Another four day work week

April 25th, 2008

This week was another chance to get away from my desk for a day.

some of my slides

Support U 2
Last Thursday, I spent the day in Hursley House running a careers training day for young people. The morning was spent on how to write CVs, and the afternoon focused on interview skills. It was a part of the current phase of my mentoring project, Support U 2. I’ve written about Support U 2 already (both before and after), which is why I didn’t post about last week at the time – although the project has continued to be been refined and improved, the aims and general ideal is still much the same as I’ve written before.

Still, the day was a big success – in particular a couple of hours in the afternoon where young people each received one-on-one interviews from IBMers. Each interview was about ten minutes long, after which they’d get feedback on their interview technique before moving on to an interview with another IBMer. Very tiring – for both the young people, and the volunteer interviewers! – but I think it went well. There was a noticeable improvement in the young people’s interviews as the afternoon went on.

(And a big thanks to Nick, James and Andy for being amongst the fantastic volunteer interviewers. There were several others – I’d link to them all, but couldn’t find them online anywhere… 🙂)

That was last week’s day away from my desk.

IBM

IBM HackDay 5
Today, I spent the day in Hursley House again! This time for our latest internal HackDay. (It seems that a lot of the cool things I do at work are happening in the House… it’s conditioning me in a Pavlov’s Dog kinda way to really like being in Hursley House! 🙂 )

Unfortunately, I got quite distracted by a few customer issues – my day job is a service role, responding to customer problems with our software. It seems that Friday is the day when a lot of customers will report problems that they’ve run into – I guess that if they’ve still not something working by Friday, then it’s time to call IBM Support!

Even if I spent a lot of time doing normal work, it was still fun to do it in the House, and get to talk in-person to a few people that I normally only communicate with through blogs or Twitter. And excuses aside, I did get a chance to write a small hack of my own, which I even managed to get working before heading home. I’ll have to post about it soon.

Looking at my diary, I’m gonna have to work every day next week. It’s so unfair…

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Using a 3 mobile broadband dongle with the EEE PC

April 24th, 2008

I’ve been loaned a USB mobile broadband modem by 3 to try out for a few months. I’ll write a proper post about why I’ve got it and what I think of it later. First, I wanted to share how I got it working with my EEE PC.

What am I talking about?
The modem is a small USB dongle – not dissimilar in appearance from a USB memory stick. You put a SIM card in, and the small mobile phone radio inside gives an Internet connection to any computer that it’s plugged into.

The dongle is a Huawei E169G.

So what’s the problem?
The dongle is supported on Windows and Mac OS. Not Linux. My EEE PC still runs the original Xandros Linux.

Should it work on Linux?
Posts on the eeeuser forum suggested that it wouldn’t be possible.

Other dongles seem to have caused less trouble, but the E169 wouldn’t work.

The consensus seemed to be that:

Huawei 169 requires a patch to usb-storage driver to recognize the hardware similarly to 220… I think that ASUS is on a way to produce a small upgrade package to fix the issue for E169.

And a little Googling failed to turn up anyone who has got the Huawei E169 to work with an EEE PC on Linux.

Still… how hard could it really be, eh? 🙂

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But, I like transcoding!

April 20th, 2008

screenshot - Image Hosted by ImageShack.usMobile transcoding – services which turn a webpage into something better suited for a mobile web browser – is an often contentious topic. It’s a topic which has come up several times recently, and at best people will begrudgingly describe it as a necessary temporary evil.

Don’t get me wrong – it hasn’t been without problems. It has been used in inappropriate ways, and I know web-developers whose sites have been broken by poor (and inflicted!) uses of mobile transcoding.

But as a practical, day-to-day tool – I kinda like it.

I started using Google’s transcoder (GWT) because when you use the mobile version of Google’s RSS reader, any links you click on are transcoded by GWT for you. And I find it very useful.

It creates efficient pages which render well in Pocket Internet Explorer. Plus it stops my phone trying to download some ridiculously large webpages over GPRS (argh… curse web-developers who have 1MB webpages on the front of your sites!).

It also adds a link to any RSS feeds it finds in a page at the top – clicking on which will take you to the feed in Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice at the moment), from where you can subscribe to the feed. (Slightly roundabout, but the only way I know to subscribe to new feeds from Google Reader Mobile).

I like.

But it’s a bit of a faff getting a page transcoded by GWT if you aren’t already given a link to a transcoded page. So (in the tiny window between tonight’s screaming fits… gah – when will the baby start sleeping through the night?!) I added a new tool to my set of Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) extensions: one that will re-open the current page using Google mobile transcoder.

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Behind the firewall? In-front? Both?

April 15th, 2008

I have a blog out there in the Internet wilderness: dalelane.co.uk/blog. My use of it has varied over the year and half I’ve had it, in both style and frequency. But overall, I feel kinda comfortable with it. I don’t have to think too much about what I do with it – I just post whatever I feel like.

But I have another blog: hidden away behind the IBM firewall. It’s on BlogCentral – which if you’re not familiar with it, is the blog platform on the intranet here at IBM.

And I’ve never really worked out what to do with it. It hasn’t really found it’s voice.

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Betavine

April 9th, 2008

I heard of Vodafone Betavine last September, at mobileCampLondon. I never got round to thinking of something to write using their API, so didn’t sign up in the end.

I met up with Owen from Betavine again last weekend at Over The Air which gave him another chance to ‘sell’ it to me. 🙂

Actually, both he and another Vodafone guy, Matt, spent time going through the idea behind Betavine and the benefits that it tries to bring – and it turned out that I’d missed some of the idea behind the site.

They convinced me to give the site another try, so last night I logged back on and started adding some content to see how it all works.

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Capturing page loaded events from a Firefox extension

April 6th, 2008

One of my hacks at Over The Air was an attempt to sync browser histories between desktop and mobile. A part of this was a Firefox extension which listens for when I go to a new webpage, gets the URL from the Firefox address bar and sends it to a connected mobile.

As my first attempt at a Firefox extension, I was surprised by how easy this was. I’ve made it, so if anyone wants to learn or build on it, downloading the source may be useful. (Remembering it was thrown together in a bit of a hurry!) But I wanted to highlight a couple of quick points.

Firstly – getting started. Owen pointed me at a brilliant Firefox extension wizard. Fill in the simple form – telling it stuff like whether you want to add an options dialog and preferences, or a context menu item, or a toolbar button, and so on. And it generates you a skeleton Firefox extension ready for you to fill in with code. This probably saved me an hour or two of reading about how to create Firefox extensions!

Secondly – capturing new pages. This was done by adding a listener for DOMContentLoaded events:

var appcontent = window.document.getElementById("appcontent");
appcontent.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", 
                            myContentLoadedFunction, 
                            false);

And in my content loaded function, I got the URL like this:

var urlbar = document.getElementById('urlbar');

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Over The Air… it’s all over

April 6th, 2008

heading home from Over The Air with our BBC bean bagsHeading home from Over The Air with our BBC bean bags!

Over The Air is all over, and I’m back home again (in time for the first proper snow I’ve seen in years, but I digress… 🙂 ). Just time to jot down a few quick thoughts.

It was talks and presentations in the day, with a hackday competition in the evening.

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Mobile translation – an unfinished hack!

April 5th, 2008

Fourth of the random ideas for Over The Air hacks – a mobile service that lets you translate foreign text that you come across from your mobile phone.

The plan was to:

  • reuse some old code from last year to control my cameraphone and take a picture
  • upload the image to LeadTools, using their OCR web service to get the text back from the picture
  • translate the text into English using the Google translate API web service
  • display the English text on the phone screen

Unfortunately, too much time spent drinking beer, listening to talks, and generally slacking, meant that I didn’t finish this one.

But I thought it still might be interesting to share my experiences with the LeadTools service.

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