dale lane

People keeping half an eye on my Wakoopa feed might have noticed that I started playing with RAPI Start this weekend.

RAPI Start is a command-line tool that lets you remotely run commands on a Windows Mobile device from a connected desktop. It’s quite neat, so I want to see what sort of things I can do with it.

Here is noddy first attempt number 1 🙂

The problem:
I get a text message while I’m sat at my desk with my mobile connected to my computer. (For a mobile device, it spends a large amount of it’s life tethered to a desktop – but that’s a discussion for another time!)

I want to reply, but writing on a mobile device is fiddly. I’m sat at a full-sized keyboard, so why can’t I just use that instead?

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Can’t sleep.

So I thought I’d go back to some of the Google Maps API stuff I last played with about a month ago.

The Google Maps code I wrote before would show my last stored location.

I thought it’d be more interesting to see a number of updates over a period of time – so went back to the code and tweaked it to show updates from the last day, week or month.

• day
• week
• month

Code is a bit messy, but in my defense it is past midnight 🙂

I wanted to use the Google routing algorithm used to show directions – to link together the points that I have been to over time. Assuming that I will probably have taken the most direct route between points, then you would end up with something approximating my travelling over time.

Unfortunately, Google don’t expose their routing stuff in the API. Shame.

And on a related note, apparently if I’d used the Yahoo Maps API to do all of this, I’d be breaching their terms of service.

A friend sent me this:

You may use location data derived from GPS or other location sensing devices in connection with the Yahoo! Maps APIs, provided that such location data is not based on real-time (i.e., less than 6 hours) GPS or any other real-time location sensing device, the GPS or location sensing device that derives the location data cannot automatically (i.e. without human intervention) provide the end user’s location, and any such location data must be uploaded by an end-user (and not you) to the Yahoo! Maps APIs.

Spoilsports! (Well, I guess it’s more to do with the demands of who provides their mapping data, but pah – yay for Google)

Note: This post is a bit thin on content – sorry about that. But Twitter is down, so had to say this somewhere! 😉

I mentioned yesterday that I never got round to writing the bit of code for my location service client which would look for known wi-fi access points.

To recap, the idea is that my phone should be able to look for the access points within range, comparing the SSIDs against a list of known locations. If a match is found, it looks up the name and GPS coordinates of the location from the known store, and uses an HTTP request to send the update to the server.

It was really easy – the interesting bit of the code looks like this…

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I mentioned ages ago about a little extension I wrote for my phone that lets me dump the contents of an email that I receive into any other bit of Pocket Outlook – turning an email about an event into a Calendar item, or an email asking me to do something into a Task item – with a single click.

I recently noticed a problem with it, and finally got around to looking into it tonight. The problem was that sometimes the body of the email wouldn’t make it to the new Calendar or Task item. Everything else, like the subject and the sender’s name would be fine, but the body of the new item would be blank.

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