While the majority of this blog is based around robotics, I'm also going to be writing about some of the coding I do as I work my way towards my goals.
As I mention in my profile, I'm an Australian living in the UK and while I like being here, I do have friends and family back in Australia. Before I got this phone, the time I spent on my computer was limited. Reading through this blog, you can see I'm reasonably prolific when I sit down to write something, so if I spent all my time writing emails and so on, I would never have got anything done in the time I had on my computer.
Recently however, I acquired an HTC Desire smartphone, which is an object of wonder in my eyes, and the eyes of my 5 year old son.
I have had "smart" phones before, an HTC Universal which I liked a lot, a Nokia E61i which was fabulous, but this HTC desire leaves me speechless. I find it to be more useful by several orders of magnitude than either of the phones I just mentioned. A large part of that is because of the Android platform which runs the applications on the phone.
For those wondering, Android is built on top of a Linux base. Linux or GNU/Linux (as Richard Stallman would ask us to say) is the operating system running the phone, Android is the bits you can see. Its more complex than that, but to completely define it would require words like "kernel" and "micro" and possibly a number of car analogys.
With this phone however, I'm discovering the joys of brief but frequent bursts of communication, and consequently I'm managing to get back in touch with a lot of the people I left back in Australia. Part of that happens on Facebook, part through writing emails on the phone to people.
I can honestly say that the smartphone has changed the way I communicate and has consequently improved my life. I know thats a huge statement, but in fairness, its also true.
Also, I'm the kind of person who likes to use the full capabilities of a device, so I'm not just using the internet capabilities of the phone, I'm using the GPS, camera and the other sensors as much as I possibly can.
In this particular post, I'm working mainly with the data embedded in the photos taken as I stroll around. The specific data I want is:
The exif (EXchangeable Image File format is kind of a format in a format. The data is embedded in specific parts of an image and taking specific bits of data means knowing what the ID number of each individual bit of data is.
The IDs are in a hexadecimal format which is fairly readily converted to decimal. Once ytou have the ID though, you might think the race is won. Not so. The values associated with each ID number is stored as a Byte array, which might, which itself has been encoded using some fairly unlikely seeming formats. Some are stored as UTF-8, some as ASCII, some as completely different formats which must be interpreted. Its a messy system.
So, I spent most of yesterday learning all this stuff and went home thinking I wouldn't get it sorted in any reasonable amount of time. Came out today and had a quick look again, to find this article on CodeProject.
The guy there has done all the hard work - and I do mean hard work, some of this stuff is incredibly dense - and released a library into the wild which I can use. So now, I'm just tinkering with the library and figuring out how to output a nice neat textfile which has an HTML table which has space for each image and next to the image, a table containing the relevant exif data.
Another idea I had is to write a program which goes through my images folder and finds each location in the photo on google maps. I know its probably been done before, but its a great exercise in figuring out a new API as well as getting some coding done.
Image is the data and image from the first part of the project.
Amazing how much data can be generated by a single button click, isn't it?
As I mention in my profile, I'm an Australian living in the UK and while I like being here, I do have friends and family back in Australia. Before I got this phone, the time I spent on my computer was limited. Reading through this blog, you can see I'm reasonably prolific when I sit down to write something, so if I spent all my time writing emails and so on, I would never have got anything done in the time I had on my computer.
Recently however, I acquired an HTC Desire smartphone, which is an object of wonder in my eyes, and the eyes of my 5 year old son.
I have had "smart" phones before, an HTC Universal which I liked a lot, a Nokia E61i which was fabulous, but this HTC desire leaves me speechless. I find it to be more useful by several orders of magnitude than either of the phones I just mentioned. A large part of that is because of the Android platform which runs the applications on the phone.
For those wondering, Android is built on top of a Linux base. Linux or GNU/Linux (as Richard Stallman would ask us to say) is the operating system running the phone, Android is the bits you can see. Its more complex than that, but to completely define it would require words like "kernel" and "micro" and possibly a number of car analogys.
With this phone however, I'm discovering the joys of brief but frequent bursts of communication, and consequently I'm managing to get back in touch with a lot of the people I left back in Australia. Part of that happens on Facebook, part through writing emails on the phone to people.
I can honestly say that the smartphone has changed the way I communicate and has consequently improved my life. I know thats a huge statement, but in fairness, its also true.
Also, I'm the kind of person who likes to use the full capabilities of a device, so I'm not just using the internet capabilities of the phone, I'm using the GPS, camera and the other sensors as much as I possibly can.
In this particular post, I'm working mainly with the data embedded in the photos taken as I stroll around. The specific data I want is:
- Date
- Time
- GPS Latitude
- GPS Longitude
- Altitude
The exif (EXchangeable Image File format is kind of a format in a format. The data is embedded in specific parts of an image and taking specific bits of data means knowing what the ID number of each individual bit of data is.
The IDs are in a hexadecimal format which is fairly readily converted to decimal. Once ytou have the ID though, you might think the race is won. Not so. The values associated with each ID number is stored as a Byte array, which might, which itself has been encoded using some fairly unlikely seeming formats. Some are stored as UTF-8, some as ASCII, some as completely different formats which must be interpreted. Its a messy system.
So, I spent most of yesterday learning all this stuff and went home thinking I wouldn't get it sorted in any reasonable amount of time. Came out today and had a quick look again, to find this article on CodeProject.
The guy there has done all the hard work - and I do mean hard work, some of this stuff is incredibly dense - and released a library into the wild which I can use. So now, I'm just tinkering with the library and figuring out how to output a nice neat textfile which has an HTML table which has space for each image and next to the image, a table containing the relevant exif data.
Another idea I had is to write a program which goes through my images folder and finds each location in the photo on google maps. I know its probably been done before, but its a great exercise in figuring out a new API as well as getting some coding done.
Image is the data and image from the first part of the project.
Amazing how much data can be generated by a single button click, isn't it?
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