Email processing in Ruby without Rails

Connect to Gmail using Ruby without using the Rails framework.

MMS Photo Upload

MMS photo upload is really a multi-part email with photo attachment sent from a phone. To receive and process MMS photo on a server, one can either run procmail locally or use a POP/IMAP fetcher.

"Stress-free Incoming E-Mail Processing with Rails" describes how to process incoming email with Rails. MMS2R can then be used to process MMS, stripping out ads and other junk that a network provider (e.g. Sprint) may insert into the message. Sprint even goes a step further and stores the photo on their servers instead of in the message itself.

"Experimental Mobile Gateway" talks about SMS processing in Python and MMS processing to post blogs to LiveJournal.

Caltrain Schedule for Mobile Phones

Go mobile and save some trees and polar bears at the same time! Now you can access Caltrain schedule on your web-enabled cell phones at http://m.iCaltrain.com. It's a simpler version of the iPhone site that should render well on most modern mobile browsers. I've tested it on Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and Samsung phones.

iCaltrain: Caltrain schedule for iPhone

I released a version of the Caltrain schedule for the iPhone at http://iCaltrain.com using a mix of Python, PHP, and the iUI toolkit.

3 Steps to Activate the iPhone without AT&T Service

This is a step-by-step guide to activate and unlock your iPhone without AT&T service. It will let you use Safari and other iPhone apps (except YouTube) over WiFi.

On July 3rd, DVD Jon published techniques to unlock the iPhone and activate it without AT&T service. It is not SIM unlock so it won't let you use your iPhone on other GSM networks (e.g. T-mobile). On July 10th, PQ DVD streamlined the techniques into a single, one-click Windows app.

Step 1: Install iTunes 7.3.0.54. No other versions of iTunes are currently supported. Apple released v7.3.1.3 on July 11th, so you'll need to find an archived version. At the time of writing, you can find v7.3.0.54 here.

Optional step: Connect your iPhone over USB and verify that it's detected by iTunes, then quit iTunes.

Step 2: Run iPhone Unlock Toolkit, and click the "Unlock iPhone" button. It streamlines the process of patching iTunes, adding an entry for albert.apple.com to your etc/hosts file, and running a local server to respond to the activation request.

Step 3: Disconnect and re-connect your iPhone. iTunes will detect the iPhone, start automatically, and ask you to activate your iPhone. Click "Cancel" and you're done!

Flash Maps

A few ActionScript-based client-side maps: FlashDynamics and ModestMaps.

Best Practices for Performance and Memory for Flash Lite

Adobe Flash Lite online live seminar: Best Practices for Performance and Memory for Flash Lite and Developer Center article.

Some takeaways:

1. Help the garbage collector by explicitly deleting objects (e.g. XML) and setting local objects to null. It's unclear how setting local objects helps because the reference count should go to zero once it's out of scope.
   
2. fscommand2("GetFreePlayerMemory") returns the size of the largest contiguous block of memory that can be allocated by the player, not total free memory.

iTunes/iPhone's Cover Flow in Flash

http://www.n99creations.com/vieweg.php?id=5

Example that use Flash 8 features: AS2, more, and more.

Flash Lite Memory Size

Total available memory allocated by Flash Lite player, using
fscommand2("GetTotalPlayerMemory");

1. FL 2.1 (standalone), Windows Mobile 5: 4096KB
2. FL 2.0 (built-in), Nokia S60 FP3: 2297KB
3. FL 2.1 (standalone), Nokia S60 FP2: 2296K

ROM Images for HTC Tornado

The HTC Tornado has been branded as iMate SP5, Qtek 8310, Dopod 577W, etc. This page shows the various versions of ROM with download links from different manufactures. For example, you can flash a iMate SP5, which is English-only (2.5.331.2), to Chinese/English (and also get AKU 2.0) by flashing it to the latest Taiwan (2.5.37.0)/Singapore (2.5.39.2) Dopod ROMs.

SPV-developers.com has some useful utilities to SIM unlock and application unlock the phone after a ROM upgrade.