Anybody played with "mobile codes" (2D barcodes) ? Apparently they are a big deal in Japan I was browsing Nokia's site and found the following: http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/index.htm Of course, my 6820 cellphone is too old/small to have a reader, and my new N810 is Linux not Symbion and doesn't have Java :-( After following various links on Google about formats and patents and people saying "not for Linux yet" I found a couple of sites saying QR was royalty-free and http://trac.koka-in.org/libdecodeqr http://megaui.net/fukuchi/works/qrencode/index.en.html I managed to build libdecodeqr and the "simpletest" demo under both FC4 and Maemo. But it won't decode images on maemo (status 4200 imagereader error). On FC4 I can decode many of the test images, also images made with qrencode. Also a photograph of an image made with qrencode (which is the whole point of the exercise). http://andrew.triumf.ca/59_48_15-260308.jpg But QR images made with Nokia's online tool give 2009 CODEDATA_NOT_SUPPORT_ECI, which is somewhat annoying. I was starting to think this was kind of cool ... we could put QR codes on museum displays etc. and if every Japanese cellphone out-of-the-box, and most others with an app download, can read them and link to a website for more information, it would be neat. But now I'm wondering about interoperability. Has anyone played with this on a cellphone ? Can anyone read my QR image ? (a while back there was a fad in Japan to have T-shirts with English text, but mostly it was gibberish. Interestingly, I think I had a T-shirt with Kanji text, and a Japanese friend said that was gibberish, too. Now Nokia suggests we have machine-readable gibberish on our shirts, which opens the door to some interesting abuse with people wearing messages they don't understand (see me naked on www...), much like the legend of the Chinese take-out in Britain whose sign apparently read "death to the round-eyes" or some such ....) -- Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 (Pacific Time) Network Security Manager
