This was interesting,  I was sitting on my sofa tonight just playing around with Google Maps on iPod Touch.    I clicked the locate me button (which had never worked before) and it zoomed right in to my exact location.

Slightly freaked out I pieced together what had happened and why ‘locate me’ was suddenly working with smart bombing precision.   Looking around I couldn’t see anyone pointing a laser targeting device at my house, so I cam up with the following.

If you remember about a month ago I posted about add geo-encoding information to your website here.

We’ll it all makes sense,   Google had indexed my blog found the geo-encode information in the meta tags of my blog/website.

The final bit of the jigsaw,  because my public IP address is the address of my router and traffic I generate from my home network (i,e from the iPod) appears to come from my base public ip.   This public IP is also the address of my blog.

So…   Google could easily relate my IP to my location.      I hope I’ve got the trail correct, but its well worth doing what I did and putting those meta tags on any web-page you host.    

I would give you a screenshot but still no simple way to-do so off an iPod/iPhone.  Come on SOTI guys

Today we needed a low cost way of sending bulk SMS messages.   With the advent of low and even free message deals,  I thought what about just hooking up an old Windows Mobile device to send messages on our behalf.

Hooking a phone up to a PC with a USB cable and a bit of socket programming to listen to request to send messages.   So on the device we have this listener.

We send messages on a TCP port in the form PHONENUMBERS|MESSAGE

Phone picks up the message and sends the SMS using this bit of code.

                           OutlookSession currentSession = new OutlookSession();
                            SmsMessage smsmess = new SmsMessage();
                            smsmess.Body = message;
                            foreach (string num in numbers)
                                smsmess.To.Add(new Recipient(num));
                            currentSession.SmsAccount.Send(smsmess);
                            currentSession.Dispose();

The whole process is invoked by a command line application on the PC, which takes the following command line -

SMSIT <ip address of phone> <phonenumbers> <message>

This application just opens a TCP socket connection to the phone and squirts down the PHONENUMBER|MESSAGE

Job done,  I can now send SMS from lots of different desktop and server applications

Today I needed to quickly do some screen mock ups for a customer.   Rather than lay out yet another mobile form with labels down the left (right aligned and prettied up) and text labels on the left (left aligned and prettied up),  I thought I would create myself some templates.

I’ve now got a set of all the most common ones I need -

Its really easy to-do and saves you a pile of time.

Here’s an example of my base form -

All you need todo in Visual Studio from the File menu is select Export Template, then follow the wizard through.

You can then tidy up the resultant templates by looking in

%userprofile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\My Exported Templates

A nice little tip, I found is that when you create a new instance of your template if you put the string

$safeitemname$

In the template file, it will substitute your class name in where you need it, great for setting window titles etc.

Finally zip up the contents of your template and copy to

%userprofile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#

You can of course do the same for VB.net etc.

My only final tip, is to make sure you get your object (form etc.) right before you export it,  its a pain to edit templates.   Not impossible just a flaff.

I know I’ve been banging on about this a fair bit.    But we are at T Minus 14 days till I attempt the worlds first Virtual Earth Powered Balloon Race, well actually its Helium powered but you get the idea.

If you want to be part of this,  go buy a ticket at www.racingballoon.com

Ok,  so here’s the scoop.

I’ve been playing around with adding location EXIF tags to a photo taken on a Windows Mobile device.  I’ve reached the conclusion that reading tags is not that difficult but writing them can be a pain in the bottom.

So, I’m thinking, about using a web-service to post pictures from the mobile device along with the location the picture was taken and letting the full framework add the required EXIF tags and save it to the photo sharing/blog of your choice.

So its early days (as I’m a newbie to this),  but here's the bit of full framework code that lists the EXIF tags and the bit commented out at the bottom shows how to add a simple tag.

            Image theImage = new Bitmap(@"someimage.jpg");

            // Get the PropertyItems property from image.
            PropertyItem[] propItems = theImage.PropertyItems;

            foreach (PropertyItem i in propItems)
            {
                if (i.Type == 2 ) // strings at the moment
                {
                    Debug.WriteLine(i.Id + " " + i.Type + " " + ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(i.Value));
                    Debug.WriteLine("");
                }
                else
                {
                    Debug.WriteLine(i.Id + " " + i.Type + " " + i.Value.Length);

                }

            }
            
            // adding a new tag
            // PropertyItem p = new PropertyItem();

            // theImage.SetPropertyItem();
            

Anyway,  we’ll see how this progresses.

Another just wow moment. (watch from about the halfway point)

http://www.gottabemobile.com/GBM+Shortcut+Live+Labs+Seadragon+On+Surface.aspx

This looks cool (and new),   NavReady - The next generation of portable navigation devices.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/products/navready/default.mspx

So here’s the problem.    Today’s sudden emergency, we found a bug with a mobile application.    The bug was traced quickly to a small typo in a web-service.    I was in my office miles away from the client,  yes I had sloooow VPN access but I needed to get a fix quickly deployed to all nodes on a three machine load balanced IIS farm.

So this is what I did.

In Visual Studio, I published my website to a local folder on my hard disk.    I then removed the web.config as  didn’t need the pressure of having to rebuild the configuration for all environments.

I then file copied this up to a test machine, got the customer to test and confirm that I’d fixed the problem.

Next step,  was to use a batch file (and this is the nugget) to restart each IIS server in turn  (using iisreset) and copy the files from test to production across each server.

Having a batch file to achieve this stopped me having to type lots of commands under pressure.   Common sense stuff I know, but this really saved my bacon today.

Total time for fix,  around 15 minutes.     The world keeps turning

Got a spare £1600 for a PDA?

Go buy yourselves one of these babies.   All my mobile software looks great on these as its got twice the clock speed of most normal high end rugged devices (i.e 800 Mhz)

These are military grade machines that I’m sure could take a bullet or two.   The picture doesn’t really do it justice  they are chunky and very well made.  The VGA screen,camera and barcode reader are all just superb.  Not forgetting its routes in high end field survey,  so it has a top of the line inbuilt GPS.

Lets just say £1600 one more time…  

Want one