Screaming Penguin

This is the tablet I am really waiting for. Again, I can't stand the limited storage, but at least it has an SD slot:

I have to admit, I am really disappointed in the iPad. The short summary: I want a small Mac, not a big iPod.

The form factor is great. I have always thought the MID market was wrong on the size factor. 7-8" screens are too small. 9.7 is just about right. The battery life -- Apple says 10 hours, so I am figuring 6 or 7 in the real world -- seems OK, but not great. Everyone on the interwebs is talking about how fast it is, that is good.

There are, however, MUTLIPLE deal breakers for me on the iPad:

Because I always have to re-learn this myself, I though I would write a quick reference tutorial on creating and using a database with an Android application. This isn't terribly well documented in the Android docs, and though many ContentProvider tutorials exist (such as the Unlocking Android code for chapter 5,and the NotePad tutorial included with the SDK), and these help a lot with general database concepts, they are really more complicated than what a basic application needs - a database to store and retrieve stuff.

I will walk through the code and tools for an oversimplified example here, with the ultimate goal of inserting and retrieving some data from an application, and then examining the database using a shell and the sqlite3 command line tool. The entire code for this example is available here: http://totsp.com/svn/repo/AndroidExamples/trunk/.

First, to get this rolling, we need to create an Android application that HAS a database. We could use any built in application that has a database just to explore it, such as com.android.alarmclock), but we are going to create one here for completeness. After it's setup, the interface for our application will look like the screen shot shown below:

Never thought I would be posting about Google in the "Politics" topic, but hey.

In response to a wide ranging attack on Google's infrastructure, that is never explicitly blamed on the Chinese government, they are threatening to take their ball and go the fuck home: