Working with the Grain

Re-reading my previous posts it occurs to me that I was assuming that spending time with my family was taking time away from doing cool hacker stuff. I've missed a trick there. What I should have been looking for was the win-win. If the things you do with your kids are cool hacks at the same time then the hours are not zero sum. So, shifting focus, my search changes from looking for ways to hack in the spare moments around the kids to looking for ways to hack with the kids.

What would constitute a hack with the kids? Well it has to be something to do with problem solving, being creative, and getting immersed in a topic. The difficulty is finding the topic. Its got to be something where both me and my kids are interested. It seems patronizing to get the kids to repeat experiments out of kits without some wider motivation.

So that's what I'm going to try to do. If you have an idea for a topic then post a comment.

Chess Griffin Becomes a DadHacker

Chess Griffin, presenter of the fabulous Linux Reality Podcast, has announced that he's stopping podcasting after 100 shows to have more spare time to spend with his family. This is the classic DadHacker dilemma -- doing something technically cool just takes up so much time. I can't even keep posting to a blog up to much speed never mind a podcast. If I can think of a answer that allows both family and techie things to happen simultaneously I'm sure I'll make my fortune somehow.

Update on DadHacking

So I've been busy on the "Dad" side of DadHacker recently. Baby v.3.0 arrived before Christmas. Seeing as writing blog posts fitted under the "Hacker" remit, things have been somewhat quiet here recently. No time for hacking, but at least some time for thinking. What I've been thinking about is a return to Smalltalk. Smalltalk was my object-oriented roots more than fifteen years ago. Recently I've discovered the Seaside web-framework and it is really intriguing. Being smalltalk development, it is tied to a full-sized machine rather than my phone. There is hope as seaside has a web-based development UI. I wonder how that would run on my nokia symbian opera web-browser.

Using SSH from the Nokia E61

Using putty as an SSH client from my Nokia E61 gives me a way to unblock development road-blocks that the phone by itself can solve.

So far I've been trying to do development on my Nokia E61 phone hand-set. Having got caught up by the pain of trying to view the PDF of the API documentation on the phone I've decided to relax the rules of my challenge somewhat. As I've got a Debian virtual host from Rimu Hosting. I'm going to extend the definition of "using the phone as a development environment", to include connecting to a Linux box from the phone.

I had SSH set up already on the server so I grabbed the Symbian port of putty from http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/

The install was very smooth over-the-air. To my shame I don't have the public-key authentication turned on, but then my server doesn't hold anything valuable. The putty implementation is very good. The most important thing to learn is that to send a TAB character you need to press CTRL-i, that way you can do the tab-completion in bash and save yourself a lot of typing. Other odd characters I grab from the "Chr" menu button so that I can get the angle-brackets and pipe-character.

The other key that causes problems is the escape-key. This is a particular problem when editing with vi. The only way I've found to do this is to use the putty menu to send a special character. This slows me down a bit but is not the end of the world.

With the putty client set-up I have given myself a way out of dead-ends on the phone alone. Now I'm going to see if I can get the Nokia python API docs in a phone-readable form.

A Talking Phone, with a Little Help

Thanks to cyke64 who read my previous post about my troubles with getting the Nokia python API doc in a phone-readable form. Cyke6f pointed me at the doc as a text file at http://cyke64.googlepages.com/PythonForS60_1_4_0_doc.txt

I still had some fun and games downloading this. My normally reliable Opera browser had a fit when clicking the link. It went into install-a-program mode and then just hung. I had hoped that I could find the downloaded file somewhere on the system, but several minutes searching yielded nothing. Swapping to the Nokia browser worked fine, but it lacks any feature to save a copy locally so I have to reload every time.

With the doc available, the solution to my challenge was within easy reach. The quick speech-synthesis program goes like this:

import audio
audio.say("hello world")

Now I've got that far the question is what next. The real interesting thing I'm aiming for is to combine data from the web with voice-synthesis to give me audio notifications while driving - traffic news being the obvious first application. So, next step: write a python app to download a web-page.

Trying to Convert the Symbian Python API from PDF to Text

I'm still determined to boot-strap my python development environment on my Nokia E61 phone. By boot-strap I mean use only the phone itself to set-up the environment and not resort to an intermediate PC. Somewhat surprisingly the thing that is currently blocking my path is that the API doc for the Nokia python environment is in PDF format and I can't read it on my phone. I've tried to find a PDF reader for the phone with no luck. Now I'm trying to convert the PDF to something I can read.

My first stop was the adobe web page where I found their on-line tools page . This gave me two promising looking options. Either I could give them a URL to the PDF and they would convert it into text for me, or I could email in the PDF file and they would mail me back the text.

The paste-a-URL option highlights a problem that I commonly have when browsing on my phone: there is no option to view the source of a page. The Adobe form needed a URL. The URL was hidden in sourceforge's download system. My preferred browser on the E61 is Opera. Opera lets you cut and paste the URL of the page that you are currently on, but there is no way to get the address of other links on the page. The phone's built-in browser doesn't even let you cut and paste the current URL,

I was beaten by the URL option so on to the email. I had successfully downloaded the PDF so emailing it off should be straightforward. I would have to use the built-in email client as the Google mobile mail client that I prefer doesn't let you add attachments. I'd done that before so my settings were still available. I fired off the email to pdf2txt@adobe.com as directed. I closed the Nokia mail client and jumped back to the Google mail app. With baited breath I pressed refresh. The reply was already there...but it was just an email bounce with "unknown user". Hmph! I mailed Adobe for help but I'm not holding my breath.

Time for a new approach. Here's my thinking: the PDF must have been created from some source code

PDF Reader on the Nokia E61 Phone

I'm right now struck in a rather extreme example of the DadHacker-needs-to-be-mobile theory. I'm on my commute into work and there has been a crash and the traffic has just stopped. Given I have now some free hacking time and a 3G network link I'll put the theory into practise.

In my quest to make my phone say "Hello World!" using python and no other computing power than that available on my Nokia E61 I've got to the point where I need a PDF reader in order to read the standard Symbian python docs. By default the E61 doesn't have a PDF reader. Checking out the All About Symbian forums I quickly find two options: one from Nokia and another called PDF+ from mBrain Software.

Trying the Nokia one first. I downloaded the sis file from the Nokia Asia site but the installation failed. Don't know why, but it is enough to make me try PDF+.

Trying the PDF+ reader from mbrains, but on clicking the sis link the browser displays the binary on the screen. I guess that the mime type is wrong on their server.

Trying the adobe site directly. Took some searching and headed off to "Reader LE". That link sends me off to a "partner site". This site gives me an option to buy but no preview. Sigh.

OK. Time for a re-think. Next time I'll try to get a text version of the API docs from somewhere. For now the traffic is moving and I'm off to work.