I’ve been doing some more programming on the system lately, even though I know I really should spend time with the report now

Made a fix for the “pan vs select” problem by using the “exit” button to switch between pan and select! Application exit is moved to the menu. Added some nice arrows to show if we are in pan mode or not. Added geographic filtering in the track request, which means that not all tracks are sent everytime. And now comments are correctly forwarded into the VTS system. Finally, I have a working “bookmark” system. Hopefully, I won’t have to spend much more time with the programming…

Switched to the Arealis web service (Thanks to Stig-Erland for assistance!), but new problems occured. The map requests doesn’t seem to run correctly on the Nokia series 40 and 6230 emulators, and the problem could be that the URL is too long. Some people say that it can only be 127 characters long…

Completed an evaluation (in Norwegian) of the Cell Info Road Tracker project by John Simensen.

Also done some more work on my server – fixed the HTTP parser to handle requests split across multiple TCP packages (in other words, not all data is received immediately). This was necessary in order to receive HTTP POST packages from my Nokia.. Now it is also possible to enter requests manually through a telnet session…

A simple project status report has now been posted on the Project documents page. The report is to be presented on Monday, March 27, 2006.

(…and it’s easy to see that I’m not late at all with the status report – this text was posted at 08:59, with deadline at 09:00 )

Update 2006-03-27: Fixed link to status report; it was referring to wrong file..

Been doing some programming these last days (finally!), which means that I am on schedule with the project. Added functions to select a track and view detailed information, and also to type in a comment and send it back to the server using HTTP POST. Created simple status indicators showing track load status and map load status (none, currently loading or error).

Used to have the IP address of the server (my laptop) hard-coded in the client, but this didn’t work well as my laptop changes its IP adress frequently. Added user-interface to type in URL of server manually. This user interface appears as the application is started, to avoid lagging problems (described below). The URL is stored in persistent storage, so that as long as the server keeps the same IP adress, the user only has to press OK on this dialog.

Frustrating issues
- The J2ME user interface components (javax.microedition.lcdui.*), especially some Command items, are handled strangely on Nokia phones. It creates a menu “options”, even if it is only one item to put there..
- Seems that if a HTTP server is not available, all threads are frozen in a time-out. However, as far as I can tell, this only happens on the simulators, and not the real phone.
- In HTTP POST requests, NetBeans mobility pack DefaultColorPhone simulator uses “Transfer-Encoding: chunked”, whereas Nokia uses normal encoding. My server now handles both, but who knows what will appear in other mobile devices, “Transfer-Encoding: gzip”?
- Decided to not rely on the time on the client. Using System.currentTimeMillis() gives a different results than expected on the Nokia phones. After looking into the problem, it seems to me that the phone uses a “GMT-13″ timezone..
- Unable to draw using transparency. Had to use a png to create a simple cursor ..

Joyful moments
- Run multiple clients, and see that a comment written on one client appears on the other
- Found the reason why no tracks were visible on the Nokia client (time problems..)
- Start up the client, and see for the first time that information has been sucessfully recovered from persistent storage.
- See my .png picture appear on screen!

Below are a couple of screendumps from a simulator:

Screen showing map and simulated tracks. Notice the “T” in the upper right corner. This indicates that the application is currently loading tracks. The red brackets are the track selector.

Screen showing track details. The user can type in comment and send back to server.

Added a new page to the website, with links to the project documents. Started writing on the main project report, which can also be found on the “project documents” page. Writing in MS Word for now, but we’ll se if I switch to LaTeX later..

Completed a more thorough project description. The file is available here.

Some tips for my co-students struggling with IEEE references and Latex: Download the IEEE bst file from IEEE author tools. If you use Miktek, then copy IEEEtran.bst to [texmf]/bibtex/bib. Run “initexmf -u” to refresh the configuration (or something..!). In the .tex document, use “\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}”. In the .bib file, add the entry “url={My url}” for webpages. Who said Latex is easy!?

I tried to use RefWorks, but found it cumbersome to export the references each time I modified them, in order to use them from Latex. Also, the names of the exported references are not logical. This makes the references in the .tex document more difficult to read. So I ended up with editing the .bib file manually.