Safe and SafeDesktop (MobileKnox / Safe)
Just a brief update: I released Safe 2.2.6 and SafeDesktop 0.9.2 a few days ago. Everybody using earlier versions of these tools should visit www.javawi.de and get an update.

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 10:45 2007-08-08 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

List of Fancy J2ME Applications (General)
I am a J2ME developer for many years now. In 2001 I started developing Safe (http://www.javawi.de) and since then I updated this application once in while. So, I kept pace with the evolvement of J2ME. MIDP 2.0, CLDC 1.1 and the advent of various JSR projects improved the plain J2ME framework a lot. Now, it is possible to access files stored on a mobile device and to communicate with back-end servers by using Web-Services. The 3D-graphic API allows fancy game scenarios and the well-known Location-API is an enabler for the location-based service market.
Not only has the Java side improved, also mobile devices advanced. Back in 2001 my Palm Pilot m505 was busy for a few hundreds milliseconds decrypting a short text message that has been encrypted using AES. Nowadays, I cannot recognize any delay in decrypting the same text message. Also, many mobile devices offer a lot of free memory, so that J2ME applications can be executed at high speed without many time-consuming garbage-collection runs.
Back in 2001 and 2002 we have seen an explosion of J2ME applications even that the J2ME-platform was not as feature-rich as it is today and the hardware was much slower. Register-websites such as www.midlet.org list nearly 500 different applications ranging from a Doom port to ICQ instant messenger client. However, my impression is that many software projects and register-websites have been shut down during the last few years. For instance, www.midlet.org's front website lists the last addition of a software project back in 2004. And if you click through the list of applications many project websites do not even exist anymore.
On the other side, companies likes Yahoo! and Google have joined the J2ME software market by releasing tools such as Google Maps, Google Mail and Yahoo! Go. These tools are on the cutting-edge of what is possible with J2ME and show how cool applications on mobile devices can be. From my point of view, we are lacking a website that keeps track of all the cool J2ME applications that have been unleashed recently. To change this I am going to post a list of cool applications I use in my daily life. I ask everybody who is using other cool J2ME applications to complete the list of applications by posting the name and a link to the project website by adding a comment to this blog entry.

Very cool J2ME applications (in random order): This is my list of fancy J2ME applications for shiny mobile devices. Now it is your turn to enhance this list. :-)

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:00 2007-08-08 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (3)

Since my last post ... (Ph.D. studies)
First of all, I have to apologize for not posting messages during the last three months. The past few weeks have been so amazing and exciting that I couldn't find the time to post updates. I am really sorry for this and I promise to be more responsive in the future. The subsequent list will give you an update what kept me busy the last 90 days:
  • I attended to the Percom in White Plains, New York during 19-23 March and held a presentation regarding my research work. The presentation was entitled "Overhearing the Wireless Interface for 802.11-based Positioning Systems" and as the questions-and-answers sections is an indicator for success, I would say I did pretty well. Not only my presentation was quite good, also the whole conference was a great experience. It was great to attend to all the other presentations and learn what other researchers in the area of pervasive computing and communications are doing. Have a look at the pictures I tool during the conference to get an impression how it was.
  • After the conference closed I stayed another week in New York and I took the whole week off. It has been my first time in New York, so I used the change to do all the sight-seeing. It was really great. The picture I took during the stay are available from my website.
  • Being back home in Germany, I started working on an LoCA paper called "Deployment, Calibration, and Measurement Factors for Position Errors in 802.11-based Indoor Positioning Systems". I submitted it a few hours before the paper submission system closed its doors and I am still waiting for the acceptance/rejection notification. The notification is scheduled for the 3rd July. So, lets keep the fingers crossed! ;-)
  • This year, a tele-seminar between the Lancaster University, UK and the University of Mannheim has been setup for the first time. The idea of this tele-seminar is to teach computer science students how software is developed in international, inter-cultural, and wide-spread teams. For this, students from Mannheim and Lancaster grouped together to implement selected video cut detection algorithms. At the beginning and the end of the tele-seminar the students meet in Lancaster and Mannheim, respectively, to build groups and present their work. As Professor Effelsberg, my supervisor is one of the organizers of this seminar and because I once studied in Lancaster, I was my duty to arrange all the travel planning and set up the used software tools. I was a lot of work, however, it was also a lot of fun and I learned a lot about group travelling and CodeBeamer (the integrated software development environment we used). :-)
  • This year, the University of Mannheim hosted the "Mobile Data Management (MDM)" conference. Professor Effelsberg, my supervisor, is one of the local organizers which means I have been quite busy organizing the conference. However, the conference went smoothly and we had a great time listening to amazing presentations and meeting interesting researchers.
  • Additionally, to all the work I have already described, I wrote a paper for the ACM WiNTECH workshop. The workshop is co-located to the ACM MobiCom and covers testbed-based evaluation of experimental wireless networking. This is exactly what I am doing during my research. The paper I wrote describes the research tools I and my research team developed over the last two years. We want to give our tools to the community and hope it may help other researchers to easily compare results and speed-up research by having standardized tools at hand. A technical report describing the tools in even more detail is available from a website at the University of Mannheim.
  • During all my research and organizing work I spend a few hours to implement SafeDesktop and an improved version of Safe. Have a look at overhauled website.

I am really sorry for all the people who wrote me emails that are still unanswered. I will work on the large list of unread emails in the next few days. Especially, I am really sorry for the guys from Jive Software. Sorry Matt!

So, see you next time.
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 14:08 2007-06-03 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Make Presentations Easier: Jodviewer (General)
We all have to attend to a lot of meetings and once in a while we are forced to present our work or ideas by ourselves. In most cases, every presenter brings his own laptop to the desk to make sure his presentation works fine. This is actually very annoying because each time the laptops are exchanged and connected, there is a small and unproductive break. It would actually be better if everyone would use the same presentation software or if the presentation software could be downloaded from the web on demand.

A friend of mine is a true believer of this idea. He already implemented a viewer for the OpenOffice presentation file format. The viewer is called Jodviewer. It is written in pure Java and it supports the OpenOffice file format. So every presentation created with OpenOffice will work with this viewer. The viewer can be used as a standalone application as well as an applet. It is still in its early stages but already provides the basic features. Give it a try and hopefully we will see a revolution in the way presentations are performed.
Posted by Thomas King at 10:46 2007-02-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Safe 1.1.0 (MobileKnox / Safe)
By the end of last year I bought a Nokia E70. Until then, I used a Siemens mobile phone to make my calls and a Palm Tungsten to organize my life. The E70 is a so-called smart-phone, what means that it combines the features offered by a Palm pilot and a common cell phone. So, the E70 is supposed to replace my old Siemens mobile phone and my Palm Tungsten.

As most of you already know, I developed a J2ME midlet to organize my accounts and other sensitive data a few years ago. This midlet is called "Safe" and it stores all data encrypted. A master password is required to get access to the data. This allows me to chose another password for each account and never forget this information. Especially, the growing number of websites that require an account make this tool very handy. However, when I started developing "Safe" back in 2001, J2ME was not supporting any file system access. This recently changed and so I started implementing an import and export for "Safe". After a few hours of development, I accomplished the job. I utilized this new feature to copy all my data from the Palm to the E70.

Special thanks to the Kxml guys for their great J2ME xml parser and generator.
Posted by Thomas King at 10:44 2007-02-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

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