Not just mobile phones

Wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

These days mobile phone is not just a mobile phone. It is a phone, camera and mp3 player, whatever it is, you can't miss its basic function as a phone, which you can call and talk to others.

My friend get a smart phone, is a HP PDA phone, can be used as a phone, store a lot of SMS, plan daily schedule, play game, surf internet, and it came with a lot of software utilities like calculator.

After my friend has used it for some time, it can do everything except one thing, to received call. It was ok when my friend first bought it, after use for about a year, the smart phone is not so smart anymore. My friend get a lot of miss call, the caller ask my friend why didn't pick up those calls, actually the phone never ring for incoming calls.

It happen to many smart phone users that I know. They always have problems with receiving call or sending SMS. I think when they try to fit in too many functions into a phone, the software becomes buggy. Remember a phone is still a phone, no matter what, you still have to make the basic function working.


Sony Ericsson Cybershot

I match this concept with a business, you can diversified your business, but you can't forget your core business. Google core business is search, something google is very good at it. Google's revenue came from online advertisement, which tie to their search and keywords.

Yahoo start as a search engine and moving to portal. Yahoo slowly losing the war to Google (refer, Google passes yahoo...), but you can't blame Yahoo, no one knows search can be so precise and so important, until Google prove it.

Not all diversified business fail, Apple is selling iPod mp3 player now and making a lot of money.

Yahoo Taiwan to acquire wretch website

天大的消息啊！雅虎奇摩收購無名小站。


無名小站班底

雅虎最喜歡併購了，怎麼會放過無名小站呢？別以為這個無名小站，只是無名，或是小站，在台灣可是大有名氣。有美少女的地方總是可吸引人氣。

雅虎沒有宣佈收購金額，據說有兩千萬美金。

Yahoo!奇摩並購無名小站
新聞評析─雅虎買無名小站
交大簡志宇 締造「無名」傳奇
無名小站不放手 將成下個蕃薯藤?
forbes.com

Microemulator on Solaris 2.6

Microemulator is an open source j2me emulator, I find it nice and easy to use. It support applet, so you can access your midp application through web browser.

I have some problem running microemulator from Solaris 2.6, finally I found out why and solve the problem.


Microemulator run on Solaris

The binary that I downloaded from the internet was compile as java 1.4 binary, but I get this error when I run java 1.4 on Solaris 2.6:

libjvm.so: symbol getloadavg: referenced symbol not found

This error will happen to java 5 as well. I am not sure the problem can be solved by patching the Solaris 2.6, but I am using the java 1.3.

What I need is to do is re-compile microemulator with java 1.3, I download from sourceforge (version 1.0), change the build.xml file to generate 1.3 code (just change 1.4 to 1.3 will do).

I change AppRecordStoreManager.java
$ vi AppRecordStoreManager.java
(at line 166)
FileOutputStream(recordStoreFile, false) to
FileOutputStream(recordStoreFile)

In 1.3 there is not such constructor, so this is yet another quick and dirty hack.

$ cd microemulator
$ ant

This will create me-app.jar in target directory

$ java -jar mee-app.jar HelloWorld.jad

This will launch your j2me midp program in microemulator, is just easy.

j2me pre-verifier on os x

Development is not that difficult as you think.

I have work on j2me development back in year 2000, j2me is very new at that time. There is no such things as MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile), there is no available phone which support java. We use an j2me GUI call spotlet, running on a Palm device.

After that I have lost track with j2me development for a few years time, I almost forgotten how to develop a j2me application. I have tried to pick up some mobile development skills at the beginning of this year but the progress is very slow.

Recently I was inspired by Gmail java client, I think may be I should refresh my j2me development skills. A few years back I develop j2me program on Linux platform and this time I want to try it on Mac OS X, but I encounter some problems with the development tools.

A j2me program is just like your normal java program, it can be compiled by a normal (J2SE) java compiler. You need an extra step to create a j2me program, pre-verify the java class object, using the j2me pre-verify tools.

When a java program loaded, it must be verify (for security, valid classes etc.), but the verify process need a lot of resources (cpu power, memory), is difficult to implement on a mobile device. A j2me program need to be pre-verify before it was loaded into a j2me virtual machine, this can be done by a pre-verify tool.

SUN java wireless toolkit came with a pre-verifier, the toolkit is available on Windows, Linux and Solaris platform. Michael Powers have ported the toolkit on Mac OS X, if you are interested to know how to do it, refer to Do-It-Yourself MIDP on Mac OS X. The pre-verifier on OS X, need a X Window library to run. The X11 on OS X is a 43MB download, after installed is about 100MB, which I don't think is necessary.

I download j2me source, and compile it myself. The source is available at Sun website, you need a login account and registration is free, it was license under Sun Community Source License (I expect it will be release soon as GPL?).

The binary is about 160k in size, and it doesn't need a X11 to execute. This is a quick and dirty hack for my own use, it work for me, but not sure it will work for all time.

I am looking for some place to upload this file.

Web stickies

What ever I can think of, is already there.

After I change my view on web zip utility, I ask myself, what else can do for similiar web application. It quickly came into my mind, the stickies utility.

I never use stickies utility, not until recently. I found it useful to write some temporary notes on my PC desktop, so is easy for me to relate it to a web application. I can even create a browser addons for it, that's what I think.

Some how I have a feeling that such an application already exist, so I search through the internet and found MyStickies and its firefox addons.


MyStickies, web stickies application

You need 2 things for a start:-

1. MyStickies account, is free.
2. plugins for your browser, currently only plugins for Firefox is available.

Once you have register with an account and installed the plugins, use the following method to add new stickies:-

1. ALT + left click, or ALT + left click and mouse drag
2. click "New Sticky" on the toolbar
3. right click (context menu), My Stickies, and New Sticky.

I have tried the plugins (version 0.1.14 and 0.1.15), is not working, I think is still buggy. If you are in mystickies site, it is working.