I wrote up a blog post there about how to speed up SQLite insert operations.
Check it out over at VG Tech.

The fix was pretty simple, and would be easy to find if you’re smart enough to poke around the documentation a little – but I ended up Googling for it, so maybe someone else will do the same. Here’s how I made it work on Ubuntu 10.10:

• Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules as root.
• Open up your favourite editor and put the following line in the file:
  SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e8", MODE="0666"
• Make it executable: chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

That’s all it took. The above should work for all Samsung devices, the Android documentation has a reference to other vendor IDs that you might use if you don’t have a Samsung device.

For months now, we’ve had regular games of the Agricola board game at work. It’s a real gem of a game, and in my opinion perfect for “thinkers” – like programmers usually are.

The application helps you with calculating the score for each player in the game, which is done at the end of each game. While far from a necessity when playing, it provided me with an opportunity to create and release an application of limited size and complexity.

You can find the application on the Android Market, just search for “Agricola Buddy” or scan the QR-code to the right.

In the future, I hope to add lots of cool features to it – a way to store results over time, submit to a webservice, easily share the results with others, occupation/minor improvement reference and so on. If you have an Android phone, give it a go

Here are some screenshots:

A popular one in Europe is the X10 Mini, from Sony Ericsson which has a QVGA resolution.

When you are creating Android applications, you should make sure that it works well on various resolutions, which the emulator helps you with. However, the built in QVGA skin is rather ugly, so I decided to try and whip up a skin based on the X10 Mini. Here’s what I ended up with:

I quite like it, and it also works fairly well on low-resolution monitors, such as on netbooks (at least it does on mine). I zipped it up and put it up for download. To use it:

1. Extract the zip file into your Android/platforms/android-<version>/skins folder.
2. Create a new AVD with the AVD Manager and select X10Mini from the skins dropdown.
3. If you want to get as close to the X10 Mini software, use the 1.6 image (android-4, I believe).
4. Enjoy!

Note: I forgot to include the hardware.ini file required for 1.6+. Should work better now

It gets rather tiresome to look at the same fake phone all the time though, so I decided to take a break and see if I could create a skin based on the upcoming Samsung i7500 (I believe they’ve named it Galaxy now, at least in Germany). The screen position and such may not be spot on, but it has the right resolution at least. I mapped most of the buttons too, but the zones had to be cut off a little due to the emulator not supporting weird button shapes (afaik).

Should anyone be interested in downloading it, feel free to get it. Just extract this to your Android/platforms/android-<version>/skins folder and you should be good to go. Run the emulator with the flag “-skin Galaxy” (or if you’re using Android 1.5 or upwards, just select Galaxy as your skin in the AVD Manager). Here’s a screenshot of how it looks in action:

Samsung Galaxy Android Emulator skin