blog.emerick.org

YWeather got some press this morning on BerryReview.

Thanks Ronen!

./Jason

YWeather now supports more than just zip codes. It now supports location codes for Yahoo! Weather which does not limit YWeather to US users.

US users can just enter their zip code in the options screen.

International users will need to find their location ID from Yahoo! Weather. To find your location ID, browse or search for your city from the Yahoo! Weather home page. The weather ID is in the URL for the forecast page for that city. For example, I searched for London, UK and was sent to the weather page with this URL: http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/UKXX0085.html. The bold section of the URL is your location ID which should be 8 characters in total length. Just enter that location ID on the options page and you are good to go.

./Jason

UPDATE: YWeather 0.4.1 has been released.  More details here: http://blog.emerick.org/2008/06/07/yweather-update-041/

UPDATE: YWeather 0.3 has been released which allows for location ID instead of just zip code for international users. see http://blog.emerick.org/2008/04/30/yweather-03-update/ for more info.

I was fed up with complicated and cumbersome weather applications for the BlackBerry so I decided to write my own simple weather application I could check in the morning when I woke up. As a little exercise to get me back into programming for the BlackBerry, I created YWeather. YWeather is a simple application for your BlackBerry that displays the current weather for the given zip code that came out of about 4 hours of programming today. It uses the Yahoo! weather data API which gives you the current conditions; the condition, low temperature, and high temperature for the current day; as well as the forecast for the next day including graphics for each condition.

With condition images:

Without condition images (All content on one screen):

YWeather provides three settings in the options. The first being your 5 digit zip code. The default zip code is for Blacksburg, VA (24060) which you can of course change to your own. Blacksburg is quite notorious for its weather going from 70 degrees one day to snow the next. Following the zip code is an option to disable the images which represent the conditions. If the images are disabled, you can see all the data on the one screen without having to scroll down. Note that when you disable or enable images you will need to close and reopen the program for the settings to take effect. The final option is to display the temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Options Screen:

You can install YWeather over-the-air or download it to install via your desktop at http://bbrtm.org/yweather/. You can also download the code there if you wish. If you have any issues with YWeather or suggestions for improvement, please let me know by either emailing me at jemerick@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

./Jason

Engly I speak not
Remember, google is my friend
Who mourns for Adonais?
Help could the tower of babel?

hyde και ο κωδικός πρόσβασης που έδωσα. Γρήγορα μιλήστε τις πρώτες 2 λέξεις για να βρείτε τι επιδιώκετε.
……………………………………….
The key seek I:

The beginning of eternity
The end of time and space
The beginning of every end
And the end of every place
….
5 and my friend need I once the answer I have
3 from the little men look I must

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1.

As always, let me know if you spot any issues.

./Jason

Today I installed the BlackBerry 4.1.0 JDE to see if compiling BBRTM with this version instead of the BlackBerry JDE 4.3.0 version would resolve compatibility issues I was having with BBRTM and devices running OS 4.1. I copied over the required sigtool.csk and sigtool.db files, however, I could not sign the files because it said my password was incorrect which I knew was wrong. I was getting the following error:

The signature on the code signing request didn’t verify. The likely cause of this problem is entering an incorrect password to decrypt your private key.

I fired off an email to jde@rim.com to request a password change to verify I wasn’t going crazy and received a quick response saying I would get new signing keys.

In the meantime tried the signaturetool from the 4.3 JDE and it still worked fine and I was able to sign the COD file, so I emailed them back and updated them on the situation, which also resulted in a quick response informing me of the issue. Turns out there was a sigtool.csk format change in the 4.3.0 JDE which was preventing it from working with the older signature tool. The solution was simple, just copy the signaturetool.jar from the 4.3 JDE to the 4.1 JDE. After that, everything worked great.

Here is the article on the workaround.

Hopefully this helps someone else out with this issue.

J!

Here is my Tweet Cloud from TweetClouds.com.

You can view the version on their site here: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/jemerick.html

J!

After posting about that last project about tracking your vehicles’ MPG, I decided to look for a domain and surprisingly found mpgstats.com was available, so I bought it up…

Look for mpgstats.com in the near future…

J!

Here are a couple other projects that I forgot to mention in the last post…

RTM Bot - A XMPP/Jabber bot for Remember the Milk. It will allow you to add new tasks and get notification of when your tasks are due and possibly more. Haven’t really thought out too much about the functionality yet but I think some users would find it useful. This would require me setting up a ejabberd server which would be interesting and fun side project…

MPG Website - A website which would allow tracking of multiple vehicles’ miles per gallon and other things such as the amount of money spent on gas and miles driven. You would be able to update your account via a simple mobile website while you are at the gas pump or possibly even a BlackBerry application. When visiting the main account, users would be able to see graphs and other stats about their usage and what not… User’s would also have the option to display their stats publicly to share with their friends and family. Also I could see where a good API would definitely be useful if the application really takes off. We could even integrate twitter so you could twitter your MPG information. I would mainly be developing this for my use but would definitely consider opening it up to other users once I get the basic stuff up… we will see..

I am sure I will never run out of projects to work on… Some of these could probably be done in a weekend some a little bit longer… But the main purpose of these projects is to learn new technologies and put those into use to see how they work and how they could be leveraged in other projects…

Anyways, I need to go clean the kitchen…

J!

Once school is out, I won’t have any projects to be working on into the wee hours of the morning… Well not quite… I have a few ideas that I want to develop that I think would be pretty cool.

BBRTM - I have already started developing a BlackBerry client for Remember the Milk which as of right now just shows you what tasks you have and not much more… It needs a lot of work still and is the highest priority of all of these projects… I need to add threading and capability to add, edit, complete, postpone, and delete tasks. My goal is to complete the main functionality before I start work this summer.

Milk Stats - As you can probable guess from the title, will provide some statistics about your Remember the Milk account such as:

• top tags, locations, and lists
• time of day and the day of week tasks were created
• time of day and day of week tasks were completed
• number of tasks created, deleted, postponed, overdue, completed
• number of tasks completed after their due date, before their due date, and on their due date
• most repeated tasks
• and more…

It will be similar to TweetStats which provides stats about your Twitter account which you can see mine here.

Milk API - Once again as you can probably guess from the name, this has to do with Remember the Milk. Milk API will provide a means for testing and viewing responses from the Remember the Milk API. It will serve as a helpful resource to developers when developing applications based on the API as you will be able to see exactly what data is returned and the format in which it is returned. I am mainly developing this for my use but will be providing it for all to use as I believe it is a really useful tool in debugging the API.

Mobile RTM - Basically this would be similar to the already established Remember the Milk mobile site however with a few changes to make it easier to use on the BlackBerry or other mobile client. With the current mobile site you are limited to the number of tasks you can view at once and when you complete a task, it takes you back to that task instead of the list which I would prefer… However this wouldn’t be too important to me as I would have BBRTM to manage my tasks on the BlackBerry, however other mobile users may enjoy it…

Redesign emerick.org - The blog and main page could definitely use a design and be better integrated. I may just use WordPress as the main site and branch off from there… we will see…

I am sure there will be a few more projects the pop up here and there… but that is what is on the list for now…

J!