for the page. This is possible by specifying media=”print” on the stylesheet link, like <link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”/css/print.css” media=”print” />. And, let all the unneccesary data be hidden in this css file (like, ads, navigational menu, header, search bar etc.). Keep the print to minimum.
• It would also look good if we provide the end-user a ‘Print Preview’ from inside our page itself. This isn’t any magic, its similar to multi theming concept as said above.

Yes, I understand these are very basics, but don’t we know that Basics are the building blocks of any application?

Update: The Print Preview concept is borrowed from
http://www.alistapart.com/d/printtopreview/example.html.
Click on ‘Print this Page’ on the LHS of the page & see that page layout changes, giving the user the Print Preview Experience

Now, my point of this article is, what is this cache location of images, so that I can easily navigate over to there and pick a friend’s avatar from there..  Well on Windows Systems, the display images cache directory for GTalk is:

C:\Documents and Settings\<windows username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\avatars

The images saved in there are PNG files with transparent background, so you can open them with basic image application [maybe, you need to change the application extension to .png]. Do you observe there are two images for each id  there ? One image is 32 x32 [ends with .online.avatar] and the other is 96 x 96 px image [ends with .original.avatar].

You can find much more information about GTalk at http://www.customizetalk.com. This site has some useful information all about the GTalk Themes Development, GTalk Bots Development and many other interesting [and not complicated at the same time] stuff.

Its fun as well as  interesting to find how simple a powerful application can be. Sticking to development basics

Update: Find some interesting Google Talk emoticons & their string equivalents here : http://tkhere.blogspot.com/2007/12/brand-new-google-chat-emoticons-no-one.html

• Yahoo! Messenger: The display image of all the users are publicly available on the web. To access the avatar / display image of a user whose Y! Id is yid, then just navigate to:

  http://img.msg.yahoo.com/avatar.php?yids=yid

  Here comes a shock now !! All images are publicly available, meaning that everyone has permissions to save your image onto their disk.

• Google Talk: I’m not really sure where the images get loaded from on GTalk, but on the GTalk plugin available on GMail, the images are loaded from: https://mail.google.com/mail/photos/username@gmail.com, where the username is the user’s Google username. On contrary to the Yahoo! Security Settings, these images are NOT publicly available. You cannot access the images of users who are not in your friends list. Also, this URL checks for your valid session, meaning that you need to be logged into GMail to access these images.

I was actually wondering if there is any tool which can list me all the data-transfers happening b/w my IMs & the host sites? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we know all the endpoints of an IM server, the message formats etc. [We can probably develop our custom messenger for that IM service, if we get to  know those details ]

Well, now girls [especially Indians, who are conservative] should give a thought before uploading their display image, if they do not want their pictures to fall into wrong / unwanted hands.

Now, its time to have fun by tricking your pals by their own display images as yours..