Waves

Yippeee!! a huge relief atlast, as I completed the last exam 5 minutes before and even checked the answers ;). That was something that happened only for a handful of exams like programming, compilers etc. There is a lot of mixed feelings as I have to prepare myself to face the big bad world out there. Don’t no what is in store for the future…

So, what did I do after the exams? Went for the “Pink Panther” movie. Not bad I must say, because it was full of this vadivelu-vivek type of comedy. And later that night, got a nice small treat from this guy. He is leaving to Bangalore to join the company where we got placed. All the best to him. Hoping to join him soon 🙂

I don’t know where I will be posted. I may or may not leave my darling city where I have been for the past 21 years and watched all its development. And I don’t want to leave this city because IT is happening. Rapid developments are the order of the day as the IT/ITES companies grab every square inch of available space.

Ok… got to go now.. See you soon!

The last and the 8th lap begins tomorrow. Feverish preparations for the exams are going on, though there are only 2 subjects. Hoping to finish them off well. Thank God, i escaped unhurt in the last 7 encounters with the highly infamous Anna University exams 😀

All the best to my classmates and friends who are taking the semester exams!

Yippppppeeeeeeee!!! finally, my K300i synchronises with the PC and I even deployed this silly application on the beauty 😀

Will be back soon with the exact details of how it is done. Thank You!!

Hi!! just back from the purchase of a brand new Sony Ericsson K300i phone… It comes with a lot of cool features and hey, the GUI is awesome!! 😀 That is one thing that I just love about Sony Ericsson models 😀

It has GPRS, USB, Java MIDP 2.0 support (the 3 features which I want most), 12 MB shared memory, 500 x 8 phone book entries and other bells and whistles such as a music player, camera, video capture, sound recording, IR, MMS, blah blah blah. First thought of buying Nokia 3120; but on comparing the features of 3120 with K300i, the latter offered better features with just a 1000 bucks extra. If I had about 3000 more, my choice would have been K750i. Anyway, absolutely no regrets with this piece and only downside is, it doesn’t support bluetooth.

Now I can try all my ultra-silly and crappy Java ME applications that I build just for fun :D. Even though Chennai’s been sweltering under the heat, things seem to be very cool for me…nice!!!

See you soon…bye!

A very good morning guys and gals… I was woken up by my mom today morning with the best piece of news I have heard so far :D. My name and Moyeen‘s have come on The Hindu on page 4 of Metro Plus titled “Where geeks get together“. The article was on BarCampChennai and related to it, our presentation of the final year project – mSync.

Read the online version of the article here 😀

Yes, I will soon write another post on how the 4 months this year, starting from 3rd Jan 2006 until today have been the finest and sweetest moments of life…

See you soon! Bye… 🙂

Hello guys! Came across this beautiful blog post from Raymond Chen. It tells about how to use the command line as a calculator.

Command Line = Start–>Run–>cmd

Check that post here. Bye!

The last post was on setting up the Nokia S60 SDK with netbeans 5.0. The application we are going to develop now doesn’t require the Nokia SDK. It is required only when you want to implement Nokia specific features. By the way, MIDP is called Mobile Information Device Profile. Two common versions of MIDP supported by most mobile phones across manufacturers are MIDP 1.0 and MIDP 2.0. MIDP on combination with CLDC – Connected Limited Device Configuration – allows us to build device independent applications. Both of them are products from Sun Microsystems. You can read more about MIDP here and CLDC here. Look at the huge list of mobile phones that support MIDP and CLDC.

For this application, we will use the standard emulator that ships with the netbeans mobility pack. We will create a simple application that accepts username and password. If the username is “aswin” 😉 then it will take you to the next screen. Otherwise, it will display a small error box. Understood??

Ok, be a good student and fire up Netbeans 5.0.

1. Go to File–>New Project. Select “Mobile” on the left pane and “Mobile Application” on the right pane.
2. Click “Next” and give the project name as “MyGreatMobile”. Click “Next”.
3. Select the Emulator Platform as J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2. Leave the other settings as it is and select “Finish”.

You should have something similar to the one shown below.

4. Choose Window–>Palette. The Palette window is now displayed. From the “Form Items” section, drag and drop 2 textfields on the “HelloForm”. The whole window should look like the one shown.

5. From the “Commands” section of the Palette, drag-n-drop and “Ok Command” and a “Exit Command”. Press F5 at anytime to view the output on the emulator.

6. Drag-n-drop a “List” and an “Alert” from the “Screens” section of the Palette. Link the “Ok” of “helloForm” to “list1”. We will link the Alert programmatically. Also d-n-d a few listitems from the “Elements” section and a “Ok Command” onto “list1”. Link the “Ok” of list1 to Form1. Check the screen shot below.

7. Double click on alert1 and change the text to “Invalid username or password”.
8. Now, if you switch to the Source view from the Flow Design view, you will be able to see that all the necessary code is generated, to implement the functionality shown in the flow design. THAT IS AMAZING!

Let us switch to Source view and do some tweaking to get the functionality we want. Find the function called public void commandAction. That function implements all the necessary conditions for navigation. It initially looks like below.

Change the code so that it is similar to the next screen shot.

We are done. Press F5 to view the beauty 😀

The next post will be on consuming .net web services on Java ME. Bye!!

I had been to Bangalore to attend the MSAPP expo. And incidentely, the same day was also for Imagine Cup National Finals. So, on the whole there were 20 teams for MSAPP and about 12 teams for Imagine Cup. Judges arrived at 12PM and went through all the projects. The best projects received a hefty sum as cash prize. At the end of the day, the best projects selected would be showcased before the whole student and the judge audience.

MSAPP – Microsoft Academic Project Program
The best one in MSAPP was a project called iTrust. You can read more about it from Praveen‘s blog. His team walked away with Rs.75000/-. The runner up was an innovative project named “Computer for Blind”. Based on the Braille system, they developed a simple keyboard, which can be used by the visually challenged to type out text, as we do on a normal keyboard. They developed the whole circuit and plugged it to the CPU thro’ the serial port. Once the typing is done, a simple voice command saves the file and another voice command retrieves the file. They also made a simpler version of braille printer. Lots of people advised them to patent their idea. Hope they do it soon.

Imagine Cup
Three teams were selected for Imagine Cup National Finals, to present their idea over the whole audience. This time, the judges selected 2 best projects. The ideas of the 3 selected teams were brilliant. But only the other 2 could make it to the International Finals. Btw, the international finals are happening at Agra by August. The two selected projects were about a whole new computing experience for the visually challenged and for cerebral palsy affected people. Two inventions that really touched me deep were the “mouse” they had developed for cerebral palsy people. They had developed the mouse in such a way that the affected people need not grip the mouse. The second one was the navigator for the visually impaired. Moving from left to right on the screen, there will be a change in sound that will tell the person his position on the desktop. Similar things happen when he moves from top to bottom. It also announces the name of an icon when the mouse is over it. One task that the team did before the audience was that they closed laptop and cleared the recycle bin blind-folded.

Teachings of the Masters 🙂
Coming back to the title of the post, what had i learnt from all these teams??
1. The people with the idea should not piss off in the middle of the project. They must be as involved as others.
2. The full team should be working on every aspect of the project with the burning desire of winning.
3. The team should have decent marketing skills to market their idea.
4. And last but never the least, the team picker must ensure that all the above happens with minimum effort.

As i was returning to the room where i was staying, all these things hit me. I knew the mistakes i made. I picked up a wrong team member as part of MSAPP. My buddy Moyeen was the one who helped me all along to get it going to MSAPP as part of the top 20 projects. Thanks a lot dude! I owe you a lot.

Over the past 2 1/2 years, i had some amazing experiences and will continue to have them. Will surely share them over time. Bye!

Hello guys, I just downloaded the Nokia S60 SDK for developing MIDP based applications for java mobile phones. Netbeans proved its mettle here again in terms of recognising the SDK and freeing me of all troubles. I downloaded the S60 SDK here and netbeans 5.0 here. CarbideJ is not required if you are going to develop on top of netbeans.

That said, i will tell you how to integrate the S60 SDK into netbeans.
1. Goto Tools–>Platform Manager and click on the “Add Platform” button.

2. Select “Java Micro Edition Platform Emulator” in the new dialog box and click on “Next”.

3. If the IDE is unable to locate the S60 platform folders, click on “Find More Java ME Platform Folders…” button and point it to the location where you have installed the SDK.

4. Click on Next. It will detect the installed platforms. Click on Finish and we are done. Close the Java Platform Manager.

Now, go to File–>New Project. Select “Mobile” on the left pane and “Mobile Application” on the right pane. Give it a name. On the next screen click on the “Emulator Platform” combo box and you will be able to see the installed emulators.

Thats it! we are done. You are up and ready to build beautiful applications for MIDP phones in just 4 steps 🙂

Oofff !! paid projects! They are really goddamn useless. I know, if you had got a paid project, you would have experienced it. Ok ok, if you are not aware of what im talking about, its about the final semester project for BE students, specifically CSE and IT people. Almost every friend of mine studying BE, paid to get their projects done. What they do is, they go a project center, pay Rs.3000 or more per head (if its a group project) and buy all the powerpoint presentations that we should be presenting for every review, all the source code and full documentation. Now, thats cool, atleast by the look of it.

Many people i know, who paid for such projects, got paid for paying them. First, they don’t get any working knowledge of the technology on which the project is based on. Second, most of the paid projects just won’t work. Third, my final review was today and people were configuring their projects on the college computers. The moment they copied all the files and executed the project, they got a “File Not Found” error. Wondering what had happened, they copied everything again and ran the project; still the same error !!!???!!!

Those idiots at the project center, wrote a small snippet of code that will erase all the files during execution if the date is on or after 2nd April 2006. Imagine all those people configuring the project and during the review, it crashes on the face of the external examiner. That is sad. Who should be blamed here? The students or the project centers??

My answer will be the students. As long as there are people who get cheated, there will be cheaters. They have got 3 full months to learn a technology and implement a decent enough project. Only when you implement a project, you will really learn a technology, its working and how you can make the current version of your project better. The external examiner today asked us to open source code of the project. He pointed at an arbitrary function and asked us to explain its working. Since we did the project on our own, we were able to answer. All those people who got paid projects are doomed for sure 🙁 :((. They just cannot explain the source code of the project, let alone understand the technology behind it.

To all my juniors, Guys, NEVER go for paid projects. They will make your life miserable. Even if you had never learnt anything in all the 4 years, this 3 months is enough to learn and implement a decent enough project. The main purpose of projects in the last semester is to test your working knowledge. When the paid project you give is not going to give you the knowledge you want, then what is the use of paying Rs.3000 per head?? Think and look before you leap.

ALL THE BEST !

And sorry if i had hurt anyone’s feelings. I hope this has opened the eyes of my juniors.