Finally the J2ME Convertor app which used to be hosted under www.liviutudor.com has been moved onto the 3B Software servers and it is from now on available for download from this page. The original page on the old www.liviutudor.com server has been set to perform a redirect to our servers so please update your bookmarks to reflect this change.

The application has started when it occured to some of us (a while back!) that the Sony Ericsson 750i does not seem to include a weight/distance/volume convertor utility. At the time Nokia had such an utility on their phones (and still does!) — even though it looked a bit, well, rubbish really . And even with the new models of Sony Ericsson mobile phones you seem to actually get such an utility nowadays.In time this has changed and most of the modern mobiles do include a measurement convertor however quite often it does not include a lot of units — which makes them a bit superfluous really

Either way, whether you don’t have a convertor unit for your mobile handset or you need one that supports more units than the one you already have, this application might come in handy.

The application is available for anonymous SVN checkout here: https://forge.3bsoft.net/j2me_convertor/

Or you can download the binaries  here:

• JAd file (for over-the-air installation): J2ME Convertor JAD - JAD file for over-the-air installation of the convertor app
• JAR file: J2ME Convertor JAR - The actual convertor app

or complete with sources here: J2ME Convertor Sources & Binaries - Complete sources for the J2ME convertor and binaries

Part of implementing the artforclick website, I needed to export the products listed on the site in order to have them imported in Froogle. I tried initially using the simple RSS component of WordPress, but as you might know, Google is using a rather changed format of the XML so trying to simply import the RSS feed exported from WordPress didn’t work.

I could of course do a database export (either through WordPress or straight from MySQL) and then handcraft it to match the required XML but that would have turned out to be labourious as with Froogle you do need to refresh your products every month — and I really didn’t fancy hand-editing an XML file once a month! So I decided to write a simple WordPress plugin that simply exports the data in the required format — and here it is “Froogle Export”!

The way it works is very simple — once installed, it adds a “Froogle Export” button under your “Settings” menu in the admin interface (ok, ok, really, that should have been under “Tools” — perhaps in version 1.1!) which when clicked opens up a page with just one button : “Export”. On clicking this, the plugin iterates through all the posts (so pages, comments etc are ignored!) and creates an <item> entry for each one in the saved XML file. While the Froogle XML data feed format is quite exhaustive, for now, the plugin only exports the following:

• <title> — set to the post title
• <link> — set to the post permalink
• <description> — set to a trimmed down version of the post contents itself
• <id> — set to the post id
• <price> — this is assume to be by default £3, however, one can add a post meta labelled “froogle_price” and set the price per each post individually
• <condition> — this will always be set to “new” (again, this is the case with artforclick.com)
• <image_link> — this will contain the link to the first image inserted in the post

On top of this, one can decide not to include a post in the export by simply adding a post meta labelled “froogle_exclude” to a post.

The above scenario is  probably not a generic one for sites which use WordPress to implement an online store, however, it can be adapted easily (I hope!). With artforclick.com, each product is a post and as such has a title, a description (which contains sometimes the price as well — however, this is stripped off at time of export!) and a couple of pictures of the product itself. Also, all of their products have the same price £3.00 — hence the hardcoded value in the php file at the moment. Therefore simply exporting all of the posts using the structure above provides an export of all of their products, ready to be imported into Froogle.

Other sites might need slight modified versions of the plugin — which is why we have created a forum thread for this plugin in order to discuss issues with the plugin itself and listen to what others have to say about it.

You can check out the sources for the plugin from SVN: https://forge.3bsoft.net/froogle_export/ or you can download the plugin here: Froogle Export - Froogle Export Wordpress plugin -- allows exporting your posts (products) in Froogle XML format

Our first utility has been made available in SVN: JCatalog. This is a simple tool intended to simply in managing a large set of digital media and split it into catalogues / folders.

The need for this product came from my lazy bad ways of operating my digital camera — as I would find myself every now and then in a position where I couldn’t take any more pictures because the memory card was full; at this point I would finally connect it to my PC and start downloading all the pictures from it only to realise that I probably have pictures on it that have been taken at last Xmas party, at my friend’s birthday, on holiday, at a conference and so on. Sorting them (we’re talking hundreds of photos) used to be a nightmare and I would give up half the way through (typically whack them all on a CD which would then get thrown in the back of my drawer never to be found again!). So I’ve put together this little handy Java/Swing app which allows one to view the pictures in a folder one by one and move them with one click into one of the sub-folders created in the original folder — so all you have to do is just create some sub-folders called “Xmas party”, “holiday”, “conference” etc and then start the app which goes through pics one by one and just press the button corresponding to each folder to move the file in the corresponding folder and move onto the next.

Here’s a quick screenshot of this little app in action:

You can follow us on twitter now and keep up to date with our updates and announcements for new releases and/or changes to our software packages by using this well-known social service.

Simply visit http://twitter.com/3bsoft and follow us from there!

You will notice that the mobile section and the hotel section of our website are currently offline.This is due to our staged migration of our sourcecode to SVN which is currently in progress, with the software utilities section being the first to be migrated — once this is sorted out and made available to the public, then we move onto the mobile section and finally onto the hotel software. During the migration we expect to occasionally experience SVN/forge downtime — please bear with us throughout this process. An announcement will be made on our website once the full migration is finished — however, expect to see some intermediary updates as we make progress on each section.