Mujtaba Hussain

Sometime ago, a friend of mine lost his laptop in a taxi and never saw it again. And today, Humpy showed me this video, and I decided time had come to do something about my laptop and my iPhone.

The iPhone was easy, ever since tracking your iPhone came free with the iOS 4.2 through the Mobile Me subscription. I set up a Mobile Me account on my iPhone, and then simply went to MobileMe and then checked the map for my phone.

I highly approve of the fact that I can send a message, lock and even wipe my phone in case its stolen or lost, but one thing I would have loved, would have been to get a picture of the person holding it. But this is a good start. Onto securing my laptop. I initially thought a daemon running in the background would be enough. And I even wrote a small one :

#!/bin/bash
PING=/sbin/ping
CURL=/opt/local/bin/curl
MAIL=/usr/bin/mail

output=`${PING} -t1 google.com`

connected=`echo $output | grep ‘unable’`
curr_date=`date`
email_address=”ipaddress.of.mujtaba.laptop@gmail.com”

if [ "x$connected" = "x" ]; then
ip=`${CURL} -s http://checkip.dyndns.org | sed ‘s/[a-zA-Z/<> :]//g’`
echo “Your IP = $ip” | mail -s “IP on $curr_date” $email_address
fi

And then I realised I am probably not the first person to have thought of securing my laptop and a quick google search proved that. A post on teknobites caught my attention and I was directed onto Prey. Installation was easy and setting up the daemon happened quickly. I went to the panel, logged in and marked my laptop as missing, set report duration and waited patiently.

Lo and Behold there was my laptop.

And what the scallywag was doing, and what he was logged in as :

And the best thing, it even takes the picture of the scallywag.

Me likey!

Hats off to guys at Prey.

What is it about mobile phone development that should attract people ? Please note that I said should and not will! I do know that there are a fair few people who develop games for mobiles and a lot of people are involved in developing applications for the iPhone, but should it attract people more and more ? Will it become a mainstream development area like Web Development or Games programming?

The main attraction that I see in development of anything for a mobile platform (which for a majority of people means mobile phones) is the condensation of content while imparting the same amount of knowledge. Let us say you run a chartered accounting business and have a website which allows your employees to perform their duties, lodge complex tax returns etc . Can you condense that quality of information onto a smart phone? Can you convey that information without confusing them ? Will you convey that information logically (one step leading to another) or intuitively (letting them search for it) ?

No longer is the term “mobile platform” constricted to smart phones. We have the iPad, the Adam and even the iPed and they have nothing to do with telephony. Applications for them can be varied and interesting. Some have even suggesting that digital mixing for DJ’s is now possible thanks to tablets like these.  Is there a case here that more technology is actually highlighting the lack of fields one can develop for now a days ?

Whatever the popular mood and whatever my own views, mobile development at the moment is at an interesting point. I do not believe that we have explored the full possibility of what we can do with it. Maybe it will lead us down the path of “Less but better information”, or maybe like so many other things that software developers have come across, we will royally screw this up. Who knows?? But one thing is for certain, I am more than eager to find out.