Tackling the Android

This past summer I overcame the inertia of the couch and plowed my way into programming on Android. I wrote a little app, called “The Devil’s Dictionary”, which I published on the Android market last Friday. You can download the Android package and source code from my home server at lotuspond.ca or you can install it onto your Android phone or tablet directly from the Android market; just do a search for my name.

Google’s Android API is not difficult to learn if you already know some Java and there are lots of examples on their developer web site. I developed my app using Eclipse so that’s another hurdle you need to overcome but persistence will pay off if you work at it a little each day.

Last week I started the Android Programmers Klub (APK) for Seneca students and staff. We meet every Wednesday (fall 2011) starting at 5:10pm in room S2149. I also set up an email list, android@senecac.on.ca. Email me if you want your name added to the list or better still come to our next meeting on Wednesday.

Life at the Bottom

Earlier this semester, one of my students began looking into Nightlife, a Fedora project to build a community computing grid. His goal is to eventually contribute some code to Nightlife and become an active, although very junior, member of the community.

Nightlife is based on Condor, a project supporting high throughput computing. His initial footsteps would be to learn how to use and build Condor and I decided to help. After all, how hard could it be to compile a program?

We downloaded the Condor source for version 7.0.5. The build instructions seemed simple enough: ./configure; make. This shouldn’t take long… or so we thought.

You can view details of our pathetic first build efforts at our school’s wiki.

So, what’s it like living at the bottom of the curve? Not great. There is one redeeming factor though: from here, every way you look is up.