random neuron misfires

(Merry|Happy) $RAND_HOLIDAY, all.

Sending images to a Palm Handheld

sisob, In your most-recent advogato diary entry, you mention you cannot transfer photos to your Palm from Linux, and that isn’t quite true.

Not only do we have pilot-foto in the pilot-link suite of tools, but you can also use Par to transfer them directly to RAM or SD on your Palm (assuming you use the PPP method and the lftp client on the Palm, if you want to go to SD directly).

Try using the pilot-link search engine to come up with some other ideas. People on the various pilot-link mailing lists are very responsive and helpful.

Here’s exactly what you want, and more-specifically, the direct par instructions for transferring images to the Palm under Linux. Hopefully this helps you out a bit.

Christmas

Christmas will be spent in Buffalo again this year, after a 9-hour drive there. Hopefully we won’t get snowed in too much. I don’t mind the snow at all, but I don’t have bindings for my snowboard yet, so I can’t bring that with us (and no roof rack for the Audi yet this year).

I still haven’t been paid for work I did 3 months ago for a client, which means Christmas is going to be lean this year, very lean. In fact, I’ve accrued more from Google banner ads in the last two months than I have in the last 6 months doing work for clients. Google hasn’t paid me either, so I can’t claim it yet. It should just about cover bandwidth costs this quarter, which will be nice, and the rest will probably go towards t-shirts and other miscellany for Plucker or to the FSF or EFF. Undetermined at this point.

Code Review

In going over some old “historical” code in a project I maintain, it has come to my attention that there is a lot of room for improvement, without even considering the need to keep it current with the new features in the device advances in the last 6 months.

I’ve been plodding through, line by line, cleaning up things in my spare time, but it’s arduous work, trying to make sure I don’t break existing functionality, or change it in a way that breaks the way the thousands of users use the code (scripted, automated, on Linux, on BSD, local, networked, over Bluetooth, etc.). Long, arduous work, and that doesn’t even count in the new API changes and protocol changes I have to reverse-engineer.

I’ve been pouring through a lot of my old C books, and prodding people on #c on Freenode and Efnet for some general ideas about future implementation designs and design goals. Interesting times, to be sure.

I’m sure there will be others posting this here, but it appears that we may have captured Saddam Hussein in a raid in Tikrit, hiding in a “ventilated spiderhole” underground.

Pardon my ignorance, but wasn’t the purpose of this war, to disarm Iraq, not to depose or capture its leader? I don’t support either position, but people are cheering as if the “goal” of this war had been achieved.

It hasn’t. We have not yet found any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Wasn’t that the whole reason for going into Iraq?

And where is Osama bin Laden, the real reason 9/11 was supposed to have happened? What happened to the manhunt for him? It’s like a bacteria. If you don’t take your full regimen of antibiotics, full to the end, you risk making the remaining bacteria in your system stronger, and more resistant to the antibiotics you’ve ingested. We left Osama bin Laden alone, somewhere, where he can now regroup, replan, and architect and even more lethal and destructive attack, with new splinter groups to help fund and support him.

And all this, because someone used the term “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in the same context with both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in such a short period of time. There is still a huge percentage of people who believe Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were BOTH responsible for the attacks on NYC on 9/11, despite them both having completely opposite religious points of view, and in fact, disliking each other to the core.

I think someone has pulled the War over our eyes.

Christmas Season

Well, it’s that time of year again. Food, family, snow, and reminiscing about the year gone by. Time to put some smiles on faces. Time to make amends, and commit to some changes for the upcoming year. This year, like the last, has been a very interesting roller-coaster ride.

ObAmazon

For those wondering what to get that unemployed hacker on your Christmas list for Christmas (me!), I have assembled my “Amazon.com Wish List” for exactly that purpose. Let’s see what Santa puts under the tree this year.

What exactly is this? Advogato spam? Should that really be allowed to stay there, and the associated account nospamplease?

Elliot

I just found out yesterday that a former coworker at Linuxcare had a death in the family… his wife.

Amethyst Mariani, Director, performer, friend, daughter, wife and mother passed away Sept 22, 2003.

Some other Linuxcare alumnus have set up a PayPal fund to help him and his daughter out. Our heartfelt apologies go out to you and your loss, Elliot. More details here if you’d like to help out (thanks Bill and Gaylen).

Paul

pjf, I am so sorry for your recent loss; very unfortunate. I hope her passing was at least peaceful.

Work

Still haven’t earned any substantial money this year, so I’ll once-again fall under the cutoff for qualifying to pay taxes. It’s going to be a lean, svelte Christmas… again.

Interesting things coming on the horizon though, if all goes well at the end of this year. Only time will tell. Life has changed in remarkable ways over the last 2 years.