8-bit cloud.com

Moving On

2012-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

Happy New year!

With the formalities now over, I turn my attention to my favourite subject: Me. I jet off tomorrow for the United States, where I will be taking up a position with Amazon, working on Amazon Fresh. Melissa will join me in a few months. We’re very excited by the opportunity to live and work in a new place, and to work with one of the world’s top tech companies.

If you have any suggestions for things to do in Seattle or weekend trips that we can take, I’m all ears :)

I’ll miss Melbourne, and I’ll miss the friends I have made here. I don’t think the move is permanent. We are planning on returning to Australia in a few years with a bunch of awesome stories :) Viva las aventura!

A new layout for a new job

2011-07-21T00:00:00-07:00

As I mentioned the other day, I am moving on from Unico and becoming an independent consultant (a grandiose title I give myself… Really I’m a contractor). To coincide with this, I am also revamping the layout of my site, with additional information about the sort of work that I do, community engagement, and how to get in touch. The site should now render better on mobile devices as well.

Is it an improvement on what was there before? Maybe. Hopefully I’ll be tweaking it more in the coming weeks.

On Monday, I start my first contract, working at Transtech.

Mob SIG Presentation 2nd Aug

2011-07-21T00:00:00-07:00

I have been asked to present a talk to the Melbourne Mob SIG, to be held at the Telstra Conference Centre on the 2nd of August. It will be a technical presentation, where I open up eclipse and show people how widgets work on the Android platform. This could be considered a basic topic, but it is one of the most requested topics on the Build Mobile site, so I thought it’d be a good topic.

If you have any other suggestions for presentations, or articles that I could write for BuildMobile, please let me know.

Venue:

Telstra Conference Centre Conference Room 2 Level 1/242 Exhibition Street, Melbourne

Date:

Tuesday 2nd August 2011

Time:

5:30PM for a 6PM Start

Abstract

Ever wanted to know how to program a widget for Android?

Join us as we go through a live example of how to create one using the Android Development Kit and Eclipse.

We’ll go through the basics of creating a widget, then move on to updating its contents on a frequent basis, and finish up with how to show complex graphics which otherwise wouldn’t be allowed.

More details can be found at the ACS web site.

Resignation from Unico

2011-07-11T00:00:00-07:00

After four years working at Unico Computer Systems, I handed in my resignation this morning. I have been working in the enterprise space performing integration architecture and devleopment work. I have found however that my own interests have shifted more and more towards working with mobile devices, and this has become a real passion of mine.

As a result, I have now accepted a contract to work in the logistics industry working with mobile devices to make truckies lives easier. In the long term, I hope to grow this work into a business working across the mobility industry, working on the (rapidly dissapearing) boundary between enterprise systems and mobility solutions.

I’d like to thank Unico for its support over the last four years. They gave me a job when I moved to Melbourne, and I have learned a lot in the period that I have been here. Furthermore, I have made a lot of friends, whom I hope to be able to continue to work with in the future.

And now on to the exciting future!

BuildMobile

2011-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

Sitepoint.com has just launched a mini-site dedicated to the builidng of mobile applications in all their forms, named BuildMobile. Inexplicably, they have chosen to feature my little application NodeDroid as their first featured app, and even more explicably they have asked me to contribte some stories as well. The featured app is up now, and my article will be posted in a few days.

There’s nothing like having a wider audience (not to mention a deadline) to inspire you to write, so hopefully I’ll be a bit more regular with my postings there than I have been here :)

NodeDroid source code released

2010-12-30T00:00:00-08:00

When I started writing NodeDroid, I did it to learn about writing mobile applications, and all of its associated technologies. One of those technologies was advertising. I added Admob advertising to the bottom of the application, and wated for the megabucks to roll in :). In the little over 3 months that its been available, it has netted a grand total of $13.88US. Thats enough to cover hosting costs, but thats about it.

A number of people have asked if I can support their provider. I have variously been asked to support Optus Cable, Exetel, Telstra, and a bunch of others. In order for me to do this properly, I’d need to have access to an account to be able to perform testing. People have quite understandably been reluctant to share this information with me, which means we are stuck with the providers that NodeDroid already has.

I’d like NodeDroid to support as many providers as posisble. I’d like it to be better than consume, the iPhone application. I don’t think I can do that on my own. As a result, I’ve decided to open source NodeDroid, in the hope that other geeks out there will write their own providers for their own provider, and then contribute the code back to the application.

I can’t ask people to work for free on something that I could make money off (even if it is a paltry amount), so I have also decided to remove all advertising from the application. I just uploaded a new version that has no admob.

The code for NodeDroid can now be found on GitHub at the NodeDroid Repository. If you are a developer, please feel free to check out the code, and get in contact with me. If you have a bug that you want to report, you can also report issues there too.

Blog Migration

2010-12-27T00:00:00-08:00

Earlier this month, I posted a new website for my hobby company 8bitcloud.com. As part of this change, I have now decided to host my personal blog here as well. My Blog will henceforth redirect to http://8bitcloud.com/blog.html. All URLs will continue to retrieve the correct posts, but with the new layout. There shouldn’t be any disruption to service, but who knows. RSS feeds should automatically switch over as well. I apologise if it re-posts everything I’ve ever done…

So why have I done this? Blogger is a great platform, but I’ve been experimenting with jekyll as a website creation method, and thought I’d try it out for a bit. If I don’t like it, I think I’ll move to wordpress, which I’ve been mulling over for a while, so perhaps this is a simple way of testing it out. In the end, I did it so that I had something new to play with. Yeah, I know… I’m sad…

I appreciate your patience.

Small update & Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T00:00:00-08:00

I have just posted a new version of NodeDroid, which incorporates only one small change:

Bugfix for issue caused by interrupting a running fetch. Future fetches may not have worked correctly.

I’m currently working on a widget, which I hope to release before the new year. In the mean time, I wish you a merry christmas!

New Layout

2010-12-12T00:00:00-08:00

This site is primarily intended to allow me to play around with new stuff. As part of this, I’m playing with Jekyll, which is a simple, ruby based web generator which creates static sites programatically.

Some advantages:

Simpler hosting requirements. All you need is a web server like Apache
If you want dynamic capabiilties, they can be added in via javascript.
Will be able to survive a slashdotting (not that that is ever likely to happen to me)
Not hackable through attacks on the CMS product, because there isn’t one
Uses Markdown, which makes writing the content much easier. You can always fall back to HTML when you need it though
Want to cross-post? Thats easy. Simply symlink between your different blogs and re-publish.

This also gives me the opportunity to replace the old design for 8bitcloud with a new one. I really enjoy doing web site designs. What a pity I’m no good at it :)

Big props to Dlimiter who showed me jekyll

New version of NodeDroid, now with Optus

2010-10-31T00:00:00-07:00

I'm the author of a usage tracking utility on Android called NodeDroid. Originally it only supported Internode, but I am now expanding it to support other ISPs and telcos. The first one I want to try out is Optus. I've just uploaded the new version of the application, and I'm hoping some of you guys would like to try it out.

The application works by screen-scraping the optus web site, and presenting it in a better format, along with usage graphs and the normal sort of thing you would expect from a usage meter. In the future, I hope to add the ability to see bills, as well as provide warnings when your quota is being reached. That sort of thing.

Because there are a large number of plans, and they all have different rules, I would imagine that I will need to take into account a large number of factors. At the moment, I've only been able to work from my own plan, which is an Extreme Cap. It should work quite well for other Caps, but it will probably break on prepaid and other account types.

If you would like to participate, you must already have a log in to the optus account page. If my application can't read your usage, it would be useful for me to see what your usage page on the optus portal looks like, along with all the usage lines expanded. If you can provide a screenshot or source, that would be beneficial (remember to black out the phone numbers first though!!)

If you would like to participate, please fetch the application from the market by searching for NodeDroid, or through AppBrain Here

I will also be expanding the program to support other providers in the near future. Vodafone Mobile prepaid broadband will be easiest for me, as I have an account, as well as Telstra prepaid, but if you are extra keen on getting something, please send me a whim.

I would appreciate any feedback you can give, either here or on my website at http://www.8bitcloud.com/nodedroid.html. The website will be updated soon with details of the new beta. I have also started a thread on Whirlpool where people can discuss it (or not...)

Do it on the device, or do it on the server?

2010-09-26T00:00:00-07:00

This weekend, I thought I'd extend my little Android usage tracking application to work on more ISPs than the one (Internode) that it already does. As my phone is (sadly) on Optus, I thought I'd write one for that.

Internode was easy to add, as they have a documented API for accessing usage counters which are ideal for computer consumption. Optus on the other hand only provide a web application interface to check usage, necessitating the use of a web scraper. A web scraper is an application that pretends to be a user on a web page, makes all the appropriate calls (and fudges any javascript calls that are necessary) to get the results it needs. It then parses the (often non-compliant) HTML results that come back to get data. I have no problem doing this, and have done so on several occasions before, but it is not easy work and can be quite fiddly. Parsing the HTML is often the most difficult part, as it is usually not well formed XML so you can't just use DOM to parse it.

In short order, I had a working prototype that used JTidy to clean up the HTML into something that I could use properly and then XPath to extract the elements of the document I needed. It works great, except that the document clean up and parsing into DOM takes a really long time on a resource constrained device such as a phone. It takes about 20 seconds to clean up and parse the document on my development emulator, which is too slow to produce a good mobile experience, especially if you have to parse multiple documents as I do.

So now I'm faced with a choice. I could write a man in the middle service that the phone sends the user's login details to which then performs the parsing on behalf of the user and sends the results on to the phone, but there are a number of drawbacks to this:

This means that the user is sending his login details to a 3rd party, which is a security no no.
It introduces a single point of failure into the equation. If my app gets popular the middle man service could get slammed. If Optus decides that they don't like what I'm doing, they could easily block it.
It means I need to host a service, which means additional expense.

I don't want to do this, so what I'm left with is more hacky solutions, using regular expressions to find what I want in the HTML documents retrieved from the provider. This will take me longer to code, will be more prone to failure, and is just generally nasty. I'm not happy. Devices these days are very powerful, and there should not be the need for intermediary servers to help with processing.

Of course this would all be much easier if the providers published web services interfaces to their data, rather than just web applications. This has been the mantra of SOA and internet connected businesses since the terms were coined. It doesn't even cost them that much more to do it, and would lead to better designed web applications, but thats a subject for another rant. Optus doesn't do this because there's no economic incentive for them to do so. They gain nothing directly from publishing a usable web interface, so they can't be bothered... bah!

To be fair to Optus, they aren't the only ones that don't get it. No ISPs and telcos provide any decent interfaces, other than Internode.

I wrote an android application

2010-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

I purchased an Android phone a few weeks ago. Part of the reason that I got it was that I wanted to see what the differences were between Android and iPhone. This extends out to how to program them as well, so I had to write an application, just like I did for iPhone.

Last night, I released my little application. Its a usage meter for my ISP, Internode. I deliberately chose something quite simple so that I could cut my teeth on the platform, and I must say that I'm very impressed. I found it very easy to write the application for Android, especially because it uses the same tools and libraries that I am used to using for my day job. One other difference that I notice is that it is much more obvious what is going on inside an Android application. The documentation describes things clearly and gives you full visibility. Apple on the other hand like to keep their platform a little more mysterious. There are plenty of good documents on how to do things, but you still get the impression that there's something going on under the hood that you don't quite understand. Perhaps its just that I'm more familiar with the Java ecosystem.

If you'd like to have a look at it, check out its site at 8-bit cloud. I've also been playing with the web site, and I will be improving it and hopefully making it more fun.

PS: I was tempted to call the application NodePony after a recent meme that Internode has got going with its cute little plush toys. In the end, I decided that I shouldn't try to cash in on it. It would spoil the meme...