Just got myself a cool new DVD player: a Kiss DP-558. DVD player is a bit of an understatement, it has a network connection, EPG, plays movies/music/pictures from connected machines, records to on board hard disk, time shirt, and more. Really cool, but there are some flaws in the firmware. Kiss is working on that and let's hope for the best.

On other machines in the network that serve music, movies or images you need a piece of software. An example of this software is JLink. It works pretty well, there was a flaw in the interpretation of m3u playlists, but luckily the (Java) source code is included so I was able to fix that in a few minutes (classical hard coding of windows file separator which breaks on *nix).

All in all a pretty cool toy.

The 0.0.2 version of BlogMe is available for download. This version allows you to post messages to Blog Servers that support the Blogger API (e.g. http://www.blogger.com) or the Pebble's enhancements on this API. For Pebble it also support the title and category fields.

It's been a while since I posted, but that doesn't mean nothing happened ;-) The current version of BlogMe is able to post messages to both Pebble and Blogger.com blogs. Not a big deal since Pebble is a extension of the Blogger API. One of the extensions of Pebble is that you can specify a title and I believe it is also possible to specify categories. Will check that and if true, that will become part of BlogMe.

I did spent some time on getting unit testing for BlogMe running. Found J2MEUnit at sourceforge.net and that does help. Unfortunately it does not provide the same features as jUnit. For some things that understandable (in J2ME there is no reflection available), but other things should be possible. E.g. to run the tests in an automated way such that you can execute them in for example nightly builds. Or generation of reports in junit XML format, such that you can use the standard junit report generation tools for it to generate HTML versions of it. I did not spent to much time on investigating this yet, but might do that in the future.

Hello Blog!

This is the first post from my J2ME base blog client running on a Treo 600. Ain't it cool? Still lot's of work to do (the GUI is hacked together an crappy) but the communication works.

I was asking Simon Brown for some details on the Blogger API and he pointed me to another effort to create a J2ME based blogger. Funny to notice how hard it is to come up with someting no one else did yet...

The AtomAPI webservice for blogging also seems one of the candicate interfaces to support and since JSR172 J2METM Web Services Specificationis out, it should be possible to support this interface also. Unfortunately is it not that simple. I ran the WSDL thru the sub generator of the WTK and it fails reporting someting about an unknown type. I'll need to dig into this a bit more, but suspect that JSR172 does not support all types required by the AtomAPI.

Ok, time for some fun. In the day job I'm mostly working on server side Java stuff, usually J2EE based. Nice, but not as sexy as those cool smartphones like the Treo 600. Recently a Java runtime has become available for Palm based devices, the J2ME Wireless Toolkit seems like an OK toolkit to build it, so let's do it ;-)

Installation of the runtime on my Treo 600 was no problem. The toolkit did have some weird behaviour that seems to be dependent on the network config. See this post in the J2ME deleoper forum for details. The problem is not resolved yet.

Initially I think I'll focus on the blogger API, simply because it is supported by the blog application I use (Pebble). Later on it should also support other blog APIs.