Android and iPhone progress

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Dean

Hey guys! This will most likely be my last entry before the new year, which I’m looking forward to. One hopes next year will bring some great new experiences and hopefully a new start in some aspects of my life, though not forgetting to hopefully have more success in my professional life either! I think this year has been full of drama in some aspect, some sad moments but also a new opportunity to take my career to the next level.

Moving on, yes my mobile development seems to be coming along ok. Currently I am in process of designing the data model of the iPhone game, and also have started building the interfaces which is exciting to see come together. I will obviously have alot to do over the christmas holidays with it, but I guess it will keep my mind active in that sense. As more development happens and I have screenshots to show, I will post them.

As for the android development, like I said in a post not long ago I was planning to development a music catalog and mobile app, well I have artist data being stored, and also album names being stored (though I get the occasional unhandled exception, that I need to look into). I need to look into being able to get a album artist, as different songs may have different artists (Say if there was a colaborative song). I am currently thinking to get the album artist from the artist folder it is stored in, as I dont think there is way of accessing the album artist ID tag using the library I have. For the android side of it, currently I have a SAX XML Parser running, and just displaying everything in a console-like program. For the moment I am programming the logic and fetching of data, the representation layer of my app will be sorted last. Im thinking to have a search page that terms can be searched across artist and album…

Android app screenshot showing parsed artist data

Only issue that I am currently having is there seems to be an issue with either “/” or “&” in the XML when it comes to parsing, which I will need to sort out before I continue, though I think I’ve made a good start considering the limited time I have to put to this project.

Anyhow, will update you when I have to talk, or show.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Back to iPhone Development

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Dean

Hey Guys! Sorry it’s been a while but I’ve had a rather eventful month, particularly the loss of family member. Saying that I have been busy continueing to bring the Mobsventures Knowledge Connect project to a state where my involvment can begin to end. This is good news for me, as I’m now beginning a two month project back at Mammoth Graphics, to which I am very happy about being how nice of a company it is. I am going to be working on a game set at a teenage auidence, and will give more details about the project when I get more into it and have work to show, which feedback would be great for you guys!
Other than that, earlier this week I had a bad experience with CVS. I use Git at home for my SCM solution but at work we have a CVS server which I have been advised to use in the past. Cutting the story short alot of my work become unusable for some unknown reason to which I ended up working 24 hours on the trott to try and recover the state of the system. From now on I will only use Git, bit more hardcore because of lack of graphical tools, but in my experience worth it.

From a more academic sense, I’ve now started the PhD. I’ve had a brief meeting with my two supervisors Prof. Tony Clark and Dr. Samia Oussena, which I’m pleased and grateful to be working with. Now I have to begin doing a literature study and start building a framework for use on the PhD with Anna Kocurova, a fellow PhD student working under the same supervisors. Also I have started trying to get seminars running in the School of Computing for lecturers and fellow researcher to share research and knowledge, to which I have to get the ball rolling by me giving the first one! When I complete my slides I will make them available online for anyone interested.

Erm, until next time!

Elgg development and other activities

Posted on November 7, 2009 by Dean

Hey guys, only got a few more weeks of Elgg development at least for the foreseeable future anyhow, to which to I have mixed feelings about. Seems like everytime you begin to get used to and fully in your stride with something its time to change, which is a shame but equally help keeps my work and life interesting.

As of what I’ve been working on, erm.. Well I’ve been continuing with the work on the videos plugin, which for the moment is almost ahead of previous expectations. Currently I have videos uploading and being able to be played, sound’s simple but it’s not quite. I’m in the process of being able to link the videos with the opportunities on the site, but need to be told how they are to be match, or I may just implement some sort of assumption. Also been working on some cool stuff with a piece of software called GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering), which is intending on being used to ‘mine’ the text and help find offensive words/phrases. I have been working with a fellow colleague Dr. Ying Zhang, who is in the field of text/data mining to help set up GATE for our particular context, which is now working (at least for the moment).

A very small program has been written to use the backend of the software, getting strings of text that will eventually be sent from Elgg. I’m hoping to integrate it all from this Monday, with some re-engineering of how Elgg deals with any type of entered text, sending everything to GATE first for checking, if something isn’t allowed an error message will be sent to the user. Other than that I have to try and prepare Elgg to be able to integrate with BT’s MOSAIC, which I’m unsure of my ability to complete that in time. After the project, if I have time I am planning to try and generalise the video plugin so it will work with other Elgg installations and release it on the Elgg Development site under GPL open source licence.

From December I’m then starting the iPhone game with Mammoth Graphics at Ealing Studios, which I’m actually getting quite excited about. I hope the guys have started preparing the material that I need to get started and hopefully will have a version of the game implemented for February. I just have concerns about my pay as I’m having to come off general payroll and go back to hourly slips (which is really annoying). As long as I’m not being paid less than I will be getting from my PhD bursary then I don’t mind, as I guess an agreement has been made for me to spend time on my PhD during this project giving me almost an extra 2 months for it.

At home, I’ve been working on a little project of my own. I have a lot of music and when I go to music stores I’ve found several times I can’t remember if I have a CD already. So to solve this problem I am developing two applications:

A backend file crawler, that trails through my music library and automatically indexes the artist, album and songs in a database, for which a PHP set of APi’s are being written to search and retrieve this data and relay it using XML.
Because I have an Android based smart phone, I’m developing a app to get these details and help facilitate easy searching of what media I have already.

The backend app is already beginning to work, though have run into a few issues already that I will need to look into. The first issue being the speed, perhaps the speed of the crawler is going to be slower as I am not testing on the machine that will be run on and the crawling is being done over a network. Other reason I think is that I need to turn it into a threaded app, and allow more songs to be sorted concurrently. This will be something I implement last as to me efficiency and speed is something you look to once everything is working. The second issue is how to deal with multiple combinations of artists, as some song aren’t made with only one artist, leaving you will potentially copies of artists and combinations of artist which may affect search results if you only type in the one of the artists. This something I will need to look into more as this project progresses. Hopefully once the backend is complete (or as complete as I feel is necessary) work on the android app will commence which I look forward to completing as the app I think will be useful by myself and my step dad as we both have the same phone.

Anyhow, until next time chums

Update on Poesia Issue

Posted on September 28, 2009 by Dean

Been on holiday, but kept myself in touch with the office with emails and such. Anyhow, managed to communicate with the project leader of Poesia and find out that the issue I was getting with Poesia not compiling had been sorted in one of many patchsets, though evidently no-one had uploaded a newer tar. Because of this I checkouted directly from the projects CVS and got the most current code. Though now the error I was getting is gone, I am now getting a different error that I think could be related to a gcc upgrade, though my superior has delegated the job of the filter on a fellow colleague which may try and look for another tool, I may see if i can sort the problem by removing the most current gcc and installing a legacy version in my spare time, if I can be bothered….

Other than that, I now have to see some one new about a project that is expected to get the all clear soon, which will be extending on what I did for Mammoth Graphics. Only issue is I’ve been told to share my code, which I’d prefer not to.

1 dedicated server and 2 VMs later…

Posted on September 17, 2009 by Dean

Hey guys, I think after about a week of failed efforts I can now say I’ve hit one of the key issues with open source software, the sometimes lack of support. Ok, for work I’ve been asked to use an Internet Filter called Poesia. This filter was created on a European project to try and create a filter to help filter material like text, photos and video of an explicit nature. So naturally because in the project I am working on filtration of this sort of content is needed using this tool and integrating it with our prototype seemed like the most feasible idea, ofcourse until I attempt to install it somewhere.

Now to start with we have a dedicated server at work which annoyingly is not accessible physically by us and has ridiculous security restrictions placed on it (because they are trying make our lives easier aren’t they?). So anyhow I installed all the prerequisites for Poesia, but the Poesia ./configure couldn’t find the package netpbm. So, anyhow like anyone would do they download the source and attempt to compile and install it. Though finding out that lots of the dev packages that really should have been installed with the OS are missing. I then trail to try and find compiled versions of these packages to save me time but some i have to compile and install separately. But just when you think you’ve had enough fun for one whole day you then find that netpbm itself does not make properly.

Anyhow I lose patience and decide to scrap the idea of the SUSE server at work and decide to try on my good friend, fedora at home. To do this on my fedora server (which this blog is hosted from) I setup a x86_64 VM using kvm/qenu. Everything is working fine, I managed to install most packages needed for the installation using the my favourite package manager YUM. Everything installed, well I had to compile and install Boehm’s Garbage Collector as the one shipped with the distro didn’t allow for pthreads which apparently is needed. Anyhow the Poesia ./configure can’t find the garbage collector (don’t they come early in the morning?).

I question if they maybe caused by the fact that I was using a 64bit OS, and maybe this was causing the error with SUSE with libraries being in slightly different places e.g. lib64 instead of lib etc. So I create another VM, this time a 32bit one. This time everything installed ok, but Poesia ./configure completed ok, but now a error occurred.

Now I am at the point where I don’t know how to proceed, and hope I can find a source to help me through. Though on the plus side I’ve learnt a considerable amount on managing VMs in bash that I’m sure will come in handy another day.

until next time.

Tour De France Screenshots

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Dean

Sorry about the wait, I’ve been busy creating the standings program for mammoth graphics to create their standings feed for the iPhone app. Here are the screen shots:

: Main Menu image

: Stages Page

: A Stage Detail page

: Stage Detail Map

: Stage Fly Through image

: Team Pages showing different Tour de france teams

: Standings menu showing different categories

The app is still in review stage, to which I hope is all approved as soon as possible. Hope the app gains at least some popularity, at least till the next app is done 😉

BTW. The name of the app is TDF2009, support will be greatly appriciated!

Speak to you all soon

“On ya Bike” – Tour De France iPhone App

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Dean

Hey Guys, good time now to say that the iPhone app i have been working on is a Tour De France app. This app now is in the final stages of development before uploading to app store this monday.
The main features of this app is contain information about the stages, including detail map images, profile images to show the contours of the stage, have fly through videos of the stage and to contain information about the different climbs and sprints.
Information about the teams including the riders in the teams is included. A history section is included in the app to show all winners of the Tour De France since the first race in 1903.
In addition to this, you will be able to keep track of the overall standings of the race, which categorises the results in to:

Individual (Yellow Jersey)
Points (Green Jersey)
Team
Climber (Red Pokadot Jersey)
Youth (White Jersey)

I will be putting up screen shots of the app on sunday when hopefully its complete (or near). I have been working with Mammoth Graphics to complete this app. The app i think will be on app store for free, so any tour de france fans should give the app a try and hope to give a good user experience for such an amazing race!

Anyhow, going for now but screen shots will be up soon!

Laters

Viva la France!

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Dean

Hey Guys! Sorry for the extreme length of time since my last post, to say I have been slightly busy would be a complete understatement! Since my last post I attended a paper workshop in Windsor for colleagues on our project to meet, discuss the current dissemination strategy and overall try and start some paper writing. This session proved to be extremely productive, but since has gone rather flat, well at least that’s my opinion. Since then I have been starting a new project for a client involving an iPhone Application development. This development has now commenced and has a deadline, at least for the iPhone development side in the next 4-5 weeks. Overall feel slightly concerned, mainly that I am the lead programmer for this (which I feel is slightly crazy for such a tight schedule). I’m slowly getting the hang of Apple iPhone development, though inexperience in using Interface Builder is causing me some head ache. Hopefully this weekend will prove productive and lower some stress I have currently. Until next time people!

Dean's Blog

A somewhat closer look at my life and thoughts.

Category Archives: Techie Stuff