John Flinchbaugh's Weblog

Emerging Technology Conference at MapQuest

john — 2008-03-28T14:02:56Z

I'm organizing An Evening of Emerging Technologies at MapQuest in Lancaster, PA on 23 April 2008.

It's a free open space conference, so join us to hear about technology in our region and to share your own experiences. Click the link and register today.

If I Implemented a new Jaiku

john — 2008-01-09T06:02:20Z

Jaiku's getting boring, since they don't actually update anything, and now, they seem to just be letting it fall apart. Maybe I'll need to move soon.

A true Unix philosopher would find just the right tools for each part of the job and pipe them together. Is that Twitter for microblogging, and Tumblr for full aggregation of all my content? Do I care about the community that has gathered around Jaiku? Leo Laporte concludes that you just have to go where your friends are, but I think I may just be able to point my RSS reader at my friends.

The key features of Jaiku to me are:

RSS aggregation
Microblogging
Comments allowing threads to grow

What else is important?

I think that otherwise, I'd enhance my system with:

Configurable RSS periods
Unlimited post length
Uniform content formatting across posts and comments
Versatile mobile, email, and XMPP interfaces

Those are the features that are important to me, but unfortunately, I don't actually get around to coding anymore, so I'll just have to wait for someone else to do it.

Spread Thin

john — 2007-08-23T12:31:22Z

Looking at my weblog, I feel that I've spread the content that I produce pretty thinly. Jaiku sucks up most my little thoughts, Flickr sucks up my occassional notable photo, del.icio.us has my links -- I don't have much left to actually post to this weblog. Fortunately Jaiku aggregates it all together, otherwise, you'd never be able to find it all.

I'll have to try to remember to dig through my past Jaiku posts for ideas to expand into real articles.

Emailing My Phone From Log4J

john — 2007-08-07T15:32:27Z

I have JBoss' log4j configured to email my mobile phone using the SMTPAppender. My SE W810i didn't seem to want to display the messages with stacktraces, though. It said the message used an unsupported encoding.

By adding the <param name = "Encoding" value = "iso-8859-1"/> parameter to the appender configuration (jboss-log4j.xml), I forced the messages down to an encoding that my phone does understand, and now it works nicely.

W810i Failed Playlist

john — 2007-06-28T18:14:47Z

Yesterday, I added a couple 1-hour podcasts to my W810i and dropped them into a playlist. When I tried to play it, it just said "Failed", and shutdown the player. After that I couldn't even open the player with the Walkman button -- it just said "Failed" again and slowly went back to the standby screen.

Restarting didn't help, removing the files didn't help, and removing the card didn't help. Finally, I managed to get into the Walkman player mode through the main menu which doesn't go right to the current playlist. From the Walkman menu, I could select another song and get it playing again.

In the end, I found that selecting the playlist again would cause the failure, so I deleted the playlist and rebuilt it. All is well now. The playlist must have gotten corrupted somehow when I was manipulating it.

Sony Ericsson W810i

john — 2007-06-08T14:33:42Z

As most people with face-to-face contact with me know, I've recently picked up a new Sony Ericsson W810i from Cingular.

I was very happy with the phone from the start, then about 4 hours later I discovered how brain-dead crippled the phone was by Cingular. With all hopes dashed, I resolved to unbrand the phone or return it.

Unbranding

I had come to expect the "security" limitations imposed on the Java implementation, but finding the stock Sony Ericsson email client disabled was completely unacceptable.

I found some scant mentions of free tools to manipulate Sony Ericsson phones, but alas, they all seemed too scary for me -- I just didn't have the stomach for bricking my phone. In the end I chose to pay about $10 and use Wotan Server -- they're documentation seemed the most complete.

I actually ended up running the Wotan software on my work computer, since I didn't have a readily available Windows machine otherwise. After the longest 5 minutes or so of my life, the unbranding process completed, and I rebooted to have a completely functional and kick-ass phone! Not only did the nice email client return, but I found that the Java implementation was functional beyond my wildest dreams -- I had open access to Bluetooth, PIM, camera, and even network sockets! MidpSSH now runs! I've wanted MidpSSH on my phones for years.

Cingular seems to have even disabled the Flash Lite menu system for some reason, so I have that back as well.

I'm currently running the R4EA031 firmware. I'm pretty sure I can't use Sony Ericsson's Update Service with this firmware, though. It seems to figure out it should be a Cingular phone, and pushes that crippled firmware back onto it, but left the upgraded filesystem. (See I Broke It below to see why I had opportunity to flash phones a couple times.)

Back to the Beginning, Unpacking the Device and Accessories

The phone is the tiny candy bar style -- very similar to my old T616. I love this form factor, though I miss the larger 320x240 pixel screen of my old S710a for a few uses.

Claire hated the tiny buttons when I tried to get her to pick this phone, but I don't mind it in the least. It's great to have so many functions so quickly accessible.

The phone comes with a USB cable and a 256M MemoryStick Duo Pro card. This is a pretty good start. The USB is indispensable if you're going to be loading music onto the phone, which you should, since it comes with very nice ear buds.

The ear buds are nice little Sony deep-ear, isolating things. They sound very good. As I unfortunately found out, to buy comparable replacement Sony ear buds can be quite expensive (~ $40).

They also finally provided a normal 1/8-inch stereo jack, so you can use your own head phones or plug the phone into any other audio system (like your car). The jack is still in a proprietary cable, but it's better than nothing. The ear buds (or anything else) plug into the main cable, and the microphone's there, so you can use any headphones for phone calls. I had hacked up my old hands-free kit on my S710a to add a jack.

Connecting to the Linux Notebook

The Bluetooth works great for serial tethering, OBEX (pushing applications and media, pulling media) just like I came to expect back with my S710a, and T616.

The phone also came with a USB cable. The phone has 2 modes: Phone Mode or File Transfer.

Phone Mode makes it do OBEX/serial just like it does over Bluetooth. I just use obexftp -u 0 or talk to /dev/ttyACM0 in place of /dev/rfcomm0.

File Transfer mode reboots the phone and makes it act as a little USB mass storage device, which Linux can still see. I'd get some errors on the Linux box about overrunning the end of the device (especially with Nautilus), but it worked for the most part. I still choose to use Phone Mode primarily though, since it keeps all the normal phone functionality enabled.

It took me a long time to get around to it, but I finally poked around and found a link with hints at having udev assign more open permissions to my phone when it's plugged into USB. Ultimately, I ended up creating an /etc/udev/rules.d/phone.rules file containing only this line:

BUS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0fce", SYSFS{idProduct}=="d042", GROUP="plugdev"

Since I'm in the plugdev group on my notebook, this provided sufficient access. With this access, I use the USB primarily to push music and podcasts to the phone.

Messaging

The email client has gotten slicker since previous phones. It now has the option to stay connected all the time and watch for email. Email gets delivered from my IMAP account within seconds of arrival on the server. It's like push email, and much faster than the 5-minute polling I used to do. I've abandoned using SMS for quick email notifications, and now I just use my IMAP account, since it's so fast.

With Bluetooth enabled and this push email option holding the data network up all the time, my battery lasts about 2 days.

Camera

The 2 megapixel camera is awesome! You can see examples shots mixed into my Flickr account. Macro mode is a welcome addition to the feature set, but spot metering is gone. Camera silent mode succeeds in muting the obnoxious shutter sound. I'll continue to use this camera extensively.

The W810i has a few more image editing options, but rotation and scaling still seems a bit awkward. It's nice to be able to use the zoom functionality while viewing a saved photo to have more flexible cropping, but it seems to save at odd resolutions (no 320x160 or 640x480). Since I'm emailing photos to Flickr these days, I don't care so much about the scaling, since that happens on the server-side now.

Yes, I Even Use It for Voice, Occasionally

The voice quality is amazingly good. The S710a was a bit disappointing in the end, but this phone performs very well, even with low signal. During the unbranding process, I did enable the AMR codec which allows lower sampling rates with low signal. I must wonder if AT&T/Cingular support this codec at all, because this may be the key to voice quality still being useful even with low signal. I didn't test the phone too much before modifying it.

The ear piece volume is a bit low for use in noisy environments (the car), but a nice set of earplug-style ear buds makes it much easier to hear.

I Broke It

About a month into using the phone, the shutter button started flaking out. It has the 2-click functionality common on most cameras where the half press focuses and the full press takes the picture. Well, the full-click stopped registering. It felt like an obvious hardware defect, but cleaning didn't help it. After about a week of struggling with it, I ended up sending it back to Cingular for a replacement. I unfortunately had to go through the whole unbranding process again with the new phone. (I never did hear any noise from Cingular about the broken phone being unbranded. That's good of them.)

The only problem with the new phone is that I put a few scratches in the screen pretty early. I've always hated those hazy little screen protector sheets, and I never had a need for them previously. Maybe I'll change my tune now, though I've still not installed one. (It'll just make it worse.)

Conclusion

I'm extremely happy with this phone. It's the best I've had. I think I've also learned my lesson about locked phones. I'll pay the extra $100 next time and buy the retail, unlocked phone to avoid the hassles. Clean phones resell better, and I'll not have to necessarily limit my upgrades to 2-year periods.

A friend is trying to convince me to step up to more advanced S60 phones from Nokia, and I may bite (since I'll not wait for subsidized phones anymore), but I more likely will remain a Sony Ericsson super-fan. As a developer, I like to target the more widely available Java phones over smart phones.

Watching for Linux WTK 2.5

john — 2007-04-16T14:01:17Z

I love the new software rat race for some reason, so I was all excited to see WTK 2.5 was released. It's only for WinXP at this point, though, so I'll be watching for the Linux one. I hope it won't be too long, since my Linux notebook is my only mobile development platform. I've been using WTK 2.2 for the longest time.

Update (13 April 2007): I see that Sun has an early access version of WTK 2.5.1 available for Linux.

Update (16 April 2007): Thank's to an explanation at man-di's weblog, I see that it's built against a newer version of GLIBC (2.4 I guess), so the emulator doesn't want to run on my Debian unstable box.

Fortunately, I just did an update of Debian and found that GLIBC 2.5 just hit the unstable tree. Awesome! I'm up and running now.

Breaking Hearts with Presence Networks

john — 2007-04-11T14:16:35Z

I found Groovr a bit lacking in features, so I jumped to Twitter. At that point, I had started wondering how I can pull it all back together.

Over the past weekend, one of the primary people I've been watching in Twitter, Leo Laporte, jumped ship to go to Jaiku. Besides now having Leo Laporte, Jaiku has a couple extra features over Twitter. Most interestingly, you can import feeds from other networks to aggregate everything into one place!

So...I have an account there now too. (That's 3 accounts now.) In addition to my microblog/presence there, I'm importing my feeds for Flickr, Twitter friends, weblog, and I'll probably add my Last.fm feed too. This is sort of slick.

Of course, it won't take much to break the hearts of thousands again when someone comes out with the next Twitter + 1 or Jaiku + 1 service which does all this and one more thing, and we all jump again. This is a game to see who can run fastest to hang onto the crowd for that extra 10 seconds.

My Own Little Web 2.0

john — 2007-03-29T19:28:06Z

I've had my little mobile weblog for a couple years, but its functionality is relatively limited, so I'm looking for more.

I've become a bit of a joiner recently, and I've joined a few services, including Groovr, Twitter, and most recently Flickr. I figure I have my normal weblog for longer-form articles and a repository for my more important thoughts, but I could use Twitter and Flickr for the micro stuff.

I don't want to be splattered all over the internet like some of people I know, so I need a way to pull this all back together into one place -- one stream. If I'm posting on Twitter and Flickr at about the same time, then it's likely the photos and text are related and should be presented together.

How do I integrate these? Or should I be looking at another service? Groovr wasn't quite it, but could be some day.

I'm also not sure how important the social aspect is to me. It's awfully amusing to watch certain people within these networks, but am I really contributing anything back to these networks? Probably not so much. I must have at least a bit of an exhibitionist thing, though, since I want to post this stuff at all.

Mobile Units of Work

john — 2007-03-23T20:41:14Z

I often find myself standing around with my phone for a few minutes wanting something to do, but I don't usually want a game! I need something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to break work into tiny units of work, and let me do each bit in these spare moments.

Introduce a framework to distribute anyone's work (and money) to people with spare moments with their mobiles, and you have the Mobile Mechanical Turk!

What units of work are appropriate for the small screen and short windows of time? Surveys with only a few questions seem like a logical choice.

I guess plain RSS reading on the phone could serve my purposes, but this isn't really synchronized with my normal desktop reader, so there's the problem of overlap.