A couple mobile phone business and development links. One came from TechRepublic, speculating about who might buy (the newly revived) Palm.

Podcast: Will the $99 smartphone trigger a price war? [Guess not. It seems to be a price war at the $199 price point.]

Correcting BREW and J2ME - a 2008 article that gives background about the competing BREW and J2ME markets, and the then-emergent iPhone business model.

Links to misc app stores (mobile or not): Linspire CNR, GetJar, Boost Mobile, ATT MediaMall, Sprint Software Store, Handmark, Ovi (Nokia), Android Market, T-Mobile T-Zones, Motorola Solutions.

A bunch of development links after the jump.

This was an odd project. Taking several PDFs of layoff data and turning them into text, so they might be used more like a database. This info should be offered up by the state as a database, but it's not (at least it wasn't to me). I ended up using a PDF to Text application to generate text files, then wrote these scripts to scrape the data out of the text. My goal was to dig up all the unionized workplaces.

So, I'm studying J2ME, and for some reason (maybe the wrong version of CLDC?) I can't use random.getNext(n). I can't specify the range of the random number. What a pain.

I wanted to avoid doing floating point math, and fell back on a C trick. To get a random number from 0 to 500:

Here's a snippet of PHP code that displays a block if a node has a specific term. You set up the block to display based on the result of PHP code.

This script is being used to move files around in a Maildir. A bunch of spam goes into the "new" directory.

WOW! I never thought ZenCart and it's parent, OSCommerce, could ever be redeemed. These are great products with really unpleasant code. Hacking these apps is a nightmare.

Now, someone's come along with a big replacement to ZenCart called ZenMagick. I just skimmed over it, and the code is much better. The product attaches to ZenCart and exposes and OO API to the underlying database.

This is a pretty good de-duper based on the one posted to a forum.

There's more than one way to do the same thing...

This is a really good presentation about HTML5. It's time to abandon coding for anything less than HTML 5 now. Bye bye cruft.

This is trial code that I used to translate an error from a Yahoo web service into a COM ErrObject.

It's not real XML parsing, but good enough for this purpose. IF an error message is sent, we extract the message and then use Err.Raise to throw an error.

This is the Hello, World program, written in Javascript and encoded as a data URI.

<script src='data:application/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUoIkhlbGxvLCB3b3JsZCEiKQ=='></script>

I was having a real WTF moment with Access. I'd coded up an SQL query in access, and a string had a single quote in it, fouling up the query.

The SQL was something like this:

If you're cheap and have a low-end, generic MP3 player that will also display text files, you can read your RSS feeds on it with the help of this script.

This is some code and controls that help you geocode addresses, and prepare a report of addresses sorted by distance from a point.

In the last entry, log lines were being "compressed" by placing them into a database table. There were a few bugs in that code that have been fixed, and features added to the new script, below, that save us from losing some log data. Explanation after the code: