Stephen’s Thoughts

I came across this issue a while a go and couldn’t really find much information on it at the time so thought that I would post about it just in case anyone has a similar issue.

We had the following code that loads an XML document and then applies a XSL transform against the XML document. The code looks a bit like following:
(This is the IE Specific version)

xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject(’Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0′);
xmlDoc.loadXML(XMLString);
xslDoc = new ActiveXObject(’Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0′);
xslDoc.load(xslFile);
output = xmlDoc.transformNode(xslDoc);

We would normally run this over HTTP and it always applied the transform and generated our output as you would expect. When we ran the same code over HTTPS the transform would never work.

After a lot of investigation it turned out that the issue was being caused due to a cache setting in the response header.

We were setting the Cache-Control parameter in the Response header to

‘private,no-cache,no-store’.

It seems that not allowing the XSL form to be cached was preventing the ActiveObject from loading it for the transform. By removing Cache-control parameter from the response header it worked fine every time.
Hope this can save someone with the same issue a bit of time.

Here are some very interesting ideas for the N95 Accelerometer that I came across via NSeries WOM world. I really like number 3:

Want to know how much memory is left in your blower? How about a quick battery update? Give your phone a shake and it’ll actually sound full (or empty)…..

I would love to see those games we had when we were younger where you had to get a metal ball into the middle of a maze without it falling between the gaps of the maze wall. See the image on the right for what it would look like.

I came across this via Oisín Hurley’s Blog.

Facebook have released a new framework to allow languages to talk with each other. This is how Facebook describe Thrift:

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source.

As Oisín points out, this sounds very like CORBA. I worked with CORBA a few years back when we needed to provide a interface between C++ applications and a Java based configuration server. I am very interested to see what Thrift is providing that CORBA is not? It may be a case of reinventing the wheel with a nice Web 2.0 spin on it.

If I am way off the mark here and Thrift is bringing something new to the table, let me know.

Just found out something cool about the N95; it turns out that it has a Accelerometer (Level Sensor). It is used by the camera in the phone to rotate pictures taken in portrait mode. It makes you wonder why Nokia did not use this to give an auto rotate to the phones screen, similar to the feature available on the IPhone? It looks like there is someone developing this for the phone at the moment. It is called rotateme and should be out later this month. Check out the developers site for more information.


Nokia have released a demo application to show the accelerometer in action. Its a pretty simple application but it shows the power of what can be done. At first I didn’t believe it was possible but check out this video below to see it in action.

They have also released the source code for the game so you can see how it is done. The game uses the N95 RD Accelerometer Plug-in package to hook into the accelerometer on the N95. According to the research group that developed the this:

In a later N95 firmware release you should be able to access the raw accelerometer data by using the official sensor plug-in downloadable from Forum Nokia (Sensor Plug-in for 60 3rd Edition).

I can think of lots of game applications that could use this that I would love to write. Unfortunately my C++ skills are very limited. I wonder if I could hook into it from a JAVA app using JNI?

As I got my phone in Asia, I was able to update my firmware to V12.0.0.14 without having to jump through all the hoops that european users had to. As the upgrade started I saw the warning to backup all of my data before the upgrade. This can be done using the Backup program in the Nokia PC Suite. I was lucky that I did as the phone is totally formatted during the upgrade.


One thing that still worried me was that my upgrade to Nokia Maps Navigation was gone. It looked like I had to pay for the upgrade again. After searching the web I came across a solution.

1. Start Maps application.
2. Go to Options > Extra services
3. Select Add navigation > Accept > Purchase > Select the correct region (i.e. the region you have earlier purchased the navigation for).
4. You see a list of licenses with different lengths of time. You don’t need to select the correct length, just go directly to Options > Update
5. Allow connection to license server to check purchase & license options by selecting “Yes” and by selecting Internet access point (if asked).
6. A note “xxx-day license activated” is shown where xxx is the amount of days left of your license.