OMG! Snakes on a Phone!

So, I got this new cell phone from work. A Nokia 6120 Classic, which has just the size and features I wanted (and more, I'm sure). I picked the white/silver model, to go with my kitchen supplies (in honour of the fact that with Series 60, you can basically install the Kitchen Sink if you so choose to).

Going further, I of course wanted to play Monkey Island and such on the amazing ScummVM. Well, admire the running of; actually playing through them might be a little straining.. Though great screen clarity makes it quite possible to discern the orange and pink on the red herring you steal from the Loom™ seagull outside the Scumm Bar kitchen, it's quite thumb-numbing to actually snatch it in time..

And then, surely, I couldn't wait to get to the real goodies: Python. Specifically, The Python for Series 60 distro by Nokia (open source). I knew it was quite capable, but seriously; it basically lets you p0wn your phone.

(Half a decade ago I had fun running Python on my old Psion Revo; but that didn't go much further than some file tinkering and exploration of new-style classes (metaprogramming and whatnot) during commuting. But this is different. The same. But different.)

You go ahead by following the instructions, basically downloading the PythonForS60_1_4_0_3rdEd.sis and PythonScriptShell_1_4_0_3rdEd.sis from sourceforge, wiring or beaming them to the phone and running them to install (py, then shell). I also got the PythonForS60_1_4_0_doc.pdf, and marvelled at its beauty. I mean, apart from greater parts of the Python Standard Library, a mere glance at the modules provided for S60 stuff gives you an impression of the power at hand:

graphics, e32db, messaging, inbox, location, sysinfo, camera, audio, telephone, calendar, contacts, keycapture, topwindow, gles, glcanvas

Now, I haven't gotten very far yet; mostly tinkered with urllib to download some stuff from the web (which just worked (after a nice confirmation dialogue from the phone to actually access the net)), rendering the obligatory mandelbrot and then peeking at the real deal by looking at the SMS inbox contents using the interactive console.

Or actually, using

$ screen /dev/tty.bt_console

from my OS X Terminal (iTerm really). Magically set up by simply following this excellent guide.

Perhaps screen scraping wasn't really what I thought of when wanting Python on the phone, but you can't deny it's cool to be able to (perhaps awaiting flatrate subscription to not drain my wallet in the process though).

Speaking of screens and webs again; damn that WebKit-based browser in the phone really worked! It actually ran the JavaScript-based SyntaxHighlighter, thus rendering the Oort Tutorial quite faithfully. I did not expect that (nor my rekindled desire for highly variable width web sites..).

[And speaking of Oort; I've added some somewhat nifty stuff (if I may say so) lately; accessible in the svn repo at google code for now. A release should be coming up. Pre- or post my planned split into core and web/publication stuff I haven't decided yet. There really is a working RDF-to-object mapper underneath the touted WSGI stuff (which is just a minimal layer).]

Now I should go on to do something productive (like shaving a yak).