PalmOS is dead. Long live PalmOS!

I’ve been a long term user of the Palm platform dating back to the original US Robotics PalmPilot with it’s serial hotsync cradle and absolutely zero expansion capability. I initially poopooed the first person who described the device to me. “No connectivity, no storage, can’t do anything except tap on the screen when it’s not docked? Go away.”
In the intervening 10+ years, the Palm platform has stabilized, grown, and matured, while still maintaining the vast library of free and commercial software that has made the Palm platform so attractive for such a long time.
Unfortunately, this legacy design has, I feel, been Palm’s achilles heel. In holding onto what was originally an outstanding system design (and truth be told, it was an excellent design – one of the reasons the platform has lasted so long!), Palm has fallen behind the performance and feature curve. What was once dismissed as “fancy glitzy doodads for corporate niche users” has now become the requirements for everyday users.
Admittedly, some of the fault does not lie with Palm, Inc directly, in fact the history of PalmOS is a map through the DotCom mayhem of the late 90’s. Spinoffs, renamings, corporate mergers and aquisitions, and changes in the market made it impossible for one company to latch onto the Palm platform long enough to redesign it into a new generation environment.
Now, with my recent aquiring of a Treo 650 hybrid cell phone and PDA, I feel this is most likely the last great product from the palm line. The design is almost 2 years old now, and while the entire platform is smooth, workable, and well supported, I feel the acute need for features that will require an entire system redesign to implement.
Note that Palm (or whatever company owns PalmOS at the moment – Palmsource I believe) knows this, and has made several abysmal attempts at a system rewrite. Palm users have been waiting for the ‘next generation’ environment, called Cobalt for almost 3 years now. The first version of Cobalt was adopted by no one, and in theory an entire rewrite is in progress, now using a Linux Kernel, though AFAIK, no Palm device is out that actually runs Cobalt.
Now we see the release of the new Treo 700w, a smartphone similar to my Treo 650 in form factor, design, and hardware. Except… it runs Windows. The Windows Mobile platform has all the capabilities PalmOS surely should have had by now. Multimedia (“Who would ever listen to music on their handheld?”), wireless connectivity (“Ahh, they can just sync it!”), multitasking (“What, on a PDA? Use your laptop if you need that!”), and so on and so on. Features that the current PalmOS platform (5.x, aka ‘Garnet’) simply cannot provide, and looking around at the current offerings, don’t look to be coming down the pike any time soon.
I’m feeling fairly resigned that the Treo 650, the outstanding piece of equipment that it is, will be my last PalmOS + phone device. Since my phone cycle seems to run about 1.5 – 2 years between devices, I can’t see Palm coming out with a full multimedia multitasking wireless enabled cell phone device that has a full software library behind it within the next 12 months.
Microsoft wins another round in their plan for world domination.

A week of changes.

“Forgive me Blogosphere. It’s been 9 days since my last posting…”
A lot has happened that’s new an interesting in the last week, but let me touch on a few highlights. I have many interesting postings brewing about various topics, but here’s a few tidbits…
Kubuntu Linux Rocks
Yes, I had ANOTHER hard disk fail on me. This took my home dir with a fair amount of localized twiddling with it, though the way I run my laptop – all my mail files, web work, source code, etc is all stored on a remote fileserver. (Note to the masses – a Laptop is not a permanent storage medium. Always remember that, and design your processes so you can recover your environment within 24 hours). I decided to try Kubuntu Linux, since it appears to be a widely-supported, Debian backed setup specifically designed to streamline KDE operations. Wow is it impressive. KDE 5 is a masterpiece, and just keeps getting slicker and slicker. I haven’t found anything truly broken so far, but I’m still working through it. I’m running the most recent ‘cutting edge’ release, named ‘Dapper’. Updates are coming fast and furious, but for now, I’m up and running (total time from having a new drive in my hand to up and running with a restored home dir, and up on the net with mail, web, IRC, chat, and dev environment: 12 hours. I’m getting better at this.
Arisia Rocks!
This past weekend saw Arisia come to life. This is a great SF convention, and the one I consider my ‘home’ event. I was the head of registration, using my own system and hardware to run things. All went smoothly despite a misfed printer during peak time on Friday, and a great time was had by all. Still slightly sleep deprived, but all in all good.
Treo 650 goodness
Yes, I know in my previous post I railed against the evil that is Verizon. However, my Kyocera 7135 just rebooted One Too Many Times, and it was time to replace it. Despite Verizons evils, I renewed my account with them, picking up a shiny new Treo 650. More chitchat about this later on, but for now, it’s one mighty sexy device, I have to admit.
There’ll be more detailed posts about some of the fantastic tools I’m finding in KDE 5 coming along in the next few days. Now, alas, I must prep for a trip down to New Jersey for a few days. Whee!

More Verizon Obscenities

I’m having a harder and harder time lately getting behind my phone provider, Verizon Wireless. On the one hand, they have by far the most complete and well run network around. No dropouts, excellent coverage, etc. I’ve been using my Kyocera 7135 phone for almost 2 years now on the Verizon network, and things have been pretty good. My plan had been to upgrade to a Treo 650 within the next month or two (now that the prices have dropped down to something reasonable, I don’t mind being behing the tech curve if I get to pay half the original price of the device), but Verizon has been doing some very shifty things that make me want to seriously consider jumping ship.
First, they have deliberately crippled Bluetooth functions on several of their phones, including the Treo 650. (See article here and thread here). There have been attempts to explain away these changes as ‘benefits’ to the user – providing ‘more security’ or such other bunk. In reality they are nothing more than pure greed. An attempt to lock in the captive user into a system that requires them to use expensive Verizon services, even though the devices are capable of the functionality on their own.
Now there’s a confirmed report that Verizons new music service, which is advertising itself as supporting MP3’s and the like, is a total sham. This article details the deal that Verizon and has struck with Microsoft to make sure you absolutely must use Microsofts proprietary audio format AND audio player to work with music on their phones. That completely cuts out Macintosh and Linux users, not to mention opening up the device to nefarious DRM restrictions:

You may ask why this was done? As far as we can analyze, Microsoft made an agreement to enginner [sic] VCast Music phones as WMA-only devices, in order to lock out iTunes and other competition from most interaction with the device that does not involve burning, ripping, and integrating into Windows Media Player. This type of monopolist tatic [sic] is something that iTunes has avoided, but Windows Media Player embraces.

It appears Verizon knows internally that this is a liability. In a leaked internal memo from Verizon’s corporate intranet, Verizon states that customers that want MP3 support should be issued a refurbished VX-8100 with V04 firmware. However, the average consumer is to not be informed that there is a difference between what VX-8100s support formats, and customers are encouraged without prior warning that MP3 support will be lost with the V06 update. Presumably a Mac or Linux customer could be downgraded to V04 firmware.

These sort of tactics make me seriously question whether I want to continue my business relationship with Verizon. Already, Microsoft has had a strong hand in destroying one of the only decent alternatives to the Microsoft ‘smartphone’, the Treo line – by forcing Palm to manufacture and distribute… a device running Windows Mobile. It’s enough to make you head for the mountains and give up on all this techno-crap.
I’m not ready to embrace the evil that is Microsoft’s monopoly and suppression of innovation. I suspect soon I may have to, but until then I’ll continue to fight.

Microsoft in a nutshell.

While working with a client in the first stages of abandoning a tightly coupled Microsoft environment for a Java based one, the following phrase was uttered:

“MIcrosoft is like a girlfriend that makes it impossible to break up with. You think you’re free, but you’re not because she still has all your cd’s.”

I do like working with these folks.

The Culture of Opensource Support

One of the big arguments often heard against using opensource software for mission critical applications is “Who do I call if something goes wrong?” In the commercial sector, the answer is simple – call up the manufacturer’s support lines, and in theory, you can get your answer.
In practice, as most have discovered, this is rarely the cure-all, with problems ranging from inability to get in touch with tech support at all, through to finding that support is available, but it’ll cost money, and there’s still no guarantee of a solution. The true detail is that with a commercial vendor, if something goes wrong, you have someone to yell at.
As opensource software gets larger and more complex (Openoffice has over 5 million lines of code), the traditional “Use the source, Luke!” argument really doesn’t work anymore. Other avenues need to be followed to track down problems.

Continue reading “The Culture of Opensource Support” →

Verizon melt-down on NYE?

I haven’t found a cite yet, but I’m willing to bet that Verizon SMS network traffic leapt through the stratosphere last night on New Years Eve. I’ve been using SMS messaging a fair amount with Cat, and last night got a “Happy New Years!” (she was out pahtaying whilst I was home with sick child and friend). 20 minutes of trying to reply with tons of “Network Error” messages pretty much convinced me that Verizon’s SMS service had gone belly up.
Apparently Verizon wasn’t the only one inundated.
Maybe this’ll convince VZ that SMS has seriously taken hold in the US.

It’s the little things in life.

Having hordes of LCD monitors around makes for some amazing lint-and-yuck gathering capabilities. It only takes moving your laptop into bright light to realize amount of junk that’s managed to accumulate on your screen.
How do you clean it, though? Images of melted laptops and innocent users with some vicious chemical glass cleaners crop up everytime I think of trying to clean these things.
Long ago someone introduced me to ‘wet/dry’ wipes. These things are perfect for folks who use LCD screens constantly. They’re double-packets of wipes – one is a small ‘wet’ cloth that has just enough alcohol and other goodies on it to wipe down maybe 2 largeish monitors (I managed to stretch mine to do 3 screens, but it was pretty grungy by the end of it), and the other is to clean off the excess material – a lint-free cloth for that added polish.
Staples carries these things for about $6 for 10. I think they should be standard equipment for any desk or laptop station.

The James Randi $1 Million Challenge Forum

I’m a pretty regular reader of James Randi’s weekly column. It’s a neverending story about what sort of noise is flying around the world masquerading as paranormal claims and magic.
One of my more recent addictions though is watching the claim forum. This is a log by the head of the claims group at the JREF that processes claims for the $1million challenge. There’s a very specific and detailed process for the challenge that offers a million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate, clearly and without ambiguity, some form of paranormal ability or event. After years and years of this challenge being public, no one has ever passed the preliminary test.
But folks keep trying. Check out the forum logs for characters like Prophet Yahweh – Master UFO Caller, Sylvia Browne, and other wonders of the world, all of which have applied for the challenge, most of which could not even agree on what ability the person was trying to prove. Dowsers, mentalists – all are welcome to the cash, if they can prove they can do what they claim to do. Not a single one has.
The forum logs all exchanges between applicants and the JREF, and it gets pretty interesting. A good read, and something to check in on every once in a while.

Of Laptops, XP, Debian etch, device drivers, and GPG signatures.

Well that was a fun adventure all around. My laptop ‘hunter’ is back up and running, pretty much at the level it was at just as it tumbled off the table last wednesday evening. Perversely I had to leave Thursday morning to go visit ${client} down in New Jersey, and really wouldn’t have the time to do all the reinstall fun until I got back.

Nonetheless, I was able to sort of limp along through Thursday (even managed to watch a movie on it at the hotel that night), and into Friday where I was able to swap out the main drive, re-install XP, and get at least the base installation of ‘sarge‘ re-installed. Total time on this was perhaps 3 hours of watching CD’s spin. Really, all in all, for 2 entire OS installs from scratch, it wasn’t too shabby.
Of course, neither installation was not without its twitches. The XP install came up on the laptop with -zero- network connectivity. The device manager SAW the 2 PCI network devices, but couldn’t initialize them because, naturally, I didn’t have the ‘driver’ disc. This is a laptop, it’s not like I have a shelf full of CD’s at hand. So the XP install, while technically complete, was really non-functional. No network connectivity means I couldn’t get the drivers I needed, so I had to pretty much shelve that install for now.
The Debian install went better. I had the IT chap burn me a CD of the Sarge ‘netinst’ cd. This is a small (100meg) image that contains the kernel and enough software to boot, partition, format, and install the ‘core’ Debian system. It assumes you have net connectivity available, and sets it up as part of the install. Once connectivity is established and you’ve selected what installation type you want (developer, gnome, databases, etc), the installer starts fetching the packages necessary.
For my install, the entire ‘fetch, unpack, install’ process from the time the installer said “I have all the information I need, go away” to completion took about an hour and a half on a mediocre DSL line.
Once done, it was a matter of getting back home, restoring my backed up home dir, and re-installing packages I was missing that I needed. I find it somewhat ironic that my Debian install -happily- came up with all the network device drivers in place, configured, and working, and I was able to continue my install, while the XP system is dead in the water with no network, requiring me to find an external source for the drivers needed to simply get online.
But moving along.
After that, we’re pretty much into normal sarge -> etch install mode, but I keep getting an annoying message from apt-get on the upgrade:

W: GPG error: http://secure-testing.debian.net etch/security-updates Release:
The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 946AA6E18722E71E
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

This was a new one on me. Apparently versions of apt-get past 0.6 now check the GPG signatures of packages before downloading them by default. This means you need to have the public key of the ‘offering’ host available in your local GPG keyring before pulling the file. (You can turn off signature checking, but checking the authenticity of a package before downloading is a good idea anyway).
The answer to this is to add the public key into your GPG keyring. Note the long hex number in the error message. That’s the ‘key id’ that uniquely identifies the entry in the keyserver. The first step is to query the keyserver for the public key. This should be run as the user who does most of the system maintenance, as it’ll be added to _THEIR_ keyring. Don’t run this as root.

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 946AA6E18722E71E

The next step is to add that new key to root’s keyring. Since you’ve already accepted the key locally, there’s a higher level of safety in simply copying the key from your personal keyring to root’s keyring (rather than writing the key into root’s keyring directly) : 

gpg --export 946AA6E18722E71E | sudo apt-key add -

Once those are done, apt-get should behave normally and update the local apt cache files without any complaints. If the security server for Debian packages should get compromised, it is nearly impossible to duplicate the private key used for signing packages and end up with the same public key, so if the key signatures match, you can be fairly sure it’s a valid package to install.
There are many other stories on bringing ‘hunter’ back from it’s near fatal plummet, but suffice to say that due to the magic of package management systems and opensource software, and a back up of just my home directory (which has most of my user configurations and the like), I was able to get back up and running from ground zero in perhaps 8 hours of work. Much of that time was simply watching a progress bar move as packages were downloaded and re-installed, primarily without me needing to do anything.
There is a way to even tell apt to make a ‘snapshot’ of all the installed packages so you can ‘replay’ the entire install to get all your installed packages back. I may explore this in a future article.

A note to tool engineers.

A computer is not an AI. It is not a living, breathing, thinking being, has no internal thought processes of it’s own that reflect it’s mood. Even more to the point, a SCRIPT is not a being. If a script or a program or a computer or an application has a problem, it should NEVER report said problem in the first person, because there is NO first person to make the statement. “Well it adds personability and comfort to the user experience” – Bull. It adds ambiguity, confusion, and makes the whole interaction more surreal. I offer as evidence the error message I just got:

I cannot start the X server (your graphical interface). It is likely that it is not set up correctly. Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the problem? [Yes] [No]

Don’t anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.

And then the other shoe dropped

… well, not necessarily a shoe, but gravity was definately involved.
Today through Saturday I’m down in NJ visiting ${client} and doing their X-mas party thingy. What better way to start a visit to your best client than.. to drop your laptop the night before leaving.
Yup, ‘hunter’ took a 3′ dive onto the floor on Wednesday night. Nothing immediately apparent broke, but I’m getting sporadic HD errors now – and fscking is not fixing them (so it’s most likely a calibration fault on the drive now). Generally, I have to consider this drive suspect, and swap it out asap.
In the meantime, linux is not booting cleanly, so I’m forced to use XP to at least do some blogging. A call to Lenova is scheduled for tomorrow to get a new drive sent out for me. I do have a clean backup of $HOME, so there should be no ‘loss’ other than time and productivity, but gosh what a pain in the buttski. Paraphrasing Rod Rescueman here… “bleah! ptui! feh!… I just upgraded this thing!”