Well what a surprise! We got registered with Austrade. The formatting is still an issue but I’m glad we got there. This is strange, we looked for ages and never found ourselves. We gave up! A potential client emailed us (mentioning Austrade) which was the way we found out (but not from Austrade themselves)
Well the entry is a little out of date but it is obviously now there. So, for those also targeting the export market, maybe this is worth doing!
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Tagged: austrade
If you read this site, you will know the experimentation we do with Groovy and when we first had Piles. Well without the improvements of the second attempt (when we used more accurate data) we have done the same solution as a mobile (phone) application called Tradie, which runs on Symbian S60 smartphones (and IPhones – we just don’t have one 
)
Why mobile? Well there is no point in getting your shiny notebook all dirty, whilst outside, when your phone can do all the work! It’s a lot lighter too. We called it Tradie because it’s the kind of thing an Aussie tradesman might want to know the answer too, but just doesn’t have the Mathematica skills to address 
. We even added a metric option (the default) but wanted to show the same calculation as the first post (most of our readers are probably in the Imperial U.S anyway).
Actually (little history here) we had developed a video surveillance mobile prototype as a front end to the Gizzy product. As we recently reported, Gizzy is no more and so our fancy mobile application, which negotiated the Gizzy protocols to acquire video server images, is thus also no more.
Nonetheless, though markets are sour and companies are going under, there is an optimists view of this (I think)! As we had previously posted on the value of by-products, our skills are also a by-product of our work (those of us in ICT anyway). Though revisiting mobile development after over 7 or 8 months was a little stressful, the core knowledge and skills acquired got us going in record time.
I am tempted to take an aside and comment on how hirers acquire staff based on what skills they can evidence (via testing) on any particular day! Such a short sighted view of what constitutes skill and staff value! Not so much looking for a useful skills base but a monkey to jump though hoops methinks. No, I wont make comment
These are lean times in the ICT world and I will note that an exceptionally talented (and skilled) ex-colleague was unsuccessful with landing a contract. Oh boy does that company not know what opportunity they missed! Didn’t think a more mature candidate could keep up with the technology I am told. Hmmmm.
We’ll keep you posted on more experiments, prototypes and products as we go along.
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Tagged: application, Groovy, mobile, prototype, s60, symbian
Well Nokia software updater (NSU) just got better, at least for me. I had become frustrated with the fact that I would have to use Windows XP to burn new firmware onto my E61i (apparently) and disliked seeing the app fail each time it tried to run on Vista. So I turned it off and forgot about it.
Well last week I wanted to make a phone backup, cranked up Nokia PC Suite and automagically NSU ran and, for the first time, gave me the option to upgrade! Well the new firmware made my WiFi access more stable so I am very pleased that I did. And no hiccups, like a dead phone!
I followed the advice to the letter, I made sure encryption / lock passwords were all off, that the battery was fully charged (actually NSU won’t let you proceed until it is – the power supply could fail after all) and that my data backup was ready to restore, which it did. Even some of the applications survived the upgrade, so getting the ones I still needed was no real hassle.
Our latest LEXECORP mobile application (yes, shameless plug to be addressed later) also has an info page which reports on phone stats (like that battery level) and Software Version (2.0633.65.01 03-10-07 RM-227 (c) Nokia) which saves me searching for the weird set of numbers to key that will tell me just that.
Fun when it is easy
Life, like software, should be simple. Being conservative with upgrades (lazy) also paid off – I really had to do nothing for a nice result (thank you Nokia).
Now I recall there being a 3.* version of the firmware for Euro phones! So does that update still not apply to us in the Asia Pacific area?
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Tagged: e61i, nokia, software updater, vista
