OMG!! I just made my cellphone browse Amazon's catalog without using a browser! With a J2ME program! OMG! OMG!!!11 It works! I wrote it in three days from the first time I saw Amazon's WSDL! Un-fucking-believable! This WSDL / SOAP thing's really simple, even from a phone!

The joke used to be that every program expanded until it could read e-mail. Now it seems no piece of consumer electronics will rest before it can play MP3s and MPEG2s off your network's harddisk.

I used to be able to tell my computer that dialing *99# on whatever modem was on the other end of the Bluetooth port was a really great idea because there would be a PPP link waiting for it. My computer would try to do so, and the phone would know that what it really should do was switch on the GPRS radio, get on that network and hook up to a special datastream I had told it would be at wap.voicestream.com. Then the datastream should be passed back to the computer just as if it was a standard

...have a facility to fill in the artwork and information tags of the songs I ripped myself with data from the store? When I did my rips, I got song and artist, I'd like the rest too, and Apple has it. (Might it even be a way to collect some revenue?)

...have a utility that "listens" to your MP3s to fill in the BPMs, where it thinks it stands a chance? Would be very handy since it has a BPM autoplay list?

I am having my doubts about WebServices.

The premiere issue of Queue, the new magazine launched by the Association of Computing Machinery, most articles were devoted to WebServices, including interview with the guys that came up with the idea. They looked at the great revolution of the Web amd wondered whether it couldn't be generalized further. The Web is very successful as a catlog and a communications medium with very simple tools: as a client you have to understand (meaning that you

So my title has been settled: my new businesscards will state I am a 'Senior Research Engineer'. I think it sounds cool.

My current research gig is taking over a project from the person whose position in the group I am filling. Its current shape is a collaboration with an IBM Alphaworks project from a group in Austin TX. I want to do a site-visit, but can't find an angle to make it necessary, yet.

Forward Lock

Combined Delivery

Separate Delivery

Note these terms. These terms are the new world of Digital Rights Management [DRM] in the mobile phone world. And remember, as much as people bellyache about Palladium and computers locking your data in, there are more mobile phones in use than actual PCs.

[Cloned from my LJ]

I engaged in some willfull consumerism today. pinkfish is ripping his complete CD collection, and, together with my music directories, we simply didn't have the disk space anymore. We went to microcenter to price external hardd-disks (IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0 capable) and found out to our surprise that each 50 Gig is around 100 bucks. That's not much for serious space.

Strange. A subtext on Slashdot and Plastic is that the Canadian economy is doing great. Then why does monster have only a smattering of JAVA jobs, all server side? Why am I not finding anything for a user interface guy, a visualizer guy, like me? What am I missing?

I have a journal on /. now?