Found myself working on a webservice yesterday. As you can imagine my Frusto meter was pretty high yesterday :-).. got it working by the end of the day (thanks to some peer programming) but it got me thinking about how little I know about the server technologies :-(. Sure, making edits is fine but when you have to start from scratch !!!. Its a humbling experience.
Found some cool tutorial sites
for ASP.NET 1.1: Go here (godotnet.com)
for ASP.NET 2.0: Go here (ASP.net)
There are plenty of other sites that come up in a google search but to me these sites were the most helpful. Hopefully my next forray into server side coding will be better ;-).
I like to build stuff that is useful and solves problems. This blog contains things that I find interesting enough to write about.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Sunday, February 12, 2006
TastePhone : An awesome resource
OK.. so now i have my J2ME application ready and working on the couple of test devices. Whats Next ?
The deployment stage of any J2ME Midlet can be a nightmarish experience specially if your MIDlet has functionality that requires it to use specific API's. So how would a developer go about ascertaining the list of devices that most likely will support his/her application. Well, the easiest thing to do is to buy all the devices out there and test the MIDlet suite on all of them. Unfortunately, this is not a very practical solution.
The site maintained by Sun is decent but usually not of much help.
Device manufacturers and even carriers have developer portals that do publish the specs of devices BUT, almost in all the cases you end up not finding the detailed information you are looking for. For e.g. The specs say that a device supports MMAPI 1.0 but it usually does not mention if the device the supports the complete implementation or just the audio subset.
Among Manufacturer's dev portals, Nokia's Forum Nokia site is my personal favorite, Motorola's Motocoder site also has improved leaps and bounds in the past 6 months. I will not even talk about Sony Ericsson's specs on their own devices.
Carriers too publish the specs of some of the phones they support but most of the times they link you back to the manufacturer's site. CDMA carriers are better to work with atleast here in US cause they do have and provide the most detailed info on devices when they want to :-).
There are a bunch of third party efforts that do offer comprehensive info and benchmarks on devices but most of them are charged services.
Personally, I love the TastePhone site, its free and gives me the info that I most look for in my apps. If you are J2ME developer then its a MUST visit site for you and while your there try adding your device to the ever growing list ;-)
TastePhone, the MIDP phone benchmark midlet
The deployment stage of any J2ME Midlet can be a nightmarish experience specially if your MIDlet has functionality that requires it to use specific API's. So how would a developer go about ascertaining the list of devices that most likely will support his/her application. Well, the easiest thing to do is to buy all the devices out there and test the MIDlet suite on all of them. Unfortunately, this is not a very practical solution.
The site maintained by Sun is decent but usually not of much help.
Device manufacturers and even carriers have developer portals that do publish the specs of devices BUT, almost in all the cases you end up not finding the detailed information you are looking for. For e.g. The specs say that a device supports MMAPI 1.0 but it usually does not mention if the device the supports the complete implementation or just the audio subset.
Among Manufacturer's dev portals, Nokia's Forum Nokia site is my personal favorite, Motorola's Motocoder site also has improved leaps and bounds in the past 6 months. I will not even talk about Sony Ericsson's specs on their own devices.
Carriers too publish the specs of some of the phones they support but most of the times they link you back to the manufacturer's site. CDMA carriers are better to work with atleast here in US cause they do have and provide the most detailed info on devices when they want to :-).
There are a bunch of third party efforts that do offer comprehensive info and benchmarks on devices but most of them are charged services.
Personally, I love the TastePhone site, its free and gives me the info that I most look for in my apps. If you are J2ME developer then its a MUST visit site for you and while your there try adding your device to the ever growing list ;-)
TastePhone, the MIDP phone benchmark midlet
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
ScanR (Beta): This stuff really works
"Scan documents or whiteboards, anywhere, anytime, using only your camera phone. "
This is a neat idea and really simple to use. I must say I am amazed with the result. I have seen similar stuff being done before. In asia (read japan), some phones come pre loaded with this feature but again these are phones that are years ahead of the devices available here in the states.
The only issue with this type of service is that the user has to be smart enough to get a good shot of the material to be scanned. I tried the service out with document and white board snapshots and got excellent results for whiteboards and documents (A4 size) with limited data. Haven't actually got a good shot of a complete A4 size page whose PDF came out with readable characters.
The image processing logic running behind seems pretty good and fast. I get the PDF in my email within 2 minutes of actually sending the MMS out. The adaptive thresholding that they are running on the images is pretty robust and does take care of shadows and residual noise pretty well.
I have a demo account with the service and I get the PDF document sent to my email address (entered during registration). I would really like to have the feature of sending a PDF to some one else's email directly from my cell phone without having to open my email and forward the email to a bunch of people. To do something like this, they might need to come up with a client application which leads to a lot of complexity(1: User has to install the app 2: get megapixel shots on devices using camera API).
More Information : ScanR
Original Post at : alarm:clock
This is a neat idea and really simple to use. I must say I am amazed with the result. I have seen similar stuff being done before. In asia (read japan), some phones come pre loaded with this feature but again these are phones that are years ahead of the devices available here in the states.
The only issue with this type of service is that the user has to be smart enough to get a good shot of the material to be scanned. I tried the service out with document and white board snapshots and got excellent results for whiteboards and documents (A4 size) with limited data. Haven't actually got a good shot of a complete A4 size page whose PDF came out with readable characters.
The image processing logic running behind seems pretty good and fast. I get the PDF in my email within 2 minutes of actually sending the MMS out. The adaptive thresholding that they are running on the images is pretty robust and does take care of shadows and residual noise pretty well.
I have a demo account with the service and I get the PDF document sent to my email address (entered during registration). I would really like to have the feature of sending a PDF to some one else's email directly from my cell phone without having to open my email and forward the email to a bunch of people. To do something like this, they might need to come up with a client application which leads to a lot of complexity(1: User has to install the app 2: get megapixel shots on devices using camera API).
More Information : ScanR
Original Post at : alarm:clock
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Friday, December 02, 2005
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