The amazing outdoor lounge at Singapore airport. (For some silly reason Gu's flying in, so I had to meet him there - i's quite a trek from the beach! I's wonderful being so close to where I grew up, breathing in this familiar warm air.
Archive for the 'Moblog' Category Page 2 of 2
Note: You will need a recent version of QuickTime installed in order to view the mobile video entries.
Decided to take a rest in Singapore and bumped into Guy!
[Somewhere in the South Atlantic Ocean...] Man, it's freezing out here! I've been swimming non-stop for five days now, since I left Brighton on Monday on course for Australia. I'm beginning to think that perhaps this wasn't the best idea (not to mention that it's terribly difficult to type on this phone with one hand while trying to swim with the other.) But I have to keep moving if I want to make it there on Monday to meet up with Guy and Grant, my roomies during MXDU. I think I just passed Cape Point so hopefully things will be a little warmer in the Indian Ocean. I'm going to keep this short... the fish around here seem to be friendly for the most part but I don't want to take any chances. I may not be able to answer emails until Monday... 
Only in Brighton - a fire juggler on a typical working day.
Note: You will need a recent version of QuickTime installed in order to view the mobile video entries.
MXDU may still be a over a week away but this is Australia we're talking about... it'll take some time to get there, surely!
And her's the proof, Emilie hard at work on the blog! Oh, i's so hard not to abuse this new moblog feature 
It's woooorking!
One of the biggest problems with troubleshooting a gateway like this is seeing the responses being sent (since they're being sent to the phone.) I had hacked in a few debug messages yesterday that were getting emailed to me but I still couldn't see the actual response being sent back to the phone. I knew instinctively that there was a problem with the response string and I knew it was probably due to a runtime error in the PHP code but I couldn't see what it was.
Enter the poster.php file to save the day.
This little file lets you call the MMS gateway with an MMS message from your computer and so any responses that are sent by the gateway are also sent to your computer. Five minutes after running it for the first time, the two dependency-related bugs that had arisen during the b2 integration were fixed and the gateway was purring like a kitten!
The Moblog will be put through its paces in Australia as I will be posting pictures and videos live from MXDU.
Do't you just hate it when this happens? Yo're in a train/plane/hot air balloon, etc. and try to wake your PC up from its slumber and it does't. So you hold down the power key until it turns off then restart it... All the while hoping you wo't get, well, this!
I decided to take things easy yesterday, after a tiring but very successful two weeks with the Hands On courses (more on that later) and hack up my blog so I could post pictures and videos to it from my phone (a Nokia 7610 I got so I could play with FlashLite on it before deciding that life is just too short to go back to writing anything in Flash 4 syntax.)
I started out by integrating Stefan Hellkvist's excellent MMS Diary module into the site -- initially thinking I'd have the Moblog as a separate section. I got that working (you can see it here) but quickly realized that it would be a shame that my posts wouldn't show up in the FlashAnt RSS and that users couldn't comment on them. I could have hacked said functionality into the new module but I didn't want to duplicate what b2 already does (or create a Frankenstein's monster of sorts) so I decided to full integrate the MMS/moblog feature into b2. It was actually not too difficult.
I had it working (at around 2am last night) to the point where I posted a test video (don't ask -- it was late!) and a test image and then hit the sack... Only to wake up to six posts (or was it eight?) this morning. Apparently, there's something wrong with the response my phone is getting that makes it think that the MMS was unsuccessful and the phone queues these unsuccessful attempts for resend. In effect, my phone kept spamming the site every so often, throughout the night!
My apologies to any aggregators this may have messed with. I should have the response message working correctly this morning so that won't happen again!
In the process of integrating MMS Diary into b2, I was able to add a few neat features to it. In the Moblog-as-separate section version, I added paging and in general I hacked it so it can now show 3gpp Video correctly (you need the Quicktime plugin to view it) instead of just saving it out as an unknown ".bin" file. Also, I implemented a primitive form of security, whereby you need to send a passcode with your message so that not anyone can use your gateway to post to your blog.
All this, so I can post live updates from MXDU starting in about a week's time
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