Swing Best Practices

Very handy, a resourceful wiki for best practices in Swing.

Cell ID Coverage

From Positioning Emergency Callers in Switzerland the GSM cell coverage in the center of downtown Zürich. In Switzerland 41% of Radio Cells have a radius of 1km or less (probably due to the swiss high density of population).

Mobile Multiplayer Games, Bandwidth and Latency

Doug Twilleager rightly points out in Mobile Multiplayer Games and 3G, that 3G won’t necessarily bring multiplayer mobile games to a higher level. Because the bottleneck for such mobile applications is not the bandwidth but the latency. And, the latency on a 3G network still has a long ways to go.

On 2G networks, expect a ~1 second latency, if HTTP must be used, then think more of ~5 second latency. In lab UMTS produces >100ms latency, but generically “3Gâ€? doesn’t solve all problems. After deployment expect ~500ms latency. (figures taken from Greg Costikyan presentation on Designing Mobile Games)

Intermittence Planifiée

l’intermittence planifiée consiste à assumer que dans certaines régions que la connectivité est à la fois impossible et trop onéreuse. Le projet DakNet en Inde en est une application.

DakNet consiste à installer des kiosques (consoles dotées d’un écran, d’un clavier et d’un processeur central) dans des villages éloignés. Ils ne sont pas connectés directement à l’internet mais ils sont dotés d’une antenne WiFi qui assure la communication dans un rayon de quelques mètres. Les habitants peuvent venir y écrire leurs courriels ou y enregistrer des courts messages vidéo.

Les bus qui assurent la liaison avec le chef lieu sont eux aussi équipés d’un ordinateur et d’une antenne WiFi. Quand ils passent par le village, près du kiosque fixe, une connexion s’établit automatiquement. Les messages enregistrés par les villageois sont téléchargés sur l’ordinateur du bus alors que les réponses à ceux des jours précédents sont envoyées au kiosque fixe sur lequel les habitants du village pourront venir les consulter.

Bizarre que cela ne soit appliqué uniquement au tiers monde. Les pays “e-ready” ont des réseaux denses mais l’accès à l’Internet est intermittent (souvent parce que trop onéreux comme les hotspots Swisscom) pour les personnes mobiles.

The 2005 e-Readiness Rankings

The Economist’s e-readiness rankings 2005 measure a country’s accumulated telecoms and computer infrastructure, and accord it the heaviest weight of all e-readiness determinants. The criteria they use also evolve with the infrastructure itself: this year hey have increased the importance of broadband (both fixed and mobile), which is why many e-ready leaders (including Switzerland topping at rank 4) have seen their rankings rise. Last year, Switzerland was singled out for its less effective (in comparison with Scandinavia), decentralised approach to e-business development. This year, however, our emphasis on next-generation infrastructure, security and ICT investment have all helped to make Switzerland our fastest gainer.
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Python for GSM Location-based Prototyping

I used the Python for Series 60 and this little script that plays with the location module to show basic GSM location info. The location module offers an API to retrieves GSM location information: Mobile Country Code, Mobile Network Code, Location Area Code, and Cell Id. Very handy to do quick prototyping of GSM based positionning applications.

Spatial Annotation in Geneva

I quickly hacked my J2ME code of ShoutSpace to make it work in Geneva. Features: post, view and reply to “shouts”.

ShoutSpace Goes Mobile

I am still on the j2ME wagon and enjoying it. It took me little time reuse my J2SE code and write a J2ME client for ShoutSpace (below running on PocketPC, Nokia 3650 (MIDP1) and 6630 (MIDP2) and . It only visualizes the messages, but it looks rather trivial to move forward, the fun being to do GSM positioning soon.

ShoutSpace Notebook Edition

I finished implementing the basic features of the ShoutSpace notebook edition. Navigating, self-positioning of the posts and replies, filtering and zooming. It runs perfectly well on Win, Linux and MacOS with Java 1.4 and above.

Context-Aware Mobile Hypermedia Systems

Context-Aware Mobile Hypermedia Systems is a PhD Progress report written by Frank Allan Hansen on context-aware mobile hypermedia system (context aware browsing, search, annotations and linking). I was more interested in the way he did his work than the output itslef. He describes the different approaches to prototyping (exploratory, experimental and evolutionary) and the actual architecture and model of his HyCon service. He mentions having to drop the use of SVG and web service on the J2Me edition. He finishes by envision ways to empower the user for such context-aware systems. Finding the right balance between user controallble applications and automatically adapting systems.