Zaurus and Pockettop

I found a webpage from which I downloaded the Zaurus driver for the PockeTop folding keyboard. At first, I got a little mad because according to Pocketop’s page, you have to pay for drivers. Luckily I found the above page, which has a freely downloadable driver. However, I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t realize all the prerequisites, like Python and the VNC server. I might should have read the README before I got all excited.

Big Z, Day one

The first full day of the Zaurus. Some things are highly spiffy and couldn’t be better. I love the screen on this thing, find the thumb board easier to use than I would have expected, and just generally dig most things about it. I slapped in a CF wifi card and at first things seemed alright. I was able to run kismet and sense the access points around me. However, even when I have a connection I seem unable to get an IP address. I’m sure there is something easy I should know, but thus far I feel a little dumb once I have pulled back the covers.

For the ordinary joe blow PDA functions that you’d expect any Willy Loman businessman in an airport to need – it rocks! It’s when I try to get a little deeper and a little more Linuxy that things are not so simple. Surely this is a simple thing, to request an IP address via DHCP over the wireless connection. I just need to learn how to do the little simple things. I did install the OpieReader and downloaded the Project Gutenberg file of the Kalevala to give the act of ebook reading on this thing a good shakedown. It’s amazing what a difference the increase in resolution from my 160X160 Handspring to the 320X240 Zaurus makes. Perhaps it is my low expectations, but this thing looks beautiful! The fonts have no discernable aliasing, and I expect to be reading Finnish myths pleasurably on the train trip home today. So far, so good!

Zaurus in the House

I have my Zaurus in my possession, sitting on the dining room table getting its first charge. If I’m at all lucky, it will be ready to be played with before I go to bed. My first big decision will be whether or not to wipe the whole ROM and install OpenZaurus instead. I think I’ll give it one day before I decide exactly what to do. I am excited about getting rolling, though. Even though it got here 7 full days before the outside estimated day, I was impatient the whole way and am impatient now about the 4 hours to charge it. My goodness waiting is difficult!

Zaurus SL-5600 Review

I subscribed to a Feedster RSS search on “zaurus” and it is turning up some interesting stuff. This morning, I found a review of the Zaurus 5600 from Connected Home magazine. They gave it on overall 5 rating, and the main thing they dinged it on was the lack of software.

As per the post on open source yesterday, wouldn’t it be interesting if Sharp located a couple of prominent open source developers that are making Zaurus applications, and gave them all a grant of $100,000 on the condition that they quit whatever day jobs they have and spend one year developing open source apps for the Zaurus? How about this guy? That would be a tiny amount of money compared to an advertising campaign, and it would have ongoing benefit to the saleability and usefulness of the entire Zaurus line. If I were offered that deal, I’d jump in a heartbeat. I’d move somewhere cheap to live with broadband connectivity and program my ass off. In fact, I noticed that they have setup up a Wifi cloud that covers 13 square miles of Lafayette Louisiana, home of my alma mater. Some place like that would be perfect for a situation like this.

Is anyone at Sharp reading this? Hire a few hackers, don’t tell them what to do but give them money to do something and let it rip. I’m guessing that you’ve taken far worse bets with far more money for far less results.

Zaurus on the Way

I placed the Zaurus order yesterday. I was dawdling around and got this horrible feeling that I was about to replay my Clie fiasco by waiting too long. It would really have sucked if either the 5600 was sold out or not available at the $330 price (a third off of the nominal $500 list price) so I just did it. I’m a ditherer by nature, so I had to get active. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to use the Amazon gift certificate (the code number was in invisible white-on-white HTML text just to piss me off) but the order is in.

Interestingly, I emailed David Rothman at Teleread about my anti-DRM post yesterday. I read his blog every day via FeedOnFeeds and he is highly critical of DRM and its various issues. He linked to my post yesterday, and then continued talking about it and my process today by making me the poster boy for dropping proprietary systems for open ones. David, it actually gets better. For unencrypted Fictionwise books my format of choice was iSilo, which isn’t on Zaurus and has a closed format. For similar reasons, I’ll be dropping that as well. A while back the guys at FW were asking if there was any interest in Plucker formatted books from FW. I liked Plucker on the Palm and would be happy for it to be my primary ebook/web page reader on the Zaurus.

I’m a little weirded out by being the spokesmodel for this transition of dumping the closed (Clie/PalmOS/Palm Reader/iSilo) for the open (Zaurus/OpenZaurus/Plucker) but his posts are an accurate summation of what I’m doing and why. Although I can’t say I’m dying to fart around with the OS layer or the rendering code or file formats for my books (and in fact I hope that I never do), it makes a world of difference to me between having that option and not having that option.

The last closed app that I’m really going to miss: Vindigo. On a webpage I heard a whisper of a rumor that someone is working on a Zaurus Vindigo solution. Man, I hope so. I’m still paid up through July.

One More Zaurus Point

I forgot to mention yesterday that although a week ago I was ready to buy the Clie TJ-25, I really am not happy with the decision of Palm One to drop support for Mac OS X. I like the idea of having an open system that I can conceivably work with. I also really like being able to write Java applications for my PDA, write Perl scripts on it, ssh into it, etc. I suppose it might work out in the long run to have been a lucky break that when I sat down to order the Clie Amazon was out of stock.

Zaurus

Since I’ve been talking about getting a Zaurus, one of my coworkers pointed me towards an article on /. today that links to a roundup of apps for the Zaurus. I continue watching eBay and Craiglist hoping for a 5600 that hits my price range. I’ve decided that if I’m going used, I’d rather have the faster and higher capacity 5600 rather than the 5500 so that I can go longer without outgrowing it. Of course, being a cheapskate has opportunity costs. It’s possible I end up with nothing or that it takes a really long time to get one. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

Strutter

I now feel like I understand Struts. For the first week or two, it was constant frustration to do any task. It seemed so highly complicated that every aspect was burdensome. Now that I’m more acquainted with it, it’s beginning to get dramatically easier. I’m creating a suite of pages, all of which read some list of data from a DB, create controls, and accept input to add, delete or edit that data. This is all standard stuff, things I do all the time.

The first page took 2 or 3 days, maybe 12 hours of time. Everything was unfamiliar, the JSP tags seemed tricky, the nomenclature consistently tripped me up when the property is addressed as “name” and the name is addressed as “property”. The first one was horrible. The second one took maybe 5 hours. Some of tags were familiar, but I had to deal with lists of values in my ActionForms, etc. I think I’m at the point where I can create a new one in something like 90 minutes and falling. I was hoping that eventually, I would get paid back for my investment of time and energy into this package. That point has been reached. I’m doing all admin pages now, nothing that will face the user. By the time I’m done with this, I think I’ll be ready to work on the other stuff and knock it all out.

The really essential piece of all this is the StrutsTestCase package. It is far better to learn you’ve made some silly mistake in the config from running the unit test, rather than having to stop and restart Tomcat 20 times. The config is very easy to screw up, so I would be flailing around if not for it.

Elliott Smith, R.I.P

Damn, singer/songwriter Elliott Smith is dead at 34. It is at this moment called by the LA County coroner’s office an apparent suicide.

That’s a damn shame. His harrowing song of leading the heroin lifestyle “Needle in the Hay” is a song I have listened to over and over. When it was used in The Royal Tennenbaums as the soundtrack to a suicide, I thought it was eerily appropriate. How sad that Smith would later act that out. Damn.

US Soldiers Bulldoze Fruit Orchards

Dear god, I read this story and pray it is not true. UK’s Independent is reporting that US soldiers have bulldozed fruit groves in Iraq to punish farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: “We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn’t tell us.”

Now all we need to complete the picture is Rumsfeld in a press conference, laughing about it as he does all such horrors. “Fruit trees are not more important than security. It was obvious the trees were Saddam loyalists.” This is shocking behavior. Here’s an acid test for those folks who rave about America’s “liberal media” – let’s see when or if any US news outlets pick up this story and what they say about it. A liberal media should be all over this. A right wing media will either ignore it completely or present it as something other than our troops overstepping the bounds of reasonable conduct.

We are in Iraq to “reduce the threat of terrorism.” Does bulldozing farms decrease terrorism, or give rise to a whole new group of people who have every reason to become terrorists? I find it unbelievable that the people prosecuting this war are not aware of this.

PDA Screen Protectors

The first PDA I owned eventually got a deep scar in the glass, which coincidentally matched the position where the “Next Turn” button was in the backgammon game I played 30 times every day. I tried hard to keep that from happening with the Handspring Prism, making sure to be very ginger with the screen. Eventually I bought some plastic screen protectors from CompanionLink. These things are supposed to be good for a month, that’s what they tell you on the package. In fact, I had the first one I put on for almost a year. It just got hazy enough that I wanted to change it recently. At this rate, I have way more screen protectors than I can reasonably expect to need for the life of this Handspring. I’ve been very happy with this product and recommend it to anyone. I was amazed when I took off the protector to clean the screen and put on a new one. It really does look like new under there. My original Handspring lasted one year before I busted it, and by the end its screen was scratched and pitted and generally looked horrible. Break down and spend the $10 and your screen will look good for a long time.

Max Cleland speaks out

Here’s something that makes me proud to have worked on Senator Cleland’s 2002 reelection campaign – a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution comparing our war in Iraq to Vietnam. An excerpt:

The president has declared “major combat over” and sent a message to every terrorist, “Bring them on.” As a result, he has lost more people in his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight.

Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East.

Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn’t go when you had the chance.

Strong stuff, and necessary stuff. I wish he was talking like this in 2002, he might still be Georgia’s Senator in that case. Link via the Daily Kos.

Swen

I’ve heard horrorific reports from folks who are getting hundreds or thousands of copies of this worm every day. Until this morning, I had gotten zero copies. I’m not sure how I ducked this bullet, but I did. Today I got one copy, although it was tagged as spam by SpamAssasin and MIME encapsulated. Can I possibly be lucky enough for this to be the only one I get?

Vampires(TM)

Here’s a funny bit of commentary on the movie Underworld and the lawsuit from White Wolf claiming infringement. It all sounds a little silly to me. Can you really trademark dark clothes and a bad attitude? If so, I and a thousand people I know have some prior art on that one.

Enhanced TV

Via Boing Boing comes an article about the American Film Institute’s eTV workshop . I really liked this quote (from a guy who does one of the few reality show I will watch):

“Audiences are lazy and TV still caters to the lowest common denominator,” quipped Fifth Wheel and Blind Date Co-Executive Producer Harley Tat. “We’re operating from a heady place where we’re thinking about the future, but plenty of viewers don’t have PCs and haven’t upgraded their cell phones in years. If the information isn’t right in front of them while they’re microwaving mac and cheese, it’s not going to happen. ETV has to be so simple that they can do it half-baked and horizontal on the couch.”

The rise of reality TV pretty much marks the decline of my interest in most TV. I no longer watch Survivor (I watched 1.5 seasons and that was too much), Real World, or other ones I used to watch. I hate all the wedding game show bullshit ones (Alaskan Mail Order Brides, Bachelor/ette, Joe Millionaire, Mr. Personality, Meet My Parents, Cupid, ad nauseum). Where the fuck are the family values squad over all this? I find marriage far too important and real to be cheapened by becoming the prizes in silly game shows. The most heinous of all these are the ones ala Joe Millionaire where the basic absurdity is compounded by extra fun deception. It’s grotesque. I can think of nothing more boring that watching The Restaurant. I’m too busy watching my own business go down in flames to care about this boner.

I have seen interesting and challenging TV lately. Most of it has been on pay channels (The Sopranos, Queer as Folk, Oz) or buried in the high numbers on the cable system (such as the original documentary on the Game Show Network about the guy who beat the system on “Press Your Luck”.) By and large, though, if the networks are happy to cut their production costs by airing this reality show drek, let them. I’m perfectly prepared to cut my costs by not watching any of it.