Barcode Scanner Overview

Doing a simple overview on the Barcode Scanner application for Android

Unboxing a Brand New Motorola Milestone

Yeah. I just bought me a brand new Motorola Milestone using Android 2.1, then I done a simple video when I was unboxing it. Enjoy!

Want Something To Do? Think About Something

This article that you will be reading right now can be resumed in four words. They are: "Have a new idea"


I've just tested the "new" Twitter. It has a nice look, copyed like Wordpress. Also it is combining some "incredible new features", that are just a bad copy of the Google Buzz. This just prove that my idea was correct. That when something that started little(Twitter) and grew much, it starts to seek for new features to implement on his project, but then the team doesn't have anything new, or something that will change the world as we see it. Then the fastest way is to copy some other idea that was just growing(Buzz on this case).

This just does an infinite loop on the projects, where everyone just copy everyone, then nothing is created, then everything gets stuck on this loop and then everything is stopped. This keeps happening, until someone changes everything! People like Gandhi, Martin Luter King, Google, IBM, Apple, Michael Jackson, God!

When something like this changes the world as we see it. The followers(copiers) start to get mad to copy this idea into their ones. But the fire was shoot from the pioneer. If we stop to copy things and instead stop some hours, days, months or even years to think. We can start creating new things and forget the idea of copying them. This will make the world turn a lot faster. Things will flow more joyful. Then one awesome idea will rise: "Let's get everyone that are the bests on having ideas and put them on just one project, instead of having tons of different projects!". This is called a revolution. ;)

Here are some examples of things that changed the way that people thought about the things. Do you remember when the IRC was created? This drastically changed the way that people communicate with themselves. Then this idea grew, it became a bit more mature, then the Instant Messaging clients were created. Where you could talk with your friend in private, then someone thought, why not take this into another level. Then someone created the VOIP, where you wasn't more using the letters to communicate, but the voice. Then someone thought a lot higher: "Why not communicate with video too?" then we started the video-conferences. And it goes flowing straight, and not doing curves.

Remember that I don't want to say that Buzz is better than Twitter, or that something is better than another. It just depends of the eye that see it. I don't know what the future reserves for us, but for now I will be going to the newer and pioneer ideas. Also, remember that nothing is impossible, then if you want to build the new power source, that will be unlimited and will not hurt the planet. Go and search for it. Because all the ideas that we have today, when they were idealized by it's inventor, everyone said: "This is impossible!" or like happened with the telephone: "What is the use of this?"

Reflect about this. Think. Have ideas. Comment

The Symbian Open Source Experiment Has Failed

The brave Symbian open source experiment has failed. The only two top-tier device manufacturers on the Symbian board other than Nokia have deserted it.


ZDNet reports Sony Ericsson are abandoning Symbian for Android, and Samsung headed down the Android and Bada road a while back. There are precious few device manufacturers remaining as foundation members, e.g. ZTE, Sharp and Compal, none of whom are exactly trend-setting industry leaders. The Symbian Foundation hasn’t been the powerhouse of innovation that the OS needs and it seems unable or unwilling to understand the desperate state Symbian is in. Back in July I described the Symbian Foundation as “re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” because they were complacently ignoring Symbian’s single biggest weakness – the user experience. I was criticised then by people who said S3 would be better, but it’s now nearly October, we’ve seen the new S3 devices and the UX isn’t great. The N8, for example, has a wonderful technical specification but try as I might, I can’t learn to love a UX which lacks “wow” factor and inherits too much from previous Symbian versions. I’m obviously not alone, I’m sure that’s one reason why Sony and Samsung have placed their bets elsewhere.

I don’t have an inside view into the Symbian Foundation’s finances, but I’d guess that money contributed by board and foundation members is going to shrink because more will depart. This will further reduce the Foundation’s ability to work on Symbian, and shifts even more of the burden back to Nokia. One of the items on Steve Elop’s strategic review agenda is sure to be the future of Symbian. So if you were Steve Elop would you (a) abandon Symbian, (B) absorb it back into Nokia (on the basis that the vast majority of the development is done by Nokia) or (c) do something else?

If I were Steve here’s what I’d do: Firstly it’s too early to abandon Symbian. It’s sick, but it’s far from dead; it’s still outshipping other mobile OSs by a huge margin. There’s a lot of value in owning a platform, it differentiates the handsets and provides Nokia with an ecosystem of developers, an app store, opportunities for cloud services and so on. Ovi without Symbian would struggle to survive. Also, Symbian can run on some very low cost devices – Nokia’s least expensive Symbian handset is around EUR 115. Symbian will allow Nokia to push smartphone prices aggressively down to undercut Android.

Secondly, I’d keep Symbian as an open source platform, if only for marketing purposes. If Symbian improves in the future some device manufacturers might re-discover it as a way to compete with Android. But there is no business case for spending any meaningful amount of money on the Foundation because in my personal view it’s adding approximately zero value. The Foundation might survive in some form without Nokia or it might wither and die. I doubt many people care either way.

Thirdly, I’d take all the important Symbian development back in house which would eliminate time-wasting Foundation activities like release councils, architecture councils, user interface councils. What Symbian needs is agility and vision, not committees, and if Symbian is fixable it will be fixed a lot faster under a single leader. And great user interfaces aren’t developed by committees.

In my view we need to separate Symbian’s problems from the Symbian Foundation’s problems. Symbian can be fixed - if Nokia acts very rapidly. Symbian 4 needs to be nothing less than outstanding, if it’s not then Nokia may have to face a difficult decision about whether to abandon Symbian entirely and rebuild Ovi in a new form.

Via Nick Jones

Tablets Running For The Android

These days I was traveling through the Engadget and I saw that the biggest deal today is to make tablets, but not just tablets, they need to be using Android. The good part of this is that there will not be many OSes on more mobile devices, concentrating the applications for a determined platform.


Every time that I enter on a technology blog, there is an article talking about a new release of a tablet. But the problem is that many companies are developing bad devices, that have many problems, like a no much sensitive touch screen. Just because people want them too much.

Then I think that at least Google should start to approve and disapprove every device that will have Android built-in. This will make the things a lot more better for the users.

Also, I think that Windows Phone 7 will be a good OS for tablets. ;)

On The Road Of Android: A Review About Google's Mobile OS

I'm now an Android user. I've installed it on my Eee PC 904HD. This project is called Android-x86 and it seems to be promising.


For sure it is an awesome operating system. One more time Google scored!

It's like the mobile version of it, but without the touch screen. All the applications that will work on a phone will work on this project, it also includes the AndAppStore, that is an awesome thing, it's included on all the Android devices and it's like Apple AppStore, but many of the things there are freeware/opensource.



I loved the UI of the OS, it has been correctly designed to be beauty, clean, flexible and easy to use even without a touch screen. But the only problem is that you can't run one more application at the same time, just some of them have this capability and this is the worst point of Android.



As there isn't any close key/button, you need to use the Back button(ESC in the PC version) many times until the application exits, but some of the applications don't close and keep running on the background, what consumes a lot of your resources, then it is obligatory to have a task killer application. I'm using TaskKiller Pro, that have a Home Screen widget that is very easy to access and makes the scanning of the unclosed applications a lot more easy.

The browsing experience is good, the sites are displaying correctly and you are redirected to the mobile version of the pages some times, also YouTube doesn't play the video if you're using the default Android web browser, so I'm using FreeTube application to view the videos. Also downloading things using the default browser is very painful, since it doesn't download ZIPs, EXEs and others, also it usually can't download some APKs while trying with file hosters like MegaUpload and Uploaded.To. So I'm not using the default web browser, but looking for some others and comparing, to see which one is the best, and that fits all my needs perfectly.



Every hardware is working fine on my Eee PC 904HD, and it has been reported to be fully working on all the other Eee PC series and on ACeR One, at least on the 1.6 version of the OS, that is the one that I'm using. The developers of the project are working on the 2.2, but it seems to be released in about 3 months, they are having some compatibility problems with it.

Resuming, Android is an awesome OS, it just need some simple fixes on it to turn it on a more useful and friendly for non-touch screen users, because it seems that will keep growing on the laptop world.

I'm At Other Social Networks Too!

I've recently reactivated all my social networks. Then If you want you can find me at Facebook and at Windows Live.


I will be there. Just do a request to be my friend and send a PM for me here to let me know that is you. Then I will add you. :)

Back From The Vacation

I'm officially back from my vacations, but this was about 1 month ago. All because when I got back there was a big university project that I was needing to do on a group. Then this consumend my time and I didn't posted more on the blog. But let's talk more about the vacation and forget the fact of the university project.


It was a big vacation, about 2 weeks and 2 days on total, then I've took a lot of photos. As my camera said, I've just took 2137 photos. ;)

Also I saw that Spain is a beautiful place, with a lot of history and religiosity. The best places that I passed were Barcelona, Sevilla, Marbella and Madrid, but all the other 18 places were awesome too, I just don't remember their names. :P



As I usually do, I like to walk using slippers(I love Havaianas, that is the best on the market), but when I was at Córdoba, passing thru the Roman Bridge, my slippers started to melt... Now it changed his format...

I also bought some new things there. I got me an iPod Touch 3g, that I've already installed iOS 4.0 on it and jailbreaked too. I got a GPS too. A Mio Moov 560, but since 3 days I got my new car, that I was waiting 1 month for, as it was imported. I got me a nice Mitsubishi Pajero Full HPE year 2010/2011, that is an awesome car compared to my old one, a Pajero Sport HPE year 2009(Yeah, I like to change my car every year). Here is a photo of my new one at the concessionaire of my city:

And a photo of my new iPod Touch 3g 64GB compared to my old iPod Video 32GB:


I'm going to post some more about my travel at the new entry. ;)

Introduction To GameBoy Advance Development

On my previous entry, I've talked about ARM, GameBoy Advance and a project that I was starting called GlassTree. Today I'm going to talk about two articles that I wrote to the OSDev Wiki.

I've thought this days that OSDev was needing more mobile projects, then I remembered that GameBoy Advance don't have a OS, every game you written to them are considered OSes, principally because you have to do all in low-level, and talking directly with the hardware. Then I started by writing a tutorial about the introduction to this platform: GameBoy Advance Introduction. After this, I've started to write my second tutorial. A bare bones one: GameBoy Advance Barebones, that I've described the basics of the GBA screen, and showed some code to make people happy and to see how to it works on practice. ;)

Also, I've just made a category to put my GameBoy tutorials:

Good To Be With You ARM

I'm starting to enter at the ARM world using Assembly, to develop some stuff to GBA. For this I'm re-reading TONC, and I bought a wonderful ebook for my Kindle DX. The best book to learn: ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software.

My goal is to design a fully featured library, that will handle console operations, 3D(like the Doom I 3D), scrolling and all the common operations that GBA use, like the libgba's, but entirely written in ARM Assembly.

If anyone here want to help me with this goal, please PM me. I'm already designing a homepage for the project. At the time it's codename is GlassTree. ;)

Also, I'm needing a image for the project, then if anyone is good with graphics(I hate to make images), I'm needing a image that is a glass tree(as the codename says), but it should be greater than 200x200 and be like the Tango style. :)

I'm going to update the blog every news from the project.

Travel Time!

Guys! I'm announcing here, that I'm going to travel on the second week of July, and I will be out on the period of two weeks. I'm going to Spain and Portugal, to explore the beautiful place that we have there, and know more about the people that had colonized my country on the past. I'm going to try to post here when I get out.

Nokia Mobile Internet Toolkit

I want to present you, the best IDE(I consider it an IDE, because it has all that you need) ever created for our wonderful world of WAP. It's called Mobile Internet Toolkit(called NMIT), from the Nokia corporation.

It already supports fully both standards of WML, the 1.x and the 2.x, also it have the CSS and WMLScript support.

Nokia Mobile Internet Toolkit facilitates the creation of different mobile media content via a comprehensive set of editors and wizards. These include Web page creation (editors for creating WML, XHTML, and CSS content), MMS creation (editors for creating MMS with SMIL messages) and Push message creation (editors for creating multipart and SI/SL messages).

New in this version are fully integrated DRM and DD editors. Also new is support for SMIL 2.0 Basic Language and 3GPP SMIL transitions in MMS messages.

Additionally, NMIT now allows users to define a working environment that allows NMIT to be restarted in the same state which is was closed.

The patch release for NMIT 4.1 enables to use NMIT 4.1 with JRE 1.5. Download and install the patch on top of NMIT 4.1

You can download it from the Official Nokia Site, and don't forget to request a serial from the link that you can find below of the download link(at the Nokia page).

WML And The Future

I've just started to learn some of the wonderful languages I ever seen, WML and the beautiful WMLScript. All because I saw one book on a site that I download the ebooks, it's this one:

I've saw that it's a lot more easy and flexible than HTML, because you can divide the pages, that are called decks on WML, into [url=http://www.w3schools.com/wap/wap_basic.asp]cards[/url]. Then you will see that it's better to have one single WML file with 10 card, than make 10 HTML files, on for each "part" of the website, but this community today is a little dead(being optimist...), but not so dead than the COBOL community.

This is because the new mobile phones have already HTML compatibility, then the use of the old, but good WAP is being forgotten and then the developers aren't attracted on this technology. But as I can see, modify a site to be compatible with mobile phones and mobile devices, is a lot more hard than just making another one using WML. And the new WML 2.x is very proximate of XHTML and also supports the use of CSS, what can attract more users for this world.

With this all, I still prefer to use the old WML 1.x, but just to learn better, then in a close future, I will move my knowledge to the new era.

Many people when they read this, will think that this is a call to developers to join this community. Yes, it is, but I'm already thinking to start a forum for this little(at the time...) community, to attract some more people, and the good newbies, that will be the future grand developers(I and my optimist ideas).

In some days I will be posting here on my blog the link to the forum, because it's already being setup on my dedicated server.

See you later! :D

WML And The Future

I've just started to learn some of the wonderful languages I ever seen, WML and the beautiful WMLScript. All because I saw one book on a site that I download the ebooks, it's this one:

I've saw that it's a lot more easy and flexible than HTML, because you can divide the pages, that are called decks on WML, into [url=http://www.w3schools.com/wap/wap_basic.asp]cards[/url]. Then you will see that it's better to have one single WML file with 10 card, than make 10 HTML files, on for each "part" of the website, but this community today is a little dead(being optimist...), but not so dead than the COBOL community.

This is because the new mobile phones have already HTML compatibility, then the use of the old, but good WAP is being forgotten and then the developers aren't attracted on this technology. But as I can see, modify a site to be compatible with mobile phones and mobile devices, is a lot more hard than just making another one using WML. And the new WML 2.x is very proximate of XHTML and also supports the use of CSS, what can attract more users for this world.

With this all, I still prefer to use the old WML 1.x, but just to learn better, then in a close future, I will move my knowledge to the new era.

Many people when they read this, will think that this is a call to developers to join this community. Yes, it is, but I'm already thinking to start a forum for this little(at the time...) community, to attract some more people, and the good newbies, that will be the future grand developers(I and my optimist ideas).

In some days I will be posting here on my blog the link to the forum, because it's already being setup on my dedicated server.

See you later! :D

Fish: The WAV Player

I'm here to present my newest project, it's a WAV player for HPCs, fully written in PocketC.

I've made it to be simple, then I just added a OpenFileDialog, a background a button to play the WAV(that is the same to open the file at the time) and nothing more.

The background image and the play button image could be changed just by editing a registry key, but it needs to be a bmp file to work, also to run it you will need a [url=http://orbworks.com/pcce/download.html]PocketC Runtime[/url] that is compatible with your OS and device. :)

I'm planning this to the future versions:
* Playlists
* Add a stop button
* Add a progress bar
* And a few other things

Enjoy!

Handheld PC Pro vs iPad

Yeah, someone got nuts and tried to compare the good, but old Sharp Mobilon Pro PV-5000 and an iPad.



The Technologizer's blog had done this, they compared a Windows CE 2.11 device with an iPhone OS 3.2 one. But before I've saw that, I was thinking that any devices of the good era(I have a HP Jornada 720) could compete with a so modern one, but that had impressive me! On some points, as the battery(HPC: 12-16 hour life - iPad: 10 hour life), but there was one point that they had done an error, on the Apps run in windows? point, they had said that on the HPC, the [b]applications run on fullscreen ONLY[/b], I don't know about the iPad, but at least on all the Widows CE HPCs, they run on fullscreen, but many of them use windows, as my Vim and my HP Settings that I run on my HP Jornada 720:

And as I've said, we got fullscreen applications too, as the Pocket Internet Explorer:


But on the general, all is ok, and as a old computer fan, I stick with the Windows CE device. ;)

Started My Journey Trough JavaScript

I'm proud to say that now I've really started my journey trough the dense forest of the most incredible scripting language ever created(in my opinion), it's called JavaScript.



Before I started, I was at a local bookstore here in my city, looking for computer books(as I usually do every month, and I always get at least one book), I've saw some Java books, C books, and many others that I already have, then I saw a wonderful one, with a monkey on the front and it was from my favorite company, the O'Reilly corporation.

Now I've already started to read it(since yesterday, and just 1 hour of reading) and I'm already at the page 23, and my prevision of finish is in about 20 days, as it's a approximately 512 pages book. Then in some days I will be helping people on the JavaScript forum here, that is very slow this days, but we need to invest on it now, attracting people for it. :)

Playing With Assembly

As I usually do, I was playing with languages, this time was Assembly, then I started to rebuild my OS, just doing simple things. Doing a simple printf and scanf using the BIOS. I will put the code and explain it to make better.

Printing Characters

printf:
    mov ah, 0eh
    mov bl, 07h

    .nextchar
       lodsb
       or al, al
       jz .return
       int 10h
       jmp .nextchar

    .return
       ret

First of all, you define the 0x0e value to the higher part of the general register AX to have the output function of the interrupt 0x10, the second line that moves the value 0x07 to the lower part of the general register BX is optional, because it say what will be the colors of the output text, where the first one(in this case 0, that is black) is the background, and the second one(white that is7, in this case) is the foreground one.

Then you need to do the lodsb, that will load what is inside the register SI and move it to the lower part of the general register AX, that is AL, used for the 0x10 interrupt as the output value, then it do a simple loop then prints it.

Getting Input

scanf:       
    mov ah, 00h
    int 16h
    
    mov ah, 0eh   
    int 10h
    
    loop getinput

This one is a lot more simple than the printf one, then you will get it better than the other. :)

First of all you need to move the value 0x00 to the higher part of the general register AX, that is the value to make the 0x16 interrupt wait for a keystroke and as it does by default, the result(character of the key that was pressed) is moved to the lower part of the general register AX, that is the same used by the 0x10 interrupt to output, then the rest is very simple to understand(as you already saw at the printf one), then it does a infinite loop into the get character function.

Using They
To use them is very simple, for the printf, you just need to move the values that you want to the register SI and call the correct function, like this:

mov si, msg
call printf

msg db "Hello, World!"

Very simple, but for the scanf one is much more simple than the other one. You just need to call the function and it will do the rest for you. Like this:

call scanf

And here is the result running on my Bochs:


I hope you've enjoyed. I was thinking first to make this a tutorial, on the tutorial are of our community, but I think that a blog entry is better to launch my blog. :)

Setting Up The Environment For Ti-83 Development

As everyone knows(because of the Introduction post), I’m a Windows 3.11 guy, then I will show you what you need to develop on it. You will need a compiler, the only one that people use is The Telemark Assembler(TASM), a table driven cross assembler for the MS-DOS and LINUX environments, to download it, you just need to go to TiCalc and download the tasm32.zip. The second thing that you will need is a linker, for this the best choice is Devpac8x, that is the update to Devpac83 which turned bin files to 83p. Devpac8x turns bin files into 8xp which can now be loaded into the flash simulator, you can get it on TiCalc(on the link before), and download the devpac8x.zip. The third thing that you need is the include file, the most used is ti83plus.inc, that you can get from TiCalc, also you can get more include files at TiCalc Archives. Time of Installation Make a directory TASM on C:\, then extract tasm32.zip, devpac8x.zip and ti83plus.zip to it. When all is completed, just create a batch file called z80.bat, on it put this:

echo off echo ==== Now assembling %1.z80 for the TI-83 Plus ==== tasm -80 -i -b %1.z80 %1.bin if errorlevel 1 goto ERRORS rem This is necessary because of a DevPac8x bug devpac8x %1 echo ==== Job finished. Program saved as %1.8xp ==== goto DONE :ERRORS echo ==== Errors!!! ==== :DONE del %1.lst > NUL del %1.bin > NUL echo ==== Done ====

Add the C:\TASM directory to the %PATH%, and now all is done now, when you want to compile something you just need to type:

C:\> z80 <filename>

Congratulations! You've successfully setup the environment to your development. :)

Setting Up The Environment For Ti-83 Development

As everyone knows(because of the Introduction post), I’m a Windows 3.11 guy, then I will show you what you need to develop on it. You will need a compiler, the only one that people use is The Telemark Assembler(TASM), a table driven cross assembler for the MS-DOS and LINUX environments, to download it, you just need to go to TiCalc and download the tasm32.zip. The second thing that you will need is a linker, for this the best choice is Devpac8x, that is the update to Devpac83 which turned bin files to 83p. Devpac8x turns bin files into 8xp which can now be loaded into the flash simulator, you can get it on TiCalc(on the link before), and download the devpac8x.zip. The third thing that you need is the include file, the most used is ti83plus.inc, that you can get from TiCalc, also you can get more include files at TiCalc Archives. Time of Installation Make a directory TASM on C:\, then extract tasm32.zip, devpac8x.zip and ti83plus.zip to it. When all is completed, just create a batch file called z80.bat, on it put this:

echo off echo ==== Now assembling %1.z80 for the TI-83 Plus ==== tasm -80 -i -b %1.z80 %1.bin if errorlevel 1 goto ERRORS rem This is necessary because of a DevPac8x bug devpac8x %1 echo ==== Job finished. Program saved as %1.8xp ==== goto DONE :ERRORS echo ==== Errors!!! ==== :DONE del %1.lst > NUL del %1.bin > NUL echo ==== Done ====

Add the C:\TASM directory to the %PATH%, and now all is done now, when you want to compile something you just need to type:

C:\> z80 <filename>

Congratulations! You've successfully setup the environment to your development. :)

Introduction

Let’s start by introducing me, I’m Nathan Paulino Campos, 21 years old, live in Brazil on the city of Vitória in the estate of Espirito Santo(Yeah, this place is on Google Maps). I’m the principal of the biggest security company in my estate.

I know these development languages: MIPS, ARM, z80 and x86 Assembly, Delphi, Pascal, Visual Basic, C/C++, C#, BASIC, Ruby, Perl, Java EE, Java, Java ME and Python.

I’ve already developed a OS, called ForestOS, but I don’t want to share it now because it isn’t totally finished, but it already have a Command-Line and a very cool and clean GUI.

I’m a old school addict. I love to play Doom I and II and Quake I and II, Duke Nuken, Super Mario Bros, Zelda(all versions). But what I most like on the old school world is Windows 3.11. I emulate it on my laptop and use it more than my Windows Vista. Here is a screenshot of the “clean one”(I’m setting up a new one because my old was too much messy and with the group manager you need to be organized and don’t have many folders):

Now I’m playing a little bit with TI-83 Plus Assembly, and I already have a goal: Develop a shell for it. :)

That’s all. I hope you like my blog and enjoy the stay.