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

[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.... ?