Tag: Lifeblog

Using Symbian Perl

I’ve been playing with Jarkko Hietaniemi’s port of Perl for Series 60 Symbian devices on my Nokia 7610.

There is a lot of work to be done on it still, but it works, and I can run simple Perl scripts.

Perl running on a Nokia 7610 phone

The screenshot above show’s me running a simple script to list the contents of the Lifeblog directory on my series 7610 phone. Here’s the code that was run on the phone to generate the listing.


my $directory = "C:\system\Data\lifeblog\";
print "$directoryn";
opendir(DIR,$directory);
foreach my $file (readdir(DIR)) {
print "$filen";
}
closedir(DIR);
sleep(5);

As you can see it’s simple stuff. I added the sleep(5) at the end just to allow me to take a screenshot as when the script has been run it prompts you to press any key to exit. In this case, the screenshot key, caused an exit. 🙂

It may not look much, but it’s bloody exciting stuff for me. The possibility of running decent Perl applications on my phone has me salivating in anticipation of the next release. At present the version out there (0.1.0) doesn’t offer any interface into the native Symbian libraries from Perl, but I’m sure that will be changing soon.

It’s easy to write simple scripts, as all I had to do for this one was to just drop it into the Perl directory on my memory card (via Nokai PC Suite) and use the PerlApp application supplied in the Symbian distribution.

The Python guys are luckier to have a fuller featured release of their favourite scripting language, but watch out, the Perl Mongers are coming!

Lifeblog Proxy Idea

Sitting in a Lifeblog debrief earlier, one thing that struck me was that others had the same problem as me regarding wanting to post to multiple blogs.

It seems most would like to seperate a work blog from a personal blog, but unless it’s hosted on the same Typepad account for example, Lifeblog doesn’t let you do this. From a service point a of view it’s a one to one match.

Posting on Lifeblog

Sitting there, my mind was mulling the problem over, and it would appear that a simple Lifeblog proxy would solve the problem. If blogs are hosted on the same service and accessible by the same username and password, Lifeblog lets you post to different blogs. Why not just build a service that can proxy between various Lifeblog compatible blogs, so you wouldn’t have to host them all together.

Posting on Lifeblog via a proxy

So how may this work from a technical perspective.

Well Lifeblog posts using a flavour of the Atom protocol. For security it uses WSSE encryption on the posts. This means that the proxy would need to it’s own username and password to authenticate against when talking to Lifeblog. The various blogs it would be proxying onto would also need different username and passwords, and proxy would have to insert these as it passes the post onto the relevant blog. We could potentially store all the blogs we’re allowing posts to in an XML config file. For example…

<blogs>
<blog>
<name>My Blog</name>
<url>http://work.blog.com/post.pl</url>
<username>robertprice</username>
<password>secret</password>
</blog>
<blog>
<name>My Blog 2</name>
<url>http://my.website.com/post.pl</url>
<username>rob</username>
<password>lifeblog</password>
</blog>
</blogs>

Here all the blogs are listed, along with their name, posting url, username and password. The proxy would take this list and return a localised list of blogs that when posted to, would just pass the relevant data across. So this means there are two areas to break the proxy down into.

First, the list of blogs. This reads the XML and returns a list of localised blogs and posting URL’s that Lifeblog can use to upload content.

Secondly, the actual localised posting URL needs to remove the Lifeblog WSSE authentication, and replace it with the correct username and password for the real blog before passing it on to the real upload URL.

It could be as simple as that. Maybe I’ll mock something up in Perl to test the theory out.

Anyway, who’s to say this just has to proxy Lifeblog. It could alternatively be a gateway that could translate into one of the common blogging API’s, instantly opening up Lifeblog to millions more users. Now that would be cool!

UPDATE 23/04/05

Hugo emailed me to say Lifeblog 1.6 can handle some of what I have suggested…

Actually, Lifeblog 1.6 can have post to more than one account, and is
available for the Nokia 6630, 6680, 6681, 6682. Unfortunately Lifeblog
1.5 (for 7610, 6670, 6260, 3230) can only post to one blog. And the PC
can post to multiple accounts.

Lifeblog – Review and Thoughts

I’ve been lucky enough to have taken part in a Lifeblog trail for Nokia in the UK over the past few weeks.

We were given a lovely new Nokia 6630 phone (that unfortunately we have to return at the end of the trial), equipped with Lifeblog and just asked to evaluate it.

Here are my thoughts, experiences and opinions on using Lifeblog.

Well firstly Lifeblog is really two pieces of software. One part runs on your series 60 based smartphone and the other runs on a fairly high spec PC running Windows. The phone stores your messages, photos, videos, etc until you can sync up with a PC to download them. I’ll cover each part separately, then as a whole.

The phone based software is excellent. All content appears in Lifeblog automatically. So I now no longer have to open various different applications to see different content. Lifeblog captures SMS and MMS messages both sent and received. It also captures any photos or videos I take. Content is kept in order, so I can cycle through by day and see all my data in order. This is great at keeping messages in context.

Best of all is the ability to post to a blog directly from the phone handset. Because Lifeblog is so well linked into the way the phone works, it means I can quickly select the content I want to blog about, and get it up on my site very rapidly. Behind the scenes, Lifeblog uses a flavour of the Atom protocol to communicate with the blog. Six Apart‘s Typepad service is supported by default, but other services are coming on stream now with a Lifeblog plugin available for Moveable Type, and a gateway into Flickr. I was even able to link Lifeblog into my own homebrew Perl based blogging system. Going over my website, you’ll probably see the posts I’ve sent via Lifeblog as I include a little strapline at the bottom of each entry highlighting the fact.

From a social point of view, as I always have my phone with me, I can blog wherever and whenever I like. It’s great that the high end Nokia phones have megapixel cameras as the images are so sharp. Lifeblog does shrink the image when posting to the web, but that’s just great, it saves me money in data charges. It’s amazing to be able just point the phone at something, and know it’ll be online a minute a later. I’ve been showing off this ability to the guys at work to much excitement.

Now for the PC side of Lifeblog…

Unfortunately this is where I’ve been having some problems. The concept is great, but its current incarnation still needs a bit of work done on it. For example, it won’t run on my 1ghz laptop. It keeps asking to update DirectX, even though I’m on the latest version. This is a shame as it’s my main machine. However, it will run on my office desktop machine, so I can share my experiences of that.

The PC version of Lifeblog takes over the whole screen when linked in. Microsoft Windows disappears and Lifeblog takes over.

The screen looks beautiful, and has the same timeline experience as the mobile version, though it contains everything that was ever in your handset. It’s great being able to scan back and see old message and photos being kept in order. There is also the ability to post to a blog from here as well, though I’ve not actually tried that, being such a fan of posting from the handset.

It’s easy to sync between the PC and the mobile phone. It just uses Nokia’s existing PC Suite software to connect up and from there it’s just an option on the menu to copy everything across. Very simple. During data transfer, Lifeblog show’s you the content coming across in real time on the screen.

Now for the overall take on Lifeblog.

I think it’s bloody brilliant. Nokia’s concept of a Digital Shoebox works really well. It’s a place to keep all that content that may otherwise be lost or backed up in various places all together. As the mobile phone takes a central role in modern lifestyles, the ability to automatically use it as a multimedia diary is very powerful.

The downside is the software needs a powerful PC to run on. This will probably be addressed as the software matures and older computers are replaced. The other side is the cost. I’ve been lucky at being able to use a full version as part of the trial instead of having to pay for it. The price point is a little too high I’d say at present, but a reduction here would really boost uptake.

There is a free version of Lifeblog available from Nokia that can store up to 200 items. If you have a compatible phone, I’d really urge anyone to give it a try. Beware though, it can be addictive 🙂

This review was based on Lifeblog 1.5.