spack++

Impossible to answer?  Perhaps not.  For awhile I thought about buying a garmin device or the like, carrying it around with me all the time, uploading bread crumbs to a server somewhere, tieing into some maps api, etc.  Sounds terrible, and heck, I can barely remember my phone sometimes.  Also, some clunky gps thing would likely look a bit dorky in my pocket, and folks would be asking stuff like, “why do you carry that around all the time again?”

Turns out there are a couple phones (systems) with geo apis.  One day it hit me that I could just buy an iPhone, program it up and be on my way.  A few things slowed me down.  Two listed on the iPhone OS wikipedia page.

1. Apple has not announced any plans to enable Java to run on the iPhone.
2. The SDK requires an Intel Mac running Mac OS X Leopard.
3. My buddy Matt was spending a lot of time with perhaps not a lot of progress.
4. The whole register and then get blocked anyway wasn’t real compelling.

Getting a hello world! app going was pretty easy.  Then I tried the geo stuff.  Figured there would be a simple api, a few google-written examples to follow and I would be on my way.  Well, I read through some of the docs and mostly got lost.  Just too much.  I found a blog, dated Christmas 2007 that talked walked through some geo api stuff.  I pasted the code into eclipse and . . . it didn’t compile.  Looks like an abstract method got added and hadn’t been implemented.  Not so hardened.  There was accompanying code at google code, and I tried the latest release with similar results.  I checked the blog and found a more recent post saying he had tried for a few hours to get things working,  but to no avail.  I checked out his most recent code from subversion, learned a little about kml and was on my way.

So, one api, some few changes.

Then I thought I would try to insert my location points into sqlite.  Had a similar experience with the docs.  Figured that there would be a nice jdbc interface and it would look much like what I do at work for hours most days.  No such luck.  I found another blog, this one posted December 1, 2007 that walked through a simple sqlite implementation.  Cut and pasted the code.  Didn’t compile.  I think this line right here

I think there was no matching openDatabase method.  Amazing to me.

Two apis, neither works with code from just a few months ago.

What about google’s sample code?  I looked, I think pretty hard, and couldn’t see a single geo or sqlite example.  Maybe the gravity stuff will someday interest me, but not so much today.

So, yeah, not real impressed.  A little while ago, I spent a day or two at work looking at google’s recently open sourced protocol buffers.  Got it working without too much pain.  Apis worked as advertised.  There were simple examples that I could change to match my investigations.  Maybe those guys could help out android stuff.  I am pretty blown away by my prima facie android experience.  They gotta know that folks gotta get some things working within a night or two, or they might leave and not return.

Is google just getting too full of themselves?  Cell phone os?  We can do that, we’re google!  I had to pass like twenty interviews to get this job, I rule!  I eat (for now) free food every day!  If some dorky senior java engineer from utah wants to do some android, let him figure it out on his own time.  I work at google!

I watched a couple google io videos in the background while I was working today.  The presenter in this one starts his talk by saying something like “this talk is about a C++ library and is going to be pretty technical, so if you’re here for some javascript, you might want to evaluate being here.”  Just kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

In this one, the presenter had (I think) code that had to be changed to compile, and his laptop eventually had to be rebooted.  He also (I think) kind of talks down to someone asking about CSS.

Anyway, enough of my rant.  Mostly I would like to get some android stuff working, and I guess android is still beta, but I wouldn’t be too big of a fan to get stuff working only to have apis change.

I had written that chrome seemed pretty cool, but then my line spacing broke in this entry 🙂  And I need to add that I have played a fair amount with google app engine, and the docs there were quite good.  Oh, and I bought a url for my android stuff, http://crumbtracker.com, which I registered via google and it all went well.

Also want to mention that I noticed tonight a few (ok, quite few) comments on this blog from folks I didn’t know, that might not even be spammers.  Welcome!

enjoy!

Earl