
  I have subclassed things like LinearLayout, ViewFlipper, Button, TextView, etc etc and thought that providing constructors for these classes that take arguments like textsize, font, layout parameters, background color etc etc might help the situation and actually might lend itself more towards OOP common design paradigms.


That's not a good idea. Widgets are not designed to be extended as a means of configuration. Moreover, it is not necessary, as all the things you list can (and should) be defined in XML layout resources.


  do some activities just naturally have lots of code?


Some activities are responsible for lots of code. You are welcome to pull some of that logic out into other classes, but they would not necessarily be subclasses of widgets. Your Adapters, various ...Listeners, AsyncTasks, Loader.Callbacks, and so forth can frequently be pulled out into separate public classes, rather than having your activity implement a zillion interfaces or have bunches of inner classes.

Android Activity - Is it common to have a lot of code in one activity class?
I need to run an NTP client on a very limited embedded device.  

ntpd is available but I do not see anything like rc.conf, or ntp.conf, or xntp.conf?  Can someone advise on how to setup NTP?  

I ran ntpd, but the date and time haven't updated.
