Reducing your data traffic costs on the iPhone – Google Mobilizer

I have a few friends who are using unlocked iPhones. Since they have “normal” (read: expensive) data rates on their mobile subscriptions, using the iPhone to surf online over EDGE/GPRS can be quite expensive.

As they didn’t know about this little trick to reducing your data transfer costs, I thought I should mention it here.

Google Mobilizer works by taking a web address as an input and converting it to a “mobile friendly” format. Basically, this means that it strips the page of formatting and reduces the size of images (and trashes the layout in the process). In other words, it works a bit like Opera Mini – only way less elegant (particularly compared to the beta of Opera Mini 4).

Give it a go: Google Mobilizer. I would suggest entering your favourite websites via Mobilizer and then bookmarking them for easy, mobilized access. Switch off images for extra savings and quicker pageloads – useful considering the slowness of EDGE.

If you have a handset that allows you to install Java apps, you should definitely try Opera Mini! The best thing to come out of Norway since, eh, the cheese slicer. Or something like that. (I’m hoping for a iPhone version of Opera Mini soon.)

Two mobile applications no W800i should be without

Over the past year, I’ve been a very active user of my W800i mobile phone. I find that it is one of the best consumer electronics devices I’ve ever owned. It is a very good music player, overall good phone, and great camera (for a phone) – all in one compact 2×5.5×10 cm / 99 grams package. (More on that in my 6 months on review of W800i.)

The size of this phone and all the features it offers means that I can do stuff I simply couldn’t before. A few of my favourite examples include:

– Lighting up the dark path in the woods or finding the right cable connections at the rear of my receiver using the camera light

– Listen to music while walking without being concerned about missing calls or texts (the phone automatically pauses the music for me when something happens)

– Do document scans anywhere – need a copy of that A4 sheet? Just photograph it!

Mobile phones today are really small computers – increasingly similar to the general purpose computers most of us use daily. My two favourite applications are brilliant examples of this trend.

“dagen@ifi” – Or “the day at IFI”

Yesterday, October 26th, I spent most of the day at the deportment of informatics (IFI) at the University of Oslo, which is where I’m studying for my master’s degree. Every year, the student organizations at IFI organize a day full of events, pizza, games, fun and stands where potential employers can be introduce themselves to the students.

From 12:00 to 18:00 there are lectures on various subjects, and I was so happy with the lectures this year that I decided to write about them here. If you’re a student at the department, you should definitely regret not coming this year!

At 12:15, Accenture opened this year’s lectures with a talk on RFID, which they implemented a trial of at the student festival in Trondheim (UKA) last year. It was used to pay in the bars at the festival, which lasts for a week. This seems to make the subject especially interesting for IT students (beer + technology can’t be anything but good, right? At least if you like beer). I have heard plenty about that RFID implementation before, but the lecture still included some new tidbits, and the delivery (by two relatively high-ranking Accenture people) was fresh and sprinkled with some good jokes.

Objectware continued at 13:15. The title of their lecture was “Modern software engineering”, and the two presenters went through a huge array of cutting-edge software engineering technologies. Maven, Hibernate, WebWork, Spring… and about 10 more. I know most of these, but I think the lecture was a bit bewildering for those who had no prior experience. Still, I think the lecture was a good high-level introduction to the tools software engineers use today, and more importantly, we learned a lot about Objectware’s attitudes towards these tools.

A very brief demo of unit testing was also included. Unfortunately, not enough context was provided to make this demo useful for those who could have benefited from it. More explainations next time, please – or leave the demo out altogether.

Microsoft sent one of their top R&D evangelists in Norway to talk about Windows Vista. He made a good impression, gave a nice overview of operating systems history, and did a good job with fending off the mandatory anti-Microsoft fanboys in the attendance. There was plenty of questions for him to answer, and he easily spent more than his alotted time, but I don’t think that bothered anyone. Some of the topics touched upon were Vista’s lineage, its kernel (mostly unchanged since the old NT kernel of 88-89, if I understood him correctly), the system monitoring tools bundled with Vista (lets you know when the disk drive approaches failure, detects bad memory sticks), Supercache, the technology that learns your program useage patterns and preloads programs into memory so that they start faster, drivers, and much more.

At 15:15, Opera’s product manager for Symbian gave an overview of Opera, the company’s technology, talked about web standards and introduced us to the ACID2 test (which made for a nice demo, where Firefox2, IE7 and Opera9 were compared). The number of platforms were Opera has a commercial presence was emphasised – 16. That is quite a lot. The Nintendo Wii was mentioned; apparently they are working hard to make Opera for Wii as good as possible. The console is launching in the US in about three weeks; the European launch isn’t before December 8th. I’ll get one on launch day and surf the web from the couch. Overall, it was a good talk, with a very amusing widget thrown in…

After four hours of lectures, I decided to have a break, so I missed out on the Geographical Information Systems talk by Geodata.

At 17:15, Norwegian consulting company Bekk had the final lecture of the day, interestingly titled “Agile development in anger”. To be honest, I can’t really recall the angry part returning anywhere in the presentation – not that I missed it. Bekk is a proponent of agile development, and shared their experiences and work methods from a real-world six month project where agile development was used. The lecture was stuffed with good advice that any software developer would find useful, and I reckon this was the best talk of the day. The developer giving the talk had good presentation skills, too. I certainly think Bekk made a good impression on graduate students looking for work.

At six o’clock, everyone ate free pizza, and then I had to go home to finish a report. That means I missed out on the stand-up show, live concert, gaming and partying. Still, even though I only experienced half of it, I think this year’s “dagen@IFI” was really great, and a marked improvement from last year. Well done. Hopefully even more students and employers will show up next year.

The dagen@ifi website can be located at http://dagen.ifi.uio.no.