A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

UPDATE: Wanted to put this update here. It works fine. The emulator takes a DOG’S age to boot up. This is going to be a painful development process.

I’m trying to get a Hello Android application up and running, per the dev website. But something seems to be missing.

I have:
- JDK 6 17
- Eclipse 3.5
- The ADT installed. (Apparently fine. tough to tell.)
- the android sdk platforms installed (1.1-2.0.1)
- a default avd created

The source for the hello world example is pretty solidly “hello world” and I’ve double-checked it and done a straight copy-paste.

But when I run the example in eclipse, an emulator comes up but the application doesn’t appear to kick off.

Any thoughts on troubleshooting that? There aren’t any compile errors. The status messages in Eclipse all look pretty straightforward, it’s just not doing anything.

[2010-01-04 19:18:43 - HelloAndroid]Android Launch!
[2010-01-04 19:18:43 - HelloAndroid]adb is running normally.
[2010-01-04 19:18:43 - HelloAndroid]Performing com.mpwilson.helloandroid.HelloAndroid activity launch
[2010-01-04 19:18:43 - HelloAndroid]Automatic Target Mode: launching new emulator with compatible AVD ‘my_avd’
[2010-01-04 19:18:43 - HelloAndroid]Launching a new emulator with Virtual Device ‘my_avd’
[2010-01-04 19:18:44 - HelloAndroid]New emulator found: emulator-5554
[2010-01-04 19:18:44 - HelloAndroid]Waiting for HOME (’android.process.acore’) to be launched…

UPDATE: Ick, sorry. That dump of the messages is nasty, but if you drop it in emacs or something it’ll straighten out.

I code in java very rarely.  There are a couple good reasons for that and an awful lot of bad ones.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that There are about two dozen little things you’ve got to remember in order to get the java compiler to simply function that are tough to track down if you don’t remember what they are.

The one that’s been biting me in the ass for DAYS is that you really need to explicitly specify a jar file itself.  Even though the variable in question is classPATH.

Days.

I had this crawling sensation that there was something about this that I couldn’t quite peg, but that I’d been there before.

It took a few rounds of looking at command lines, directory contents and error outputs with an in-house java expert before she said… “wait… where’s the jar name?”
That moment opened the door to the flood of past lives where I’d gone through this exact same exercise, casting down java as being “just fucking stupid, written by retarded tripping monkeys.”

“SHIT!” I exclaimed rather unprofessionally over the phone.
“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, you’re right.  That’s it.  I’ve been here a dozen times.”

“Well, I’m not guaranteeing that’s the problem.”

“You don’t have to.  I will.  That’s it.  Shitshitshitshitshitshit.  I should know better by now.”

So yeah.  Days.

- Retarded Tripping Monkey