Football!

I'm not a great fan of football but I've been following Euro 2004 with keen interest. Okay, I've seen only two matches and both of them were really spectacular! The first one was the first game of Euro2004, France vs England. Zidane stole the show! Two goals after the 90th minute, that was one heck of a game! Today, I watched the second match which was between Portugal and England. I got to watch the penalty kicks, which I like the most! ;) It was really a treat to watch the Portuguese in such high spirits! Beckham was a disappointment but lucky for me, I was supporting Portugal. Rui scored a goal but he missed the kick, that was a bit disappointing too. England is out of the league! Beckham will get a special treatment back home for missing his second penalty.

I'll be following the rest of the quarter finals and future games hopefully!

WhizSMS Java App!

Finally! I've worked it out. I've made my first J2ME application which is actually a frontend for my WAP-based WhizSMS thing, it still lives here: http://nasim.org/mobile/sms/

Okay, here's how you install the Java app on your cell phone:
Go to: http://nasim.org/mobile/download.wml
click on 'WhizSMS' and it asks you for download. Just hit okay and it'll download the 3KB application on your cell and thats it! Start sending cheap SMS! :)

I've got a Nokia 6100, which offers me some cool options. For instance, I went to Applications and then to WhizSMS and I set WebAccess to 'Yes', now I don't get a confirmation each each time the application would try to access a URL. There is also a Update Version option where I can automatically update the application, if an update is available of course. (New Idea: I'll pass along the current version to the SMS software on my server, which will determine if the user is using the latest version. If its an older version, a message will be appended that he should upgrade.)

Another cool feature I'd like to mention here is that you can lookup a phone number from your phone directory as well. Just go to the phone number box, go to EDIT and go to Search and you get your phone directory for easy lookup.

Please add comments if you like the service or if you had any difficulty downloading or using the software.

Remember, there are no connection charges for GPRS :)

Happy messaging! Here are two snapshots for you, it looks much better in my Nokia!

PTCL Phone to Address lookup on Mobile

Just upped:
http://nasim.org/mobile/lookup/

Go to that URL with any WAP-enabled phone and you can lookup any PTCL Karachi number (well actually a total of 781131 numbers only!).

You don't have to enter an area code. Just enter a PTCL number.

More mobile ideas!

I'm probably going to started a mobile portal for paki people! Most probably at:
http://nasim.org/mobile/

The initial tools I'll provide will be quick Ufone SMS and a Phone number to Address lookup facility, for Karachi.

Moreover, I can package all these tools into a java application for mobile. The database would still live at my server which the java would access either through webservice or a simple HTTP GET request (reduces download size! that is really important here!)

More updates soon.

PDC 3rd day

The day wasn't as cool as the 2nd day. BizTalk was pretty nice, memory management was okay and C# Generics was a push!

The funniest thing happened in the last session when they announced that they'll be giving away X-Boxes and return tickets to *developers* as a gift or whatever through a raffle-draw. Firstly, we're developers! It would have been much nicer to have received a VS.NET 2003 original copy or something instead of a X-Box or a Dubai return trip. Moreover, the raffle draw idea was totally sick! Come on, 1500 developers around and all Microsoft people couldn't devise a simple program to do a randomized draw through PC! Almost half the crowd would make such a simple program in just 10 minutes right there! They had PCs connected to the large projectors, that was not an issue.

It was a bit disappointing, really!

Ufone SMS facility!

I have had this idea for quite a while now and finally I've implemented first phase of it. I hope this is not against the law or anything! ;)

We all love the GPRS facility that Ufone provides and lucky for us its so inexpensive! 1MB costs only Rs. 15. Now, if you look at the SMS charges, my gosh, they are Rs. 2.5/SMS. I always wanted to create a WEB->SMS gateway for myself and now I've succesfully done that. The idea is that you logon to my website using a any wap-enabled cellphone/PDA:
http://nasim.org/uf/

All you have to do is enter the phone number (ufones only! okay thats that catch!) and put in the message! Away we go... it's sent through Ufone's gateway as an SMS! Now for some mathematics. Total size of entire transaction seems to be 1KB in all. If you good at elemetary maths, you can easily figure that an SMS costed just Rs. 0.02. 2 paisas, thats nothing! ;)

I'm going to chop it down even further! How you ask? AHhh.... recently I've been getting my hands dirty with J2ME. So I'll write a java application for my cell phone which would chop down another 700 bytes off the transaction. So I'll spend about only 100B or so on a single sms (of course assuming that the message itself is small hehe!). Now, that'd cost me a massive Rs. 0.002!

Thats almost FREE sms! :) Hooray!

I'll put the java app for download somewhere perhaps! Don't worry I'll post a blog!

PDC 2nd day!

While the first day was extremely boring. I really liked the second day. Mr. Kemmou had lots of intereting mobile samples for us. The first session was so so as he only taught how to use ASP.NET to design WAP/WML pages. I was really interested in the mobile embedding technologies. So, there it was in the second session! A brief overview of the compact framework for mobile devices. 3MB for a windows os and 1MB for the .NET framework... thats 4MB pre-reserved on any smartphone/pocketpc ;)

.NET supports three types of devices at this time... Windows CE based systems, PocketPCs (most features!) and there's Smartphone. It had two emulators for Smartphone.

I was really excited when Mr. Kemmou showed us how to access the low level phone api (like dialing another number, accessing sim info, sending sms and stuff). That was really exciting.

In the end he said that he'd be uploading the slides and all the source code on his website and microsoft will be uploading all the slides too... I was really excited!
Too bad there are no GPS classes in the Compact Framework. Really wanted that.

The next speaker was Mr. Rafal... I just love to hear whatever this guy has to tell. Luckily, it was a very interesting topic on IPv6. I already knew the basics so it was pretty easy to grasp! Ah well, this guy didn't take questions in the end. Whenever he speaks, I feel like its Mr. Bean (Rowan Aitkinson) speaking! ;)

yada yada

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