Fiery Fred

I finally gave in and bought a new mobile phone. The old brick was at least six years old and could be used for phoning people and for writing text messages….slowly. It didn’t have predictive text so it was the old multi key push way of writing messages.

The new phone is a Nokia 3110 classic and the first thing I did after geting it home was download the Nokia PC Suite so that I could use the PC to transfer images and addresses to the phone. The next thing I did was to download the SDK from Nokia because the phone runs Java applications so in theory I ought to be able to write an application. Once I’ve worked out what killer app I should write I may even get around to coding it.

One idea would be to use the phone to talk to a PC via BlueTooth so that is could control a USB missile launcher (I actually bought one from PC World when they were reduced in the New Year sales). Why Bluetooth? Well it saves having to pay expensive mobile internet charges!

Its so frustrating when there are lots of things that you want to do but no time to do them in! I’ve got my parents in law’s garden to finish off (3 years and counting!) a bookcase in the bedroom, Java song or what ever I eventually call it and I have recently come across an application called Javacc. This app lets you define a language grammer and then generates the Java classes necessary to interpret and execute your new language. Which got me thinking, since there is an international speak like a pirate day why not create a language for pirates to program in? Consider the following Java:

if (2 > 3) {
System.out.println(“True”);
}
else {
System.out.println(“False”);
}

In Pirate this could be expressed as:

2 > 3 This be true?
Aye
Ahoy “True”
That it be
Nay
Ahoy “False”
It be not

Ok so its a bit verbose and probably has no real use but whats that got to do with it. All thats needed is to expand the syntax a bit and have a go with Javacc. Which comes back to not having any time……

Ok so the name needs a bit of work

I’m just about to send an email out to some users of OpenSong to see what
changes they would like to see and I have also had some further thoughts on
what I would like to implement.

One of those thoughts is to have the code that drives the display monitor
run as a server. You could then have the control/edit code run as a client
so that you could have multiple computers controlling the display. One of
the problems is to ensure that you don’t make the set up of the system so
complicated that it needs a very experienced user to get the thing working.

Some more thought is obviously needed.

Currently we use OpenSong to display the lyrics of worship songs on an overhead projector and it seems to work very well. However there are some features that it is missing and the language it is written in (Real Basic) is not one that is readily available or in common usage. Therefore I propose to write a new version in Java. Why Java? Well I can program in Java and I know it has a lot of the stuff that we require already built in. It is also free!

So the first stage is to get some requirements, and here are some to start with:

1. Must support multiple monitors i.e. a control monitor and one or more display monitors.

2. Allow the editing of songs whilst displaying the same song on the display monitor. The changes made would be reflected on the display next time it was displayed.

3. Draw outline fonts i.e. have the outline of the font in one colour and the fill in another.

Actually I need to get this lot down in a document along with any other ideas that anyone may have!