Latest entries from vehera.symbiandevelopersjournal.com

Mobile web reaches tipping point

Jim Liddle — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:19:00 GMT

According to Forrester research wider handset availability, improved network coverage and new pricing models are going to foster rapid adoption of mobile internet services in Europe.

By 2013 they predict that the number of people using the Internet via mobile phone will be 125 million - three times today's figure. Some countries, such as the UK, will adopt even faster.

Improved handset devices, such as the Iphone 2.0, improved networks, such as 3.5G, better network coverage, and flat data tariffs are expected to drive the adoption rate. The report predicts that the mobile web has finally reached a tipping point in terms of its widespread use.

Location based Services Market for Mobile is huge !

Jim Liddle — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:24:00 GMT

A recent forecast issued by market analysis firm ABI Research suggests the potential for mobile location-based services is huge, anticipating annual global revenues of $13.3 billion by 2013 ! The Iphone has probably done a lot to bring the idea of Location based services forward, particularly the Google Maps integration - if you haven't seen this yet check out this video.

So, all you developers out there get your killer ideas of the ground now !

Iphone restore not working ?

Jim Liddle — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 10:25:00 GMT

If your Iphone won't restore and you get the error "Unable to restore Iphone Unknown error (6)" update to the latest version of ITunes. and try again. If this does not work then the likely cause is that one or more of the .ipsw files located in your user folder/Library/iTunes/iPhoneSoftwareUpdates is damaged. Delete the files and try the restore again - you should find that new copies of the files will download and the process should start again and works as expected.

Iphone breaks the top ten

Jim Liddle — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:58:00 GMT

In Q4 2007 Apple became the 10th largest phone manufacturer. According to Gartner Apple holds a 0.6% share of the market compared to RIM in 6th place that has a 1.2% share. Nokia continues to dominate with a 40.4% share of the market.

Silverlight to be launched on mobile phones

Jim Liddle — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:24:00 GMT

Microsoft has struck a deal with Nokia to bring a version of Silverlight to the Nokia Series 60 mobile phones. The software is also feted to run on Nokia's Tablet devices. Silverlight is a rich media technology that competes with Flash and Shockwave. Microsoft is already producing a version of Silverlight for its own Mobile platform later this year. Microsoft is obviously aiming to play catch up quickly to the lead that Flash, as a technology, has on Silverlight. Microsoft already has a Windows and Mac version and on the cusp of creating a linux version with Novell.

Microsoft buys Danger Inc

Jim Liddle — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:17:00 GMT

Danger Inc has been purchased by Microsoft for an undisclosed price. Danger produce the Sidekick which is popular in the US and growing in popularity in the UK. Microsoft seems to have made a strategic purchase to ensure that it can compete with the growing Apple Iphone and Android OS. And what of the Danger founders ? well Andy Rubin has an interesting new position - he has new job at Google running their mobile division....watch this space !

Google announce Gears for Mobile Devices

Jim Liddle — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:53:00 GMT

Google Gears is now available for Windows Mobile devices. Of course the Gears paradigm fits well with mobile devices as they can be disconnected quite often and local storage then becomes a necessity. Zoho are on of the showcase sites using it, and although the features for the mobile edition are still limited, this looks to be compelling as a model for developing mobile apps.

Thinlet and Amazon Explorer Mobile application source released

Jim Liddle — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:30:00 GMT

I've finally got around to releasing the source for the J2ME MIDP Amazon Explorer. You can get it at the ThinletMobile website. If you use the source for any nice Thinlet mobile apps then drop me an email and I'll feature them.

Predictive Text lands Apple in Court

Jim Liddle — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Apple is among 23 companies that are being sued by Autotext technologies for the unlawful deployment of predictive text technology. The suit was file in an Ohio court asserting that the named companies infringed a "computer based transcript" patent it files in 1994.

Apple's co-defendants include companies such as HP, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, RIM as well as IBM and AT&T.

E90 & Isync on the Mac

Jim Liddle — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:34:00 GMT

I've been using the brand new E90 recently and it is a really great device if you want access to what is essentially a lightweight laptop type device that is also a phone.

One of the big issues I had with the device was getting it to sync with my Mac. Now Nokia does provide an Isync add on specifically for the E90 (which is not present by default on Mac OS X). I could not initially get this to work and figured it was probably a problem with the add-on and so purchased an add-on from NovaMedia. This did not work either ! The issue I was getting was that I was getting a message telling me synchronisation could not take place.

By a process of elimination I figured out that the issue was with contacts rather than the Calendar as unchecking contacts allowed Calendar data to sync. After various efforts to get contacts sync'd I finally managed it - here is how.

1. Firstly install your plug-in of choice (the free Nokia plug-in above works fine) and pair the phone

2. Isync will pick up the phone by default and install the new plug-in. At this point your phone may sync fine - I know others have managed to get this working straight away.

3. If you have a problem - reset Isync data log through preferences and then reset the device - this was the only thing that worked for me when trying to get the phone to sync.

Phantom Jams to become a thing of the Past

Jim Liddle — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:10:00 GMT

Phantom Jams on SatNav systems look set to become a thing of the past with a new service that combines SatNav and Mobile Phone technology. In essence the new service allows drivers to view real-time images of traffic hotspots and will direct them towards alternative routes.

The new service was shown last week by Dutch Satnav heavyweight TomTom and looks set to be made available in Britain early next year.

How does it work? Well like all clever idea it is actually pretty simple. It relies on the signals from mobile phones to assess where the phone is and how fast it is moving. Crunching this data allows for the most accurate picture yet of what is happening on the roads. Vodafone are the mobile partner with TomTom for this service.

Any information picked up in this way is relayed to the SatNav device located in the vehicle and in analysing movement patterns in this way is able to determine which cars are moving freely and therefore where traffic hotspots are in realtime, which can be shown directly on the SatNav device.

Although many existing SatNav systems purports to offer traffic statistics, including TomTom themselves , the data is not real-time and is often out of date.

Google all out to get into the Mobile Space

Jim Liddle — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:09:00 GMT

As well as announcing Google Android (see the video clip here ), there are rumours of Google looking to gobble up sprint. Perhaps the 'Google Gobble' will make it as one of those phrases that transcends the actual original use. From now on to acquire something can simply be phrased as the 'Google Gobble'. Gobble-de-gook ! Probably....hey ho, its been a long day

Thoughts on HPC, Grid and DataGrid

Jim Liddle — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:52:00 GMT

I work for a company called GigaSpaces , a company that specialises in providing software to enable the building of highly transactional, low-latency applications that need to be able scale-out and shrink back on demand.

Analysts tend to put GigaSpaces in a few different technology categories, namely Grid, DataGrid, Grid enabled Application Servers, or XTP (Extreme Transaction Processing). If you want a good concise overview of the current version of GigaSpaces XTP product, and what it can do I would suggest you check out the article by InfoQ and also the interview with Geva Perry , GigaSpaces chief marketing officer, at FishTrain.

There are some good screencasts which show how to download and setup the basic examples here and here . You can also choose to use GigaSpaces on Amazon EC2 - more about that here .

There have been a few times now where i've been with prospects who have no interest in the terminology other than its use for them in building a highly scalable application. To that end I've found myself explaining to them the differences / similarities between the various technology place holders, like Grid, DataGrid et al, that get bandied about.

I've done it often enough to think that it is worthwhile jotting this down here. There are my own thoughts and no way represent the opinions of GigaSpaces.

HPC is an acronym for ‘High Performance Computing’. This may seem to be stating the obvious, but HPC is starting to gather pace as an acronym for’ High Productivity Computing’ which brings together HPC, Grid, DataGrid, and virtualisation (of Middleware, storage and OS), so it worth knowing the difference.

High Performance Computing refers to computing systems and environments that typically use large numbers of processors, either as part of a single machine, or multiple computers that are organised in a cluster that operate as a single computing resource.

High-performance networking interconnects are used for Cluster based HPC systems. InfiniBand or Myrinet are an example of such interconnects. The network topology for such systems tends to be either a simple bus topology or (for extreme HPC requirements) a mesh topology. Mesh topologies tend to provide lower latency between each of the hosts. Networking performance and Transfer rates are therefore improved.

HPC business uses include data warehouses, line-of-business (LOB) applications and HPC provides the infrastructure for heavy transaction processing systems.

Grid computing, from a technology perspective, is still relatively new, hence why skillsets in this area are still valued at a premium.

Whereas with HPC you deploy a solution with a fixed number of nodes on dedicated hardware, Grid computing brings the flexibility of using standard non-hetregeneous hardware and standard operating systems, in which nodes can be added on demand. A standard software layers is applied across this infrastructure to achieve this. Key to the whole Grid proposition is that dedicated computing resources are not necessary, which leads to many Grids being built by reusing existing hardware to produce a powerful unified computing resource.

No special networking components are needed for Grid, and Grid computing is not limited to the local LAN. It is not unusual for MAN’s and WAN boundaries to be crossed when building a Grid resource.

A Grid can be thought of as a general computing resource in which different nodes of the Grid work, in parallel , on computational tasks that have been broken down by the Grid management software and farmed out using the Grid scheduler. Unlike traditional HPC solutions each node can be working on different computational algorithms and tasks which, after being farmed out, are brought back together to calculate the final result.

A good example of this in practice is in Investment bank where Grids are used to run Monte Carlo simulations to calculate risk With the adoption of Grid these type of calculations can now be run in near real-time allowing the banks to calculate risk positions on the fly which ultimately leads to shorter time to market, greater volumes and therefore increased revenue.

Perhaps an easier example to illustrate this is SETI , the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The SETI at home project searches for transmissions from ‘other’ civilizations by analyzing transmissions of cosmic origins to find patterns of communication. Clearly this is a vast undertaking and would require an infinite amount of compute resource. Cleverly the SETI project taps into the idle resources of millions of personal computers around the world, for the analysis of raw SETI data. This is done on by farming out work to home user PC’s that have installed a SETI screen saver. They analyze a chunk of work when idle and send the data result back, functioning very much like a vast on demand geographically disbursed Grid. Albeit one that has no latency constraints or end goal in sight !

DataGrid is a term bourne of out of the use of Grid technologies. In many ways it is a specialized used of Grid for certain types of applications that traditionally were not thought about when looking at applications to run on the Grid.

Grids are good for computationally intensive type of applications with fixed sizes of data to work on. These data elements form the input to the computation tasks and tend to be small. However Grids have been so successful in reducing TCO and ROA that it makes perfect sense to see what other type of applications they could be used for. Other application use cases tend to bring two types of issues that traditional Grid does not cope with well. The first is that of latency when interacting with data, the second is that of data affinity.

Firstly lets categorise the types of applications that bring these issues to the Grid as being ‘stateful’ applications and those that are traditionally deployed on the Grid as being ‘stateless’. Stateful applications bring additional challenges that compute Grid were not designed to cope with, namely:

- Data Contention: When fetching data for Grid nodes and when saving data.
- Data Affinity: Ensuring the correct pieces of data are delivered to the correct node on the Grid so that a task has the data it requires to execute
- Latency: When dealing with stateful applications on the Grid we hit Amdahl’s law , which essentially presents a theoretical upper limit on how performance can be increased when having to save state.

You can think of Enterprise DataGrid as a specialized type of Grid that can deal with stateful as well as stateless applications that are deployed onto it.

Data caching or distributed data caching is often used interchangeably with Enterprise Data Grid (EDG). Whereas the two have similarities to my mind they are different. They have similarities because vendors market products that seem to do the same thing i.e. providing an in-memory distributed data cache. However an EDG has to plug seamlessly into a Grid, be able to provide data affinity, be able to be used by the Grid Scheduler, be able to handle multi-tenancy, be able to be managed by the Grid management tools. There are facets that are the same but facets that mark out an EDG as something more than just a distributed cache.

How does this apply to the mobile world ? Well, this type of technology is often the backbone to the services that are provided by Telco's. A good example and description of this can be found in this post by Julian Browne. The Technology also underpins the delivery of mobile services in other industries outside of just finance and Telco. A good example of this can be found in this case study .

Finally got my hands on an Iphone

Jim Liddle — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:32:00 GMT

Now that the IPhone has launched in the UK on O2, I finally got hold of one so expect a full report soon ! First impressions are that this is a pretty amazing device.....truly a next generation step in mobile communications,

Big Brother in the US

Jim Liddle — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:27:00 GMT

Further to my prior post on Big Brother and communications in the UK post, I had an email from Jon from Ohio telling me about similar privacy issues in the US.

A ruling by the District Court of Massachussets stated that although law enforcement agencies need a warrant to obtain subscriber information (which identifies the actual mobile infrastructure cells and can be used to track individuals) they only have to prove that "relevance" to an ongoing investigation to get historical data.

As you can imagine the reality of this meant that almost anyone's phone records could be accessed on the flimsiest of association.According to Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the decisions was "deeply screwy" - could not have put it better myself ;)

Ultimately its another sign that governments believe that to account for the exception and abberation of individuals who commit crime the privacy of the majority must be cut.

The ways in which this can be used is already starting to be seen. Take the case of John Halpin, a carpenter supervisor in the US who was fired by the New York Department of Education. What for ? Submitting false time sheets ! How did they know ? THe NYED was able to track his movements having sequestered his mobile phone records and prove that he skipped off work early on several occasions. Scary....no more skipping of early for a pint with your mates anymore...at least not with your mobile..which will probably result in all of you sitting in different places in the same pub without anyone knowing the other is there......how did we survive without the mobile......

Mobile Security

Jim Liddle — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:25:00 GMT

Face it, we no longer have downtime - on a train, in a coffee shop, on an airplane everyone is frantically responding to calls and emails from their crackberry's, Palm's or Iphone's. Companies embrace the mobile device figuring they are getting greater productivity from their workforce. However it seems the Mobile is the Achilles heel as far as security for the organisation goes.

A Recent study on enterprise mobility by MFormation ound that almost 90% of (200 polled) organisations had no process for the tracking of data stored on mobile devices. As well as this 40% were unable to match mobile devices to the correct employee who used it.

Not surprisingly 78% are concerned about mobile data security with 55% believing that data loss through mobile will be a "significant issue".

How to bulk delete data on Palm Treo

Jim Liddle — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:04:00 GMT

Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, you want to remove all your data from a Treo i.e. Calendar data, Contacts, SMS etc. Here is how to do it:

Calendar:

Go to the Calendar application and from the Menu and choose purge from the Record Menu. You can then choose to delete everything on the phone that is older than 1 week. Note that this does not delete birthday events.

Contacts:

Using an application like Filez or Resco Explorer locate the following files in RAM and delete them:

- AddressDB

- ContactsDB-PAdd

SMS:

Locate MessagingDB in RAM and delete it. This will delete all SMS messages.

UK Government, Big Brother and Communications

Jim Liddle — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:08:00 GMT

This may have completely passed you by, I know it did me, but from October 1st an act came into place that compels phone companies to retain information about their use base, no matter how private, This means information about all landline and mobile calls which have to made available to, get this, some 795 public bodies and quangos.

This has been done at the personal decree of Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, and allows all of these organisations to delve into personal communications information as and when they want.

So who are these organisations that so desperately need to have access to this information ? Well let me tell you - 475 local councils, and a host of other organisations, including the Food Standards Agency, the Department of Health, the Immigration Service, the Gaming Board and the Charity Commission......

This access have been dressed up as being needed as "a vital tool against terrorism". Now I am all for things that stop terrorism, but it strikes me that anytime the UK government wants to push something through it plays the 'its needed to combat terrorism' card. Its nothing short of disgraceful. It's nothing more than a free for all of state snooping on the very citizens that the government is supposed to represent and is a serious erosion of civil liberties and personal freedom that, now that it has gone, we will never get back.

Once you start digging into this, it stinks to high heaven. The new measures were implemented after the Home Secretary signed a 'statutory instrument' on July 26. The process allows the Government to alter laws without a full act of Parliament. Can you believe this !! What separates a supposedly free democratic country like the UK from dictatorial third world or eastern block countries is the democratic process. As soon as a government starts to think that we the people are not smart enough to understand the decisions being made then believe me, it becomes a rocky road to oblivion.

So what is this information that will be available ? The records to be kept will detail exactly what calls are made, their time and duration, and the name and address of the registered user of the phone.

The information provided will also reveal where people are when they made mobile phone calls. The information can even be used to track someone's route if i.e. if the call was made from a moving car. Information will also be kept on the sending and receipt of text messages, possibly including content. Even scarier, by 2009 the Government plans to extend the rules to cover internet use i.e. ISP's will have to provide the websites we have visited, the people we have emailed and phone calls made over the net.

I really fear for what the UK will become in 10 to 15 years. The best thing we can do is to tell this government what we think and kick them out . Let them know that we, the people they represent, will not tolerate this infringement of our personal freedoms. Use this site to find out who your local MP is and complain to them.

Creating shortcuts to Midlets on Windows Mobile

Jim Liddle — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:18:00 GMT

For frequently run Midlets on Windows Mobile Devices it would be nice to be able to run this from an icon within the Start Menu rather than having to launch the JVM and then having to look for the application you want to run itself. This also has the benefit of of the App icon popping up in the last run apps' application bar (if you utilise this view).

This can be done, but you have to get your hands a little dirty. Firstly, these instructions are for Windows Mobile devices that use Jeodek as the Midlet Manager. You can find this out by launching the Midlet Manager and choosing 'About' from the menu.

Once you have established you are using Jeodek then you should navigate to the windows\appdb folder using something like Resco Explorer . Once there you will so all the midlet jar files you have installed. The will be labelled similar to s1_.jar etc. The number refers to the order the Midlet is listed in the Midlet manager.

Only the letter "s", and the number is needed for your shortcut link. Also, only the first part of the file name of the midlet is needed. Lets take an example. If , in the appdb folder, there is a "s16_suite.jar", thenyour shortcut would be "\windows\jeodek.exe" -run s16_), i.e. NOT ("\windows\jeodek.exe" -run s16_suite.jar).

You can use Resco Explorer or some other shortcut utility to make the shortcuts on the phone, or you can create the shortcut in any text editor and save with an extension of ".lnk". Next you'll need to ensure that your shortcut is in the windows\start menu directory. That's it - do this for all Midlets that you want to directly launch.

Hotspot or HoneyTrap ?

Jim Liddle — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:18:00 GMT

With more and more phones incorporating Wi Fi it stands to reason that more and more people are looking to access Wi Fi hotspots as and where they can. As ever ease of use goes hand in hand with ease of fraud.....

It is very easy for someone to set up a honeytrap to try and spy and steal confidential information. For example, lets imagine you are in the city and are in a coffee shop called ' Acme'and you turn the Wi Fi on your phone or laptop and see an open hotspot called "AcmeCoffee" - stand to reason you can connect for free and surf away right? Well not always....

It would be very easy for someone to have a nearby laptop or PC that is in access point mode and has the name "AcmeCoffee". This means when you connect they can view everything you send or receive even if it is encrypted...they could also choose to manipulate the sites you see to allow them to store malicious Trojans or Spyware on your device.

So what to do ? In an ideal world you should only connect to Hot Spots using software provided by the Hot Spot provider - very few at this point do so this is not very practical either right now - with identity theft becoming prevalent every day it pays to know the dangers and be careful....

Who needs an IPhone ? IPhone style functionality for Windows Mobile

Jim Liddle — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:06:00 GMT

Without a doubt the IPhone is an amazing device and there are some great innovations in it. If you have not seen a video overview of the device check out this video and also check out how it compares side by side to Windows Mobile in a video here .

However, as I suspected some of these innovations are being taken by developers who are trying to implement them for other devices. If you took a device like the HTC touch and added in a few choice piece of software you have a more than passable imitation. Two new applications from developer Quentin Pouplard both of which can be found here , give IPhone like contact and Keyboard capability. You can watch a video of the functionality here .

Nokia Picks Enpocket for Mobile Advertising

Jim Liddle — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:06:00 GMT

Market-leading phone maker Nokia on Sept. 17 moved to bolster its mobile advertising front by agreeing to acquire Enpocket for an undisclosed sum.

Boston-based Enpocket makes a mobile advertising campaign management and delivery system that uses analytics technologies to draw a bead on consumer interests and deliver mobile advertising via SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and video.

Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, said in a statement that it plans to leverage Enpocket's mobile ad platform along with its partnerships with advertisers, publishers and operators, including Vodafone, Telefonica and Pepsi.

The multi-billion-dollar potential of putting ads in front of consumers via their smartphones and other Web-enabled gadgets has made locking down mobile ad technologies a key focus for phone makers, content providers and search specialists.Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all enable mobile search to help consumers find what they need on mobile gadgets, and The Kelsey Group said in a recent report that the mobile search ad market will blossom over the next five years, topping more than $1.4 billion in 2012.

Nokia Picks Enpocket for Mobile Advertising

It looks like the last bastion of ad-free technology use is about to fall...I already get my fare share of SMS spam, pretty soon I'll be getting ads delivered when I switch my phone on and no doubt at the end of the call. You can just imagine dialing direct enquiries and then at the end of the call being delivered an advert for 'cheaper' alternative directory enquiries services. How long beore calls are parsed on the smartphone to track calling patterns to deliver targeted ads ? Welcome to '1984' .......

Python for Flashlite

Jim Liddle — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:05:00 GMT

Flyer was built to extend Flashlite features with Python for S60.

Flyer is based on the Flash Lite 2.1 integration with Python for S60 and contains the following features:

- Take photos with device camera from Flash Lite
- Take device screenshots from Flash Lite
- Send files over a bluetooth connection from Flash Lite
- Get the contact entries in the default device database
- Text To Speech
- Sound recording and playback

Interesting mix of technologies and well worth checking out .

Using Bluetooth Headphones with your Smartphone

Jim Liddle — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:24:00 GMT

A great piece of freeware by Teksoft lets you instantly switch the audio between the speaker and A2DP Stereo Headsets. They also offer another free plug-in on the same page that lets you turn the speakerphone on easily.

Fixing the "Storage Memory is critically low" message on Windows Mobile

Jim Liddle — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:13:00 GMT

If you have used Windows Mobile for a little while then you are bound to have seen the "Storage memory is critically low" message. But what can you do to ensure your Phone is in tip top condition and to ensure that you have enough memory? Well....you could:

1. Remove any applications you installed to the mobile and re-install them to a storage card

2. Remove any temporary files from Pocket IE (Tools>Options>Memory)

3. Check files within \My Documents, move any files you find to your storage card.

4. Remove any files within the \Temp directory

5. For completeness, check the \Windows\Profiles directory for temp internet files that have not been removed - clearing the cache does not always work in PIE.

6. Delete any texts / emails from your Inbox and empty deleted items.

If you have a PPC based phone you could do worse than to invest in MemMaid . If you have a Smartphone based device MemMaid does not work so try Oxios Memory for Smartphone (freeware)