Ooh, the nerve!

This afternoon, we noticed that a large patch of monkey grass (liriope) was mashed down in our yard, between our front door and my garden. It looks like a deer snoozed in our yard last night! Ooh, the nerve of those deer! I don't want them in my yard, no not at all! White-tailed deer are very destructive to their environment (ripping grass out of the ground so it can't grow back, ripping bark off trees when trees are most vulnerable) and they're a dangerous disease vector for people (Lyme's disease anyone?). I don't want those germs in the same yard where my son plays! Plus I'm sure snoozing in the yard means munching on my garden, and I don't approve of that either. Bah humbug.

Fall!

Well, today it's officially (according to me) fall in my neighborhood. When I drove to work this morning, most of the trees were turning colors, and dropping yellow leaves on the road. Most of those leaves were still attached yesterday after work. I know the calendar said it turned fall last month, but I wait until the trees tell me it's fall. Based on my drive to work this morning, my neighborhood hit fall a little sooner. At least it's a colorful season this year!

Hidden iMovie Installer

I need to spend some quality time with iMovie HD, to import footage of The Kid before there's too much footage to touch! (It doesn't help my motivation that there's 40 minutes of footage where Daddy got "record" and "pause" confused -- so what if Record shows a red dot? and Pause parallel green bars? Not all red means stop! So I'll get to throw away some boring stuff.) After reading this post, I wanted to be sure I could install iMovie HD without re-installing my whole system. However, I don't have a System Restore CD, just the Mac OS X Install CD, and it doesn't have a .images directory. What to do? A little work with the find command, and the answer is to look in the System/Installation/Packages/.packages directory instead! Easy cheesy!

Acrobat Toolbar

It's funny that so many people want to get rid of the Acrobat toolbar in Microsoft Office, because I've been looking for it! I want a hyperlinked version of my dissertation without having to create all of those links manually, and Acrobat Professional just won't convert a Word document to any kind of PDF for me. I don't want to make all those useful hyperlinks in the Table of Contents by myself! I also have another issue, that Print To PDF makes 4 documents instead of one, but there's a fix for that.

Of course, I think the final answer is that I can't do it on a Mac because the folks at TidBITs can't either (see the third-from-last paragraph here). No wonder I had that feeling of swimming uphill.

Linda

I was having a normal day, and then I found out that a friend of mine didn't know she was pregnant, went to the emergency room with a placental abruption, and had a baby girl six weeks premature. They barely survived the experience. (I was six weeks premature, so I think that part doesn't matter. The doctors said all the same doom-and-gloom about me too. Although, at 4 pounds, I did weigh a little more than Violet.) I had nine months to get used to the idea of me being a mother with a baby in our house, and I think I needed that time. Despite some less-than-ideal circumstances, Linda's very positive and wants the best for her daughter, so I'm sure she'll make it work out. That's where it gets really simple. Linda fiercely wants Violet, and Violet definitely wants Linda (all babies want mother, I've seen it). That's the hopeful part.

So that was my surprise of the month. I'll go back to having normal days, but one of my friends won't. Wow. What do I say?

Treo 700p Saga

So I finally ordered a new phone at work, a Treo 700p to replace my Motorola StarTac ST7860W with the battery of 30 seconds of talk-time. At Telecomm, they were joking that this was such a large step, I wouldn't know what to do.

On the Palm side, I'll retire (maybe) my Tungsten T3. With the slider expanded, the T3 has more pixels (320 x 480) than the 700p (320 x 320), although the Treo has a finer dot pitch. A finer dot pitch is bad news for squinting, but with the really bright screen, it just looks smoother to me (and I don't squint).

The SK6688 keyboard driver IrDA is really bad: when it's installed (not active, mind you), I can only use left 1/4 of touchscreen in any app!

I can't run TimeCopy (I've been running it for a while, and it comes with The Missing Sync), which makes sense since the Treo syncs time from the cellular network. My Treo went into a reset loop when I sync'd with it installed. That's added to my blacklist, but not to my badlist unlike the SK6688 driver.

Last night I decided it was time for The Sync, to move my data from the T3 to the 700p. I don't know if this was the fault of The Missing Sync or of some old software, but when the sync was "done," so was my Treo! It was on an endless cycle of reboots, and when I got it out of that (by a system reset; soft reset didn't do it), it didn't know how to be a phone. Great! That's its job. The Palm software is just a bonus for me.

However, a hard reset AND erasing all data got it back to phone status, thank goodness. Now to put my data back ... It's probably cleaner this way, putting apps back one at a time, and testing Calendar, Contacts, Phone, and the new app for functionality. But it does take longer.

These are the apps that I installed right away:

Graffiti Anywhere and Graffiti ShortCuts.prc from my T3 (no way to change shortcuts on Treo, I guess I must keep T3 for that)

Blazer Bookmarks.pdb from before the hard reset

NoteTaker aka MacNoteTaker

HandyShopper and HS2*.pdb from T3

Patience (solitaire)

Toast Timer

NFP and Unicycle (each is better at different aspects of fertility awareness)

The Core Pocket Media Player - TCPMP

FileZ (and maybe later IdeaPad that I think has a Mac conduit and desktop app but that might be a different Idea Pad?)

Plucker (hasn't been updated in a while ... wondering if I need to switch offline viewers, but I'm not going back to AvantGo)

Yahdice (yahtzee)

Cribbage (in color on T3, now B/W even with fresh download)

The Missing Sync for Palm OS

I don't think The Missing Sync is worth as much as its price tag, but it does let me use iCal without having all of my Palm calendars lumped into one iCal calendar as a one-way trip. Too bad I decided that iCal was part of my GTD plan! I decided to justify The Missing Sync's cost to myself by counting up the Palm software I didn't need to buy for Mac-Palm GTD. Most of all, I wish The Missing Sync would show me the HotSync error number -- and let me know there was a HotSync error! I did a reset on my T3 shortly after I bought The Missing Sync, the IrDA driver is enabled by default after a reset, and all of my (missing) syncs failed without errors until I reverted back to Palm Desktop sync, saw the error number, and recognized what it meant. That's just not good software programming! I took that course, and it's better to fail all over the place with error messages than to fail silently, because subtle errors are the hardest to find. (Plus you should check both input and output data for validity, and always try to give good error messages. How hard are those concepts?)

If the reset-loop problems had persisted, I would have used ResetEmu to find the culprit. However, that's for the "what should I remove" approach, and given that I get a new Palm maybe every three years, I prefer the "add what I still use" approach as a way to get rid of the cruft that otherwise builds up.

After I installed Palm applications, I moved on to productivity applications for networked Palms. Top of the list, secure shell (version 2)! The first one I tried,pssh works with my servers, so that's good enough. I could imagine using a VNC viewer as well, like these: palmVNC 2.0 GPL, PalmVNC 2.0 (didn't work on first try; $10 registration requested), PalmVNC 1.40 (free, but might be a bit old since it's for PalmOS 3.1), μVNC for Palm for $19.95. I don't need VNC (yet) so I haven't gone through them.

Treo 700p: First Impressions

I couldn't believe that my new Treo 700p didn't allow me to write Graffiti all over the touch screen (like my Tungsten T3). Thanks to Mr. Google, Graffiti Anywhere came to the rescue! That's on my short list of must-have Treo applications. I'm much happier now that I can use graffiti again. (All this does is enable the Graffiti that's in the ROM already. It's not some nasty hack that could do terrible things to your Treo's memory.)

The built-in keyboard isn't as bad as I expected, but I'm better at Graffiti or on full-sized keyboards. Not surprisingly given its history [1] [2], the SK6688 keyboard driver kills my Treo. Even when that IrDA driver (latest 2.30 version) is not active, I can't use the right 75% of my touchscreen. Quickly deleted and placed on my black list! In theory, my Treo 700p is supported, but I'd like to talk the QA person who said that! I started with a Treo 700p that didn't have any custom installs, and I had problems. I could see that being the only test case, and the only case that works, but when it's a case that doesn't work, the QA group is asleep at the wheel. (Note: this is not a complaint about the Treo 700p, but a diatribe about a bad driver for an external keyboard.)

The whole Treo is smaller than I expected, but it has a certain heft. It does weigh 50% more than my StarTac it replaces as a phone. I don't think it's heavier than my Palm on a scale, but because it's smaller, it's denser, and I notice that heft. The 320 x 320 screen, physically smaller than the Tungsten T3 screen in 320 x 320 compact mode, obviously has a finer dot pitch. However, the screen is very bright, so I'm not squinting at the screen. In fact, I like the smoother appearance of this screen, even though I expected not to like the smaller screen.

I appreciate the hot sync button on the sync cable. My Tungsten T3 only had a hot sync button on the cradle, so when I brought the smaller hot sync cable on a road trip, I had a laborious process to get Hot Sync-ing. It's a nice touch.

The Verizon belt clip case for it is obnoxious: I don't need a case that holds my phone an inch away from my body! Egad, what were they thinking? I'm used to clipping equipment to my belt or to my pocket. I've found that clipping those items farther from my body just gives them a chance to build up momentum when they do whack into me, and I'd prefer to keep them snug. Less chance of knocking them off when I dart through a small area (like between racks in the data center when I'm working on my servers). (Again, this is not a complaint about the Treo 700p itself!)

Overall, I like this gadget so far.