Mobile SETI
Mobile SETI is a mobile phone application that allows you access your
current SETI@home progress from your mobile. So wherever you are, you
can check out your current SETI@home progress.
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So far Mobile SETI has only been tested on my Sony Ericsson T610, but it's written purely using J2ME, without any manufacturer-specifiec extensions, so if you phone supports MIDP 1.0 and CLDC 1.0 (as almost all of the current batch of Java-enabled mobile phones do), it should work on you phone. If you do download it and try it out, let me know how you get on, and I could take a look at implementing some kind of compatibility list.
Download
If you have access to put apps on your phone directly (you have a data cable, Infra-Red
port or perhaps a Bluetooth dongle) you can downlaod the Jar and Jad file here and
install them directly on your phone:
download mobileseti.jad (183 bytes)
download mobileseti.jar (17.8KB)
Otherwise if you phone supports wap you can use the following URL to download Mobile SETI
'over the air' directly onto your phone:
http://miraclemaker.f2o.org/david_felton/mobileseti/download.wml
Usage Instructions
Once you've got Mobile SETI installed on your phone using it is very straight forward.
First you'll want to set your email address: once the midlet has started up for the first
time all you will see displayed on the screen is a message asking you to enter your email
address , go ahead and do this by selecting the 'Menu' option, then select 'set email address'.
Enter your email address using the keypad. You will now be returned to the main screen and
the main message will be asking you to update the stats. Do this by selecting the 'update'
option. At this point Mobile SETI will connect to the Internet and retrieve your stats.
As most mobile operators charge by the time connected or the amount of data retrieved
(depending on whether you are using WAP or GPRS) the amount of data transferred is kept to an
absolute minimum. Once the transfer has completed you will be presented with your performance
data. Your email address and current performance data are stored in persistent storage on the
phone. You can update your statistics whenever you please.
Revision History
Version 1 - first release.
How does it work?
Performance data is available directly from the SETI@home website for any registered
user as XML data. While it's tempting to just request this document directly from the
phone and then parse the XML this is not the route I took. There is a PHP page on my
website to which the phone passes the email address. This page then requests the the
XML page from SETI@home and applies an XSLT transform to it. The performance data is returned
in a format that the phone can store directly without having to do any further processing of it.
The benefits of doing it this way are two-fold:
- It keeps the data transferred to the phone to an absolute minimum, keeping any costs for the user down.
- There is a bug in the SET@home website that means it thinks requests for pages from the phone are invalid, doing things this way neatly sidesteps the problem.
Copyright © 1999 - 2008 David Felton. Designed by David Felton.