I Start Through Karim's Slides

Might as well start going back through Karim's slides.  There are 350, so to do them in a week means 70 a day. We did that in his class, but I won't do that now, even though I've been through them once.

I want to stop and think about everything.

The first thing I hit of interest are three sites he recommends as references: {source,developer,tools}.android.com. This seems like a good time to browse through them, learn which is good for what, and internalize that.

source.android.com starts with this:
Here you can find the information and source code you need to build an
Android-compatible device.
The first two links on the page are for companies (the docs that set out the rules for what companies should do to create Android devices) and tips for developers on how to get involved. One link
talks about setting up a dev environment, including how to do it on Ubuntu 12.04, the Long-Term Stable (LTS) release I'm running, so I'll grab the packages it recommends.

Here's the script.

The next one's developer.android.com, which looks to be for app developers. Though that's not what I'm trying to do, lots of this stuff is interesting and some of it is going to be essential knowledge. For example, I've been mystified by "signing," which is explained clearly enough here.

Google encourages me to sign apps with certificates that will be good for at least 25 years, to allow for updates. (Updates need to have matching certs.) This tells me I'm in the wrong game.

First, I doubt anyone will be using any app I'd write in 25 years. 25 years ago was 1988. I doubt I could even have imagined smartphones, and I'm not likely to be able to imagine what we'll have in 25 years. (Unless, of course the government finally successfully regulates the internet, in which case, we'll be internetting like it's 1988 and have to go back to using land-lines.)

Second, I'm likely to be dead. I'm 64 and can't think of any male in my family who's lived to be 90.

The third is tools.android.com. This is info on the Android Developer Toolkit (ADT), such as the Android Virtual Device (AVD) Manager and the Software Development Kit (SDK).

An hour's browsing through these, learning acronyms and buzzwords, and shoring up the sides of my mental boxes seems like time well spent.