I managed to (not so subtly) pry the name of the song from her a few weeks ago and found (what I hope) is an mp3 recording of a barbershop quartet performing it. Of course, I can’t verify this because I can’t let her listen to it without tipping my hand. However, even if it’s not the right one, it’s at least a romantic song sung by a barbershop quartet with the same name.

So, what to do with it, then? I finally came up with the idea to write an Android app using the song and a few other elements to create a customized Valentine’s Day greeting card app.

The kids got new Nintendo DSi portable gaming devices for Christmas with an app called Flipnote which allows them to create animations and share them with their friends. This has been the biggest fun for them and I found out that you can export the frames of the animations as individual GIF files to an SD card. It just so happens that Android supports the AnimationDrawable which is defined in XML like so:

The “@drawable/b1004″ strings will resolve the the individual GIF files in the res/drawables directory in the android package. In this case they are called b1001.gif, b1002.gif, b1003.gif, etc. Also, the animation defined in the XML can be addressed as a @drawable itself and can be controlled in code like so:

The next resource I need is the actual song itself to play. For this, I placed the mp3 file into the res/raw folder and now I can reference it using the generated R class (in this case R.raw.songname in place of res/raw/songname.mp3).

The playAudio() function is called anytime in the application lifecycle that the the music should start playing. It’s important to note here that at this point in the development I started to run into numerous OutOfMemory exceptions and that’s the reason there are so many calls to Log.d which outputs to the debug console in Eclipse. At first I thought the cause of these was the mediaplayer, but it turned out to be the animation.

The garbage collector cannot reclaim memory unless all references to an object are removed and with a 16MB heap, it looks like all of those GIF images was using up a pretty big chunk. There wasn’t much room for a reference to be left behind.

As I soon discovered through a lot reading of SDK documentation and forums, the ImageView and the animation itself requires a little bit of extra handling in onPause() and onDestroy(). The ImageView itself retains a reference to the animation resource in it’s callback and so the callbacks must be set to null and garbage collection initiated:

The final resource I need to manage is an HTML-escaped string displayed in a ScrollView which contains a heartfelt message to the love of my life.

At this point, the application is completely functional. I can install it on a device using a debug key and launch it from the icon in the application manager. I can tap the animation and it plays, the music plays when the application is on-screen, and the text is scrollable. The application also functions in both orientations. However, keep in mind, that I developed the app on my Motorola Droid X for my wife’s Motorola Droid and the app is not for general release so I probably made a lot of assumptions about device capabilities.

There is one final feature that I really wanted to add to make it fully functional. At a given date and time (February 14, 2011 7:00am), I wanted a notification to appear with a heart icon and the text “Be My Valentine”. When she sees that and selects the notification, I want the app to start and do its thing. When the day is over, I want the notification to no longer show up. As it turns out, implementing this one feature was nearly as much work as all the entire app itself.

There are several pieces to this: an alarm, a service, a receiver, and a binder.

First in the UI class’s onCreate(), I need to start the service I created to handle notifications using an alarm at a particular time:

I also need a broadcast receiver to handle broadcasts sent to my application. Specifically, the broadcast generated by the alarm which will start the service.

Now for the real workhorse of this feature, the BeMyValentineService. In the service’s onCreate(), I call a function to display the notification by creating an intent to launch the app and calling the system notification service to display it (this will quickly disappear if the date not February 14, 2011):

Next, I create and start a thread whose job it is to wait until a specific time and tell the service to shut itself down:

Of course, part of the service shutting down is to cancel the notification:

Finally, the glue that holds it all together is the binder object which synchronizes the work of the thread (it’s returned in the service’s onBind() function).

One final note. I’ve only posted sections of code use to highlight particular challenges I had to solve. There are a lot of smaller pieces that are used to put it all together and I relied heavily on the SDK documentation, the SDK sample code, StackOverflow, and other forums.

Feel free to contact me if you want more information or help with solving a similar problem.

The big news for this week is that I had another visit with the doctor. He mentioned once before in passing that it might be a good idea to try a basal insulin routine as a way to help bring the blood sugar down overnight. It’s also mentioned on the Bloodsugar 101 site that insulin shouldn’t be viewed as a last resort or the “we lost the fight” option, but it is the body’s natural way to utilize glucose and should be used to help relieve the body rather than medications with severe side-effects (especially fatal ones).

So, I led the appointment with the idea of trying insulin since my a1c results were back up and since the last time he increased my medication dosage, it seemed like I was always on verge of going hypo every afternoon unless I ate extra carbs which was not the right thing to do. In fact, I wasn’t going hypo, but the wild fluctuations in my blood  glucose levels left me feeling that way. He agreed to the idea and put me on 10 units of basal insulin at bedtime as well as drastically reduce the medication which stimulates the production of insulin.

It’s been 4 days and my fasting sugars are down and seem to be more stable throughout the day. They are still high and I believe he’ll have to increase the dosage, but I do feel much better. I’ve even renewed my commitment to the low-carb lifestyle.

Since my new job means I have a commute that is over an hour, I’ve been going to the gym at the office in order to allow traffic to ease up so I can spend as little time in the car. This has worked okay, but I’m working from home this week and will be working from home more often as I come up to speed in my duties. As a result, I’ve signed up a membership with LA Fitness. There is one both near where I live and one just down the street from the office so I’ll have one membership and two locations available to me. It should help to have some consistency in routine and available equipment.

I came across this article yesterday which was really satisfying to read since there is so much power behind the false message of low-fat diets. Dr. Atkins discovered the principles in the article and first wrote about them in the 1970s. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the world’s obesity problems can directly be attributed to high-carb, low-fat diets and especially to high-fructose corn syrup (now renamed corn sugar). My favorite quote from the article is:

Carbohydrates are a metabolic bully,” Phinney says. “They cut in front of fat as a fuel source and insist on being burned first. What isn’t burned gets stored as fat, and doesn’t come out of storage as long as carbs are available. And in the average American diet, they always are.”

Particularly if you have a history of diabetes in your family, as I do, you need to read the article and listen to its message. I had many opportunities to listen  and I wish now I had done more about it. I read Dr. Atkins book and had lost over 50 lbs on the diet several years before I gave up the low-carb lifestyle and ended up with Diabetes.

This new project is essentially to keep a detailed (how detailed is still to be determined) private journal of my activities throughout the day without any expectation that it will ever become anything more than a list of things I did that day. My thinking with this is that if I spend all of my retentive energy with the initial-list making that I’ll be freer to take that information and actually do something with it. I can train myself to not filter the input, but filter the output so to speak.

The corollary to this project is that I’m consider trying  to write a weekly blog post summarizing the week in some way, most likely an actual narrative. This will be the public part of the journal that, when combined with the private part of the journal, tells the whole story. Depending whether you want the complete picture with all of the mundane details or just the reader’s digest version. If nothing else, it will be something I can share with my posterity.

The original game, now called classic, was a basic block-building sandbox game which has been around for about a year. You had unlimited resources, so other than building cool stuff, there wasn’t much to do. This version is still available and it’s free to play. The fun, however, is in the alpha version which costs 10 euros.

The entire world is randomly generated of blocks of different textures: stone, dirt, sand, gold ore, coal, water, lava, etc. Your job is to gather resources, craft tools, an explore. However, the bad guys comes out and night and try to kill you so it’s a challenge just to survive.

Here’s an intro video..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylVtj-1Ccgg

Here’s another video that shows some off some of the cool stuff you can build..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=krZgXzSAbkA

This is such a fun game and there are so many neat things to discover and do. I highly recommend reading the wikifor more ideas.

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