Archive for the ‘Techno’ Category

Alternative technologies on the Nokia N900

Friday, May 14th, 2010

Hello, all.  I’ve been on holiday in darkest Cornwall this week, but nevertheless there has been a soupcon of time for adventures in the world of the mobile technology.  Just wanted to quickly share the results here, partly to show what a flexible beast the N900 really is.

First up – with the help of another enthusiatic coder – here’s a couple of (admittedly as yet unexciting) proof-of-concept applications running under the OpenLazarus (that’s Pascal/Delphi for people old/mad enough to remember) framework for Maemo 5.  I didn’t do much but test and run these, so here’s the results:


OpenLazarus app running on Maemo 5 using standard widgets

OpenLazarus app running under Maemo 5 using Custom Widgets

…and then there’s what I’ve been fiddling with.  Thanks to the frankly magnificent Wonko from the talk.maemo.org forums, we have a working Java/SWT stack for the phone.  That means that my ShinySlots project can run out of the box and look like this:

You can see that the forced window-size has exposed my slightly-cheating repeating background, and sadly it’s not that performant at the moment, but it works as advertised, and improvements are in hand…

Up, Down, Left, Right, A+Text

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

I wandered past an advert for the Sony Ericsson Jalou the other day.  Here’s a picture:

sony-ericsson-jalou

I can only assume that if you collect all 8 phone colours and get 50 text messages you’ll go bright yellow, your hair will stand on end and you can run around for the rest of the day making people explode until your battery runs out.

Shinypixel on the Nokia N900

Friday, November 27th, 2009

…well, almost.  The culmination of tonight’s informative voyage into the bleeding-edge world of the Nokia N900 (which I will be getting assuming I can a) find one and b) the touchscreen doesn’t suck) SDK was this screenshot of a familiar website:

shinypixel-n900

(Click for full-size.)

So: that’s Shinypixel up there being rendered as it would be on (an old version of) a N900, in a virtualized Maemo OS, running in a virtual image of Ubuntu, which is in turn running in VMWare under Windows XP.  And after all that, it still renders like it’s meant to.  Look how far we’ve come.

Well, that was probably the geekiest thing I’ll do all month.  I reckon I ought to go and lie down.

Yes, please

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

In the UK the Nokia N900 will be free on a two-year contract at £35 monthly plan from Orange, or for £10 on a £30 per month plan at O2 (with a two-year service agreement). … the UK will get a release date of November 16.

Ooooooh…

Under Destruction

Monday, October 26th, 2009

dedeevatvunderconstruction

It’s hard to shed a tear for the demise of GeoCities, even though I should as it started my web design career.  It’s difficult to mourn that which is long-forgotten, though – it’d be like becoming upset about for my cat who died years ago.

ma_geo_1The truth is that I once had a GeoCities site, but all I recall about it was that the background was black, the URL was impossible to remember, the web FTP interface was unbelievably bad even for those days, and they had some Javascript that stuffed a shuddering GeoCities logo into the bottom-right corner.  I have no idea what it was actually about, and slipping peacefully away into history is the best thing for it.

The Archive Team are to be applauded for their efforts, though.  They’ve rescued all the under construction GIFs that they could possibly find and whacked them on one eye-bleeding page for posterity.  I haven’t seen so much irritating crap in one place since I was last in a Starbucks, so naturally I picked out a few of my faves and archived them here too, y’know, just in case…

MoMotorCity4109construct“More updates to come once I’m back from primary school”

AtAthensTroy1330underconstructodoecran“Who turned out the lights?”

CaCapitolHill1114Under_ConstructionNothing says class like a 3D rotating construction sign (with only one side)

SiSiliconValleyVista2013constructor-indexNothing says “we’re not quite sure what we’re archiving” like saving ancient Javadoc .gifs for posterityTokyoFuji7118constructsonic

Hey, quit ruining my childhood memories!

HeHeartlandForest8728imagesunderconstruction3

This is just a little bit like that Catchphrase episode.CaCapitolHillLobby9717construction

I seriously have absolutely no idea what is meant to be going on here.

Nova1466underconstruction

Believe it or not, this was actually about as reliable as Mac OS 9 dialogs got in my experience.

CaCapeCanaveralGalaxy8999construction1 Achtung!  Awful designen!

thefirepoliceconstruction10

Actually, I know a couple of people who could use this.