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Circuit Breaker Day 4


Day 4 (jumping ahead from Day 2 and 3)




So the big news from Day 1 was the COVID-19 (Temporary Measures) Bill, which gives, to quote, 'the Government has included provisions to provide the legal basis in order to enforce the enhanced safe distancing measures'.

What this means is all social gatherings of any size, whether in a public or private environment is prohibited, and the government can enforce it through various agencies and offenders can be charged in court with fines of up to $10,000 and or jail of up to 6 months for first-time offenders.

This is a good move; when I was out for groceries or collecting my mask I could see people milling around and congregating. Thankfully that has lessened as of today.

The number of infected cases in Singapore continues to go up and to the shame of us all, one of the biggest clusters are from dormitories of foreign workers. This is due to in no small part to the cramped and unhygienic conditions of those quarters. We can and should have done better by them. Let's hope when this crisis blows over their plight is not forgotten.

Flutter

I installed Android Studio and downloaded the Flutter module for it. Of course, Murphy's law dictates something has to go wrong and it did.

Long story short Flutter has some form of incompatibility with the current version of Android Studio, 3.6.2.  It requires some packages which are considered obsolete but fortunately for us is still there if you need it.

The Fix

1. Go to Preferences - System Settings - Android SDK and the SDK Tools tab
2. Uncheck Hide Obsolete Packages
3. Install Android SDK Tools (Obsolete)
4. Then go to the command line and run flutter doctor --android-licenses

You should now be able to compile the demo flutter app and either run in through an emulator or your Android phone (Yes, it is still very slow on the emulator).

Rant Mode On/

So I have not touched Android Studio in more than a year and a half. Since I started using Android Studio in 2013 (while a leap forward compared to what we had to deal with before) feels 5 steps too many to get things working together rather than a good out of the box experience. Here we are in 2020 and we seem to be having similar challenges. This is going to put off a lot of casual developers, especially if they can't even get to the stage of running the demo app (no coding) without having to google for the solution to get the IDE working.

I will add it could just be Flutter/Android Studio having this issue.

/Rant Mode Off

On Reading

I continued my MR James roll, and read the Mezzotint as well as Count Magnus. Both very atmospheric and done in a way I will describe as a kind of quiet dread.

I have also decided to re-read some of my The Three Investigators books! They are a series of cherished books from my childhood, which, despite their juvenile and period nature still holds up today. I started with the first book, The Secret of Terror Castle where we are introduced for the first time to Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. The boys have just setup an Investigation agency and are about to get their first case!

The boys are supposedly about 13 years of age or so. What draws me in is the characterisation of the boys, especially that of Jupiter Jones, their unofficial leader. Like all boys their age, they are earnest and take the investigation very seriously, and because they are young, they have a tendency to be more creative and think outside of the box. I think the author Robert Arther captured this very well.

There is the interesting premise of each book being introduced by the fictionalised version of the famous director, Alfred Hitchcock. When I first started reading them, I thought Alfred Hitchcock was the author, so prominent was his name on the cover!

I am about to start on The Whispering Mummy, the third book in the series. If those titles sound intriguing, check them out.  Electronic copies of them are online but I am not sure about the legality of that.








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