I want to be an anglepoise lamp

[hirez]

I appear to have set myself a bit of a task.

Part of the reason for buying the 7250i (apart from Shiny! Toy!) was that it's got a camera built in, has a permanent IP connection and does Java. I had in the back of my head the idea that this phone-weblogging thing might be interesting to play with.

And indeed it might be, were any of the tech even minimally functional.

I could use a lashed-up MMS->email gateway. It's how most other people do it, after all. But as detailed a couple of posts back, Cellnet can't manage to make it work right, and the thought of relying on a wrinkle in their b0rked provisioning system fills me with argument.

I could use BlogPlanet, but that's written for Series-60 phones (Nokia 7650, 3650 et al), whereas the 7250/7210 is a Series-40. The software available thus far for S40 is either relentlessly trivial (Biorhythm calculators, period planners - the sort of thing that I last encountered on a 3032 PET written in Commodore BASIC. In 1977.) or blappy games (which seem to keep deathboy in musical tech, warehouse apartments and nude fetish totty, so are self-evidently Good Things).

So. I've just under two weeks to get my head around object-orienteering (got me bobble hat and compass), Java (Mobile Edition), XML-RPC (That's how the Blogger/MT/Radio remote-access APIs work, so that's what you use) and the Nokia S40 API. And fit the result into 64k.

At the back of my head lurks The Fear. The fear that my brain isn't anything like as elastic as it used to be and I'm just not going to be able to recall what coding skills I had (The last time I wrote any Proper Code with a Design and a Compiler and everything was nearly ten years ago. Though I've lashed up Perl regularly in the meantime, I just can't seem to consider that Proper Code. No doubt that attitude will garner me hard stares from the perlites here, but... It's my problem, not yours, ok?) and bring them to bear on the problem.

Still, if I don't try, then I'll never find out, and those bits of my brain will wither away and be replaced with parts that go 'That's a nice antique fireplace' or 'We could paint the bathroom that colour'. I don't want that to happen. I get/got a lot more out of hacking away on something odd than I did/do thinking about fireplaces. I'm just better at it.

And indeed, posting this here gives me the opportunity for Glorious Public Failure when/if it all fails to gel and I have to shuffle off to be a Stupid Person for the rest of my natural.

I love the smell of adrenaline in the morning...

Comments

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I take that as a slur on the worthiness of our quest to build the oddest furnishings in the world. I shall have to ask you to step outside.

[bonk]

Ah. We are in a computer here. There is no outside.

I seem to be getting some sort of Tron/King Arthur/knightly quest crossover thing going in my head. Too much coffee.

Sir Gawain - you must ride like the wind to the B Acccumulator, and defeat that divide instruction in mortal combat. If you fail, a malformed exception handler will sweep us all away, and we will never live to reach the storage subsystem.

So, do you know what sort of APIs you've got avalable to do transport on the thing ? Will it do HTTP for you ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

:p

Nonono... Building fireplaces (barbequeues, trizers, etc) is an entertaining and communal/ist business.

I just feel the need to do something else for a couple of weeks. (Though I need to hoik the wireless out the car and replace it with the CD unit in the other one, too)

Yes. Far too much coffee.

It appears to do HTTP itself. The 'Halfwit's guide to XML and SOAP' from Nokia seemed reasonably encouraging as well.

I need to try some MT fiddling next, to test some assumptions.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Just checking.

So, is your XML/SOAP just one cunningly hardcoded printf with your image jammed into it ? Or do you need to engage in meaningful dialog with the server ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You need to log in to the specific weblog and talk to it proper, like.

(A cleaner answer than the usual 'run perl from the aliases table and dismember multi-part email' because it requires no server-side faffing, at the expense of having to run something with a Metaweblog API. Since I've already got one of those, I'm not bothered about re-inventing that wheel.)

Which is currently failing with the usual dismal and impenetrable Perl errors I've come to know and loathe.

What I'm trying to find out is where MT puts its uploaded files, since I don't want to have to thumb-in the picture URL. (I'll probably have to give each image a unique name before upload, otherwise they'll likely all be img001.jpg. Bugger.)

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

So, 3 or 4 hardcoded XML strings with various parameters in ?

If you have a working desktop client that does the right protocol, can you just log its traffic with Ethereal (toy of the week!) and paste that into your app ?

Maybe you should rename the pictures with date & serial number in your client, so they sort nicely without thumbwork ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Brutal and ugly. Sounds like a plan.

I have a working (at least it did...) client. It's at home and doesn't do images, though. While it's not something I'm blocking on, it is pretty much The Point.

I'll have a further frig with this fucking perl before poking about for something else.

Yes. That was The Plan. Time-of-upload down to the second should be granular enough. (Famous last words...)

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

It's a little thing, but today's date & a count of photos today is a bit more approachable (and typeable) than time down to seconds.

Now, back to Chinese font support...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ye-es... But that involves keeping some state, and if I've already got to deal with the date anyway...

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Hokay. It'll seem easier when you've got some other state tucked away... :-)

[quercus.livejournal.com]

So, 3 or 4 hardcoded XML strings with various parameters in ?

Were you using those kneecaps ?

If I can re-code a 10-year old DOS program to output XML, and to do it by coding up a DOM with an accurate subset of the W3C DOM model, then you don't have to go frigging about with printf()

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

And that more complicated and difficult implenetation is better because.... ?

[codepope.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, the fear of the fresh uncut technology. Snort it up well. I've kinda been doing the same with Rendezvous, XML Streams and XMPP... But the feeling when your client can see and chat to an iChatAV users from a Windows/Linux box is good.

Gimme a yell if I can help.

[steer.livejournal.com]

To analogise briefly: perl is to writing code as putting up wall-paper with drawing-pins is to architecture.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

YA the coder's Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen and I shall like as not be hiding from you at Whitby...

[fross.livejournal.com]

if you feel like splashing out, the "in a nutshell" series from o'reilly have some good java books. i think they do a JME one too.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I have 'Java in a nutshell' and 'Java network programming' (or some permutation of those words).

I suspect the real brain-warp will be the object-orienteering. I've been meaning to get my head around Java since... Ohgod... Sun sent us a pile of bumph when I was still working at Inepte, so that would have been 1996.

[fross.livejournal.com]

OO is fun, it'll seem simple, then it'll seem ludicrously hard, then you'll have a "zen moment" and everything will fall into place :>

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Jolly good.

This doesn't mean I'll want an in-depth discussion of subclassing in The Elsinore, mind. If I show any signs of that sort of thing, please point and laugh. (Werl guv, it's yer operator overloading, innit?)

Correct Amount Of Coffee Moment: I have visions of an earnest Object-Orienteer (Paul Whitehouse in big round glasses) being confronted by a half-mad systems programmer: "OWLS!"

Back to basic

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Get a row of switches, 8LEDs and get back to some hardcore 8086 old Skool.
Now THAT's C0de.


You young-uns are spoilt with all these toys. I mean, it's a phone, the fact that you can chat on it while yomping across the moors, or wherever is cool enough no?

Re: Back to basic

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[Grams: Dvorak]

It was 8085 back at GlosCAT. (And brief attacks of 6502. And 68k/copperlists when 'writing' Amiga demos. Well, demo, in point of fact. Oh hell. And Z80 under CP/M. And Fortran, Turbo Pascal/TP(winders), Lomac Natural Language...)

Uncle Andi will be along in a minute to conclusively win that DSW, but I'd like to point out that I didn't go to college for any of that, save the 8085.

Re: Back to basic

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

You'd love the computer room at Bletchley Park.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Some of that stuff is only on display because I dragged it out of skips when I worked there.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Well done that man. =:-)

I was particularly chuffed to see a Nascom. And core memory - which I'd never actually seen before.

Re: Back to basic

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

8085, that's what I said wasn't it?

Yes, me too (more bloody // Chelt). If you didn't know the answer it was usually written on the portacabin ceiling.

[squiddity.livejournal.com]

If you've not done the OO thing before, best way to get the paradigm in yer head is a chat in a pub with a knowledgeable bod. Reading doesn't seem to cut it.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I did this to baratron many many years ago - except it was a pizza restaurant and not a pub. Unfortunately not being a hardore techie she doesn't code much.... :-(

[quercus.livejournal.com]

But where do you find a knowledgeable bod ? There's a whole pile of ignorant shite talked about OO. Unless you can find someone who read their Meyer at least a decade ago, and who knows why VB is better than VC++ (It is ! In at least one significant aspect, which is of relevance to designing good Java - rest of the VB language is shite, mind)

Anyway, didn't young Hirez (the one with the cheekbones) know his way round some fairly decent TP code ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hirez-with-cheekbones wrote some shite-awful TP to begin with, reinvented a few wheels, and was starting to get dead handy at driving Win3 without the aid of OWL (OWLS! Beware the OWLS, boy!) before he fell for the wrong (or indeed right) purple-haired gothette and had to be taken away in a rubber car for detoxing.

The C I wrote at Inepte was tolerably robust by the time I discovered Solaris. But then it had to be.

But that was a long time ago.

[juliann.livejournal.com]

Have you tried www.20six.co.uk? They are really advertising themselves as the moblogger's host of choice...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[FX: Pokes about]

I am strangely reminded of another.com, but no matter.

[FX: Pokes some more]

Hm. They're SMS or MMSing into an email address. Ugh.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Or just emailing. Which would be easy for you, if the thing has an SMTP implementation in it. But less honourable.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I think Symbian's got a reasonable SMTP, S60 comes with most of that, and S40 is a case of 'Keep banging the rocks together, guys. How about a nice Tetris clone instead?'

Email's the coward's way out. Watch me implement it next weekend...

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Excellent. I'll be coming back past Bristle sometime late Sunday, probably - maybe I'll drop by to see it run & jump.