Sampath’s Mindspace

After a long silence on the moBlog front I finally got sometime to work on moBlog. The following are the enhancements done to moBlog:

Ability to work with published posts 
Now moBlog allows you to retrieve the latest 20 published posts in your blog. After retrieval, you can amend and re-publish them via moBlog. You can also delete a published post after retrieval.  You can retrieve the published posts via the Open Posts option. In that screen there is a drop down on top of the screen with the following options:

• Saved Posts - locally saved un-published posts
• Published Posts - retrieves the latest 20 posts published on your blog.

Please note that moBlog does not locally store the published posts, so every time you choose the Published Posts option, moBlog retrieves the posts directly from your blog. So if you are charged for the amount of data you are using, be mindful of that.

Editing Enhancements
Now moBlog allows you to bold, underline and italicize your post content body. moBlog would insert HTML tags to the body so i advice you to do these actions at last otherwise your body will start to look like a HTML code!

Removal of ‘Posted by moBlog’
I used this pingback to promote moBlog. But since most of you have complained about it, I decided to remove it. Besides I could not figure out the actual visitors to my site and the pingbacks!

Hope everyone would give this new release a try as well. I have done a bit of tweaks to make blogging from moBlog easier and given more power to authors to post better formatted posts. I personally am not very fond of the text editors that are being used on moBlog, but in the absense of a better, more powerful and FREE editor control that can be used on .NETCF, I am left with no other alternatives. If someone can point me towards an editor that can be used,  I’ll be happy to incorporate that into moBlog.

Please download release 2.2 from HERE

Happy moBile Blogging with moBlog!

I have been an ardent and a loyal Windows Mobile user. There were several reasons for this loyalty. I come from a development background that is heavily biased towards Microsoft (read .NET). With this back ground I found it quite easy to develop a few applications for the Windows Mobile platform using .NETCF. So whenever I had the option to upgrade my mobile, I went for a Windows Mobile device.

But since I was given a Blackberry Curve in my current job I have fallen in love with the Blackberry. One of the facts that I love about it is the fact that the OS is more biased towards the usual phone style. Windows Mobile OS is more biased towards the usual computer navigation style.

And the other thing is it is definitely a lot better for Email on the GO. With Windows Mobile, you need to initiate an operation to check for new Mail. I know there are solutions to provide Push Email on Windows MObile as well, but these usually require special software and additional configurations to get them to work. At least I never could get Push Email to work on my earlier Windows Mobile device.

And the BB is a lot lighter and sleeker than most of the Windows Mobile devices. It is definitely aesthetically more pleasing than the Windows Mobile device I had and a hell of a lot lighter.

My next step is to port my mobile application development knowledge to the BB platform so I can write a few apps for the device. Most of the applications that were a bit hard to find for the Windows Mobile devices were easy to find for the BB. But still there are a few that I could not still find. So hopefully I will be able to fill that gap, starting off with the applications that I would like to have on my BB!

My only hope was that there was some kind of an emulator which allows to run .NETCF applications on the BB. Now that would be superb. That way, I wont have to learn java to write apps for my BB. Do you know of anything like that?

The government did the inevitable last night. They raised petrol and diesel prices with effect from this morning. Petrol has gone up by Rs. 30 a litre! Quite a large price increase by any means.

I am not naive enough to blame it on the government alone. I know the price of crude oil has been rising sharply in the wold market and this move was inevitable. But for the average Sri Lankan this is a huge blow. The cascading effect of these fuel price increases will result in everything going up in price.

Private bus owners are already hinting that they need to increase the bus fares or they’ll go on strike. The prices of the essential items (depending on what your needs are) will go up as there is not much of a control on those.

I for one will have to take on several cut backs. First will be on my travelling and travelling patterns. I will have to start hitching more rides with my wife. My recently acquired VW Bora will spend more time in the Garage at home rather than on the road! And depending on what prices other commodities reach on the open markets, other creature comforts will also be cut back.

I am determined to stick in this country. I am not about to run away from here in search of greener pastures overseas.  So in that respect, I am ready to let go of some of my comforts in that endeavor. Let’s see where we are going to end up in. In that sense, where the whole world will end up in.

I discovered this morning that my mobile was disconnected due to my bill exceeding the credit limit. Since I had some things to be done in the office and had no time to go out to make a payment, I chose to pay online through www.dialog.lk web site.

So I made a payment that was adequatete and was waiting for my phone to be reconnected. Since it was taking way too long, I decided to check up with Dialog’s online customer support. (I had no way of calling the hotline as well).

To my horror they told me that they cannot see the payment I have made. It had been about two hours by then and I had recieved a payment confirmation from the dialog website. But unfortunately I had not written down the transaction id nor had I taken a printout.

But since getting my connection up was really critical for me, I made another payment online. Same story, they could not see it on their side. This time I had the transaction id, but still they could not trace it! And guess what, they told me it’ll take 24 hours for the line to get connected!!! 24 Hours??? C’mon, online payments are meant to be instantaneous.

But I guess in our part of the world, online means 24 hours! Man, was I disappointed to hear this from a company touting to be on the cutting edge of technology. But yet, their systems seem to be operating offline!

A word has to be said about the Sampath Bank Payment Gateway that they are using. It is too damn slow! And once after I paid the confirm button to make the payment, there was a time out on the server. So I was lost and had no idea whether my payment had gone through or not. But in any case I went back and made the payment again. Sampath Banks online banking solution is another story. It shows me credit card transactions as of last evening and even in that list, some transactions that I had made days ago are missing. At some point they will suddenly appear on it! You cannot really rely on it for an accuratete picture either!

So now I don’t know whether I have ended up making three payments instead of one. I guess these companies and banks that claim they are on the cutting edge and connected and online, need to look at their systems and their integrations to see whether they are as good as they claim.

A couple of weeks ago I got a new laptop from office. It is a Dell Latitude D630 running Vista Business. I didn’t get much time to setup the machine, just did the bare essentials to do my day to day work. And during the last long weekend, since I had sometime in my hands, I started setting up my development environments on it.

I started off with Visual Studio 2003 as the main solution that I need to support on my new job is a ASP.NET 1.1 application. Through officially VS2003 is not supported on Vista, I managed to install and run it on my machine. I still havent done any debugging or anything yet, but hope I wont face much issues. In case I do, i do have another laptop running Windows XP, on which I have installed VS2003.

Then came my favourite IDE, VS2005. Installed the Professional Edition and WM5 SDK’s and tried to do some changes to moBlog. Managed to do the changes, but was not able to test it as I could not get the emulator to connect to the Internet. Also, since I have switched my mobile also to a Blackberry I did not have a device to test it on either.

Ended up installing an untold number of software on my laptop including Virtual PC, patches, WM6 SDK’s, you name it. But still I cannot get my emulator to connect to the Internet. The Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) only started to recognize the cradling of the emulator after I installed MS Virtual PC. Now, when I cradle the emulator, WMDC recognizes and initiated a connection. But still I cannot browse the Internet from the emulator.

When I try to browse a web site from it, I get a message saying that “Page cannot be found. Check the name and try again”. From moBlog, I get a exception saying that the remote host name cannot be resolved. I know the issue is with the connectivity between the emulator and machine. But right now I have run out of ideas. And I could not find much information on the Internet regarding connecting emulators to Internet using WMDC. All the articles refer to ActiveSync. But the information is straight forward enough to apply to WMDC, unless there are any specific things that you need to do with WMDC.

Any ideas or suggestions are welcome!

UPDATE: I allowed WMDHost (C:\Windows\WindowsMobile\WmdHost.exe) through the firewall and it happened to solve the problem.  Voila! Now my .NETCF programs can connect to the Internet through the Emulator!

Happy Wesak everyone. At least those of you who are in Sri Lanka are enjoying an extended weekend of 4 days this weekend. Some of you have been lucky enough to go out of Colombo. But I am in Colombo for several reasons as there were a few things we had to attend over the weekend.

To start off with there was a ‘bana’ and an alms giving on Friday and Saturday. Then there was Vidara and Thedara’s birthday party. Then there is the fact that my parent company being in the US, requiring me to be in Colombo with broadband connectivity in order to support thier operations. This is one of the things that I will have to do, working on US calendar as my head office. Something I figured would nt be much of a hassle. But in the long run I will have to get some Sri Lankan holidays, at least ones like the Sinhala New Year.

Coming back to Wesak, the recent bomb blast and the security situation in the country will put in a lot of restrictions on the Wesak celebrations. At least people will be a bit reluctant to travel to see the wesak celebrations due to security fears. Even my mother did not go to the usual temple that she goes to obtain SIL as today there is some big program with a lot of big shots in attendance and hence she was scared about being at a locations which is a prime target.

So on this noble day my wish is for peace in this paradise island. May we be allowed to celebrate wesak in  peace and harmony next year wihout the fear of bombs and loss of life!

I changed jobs! Well it’s a bit more than changing just the job, I kind of changed careers. I was working as a Project Manager for a little over 4 years now. I have had many wonderful experiences as a PM as well as a few experiences are not so fond memories. But the thing was I was getting a bit too used to the routine of being a PM. If there is anything that I hate, that is routine.

So I took up a job as an IT manager for a company whose primary business is not IT! That is a change for me since my last two jobs were in IT companies. And I was more or less involved in technical aspects of the job and I wanted to move on to more operational role. That I got and I took up the responsibility.

There was somewhat of a hesitation in the decision process. Since I was in a permanent job and had a few financial obligations such as a mortgage and a lease, getting on board in a start up operation and taking up the challenge of setting up the operation involved a bit of thinking on my part. But eventually I decided to take it up as it matched my career aspirations.

To be honest I am more of a generalist. I am not someone who likes togo very deep into technologies. I like to keep pace with the developments on the technological front, but not so much into the level of nuts and bolts. So this new opening that came my way paved a path for me to take up a more general path.

Let’s see what the future holds!

 

Dear Thaththi,

I remember that day, four years ago. The day that changed our lives in a flash. Can’t imagine how time flies and how we coped up. But life goes on and we have come to terms! Thought I’d write a short note in your memory!

I am what I am today, because of what you made of me. The values you instilled and the love you bestowed. You taught me to live by principles and values. You taught me that knowledge is more important than money. You taught me love is unconditional. You taught me the virtue of patience (I was a brat and a half, wasn’t I?). Above all, you taught me what a father should be to a child!

Today, when I stand in front of my kid, I ask myself, is this how thaththa dealt with me. Because I know, if I parent my kid, the way you parented me, nothing can ever go wrong!

It’s been four years since you took your leave from us. The gods must have thought that your place was among them rather than among us! But what they failed to see was the impact it would have on us, how we would go on without you around!

We depended on you for everything. The mere fact that you were around was so much of a relief, we knew you would be there to put things right, if we messed up! Now that we are left to mend for our selves, I had no idea of the weight you were shouldering. Responsibilities you bore, with so much ease, you made it look like it was a breeze. Once they fell on our shoulders only did we realize the breadth and depth of them all. But with the grooming we received from you, we are managing!

We are all doing good Thaththi. I am sure you will be proud of us all. Then again, you must be knowing that! You gave us what it takes to live honourably and justly in this world. It wasn’t money or assets. But it was an education!

I am not wishing you the bliss of Nirvana purely for selfish reasons. That is because I want you as my father in my journey through Sansara!

Till we meet again,
Loku Putha

Since I got my hands on a Blackberry Curve yesterday, I was looking for ways to setting it up. The initial tasks included, getting my phone book into it. ALl my attempts to transfer my contacts from my Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox 830 through Bluetooth failed as the two devices could not identify each others services. The pairing worked fine but no transfers were done.

Then the next option was to use the software that came with my Blackberry, the Desktop Software. The CD had version 4.2.2 in it and all my attempts to install it, even after disabling UAC failed with a “Failed to Run VBScript custom actions” error message (or something like that).

Then browsing through I figured out that the error could be with the vbScript on my Vista machine and had not so much to do with the Blackberry software. So the suggested solutions were to register vbscript DLL. To do that:

1. Locate VBScript.dll file on your machine. Mine was in Windows/System32 folder
2. To to All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt, right click on it and chose “Run As Administrator”
3. Then navigate to the folder where the VBScript.dll file is residing (using cd commands)
4. Run the following command: regsvr32 vbscript.dll

If your installation goes without a hitch you’ll get an error message saying that it was successfully registered.

Now run your Blackberry Desktop software. It should run without a hitch. Just make sure that UAC is turned off. I know Vista means to do good with UAC, but it seems to be messing with a lot of software out there. So I keep that permanently switched off, unless I am on a public WiFi hotspot.

Lately, all my blogging had been related to moBlog. This blog was supposed to be my personal blog, but for the past month or so, it was more like the official blog of moBlog. It’s time to re-claim my blog! I am thinking about getting moBlog its own blog!

Anyways, on the personal side, the past few weeks been a bit hectic with work. Been spending quite a lot of time at client sites. A lot of my projects have come to the implementation stages, so there’s a bit of running around to do.

Lushi has been having a hectic time too. She seems to be getting landed with a lot of work, some of which I feel are outside her scope of work. But then, that’s what you get when you prove your capability! So goes the saying, if you want something done, give it to the busiest person! That’s exactly what’s been happening on her work front.

Little Dinara is amazing. She has started to walk and she just can’t seem to get enough of it. As much as it is an exercise to all the rest of us, she doesn’t seem to be getting fed up of walking and running about. The thing is, she is so fast and agile, it is very difficult to keep up with her.

My week days has been a bit hectic and that has resulted in the time spent with Lushi and Dinara coming to a minimum. I am trying to carve out some time exclusively for them, and more than that, to spend the little time spent with them, completely on them. I know I still have not perfected this art, but that’s what I am trying to get to. Quality over Quantity!

Other than that, I have had this craze to buy a Ford Capri MK1. Went and saw one, seems to be in a pretty good condition but the price is absurd. Then there is one which seems to be of a reasonable price, but it is minus its wheels. Now I know I wont find a Capri for the price I have in mind which is in perfect condition. I am still trying to make up my mind whether I want to wrestle with an old car. I like the idea of getting an old car. I just dont like the idea of spending my tille free time in garages!

moBlog has had a pretty good ride. There has been about 1000 downloads of both Pocket PC and Smartphone versions.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I fixed the issues and performed a limited testing. By limited what I meant was the PPC version was tested on a device, but the Smartphone version was only tested on the emulator.

So if you want to test the new and improved moBlog, please download the required versions from the links in this page.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

This post is to test the latest enhancements for moBlog for Smartphone with wordpress.com.

These enhancements came about as a result of listening to user feedback. Though moBlog only has a small user base, they have been pretty active in using the application, suggesting improvements and finding bugs, all of which would not have been possible, specially with the Smartphone version as I do not own an actual device.

I was earlier paranoid about releasing the software as I had not tested it on an actual device. But after reading “Getting Real” by 37Signals and also due to the limitation of me not owning a Smartphone device I was compelled to release it only after testing it on the emulator. And the user community has been wonderful in reporting issues and suggesting improvements for the application after test driving it in various devices.

Thank you Nick, Pat and all the others for finding bugs and suggesting improvements. Please do keep on sending your suggestions.

Let’s make moBlog THE mobile blogging software for Windows Mobile!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

There were several requests for a Smart Phone version of moBlog. Since the original moBlog application was designed for the Pocket PC’s form factor and it had used a few PPC controls, it was not working on Smartphones. And I heard your requests for a smartphone edition of moBlog and today I am happy to announce the release of the moBlog Smpartphone Edition!

I know this release was a little bit behind the PPC editions, but the reason was that I did not want to release a stripped down edition for the Smartphones. This released edition supports all the features of the moBlog including support for embedding images for blog posts!

So those of you who were using smartphones, go ahead, give it a spin and let me know what you think.

Get moBlog for Smartphones here

moBlog 2.1.0 had an error when you were trying to setup a profile for your Blogger.com account. This was due to a careless error on my part. Thanks so much to Hans and Pat who pointed out the error to me. I have now fixed it and have released version 2.1.1.

Enjoy moBlog with photo blogging support!

moBlog now supports Photo Blogging for WordPress and Blogger platforms!

It was the most requested feature for moBlog! Support for posting photos taken with device camera’s. As far as I know there aren’t that many mobile blogging applications that support Photo Blogging! Hope this feature will make moBlog THE mobile blogging application!

All you smartphone users, yes I hear you. You need a moBlog version that works on Smartphones! Hey, I’m on it! Your patience will be rewarded pretty soon! Now that moBlog is complete with photo blogging, I am on the task of converting it to work on Smartphones!

As usual, moBlog is still in beta. So please let me know if you come across any issues or have any comments! Looking forward to hearing from all of you!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

The most requested feature for moBlog has been the ability to upload photos from the devices. Since most devices are equipped with a camera it makes perfect sense to enable photo blogging on moBlog as it will give people a quick way to get their photos in the devices to their blogs.

Of the blogging platforms that moBlog the easiest to get photo blogging working on was the on WordPress. WordPress supports Metaweblog API’s newMediaObject method and it worked like a charm. You can see the first photo uploaded from moBlog on the previous post!

Blogger now hosts the photos uploaded to the blogger.com blogs on Picasa Web Albums. The documentation vaguely mentioned something about Blogger creating a default album on Picasa for Blogger photos, but this web album is not accessible via the API. Hence I devised a crude method of creating an album for moBlog and uploading the photos to that album!

But the biggest disappointment was Live Spaces. Though they support Metaweblog API, their support of that is limited. Specifically they do not support the newMediaObject method. That was a pretty bad decision from the Live Spaces team. If they support a particular API, either MetaWebLog API or ATOM API, they have to support it completely. To make matters worse they do not provide any API to upload photos to the Live Spaces Blog.

I know that Windows Live Writer supports uploading photos to Live Spaces blog posts and similar to Google approach, those photos are stored in a seperate album on Live Spaces. But my problem was I was not able to find any documentation on the approach taken by Live Writer.

In any case, a new version of moBlog will be released in a couple of days with photo blogging support on Blogger and WordPress blogs. Along with that I will be releasing a few more enhancements to the post composition screen with the option to decorate the body of the blog posts.

Look forward to an enhanced moBlog!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Testing photo blogging from moBlog!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

I have been thinking about what to do next with moBlog. Since the initial release and the subsequent bug fixed version, I have been thinking about where I wanted to take moBlog.

There have been a particular feature request from the those who gave it a try. It is to enable support for posting images to their blogs. Since most of the devices come equipped with a camera this makes perfect sense as it will be great to post those pictures that you capture from your phone. Actually it was something that I also thought of doing, even initially, but differed as I wanted to get the application out as soon as possible. So it is definitely at the top of planned features list.

I have a few other features that I wanted to incorporate as well. If you have used moBlog with WordPress or Livespaces you would have noticed that moBlog currently does not support tags (or labels) for that. Tags are only supported for Blogger posts. This is because I could not figure out, at least with the client code I was using for MetaWebLog API, how to pass the Tags to the API. So this is something I want to incorporate on to a next version: option to tag wordpress/livespaces posts.

Currently moBlog is a .NET Compact Framework application. This deprives all those non Windows Mobile device users of the option to use a great mobile blogging application (do you notice me blowing my own horn here??). So I was thinking about hacking out a moBlog J2ME version as well! Now that is easier said than being done as I have not coded Java in a long long time, let alone tackle the intricacies of J2ME as well. But I think that will be a pretty good challenge for me to get on to a bit of Java coding. I am hoping that coding on Java has become as easy as it is to code on .NET. After all, Java lobby kept on saying that C# was a copy of Java, so I am hoping that those similarities will work in favor for me, coming from a C# background.

But what I actually do next will more or less depend on the user feedback that I get over the next couple of days. Either way, I think an enhanced version for WM with option to upload images will come out way before any J2ME  version sees the light of the day.  But if the demand for a J2ME version out weighs the enhancements for the WM version, I might consider dedicating my time on to that. What do you say?

If you have installed moBlog on your devices you would have noticed that moBlog installs with the default program icon for Windows Mobile. There are is one BIG reason for that. I tried coming up with a logo and I wasn’t happy with what I came up with at all. You might say that I am a completely right-handed person, not arty at all!

But I am pretty sure there are plenty of talented, creative and arty guys out there. This is an open invitation to those. If you have a few minutes to spare, please design a logo for moBlog. Create something unique and out of this world! And if I use your logo, I will give you credits for the logo both on this blog as well as on the program as well.

So put on your creative hats and come up with a logo for moBlog!

Since the release of moBlog most of the queries were with how to setup the application. It was evident that a help page was the order of the day.

Today I took the time to write a brief help page on setting up profiles, and also on settings to connect through a Proxy Server (in case you didn’t know, moBlog has support for connection through a Proxy Server!). Please find the help page here (moBlog Help)

As always any comments are welcome, good or bad!

moBlog has had a another release within the space of 2 days.

Since the initial release of moBlog, there has been over 150 downloads. Thank you for all those who gave it a spin. And a couple of bugs were also reported. As a token of appreciation to all those who gave it a spin, I fixed the bugs as quickly as possible and made another release, in order to minimize the inconveniences.

So what’s new with moBlog 2.0.3?

• Bug Fix - There was a bug when you tried to open a saved post which had categories selected. This has now been fixed.
• Bug Fix - When saved posts were opened, the paragraph breaks were lost. This has now been fixed.
• Enhancement - An option to delete a saved profile.

Give this new version a spin and let me know what you think.

Happy mobile blogging!

moBlog has had about 140 downloads by now. A few people had left comments asking about how to set up moBlog as well as two bug reports.

I have found and fixed one bug that was reported, but the other I have not been able to simulate. Hopefully, I would be able to simulate the issue without inconviniencing the users!

Well this is another posting from moBlog, while in the process of testing the bug fixes!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

msmobiles.com has just published a news item about the release of moBlog. You can find it here.

Today seems to be my release day!

Just released a new enhanced version of GMobileSync (1.3.6) which now has Proxy Support as well as a few bug fixes.

One major bug was due to Who.Rel being a required property since of late on GData API. GMS had not implemented this property before but since our last release updating GCal was failing since Who/Rel was made a required parameter. That is now fixed with 1.3.6 so your syncs should work like a charm!

Go ahead and grab yourselves the latest release and be in Sync with your WM Devices and GCAL!

Happy holidays!

It is official! Though it is in beta, moBlog is released. I have created a page for it on this blog.

Those who wanted to give it  a spin, please go ahead and let me know what you think. I would love to hear your feedback and comments. Looking forward to those!