Android Oneliners

The next time I have to setup a non-Eclipse (aka: VIM) Android development environment, I'm going to want to remember these commands.

# android PATH
export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Android/sdk/android-sdk-mac_86/platform-tools:/Applications/Android/sdk/android-sdk-mac_86/tools

# complete the SDK install (adb and all other platform-tools will be missing without this)
android update sdk

# create an Android Virtual Device
android create avd -c 256M -t $(android list | awk '$1=="id:"{l=$2} END{print l}') -n latest

# start the emulator
emulator -avd Captivate2.1u1 -no-boot-anim -scale 0.65 -show-kernel
# or
emulator -avd latest -no-boot-anim

# kill the adb server (for when the adb server was started before your emulator was launched)
adb kill-server

# add sdk.dir to ant settings
sed -i.bak '/^sdk\.dir=/d' local.properties; echo "sdk.dir=$(which adb | sed 's|/[^/]*/[^/]*$||')" >> local.properties

# compile in debug mode
ant debug

# install a package in the emulator replacing the existing install
adb -e install -r bin/HelloWorld-debug.apk 

Playhouse in progress, part 3

I'm really excited to have finally found a reason to learn Google Sketchup. I've recreated a 3D version my plans, which I created in Adobe Illustrator (2D PDF in an earlier post). I took some still shots and exported an animation to video.

Yesterday I graded the land and set the foundation stones. Today I moved all of the pre-constructed floor, porch, and walls outside to the foundation and assembled it all. I still need to put plywood on the walls, and have not even begun to do the roof.

Playhouse Animation from Richard Bronosky on Vimeo.

Playhouse in progress, part 2

I bought the windows for the playhouse today. I finally uploaded some photos to Flickr. They are a bit underwhelming so far. I haven't been able to start on the 3 walls that contain windows because I didn't know where I could buy them. I can finally move on with my plans.

Playhouse in progress

I decided to make the girls a playhouse that would take up 8ft x 8ft in the back yard. Most of the plans I found online were for a 8ft x 4ft, only 4ft tall (excluding the pitched roof) with a 2ft porch. I really appreciate the insight I got from those plans but I think 4ft on the inside is just too small, my 3 yr old is 41 inches tall already, and 2ft for a porch doesn't even give you room for a chair. So, I decided to make it 5ft x 8ft and 5ft tall with a 3ft porch. I realize that at some point we won't want this thing in the backyard anymore and an 8x8 structure can't be moved without a CDL (trucker's license). For this reason I have decided to make the covered front porch detachable. I accomplish this with separate foundations for the house and porch and a 2 piece over-under roof system. Here are the plans.

So far I have framed both floors and the back wall. Today I bought and cut the composite decking for the porch and picked out the 4 windows. Now that I have settled on 18in x 27in windows, I can make the front and side walls.

Hosting your own Blog is stupid!

I've hosted my own blog for 15 years. For me it has been about "freedom". The new "freedom" is being free to not have to deal with the hassle.

I started in 1994 with plain HTML. A year later I added JavaScript, ColdFusion, and MSSQL server when I started working professionally. In late 1998, I got into Macromedia Flash. At that point I broke from expressing myself verbally ("blogging") and was more interested in artistic expression. (This would be a short lived diversion.) In 1999 I started coding in PHP and learned about Free Software.

By the end of 2000 I had solid experience with RedHat 6 & 7 and considered my self an "expert". (In reality I know nothing but bash and GNU utils.) Near the end of 2000, my company hired Jerry Tubbs who brought with him a Beta of Mac OS X which I installed on my company issued G3 PowerBook "Lombard". (I clearly remember how the blue Apple logo in the center of the menu bar made it feel like an iMac.) I found myself compiling Apache, PHP, and MySQL from source tarballs and being amazed that it worked "on a freaking Mac"! I hated Apple up until that point. I hated that my company forced me to use OS 9. I hated that anybody used any web browser other than Internet Explorer 5! I quickly upgraded to Mac OS 10.0 and then 10.1. At this point I would never own another MSFT windows computer.

I would continue developing PHP for 10 years. I used custom PHP to template my own blog, then for content entry. I was very active in the Open Source community. I used a lot and contributed a lot of code snippets from/to places like http://www.phpclasses.org/ and numerous mailing lists and forums. I was very resistant to using Wordpress, but I eventually submitted to temptation in late 2004. Since then I have dealt with comment spam, plugins, a few exploit avoidance upgrades, backups, blah, blah, blah. I use http://flickr.com to host my photos. I use http://github.com to host my code. I use http://gmail.com for email with my own bronosky.com domain. I just can't justify hosting my own blog. I will continue to own bronosky.com and use it for email, FTP, and as a SOCKS proxy and SSH hop. I will continue to run a VPS at http://slicehost.com to keep up my sysadmin chops. However, I will not be hosting a blog there. For now I've chosen to use http://blogger.com and I am very pleased with my ability to use things like the http://cooliris.com Flash widget. I can now remove modPHP and optimise my Apache configuration for serving Django via WSGI and Worker MPM.