Android :: Modified Snake Example - Display A Few Tiles On The Screen

I am using a gutted version of the Snake Android sample. Pretty much I am using the TileView class verbatim and am only trying to display a few tiles on the screen. Instead of the SnakeView class I am using a GameView class in which I only included the code I thought necessary to display a tile on the screen.

Here is the class

CODE:...............

Now what is happening is that when the updateWalls() method is called, the tiles are placed within the View and comes up like this:

Now when I uncomment out the updateCellularArray() method and comment out the updateWalls() the program force closes and throws a NullPointerException. After some debugging I figured out that when the updateCellular array method is called, the mTileGrid array in the TileView class is not initialized, but it is when updateWalls() is called. I am completely baffled as to why this is happening. It doesn't matter if i replace the for loop with a simple setTile(GREEN_STAR, 3, 3); it still force closes.

Here is the TileView class I am using (again this is the same one in the Snake sample that comes with the Android SDK):
CODE:.......

simplified GameView class

Alright after modifying the updateCellularArray() method to the following:

CODE:........

It finally placed the tile where I wanted it to...

I'm starting to wonder if it has something to do with the RefreshHandler. Possibly when the RedrawHandler's sleep method is called in the update method of the GameView class. I'm not quite sure how it works so I am going to try playing around with it and see what I can come up with.