Ron Liechty's Forum Nokia Blog

New Goodies on Discussion Boards or Living the Eternal Beta of Web 2.0

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 04:55:00 +0300

If you haven’t been to the discussion boards in the last day or so, we have some new goodies you should check out. While we haven’t gotten it all yet, we do have a few new features and more that we can now add later on. This was enabled when we updated our discussion board software to a newer version.

One of the new features I like is having a new post list only have the final forum name rather than a long list which made scrolling the list a long chore. This however has raised a few hairs with some of our members so later this week, any duplicate or confusing names such as General (Java, and Web Technologies) will be renamed. If you find some things you see need tweaking let us know so we can fix them.

Another thing we now have is and icon for multiple quotes where you can quote from more than one message in a reply. We can also, play a little football and give out yellow or red cards to people that are pushing the terms of service. Before we had this feature we would have to either ban a user or edit his message, which I’m very hesitant to do. So now we can give them a warning to clean it up before outright banning a person. We’ll try to bring more new features online later this year.

Ron

New Software Installer Launched, Feedback Desired

Mon, 21 May 2007 15:54:46 +0300

Recently Nokia launched a download application in the menu of most Nokia devices. Whether you have experiences as a in deploying your product or as a user we would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on downloading to a device. Nokia is working with the best partners around the world, such as EA Games, Warner Brothers and more, to bring world class content to your customers and would be especially interested if there's a kind of application that you want us to try and include! You can find more information at http://catalogs.nokia.com Please feel free to contact me directly in a private e-mail or post a reply to the thread in this message board. Nokia looks forward to hearing from you!

Ron

Beware the Ides of March, Daylight Savings Start Time Changes

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 22:34:48 +0200

Normally the change from standard time to daylight savings time (DST) only affects me in that I wake up an hour later than normal. However this year the date for daylight savings time will change in the USA from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November. Unlike Y2K which was warned about for years the change in DST has been widely forgotten. Some say there is the same potential for disruption of banking and billing with the change in DST that there was with Y2K seven years ago. For certain any software that depends on older versions of JRE can fail.

I’m not a doomsayer. I don’t think there is a great chance of a problem with the change of daylight savings time. However, there is always a chance of problems whenever there is a change in time, I see it when I travel or share papers with someone in another time zone. What about the time stamps on your code, will they suddenly have a fit and force rebuilds on all of your projects. What about the code itself, is it time relative, did you consider the time zone not being standard or changing. Will it change once when the operators change to DST and then again the first week of April? What about other nations will some follow the United States or will they remain the first week in April? We need to take all of this into consideration now a month ahead of time so we are prepared when the time arrives. If you do nothing else, be sure you are running the latest JRE.

For more information you might want to see the Computerworld article by Todd Weiss.

Ron

NSeries Hits New York in StoryMashup

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 23:58:41 +0300

A new game is to be played with 250 participants in New York City this Saturday, September 21, 2006. The game involves a storyline, an engine to generate nouns that are sent out to players to be photographed. Once the photographs are identified the nouns are used in a sentence and the game is afoot. The Story Mashup Game is a creation of Nokia Research Center’s SensorPlanet where they are interested in new ways of how you sense physical and virtual worlds. Check out the game on any J2ME enable phone using widsets to see the action as it happens.

When at Java One the Forum Nokia Champions and Forum Nokia members played a visual scavenger hunt game, where we were able to find clues, send answers and make videos of events over the streets of San Francisco. This involved receiving clues and submitting answers as pictures or videos over the internet and was a great team building experience. The newest game raises the gaming level two steps with players having to interpret visual clues taken on the streets of NYC before they can start new sentences to finish the story.

Next holiday party you and your friends can have your own mobile scavenger hunts, let me know how they go.

Ron