J2i.Net

I saw this on TV last night and thought it was too funny not to share:

"We recently read that needless use of big words actually makes you look dumber. College essay buffing with obscure theasaurus suggestions appears contrived and inharmonious and apprises vernacular chicanery insinuating a begetter's subjacent sagacity."

Tags:

The information on how to directly interact with Google Voice in your own program is available all over the web, though not always in a form that is directly consumable to managed developers.  Most of the information targets developers that are creating scripts for their server.  The best information source that I cam across was documentation on a FireFox add-in for Google Voice.  It listed all of the URLs and messages that must be sent to invoke the Google Voice functionality.  You can find it here http://posttopic.com/topic/google-voice-add-on-development

Retrieving information from Google Voice is easy. Log into your google voice account (so that you are authenticated) and then open the URL https://www.google.com/voice/inbox/recent/inbox/.  You will get back a cryptic looking text file, but if you look closly at the text file you see that it contains information that is recognizable; it has the contents of your inbox. The information for the other folders and Google Voice data can be retrieved in a similar manner.  A program only needs to parse this data and present it to the user in an acceptable form.

The more interesting functionality is sending an SMS or initiating a call.  To send an SMS information must be posted to the address http://google.com/voice/sms/send/. The information that must be posted includes the following fields: 

The last field demands further explanation.  A string value goes here.  I believe the string value to be specific to user IDs.  As far as I can tell this string value will remain the same across sessions for a specific user ID.  To get the value that must be used with your ID navigate to http://google.com/voice/m and log into your account.  After you are logged in view the source code of the page and search for "_rnr_se".  You will find a hiddden field of this name containing the text value to be used for your id.

If you were to wrap up all of this information into a POST request to the Google voice server it is going to fail with error code 407.  That means you are authorized to get to the page.  You need to pass your Google Voice user ID and password with the POST request.  Chances are your request will fail again.  It took me a while to figure out what was going on.  But the Google Voice service will send a session Cookie after you are logged in and this cookie must be passed back in ever request.

Once I figured out the cookie was needed I put together a quick .Net program and ran it on a phone that only has a WIFI connection.  It was able to successfully send SMS messages.  Sorry, I can't share the source code because I hard coded some of the information in my program.  But the above should be well more than enough information for some one to write their own Google Voice application.

Tags:

I've finished up on a two year project with a client.  As is my way I've started to rebuild my development environment so that it is as clean and pristine as possible for my next assignment.  While I've always remembered reinstalling all of my development tools to be a day long process I've noticed that this time around the number of installations I had to do has grown significantly.

• Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (RC)
• IIS 7
• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2008 SP 1
• Visual Studio Cloud Services
• Windows Azure SDK (64-bit Edition)
• .Net Services SDK
• Mesh Client
• Expressions 2
  • Blend 2
  • Blend 3 RC
  • Web 2
  • Encoder 2
  • Designer 2
  • Media 2
  • Deep Zoom Composer
• Silverlight 2 Tools
• Silverlight 3 Tools
• SQL Server 2008
• SQL Server 2008 SP1
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Refresh
• Windows Mobile 6 Standard Refresh
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional DTK
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard DTK
• Windows Mobile 6 Professional Images
• Windows Mobile 6 Standard Images
• Windows Mobile 6.1.4 Professional Images
• Windows Mobile 6.1.4 Standard Images
• Samsung Windows Mobile SDK
• .Net CF v3.5 Power Toys
• Office 2007
• Office Communicator
• MSN Messenger
• XNA Game Studio Express 3.0 - (for recreational programming)
• VMWare
• Virtual PC

I really need to find a better (fully automated) way to handle this.

Updated - With Windows Mobile 7 RTM coming soon I'm keeping this list up to date for my own good

I need to add the following:

• Expressions Blend 3
• Composite Application Guidance - Feb 2008
• Project Linker

Tags:

Decency standards force me to edit this before posting, but it was to funny not to share.  You can find the original post here.

Tags:

Update - 2008-11-25

I see a lot of people have come to this bage because they want to access multiple exchange accounts on their Windows Mobile device. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but this can't be done.  While Windows Mobile devices can access multiple mail accounts there can only be one Exchange account that they access.  If you have multiple exchange accounts your only solution is to configure one of the accounts as an IMAP or Pop3 account.  Ofcourse with such a configuration you will not be able to sync contacts, calendar, and tasks with the secondary account.  But don't take my word for it.  See this Microsoft page to hear it from them. If you want to access multiple exchange accounts on your computer then read on.

I have an exchange account with my employer and a second account from the client to which I am assigned.  A problem that has plagued me since I acquired the second Exchange account is that I could only be in one account at a time; Outlook does not allow one to access both accounts at the same time.  I've tried to access one of the accounts using Outlook Web Access but the experience is no where near as rich and I had constant problems with my session terminating without me realizing it.  So I found myself in the client assigned Outlook account for most of the day and disconnected from my coworkers.

I was reading through the blogs of some random Windows Mobile MVPs and came across a solution. It is a small command line utility available from HammarOfGod.com that allows one to start multiple outlook sessions (each one using a different outlook profile). I've tried it out and it works great!  Now if only I could have multiple instances of Windows Live Messenger.

Tags:

I've got my hands on the Sony  PRS-505 Reader for the next 3 months and plan to test it over that course of time.  So far I have lots of positives to say about the device.  The display is sharp, the battery last for ever, and best of all it let's me carry a multitude of books in one small package.  The device isn't without it's negatives, the largest of which being content acquisition.  I'll go into more detail on all of that and more after I've had more time with the device.

Those that know me know that I almost always carry a book.  When I travel I'm usually torn between what book(s) I will bring and what will be left behind.  With this solution I would be able to bring as many as I like in a package the fraction of the size of one of my typical books.

Tags:

I had to pull out one of my older Pocket PCs for testing something and while I was at it I decided to round up my Windows CE devices and take a picture of them together.  I seem to have quite a bit.  Missing from the history of devices that I've owned are an i-mate Jam and the ViewSonic V37.  Regretably I sold one and gave the other to some one that wanted a PocketPC.  I hope to get a Windows Mobile 6 standard device and a Windows CE development kit in the coming months.

Tags: