March 2011 – >_bryanallott.net

If you’re keeping up with the Playbook SDK Betas, you will no doubt have gone through the cycle of getting your signing keys and installing them. Thing is, when you update your SDK version, you don’t want to lose those artifacts. Else, you’ll have to request new keys. So before you update, let me tell what to expect…

You will have -a- version of the SDK setup nicely. You will also have your signing keys installed with the .p12 file artifacts along with some barsigner.csk and barsigner.db files. You will also have updated your bbwp.properties file. Now, when you install the new SDK, it will display a prompt along the lines of: “Detected previous version. Uninstall old version first. Cancel, Ignore, Retry”. Wait.

If you uninstall your old version, you’re going to lose all those artifacts. You WILL need to request new keys and install them all over again. Mission, but not impossible 🙂

You might want to cancel and think it over. I chose “Ignore”.

I ignored the warning and went on with (Plan A) installing the newer SDK alongside the older one. This kinda worked well, but there were some issues with the paths and picking up the correct one (a non-signing SDK alongside the first version of a signing SDK). It got messy. It turned out easier (at this stage) to just uninstall everything, request new keys and start again.

With the next upgrade, I chose “Ignore” again. But this time, I just installed it right over my old installation folder. I got prompted during the install to “Overwrite existing file? Yes/No/Yes To All”.

“Yes to All”, please.

Didn’t need to request new keys or configure any additional paths- it just worked. Re-compiling against 0.9.4 and signing went off without a hitch.

So, based on my experiences, I would say, once you have a 0.9.n version of the SDK setup with signing keys and it’s all good, the next upgrade experience should be relatively safe if you just ignore the previous version warning and install right over the old SDK 🙂

Of course, if it didn’t (or doesn’t) work for you, you probably didn’t (or won’t) do something that I wouldn’t not have not recommended or didn’t suggest you shouldn’t have tried or didn’t do something that wasn’t not unlike the process that I haven’t described in this or any other post that I may not have written (sic) :p

There’s always a lot of debate (and hence opinion) on the “standard of education”. From politicians to parents, teachers and taxpayers, everyone (including Grandma) has something to say about (generally) the decline in the standard of education. Problem is, all this negative media is very public.

If I was a school-going kid today and all I heard on the radio, saw on television and endured at the dinner table was complaints about:
* ill-equipped teachers
* low standards
* education “crisis” after “crisis”
* decay in the moral fibre of the education system at large
* incompetence of the government to execute decent delivery of education

And so on…

Would I be enthusiastic about going to the same place everyday which everyone else drums up as a “hole”? Hell, no. And more- pay attention?

And then we exacerbate the situation when we bemoan the lack of attitude and performance of the learners. Really? We actually expect them to ignore our very public and negatively distorted opinions on education and apply themselves?

What if we told our kids that going to school was:
* fun
* exciting
* filled with opportunities
* a time to create and invent -yourself-
* all-round just plain awesome
?

Because truth be told, it is all of the above.