laur.ie

Current Mood: Happy

My housemate dragged out his old Windows Mobile 2003 PocketPC and got it all hooked up for ActiveSync to our corporate mail server, and whilst doing it he found this awesome hack that lets you assign a single button to a) connect the bluetooth port and b) start an ActiveSync.

Handy, I thought, since at the moment with my Vista laptop and Windows Mobile 6 device you have to open the ActiveSync application and then right menu then “Connect using Bluetooth…”

I failed on the first step, however, when if you go to Menu in ActiveSync on WM6, then connections, you can only choose to automatically connect to “`USB”, not Bluetooth. D’oh! So the “replog.exe” hack kinda worked.. It was triggering ActiveSync but it wasn’t really sure what do. I tried editing the registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Comm) to “`BlueToothActiveSync” which is how it worked on WM2003 to no avail.

After some Googling I found HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Comm\Rasbook.. A list of all your connections. And in there, voila, the name of my laptop. Windows Mobile 6 obviously handles it slightly differently and allows many different Bluetooth AS connections. I gave it a shot, and changed HKCU\ControlPanel\Comm\Cnct to the name of my laptop, and voila! It started the Bluetooth port, and then start the ActiveSync. The only thing is doesn’t do is disconnect again, which it does on WM2003, but no matter; it’s not too bad hitting the disconnect button

On a completly seperate note, I wish the rain would go away. I don’t like getting soaked walking to and from work!

Current Mood: Cool

I got this wonderful Blackberry device courtesy of work, since I’m on call and people want emails answering quickly etc, etc.

The miracle of BIM and Google Talk is fantastic.. lots of ways to talk to my fellow operations coworkers, but there was something missing. We use good old IRC at Last.fm to communicate, so when something goes a bit wrong its nice to be able to jump in and see what’s gone on (or whether no one is fixing anything and its up to you..!)

On a first search there was plenty of good IRC clients around. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any to work… They just said disconnected from server. Using MidpSSH I telnet’d to the server and got a connection refused.. Then I changed the connection method to “TCP” and it worked fine. Great! But no such option exists in any IRC client (Mobilirc is the best one at the moment it seems).

So, the BES won’t forward the traffic, the BES isn’t even managed by us, and both apps are open source. Let’s delve into the code!

else if ( spec.blackberryConnType == SessionSpec.BLACKBERRY_CONN_TYPE_DEVICESIDE ) {
conn.append(“;deviceside=true”);

References to “deviceside”… basically it proxies via the BES, so that’s deviceside=false, which is the default if not specified. Funnily enough. Mobilirc doesn’t specifiy this, so I jump in and add the line, so it now looks like this:

connector = (StreamConnection) Connector.open(“socket://” + host + “:” + port + “;deviceside=true”, Connector.READ_WRITE);

After a couple of hours of trying to get the Blackberry Development Environment working for me, I managed to get a .jar, .jad, .alx, .cod, and using javaload, got it on my device and SUCCESS! IRC running, backgrounded, highlights, always on. Hurrah!

I don’t know if this affects anyone, or if anyone else really cares, but if you do, let me know and I’ll send you the stuff. At least we’re happy now and I’m happy that I still vaguely understand Java!