dale lane

It was the afternoon of HackDay… and I’d tried a couple of hack ideas without a massive amount of success. I wanted to have something functional to show by the end of the day, so thought I’d give something easy a try.

I’d spent quite a bit of the morning getting to know the Windows Mobile camera API, so I thought I’d try and use it in an application.

Background
My Windows Mobile cameraphone comes with a basic camera app. Then you can do what you want with your photos.

The idea
I thought I’d try writing an alternative camera app that makes it easier to do some things with photos – such as uploading to flickr, posting to a WordPress blog, sending by email, and so on.

Why?
Without sounding like a Kodak advert, photos are more fun if you can share them. Anything that makes that easier could be a good thing.

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After my less-than-entirely-successful first hack, I started a second idea yesterday afternoon for the IBM HackDay.

Background
Windows Mobile smartphones include a screen brightness control. When indoors or in low light levels, you can turn the screen brightness down to maximise the battery life. When outdoors or in bright ambient light, you need to turn the screen brightness up in order to be able to make out things on the screen.

The idea
The plan was to write something that would use the camera in my cameraphone to work out the ambient light level. And then use this to programmatically alter the screen brightness as appropriate.

Why?
It takes seven screen-taps to change the screen brightness – so it’s not very quick. Something that did it for me would improve the usability of my phone.

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Yesterday was IBM’s fourth HackDay. My first project attempt of the day was to try and ‘hack’ our internal wiki.

Background
We have an internally hosted wiki software on the intranet. Anyone is free to create a new wiki, and these wikis are used to manage anything from work projects and teams to community projects.

The idea
The plan was to write something that would let you have a local copy of a wiki – a copy which lets you read and edit an intranet wiki while offline (or with only Internet access). The idea was to have the ability to sync this local wiki to the intranet-hosted the next time you are on the intranet.

Why?
The thought was that sales or service IBMers who work at customer sites might not always have access to the intranet.

And even with Intranet access, I thought that some tasks – such as looking something up quickly – might be better-suited to the quicker access you could get from a locally-hosted mirror.

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