The main reason I embarked on this Hyakutake adventure is that I’m too sentimental.

You see, I just hate to see perfectly good, if slightly obsolete, hardware go unused. At the same time, I can’t bear to part with it, and sometimes even rescue “collectors” from corporate dumpsters. So of course, I always end up with more than I can use or manage, which breaks my heart.

Specifically in this case, I have too many tablets. At the time (last summer), I had one of each: 770, N800, N810. The N810 was my daily workhorse, always with me everywhere. The N800 was the stay-at-home mobile terminal, for news at breakfast and quick domestic lookups at any time (weather, TV programs, bus schedules, etc.). Both saw daily, even intensive use. The 770… well, good old 770 mostly sat around and served to test those Mer releases that had support for it, when I got around to it, which was not saying much. I needed some other use for it.

I also had an old laptop lying around, a victim of the netbook wave. It had been an expensive ultra-light in its day, still sleek and in good working order, just not up to modern standards any more. I wanted it put into active retirement, but none of the “mod” ideas I could find on the Web (like a digital photo frame or torrent box) appealed to me.

Then one day I happened to think of both devices at the same time, and something clicked into place: I would kill both birds with one stone. I would write an app that would make them both useful again — together.

I saw it all so clearly in my mind…

Let’s kick off the new year with a new series.

If you recall, Season One was about a presentation I gave at the first (Berlin, 2008) Maemo Summit, revisited and extended. Season Two will be about a presentation I would have given at the 2009 Summit in Amsterdam… if I had actually managed to attend, that is. This way I can salvage some of it, and maybe give some readers useful tips or ideas for new uses of their tablets.

This presentation would have been quite different from the first, if only for the fact that it was to be a 5-minute “lightning talk”. This format does not lend itself well to philosophical ramblings, so I intended to do what suits it best: a demo of an application, which I had created last summer.

As is usually the case, the idea for this app stemmed from an “itch to scratch”. Of course, as you may already have guessed, there is plenty of Python and Web protocols in this story, and some web2py, but in the end I had to dig into deeper and more complex stuff than I had initially anticipated, so that is not all of it.

In hindsight, the five-minute demo would probably have been quite a challenge to set up, as it would have involved at least two devices (one of them a tablet) communicating over three protocol stacks.

Hyakutake is the name of the resulting product. For the curious, it is also the name of an atypical comet which crossed the solar system in 1996. It’s a bitch to spell, but I find it has a nice ring to it :-)

The nature of the itch I’ve been scratching, and the reason for choosing a comet’s name, will be made clear in the following posts…

Those who didn’t dig my Season One series may have appreciated the lull — to others, I apologize for the long delay in launching Season Two, which will be quite different. In the meanwhile, I just wanted to add a few words about mobile python web apps, with some good news about Maemo5 and the N900 hardware.

To conclude this series I’d like to highlight an important point that didn’t quite fit in before, because it is from the point of view of the end user, rather than of the developer (although they may well be the same person :-).

We’ll round up this series about web2py with two more subjects: how to best run the server on a tablet using the stock distribution as is; and how things could be made easier for the end user by creating a specific Maemo package.

In this part we’ll look at some technical aspects of web2py that make it interesting as an embarked server on a mobile device. I won’t go into too much detail about the bells and whistles here, the feature list is available from the site’s front page, and a good summary is here. Suffice it to say that there are more than enough features for our needs, and all the right buzzwords to please the corporate types too. I’ll just underline those traits that serve our purpose best:

In this last section of the series, we’ll try to determine what makes a web framework appropriate for a) bricoleurs, and b) hosting embarked apps on the tablets… which is generally not what their creators had in mind :-)

Before we move on to the last topic in this series, we need to answer two questions I’ve hinted at previously:

OK, let’s pause for a second to recap, and pinpoint our position on the map :

Please relax now, I’m not going to try to convince you that Python is the best thing since sliced bread… this part is not advocacy :-)