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Recovering deleted images from a Nokia N90 (Symbian OS)

Over the holidays we had an accidental deletion of every image on one of our phones (a Nokia N90, Symbian OS device.) Mild panic was quickly replaced with a gentle pondering on the difference between what a normal person would do in this situation vs. what a geek would do. The geek process goes something like this:

Step 1: Get the memory card out of the phone as quickly as possible

Either shut the phone down and pull the card, or use the super-secret combo hidden within the profile-switching shortcut to have the phone un-mount the card.

Step 2: Obtain a USB memory card reader

I’ve needed a reason to buy one of these for a long time. Good thing I had a gift card left from the holidays. I went with a Dynex gazillion-to-one card reader, not for it’s technical superiority, but because it was the only thing the shop nearby had.

Step 3: Stick the memory card into the reader, and plug the reader into your Linux box

Mine happens to run Ubuntu at the moment, but the results will likely be similar on other distros.

Step 4: sudo apt-get install testdisk

Testdisk “was primarily designed to help recover lost data storage partitions…” and includes a utility called “PhotoRec“, which is what you want.

Step 5: Run photorec

PhotoRec is a data recovery tool designed specifically for recovering files from digital camera media. It supports a number of file-system formats, including the FAT format that Symbian OS uses on it’s memory cards. PhotoRec is a text-based, terminal application, but it does the job perfectly.

Select the mounted memory card from the list of drives (which should be easy to spot given how small memory cards are relative to modern hard drives), and send it scanning. PhotoRec can be told to look for specific file types (you want JPG’s, in this case), but by default it will look for just about any media file format that you’re likely to have on your phone. Files will be recovered and written to a local directory.

Step 6: Sigh in relief when you see your beloved cat pictures returned to you

PhotoRec isn’t going to restore the images to the memory card’s file system such that the phone can see them again, but you’ll have the pictures on your Linux box now, and can copy them back over if you choose to. The naming scheme will be different, but that’s an acceptable compromise.

Lily: Visual programming in JavaScript

I have an odd fascination with Visual Programming languages, and while I’ve gotten so far as sketching out some UI concepts and object models for a text-processing focused, web-mashing, visual programming environment, I’m a long way from having anything that works. Much to my surprise then when David Ascher dropped a link to the Lily project on his blog today. Holy cow this is sweet. Think PD or Max/MSP written in JavaScript, running in a browser, with modules for popular Web API’s and JavaScript frameworks (ex., “Amazon, Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo; UI modules that wrap widgets from YUI, Scriptaculous, JQuery, Google Maps….”)

Check out one of the demo’s here:

(Via: Lily: JavaScript, visual programming, fun.)

Ubuntu + Hildon UI = in-Car PC UI

Awhile back, Ubuntu announced a mobile and embedded edition of it’s popular Linux distribution. The buzz was around the possibility of Ubuntu Mobile showing up on future UMPCs. The news caught my eye, but didn’t really get my attention until the plans for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) were announced:

“Ubuntu 7.10 will be the first Ubuntu release to offer a complete mobile and embedded edition built with the Hildon user interface components” (developed by Nokia for the Maemo platform.)

Now that’s interesting. Could it be that we’ll see Ubuntu Mobile booting on Nokia N800’s? It’s certainly a possibility — and one that could bring a larger breadth of software to Nokia’s mobile Linux tablets.

However, as interesting as it may be if Nokia adopts Ubuntu, the possibilities for wider Hildon support didn’t hit me until my drive home today. It was one of those obvious moments. I had been using my Nokia N800 while walking to my car, so the touch- and small-screen friendly UI was fresh in my mind. Then I started thinking about my Car PC. It uses a 7″ touch screen and runs Ubuntu (a full distribution, with a UI designed for full-size monitors.) Running Gnome on my cheap, in-car 7″ monitor makes for a pretty lousy experience. Text is hard to read, and everything is too small to click on. However, if this news is right, Ubuntu 7.10 will change all of that. I’ll be able to run Hildon on my Car PC! That’s killer. Imagine having Canola running in-car, sitting on 100GB of multimedia…

iPhone development platform will wake up the mobile industry

One of the most interesting topics of iPhone speculation is the choice of interpreted, web technologies as the development platform. I greeted the news with a big smile, and a sigh of obviousness. Having spent a few frustrating years preaching the potential of agile mobile development platforms, it sits near and dear to me to here that Apple is paying attention to a bigger market.

Of course, the old-school, “Mobile 1.0″ crowd’s reaction is just as I would expect. Some of the claims make me laugh, so I felt motivated to chime in on the topic. Let’s break down the big three that I’m hearing:

“No SDK means no killer apps.” There are two issues here: (1) That there are ‘killer’ mobile apps that aren’t already included in the iPhone; and (2) That killer apps can’t be built with web technologies. For the first bit, ask yourself what the killer mobile apps are? Number One is voice… Number Two is SMS… Number Three varies, but support for syncing PIM data, taking pictures, listening to music, checking email, and browsing the web, pretty much covers it. For the second part, to assume that killer apps can’t be built with web technologies would require denying the last ten years of Internet development. The Web has changed everything — and it was built with web technologies ;-) Besides, Apple hasn’t commented yet on whether they’re exposing select native API’s via JavaScript.

“No clear revenue stream (for developers and operators) means no developers.” Stop thinking Mobile 1.0. Stop thinking traditional channels. Stop thinking about the Operators and Manufacturers “owning a customer”. Drop all this telcom baggage and start looking at the Web. There are plenty of companies making significant revenue simply because a large number of people have a browser and a data connection to their PCs. If anything, the mobile market becomes more interesting (and potentially more lucrative) when application development is cheap and the legacy mobile bureaucracy is out of the way.

“Developers need low-level access to the hardware.” This actually came up in a recent conversation, and I just about walked away at that point. Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how much of a PITA (and HUGE waste of time) it is to develop high-quality, reliable, usable, native applications on embedded hardware? I do. And I can assure you that you want no part of it. I appreciate the occasional need, and I’m sure Apple can give the John Carmack’s and Google’s of the world a l33t SDK; but if you’re looking to develop innovative, profitable mobile applications, there’s no reason for you to be tracking down memory leaks and hardware bugs. The less time you waste fighting the hardware, the more time you’ll have to launch new software. (If you don’t believe me, compare the rates of software and business model innovation that happens on the Web vs. on mobile phones. Mobile phones have done wonders for flattening the world, but they can’t compare to the Web as an environment for cheap, rapid innovation.)

Offline web app with Google Gears

The blogosphere is already lit up with posts about Google Gears, and for good reason. Solving the offline/local-storage problem for web applications has been a hot topic — it’s one of those glaring voids in the web stack that keeps web applications from replacing desktop applications completely.

So what is Google Gears? It’s an Open Source browser plugin that provides services (via JavaScript) for offline storage, data recovery, and synchronization. And here’s the best part: it works on Mac, Linux, and Windows… on Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+ (with Safari support in development.) With such a huge support base, combined with the benefit of being a cross-browser solution and being open source, Gears has the right ingredients to become a defacto solution for offline web applications.

For more details, check out:

• Google Gears Project page
• Google Gears API Developer’s Guide
• Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline (via Techcrunch)

Photosynth — Navigating 2D photos in 3D space

Interesting video demonstrating Photosynth, an application for navigating 2D photos in 3D space: “Dive into the world of Photosynth.”

From the site:
“Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.”

“Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a door handle. Photos that share features are then linked together in a web. When the same feature is found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. It’s similar to depth perception - what your brain does to perceive the 3D positions of things in your field of view based on their images in both of your eyes. Photosynth’s 3D model is just the cloud of points showing where those features are in space.”

(Via: My Icon. Your Icon?.)

ColorZilla conflict causes FireBug 1.0 to not display on FF 2.x on Ubuntu (update: getting better)

Just wanted to share this find: After the 1.0 update of FireBug last month, the extension stopped working for me on Firefox 2.0.x on Ubuntu. Thanks to a quick Google search, I found that FireBug conflicts with ColorZilla. After disabling ColorZilla, FireBug now works again.

(Via the comments in: Firebug 1.0: Public Beta, Still Free, and a Lite version for other browsers.)

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Update 2007-02-08: The author of ColorZilla contacted me, and while we still haven’t isolated the problem, we did find that my ColorZilla extension was at version 0.8.x, and wasn’t finding the 1.0 update. After un-installing and re-installing ColorZilla, it is now somewhat more compatible with FireBug. Both extensions load, and everything except the ColorZilla Eyedropper works.
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Update: It’s broken again… And once again, disabling ColorZilla got my FireBug working again. I don’t know which extension is causing the problem, but there seems to be a conflict.

Putting the metadata back on Google Image Search

For anyone else who needs it, I found a user script (here) that re-enables the metadata on Google Image Search. (The “redesign” of Google Image Search no longer includes the image size, format, and dimensions.) The script requires the Stylish Firefox extension.

(Via: Google Image Search Has a Cleaner Look)