Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2004

  • Java Certified Codemonkey

    Well, not quite, though I did pass my Java Certified Programmer exam this afternoon.  I’ve spent a fair amount of my free time over the last month studying with this book by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates.  I picked it up from bookpool at a great price in early June but put the afterburners on in the past week or two.  The tone of the book got to me at times, but what can I say, it allowed me to fill in the gaps and pass the test.

  • The Day that Started it All: The Nokia 7650

    Exactly two years ago today I wrote:

    In morning news linkage: genetic algorithms evolved a guy’s keyboard layout, the Simputer is coming, and Nokia has a cel phone with an integrated digital camera.

    I caught this a week or so ago when I was checking the date of my first entry at postneo and it’s been hard to keep this inside since then.  Can you imagine.  Nokia shipped the 7650.  Two years ago.  Today.  I linked to a post about a cel mobile phone with a camera in it.  I didn’t mention Series 60, I didn’t know a whole lot about it until much later.  The article that I pointed to didn’t even mention Series 60.  The big thing then was “oh my goodness, this mobile phone has a camera!”

    Russ played with one in Madrid on July 24, 2002, a few weeks after it came out.

    Now, two years later, I have a Series 60 phone in my pocket every day.  I use its built-in camera almost daily, though I tend to use email to post to my moblog.  I only use MMS to send a picture to another mobile phone once every week or two.  It is however a mobile development platform for me.

    The number of Series 60 devices on the market has skyrocketed.  The number of Series 60 devices waiting behind the curtain is unknown but tantalizing.  My phone now has an interactive Python interpreter.  It can also speak Symbian C++, Java, and OPL.  I stay up until 4am trying to catch a Nokia press conference in Finland.  Two years ago the 7650 was just an afterthought in a couple of links.  “Oh, here’s a cameraphone.  Neat.”  Today I know that the platform is more important than any single feature.  Sure the cameraphone is still a killer app.  But the platform, man.  You’ve got to see the big picture.  It’s beautiful.

    Series 60.  What comes next?  What about after that?  Oh man, I can’t wait.  I can only imagine what I’m going to be talking about two years from today.

  • Single Handedly Propping up the PDA Market

    Over the past few days I have been single-handedly (okay, my wife had something to do with it too) propping up the ailing PDA market.  Last week we ordered a Dell Axim X30 with Wi-Fi (I’m told it does WPA) and Bluetooth.  Today we picked up a Pa1mOne Tungsten E for her.

    I have a Smartphone, and yes it does a wonderful job at being a smartphone.  I have a laptop that does a wonderful job of being a laptop, but I don’t have it powered up with me everywhere I go.  I also have a Daytimers organizer that has been working wonderfully, except that it doesn’t pop stuff up in my face to remind me.  I decided that perhaps I needed a PDA when I missed a vet appointment for our cats a few weeks ago.

    It is time again for a PDA.  I had a Palm III (with a whopping 2MB) years ago and replaced it with a Palm IIIxe after it was stolen.  I also have a URThere @migo which is one of the few Pocket PC devices out there that has a full PCMCIA card.  It’s nice and all, but sheesh the thing is huge.

    My X30 is due in tomorrow, and you can be sure that I will write up my experiences with it.  I won’t be able to say much about the Tungsten E because my wife will be too busy playing with it.

  • Happy Techblogiversary!

    Two years ago today I started blogging at postneo.com.  I did start my livejournal in September, 2001, so I have been at it a bit longer than two years.  Either way, today is my techblogiversary.

  • Emulated Cross Platform Development

    I managed to coax Xcode on to my new emulated Mac this afternoon.  I’m excited to finally have OSX as a viable (yet slow) development environment.  Building the above sample project took longer than it would have if OSX were running natively, but it’s not, so I’ll cope with it.

    I’ve been experimenting with some binary versions from CVS by Richard Goodwin and the SDL builds by apophis.  They have been a little faster but there’s usually something useful broken at any given time (which is to be expected).  It looks like 0.3.0 will have some major improvements when it comes out.  I’m most excited about the idle code which should save my poor laptop from flooring it the whole time it is emulating.

    Update:

    The latest 0.3.0-pre from CVS is significanlty faster than 0.2.0.  Right now it doesn’t seem to be handling CDs properly, but I’ll just switch back to 0.2.0 if I need to load something from CD.  Another big advantage of 0.3.0-pre is that it has the idle code baked in.  This means that when my virtual mac isn’t doing anything it’s not hammering the processor in my laptop.  It’s much better than 0.2.0, where the bottom of my laptop approaches the temperature of the sun.

  • Rendezvous Javadoc

    Someone on the the Rendezvous mailing list pointed out an excellet collection of references for Apple’s Rendezvous API. Of most interest to me is the Rendezvous Javadoc.

  • Dive Into Series 60 Python

    For the past month or two, I have been tinkering with Python for Series 60. I regret that I have not had enough time to pound on it, but what I have played with has been awesome. I can parse HTML, like an adaptation from this page of Dive Into Python. When things like from sgmllib import SGMLParser just work, I’m amazed. Hey, check that out, I’m parsing HTML on my phone. Rock!

    Series 60 Python is still a research project at Nokia. There are no guarantees that it will ever see the light of day beyond limited testing. There’s only one problem: sockets. It always comes back to sockets. Don’t get me wrong, sockets are available in Series 60 Python, but you can’t do something like urllib.urlopen(url). That little thing is keeping a lot of people from doing useful things with Series 60 Python. Part of the reason that so many people use and love Python is because it’s sort of runnable pseudocode. It’s intuitive, it makes sense, and the syntax that you think ought to work often does. Once writing a Python app for a platform becomes much harder than that, you start loosing developers quickly. So many killer mobile apps that would be awesome to code in Python involve the following steps:

    1. Grab a specific resource (XML, HTML, etc)
    2. parse the resource and do something with the data
    3. interpret and present the data to the user

    If the first step is overly complicated, or doesn’t work as Python programmers expect it to, you’re going to loose a lot of potential developers quickly. There’s a bit of a catch 22 though: Nokia needs to be sure that Python for Series 60 is a worthwhile project, so they’ve seeded it to developers. However the developers are frustraed because they can’t just type urllib.urlopen(url). Which came first, the useful apps taking full advantage of a connected mobile platform, or the infrastructure to do so?

    It is obvious that Nokia has put a lot of time and effort in to Series 60 Python. There’s a lot beyond your standard Python distro buried in there. It would be an absolute tragedy to see this die half-ripened on the vine. Hey Nokia: you’ve done a great job so far, keep it up! Hey developers and bloggers: make some noise! Play with it. Have fun. Post your thoughts. Let them know what you think.

    Further Reading:

  • Multiplatform Rendezvous: Big News

    Apple opened the Rendezvous floodgates yesterday with new multiplatform Rendezvous releases. Most notable was the technology preview of Rendezvous for Windows XP/2000. It ships with Howl-like IE integration (Russ wants a Firefox plugin), but more important are the hooks. The platform ships with .dlls so that developers can bring on the apps with Rendezvous/Zeroconf integration. The package also ships with .jars so that Java developers can have access.

    This really is big news. Now we Windows users can become full-fledged citizens of the Rendezvous world.

  • Service Oriented Architectures

    WebServices.Org:

    At this weeks Java One conference, Sun introduced its latest release of the Java platform, Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0, and Project Kitty Hawk, “a new initiative encompassing expanded SOA-enabling capabilities in Sun products..as well as a new SOA Readiness Assessment offering”.

    Is it just me or have we substituted one buzzword (web services) for another (service oriented architectures)? Has anything really changed, or are we just using a new word because web services are so last year? I know that I’m oversimplifying things. I wish that the industry would simplify things a bit rather than throw WS- specs around. Yes, I know that without security and a lot of the other stuff that the WS- specs address we can’t seem to function. I’m just worried that in trying to make life easier for developers, we have made life harder for them.

  • Frozen Bubble for Series 60

    NewLC links to a port of Frozen Bubble to Series 60. Frozen Bubble for Series 60 is released under the GPL. I’m currently installing it on my 3650. Frozen bubble is released for newer S60 phones as well as ancient S60 phones like my 3650. It’s addictive, go grab it.

    Mini review: At a 463k SIS, it’s a pretty big app. I put it on my MMC so I’m not too worried. It could use some polish, it’s not that fast or responsive, but I’m impressed at the same time. Hardcore Puzzle Bobble addicts like Ewan will probably be dissapointed, but casual players should be at least satisfied.

  • Links for Tuesday

    • PMWiki 1.0.2, a major bugfix release is out. PMWiki rocks.
    • I’m running Panther on PearPC 0.2.0, but if you’re adventerous, you can run PearPC nightly builds. If you run out of disk space on your 3 gig image like I have, check out these directions [pdf] on how to create a larger drive and copy data to it. Once I’m done with the move to a 6 gig image I can actually install Xcode.
    • Ewan at All About Symbian reviews the Sendo X.
    • CNet: Nokia expands developer tools for CDMA.
    • J2SE 5.0 doesn’t really roll off the tongue. Neither does J5SE. Oh well, there are a ton of great things in there regardless of what you call it.
    • Blojsom is to be included in the next OSX Server release.
    • If you need guidance, check out the Java Studio Creator Field Guide.
    • Engadget covers Engadget covers Flash Lite.
    • Jabber Architecture handles the topic of instant messaging in the corporate environment of a company whose business is instant messaging. “If the phone rings, everyone on the developer side of the house jumps, since it’s certainly someone from outside, and probably not a spouse, since they all have Jabber accounts as well.”
    • Matt Raible isn’t happy with Java Studio Creator on the Mac.
    • eWeek has positive press for BlueGlue.
    • NewLC brings news of a new book from Symbian: Programming Java 2 Micro Edition on Symbian OS. It covers developing MIDP 2.0 apps on Symbian OS.
    • Apple hosed Konfabulator pretty badly.
    • Via danbri, MobiQuitous (The First Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services) looks like it has a ton of potential. It is being held in Boston Aug 22-26. I can’t quite pull the cash to go, but the list of accepted papers makes my brain salivate. UMBC will have quite a presence at the conference. Harry Chen, an RDF geek working on his PHD keeps a weblog as his home page along with a juicy atom feed.

  • Happy 30th Birthday, UPC

    The Baltimore Sun wishes the Universal Product Code a happy 30th birthday.

  • Panther on My Laptop

    Today I installed Panther on my laptop using PearPC 0.2.0. I’ve got quite an army of aging Mac hardware, but nothing that I can coax OSX on to. Over the years I’ve installed the OSX Beta and several versions of OSX on G3/G4 hardware, but never my own. I’ve always been in love with it, but only today have I actually been able to poke around and fall for it completely.

    Panther is a wonderful thing. OSX is a wonderful thing. The fact that I can run both of those on my Athlon XP 2500+ laptop using an open source emulation program is absolutely wonderful. Some parts are faster than others, and it’s nowhere near usable for everyday tasks, but I’m running OSX on my AMD laptop. There is some Zen OS-fu to that.

    I’ve been ambiently looking for some older but usable G3/G4 capable hardware so that I can run OSX on a dedicated native machine. My new love affair means that I really have to find some hardware so that OSX can become part of my daily life.

    To the PearPC dev heads: you are amazing. I am thorougly impessed and in awe at the ablility to run a modern OS in emulation at a slow yet tolerable speed. It’s only going to get better from here. Networking didn’t work under Windows in the previous release, but I can assure you that I’ve been giving Safari a workout under 0.2.0.

    Rock. On.

  • JavaOne, WWDC, and a Barrel Full of Links

  • INSERT CD

    Via DistroWatch, INSERT stands for Inside Security Rescue Toolkit. It is based on Knoppix and looks like a solid distro for recovery, security audits, antivirus checking, and more. It’s based on Knoppix 3.4 and uses the 2.6 kernel. It looks like it can handle just about any filesystem that you would normally need, including NTFS.

    It is a lightweight (about 50 megs) distro, but packs a bunch of programs in. I have not had a chance to give this distro a try, but I’m definitely going to download it and check it out.

  • TiVo Prices Tumble

    A few days ago I noticed some 40 hour TiVo units at Best Buy for $119 after rebates.  Yesterday I saw the same unit for $129 at Circuit City.  Both prices are extremely impressive and seem to be mirroring DVD prices.  A few years ago it was unheard of to pick up a halfway decent DVD player for less than two hundred bucks or so.  Today you can buy one at Wal-Mart for $40.

    Right now PVRs seem to be nearing just above that $100 or so range that VCRs spent so many years in and where a good solid (non-barebones) DVD player can still cost today.  Here’s the kicker: Tech Bargains has a link to a refurbed 40 hour TiVo direct from the source for $80 after rebates.  I’m sure that it won’t last long, but it’s a hell of a deal.

    I wonder how long it will take GPX to put out a 15 hour PVR in a little translucent plastic box for $50 at my local big box store…

  • Python Development with Eclipse and Ant

    The Daily Python-URL is chock full of Python linkage today.  The one that has the biggest wow factor to me is a link to Python development with Eclipse and Ant at IBM developerWorks.  The article, which I managed to miss when it came out on June 15, details how to set up Eclipse as a Python development environment.  The story glues together PyDev, a Python Eclipse plugin, Python Ant tasks, and even manages to make mention of Mark’s feed parser.

    The eclipse solution sounds like it would be much more elegant and coherent than my current uses of Pythonwin and IDLE on Windows and the text editor of the moment, the command line, and the interactive interpreter on Linux (usually over SSH).

  • Celebrate Downtime with Links

    Sorry for the downtime.  Connectivity to one of my boxes has been spotty for a day or two.

  • Dot IQ

    The World had another interesting story about Iraq IT today during their Iraq domain report:

    As the handover of power approaches, Iraqis are seeking their own domain name. The World’s Clark Boyd reports.

    Hopefully ICANN will give control of .iq to the Iraqi people in a timely manner.

  • Save December 7 for Wonderfalls

    SaveWonderfalls brings good news this morning:

    At the Knitting Factory screening in LA on Friday, show creators Bryan Fuller and Todd Holland announced a tentative DVD release date — December 7 of this year.

    Excellent, I’ll be there!