Text me Rhonda

If you need to integrate your application with SMS then I am told Clickatell are pretty good.

Job Description

Most countries I imagine, require you to register your child's birth. In England, by law, you are required to present yourself, with partner, at your dreary local council offices to register you new offspring.

All my children were registered in Hammersmith in west London, where a sullen lady in a shabby office in a big grey building asks you lots of impertinent questions. Registering my last child went something like this:

Lady: Occupation?
Spug: Blacksmith.
Lady: Is that what you do for a living Mr Spence?
Spug: Not precisely, but I sort of make things.
Lady: Mr Spence, under regulation 663312b I am required to note you correct occupation, supplying false information is a crime. Mr Spence are you a Blacksmith?
Spug: No, I am a computer programmer .. oh what about software developer?
Lady: Software Developer it is Mr Spence.

Here is an extract from the resulting birth certificate, with my dull profession all typed up for posterity - how unromantic it all sounds.



What made me think of all this was my cousin turning up today with the birth certificate of my Great Great Grandfather. Here is an extract:



So what does he do for a living? Shepherd - no less. So that's what I should have said.

Oh and by the way, yeah my middle name is Gordon.... so what? You looking at me?

;-)

Tron

In a terrible 21st century version of Tron, Monkey Programmer Boy is sucked through a space-time continuum on to a tab in Domino Designer. In next week's episode he is chased, caught and has his trousers pulled down by some badly written Lotusscript. In the final episode he wakes up sweating only to realise that it was all a nightmare. Apart from the bit about the Lotusscript of course.

Internet Radio

Hi this is D.J. SpugChutney and your listening to my after party mix of ambiant trip-hop techno trance on Radio Lotusscript .

ecademy

Over the last few months I have been networking via ecademy. This is an on-line business exchange which enables you to network with similar folks and in theory find clients and suppliers.

I was suspicious at first as there is always a catch, but actually it has proven rather good. For instance, I have been developing some Nokia phone applications recently and I really needed to talk to someone who had been there and done it. Via the ecademy mobile applications club I was able to talk to a couple of guys who had real world experience of serious mobile stuff with the BBC and others. I was able to read their profiles and visit their websites before hand too.

This was all priceless, getting the same quality information jus through normal channels would have been impossible.

Having had this kind of success I decided to join some local ecademy clubs and go to one of their networking evenings. So last night I found myself driving to a local Golf Club for a evenings networking. The meeting started in the buffet where I chatted with people who all looked like Reggie Perrin. After this we were all ushered into an annex room full of golfing awards to see "The presentations".

A couple of guys talked about their business and then the main attraction came on. The first part of his talk was done in costume - I kid you not. The second half he banged on about sales and stuff and then finished by making us all sing. What we had to sing was:

I don't like selling, oh no, I love it
I don't like selling, oh no, I love it

All to the tune of Dreadlock Holiday by 10cc; all sort of mumbled, as English people always do when required to sing in public.

I managed to leave shorly afterwards, stopped in a lay bye and pissed myself laughing for about five minutes - all on my own, tears rolling down my cheeks and everything. Oh if only you had been there to enjoy it with me.

Dick Turpin - Aka The Baron von Pud

We are a bit short of cash at the moment so we thought we would get my son George (aka "the baron von pud") to don a mask and rob people on the cycle track near our house. In true Dick Turpin style he will make his get away on his trusty steed, "Black Bess". He is a bit small for a real horse so we thought he could ride Betty the dog instead.

Here they are just before their first outing.

Stand and Deliver!

hot kimono action

Luke duke in his working a home gear

And the cow said "hay! Bartender

In the heart of Gotham city, writing Notes apps for the Hooded Claw.

"quick Robin! Give me one of those Rothmans from your utility belt, I'm off to hide in the gents"

hot doggy style action

More pratting about with mobile phone to blogger using flickr.

This is betty
aka betty bin bag
aka betty bin laden

a message from our hostage

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Import Fashion Information

M'chumley Anna just sent me a link to Justin's Dukes of Hazard Store where you can buy Daisy Duke t-shirts. Oh my.

I have just bought a Daisy Duke t-shirt.

But you can also buy things like this:

Festival Ukes

M'colleague Luke Duke from the Dukes of Uke applied to run a Ukulele stall at the Glastonbury Festival, suprisingly they appear to have given us the nod and so Festival Ukes is born.

I understand that our "shop" will be in the "Field of Lost Vagueness" which is very groovy. We have lots of hurdles to overcome, such as buidling the stall, getting the Ukes, finding all the money; the biggest one though will be trying to make me NOT look like an off duty policeman ;-).

I will keep this and maybe a "Festival Ukes" blog site update with news.

Four strings and the truth brother.

Mobile Application Developer Certification

I drag down new stuff from developerworks to my rss reader. Occasionally little nuggets like this turn up:

Preparing for the Mobile Application Developer Certification

J2ME and Me

Latley I have been doing a lot of Java2 Mobile Edition (J2ME) work. The project I am working allows Nokia series 40 phones to communicate with a Domino server.

The comms is all done via http and xml rpc calls, it is all rather fab and challenging. The product will allow my client's staff to download surveys from a Domino server and complete them on their Nokia 6100 phones. They can then post the results back up, where they are pushed into a SQL server backend for analysis and graph generation.

Developing for phones is tough because each phone behaves differently, sometimes between software/firmware version on the same phone and even depending on what telco you are connected to. Write once test everywhere? You betcha.

Still we are up and running and the application should go live in a couple of weeks.

For development I am using Eclipse with the J2Me plug in EclipseME and the ANT add in Anntenna which lets me do loads of J2ME specific things in ANT, like building jad files and obsfucating my code.

I am planning to bang on more on this blog about J2ME. So if you are interested .... don't touch that dial, don't touch that dial, don't touch that diaaaaaaaaaaalllllll.