Happy New year! With the formalities now over, I turn my attention to my favourite subject: Me. I jet off tomorrow for the United States, where I will be taking up a position with Amazon, working on Amazon Fresh. Melissa will join me in a few months. We’re very excited by the opportunity to live and work in a new place, and to work with one of the world’s top tech companies.

As I mentioned the other day, I am moving on from Unico and becoming an independent consultant (a grandiose title I give myself… Really I’m a contractor). To coincide with this, I am also revamping the layout of my site, with additional information about the sort of work that I do, community engagement, and how to get in touch. The site should now render better on mobile devices as well.

I have been asked to present a talk to the Melbourne Mob SIG, to be held at the Telstra Conference Centre on the 2nd of August. It will be a technical presentation, where I open up eclipse and show people how widgets work on the Android platform. This could be considered a basic topic, but it is one of the most requested topics on the Build Mobile site, so I thought it’d be a good topic.

After four years working at Unico Computer Systems, I handed in my resignation this morning. I have been working in the enterprise space performing integration architecture and devleopment work. I have found however that my own interests have shifted more and more towards working with mobile devices, and this has become a real passion of mine. As a result, I have now accepted a contract to work in the logistics industry working with mobile devices to make truckies lives easier.

Sitepoint.com has just launched a mini-site dedicated to the builidng of mobile applications in all their forms, named BuildMobile. Inexplicably, they have chosen to feature my little application NodeDroid as their first featured app, and even more explicably they have asked me to contribte some stories as well. The featured app is up now, and my article will be posted in a few days. There’s nothing like having a wider audience (not to mention a deadline) to inspire you to write, so hopefully I’ll be a bit more regular with my postings there than I have been here :)

When I started writing NodeDroid, I did it to learn about writing mobile applications, and all of its associated technologies. One of those technologies was advertising. I added Admob advertising to the bottom of the application, and wated for the megabucks to roll in :). In the little over 3 months that its been available, it has netted a grand total of $13.88US. Thats enough to cover hosting costs, but thats about it.

Earlier this month, I posted a new website for my hobby company 8bitcloud.com. As part of this change, I have now decided to host my personal blog here as well. My Blog will henceforth redirect to http://8bitcloud.com/blog.html. All URLs will continue to retrieve the correct posts, but with the new layout. There shouldn’t be any disruption to service, but who knows. RSS feeds should automatically switch over as well. I apologise if it re-posts everything I’ve ever done…

I have just posted a new version of NodeDroid, which incorporates only one small change: Bugfix for issue caused by interrupting a running fetch. Future fetches may not have worked correctly. I’m currently working on a widget, which I hope to release before the new year. In the mean time, I wish you a merry christmas!

This site is primarily intended to allow me to play around with new stuff. As part of this, I’m playing with Jekyll, which is a simple, ruby based web generator which creates static sites programatically. Some advantages: Simpler hosting requirements. All you need is a web server like Apache If you want dynamic capabiilties, they can be added in via javascript. Will be able to survive a slashdotting (not that that is ever likely to happen to me) Not hackable through attacks on the CMS product, because there isn’t one Uses Markdown, which makes writing the content much easier.

I'm the author of a usage tracking utility on Android called NodeDroid. Originally it only supported Internode, but I am now expanding it to support other ISPs and telcos. The first one I want to try out is Optus. I've just uploaded the new version of the application, and I'm hoping some of you guys would like to try it out.The application works by screen-scraping the optus web site, and presenting it in a better format, along with usage graphs and the normal sort of thing you would expect from a usage meter.

This weekend, I thought I'd extend my little Android usage tracking application to work on more ISPs than the one (Internode) that it already does. As my phone is (sadly) on Optus, I thought I'd write one for that. Internode was easy to add, as they have a documented API for accessing usage counters which are ideal for computer consumption. Optus on the other hand only provide a web application interface to check usage, necessitating the use of a web scraper.

I purchased an Android phone a few weeks ago. Part of the reason that I got it was that I wanted to see what the differences were between Android and iPhone.  This extends out to how to program them as well, so I had to write an application, just like I did for iPhone. Last night, I released my little application.  Its a usage meter for my ISP, Internode. I deliberately chose something quite simple so that I could cut my teeth on the platform, and I must say that I'm very impressed.