My first point of call is to find out if any social networking sites (e.g. Brightkite) are interested in using this to create a great mobile web interface for Windows Mobile devices.

Combine that with ability to intercept text messages into my own application on my phone, this basically means I can write a Jaiku application which keeps track of everyone’s Jaikus but doesn’t interfere in my day by beeping and flashing at me 24/7.

In theory, this means I could write a Windows Mobile Jaiku client that stays off GPRS.

Our Scouts came joint 7th out of 17 groups from around the district on the night hike on Friday. This is pretty surprising, since we had to rush back by skipping 2 bases with a shortcut. It turns out that very few teams went to all 10 bases, with one team only managing 6. My legs have recovered now, but my sleeping pattern is still a bit off.

Prawns in tikka masala sauce with pilau rice

In an attempt to expand my cooking abilities, I bought a bunch of spices and checked out a recipe for pilau rice. I’m very slowly working on becoming a better cook. Perhaps the next part is making the sauce by myself too – as I’m pretty unlikely to go catch my own prawns.

GSM stumbler failed

My attempts at making my GSM stumbler application run while my phone is sleeping has not gone well. The latest version doesn’t seem to pick up any changes of cell tower at all while the phone is off, and takes a pretty long time to discover that I’ve moved. I’ll have to look into this again.

My discovery this evening is that it is incredibly simple to make my phone run C# code while it is in sleep mode, by just using threading. This opens up quite a few ideas for me which help me progress towards a better Jaiku-like client for my phone:

1. I can send “Keep-Alive” packets at regular intervals to make sure my XMPP connection to Jabber didn’t time out.
2. I can automatically find out the current cell tower I’m connected to at regular intervals – and possibly also send these straight to Jaiku and the web by SMS/GPRS. (Update: this is now implemented in my GSM Stumbler application)
3. I can scan for nearby bluetooth devices and wireless networks throughout the day.

All that while my phone is looking harmless and the screen is completely off, very handy:

ThreadStart starter = new ThreadStart(this.FindCurrentLocation);
Thread backgroundThread = new Thread(starter);
backgroundThread.Start();

Manual labour

About 6 times per day, I press a button on my phone and it sends a text message to my website with my current cell tower ID. My website then takes over and does all the smart stuff by itself. If I’ve traveled somewhere new, it automatically looks up the cell ID in a large UK database using their API to find the latitude and longitude of the cell tower I’m currently connected to. But big decimal numbers showing my current latitude and longitude aren’t all that interesting on their own.

Sidebar widget

The next step in my process was to add the widget on the side of my website to show everyone my current location. It’s not particularly fascinating – either I’m in my home town, at work, or traveling somewhere in between. But I’ve just added something a little more interesting.

Google Earth

Whereas before the link on my current location just took you to the coordinates where I’m currently sat, it will now load up a KML file showing a nice picture of a man standing on my current location, and hopefully a number of little cell towers which will show where I’ve been over the last 7 days.

The historic data isn’t all that interesting in Google Maps, but if I open up my KML file in Google Earth then I expose the timeline controls and I can choose to see where I was at different times and even animate my location over time.

What’s next?

I’ve got a habit of always wanting to do more.  I’ve cleaned up my location database so I could add in other locations (i.e. not just cell towers) and try plotting even more data. I’d like to try the following:

• Load up GPS data for any hikes I go on
• Add a few key locations onto the map such as the Scout hut, my brother’s place in Canada, anything relevant to me
• Add some kind of refresh so that it updates automatically when I’m on the move
• Create some kind of JavScript timeline interface for Google Maps

Development

I started off again by looking at the agsXMPP MiniClient code. This covers pretty much everything I was interested in achieving tonight, but I wanted to break it down to a bare-bones application that just showed me my communications with Jaiku and some debugging information.

This was great, and worked well to show me the many #testku messages I was sending. The screenshot on the right shows one of the test messages received.

Going wireless

I unplugged my phone from the computer and turned on the wireless LAN. Again, predictably, I could connect fine and it was pretty cool receiving updates from Jaiku as I walked around the house – yes, I’m that sad.

The problem here was that the moment I touch the power button on my phone, the wireless card turns off and the connection is lost, which definitely doesn’t help me. I had a sneaky feeling that GPRS might be slightly different, so I tried that instead.

Jaiku over GPRS

Like the other day, I had trouble again connecting to Jabber over GPRS. It seems to send a few packets and receive a few back, but then halt when trying to send any more. A handful of attempts later I was able to create a full connection.

GPRS was on, Jabber was connected, and Jaiku was slowly receiving messages. So I turned my phone off.

And turned it back on.

Amazing! I was truly impressed that the message I had sent from the PC while my phone was off was already waiting for me to see when I turned the phone back on. Not only was the connection re-established, but it had never been lost – implying that the Jabber connection was still receiving messages in the background even though the phone looked dead.

What does this mean?

In short, it means I can make a program which stays connected to the internet all day and receives updates about my contacts and their statuses. Jaiku for Windows Mobile could work even better than I thought.

Andy Smith (a key developer at Jaiku) confirmed recently that the Jaiku Mobile Nokia client uses XMPP (Jabber) to communicate with Jaiku. Although the full API used for this interface hasn’t yet been revealed, I thought I best make sure first thatI could create a suitable Jabber connection over GPRS from my phone.

A little Google searching at lunch led me to the agsXMPP SDK, a dual licensed XMPP library which definitely has the potential to do what I want. The project is very well structured, with versions not only for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, but also Mono for any Linux users.

The screenshot on the right is the sample MiniClient PPC project provided with the SDK. It took me a few attempts to connect, and then after that I had a pretty stable and responsive chat with myself over a GPRS connection.

I look forward to integrating this with my Jaiku application.

So what is it?

Essentially, it’s the start of an interface between the Jaiku website and my mobile phone. All it lets me do right now is load my current Jaiku status as a mess of JSON text into the big text box (shown above) and allows me to send a new status to the site via HTTP or SMS.

What’s next?

The program has advanced a little from the screenshot above and you no longer need to type in your location. It’s linked up with my GSM Stumbler code to look up your phone’s current location based on the nearest cell tower. I’d like to perfect this a little more and try to make this fundamental feature as simple as possible.

And after that?

Here’s my wish list:

• Display your RSS presence feed / Jaiku history
• Provide a local cache of cell tower locations to reduce web requests
• Channel switching to view other Jaiku feeds (channels and your contacts)
• Comment support
• Jaiku icon support

It’s very basic right now. All it does is pull out the phone’s currently connected cell tower and logs it to a text box on the screen. This data can also be sent via SMS or HTTP to my website to update my current location.

Also today, I created a PHP script to update my current Jaiku location. This isn’t in place yet, but I eventually intend to integrate this into my GSM Stumbler application. Future ideas include: looking up the location as human-readable format on the device, detecting multiple nearby base stations and their signal strength (for triangulation) and more Jaiku support.

1. Enable bluetooth on your PC and Windows Mobile device
2. Create an incoming bluetooth COM port on your PC
3. Go to ActiveSync connection settings on your PC to enable COM port access
4. Create a bluetooth connection partnership (or refresh an existing one) to see the ActiveSync service on your device
5. Open up ActiveSync on your device, go to Menu, and choose “Connect via Bluetooth”

All that because I wanted to transfer a single file from my phone to my PC.

In fact, all I needed to do was use the “Beam file” functionality in File Explorer. I’m pretty sure this was limited in the past to use Infrared only. It now supports Bluetooth and it was possible for me to transfer the file.

It’s still not a perfect solution though. After choosing the “Beam file” option, I then have to wait 5 minutes while it looks through every nearby bluetooth device and tells me it’s name. A big shame it can’t instantly recognise that I’ve got my bluetooth dongle nearby and already paired up.

There’s one area where the WIDCOMM bluetooth driver is far superior to Microsoft’s – it has bluetooth FTP support.