March 12th, 2008
I’m still on paternity leave at the moment, so time near a computer is limited to 20 or 30 minute periods in the rare occasions while Faith is asleep!
But in the last few days, I’ve still been playing with a few new geeky things. One of these is FindMe – a Windows Mobile application from Electric Pocket.
The basic idea is:
- it gets the CellID of the GSM transmitter that your mobile phone is currently talking to
- if it hasn’t seen this CellID before, it displays “You are in a new place” and prompts you to type in a name for where you are
- if it has seen this CellID before, it uses the name you last entered for it
Then it uploads your name for the CellID (your description for where you are) to your Facebook profile.
Hey presto – location tracking without the need for GPS.
It works quite well.
I’ve played with location based stuff on my phone before but never tried to use GSM cell id before. I did consider it, but after failing to find a free database that could transform the cell id string into a location I could plot on a map, I didn’t really pursue it any further.
Playing with FindMe encouraged me to give it a try.
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Tags: .net, .netcf, c#, cellid, code, dotnet, facebook, findme, fire eagle, fireeagle, gps, lbs, location, ril, visual studio, windows mobile
Posted in code | 115 Comments »
March 9th, 2008
I’ve mentioned Jungle Disk in a few tweets before, but now I’ve got my first few bills from them, I thought I’d write a longer post about what they’re like.
For the uninitiated, Jungle Disk is an application that lets you use Amazon’s S3 storage as an online file store and backup service. You can set the app up to point at a directory of your hard-drive and forget about it – letting the client backup your files in the background. And you can get the client for Windows, Mac and Linux.
I started using it last December for digital photos. I had over 20 gigs of photos and video clips – photos from Uni, photos of my daughter’s first few years, photos from my wedding… and tons more.
And I wanted to put them somewhere safe.
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Tags: amazon, backup, jungle disk, s3
Posted in web | 18 Comments »
February 28th, 2008
Welcome to the world, Faith Emily Lane.
Yup, I am now well and truly out-numbered, and am doomed to live in a house of women.
Even my cat is a girl 🙂
Twitter was down today (typical!) so my twitter followers were spared minute-by-minute updates on the labour. Probably the best for all concerned, actually.
Faith is absolutely perfect. She weighed 8lbs (why is that always the first thing people tell you?), and all the tests so far have showed no problems.
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Tags: baby, family
Posted in kids, misc | 13 Comments »
February 16th, 2008
I was asked to get a C application working on Windows Mobile. Some colleagues at work have got some hobby code : a bunch of C files which they want to try out on a huge range of mobile platforms such as a slug. On Linux-based platforms, it’s apparently fairly straightforward – without too much work, gcc or some such compiler turns the code into a neat little executable.
Now the plan is to try it on a Windows Mobile device. And, probably cos I won’t shut up about Windows Mobile, they asked if I’d fancy giving the code a try on Windows Mobile.
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Tags: build, c#, code, compile, visual studio, windows mobile
Posted in code | 4 Comments »
February 15th, 2008
After last year’s blurb in Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, I’ve seen another small write-up for my Windows Mobile wiki-based note-taking program, bLADE Wiki.
This time, it’s in a German computing magazine called c’t. They’ve included the app on their cover CD, and written a short paragraph describing it.
Yay – that’s quite a nice end to the week. 🙂
Tags: bLADE Wiki, ego, magazine, wiki, windows mobile
Posted in misc | 5 Comments »
February 13th, 2008
My “ballot paper” arrived.
“I Want a Referendum” is holding a referendum in ten Labour and Lib Dem constituencies in the UK. It’s even made the news, and Eastleigh – where I live – is one of the constituencies involved.
You get two questions – which essentially boil down to “do you think there should be a referendum?” and “if there was, how would you vote?”.
And a litle “Information Booklet” that explains the two sides of the argument – the argument against the Lisbon Treaty written by “I Want a Referendum”, and an argument for it from the European Movement.
I found this booklet very interesting.
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Tags: EU, europe, lisbon treaty, referendum
Posted in politics | Comments Closed
February 12th, 2008
When I wrote the PowerShell snap-in for WebSphere MQ, I chose to implement it as a set of cmdlets.
PS C:\> $myqmgr = Get-WMQQueueManager DALE
PS C:\> Get-WMQQueue -Qmgr $myqmgr
They are new commands for WebSphere MQ – commands that let you get, create, modify new objects representing WebSphere MQ objects.
The commands are consistent with existing commands in syntax and style, to be sure. But, they’re still new commands.
I didn’t have to do it this way.
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Tags: ibm, microsoft, powershell, websphere mq
Posted in code, ibm | 2 Comments »
February 11th, 2008
I wrote last week about an evening I spent throwing together a password manager for Windows and Windows Mobile. As I wrote at the time, one of the motivations was to try writing some encryption code.
I’ve finally got around to writing it, and wanted to post it here with a few comments.
This is what I needed code to be able to do:
- Encrypt and decrypt data based on a user-provided password
- Encrypt/decrypt consistently on both Windows desktops and Windows Mobile devices – a file encrypted on a Windows Mobile PDA should be able to be decrypted on a Windows desktop, and vice versa
The System.Security.Cryptography library in .NET makes this fairly straightforward – the class I have written to add crypto support to the password manager app needed only a few hundred lines of code in total.
I’ve shared a simplified version of the source at the end of this post.
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Tags: .net, .netcf, c#, code, crypto, cryptography, csharp, dotnet, opennetcf, password, security, visual studio, windows mobile
Posted in code | 3 Comments »