~shree
29Sep/098

Next Tour : Starts Oct 1

Welcome to my next journey. I'll be touring Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab for the whole of October (approximately the area marked in green below). Again on my bicycle. Starting from Ahmedabad on October 1st. More than 30 days, 3000 kms for the stat junkies.

I'll be blogging live (approximately once per day). Hopefully, you'll see better stories this time. "More experiences and insight, less data", I keep reminding myself. I'll also upload interesting pictures when I am able to.

If you are a first time visitor here, feel free to have a look at my previous journeys - the links to those are on the right hand side of this page.

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29Sep/091

Resizing dSLR images on my mobile

I'll be carrying my Nikon D80 during this trip. One issue I have faced all these years : how to upload those images ? I'm not carrying my laptop during this tour, and I don't plan to waste time visiting cyber-cafes. My E71 will be my laptop, pretty much.

The solution we came up with is quite simple : instead of the standard SD cards, use micro-SD cards. These fit inside my camera via an adaptor. After I shoot the images, I remove the card, push it inside my mobile, and then upload it to my website using GPRS. That all seems fine, but an image from the camera is upward of 3 MB. That could take ages to upload via GPRS. Also, I don't intend to show the images in the full resolution on this website, since that takes too much bandwidth as well. So I really need to resize the image to something that's small enough : on the order of a 100 kB or so.

I've solved this problem by writing another small python script to resize images. Python for S60 really is neat, and provides all that I need to write this script with ease.

28Sep/091

Enough coding… Well, almost!

Spent the last day & more trying to figure out a way to get my KML files show up on WordPress. I was thinking of uploading my tracks at the end of every day. I'm giving up on this - almost. The killer turned out to be "newMediaObject". Looks like there is no way to add attachments to WordPress posts using XML-RPC. And that's the only way Geo Mashup will pickup KMLs. So, time to stop coding. Except for one part : I need to write some code to resize images from my D80. That will keep me occupied for some time tonite 🙂

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25Sep/094

More WordMobi Plans

First things first : I fixed a bug in my geo-blogging code yesterday. I had a busy loop in python - that's fixed now. This turned out to be the reason why I wasn't able to take snapshots of the new dialog using ScreenShot. I've uploaded the changed posts.py too. Plus, WordPress Geo Mashup released their version 1.2.8 today, which includes a fix for the issue I had reported yesterday. Thumbs up to them ! I'll update my previous post with this information.

Also, I realized yesterday that I could do a little more with WordMobi than just posting coordinates. For instance, that I can post KML files - thus plotting my route on the blog! The file attached to this post has a path that shows the appropriate area of my tour (experimenting right now with this - it's supposed to show up on the map on top - doesn't seem to be working!). Need to add this functionality to WordMobi - and need to figure out how as well... Update: This doesn't seem to be possible with the current Geo Mashup. Perhaps I should try 1.3alpha...

Filed under: Updates 4 Comments
24Sep/094

Geo-Blogging Using WordMobi

As mentioned in earlier posts, I have enhanced WordMobi to do Geo-Blogging. The interface is functional, though fairly basic at this time. With my changes, WordMobi should be able to pick up GPS data from either the built in GPS receiver, or an external bluetooth GPS. Worst case, you can enter a value manually.

The rest of this lengthy post describes the user view (selling the idea first 😉 ), followed by software requirements, modifications and installation steps you need to get it working for yourself.

24Sep/090

Geo post testing

This is a test post for mobile geo blogging. Coordinates are from the inbuilt GPS on my E71. More details about this in the next post.

Note: The "balloon" for this is on the map. However, you won't see it unless you zoom in!

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23Sep/094

Ready for Geo-Blogging

I just finished adding Geo-Blogging capabilities to WordMobi. So, I can now post stories during my trip and you can see from where I posted them.

WordMobi in written in Python for S60, and runs on my E71. I use the "positioning" module to get the information from the in-built GPS. There's an option to manually enter coordinates as well. My additions add the position as a shortcode in the post. WordPress and the WordPress-Geo-Mashup plugin take care of the rest.

I've sent email to the developer of WordMobi. It would be nice to have others geo-blogging in their favourite mobile blogging application.

20Sep/090

Plans for Geo Blogging

I have plans to switch to Geo Blogging this time. Simply put, this means that all my posts will have a geographical location. These will then get plotted on a map, where you can an overall picture of everything. There will be an overview map on the main page that will show my trail.

Filed under: Updates Continue reading
6Sep/090

First post from my new “laptop”

This is my first post from my new E71. My plan is to use this device as the all-in-one during my october tour: saves me from carrying my bulky laptop. Typing is fast and simple on this. I will use microSD cards as a means of transferring data from my camera/GPS to the mobile and then onto the internet. I'm using Wordmobi for blogging directly to my page. That is part of the intent of this post : testing 🙂

Posted by Wordmobi

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