My Programs

I will use this page to present some small utilities, emerged from daily need to solve some small or not so small problems.

Create Empty File

Utility with very suggestive name 😉 was created when I found out (by slow trial and error method) that my stupid DVD player Marantz DV 4100 (picture), brilliant in all other areas, won’t play burned DVD disks if those disks are not filled up to the end, all 4.7GB – it seems that it dislikes color of not burned part of the disk.

Solution was obvious: make program for creation of the empty (zero filled) files of arbitrary size and then burn them somewhere on the DVD video disk, outside AUDIO_TS / VIDEO_TS folders.

CreateEmptyFile.Exe  Fileof100b.bin  100
CreateEmptyFile.Exe  Fileof100Kb.bin 100K
CreateEmptyFile.Exe  Fileof100Mb.bin 100M
CreateEmptyFile.Exe  Fileof100GB.bin 100G

Allowed Suffixes: K (* 1024), M (* 1048576) and G (* 1073741824)

LoanCalculator for Siemens SK65

Recently, I became owner of the nice, heavy and elegant phone, Siemens SK65.

SK65 have lot of memory (64 Mb from which 35Mb is available to user), great PIM part (Personal Information Manager)
which can be synchronized with Microsoft Outlook and good menu system. It’s turn out to be great replacement for old
Handspring Visor Deluxe, Palm compatible device.

What I missed on new platform are small utility programs for everyday tasks. Luckily, SK65 supports Java for mobile devices – Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) and I managed to find replacement for most Palm utilities in the freeware or open source part of J2ME world except one small program: Loan Calculator.

Given the fact that I did not learn new platform / language for quite while, this was good opportunity for me; result of that new challenge is here: LoanCalculator, J2ME (CLCD 1.1 i MIDP 2.0), utility which for given Loan Amount, Interest Rate and Loan period calculates Monthly Payment, Total Payment and Total Interest.

Program is tested using SK65 emulator as well in the phone itself; it should work on all Siemens Series 65 phones and on other J2ME enabled phones which support CLCD 1.1 and MIDP 2.0.

Used in development:

• Eclipse IDE
• EclipseME, Eclipse plugin for midlet development
• Ant and Antenna for generating final Jad and Jar files.