The social race

Sort of like the arms race and the technological race, i can say that we are witnessing a social networks race.
Since the discovery of the internet, there has been a growing need to bring individuals together.By combining human sociology and technology, social networks were born.The huge success in this field indicates that there is a lot of potential.
Currently the competing giants are Facebook, Twitter and late entrant Google+.
There is certainly a wave of excitement as to who will hold the most users and the competition has become very stiff.
This is evidenced by the high degree of non-disclosure going on in the industry.Non disclosure is okay according to my opinion but this has become an outright cold war.
The entrance of Google+ brought with it a lot of reaction.Some say that it will effectively crush the opponents.On the other hand we have speculation and some confirmed launches of new features by opponents.
Overall, does this translate to better services for the end users or is it just a battle for web traffic.The end users soon finds themselves with a lot of accounts and passwords to remember, but on the other hand it can be argued that their lives have changed for the better.

Strife in mobile programming

So today i turned in to my work desk in the afternoon feeling highly exhausted.
I open the python project i am working on and all i want to do is to make some progress,
the problem is i have realized that there is a lot of strife and plenty of stray winds in this field.

I am talking about mobile programming.To begin with,there is a lot of hype about mobile being the way to go,
yes i agree with that,so i ask where do you go?

Handset manufacturers develop their own API's and encourage developers to learn only what they churn out.This means that you will become a slave to their
every whim if you intend to make a living.The problem is that there is no standardization.
I think J2ME was a good idea towards standardization,but it became clear that it isn't as powerful as native handset languages.

So to say the least,there is some strife.
About the stray winds.So in college we have all sorts of visiting speakers coming to tell us about their exploits and
what they believe is the most rewarding pursuit in the field of computing(by rewarding i mean:brings a lot of money and glory).
So on one day comes the Google guys with the slogan "Android is the way to go",Then the samsung guys follow the next day with the slogan
"Bada is the future",not to mention the plight of Nokia.Having fed us with symbian,Qt for years nokia now turns and stabs us in the back by dealing with
Microsoft.

Oh and don't forget that the promise of something being totally opensource is something used as a marketing strategy.
So i close my project and lay my head down to get a rest.My fellow coders,please don't get caught in the strife.

How to learn programming

Best way to learn
So how should I go about learning the programming language of my choice?

1. Get a beginners book on your programming language.
Before you choose the book, make sure you read the reviews to make sure it’s a good choice.


2. It is important that once you begin learning the programming language through your book, you don’t take big breaks. Taking long breaks will cause you to forget things you learned in the beginning that apply to the rest of the book.


3. Do ALL of the practice problems provided in the book. The only way you will become better is by applying what you learn.


4. When something difficult comes up or something that makes no sense to you, don’t avoid or skip it. Instead embrace it! This is how you actually learn. If you still don’t understand it after going over it multiple times, find someone that can help you.


5. Join a programming forum. Search for a website on your programming language that has a large user base. There will be many professionals on there that will be able to help you when you get stuck.


6. Practice. Practice Practice. Think of ideas for fun programs that you could make and program them!

how to access phones sms inbox

sadly j2me does not provide the feature to access the phones sms inbox.
One alternative is to use python for series 60 phones(pyS60).
here is a sample code for accessing the contents of the inbox