Android

First things first: Big ups to Cornell's men's basket ball team for making it to the Sweet 16. Hmmm now should I consider the quality of the basketball team in my graduate school decision (Duke or Cornell)? Let us see who goes further in the tournament. (I'm joking by the way)

Just got back from the IEEE Southeast Convention. Overall it was quite the experience. I went as part of the school's Software team. We expected the software competition to be structured more like the ACM ICPC since this is how it has been done the last...well always. However, this year they decided to change the format. This year teams would have to create simple Android applications in Eclipse. Another aspect would be that there would be no time component involved in the scoring.
Now, no one on our team had any experience writing Android applications, much less programs that needed GUI. Also we didn't have much experience developing "actual software". Our plan was to spend all of Friday learning all of this. But as you know, sh*t happens. Turns out the hotel internet was "overloaded" and thus insanely slow. We spent all day downloading about 300MB+ of files at about 15kb/s. Then there were all the installation problems we ran into since we were all using Ubuntu (thanks for the great Linux support Google).
When we did manage to have a working install of everything it was midnight, which meant that we had 7hours until the competition started. Luckily we somehow managed to read somewhere that we would have to deal with XML documents, so we spent a little time learning about those while obtaining everything else. For the 2hours after having a working environment we managed to create 2 simple applications. One just printed "hello android" to the screen while the other simulated a login screen. Nothing too complicated but it gave us a little feel of how things were done.

After we got some sleep (more like a nap to be honest) it was time for the competition. Now, the competition started at 7am...and the hotel's breakfast service didn't start until 7am as well. So you can imagine that none of the coders there were all to happy about that (in addition to them changing the competition set up). We managed to solve 5 of the 12-13 problems, which I don't think was too bad considering how much time we had to learn Android. The worst part of the competition was that we had to work on laptops which were running a virtual machine. This virtual machine was from a central computer (not a very good one since everything was super slow. Like pre 1995 slow).
My main problem with the competition was that they decided to inform us of the change a few days before hand. Now if they had given us a month or so to prepare it would be a whole other story. On the bright side, if I ever have some free time and feel like making an Android application I now have the tools.