i’ll try to share useful stuff with you

Bubbles: Minimizing the web

Filed under: — ohad @ 12:15 PM March 17, 2006

We just released Bubbles, a cool little (183k) piece of software that aims to turn Web-Applications into desktop applications.

It does this by housing your favorite sites in a bare-bone window, no toolbar/addressbar/buttons/statusbar/***bar around, pure app. These windows, or as we call them, Bubbles, go to the system-tray when you close them, and wait there for you.
When you hit a bubble’s tray-icon, it just pops back, like an Application does.

So, go ahead, start popping some bubbles

solution to unresolved external symbol _com_issue_error _bstr_t::_bstr_t

Filed under: — ohad @ 7:14 AM March 16, 2006

LNK2019: unresolved external symbol “void __stdcall _com_issue_error(long)” (?_com_issue_error@@YGXJ@Z) referenced in function “public: __thiscall _bstr_t::_bstr_t(unsigned short const *)” (??0_bstr_t@@QAE@PBG@Z)

I despise this error. Every time I write a new ATL or WTL app, and don’t use COM much in it, I get this.
I then plow for 10 minutes throuh newsgroups to get it figured.
So, hopefully Google will pick this text up and make the solution shorter for other people.

SOLUTION: #include <comdef.h>

Ben says that If #include comdef.h does not fix the unresolved externals, then make sure you are also linking against comsupp.lib

Sorta 1-way Video chat from your 6680 to a PC

Filed under: — ohad @ 5:29 PM March 14, 2006

Like I said, you gotta love Nokia for putting Python on the Series-60 phones.

My first mashup was to write an app that continuously pulls pictures from the phone’s camera, and sends them over to a PC for display (thanks Jurgen Scheible for great tutorial). This gives us a lame 1-way video-only ‘call/chat’ from your phone to any PC in the world.

At first I wanted to write a JAVA applet that would display the video stream, but for some reason the Java ServerSocket doesn’t return from ‘accept’, perhaps it’s not listening on the right interface, I got tired of playing with it. Here’s the source for the Java applet if you feel like making it work.

What I did was write something VERY SMALL in Python. It listens for connections, reads the JPG files from them, decodes and shows using PIL.

Here’s what it looks like on the PC:


Requirements:

  • A Series-60 Nokia phone with Python on it
  • A PC with Python and PIL on it
  • This PC needs to have TCP port 9134 open (configure your NAT if necessary)

Download:
That’s about it, here are the two Python scripts
camera_srv.py -> run on the PC first
cam_sender.py -> run this one on the phone

Warning:
The way PIL shows images on windows is by saving aside a copy and opening it with ShellExecute!!! This means that this remains more of a mockup until I or somebody else makes the Java Applet work.

comments/changes/etc are more than welcome, email me.

enjoy

6680

Filed under: — ohad @ 12:02 PM March 10, 2006


I just got a new phone, the Nokia 6680.
It runs on Symbian.
Somebody compiled Python for it (that somebody being Nokia).

This smells like lots of fun comming up. I just love it when a new programmable device lands on my lap. Especially if it’s small enough to carry around all the time (I’m a fanatic minimalist).

I’m all booked till the begining of April, but I hope to start doing stuff by then.

I can think of a zillion programs, for example synchronizing the Calendar with my 30boxes Calendar (f!@#k SyncML), Auto-Uploading stuff to Flickr, RSS-Readers, Turning it into a web-cam, playing shoutcast radio ?, gosh this doesn’t end.
I’d bet half of these have already been done or at the very least contemplated about.

Any ideas ? requests ? wanna hop on the wagon ? email me

p.s. – this looks like a good place to start