I came back home late on wednesday the 22nd, so I did not manage to do much work related to the Where R U project last week. I have lots to do this week, so I will post more information later.
March 27, 2006
March 7, 2006
Gone for 2 weeks
Tonight I am going to vist El Chorro in Spain to go climbing for a couple of weeks. For those of you who are interested can see a picture of me climbing a route on a wall called El Polvorin taken last year. I will be going back to that wall amongst others this year as well.
I just checked out the prices of uploading stuff via my phone from Spain, and it looks like I won't be doing a lot of that because of the prices. It would cost me about NOK 70,- pr. MB. Thats about 8.7 Euro… :(
March 6, 2006
Progress report for week 9
The last week I have been busy writing a more thorough project description for the Where R U? project in the Location Aware Systems course. The paper that I have written can be downloaded here.
February 26, 2006
Progress report for week 8
I had to figure out some issues about Python for Series 60 this week. The first thing I needed to find out was how to manage to send an MMS from the phone via Python since this was not implemented in pys60. I posted some questions on the Nokia Forum, and some guy there posted a link to a contact page where I could contact Jukka Laurila, one of the pys60 developers at Nokia. I asked about an MMS module and if there were planning to implement that. The answer I got in the mail was not very positive.
“Sorry, but an MMS module is not in the works by us in the near future.”
Jukka also answered my question on the Nokia Forum shortly after saying:
“Sorry, but we’re not planning to implement MMS messaging support in the near future. If anyone else would like to prototype something then go right ahead.”
Before this I had glanced at the C++ API for Series 60, and it did not look very easy (at least for me) to send MMS messages, and when Jukka wrote in the forum that “implementing proper MMS support seemed fairly complex”, I lost the motivation to try. When these guys that had been working on this a long time thought it looked complex, I guess it would be a waste of time for me to give it a go. Because of this I need to figure out another way of sending an MMS. I could for example send a request to a server that might be able to generate an MMS, and then send it to the user that requested information on my whereabouts.
There are several ways of posting the information needed to the server. I could for instance download a map on the phone based in information from the GPS, and then post the map to the server, so it could forward it to another phone. Another idea I had was just to fetch information from the GPS, and send an xmlrpc request to a server, and do the mapfetching from there. That would be quicker and not that much data would have to be sent from my phone. I have to talk to Gunnar Misund about this before I decide on something.
The last week I have started on a couple of small applications trying to get to know the Python for series 60 API better. The first think I wanted to check out was the Inbox module that is new in the 1.3 version of pys60. It lets you have access to the inbox of the phone. You can now do neat stuff like binding a function to the inbox that gets fired whenever a message arrives. This is very useful for the type of application I am making where users can send me a message asking where I am, and I can automagically send a reply.
I have also looked at some xmlrpc stuff from the mobile since I might do that for this project as well since I can’t send MMS messages directly from pys60.
Well, that is roughly what I have been up to in the Location Aware Systems course last week. :)
February 23, 2006
Apache and mod_python for S60
The Nokia Research Center just announced a Mobile Web Server project that has ported Apache and mod_python (using Python for S60) to the S60 platform (source)
Word from a pys60 developer
Yesterday I sent a question to one of the developers of Python for series 60 asking about an MMS module. The answer I got today was:
“Sorry, but an MMS module is not in the works by us in the near future.”
I also posted a thread about this on Nokia’s Developer Discussion Boards, and the same guy posted an answer there:
“Sorry, but we’re not planning to implement MMS messaging support in the near future. If anyone else would like to prototype something then go right ahead.”
So … anyone feel like going right ahead? :)
February 16, 2006
MMS + python for series 60
The project I am supposed to do will include sending MMS messages, and I would like to do this in python. Currently there is no MMS extension for python for series 60 available. I will have to take a look at how this is done in the C++ API, and maybe try and write a wrapper so I can send MMS using python code.
If anyone has heard of some work beeing done on an MMS extension for python for series 60, please let me know.
February 14, 2006
New Mashup
Just found another cool google maps mashup. The University of Michigan bus system uses GPS and Google Maps. Looks cool!
Wouldnt it be great if I had a GPS with me when I rode the bus, so all you out there could see which bus I was on! Oh wait…
(found this on our friend Tim’s blog)
January 26, 2006
New pages
Just put up a couple of pages here on the blog. On of the is some information about me, and the other is the preliminary project plan. The link to those pages is in the menu.
Preliminary Project Plan
Where R U?
Christer Edvartsen
Summary
Where R U is a project that will make it possible for person 1 to send an SMS to person 2, and then receive an MMS with a map containing the whereabouts of person 2.
Description
An application like Where R U can be used on several occasions. If you are to meet another person somewhere you have never been before, you might use Where R U to get the other person to send you a map of where he/she is. It might also be used in a more serious situation where a person is lost, and need to send information on where he/she is to others.
Background
Some parts of Where R U can be used in other applications related to for example search and rescue. The part that connects to the GPS and sends a request to a mapservice to receive mapdata can also be used by other applications.
Deliveries
Project report, Software for Series 60 mobile phones.
Plan
| Content | Delivery | Start | End | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hello World | Writing a standard Hello World application to learn the basics of programming on series 60 | - | 2006-01-25 | 2006-01-25 | - |
| Connecting to the GPS via bluetooth | To get GPS positions one needs to connect to a GPS device. I have chosen to do this via bluetooth. | - | - | - | - |
| Connecting to the net | The phone needs to be connected to the net to send a request and download map data. | - | - | - | - |
| Receive information from mapservice and generate image | The imformation received from the mapservice needs to be parsed and used to generate an image of a map. | - | - | - | - |
| Sending MMS | The map will be sent as an MMS to other phones. | - | - | - | - |
Device and Softwarerequirements
The application will be developed for mobiles phones using the Series 60 platform. The mobile phone that will be used for development and testing is a Nokia 6680. The phone will need to access a GPS to get information about position, and access the internet to get mapdata.
References
Books
- Learning Python, Second Edition
- Programming Python, Second Edition
Articles
Webpages
- http://www.python.org/
- http://www.forum.nokia.com/
- http://www.s60.com/
- http://www.symbian.com/
Software
- S60 SDK for Symbian OS 2nd Ed. FP2
- Python for S60 2nd Ed. SIS
- Python for S60; 1.2 for 2nd Ed. FP2 SDK
