Wap

Oct. 21st, 2003 10:44 am
hirez: More graf. Same place as the other one. (Default)
[personal profile] hirez
(That's the sound of me hitting a wall)

Bugger.

As mentioned previous, like, some part of the S-40 http connector bolts a ':80' into the URL. While not illegal, it's spurious and confuses Gradwell's cgi-wrapping script. Neither problem appears fixable by me in any useful timeframe.

It would also seem that direct access to the camera is part of the Mobile Media API, which is (drum roll) S-60 only. Ok, not a problem. There's a Good Enough picture-taking application that saves out JPEGs - I can just grab those and...

... Bollocks. I don't hold out much hope of the saved pictures in the phone being available as part of the Palm-like 'record store'. (Can't think of anywhere else they might be, mind.)

[Sigh]

Does anyone want a nice biorhythm calculator?

Date: 2003-10-21 03:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steer.livejournal.com
While not illegal, it's spurious and confuses Gradwell's cgi-wrapping script. Neither problem appears fixable by me in any useful timeframe.

You couldn't simply wrap the wrapping script? (A comment offered in total ignorance of what the wrapping script actually does or where it sits in the chain of things - but removing all occurrances of :80 is quite an easy problem).

Date: 2003-10-21 04:33 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
Possibly. Bear in mind this isn't a back-bedroom ISP, and whatever tweak has to work for everyone else too.

It's actually three lines of mod_rewrite that looks like a terrible accident in a regular expression factory. And there's some other malarkey to get it running as unprived punter in a BSD jail.

If I point the thing at my BSD box (that runs a webswerver on port 82 so BY's security scanner doesn't have a fit) then it works cheerfully enough.

Date: 2003-10-21 04:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steer.livejournal.com
ah - apologies - I thought you wanted something that worked just for you. I thought it didn't seem too much of a problem.

Date: 2003-10-21 04:58 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
Well, I do want it to work for me. It's just that I can't expect Dear Leader Gradwell to shag up a working webhosting business without a really good reason and/or a really good fix.

Date: 2003-10-21 05:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steer.livejournal.com
Ah - then surely the answer is to host a script yourself which just remangles everything, strips the offending :80 and passes it on to the other site? (Yes, this is a grotesque bodge and I've probably misunderstood the problem).

Date: 2003-10-21 06:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
Quite possibly.

Although XML-RPC is cheerfully bidirectional.

I'll have a look at mod_rewrite. I may be some time...

Date: 2003-10-21 03:57 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] aoakley.livejournal.com
<cockney>Nah, nah, nah, yer goin' abaat this all wrong, mate...</cockney>

It appears to me that you're trying to create an all-singing-all-dancing all-in-one application for a series of tasks that should essentially be client-server.

The phone is your client.

The web server is your bitch.

Let the web server do all the hard work. You have a perfectly capable colour WAP browser on your phone, you have a perfectly functioning "send phonecam picture as email attachment" feature, why on earth do you want to process the pictures on the phone? This is so not the place.

How I'd Do It:

  • Phone emails a picture to the server
  • Server places the picture in a holding area
  • Client logs on to password-protected WAP area and constructs blog entry using pictures from holding area as required (WML2.0 does pictures just fine). Server does all image resizing through inbuilt PHP or Perl libraries.
  • Server constructs blog entry and publishes it.

    This is a task for PHP & Perl, not J2ME. J2ME, as you pointed out, is for biorhythms and tetris-clones. (I do have a rather excellent J2ME-MIDP Solitaire, if you want it).
  • Date: 2003-10-21 04:55 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    [Sigh]

    You've not read anything I've posted previously, have you?

    [Oh, and the next person who uses the phrase '($thing) is your/my bitch' in my hearing is going to be Spoken To.]

    It is client-server. There's a documented spec. for talking to (most) weblog code what is known to work. If I want to Just Do Text, then I could install Azure or Kablog on the phone and have done with it.

    I don't want to 'process' the picture on the phone. There's a JPEG in a 'directory' on the device. I want to open that, translate it to base64 (a kXML library function, so I don't have to do any work there either) and squirt it up the line as a 'metaweblog.mediaUpload' RPC call. The MMS library isn't going to be doing anything different.

    The functionality for remote clients is already in the weblog code. I'm trying not to reinvent boring wheels and have a small amount of fun fiddling with Shiny Toys.

    But if the phone is crippled such that you have to use MMS to get pictures off the thing and thus make $$$ for the airtime provider... I shan't be in the least bit surprised.

    Date: 2003-10-21 05:40 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] aoakley.livejournal.com
    Projects like this are more about personal aims than path of least resistance, so my twopennethworth isn't important; but the point of LJ is commentary so here is mine.

    I do get exactly what you're aiming at here; yes, you are already doing client-server so I should have purported my 2p as "browser-server" instead of "client-server".

    > There's a JPEG in a 'directory' on the device. I want to open that, translate it to base64 (a kXML library function, so I don't have to do any work there either) and squirt it up the line as a 'metaweblog.mediaUpload' RPC call.

    I don't think you're going to be able to do that, and even if you could, I very much doubt you'd still have a useful program wot would work on anything other than your specific phone running your specific firmware revision. AFAIK (and if I've got this wrong, I am missing the point) there is no standard for addressing phonecam pics from J2ME because there is no standard for where the pics are stored on all phones (and that's without even addressing the sandbox issue- do we really want our Java applets to be allowed to crawl around the innards of our phones? That's a recipe for virii and privacy breaches).

    Which is why we've all been complaining about the nonstandardness of J2ME and why I suggested bypassing J2ME altogether and doing the whole thing via the already proven and very much standardised MMS/WAP route.

    I also don't see what advantages editing the entry (be it pics, HTML, plaintext, whatever) on a client application on the phone, as opposed to doing it via a WAP browser with a WML form, provides.

    >The MMS library isn't going to be doing anything different. [...] But if the phone is crippled such that you have to use MMS to get pictures off the thing and thus make $$$ for the airtime provider... I shan't be in the least bit surprised.

    I think Sir very much has the measure of the situation. My solution was knock up a dirty sendmail perl script and then swear a little, buy a bolt-on bundle of MMSes for 3 quid extra a month, and be done with it, rather than pay 50p+ per pic and swear a lot.

    Date: 2003-10-21 06:06 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] jarkman.livejournal.com
    The J2ME solution is (if it can be made to work) a lot simpler. It lets the client work directly with the existing server API, so you get to play with all the server features directly.

    And if Java won't do it, there's always C++/Symbian development. That would be fun.

    Date: 2003-10-21 06:17 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    Isn't Symbian S-60 only?

    Date: 2003-10-21 06:21 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] jarkman.livejournal.com
    No, the S40 is Symbian-y too. You'd need to find the right SDKs & stuff, of course.

    Date: 2003-10-21 12:23 pm (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    Not according to Nokia.

    Though I don't know how much deeper I can get into forum.nokia w/o running amok...

    Date: 2003-10-21 05:43 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] jarkman.livejournal.com
    Hm. The photos must be in there somewhere. Can you find anything by digging about in javax.microedition.rms ?

    On the :80 front, questions:

    Is this just a Gradwell problem ? If so, got anywhere else where it could be hosted ?

    Is there a possible hack to get you going on Gradwell involving a tiny url-rewriting proxy ?

    If you use the phone's HTTP layer to post stuff directly, does it do the :80 thing ? If not, you have a variety of hackety-hack options available (get xml-rps to make you the text, the post it yourself, or make the text by printf, or whatever)

    Date: 2003-10-21 06:36 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    Well, quite. Don't know yet.


    Gradwell? Yes. Hosting elsewhere? Not worth the hassle-value.

    Possibly.

    I think so. There's next-to-nothing in that library. (in that it's a sensibly written layer on top of the XML library) I've not really tried to prod it with a stick.


    Brain hurts. Will fiddle with MX settings and LDAP instead, given it's daytime.

    (You were just taunting me with those latches, right? What are they for?)

    Date: 2003-10-21 06:57 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] jarkman.livejournal.com
    They were 10 for 30 quid, which settled it for me.

    Oh, you mean what are they *for* ? God knows. They're each the size of your foot. They're explosion-venting latches, with a calibrated (and adjustable) push-open force so when your chemical plant goes up all the doors fly open in a Laurel-and-Hardy manner. These are 180-lb open-force models. But I think I'll be likely to use as Gratuitously Big Latches on some as-yet-uninvented item of furniture.

    More details here:

    http://www.brixon.com/latch3.htm

    and here :

    http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2563136269&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOAB:UK:6

    Date: 2003-10-21 06:54 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] lucifein.livejournal.com
    What I want to know is does it let you send naughty pictures of you to my email box? >:P

    ~HS~
    Luci xxx (the human touch to your posts)

    Date: 2003-10-21 07:43 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    [FX: Sudden flurry of coding]

    Date: 2003-10-21 09:06 am (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] lucifein.livejournal.com
    .... *blinks*



    *waits*......


    ~HS~
    Luci xxx

    Date: 2003-10-21 01:43 pm (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] steer.livejournal.com
    Does anyone want a nice biorhythm calculator?

    For a java enabled phone with source and install instructions? Yes. Spent half an hour trying to write "hellophone" failed. (Phone says "file format not recognised" to my .jar but recognises other people's fine - I suspect I am missing lots of the technicalities so an example would help lots).

    Date: 2003-10-21 02:24 pm (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    Start with [livejournal.com profile] deathboy's treatise. (It's in my 'memories' section)

    The Currant-bun Wireless Toolkit works well enough, though it defaults to MIDP-2.0 projects. The 7210/50/i is a MIDP-1.0 device, so if you've got one of them it'll fail dismally. Edit the field in the .jad file (project properties button), rebuild, repackage, reinstall, repair to the pub.

    Mind you, if you've a !Nokia, then I'm less sure. As if I knew anything anyway.

    (The 'calculator' thing probably makes more sense if read in the same tone as 'Would anyone like a nice game of chess?')

    Date: 2003-10-21 02:37 pm (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] steer.livejournal.com
    The 7210/50/i is a MIDP-1.0 device, so if you've got one of them it'll fail dismally

    Hmm.. just my luck. Still, that Deathboy post is useful indeed - thanks kindly for pointing it out.

    Date: 2003-10-21 03:47 pm (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    It still works, mind. You just need to change the project settings and rebuild. Sorted.

    Date: 2003-10-21 03:55 pm (UTC)
    From: [identity profile] steer.livejournal.com
    Woo -- got "Hello Phone" going. I'm rocking now. Oh yes.

    *bounce*. Now, what chance I could get a z-machine emulator running on it.

    Actually, I really should do some proper real work - but this stuff is fun.
    From: [identity profile] lazrus-armagedn.livejournal.com
    Depends ... Will it work on a Samsung A800?

    No...don't say a word! ... I much preferred my old Sony CMD J5 ... And before yoy say anything about that, unless you've used one ... and then gone back to a 'normal' Nokia-style system and discovered just how UNfuckingIntuitive it is ... you have absolutely NO idea of what the words 'intuitive', 'user-friendly' or 'transparent' actually mean
    From: [identity profile] hirez.livejournal.com
    [FX: Grovels across interweb. Lots of it is b0rked. More than usual, in fact. Strange...]

    I suspect not.

    This Java business appears to be flash-bastard smartphones only (aka 'kit that's licensed Symbian'). And handbag-specials like the 72xx series. (aka 'bare minimum j2me you bastards')

    I think phone UIs have gone downhill ever since they did away with the rotary dial and the bakelite handset attached with plaited fabric-covered wire.

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