Death By Mobile Phone
In my pocket right now I have what is possibly the most annoying mobile phone in existence -- the Siemens A55. Why do I have this instead of my ever-faithful T68i? Well, it turns out my T68i (ever-faithful, remember) decided that instead of sending noise into my ear when I use it, it would send electricity instead.
Imagine the scene: I want to make a quick call to see where a friend is, so I put the phone up to my ear and it feels like someone has stuck a pin on my phone. I look at the phone, it seems okay. I put it by my ear, and Slow Death By Invisible Mobile Phone Needles is back. Twenty seconds of scientific experimenting later, and I discover that the needles appear to retract when I remove the phone from the charger -- it appears that my computer science degree was useful after all. Vicky wonders what I am doing (did I forgot to mention I've been shouting curses at the phone?) and as I explain she pokes at the phone, and also gets a shock in her finger. The next day I was down the Vodafone shop explaining about the Death By Tiny Needles the phone was trying to inflict on me, hoping that they would upgrade me to, say, a T610, but no. Instead I get this crappy red A55 whilst they repair my phone, which takes a fortnight.
One interesting thing came out of all this -- Vodafone obviously have a stash of phones they give to people who break their phones. It is logical to assume that when they get the phones back again they don't have any SIM cards in, so they can't wipe the phones memory easily... (well, they could use another SIM to boot the phone and wipe it, but they don't). Turns out the lady (she has a boyfriend) who last had this phone didn't delete the SMS's she had received. She is "a ploncker" (sic) says one. Another gives me someones bank details. One more suggests they engage in "phone nookie". One of the others is a little more risqu&eactute; and not suitable for this forum...
RDF in PNG
A long-running goal of mine is to write a image gallery for my web page, so the screenshot and photo galleries can have categories, titles, dates, etc. Being a fan of metadata, XML, Dublin Core etc, I've planned to do this by embedding the metadata into the image files instead of relying on a database.
A little poking and emailing comes up with interesting links. Dave Beckett has embedded RDF into a PNG by using a tEXt field called 'Metadata'. However, he doesn't have any nice tools to do this and usually uses pnmtopng (which allows the user to specify text chunks). I poked a libpng but that doesn't really allow me to fiddle with the chunks.
So I'm announcing PyPNG! A very small and rather poor Python (plus a smidge of C to do CRCs) library with grand ambitions. At the moment I can copy a PNG file (by reading the chunks, and then writing them again), display the text chunks, et la piece de resistance: a tool to set the content of an arbitary text chunk! PNGs with embedded RDF, here I come.
Once I've fiddled with the library design a little I'll write a PNG Explorer (hmm, png:/// in Nautilus is tempting) and a Metadata Editor for PNG files. Then I'll try and do exactly the same for JPEG files. Finally of course I'll have to write the web front-end.
No downloads yet, but if you want the source ask for it. Hopefully I'll have a sane tarball of PyPNG done this week though.
