What the heck!??!?!

Finally some progress on Philips side. The hardware, which is an NFC shell, for 1 part of my FYP (final year project) has finally arrived and will be picking it up on Tuesday =D After getting the phone (cant seem to remember when I got the phone due to the hectic schedule I’ve had since I got back) that supports this shell I’ve been trying to work out the kinks in the programming and stuff. The SDK that Philips provided to us (which is actually from Nokia) is kind of screwed up. Had to install them in the proper order and kept getting funny errors. It could partially be my fault as I am lazy to read the installtion and manuals. Out of the little that I did read I was able to configure it properly and finally got the 1st part of the 2 part installation to work. I could develop handphone programs using Eclipse.

I’ve never used Eclipse before so getting used to the IDE and trying to find out how it works is always a pain to me. The tutorial provided seems to pathetic to me, unless there was a more indepth one which I missed. What I hated most was the fact that I could NOT Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+Shift+Tab to alternate between tabs in the program. That completely sucked. I remapped the keys but that didnt seem to work either. However I couldnt get the NFC part to work with Eclipse. From problems with ANT where I accidentallby put a trailing ” at the end of the ANT_HOME variable caused ANT to not work properly to Eclipse seemingly compiling the application downloading it to the emulator phone and the phone not being able to find a class required by the program thus giving an error on startup to not being able to create a JAR file due to the fact that it could not load a class in the SDK JAR file. Like what the heck. Something to note, why do IDEs have to make things so complicated??? Just trying to run or compile the project was a pain as I had to go an extra step to just create a special configuration for it. There doesnt even seem to be a compile option just run which compiles and automatically runs the program.

After the whole day trying to get Eclipse to work nicely with the NFC SDK, I decided to give up and try Netbeans. And guess what it works! Kind of. When I run the program in Netbeans it runs on the emulator however it uses a different emulator compared to Eclipse. It uses the Java Wireless Toolkit emulator instead of the S40 Emulator that I downloaded from the Nokia Forum. So when I added the S40 SDK that would run the program in the S40 emulator the program decides to not work on the emulator. However using Netbeans I could create the JAR file which I can use the S40 standalone emulator (where I manually start it up, not via Eclipse or Netbeans) to manually download that JAR file created to run the application. So I guess this is my workaround. It’s times like these that makes me wonder if I should just spend time (who knows how much of it though) to actually find out what the problem is and try to understand how both Eclipse and Netbeans work (as learning IDEs would be good), not to mention the several Nokia applications that got bundled up with the SDKs (S40 and NFC SDKs) or just live with the workaround and just continue and finish up my FYP ASAP.

Anyway been having male PMS for the past few days I swear. IYWSDRYHTDIY: if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Club stuff. Sucks. Whatever. Anyway got my final modules that I will be doing in NUS, EE4217 Technology of Digital Entertainment, CS3221 Advanced Operating Systems, FNA1002 Financial Accounting and last but not at all the least, EE4001 B.Eng Dissertation, ie Final Year Project. I should go to sleep now. Going to the nightwatch service 2230-0030 later on today. In the afternoon cell will be converging to Joline‘s place just to hang out and basically rot, something I rather do a lot of right now but not much time to do so. Feel there’s a lot to do for my FYP as the phone application that I’m doing in J2ME is just 1 application, there still is another PocketPC application to be done, not to mention a desktop application + thesis writing + whatever else FYP throws at me. Anyway people time to sleep. Good night, belated Merry Christmas and advanced Happy New Year!