Developing for Android with the SDK ADT bundle

This semester, I’m taking a course on Android development. So I’ll be posting a bit more Android-related stuff as we go along. I’m developing on the MacBook Air, so get comfy with the command line. To get started, grab a copy of the Android SDK. The Android Development Toolkit (ADT) bundle is pretty awesome. It comes with Eclipse and the plugin all setup already: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html#mac-bundle. Unzip the .zip, so the full path be like: /Users/<YOUR-HOME-DIRECTORY>/Downloads/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64/.

Google Reader to Springpad

Awhile back I decided to start using Springpad for bookmarking and notes. It’s worked out pretty well so far. Springpad has various ways of saving stuff; e.g. browser extensions, a bookmark-let, email but I was looking a way to feed stuff from Reader (which I love); i.e. without opening a new window, waiting for the page to load and then finally using either the extension or bookmark-let to save it to Springpad.

Show, don't tell

“Show, don’t tell” is an ad about some English enrichment class. So instead of saying that John is smart, show how smart he is: John asks thoughtful and insightful questions, solves problems others take awhile to delve into, and so on and so forth. Bonus: George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones version: “Words are wind”. References http://bullythebear.blogspot.sg/2012/12/show-dont-tell.html

Windows, Linux and Samba

I needed to copy a 140 megabyte file from a Windows 2000 server. The only problem was that it didn’t support FTP (or SFTP) and I couldn’t download FileZilla Server since there was no network connection. I asked my colleague for a quick fix to this, and I can’t recall what he said, but suddenly I remember that I’d RHEL 3 (and Samba) and I could use Windows to map a Samba share.

Down key scrolls instead of moving to the next cell in Excel

Learnt something new today. I was using Excel with my keyboard, and was puzzled why pressing the down key scrolled instead of moving (down) to the next cell as I’d expected. So I Googled and found this excellent post. It turns out I’d inadvertently turned on Scroll Lock.