You will also obviously need the Android SDK. If you just want to play around with the emulator or test websites, ignore the stuff on the installation instructions about Eclipse or other IDEs. If you meet the system requirements, download the right SDK version for your computer.

Once it’s downloaded, unzip it wherever is convenient for you (into a /code or /development directory, or just in your home directory).

Next, you will probably want to add the directory where android is to your system PATH. You can see what your path is by typing in your terminal “echo $PATH”. You will want to go to your home directory /Users/<yourloginname> and edit your .profile file. If it already has something that looks like this:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH

Then just add the android directory onto the end like so:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH:/Users/<yourusername>/android-sdk-mac_86/tools

When that’s done, close Terminal.app, restart it and type “android.” This will start the SDK and AVD (Android Virtual Device) Manager. You will not have any virtual devices downloaded/installed yet, so that will be your first step.

Click on “Available Packages” on the menu on the left side, and you will get a list of SDKs to download.

Check the box next to the latest one (in this case, SDK Platform Android 2.2, API 8, revision 2). Click “Install Selected” then click “Install”. The SDK will probably take a few minutes to download and install.

When it’s done installing, click on “Virtual Devices” then click the button “New” to create a new virtual device. Call it something like android2.2HVGA for the SDK and screen resolution (HVGA is for Half VGA). The size of the SD card doesn’t matter much for our purposes here, but it must be at least 9 MB. There are other configuration options you can tweak, but again we don’t need to worry about them now. If you want, you can change the skin to WVGA 800 or 854, which are common on the latest generation of Android phones.

Click the button to create the AVD, then select it from the Virtual Devices manager and click “Start…”, leaving the options at their default before you click “Launch”.

It will take anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple minutes to start (takes me a couple minutes on a MBP 2.53 ghz core 2 duo), during which you will see the following screens:

Eventually, you’ll see the home screen and you’re ready to go.

Vow

Vow also has extended glyph and European character support. Too bad I’m too poor to pay the (eminently reasonable) ~$50 for each one

Yours, Hölderlin (letter to Christian Neuffer, 1794)

1. I saw The Road last night (good, depressing post-apocalyptic film) and was googling Cormac McCarthy today, and came across an interview with him done by the Wall Street Journal. He relates an anecdote about the physicist Paul Dirac who, in response to Richard Feynman’s revision of quantum electrodynamics, declared it too ugly to be true, despite its logicalness; turns out Dirac was wrong. Also turns out that this is a perfect example to help me illustrate a point I made in a paper I wrote a few years ago about Hilary Putnam, basically agreeing that a certain amount of imaginative identification with a discourse and its evaluative stances was essential to doing science (i.e. being able to appreciate the beauty of a theorem or hypothesis), but disagreeing that this constituted objectivity in any sense beyond what intersubjectivity, and that a standard such as “beautiful” did not stand on its own, and was to some degree derivative of other criteria.

2. I stumbled across an old notebook in which I had written some quotations from a book by C.S. Lewis (probably The Abolition of Man) which will be perfect for an essay I’m currently writing on the late British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott and creativity. Not so much an argument, as a turn of phrase—something of which Lewis was a master.

One of the first beers I sampled here (other than the ubiquitous and usually cheapest of the cheap Pabst Blue Ribbon) was Smuttynose brewing co’s Pumpkin Ale ($9.99 for a six pack of bottles), which I bought because I like pumpkin pie, and because I’m wishing fall would get here already and banish the summer heat. Without much pumpkin taste, and a strange, metallic aftertaste, I definitely wouldn’t try it again. Same goes for Smuttnose’s Star Island Single, a Belgian style pale ale, which I bought because I didn’t like any of the other beers at the bar and it had a mermaid on the label–slightly malty, not too interesting, wouldn’t drink it again.

Lest I give the impression of being a negative Nancy, I can list three beers I can unreservedly recommend: the first, Geary’s Hampshire Special Ale, a great all-round toasted “drink it all night” beer. As a lover of stout, I have been trying to get myself out of the habit of just ordering a pint of whatever the stout on tap is, so that I expand my horizons a bit, but fortunately I bucked the trend-bucking trend last night and got a pint of O’Hara’s Irish (or Celtic) Stout. Apparently this brew won a prestigious international stout award in 2000, and I’m not too surprised by the fact as it was delicious, creamy, slightly smokey and satisfying the way only a stout can be. It might well replace Guinness as my fall-back stout if it were more common.

Last, though I only had a sample of it at reBar last night, I’m definitely going to make the trek back just to get a full pint of Goose Island brewing’s Bourbon County Stout, which has garnered an incredible 861 reviews (as of this writing) on Beeradvocate.com. Unfortunately difficult to get your hands on, this 13% a.b.c. beer is brewed in bourbon casks, imparting an unmistakably wonderful aroma and taste. Visit the brewery’s interactive map to see if you can get ahold of this marvel without undertaking the otherwise obligatory pilgrimage to Chicago.

At nearly $1,000,000 for one of the less flamboyant homes, though, I doubt that this community is still living up to its intention of providing options for low-income buyers.

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