If I already opened the ideas vine, let’s hear another one.
I saw a lot of media LCD screens appearing in Bucharest lately. Unfortunately, I think the crisis affected the advertising budget of companies and these screens as a consequence.
So why not using them for everyone, not only for big budget advertising companies? And here is a possible solution.
But first of all, why somebody would like to use them for ads? One example, dedications. Love ones .
And now let’s see how. Let’s say that you want to propose your love one. You go to the media screen company website, even from your mobile phone. There you will create online your message, specifying the text, the template (red text on pink falling heart, white text on a blue stripe over a bouquet of lilies etc), the exact time of appearance, the display time and the exact display from an entire network of media screens allover the city. You can even see a preview of the entire ad.
One more step left, payment. The final cost is automatically calculated taking into account the time of the day, the period and the location of the display.
The entire ad will receive a unique code in the system and you will see that code at the end. Now if you send that code through SMS to an extra-cost number you will receive a confirmation of your message, payment, URL with details and the exact time when it will be displayed.
You have to work a little bit on your synchronization and it might cost you some money, but the effect could be one of a kind.
It could also be that the easiness of creating such ads could attract even smaller companies.
Do you like the idea? What would you display on such a media screen?

I will start a new category in my blog: ideas. I will post here cool (in my opinion) new ideas to be implemented in the web, software or technology field area.
First one. From the making of the car more than 100 years ago since today, things evolved tremendously. Except the fuel, but that’s another discussion. A lot of features and gadgets are part now of the modern car, just to make your life easier.
I always liked when gadgets and technologies are integrating and interoperating smooth and nicely. In auto industry there are a lot of efforts in this direction: some cars have integrated Bluetooth, so if you enter with your phone you can use it as a handset, others have special connectors for your iPod and iPhone and so on. But what I’m talking here is really true integration. Also when it comes to personalize your car, things are looking pretty good. Some cars memorize different seat positions for different drivers. Or even mirrors position.
The mobile phone is probably the most personal device. Unlike the car, that can be driven by any member of the family or it can even be a rental. So a true integration between these two will be the most desired. Imagine that you enter your car. Previously you memorized driver seat position, mirrors etc. Just a few button pushes and your car is exactly like you want it. But if you rent the car, you will need more than this.
Now, imagine that you enter a car, not just your, but any, and the car simply adapts to your needs. Sci-fi? Not quite. The entire technology is there, it misses only the INTEGRATION.
How this will work? Simple. Enter a car, just any car, personalize it and then save the settings to your mobile phones through Bluetooth. Next time your enter another car, the settings will be taken from the mobile phone and the car will instantly adapt to your wishes. Just like that.
And the entire technology is there. Cars, for sure, can be personalized and can understand Bluetooth, mobiles, for sure, can understand Bluetooth. There is only one link missing. You can even use existing protocols in the Bluetooth stack, like OBEX. Or if you’re concerned about wireless technology and security, USB is also available .
And now let’s take a few moments to day dream of what a car can do.

• Mirrors (front and lateral), driver seat, wheel position, all these are adapted instantly to your driving style. It can even differ according to the speed.
• Forget about setting the heating or air conditioner. The car simply knows what is your favorite temperature (in summer and winter) and it sets the heating system, also according to the external temperature in such a way to be just right for you.
• Play my favorite radio station. Or no, better play my favorite tunes, directly from my phone. And change the music genre when I go faster.
• Your smartphone becomes instantly a small computer board, displaying, speed, average speed, rpms, fuel consumption etc. And the GPS software just got a little better. No guess for the average speed, it simply knows the real instant one.
• In a convertible, I don’t care about the rooftop. Weather, speed and the secret ingredient, my preferences, make the recipe.
• Lights are adapting to the road, time and weather.
• And if not everything so far wasn’t making your life easier, add voice commands on top. Anyway, it is already there, on your smartphone.
• Now let’s take a step further and replace the board panel with a small touchscreen. This will display only the information that you find useful. Forget about rpms, show me only the speed. Or do it in a different color. By day and night. Everything skinnable. And all these possible in a blink of an eye.

You can even develop plug-ins for either your mobile device (the client) or your car (the server). And because I like Java, I even found a cool name: carlets (like applets, midlets or servlets). Or you can use widgets. And you have to admit that this opens a new world of opportunities.
For all this, the auto makers will need to agree to some standards, which could be very hard in this industry.
But I can still hope and dream about it. What would you like to personalize in your car?

From my point of view, following standards in whatever you’re producing as a company is a form of respect for the customer.
There is no good reason, except the economical one, for not to. And economically speaking this can have multiple causes. One could be that the product was developed before the standard and adhering to the standard will be an extra cost. This is in some way understandable. Much less understandable is when making the product after the standard and intentionally not adopting it. The economical reason behind is clear: tying up the customer to the product and automatically to the company.
In my personal opinion, the customer should be educated in this way that he/she should ask the companies to follow the standards and to penalize the ones that are not doing it.
I agree that in some cases the standards are outdated. A very notable case is J2ME. Even tough a lot of mobiles are implementing it, the standard is so outdated, so general, that if you want to develop an application with the latest trends you will end up developing it in five different platforms.
Let’s take another simpler example: phone chargers. There the intention of making you as a customer dependent of the company is even more obvious. For example, Nokia, nany years back had only one type of charger for all their phones. Which was great, you could share the charger with any of your friends and colleagues with a Nokia phone. Lately they switched to a lighter version of that charger, implementing it also on all the phones.
But nowadays, when almost all their phones have a mini-USB connector, why still keeping a proprietary charging connector? Moreover, the specs for the charger are the same as the one for the power from USB. So dropping that charger connector will even save money when producing the phone. And also it will save you money on accessories, which in fact is the problem .
But less acceptable is when they use X different USB connectors. I understand the necessity of two sizes of USB connectors. But why so many shapes for the same size of the connector?
There are a lot of organizations and many efforts in standardization, but you will be, as a customer, the ultimate reason for companies in adhering to standards.

As I’m involved in web development, Firefox became an essential tool. If you think of web development, forget about Internet Explorer, this is the tool. What makes Firefox unique is its ability to integrate a wide variety of plug-ins.
Which one do I used? I will provide a list below and the reasons why. In time I will try to update this list according to my preferences.

• Venkman JavaScript Debugger. Not too many comments here. If you are a serious JavaScript developer this is a must. Along with this, Firefox might feel almost like a real JavaScript IDE.
• Firebug. Another serious tool for JavaScript development. With this you can inspect DOM elements, you can modify on the fly CSS and see the changes instantly. But it’s good not only to check your website, but you can also snoop into color codes, fonts etc. from other pages. If you want to print a page, this can help you by removing on the fly unwanted elements.
• HttpFoxIt is a traffic monitor for all HTTP requests in the browser. I know that Firebug has a similar functionality in the Net panel, but for me this plug-in seems a little bit more clear and easier to use.
• Web developer toolbar. The name says it all. Although lately I used rarely this extension, you can easily disable/enable JavaScript/CSS/cookies in the browser with it and resize the window to test your design on different resolutions.
• Screengrab!. You’ll never know when you need a screenshot of the entire page, not only the viewport area. But when you do, this plug-in is the best choice.
• User Agent Switcher. Test how your web server/pages respond on different browsers/devices. You can import or define your own user agent strings (User-Agent HTTP header) and easily change them from the File/Tools menu. As I’m a WURFL user, I miss here an integration feature.
• Download Statusbar. If you’re tired of the boring default downloads window, this might be on your taste. Check out the mini mode. Non-intrusive, compact and with detailed info.
• JSView. Install it and with one right click you can view any JavaScript or CSS referenced from the current page.
• Plain Old Favorites. I don’t like to sync my bookmarks, so with this I can use IE Favorites in Firefox. In the same way as Bookmarks.
• CoolIris. Web developer or not you have to like this add-on. Instead of viewing images from Flickr, Google Image Search, Photobucket etc in plain web pages, display them on a 3D wall, with smooth scrolling and zoom. For me it is really useful when I search an image on Google or Flickr because I get rid of paging.

What extensions do you use?

I read once someone saying that mobile transcoders are the most evil thing. Indeed, but if you refer to the general ones, like the ones put in place by the GSM providers, e.g. Vodafone in UK. To be frankly that someone was also continuing with the fact that the GSM providers don’t know what they’re doing.
Previously I wrote an article about how can you expand your online presence into the mobile world. Taking into account that you will use the transcoding option, I will give you some tips about.

• Transcode content, not layout. You should focus on transcoding content, not layout. I think this is the biggest problem on general transcoders, they try to transform a layout into another one. It is understandable, because they don’t have any knowledge about the content. I’m not talking here about implementing a neural network, but you should at least have some high level knowledge about the pages.
• Use a mobile template. Build a mobile optimized template and then move the content from the classic online website into it. You can, of course, do this either statically or dynamically
• Transcode images. Don’t forget about images. An image that looks just great on the desktop, could not even be rendering on the mobile devices. Most mobile devices can only display images up to a certain resolution. Also bandwidth is a concern there, don’t make your visitors pay too much for just visiting your site. I also explained this in detail here
• Strip out the non-mobile content. If a part of your site is dedicated to download Windows/Linux/Mac software, don’t even bother to transcode it. Remove even the links to that part of the site. I cannot even think to a scenario where somebody will download an application on his mobile phone so that he can install it later on his laptop. The other way around, very likely.
• Optimize the pages for different set of devices. If you target mobile users, take into account that the number of devices is huge and their capabilities quite different. Here, CSS will do just fine. But don’t fall into the other extreme and create a CSS for every device, it will be a nightmare to maintain it
• JavaScript – don’t even think about it. You can even strip it out entirely during the transcoding process. Act as the browser has this disabled by default. On the other hand, you can improve the user experience on some high end devices with JS, but NOSCRIPT alternative is a MUST.
• Flash, Applets etc – forget about them. Simply remove them while transcoding. They will be a total waste of bandwidth. There are very few devices able to render Flash, actually FlashLite, and they’re not so popular.
• Table transcoding. If you have to transcode tables, I totally understand your headache. Still, choose one strategy (row-by-row or column-by-column) and do your magic. Row-by-row is easier to implement and I would recommend to transform every TR into a P or DIV and the TD into a SPAN. But this is far from being a rule. You can choose different strategies for different types of tables, if it better suits your needs.
• Meta data. Remember to propagate them too. But only those that makes sense and with appropriate values.

This will be all for the moment, but the list remains open.

“What? No XPath2 in .Net? Only v1?”
This is how it starts. At first you can call Microsoft however you want for not implementing XPath2, not even in .Net framework 4. But then you should come together and do it yourself. Actually doing a small workaround, that will enable you to use XPath2 functions in .Net.
First of all see the difference between the XPath functions implemented by Microsoft and the XPath2 standard functions.
Most likely for XSLT transformation in .Net you will use XslCompiledTransform. The workaround is based on adding an extension object.

// creating the XSLT transformation object
XslCompiledTransform xslTransform = new XslCompiledTransform();
// loading the stylesheet - see the Load method for all the possible arguments
xslTransform.Load(...);
// create the transformation arguments object
XsltArgumentList xslArg = new XsltArgumentList();
// the extension object needed for the workaround
xslArg.AddExtensionObject("urn:xpath2", new XPath2());
// apply the transformation
xslTransform.Transform(inputXmlDocument, xslArg, output);

And now we have to define the XPath class

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
public class XPath2
{
	public int compare(String comparand1, String comparand2)
	{
		return comparand1.CompareTo(comparand2);
	}

	public String replace(String input, String pattern, String replacement)
	{
		return Regex.Replace(input, pattern, replacement);
	}
}

For the sake of example and simplicity I included in here only two example functions, compare and replace. But you can implement here all the XPath2 functions that you need, as methods (not static ones) of the class XPath2.

In the XSLT file it is mandatory to have

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xpath2="urn:xpath2">

as the first line. And then using any function will be simple and straightforward:

<xsl:value-of select="xpath2:compare('xpath1', 'xpath2')" />

Of course another way will be to simply use Saxon, an open source implementation for XSLT 2 for both Java and .Net. But if you just need an XPath2 function, it should be simpler what I described above.

I finally managed to get a first version done for a web obfuscator and compressor.
First of all, why to use such a program. Some may say to hide your HTML/JavaScript/CSS code. Right. This could be one option. And it is powerful enough to do so. But I would personally use it to reduce the size of the code. I tested on a few projects and the code gets reduced up to 60-70% from the initial size. It’s not like a zip but quite good if you take into account that you’re dealing only with scripts.
It is very good practice to comment and indent your code, but this doesn’t have any value at all for the end user, it only eats up his/her bandwidth.
The application has a very nice and intuitive interface (check out the screenshots), it is very customizable and it can be run on both UI and command line mode. A nice feature in the graphical interface is the drop zone, where you can drag and drop files or folders and they are automatically processed. Just switch first to the drop zone mode.
If you want to play with it you can download it from SourceForge or check out its home page.
I would gladly want to hear your opinion or how do you use it.

Typing URL addresses on mobile phones is not a pleasant or easy task. Not even on iPhone or other touchsmart devices.
If you have an URL like m.my.com, then you and your visitors are happy. But what if you have a longer URL? Would your customers stay for 2 minutes in front of a billboard to write down that URL? Maybe not. But there’s a faster, yet very simple way to do it. And everything will become a matter of about two clicks for your visitors.
The solution is named QR codes, a type of 2D barcodes.
The process is very simple: you generate the QR codes, put them on your advertising materials (banners, billboards, print ads, even TV ads) and then your visitors will scan them and be redirected to your website. So you will need QR codes generators and your customers will need QR codes readers installed on their mobiles.

QR codes generators

Here everything is reduced to the creation of an image. There are different software applications to generate QR codes, but I would prefer the online ones. There you can specify the URL, optionally the image size and you get the image. Also you get image generated URL for future use. Maybe you want to include it in your website, let’s say for downloadable coupons.
Besides URLs, you can generate phone numbers, email addresses, VCards, texts etc.

• Nokia mobile barcode generator – generates QR and DataMatrix codes (size S, M and L) for links, texts and VCards
• Kaywa generator – generates QR codes (size S, M, L and XL) for URLs, texts, phone numbers and SMSes
• Mobile barcodes generator – generates QR codes (only one size) for URLs, VCards, messages, phone numbers, SMSes and emails.
• For Firefox enthusiasts there is also a plugin: Mobile Barcoder which generates 2D barcodes, QR Codes, Data Matrix, Semacode for the current URL

QR codes mobile readers

Usually the mobile code reader applications can be downloaded on your computer, through SMS or by directly visiting the website with your mobile.

For iPhone

To find a QR code reader it’s pretty easy. Just start the iTunes, go to the iTunes store and search for QR code or barcode. You will see quite a few results. I tried

• Barcode from Stefan Hafeneger which can scan QR and DataMatrix codes and open the URLs in Safari, email addresses in mail application, send content via email, save phone numbers in the contacts.
• Barcodes from the ZXing project. It is open source in case you’re interested and it has versions for other mobile platforms as well.

For Symbian S60

You have the following options here:

• Kaywa Reader – I have a Nokia N95 and this one worked just fine. It requires a two steps registration: a form on their website and confirmation of a valid email address. After downloading and installing the application, you don’t even have to take the snapshot, just point the phone camera on the code and the URL will be recognized and you will be asked if you want to open the URL in the browser.
  
• NeoReader – No registration is required, but you can download it only from your phone from get.neoreader.com. Your mobile will be automatically recognized and you can download and install the application. Remember to turn on auto focus from the settings (disabled by default).
  
• Nokia Barcode Reader
• Glass Reader
• UpCode Reader
• Semacode Reader

For Java phones

• I also tried on my Nokia a Java(J2ME) barcode reader: ZXing. The problem there was the lack of autofocus for snapshots taken and, as a consequence, no barcodes were recognized. This project is open source if you’re interested in how it is done.
• Another Java barcode reader is Okotag, the successor of Snap’A'Bar from Jaxo Systems. Just choose Nokia N93 for N95, but there is the same problem with the autofocus.

For Windows Mobile phones

I tested QuickMark on a HTC Touch HD. It requires two steps registration (website form and email confirmation) and then you are able to download the version needed for your phone. Besides QR, it also automatically recognizes DataMatrix, EAN8, EAN13.

In the end a nice QR to visit!

I just celebrated over 50,000 views to my blog so I assembled a few numbers to describe it:

• Over 50k page views
• Over 50 articles
• 20 months of existence
• 150-200 page views daily, 70-80 over the weekend
• …

For the future I want to write one article weekly (as I initially hoped) and to provide you quite unique tips on programming, web, project management and technology.

A frame can be moved by dragging it from the title bar. But if you have a window without the title bar or you want to move it by dragging from wherever you want, this is the tip for you.
The MouseListener and MouseMotionListener will do the trick. They will be added to the JWindow that we want to move by dragging.



import java.awt.event.MouseListener;
import java.awt.event.MouseMotionListener;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
import java.awt.*;

public class DragMove implements MouseListener, MouseMotionListener {

public static DragMove install(Component c) {
DragMove x = new DragMove();
c.addMouseListener(x);
c.addMouseMotionListener(x);
return x;
}

private Point start;

public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) {
}

public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {
start = e.getPoint();
}

public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) {
}

public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) {
}

public void mouseExited(MouseEvent e) {
}

public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) {
Point p = e.getLocationOnScreen();
Component c = e.getComponent();
c.setLocation((int)(p.getX() - start.getX()), (int)(p.getY() - start.getY()));
c.repaint();
}

public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) {
}
}

Just a few explanations. When the mouse button is pressed, then the starting location relative to the window is stored. Then as the window is dragged, its location is moved on the screen relative to this starting point. And the window is repainted.
Pretty fast and simple enough.