Today is father’s day and P and Nan gave me a surprise gift. I had no idea that I am getting something, P executed her surprise very well. I got a blue t-shirt, a photo frame and paintings from Nan and P. We were planning to go to India garden for lunch. We went to the Zoo (again) first and drove to India garden, Nan slept when we were a minute away from reaching India garden. I went inside to get take-out buffet but they said no take-out on weekends (??). I don’t want to wait longer since P and Nan were in the car, we drove back and had food from the new mexican place Qdoba. I felt the burrito was okay, chipotle’s had a rich flavor. All in all a good day. We all had fun in the sun. Today Nan saw bears - first time she is seeing the bears. One polar bear was there, sleeping under the shades as the temperature reached 90c today.

In android you can use the SharedPreference class to store presistent data (only the primitive types like int,float..). Android stores this data in an XML file. For debugging purpose I wanted to see what are the values that this file had. After some digging I found out that this file can be accessed using DDMS file explorer.

 Data->Data->your.package->name->Shared_Prefs->theXmlFile.xml is the location of the file, you can use the pull from the menu to get the file and look at it.

Today I published my second android application to the market “m Fizz Buzz game”. Here are some screen shots of the application.

I am working on a number game for android in which I have to solve a basic math problem which I though I will share. For a given number “n” , where n can be divided by 5, I have to find a number x which is a divisible of 7(can be greater or lesser than n). confusing.

Let’s take a example, let take a number n = 1125 (this can be divided by 5). Now I have figure out the number divided by 7. To solve this, this are the steps I used. 

if n is < 35 then add 35 to add.

temp1 = n/7

temp2 = temp1%5

temp1 = temp1 - (temp2)

now x = temp1*7

For n = 1125,

 temp1 = 160

 temp2 = 160%5 = 0

 temp1 = 160-0 = 160

x = 160*7 = 1120

for n = 45,

 temp1 = 45/7 = 6

 temp2 = 6%5  = 1

 temp1 = 6-1 = 5

 x = 5*7 = 35

I have not tested it extensively, but I hope this is correct and I don’t know there are any easier ways to solve this problem.

For a past three or four months the gmail app in my Nexus one crashes regularly. At first I thought this is some temperory issue, but lately I am getting annoyed with this crashes. It seems some kind of a memeory exception (looked at the preview of the error report which has some log files). Then yesterday I decided to open a new gmail account and see whehter I can reproduce the bug over there, to my surprise no there are no problems with the new gmail account, it sysnc’s fine. That brings the question does having many emails (3000+) affect the way in which gmail app for android works, I would love to spend some time on this and see what is the real reason behind the crash. May be I can back-up my Inbox and see what happens.

UPDATE

 I archived my inbox and tried this, nope the gmail android app on my nexus one is still crashing. More research…

UPDATE 2

I got this issue fixed by following the steps mentioned in this link:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=1fd041aa21e2bc6d&hl=en

Some of the screen shots from my android application “Children Activities”

Today I finally published my application at android market “Children Activities”. It’s a nice little application to teach kids about colors and animal sounds. There are few surprises glitches when trying to upload the application. First is the way signing is done, I was reading a old documentation and did not realize that Eclipse does have an export wizard which makes signing your application very easy. The second surprise was about minSDKVersion, I did not mention that in my Manifest file. The next problem was about the size of the screen shots, if developers know these steps before it will be good. As far as I know, there is no documentation about the process of submission itself. I fixed it and was finally able to upload my application. Hoping to improve this application and waiting for users feedback. 

It’s been more than six months since I started learning Android SDK and I am very happy about that. When I was in India (Oct 2010), I took a traing class “Hardware solutions for Android platform” which gave me a excellent insight in to NDK. Prakash from Ethics Technologies Chennai taught me the course. The course covered topics such as:

• What are some of the ARM based board available and what are it’s limitations.
• What are the events happening when android OS starts-up.
• How Dalvik VM intreacts with the Linux kernel.
• How bottloader works and what are the different types of it.
• The directory structure of the linux and where the kernel is located.
• How to edit the make files when you add any .apk to the source code.
• and the most important topic: how to re-build the ARM board after editing the code.

All in all, it’s a great course. It’s been a long time since I touched any electronics board, this course gave me very good insight of how things work inside the Android OS. I am hoping to get a ARM board sometime early next year and play around more.