After being assured on the Coldsync mailing list that the lastest coldsync cvs would let me sync my Tungsten E, I just wasted an hour trying to get this working.
Still no joy.
*sigh*
GPSDrive
While at ApacheCon, legobuff showed me GPSDrive. It was very cool. But then his battery died, and I didn’t get to play with it much.
Last night, I got it working, and wow it is cool.
Tips for folks searching for stuff, as I did last night, finding very little.
* With the Magellan SporTrak Pro (or other Magellan devices, I expect) you have to turn on NMEA and set the baud rate to 4800, otherwise it won’t see your GPS.
* Installing the RPMs on RedHat 8 proved to be dependency hell, and I gave up on it. Installing PCRE from source proved to be the fastest way to get ./configure to run correctly, and then installing gpsdrive from source. I’ll omit my package management rant here, since I’m short on time.
* Very important! West longitude is negative. If you don’t use negative numbers, your waypoints end up somewhere in Uzbekistan or something.
The general idea here is that gpsdrive receives gps signals from your gpsr on the serial port, and then superimposes your position on top of maps downloaded from mapquest or Expedia. The Expedia maps seem to be more up-to-date.
The cool thing here is that it’s not downloading vector maps, just gif images, so they are very small, and whatever scale you want. It automatically chooses the best map that you have for the location you’re in, zooming in and out depending on how detailed a map you have for that position. If you’re online, you just click download, and it downloads the map for your current position.
Really, the only downside here is the increased tendency to run into things because you have a laptop sitting on the seat next to you, so a co-pilot is recommended. 😉
So, now I need to hack up some Perl scripts to convert my Geocaching.com GPX files into waypoint files for GPSdrive. The syntax is very simple, so I should be able to do that pretty quick. Unless someone has already done it.
So, thanks, Legobuff!
Tungsten E, part deux
i’ve used the Tungsten E since Tuesday, and here are my remarks thus far, for those looking for a Palm device, perhaps to work in conjunction with Linux, or who are upgrading from an older device.
* Apparently there are no Tungsten E drivers that work with Coldsync unless you are running a 2.6 Kernel. I found two references to this on Google, but now can’t find them. So you can take this as authoritative or not, as you like. However, despite that, I think that I’ll stick with this device, and just tough it out using Windows to sync/install until I upgrade the OS on my laptop.
* A significant number of applications no longer work under OS5. Now, in my case, this is not particularly surprising, because many of the apps I use were downloaded 5 years ago, and I’ve not upgraded because 1) they worked and 2) the upgrades were non-free.
* Which leads to another point. The idea of paying for software, I’m finding, is very odd to me. I expect to be able to go to Freshmeat or Sourceforge and download something that works for me. And, since I am generally not merely a freeloader, and contribute back to a decent number of the projects from which I benefit, I think that this is perfectly legit. But, in the Palm world, most of the useful stuff is not free. The prices are very very reasonable, but I’m so used to free software that paying for software seems … I dunno … somehow *wrong*.
* The calendar that comes with Palm OS5 is not as good as the one that came with the original Visor. Yes, it has some neat points, like the ‘Agenda’ view, which is very useful. But it lacks other things, like ToDo items in the day view, a number of the calendar views that I used fairly frequently, and the entire concept of “floating events”, which is exceedingly useful.
* Someone offered to sell me a Tungsten C for a very good price. Seems I’m going to decline. The C has built-in 802.11, which seems very neat at first glance, but I’m just not sure I’d use it often enough to justify the extra cost. Additionally, it has a keyboard rather than graffiti, and I don’t think I’d like that a whole lot.
* Speaking of graffiti, the new Palms now have “Graffiti 2”, which is a new and distinctly *not* improved version of Graffiti. A number of letters are harder to write, and almost all non alphanumeric things are much harder to write. One example would be the bullet point, which I use frequently. Used to be slash-dot. Now it is stroke-dot-stroke-stroke-stroke. Oy. The guy that stiffed Palm on the patent for this needs to be strung up by his toes.
OK, that’s about it. And I need to write about something else before I start working, so I should finish this one.
Palm Tungsten E
Yesterday morning in the dark I dropped my Visor Prism, which I’ve been using for at least 5 years, and I think longer. The screen broke just enough to lose a line of pixels. However, this grew to 4 lines by lunch time.
On the way back from the LPLUG meeting, I stopped and picked up a Palm Tungsten E.
Observations thus far.
The speed increase from the Visor is like upgrading from a 486 DX to a 1.8GHz Pentium. Or something like that. Yow!
The colors, and the screen clarity, are simply amazing. Photos look better than on my laptop.
Unfortunately, a number of the applications that I use frequently, don’t run under OS5. I’ve been running the same apps for 4 or 5 years, so there was no need to upgrade. Now, things that were free are no longer free, and so I can’t simply transfer data over from the old device, and in many cases I’ll have to spend $20 or $30 to retain the same functionality.
And, finally, it appears that Coldsync can’t sync to it. Yet. Presumably, it will with a 2.6 kernel.
I have not yet decided if I’m going to put up with these annoyances, and sync on Windows for a while, or if I will try to get something different. The OS5 thing can’t be got around without getting something old and/or refurbished. The Coldsync thing can be got around by getting a different device, but I’d have to do some research to find out which one. And since I’m expecting to upgrade to 2.6 as soon as there’s a solid distro with the new kernel, I can probably put up with it until then. I think. We’ll see. I have 14 days to return it.
Catching up on my rants
Thursday or Friday on the news, there was a story about a budget bill. Apparently, this budget bill (the “omnibus” budget in the US congress) was released a whole week before they were to vote on it, so that people could read it and know what they were voting on.
And this is unusual.
Normally, they are released the night before. And they are thousands of pages long. So there’s no chance that anybody voting on it will have any idea what they are voting on. And that’s the normal, accepted, practice.
Doesn’t anybody but me think that’s wrong? Surely, that’s a miscarriage of our congressional representation, no matter how you look at it, if they are voting on stuff that they haven’t read?
The story went on to say that they were finding stuff in there (which they ordinarily would have approved blindly) giving zillions of dollars to personal projects in various folks’ hometown and home states. $100,000 for this hospital. $200,000 for park benches in that town. $800,000 to renovate a statue in some town square. It’s absolutely amazing.
For a while I’ve been viewing some stories like this in a sense of awe that we have a closed-source government. We’re not permitted to see how we are being government most of the time, at least until it’s too late. Granted, this is not a simple democracy – it’s much more complex and disfunctional than that. But it would at least be nice to see what’s going on before it’s too late.
Phrases like “crafted in closed door sessions in the dark of night” should not apply to how my tax dollars are being spent, or the next way I will be harrassed when I go on a business trip.
So, I applaud the folks that released this bill early so that people could actually read what they are voting on. I sincerely hope that they are not alarmed by people finding unsavory stuff in it, to the point that they don’t do this again. I only think that it doesn’t go far enough. I think that these things should be developed entirely openly, with cvs commits going to a public website and/or mailing list of interested persons, so that each addition and extra pork can be scrutinized while it is happening. Personal accountability for every wasted dollar would put a bit of a pinch on this kind of absurd spending on personal projects.
Which brought me to another point. Some of these things were worthy projects, and I’m sure that the folks that were to benefit from them are cringing that they are now likely to lose them. But should *my* tax dollars go to pay for a children’s museum in Potowski, Utah (or whatever)? No, *my* tax dollars should go to assist kids in Kentucky, not in Utah. That’s why we have state tax, right?
Anyways, I had other rants, but I need to go make breakfast.
File persimmons
I just got email on an Apache mailing list with a subject of “Permissions”. At the same time, I got email to a food mailing list with a subject of “Persimmons”
Always in the slow line …
it appears that i have a hidden talent for finding the slow line at the grocery store. i always seem to manage to pick the line in which the harmless-looking person with three items will hagle for 27 minutes over the 12 cent coupon, and have price checks on the other two items. i need to find a way to turn this skill to profit.
Geronimo demo
In the closing session at ApacheCon, there was a demo of the Geronimo project. They showed some web pages of a fictitious Pet Store web site. I didn’t get it at all. The folks giving the demo made no attempt to explain what Geronimo was, or why thse pet store pages should in any way be interesting or impressive.
Finally, this evening, I understood why it was impressive.
What amazes me is the attitude that these folks seem to have. It’s as though they assume that the entire world understands what they are doing, and any attempt to explain it is below their dignity.
So, for those of you who still don’t understand, here’s the basics.
J2EE is apparently a specification (or, perhaps, an API) for building multi-user Java server applications. There are multiple implementations of J2EE engines. Jboss is one of them. Geronimo is another.
The Pet Store application is a standard J2EE proof application. ie, if the Pet Store runs, then you have implemented J2EE correctly. It’s like a test suite that verifies function.
So, when they showed the Pet Store pages, this proved that their J2EE implementation was correct, and worked.
Now, why they could not take the 3 minutes to explain this to all of us is rather boggling to me, but seems to be pretty standard across the Java community. The Java folks, as a group, seem to assume that all the rest of the world has alphabet soup for every meal just like they do, and so we all know what J2EE, WSDP, JAX-RPC, and so on, all mean. Either that, or they consider folks who *don’t* understand these things to be unworthy of dignifying with notice. I’m unable to come up with a third explanation, and would welcome a response from a “Java person” who could shed some light on this for me.
It’s increasingly clear that my difficulty in understanding what all these Java projects do, is based on the fact that they are all 18 levels deep in abstraction, and it’s assumed that you already understand the first 17 layers.
However, I’m trying very hard to be open minded. I really want to undersatnd what every one of the Apache projects is. And if my quest leads to some better (more world-friendly) explanations of what the projects do, that would be great, too.
I have a simple benchmark for these sorts of things. Can I explain it to my mother? Now, understand, my mother is a *very* intelligent person. But she is not a programmer, not a techie, and has not been exposed to the jargon that we steep ourselves in every day. So if I can explain these things to my mother, that means that I’m using regular english, and I’m probably going to be understandable to most beginners in that particular technology.
Apachecon keysigning
I was too lazy to actually send out all the keys that I signed at the keysigning, but this evening I hacked up a script for sending them for me:
Obviously, you’ll need 1) a file of the key IDs, 2) edit the regex that tests to see if you’ve signed the key, and 3) to edit the script to put YOUR name and email address in the email message.
Too many projects
So, once again, I’ve arrived at the point of having too many things going on at the same time, and so being incapable of getting anything done. I’m working on two books (one Apache, one fiction) and there are at least a half-dozen books that I need/want to read. I’m trying to get 3 different servers running the way that I need them to (and one of them seems obdurately determined not to cooperate). I really want to spend some time getting up to speed with the Perl DateTime project, which I played a small part in getting off of the ground, and have subsequently abandoned due to Apache stuff. And there are a few things that I want to get done on Apache – notably, several of the howtos are crap and need redone, and there are a number of other howtos that I want to write. Oh, yeah, and I have this great idea for a series of articles, of which I’ve written the first one.
Apparently I need to get my ToDo list back into RT and try to get priorities assigned. Oh, yeah, that would mean that I need to get that server operating again, and get RT installed. And then … um … there we go again.