Making some headway with writing mobile phone software for GNOME 2. Got a basic applet up and running which listens on a serial port for incoming SMS messages and notifies you. The idea is to make it bind either to a Bluetooth phone, infrared port, or conventional serial port. I've been testing it over Bluetooth with my Ericsson r520m.

Thanks to gsmlib, the comms parts of this are proving to be the simplest. I've been on a rollercoaster ride through gtkmm/gnomemm and also on creating applets for GNOME 2. Not for the first time I'm grateful for apt-get source that lets me grab examples to copy from!

As the panel stuff for GNOME 2 hasn't been wrapped for C++ yet, I've had to mix up C and C++ together for this project. That's not been as bad as I feared it might be, once the issue of initialising gnomemm was sorted out.

Lots of other things going on but after a day in the coding "zone" I forget what they are.

Recently published: Whither Web Services? (XML.com) and Exploring alternative syntaxes for XML (IBM developerWorks).