Adventures in IT

The supposedly standard method of retrieving a handset's capability is through UAPROF (see UAPROF on Wikipedia). Very simply put a mobile phone should send through identifying information when it retrieves a website. However, UAPROF is entirely voluntary and there are several problems associated with relying on it. Along comes WURFL , which touts itself as a free option to consider when looking to identify the capabilities of your visitors browsers. There are of course paid options to help you identify mobile phones visiting your site (such as device atlas ), but why pay for a service when you can get it free? At first glance WURFL looked very promising. It has an active project on Sourceforge and a set of API's for PHP, JAVA, and others. One immediate problem I encountered was that the current release revision (1.1.r2) of the WURFL API is buggy. Well that's not fair for me to say actually- the API works perfectly, it's just the example code that doesn't work ...

I've been working on a gateway system that will help a WASP to accept MMS requests and pass them on to the network for delivery to a mobile handset. For some reason the original designers of the gateway decided not to allow service consumers the ability to upload SMIL directly. Rather, an XML is POSTed to a webservice. The XML is then parsed into SMIL and handed to the network provider in a nice SOAP wrapper. Why is this a problem? Well it means that only the gateway only supports a subset of SMIL. So in order to make a slide look the way that our client wants it to look we have to modify the gateway code to allow text colours and backgrounds to change. Another problem I've had is that there seem to be very few SMIL tutorials online . When I'm learning a new language I usually pick up what I need by asking Google. Unfortunately even the mighty search engine draws a blank, provides hopelessly outdated pages, or documents like the technical specifications which I don...

I'm currently developing a mobile site for a client. The site is the frontend for a competition that they will be running in 2010. Part of the project specification requires the user to be able to build an image by choosing a background, foreground, and slogan. The site will then composite these images and enter the result into the competition. In addition the site will send text messages to the users cellphone informing them of their status and (if they elect to receive it) a "word of the day" This is probably the closest C# solution to what I was looking for: public Image LayerImage(Image Current, Image Layer, Int32 LayerOpacity) { Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(Current); Bitmap layer = new Bitmap(Layer); Color pixel = new Color(); for (int x = 0; x { for (int y = 0; y { pixel = layer.GetPixel(x, y); bitmap.SetPixel(x, y, Color.From...