Rodster on the Web

I had a chance to dine at TasteAsia with a few friends courtesy of  Janette Toral of Digital Filipino and Emil of YesPayments (thank you YesPayments for paying the bill! :))   It was just a gathering that Janette organized for the club members who were there during the eServices Expo but for sure everyone had fun!  the food is great and the beer was just cold enough.

It was a surprise to me that such a place exists at the north end of the SM Mall of Asia.  It was long walk from the SMX convention center (which is the far other end of the area) but it was worth it.

I've been told that TasteAsia is a favorite among Manila bloggers and I wouldn't be surprised why.  The place is relaxing amidst its located at the Mall of Asia, the food was surprisingly ok, and of course nothing beats a good company of friends.  This place is recommendable to groups who'd just like to hang out and chill.

I spoke at the Ateneo de Davao University last Friday(Feb 20, 2009), sharing to educators from all over Davao Region on Windows Mobile Programming.   I shared with them how they can take advantage in custom projects the hardware that's built into windows mobile like the camera, sms, gps, and so on.

I did get several questions after on training, which I don't do, but I hope this can be a start to promote Windows Mobile development into the academe or at least have sparked the interest of educators for mobility programming.

The eServices expo last Feb 9 and 10 was a successful event.  eServices Expo showcases the different IT and IT enabled outsourcing companies with conferences discussing the state of the outsourcing industry as well as future directions and opportunities.

I went there to share a space with Janette Toral's SEO booth and spent time at the Davao booth from time to time.  I did not officially join the Davao booth this time but was there to support them and helped as needed.   

The event was successful.   My good friend, a "dabawenyo" as he calls himself,  and an excellent writer of Adobe books, Mr. Ted Padova, thinks that though of the global financial crisis that outsourcing should be the choice for the foreign businesses to do to cut costs, sustain, and the Philippines is able to meet these requirements.  

The event invited several foreign companies to do business matching with Philippine based providers.  I was fortunate to meet a few of them and I keeping my finger's crossed to have some potential business realized soon.

Congratulations to CITEM for a successful event and more power to eServices expo 2010!

I'd like to extend this invitation to everyone to join us at the Web Ramp UP.   Microsoft will be showcasing Silveright, Azure, and other exciting technologies.    I'll also be one of the speaker presenting Windows Mobile development.   See you there!

Yesterday (Nov 19, 2008) we had a Microsoft developer event in Davao City.   More than 50 participants came and I’m honored to be able to share and present some new stuff on software development.

The two sessions were about Windows Mobile Development and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

A good article regarding yesterday’s event can be found at the ITTalks.NET

Attendees can download the slides:  Windows Mobile and Dynamic Data.

One of the limited applications bundled in Windows Mobile is Pocket IE.   The websites and web applications accessed via Pocket IE has to be built for Pocket IE; with limited scripting functionality and should conform to the mobile device display.   Finally, Microsoft is releasing an enhanced version of Pocket IE called Internet Explorer Mobile 6 (IEM6).

IEM6 is based on the desktop Internet Explorer with features like;

• Desktop rendering engine.  You can now display web pages on the Windows Mobile with the same look, feel, and user experience as you see on a Windows Desktop!
• Support for Flash (using Flash Lite)
• Enhanced scripting (Jscript 5.7, finally!) and same scripting engine as IE8 – ability to run browser based scripts that before was only possible for the desktop and won’t work on the Windows Mobile device.
• AJAX sites supported!
• Touch and gesture control

IEM6 now supports the following:

• HTML 4.01
• XHTML 1 and XHTML 1.1 (partial)
• XHTML Mobile Profile (20011029)
• CSS 2.1 (partial) and CSS 3 (limited)
• DOM 1 (full), DOM 2 (partial), DOM 3 (limited)
• ECMAScript 3rd Edition

IEM6 still allows you to display pages, as mobile web pages, same as the previous release but the huge improvement is the ability to render the site that’s the same desktop and have all the features of the site available.  

IEM6 returns the following user agent settings (for developers, on detecting the type of browser accessing the site):

• If on desktop view, the browser returns Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
• If on mobile view, the browser returns Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Window CE; IEMobile 8.12; MSIEMobile 6.0)

Mobile services integration.  Since most Windows Mobile devices are now integrated with a phone (Windows Mobile Professional and Windows Mobile Standard), you can access the phone services like send email messages, send sms messages, and make phone calls via IEM6.

Here’s a screenshot of IEM6 accessing youtube.com

Developers can now download Windows Mobile 6.1.4 emulator images to try out and develop for IEM6.  The URL for downloading the emulator images is available from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1A7A6B52-F89E-4354-84CE-5D19C204498A&displaylang=en

The support for ActiveX is still limited and ActiveX components has to be installed on the mobile device separately (no cab download and install support yet).  This is still a big limitation of the browser.  However, the AJAX support has extended the use of the Windows Mobile device and makes Windows Mobile a real alternative to browsing and accessing web sites and web applications with the same user experience as the desktop.

The release of IEM6 on WM devices is scheduled before the end of 2008.  Expect newer devices soon with IEM6 built-in!

I’m invited to speak on two events;  one in Manila (Nov 17 at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, Podium 4,  RCBC Plaza, Ayala Avenue) and in Davao (Nov 19, at the Grand Menseng Hotel, Pichon St).   I’d like to invite everyone to attend these developer activities.   I’m speaking about Windows Mobile 6 development both in Manila and in Davao and on ASP.NET Dynamic Data as my second session in Davao.

I hope to see you there!  Cheers!

When Tom Cruise showed how he can move documents by hand on a virtual reality surface was a big hit for the movie Minority Report and looks like a technology that’s possible for a decade further.  Hollywood did a good job on showing what to expect next. I’m always a fan of sci fi movies. 

Well, I stumbled on a very cool stuff from Microsoft…  an open source SDK called Touchless that enables developers to build applications that will do more or less the same thing showed in the movie or maybe this is good start for the same technology.

Touchless uses your webcam as an input device and uses contrasting colors as your pointing device.   As shown in the screenshot above, I played around the demo and rotating a map with a yellow and pink plastic covers as controls.

I can imagine tons of possibilities with this technology and best of all, no new additional hardware!    You can create photo and image editing app on a virtual space, you can put document side by side with your hands (look ma no mouse!), drag documents away, and much much more.

I’m excited to see where applications will go with this technology.  Time for me to think of some applications for this also!

The Touchless SDK can be downloaded from http://www.codeplex.com/touchless

I’m working with Intermec, Psion, and Symbol hardware and devices in doing programming for requirements on mobile data collection and automatic identification technologies.  My focus lately has been on EPCGEN2 RFID tag integration (which is still rare and new in the industry) but has high acceptance in the airline and military segments.

A little backgrounder, most of the RFID tags deployed today are those just being used for the unique id (sometimes called Tag ID or TID) that it contains.  It’s good for identifying items instead of using barcodes as the reader will identify the item by its proximity to the reader instead of manually facing the label to the reader.   RFID tags, by its name, uses Radio Frequency as means to communicate with the reader.   Around the tag is an antenna that receives Radio transmissions from the reader and that signal is enough to power the tag and be able to transmit its contents.  We see this at bookstores (that square thing they remove when you buy books) or at garments shops (where they remove a round thick plastic during checkout) but most uses are just for anti-theft or for identifying the item being bought.

EPCGEN2 tags are similar but these have read/write memory areas instead of just having a unique ID.   The ECPGEN2 tag have user memory area that can be written to and be read from. An example of an EPCGEN2 tag is the one from UPM (image above).  These tags have different user memory sizes; the UPM sample above has 512bits of user memory and another type of EPCGEN2 tag from Fujitsu has 64KBits of user memory.   It simply looks like any sticker label and if you can see that tiny black thing in the middle of the sticker, that is the RFID chip.

Imagine the ability to store an item’s brand, serial number, expiry, and information on location transfers being part of a label instead of just the unique ID that still requires to query a database to get the rest of the data.

A typical EPCGEN2 tag has four memory structure:

Membank 0: usually used for passwords to protect the tag
Membank 1:Contains the EPC or UII or a little read/write area
Membank 2: Contains the unique TID
and Membank 3:contains the user area and the size of this area is dependent on the type of label

Note: not all EPCGEN2 tags have a Membank 3.   The User Memory feature is new and this is what this article is all about. 

But though of the user memory, it’s still not much data you can put in.  But definitely this is a good start.  What I do to save memory space is to write data using 6bit ascii instead of 8bit ascii and allows me to write more characters.  The trade-off is that the other applications reading the tag should also read it as 6bit.

There are many uses of this technology and I can think of an unlimited requirements that can take advantage of EPCGen2 tags.  With this technology, we now have the ability to query the history of a product and that data is part of the label that can be scanned instead of just knowing its item code and not requiring access to a database anymore to get the rest of the data.