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

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.