dot kam

Haptic Clock Beats The Time Into You

Have a mobile phone that you do not want to look at? Is it that bad, or maybe it is awesome, but you are just annoyed to look at it to find out something as simple as current time? Then here is a very interesting Java Mobile application that is written by Che-Wei Wang and makes your phone to literally beat the time into you.

The Haptic Clock is a small clock program for Java powered mobile phones. The clock conveys time through a sequence of vibrations so you never have to pull the phone out of your pocket to tell time.

Long vibrations are the number of hours of the current time on a 12 hour clock, so 6pm and 6am are both 6 vibrations. The shorter vibrations are the number of minutes divided by 5. So 4 vibrations is 20 minutes and 7 vibrations is 35 minutes. Example: (3) long vibrations and (6) short vibrations means it’s 3:30. Just in case you do want to see the time, the screen displays the time with tick marks for hours, minutes and seconds.

Instructions: Press ‘5′ to vibrate the current time. Press ‘0′ to exit program. UP and DOWN to control the speed of vibrations. Time alerts (vibrations) will occur automatically every 15 minutes on the hour.

Version:         0.06
Released:    5.24.2007
Creator:         Che-Wei Wang
License:        GNU Public License (source coming soon)

Download Beta: Haptic-Clock.zip (includes JAR and JAD)
_{Beta means it may not work on your phone or worse, may break your phone. Install and use at your own risk.}

Tested on: Nokia E70
Issues: J2ME drains the batteries. Looking for ways around it, or a more efficient platform.

howto / java / software / tutorials — 19 comments
09
Jun 07

Convert Date to String in Java

Just an example on how “java.text.SimpleDateFormat” can be used to convert a java date object (java.util.Date) to a string (String, StringBuffer, StringBuilder, etc..).
The whole magic is done by SimpleDateFormat, the child of “java.text.DateFormat”, which, as its name suggests, formats the date by a provided template.

This template is very flexible and provided to the formatter as a string. Here are the values which are used by SimpleDateFormat’s template:

Letter	Date or Time Component	Presentation	Examples
`G`	Era designator	Text	`AD`
`y`	Year	Year	`1996`; `96`
`M`	Month in year	Month	`July`; `Jul`; `07`
`w`	Week in year	Number	`27`
`W`	Week in month	Number	`2`
`D`	Day in year	Number	`189`
`d`	Day in month	Number	`10`
`F`	Day of week in month	Number	`2`
`E`	Day in week	Text	`Tuesday`; `Tue`
`a`	Am/pm marker	Text	`PM`
`H`	Hour in day (0-23)	Number	`0`
`k`	Hour in day (1-24)	Number	`24`
`K`	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	`0`
`h`	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	`12`
`m`	Minute in hour	Number	`30`
`s`	Second in minute	Number	`55`
`S`	Millisecond	Number	`978`
`z`	Time zone	General time zone	`Pacific Standard Time`; `PST`; `GMT-08:00`
`Z`	Time zone	RFC 822 time zone	`-0800`

Below, I wrote an example on how to implement the conversion. Here I used two different templates: “yyyyMMdd” and “MMddyyyy” to show that several letters from the table above can be used in different sequence for the desired format:

import java.util.Date;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
... ... ... ...
 
    public void testConvertDateToString()    {
 
        //   Allocates a Date object and initializes it so that it represents the time
        // at which it was allocated, measured to the nearest millisecond.
        Date dateNow = new Date ();
 
        SimpleDateFormat dateformatYYYYMMDD = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd");
        SimpleDateFormat dateformatMMDDYYYY = new SimpleDateFormat("MMddyyyy");
 
        StringBuilder nowYYYYMMDD = new StringBuilder( dateformatYYYYMMDD.format( dateNow ) );
        StringBuilder nowMMDDYYYY = new StringBuilder( dateformatMMDDYYYY.format( dateNow ) );
 
        System.out.println( "DEBUG: Today in YYYYMMDD: '" + nowYYYYMMDD + "'");
        System.out.println( "DEBUG: Today in MMDDYYYY: '" + nowMMDDYYYY + "'");
 
    }

Results:

DEBUG: Today in YYYYMMDD: ‘20070609’
DEBUG: Today in MMDDYYYY: ‘06092007’

You may also notice that in the example I used StringBuilder, and not String or StringBuffer. The reason is simple – “best practice – use the right tool for the right task”.

“String” is immutable, meaning it cannot be changed, every time you try to change it, new String object is created and the old one is released for garbage collection, therefore String can be perfect for something like constants e.g. { private static final String FORTY_TWO = “42”; }.

StringBuilder and StringBuffer can be changed (modified), and, in fact, they have exactly the same functionality with one distinct difference – StringBuffer is synchronized and StringBuilder is not. Therefore if the segment of code we are working on is not designed to be multi threaded (used by different threads in a same time), it is better to use StringBuilder, since it will work faster.

_{StringBuilder is available in Java 1.5.0 (Java 2 SE 5.0) and up.}

KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid ;)

hardware / howto / linux / me / software / tutorials — 17 comments
02
Jun 07

Switch Between Dual/Single Monitor on (Ubuntu) Linux

xorg logo ubuntu Recently I wrote a howto on dual monitor configuration, which works great for my setup. However one thing that is not that great is switching between two modes: dual and single monitor. At work I have an external monitor that I use (which means I use two monitors – my laptop’s and external one), but whenever I am not at work I only need to use my laptop’s. Since all the xorg configuration resides in xorg.conf file, and this file is a regular static text file that is used by X (window system – gdm, kdm, etc.) when it starts, it is nontrivial to change this configuration while running X without some X tools. Unfortunately, Ubuntu is not that fancy (yet) and does not provide these tools by default, so here is a way to do it (sort of) manually.

What we can do is to create two xorg.conf files – "xorg.conf.single" and "xorg.conf.dual". In "xorg.conf.single" just comment out the following line from ServerLayout section:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
.....
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          0 "0 Screen"
        #Screen         1 "1 Screen" Above "0 Screen"   <-- comment out this line
        Option          "Xinerama" "on"
        Option          "Clone" "off"
.....
EndSection

Here is the listing of "xorg" files that I have:

user@host:/etc/X11$ ll xorg.conf*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4457 2007-06-02 15:05 xorg.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4456 2007-05-22 22:03 xorg.conf.dual
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4457 2007-05-22 22:04 xorg.conf.single

Now the idea is simple - before X (I use Gnome Desktop, but it can be any desktop environment) starts, we need to copy xorg file that we need (dual or single) to "xorg.conf", which will be picked and loaded by X.

In /home/user/ directory we have a .bashrc file that is loaded whenever the user logs in (if we use bash shell, which is a most popular shell anyway). Therefore we can leverage this file to define aliases that we would like to use once we login. Since alias can be anything we'd like, why not make a dual/single commands as aliases? Here is an example:

user@host:/etc/X11$ tail -5 /home/user/.bashrc
# restart gdm with dual monitor support
alias xdual='sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.dual /etc/X11/xorg.conf; sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart'

# restart gdm with single monitor support
alias xsingle='sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.single /etc/X11/xorg.conf; sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart'

Now when we need to switch between dual/single monitor, we can fire up shell (by pressing Ctrl+Alt+1, or gnome-terminal, or kterm, etc.) and type xsingle or xdual whichever we need.

action / hardware / linux / software — 2 comments
28
May 07

Ubuntu Dell – Three Real Models

Welcome to DELL Open Source

You asked, we listened. For advanced users and tech enthusiasts, we’re happy to offer a new open-source operating system, so you can dive in and truly enjoy a PC experience just the way you want it. In addition to the FreeDOS systems we already offer, we are proud to announce PCs with Ubuntu.

So far only these three models are for sale with Ubuntu on them:

_{Dimension E520 N}

_{Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E4300 (1.8GHz, 800 FSB)}

_{Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04}

_{1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs}

_{250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™}

_{Inspiron E1505 N}

_{Intel® Pentium® dual-core proc T2080(1MB Cache/1.73GHz/533MHz FSB}

_{Ubuntu Edition version 7.04}

_{512MB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 DIMM}

_{80GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive}

_{XPS 410 N}

_{Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4300 (2MB L2 Cache,1.8GHz,800FSB)}

_{Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04}

_{1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz – 2 DIMMs}

_{250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™}

hardware — 60 comments
24
May 07

Word’s Thinnest Laptop from Intel

_{source: businessweek}

When Intel asked designers to build a better laptop, its instructions were simple, really. The machine has to be fashionable, able to connect to all manner of wireless networks, and full of the latest, fastest computing capabilities. Oh yes, and make it as thin as Motorola’s Razr. Its own engineers in conjunction with Ziba Design in Portland, Ore., rose to the challenge.

The result, code-named Intel mobile Metro notebook, is less than 0.7 inches thick—about one-quarter of an inch thicker than Motorola’s (MOT) iconic cell phone, making it the world’s thinnest notebook. And at 2.25 pounds, it’s also one of the lightest small-sized portable computers. Other features include always-on Internet connectivity via various wireless technologies:

intel metro - ultra thin laptop/notebook

This looks nice and cool. The only thing that I noticed is that a display model of this machine has Windows Vista installed. I think this makes it looks 4 times less as cool, as it could have looked with Ubuntu logo..

Common Intel, clean your “interior” design. :)

kam
one of those blogs

Haptic Clock Beats The Time Into You

Convert Date to String in Java

Switch Between Dual/Single Monitor on (Ubuntu) Linux

Ubuntu Dell – Three Real Models

Word’s Thinnest Laptop from Intel

here is more about

kamone of those blogs

Haptic Clock Beats The Time Into You

Convert Date to String in Java

Switch Between Dual/Single Monitor on (Ubuntu) Linux

Ubuntu Dell – Three Real Models

Word’s Thinnest Laptop from Intel

here is more about

kam
one of those blogs