Tag Archives: o4send

Day 22 – Release some software under an open source license that you haven’t released before.

Leave a reply

This late post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

I’ve released a bit of software before under open source licenses – originally mostly scripts and various utilities, before moving on to starting my own open source company (Amberdms Ltd) which resulted in various large applications, such as the Amberdms Billing System and centralised authentication components like LDAPAuthManager.

The other day I released my o4send application, which is a utility for sending bluetooth messages to any phones supporting OPP and today I pushed a new release of LDAPAuthManager (version 1.2.0) out to the project tracker.

 

I haven’t talked about LDAPAuthManager much before – it’s a useful web-based application that I developed for several customers that makes LDAP user and group management easy for anyone to use without needing to understand the pain that is LDAP.

It’s been extended to provide optional radius attribute support, for setting additional values on a per-user or per-group, making LDAPAuthManager part of a wider centralised authentication solution.

 

For other open source goodness, all my current open source components developed by Amberdms can be found on our Indefero project tracker at www.amberdms.com/projects/.

There’s a lot that I have yet to release – releasing means I need to validate the documentation, package, test and then upload so I can be sure that everyone gets the desired experience with the source, so it can be tricky to find the time sometimes :-/

Introducing o4send

Leave a reply

Awhile ago, Amberdms was contracted to develop an application for sending messages to bluetooth enabled mobile phones for the NZ world expo.

Essentially the idea was that people would visit the expo, receive a file on their mobiles and receive some awesome content about New Zealand. The cool thing about this was that you didn’t need to be paired, any phone with bluetooth active would get this message.

Apparently this worked quite nicely, although I’m not convinced that OPP will be much use for the future, with the two major smartphone platforms (Android and iPhone/iOS) not providing support for it – we found that it worked best with Nokia Symbian phones.

To make this work, I wrote a perl script and coupled it with a CSV or MySQL database backend to track the connections and file distributions – I bundled this into a little application called “o4send” which I’ve now released the source publicly.

You can check out the source and download the application at the Amberdms project tracker at: https://www.amberdms.com/projects/p/oss-o4send/

Take care with this application, it can talk to a lot of mobile phones and I’m not sure of the legality of sending unsolicited messages to bluetooth devices – but I figured this source might be useful to somebody oneday for a project – or at the very least, a “hey that’s cool” moment.