Category: Java

Mobile Location Tracking Library

Welcome to the Place Lab homepage
Java based location finding libraries using GPS, GPRS, WiFi and Bluetooth (all the good stuffs).

From the site:
Place Lab is software providing low-cost, easy-to-use device positioning for location-enhanced computing applications. Place Lab tries to provide positioning which works worldwide, both indoors and out (unlike GPS which only works outside). Place Lab clients can determine their location privately without constant interaction with a central service (unlike badge tracking or mobile phone location services where the service owns your location information).

Java + BitTorrent Library

TorrentSniffer – TorrentSniffer
TorrentSniffer is a Java library for reading BitTorrent information. TorrentSniffer currently implements the following sections of the BitTorrent Protocol Specification 1.0: Metainfo File Structure, Bencoding and Tracker ‘scrape’ Convention. The primary purpose of this library is to retrieve the number of seeds and peers of a torrent. This is done by using the Tracker ‘scrape’ Convention.

Java + USB

Universal Serial Bus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
On the ITP PComp Listserv there was recently a thread about USB and Java. I have some interest in this so I figured I would do a bit of searching around.

Here is what I found:

jUSB – Java USB API for Windows

jUSB: Java USB (Linux)

The Java Community Process(SM) Program – JSRs: Java Specification Requests – detail JSR (JSR 80: JavaTM USB API)

JSR080 – javax.usb

It seems that the Communication API can work with USB devices that implement the communications device class. USB devices can extend from any of the following device classes that are supposed to be supported by the underlying OS. Thanks to WIkipedia Entry

USB human interface device class
USB mass storage device class
USB communications device class
USB printer device class
USB audio device class
USB video device class

Local Report

local report: home
For those of you wondering what I have been up to for the past month or so, here is your answer: Called, Whitman Local Report, this is a performance piece utilizing mobile phones to create a montage of video “reports” and phone “reports” all in real time (live).
I created some custom software that runs on the phones (Nokia 6710’s) to shoot and automatically upload video from the participant’s phones (30 of them) and more software to playback the videos as they come in (with some controls for play, pause, stop, next and previous).
Hans, my technical collaborator, took care of setting up an Asterisk server and queue to receive the phone in reports and play those out as they came in.
We have one performance to go, please tune into the live stream, come to the live event or check it out afterwards. The previous 4 are available now if you would like a taste.

Here is some press that I just came across: Art and Innovation Collide

Launch those JARs

SourceForge.net: launch4j 2.0.RC3 released
From the site:
Launch4j is a cross-platform tool for wrapping Java applications distributed as jars in lightweight Windows native executables. The executable can be configured to search for a certain JRE version or use a bundled one, and it’s possible to set runtime options, like the initial/max heap size. The wrapper also provides better user experience through an application icon, a native pre-JRE splash screen, a custom process name, and a Java download page in case the appropriate JRE cannot be found.

IBM/ASF Cloudscape/Derby (in terms of MySQL)

IBM’s Cloudscape Versus MySQL
I loathe articles that pit one piece of software vs. another but this one has a good explanation of Cloudscape/Derby (IBM’s recently open sourced java embeded database). Sounds pretty nice.. Perhaps my next project will veer from my standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) environment and go the AJAX/Servlet/Derby route..