I decided to implement first quick-and-dirty version of this in such way that the phone takes pictures every 10 seconds and sends them, one-by-one, using the wifi interface, to joker.iki.fi as a POST request. On the server side, there would be simple server component, which saves the image and tags it with the time it’s taken.

Since I made a holy promise not to touch Symbian C++ ever again, I implemented the component which takes the pictures and sends them using python for S60. I already had some good experiences of this from the SMS forwarder script, so I decided to take a deliberate risk on developing something for a Symbian device on my free time. On vacation time, I like to avoid any frustrating projects and doing something on Symbian is always frustrating, maybe excluding shooting the thing with a shotgun.

At first, everything seemed to work very nicely. Then I got *AGAIN* into the hell that is development on the S60 platform. Even using Python, you can feel the shaky yet rigid bubblegum patchwork that is Symbian underneath. Nothing works like you expect, error messages are about as informative as sudden kick to groin and documentation is outdated, crap or it doesn’t exist.

The script is under hundred lines and doing basic things, yet it took me close to 12 hours to get it working (well kinda). Here’s the most annoying things I found:

1. PyS60 Socket library madness. I can’t understand (or really care) why there are two socket libraries in PyS60. There’s the normal python “socket” module and then there’s something called “btsocket”. These look mostly the same and BT in the beginning refers to “Bluetooth”, but then you can use it like you would use sockets for anything else. The thing is, it seems like pys60 libs use the socket library, so if you give python libs instances of btsocket, you get unexpected behavior. Nothing in the documentation tells you this.

2. The “default access point” behavior on S60. This is related to the socket annoyance but is a nice extension to this. You see, when an application tries to use network in Symbian, the os pops up a dialog for the user to select which access point (can be 3G packet data or Wifi for example) you want to use. At times this dialog randomly refuses to show you the Wifi access option and best of all: If you do “send(data, server)” in a loop for example, 10 times over, the default behavior is to … yes you guessed it: Ask the question 10 times, each time for each loop! How cool and secure is that!

So I ended up doing my own access point selection dialog which prevents also the problem of constantly selecting the access point. Why oh why did I need to code this myself?

3. Fail eventually, silently, horribly -style behavior. This is really notorious thing and seems to happen always on this platform. My application is essentially like this:

initialize()
ap = select_access_point()
while(True):
image = camera.take_photo()
send_image(ap, image)


Everything worked nicely so I decided to leave the script running and went to golf course. When driving back, I checked the camera output from my trusty HTC Hero. Surprise, the image hadn’t updated for hours.

I spend a lot of time trying to find why it’s crashing (and it was crashing the OS, not the python runtime) and managed to isolate the problem.

Probably most annoying thing was this:

4. When the app crashed the first time I first checked through the code and found no problems. Then I checked my pyS60 version, which was quite old, and decided to upgrade to the latest 2.0.0. I spend hours trying to do this and found out that no, it seems that for some reason the installation is just not working. Grr.

While every annoyance is probably not related to Symbian but some can be attributed to the pyS60 project, this is yet-another negative development experience on top of Symbian. It really is a waste-of-time-kinda-platform. I do realize that I’m in S60 3rd edition still and newer versions exist, but still I wonder when there will be a brave leader of Symbian who has the balls to say: Look guys, this OS is no more. It was nice in 2000, but we actually need to develop something that works nowadays and Symbian only gets in the way.

Please let there be such hero really soon.

I’ll probably release the surveillance camera as soon as I get the code cleaned up and hopefully the bugs get fixed sooner than later by PyS60 team.

• Google Maps Navigation
• Rootless wlan access point

I the first one is coming whenever the navigation is coming to Finland, but the second one is, as far as I understand, only available for 2.2, which sucks big time. I am hesitant on installing a custom rom to a device which I use for daily work, but this means that I’ll need to do that.

Overall, Hero is the best device I have ever owned but there’s still room for improvement.

Have the VMWare tools installed and then when you plugin the Hero to your Mac, you only need to remember to click “Connect to Windows” button on the dialog rather than “Connect to Max”.

Otherwise everything seemed to work as expected, but I needed to run the HTC RUU (Rom Upgrade Utility?) twice since the first time the upgrade got stuck on waiting the bootloader on Hero. I unplugged the USB cable and rerun RUU, after which everything went ok.

I’ll tell you if something still went wrong, but for the time being, it seems like it’s possible to upgrade the Hero firmware using a VMware guest operating system.

I just hope the HTC will have a Linux or Mac version of their tools soon.

(UPDATE 2010-06-28) And as you probably guessed - NO, this is not the android 2.1 update but the one which just upgrades OTA and flash player… I misread the update specification (guess due to elevated expectation) and blogged before the install was complete.. Duh!

What happened to that place is a story in itself but that’s not the point of this posting. The point is that it was probably one of the few places I ever had the feeling that I belonged there. Other was probably my grandmother’s house in Kotka. Now that all my grandparents are dead and buried and their places sold, I have had many times the sad feeling that I don’t really have any places where I belong. This is an overwhelmingly sad feeling to have if you have not ever experienced it. Think of the feeling that you get on a busy airport where people just run around but nobody’s there to stay. The feeling that everything is temporary and plastic and you could just make do without.

Sure, I have a house where we live with my wife and daughter, but this is a suburban home build on a land that’s rented from the city of Helsinki. It’s more of an investment and a necessity to have rather than something where I feel like I belong. When I spend time here, I don’t feel like I’m in the right place where I’m supposed to be. Sure, here’s a lot of people I love and like, friends nearby and all a person needs for a happy life, but there’s the feeling of not belonging here.

For example, when I woke up on mornings in my grandfather’s place and walked to the beachfront as a kid, I could feel a very strong bond with the land, sea, nature and sky. The feeling is such that you can say: “This is where I’m supposed to be and I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

I have to wonder how much of this is really just about me getting older and longing for the worry-free days of childhood and teenage years, but I definitely need the sense of belonging somewhere back. Currently, I wouldn’t have any bigger issues if I were to leave Finland altogether. I really don’t own anything here, it’s just temporary arrangements around rent and ownership I could easily monetize and move the fuck away.

Like a plant needs some roots, I need my own spot on earth where I can get at least some of the feeling of belonging back. I need to have nature around me, I want to live by clean water. Sad fact thought is that this might be too late for me. I would like to offer my kids the feeling that they live in the place that’s for them to live in and not some temporary plastic dream of consumerism and empty popular ideals. I would still like to believe that there are such places around earth somewhere, and I think they can even be found in Finland, even if our elected representatives are trying to do everything to kill the concept of heritage and replace it with ownership.

I wonder if this posting is the first step towards me moving my family to the countryside. The practicalities of that will be hard to solve, since somehow still IT work requires physical presence. But now that I have said it openly, it sounds good enough. I’m so fucking sick of metropolitan areas filled with bullshit cruft rather than what I actually need.

Ok, it remains to be seen how good these libs actually are but I will definitely give them a try.

I think this is positive. Honestly. Everybody who knows me knows that I really really hate flying. Everything about travelling by a plane makes me feel physically ill. But this is a personal thing of course. This current situation is not personal but affects pretty much everybody and people seem to be quite agitated about not being able to fly here and there.

But think of all the good things:

• No emissions from the air traffic. I understand air travel causes something like 3 percent of all carbon emissions, so this is not insignificant.
• There will be a better business case for videoconferencing and remote presence. It makes me sick to fly for example to sweden to take a two hour meeting. Maybe, just maybe this will make the teleconferencing option so much more efficient that clients finally understand that flying to just meet a person for a few hours does not make that much sense.
• There will be a better business case for developing sea and railway travel. I mean really developing, like digging a railway tunnel under the baltic sea for ultra-high speed trains or something like this. Also opening a fast shuttle ferry between Finland and Sweden would be a big improvement over the 14 hours or whatever it now takes to cross the gulf.
• The unhealthy government-subsidized air carriers may go bankrupt. What’s healthy for the economy, I believe, is also healthy for the people.
• World becomes larger again. I know this point is easy to hear like “I’m a racist idiot who wants to keep people of different nationality separate”, so please hear me out. What I mean by this is that if flying suddenly would get more expensive or difficult, people would start to plan their time more. When you would fly for example from Finland to, say UK, you would actually think what you’re going to do there and then enjoy it more. Nowadays people just fly in and out and see and hear nothing because of the constant hurry to get around.

That’s just a short list, I can probably think some more points. Let’s see where this goes but for now, I’m actually pleased about that Volcano.

The diagnosis was simple: Broken motherboard. Getting a new one would have cost more than a new machine and would have been a pain to install (repair shop offered to do this for a “small” fee) but this was the time netbooks were all the rage and my wife wanted one, so I decided to throw the machine to the PC graveyard (my home office cupboard) and buy a new one (Asus EEE PC).

Couple of days ago I was cleaning the office and looking for some receipts for tax returns and saw the machine. I decided to spend a few moments with the dead laptop. I plugged it in and pressed the power button. I was quite surprised to see that the thing booted and loaded the Win XP that was on it without any problems. I did try to do this once when the machine was returned from the repair shop and it did not work at the time!

So, apparently one way to fix a broken laptop motherboard is to leave it in a dusty cupboard for more than a year.

I’m just now installing a new OS on the thing since it’s still a usable machine, especially after I added some memory from the dead Asus EEE PC netbook that was bought to replace this particular machine. In human context this would be like a liver transplant from a dead son to a dying father. I guess lives of laptops can have similar ups and downs as ours.

1. Go to the optician to get your eyes checked
2. Place an order for lenses or contacts
3. Wait for the delivery of your order
4. Go to the optician and get your contacts/lenses

(And after this most typically just order the contacts from the internet since it’s cheaper and easier that way, no need to do the step 1 anymore.)

Well, how it really happens, at least in the case of Instrumentarium is as follows:

1. Book your time to see the optician in Sello.
2. Wait for your appointment, which is after two weeks.
3. Go to the appointment, during a work day, and wait for extra 30 minutes since the optician is busy.
4. Get your eyes measured
5. Place an order for the contact lenses (on pair for testing).
6. Wait for three weeks for delivery, and the SMS which will inform me of arrived order
7. Start calling to Instrumentarium every day for a week to find nobody answers
8. Go visit them (during a work-day), wait 20 minutes for someone to be available in the store.
9. Hear that the order got actually delivered after 1 week after me placing the order but for some reason me not getting the SMS
10. Book another time to get “important training on the use of contact lenses” before I can actually use them
11. Find out that the next available time is in three weeks
12. Get a “bit” annoyed and ask them to book me a time from the Instrumentarium in Kontula (close by where I live) where I actually manage to get the time within 1 week. At this point I need to pay them 30 euros to get the pair of lenses and have them send me off to Kontula.
13. Go to Instrumentarium of Kontula (which actually turned out to be a lot better than the one in Sello), get the formal training in the secret art of contact lenses.
14. Find that the pair is not actually very good for me since I can’t see too well with them
15. Hear lots of explanations, some making some sense and some less so, I get the Kontula Optician to place another order for a new pair from another manufacturer.
16. Wait one week and after the successful arrival of the SMS, get the new pair.
17. This pair actually works.

30 euros poorer (not too bad) and about two months older, I got myself a pair of working contact lenses. I estimate I spend something like two to three workdays worth of effort in going through the process.

Let me just place a little humble wish. Instrumentarium, please. Get a grip. You sell glasses and contact lenses and some other random shit. It’s not like you need to split the atom and move mountains to do it. It should not be this difficult, really.

Now, I use a MacBook Pro, with newer Eclipse, Android SDK 2.1 and completely new emulator setup than previously.

I checked out the source, compiled the project, ran it in the emulator, and posted this entry as the first thing I did (fixing a few bugs as I went).

I think Google loves developers.