Teemu’s Blog

Have you seen this site yet? www.clustrmaps.com Thanks to Timo for the hint. It’s a site that maps the visitors of your site and you can see where they come from. Just look at the example on the right. Clustrmaps is still in beta and you need invitations to join. Big thanks to Derek for giving me one. Now I’ve got one invitation still left to give… so if you need one let me know.

I have made this Wordpress plugin that loads your photos from Flickr and makes an album of them on your blog. Read more about it here. You can also see it in action in my photos section. At the moment it’s little limited in features, but I’ll keep on developing it. I will try to consentrate on easy installation and usage.

If you have problems intalling or using this, you can post comments in this blog entry. Also give your opinions on how good or bad it actually is and if someone is even using it, let me know.

Seems like my blog is going to be Google this and Google that, but this is so big that it cannot be left out. Google has released their long waited Google Talk. It’s still in beta (as seems to be everything nowadays), but it should at least support instant messaging and voice calls. I will test this for sure today and probably post some comments here. Like suspected they are using Jabber protocol and here is what Google has to say about open standards.

We believe that you should have a choice in how you communicate with your friends, that you shouldn’t have to use one service because that’s where you keep your contacts and other information. We launched free auto-forwarding and POP access for Gmail so our users could take their messages with them and use any service they want, and we’re committed to upholding this idea of user choice for Google Talk as well. Today, with instant communications, you can’t talk to your contacts or buddies in one service while using another service. We hope to change that. We want to work with other willing service providers to enable their users to communicate directly with Google Talk users. And while we hope many people will use and like the Google Talk client, we’re committed to making it as easy as possible for you to communicate with your friends using the client that you want–even if it doesn’t happen to be ours. That’s why we’re also supporting open standards and the same protocol that clients such as Trillian, GAIM and iChat do. For more details, please visit our FAQ for developers.

Google has recently released a new version of their desktop search application. I haven’t been able to test it yet, but it seems like there are quite a few improvements. Seems that you can even write plug-ins for it. Very interesting…

This morning I ended up to a site that offers free themes for Symbian phones . I you’re interested in adding some looks to your mobile check out the site. Here’s a pic of my favourite theme (yes of course Firefox ).

Nokia has released a search application for 6630, 6680 and 6681 phones. It will be bundled with these models, but you can also download it from here. Seems to work quite well. It uses Yahoo Search for searching websites and images. It has also some preconfigured local search services to search for local companies and services. The user interface was far better than in the search engines used through a mobile browser so this might actually be even an application that I might consider using.

I’m here at the Helsinki 2005 World Championsips. After 30 minutes or queueing we got to the stadium and so far it has been a great experience.

Now I’ve gotten this far in my Python for Series 60 project. The app is called Mosaickr and you can see a pic of it below. At the moment it fetches a random picture from Flickr and then puts the picture into pieces. What I still need to do is to shuffle the pieces and make them move using arrow keys. When I get this ready I will put it on my site for download. Hopefully soon…

I think I’ve now figured out the problem of parsing Flickr’s XML-RPC responses using Python for Series 60. Mike from Flickr mailing list was kind enough to point me to use ElementTree to parse the xml responses in handy tree structure to use in the application. All I need to load to my phone is xmllib which is already required by xmlrpclib and therefore installed already. To use ElementTree I need to load ElementTree module. Then because the Python release doesn’t include any ready parsers yet (I haven’t yet tested the pyexpat) I also need to load SimpleXMLTreeBuilder module . This should work, although I haven’t had yet time to test it on the phone, but since these modules have no other dependencies, they should work fine.

OK, the Python for Series 60 experiments continue. I’m somewhat sure about what I’m going to do with this. I’m going to develop a game called Mosaickr. Simply it’s a game that loads a random picture from Flickr and then it breaks the picture into blocks and shuffles them. Then you simply have to put the blocks in right order. Nothing too fancy but a good way to get familiar with the GUI API of Python for Series 60. Let’s see how it goes…