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Rise and fall of WAP
Posted on February 19th, 2019 No commentsIn the perspective of an engineer…
I started working as a Service Quality engineer at a telecom company in 2001. After many small projects a manager asked me whether I can create a software to grab the content of our entire mobile site to verify everything, literally (broken links, grammar, changes, pictures etc). Mobile sites were using WAP technology back then and there was no deep knowledge on how to communicate via the WAP protocol. I got a small byte array (less than 50 bytes long) from a WAP Gateway operator which meant to be the WAP request. The software used it to generate the WAP request by appending the URL to it. That was a simple WAP Class 0 (connectionless) transaction. I sent one UDP packet with the request then the WAP Gateway sent me the response. That was it.
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Software controlled infrared device
Posted on February 3rd, 2019 No commentsAfter a long silence I pushed myself to create a new article. I have many half written materials I can choose from. This time I finished my IR device story.
In 2008 my then boss came up with an idea: End-to-End testing/monitoring of the TV services by using real set-top-boxes (STB). One of the interesting part of this project was the development of the software controlled infrared remote device. E2E mean we had to control an STB just like clients do, so a computer controlled IR had to be developed. We intended to simulate the original remote, so I had to watch-and-learn the signal it sent.