Rabidgremlin’s Soapbox

I’m quite pleased with this bit of work: mPass allows you to download your boarding passes for Air New Zealand flights onto your mobile phone. It generates a bar code that you can then scan at their kiosks to check-in or at the gates to board. Pretty cool if I must say so my self.  [...]

Ooooooo, Just found a link to the new Google Chrome browser on my Google home page.
Its pretty cool, very lightweight and very very fast. It even has as “stats for nerds” link on it’s task manager which gives heaps of detail on memory and CPU usage. The internals of the browser are pretty interesting as [...]

Here are the slides for a quick presentation I gave on Bubbles! Shamelessly pulled content and images from various sources on the web.

Click to see next slide
Here is the PDF: Bubbles! and Google Android Presentation

Just for kicks I decided to port the backend services for my Google Android app, Bubbles!,  to use the Google App Engine.
For those of you who don’t know Googles App Engine is a “free” application hosting environment. It promises to be able to scale Google style (as long as you pay of course).
The free account [...]

Just received an email from the Android Developer Challenge team, seems that Bubbles! my Google Android application didn’t make it into round two:
During the past few weeks, 100+ judges around the world reviewed over 1,700
applications. They were extremely impressed with the diversity and the
large number of high quality entries submitted. It is clear [...]

Well working into the wee hours of the morning I finally finished off my Google Android Developer Challenge entry.
Bubbles! allows you to create a pop (point of presence) that is ‘broadcasted’ from your phone. Other Bubbles! users in close proximity (about 50m) get to see your pop and you get see theirs. Of course as [...]

Ok I’ve gone a little crazy….
If you use iGoogle then add you can get ticktock on your personalized page.
Just add http://www.rabidgremlin.com/ticktock/google_ticktock.xml

Just added the finishing touches to my Facebook application. Its called ticktock and basically displays a clock on your Facebook page.
But its no ordinary clock; it shows the local time AND Internet time. The Internet time is measured in units called tocks which are the same regardless of where in the world you are. So [...]

I’ve been playing with Markov chains for doing ‘random’ text generation. Had an interesting problem in that I needed the GUI code to run on a PHP based web server but I didn’t want to have the processing of the source files occur every time. I also had a nice Java program doing all the [...]

Google have a couple of J2ME applications for your phone that are really cool.
The first gives you access to your GMail account. It’s really easy to use. Just browse to http://www.gmail.com/app with your phone to download it.
The second gives you access to Google Maps. The travel directions are great (although it can be a little [...]