USA Today interview at Palmsource conference

Tags:

Hey look! I was in USA Today! Note to self: Never talk to anyone at PalmSource. He never presented himself as a reporter when he was at the booth talking small-talk to me.

dhd: I feel your pain wrt telecommunications companies. I can make long-distance calls, but not local calls, because my “local long distance” charges exceeded 75% of some threshold I was never told about. Even to this day, they can’t tell me what that threshold is.

ianmacd: I think something “odd” has happened to my access at the Palm Pavilion. I now no longer have access to anything with my login that I can’t get publicly through the normal seeding pages. It would appear as though I now have less access than before. johnm Did I piss someone off?

jpr: I saw your abstract. If I can finagle it from work, I’ll try to make it to OLS to catch your talk. I promise I won’t heckle like I did over there. I have way too much on my plate right now, so I don’t think I’ll be submitting any papers this year for that.

New Years

Boring.

I coded my butt off.

The results of the new Plucker Portal will be live soon. The Perl major hurdles are done. I might start playing with Text::Template soon too. Looks promising. I hope they’re not just shrouding eval in a module though.

Some of my slurped ViewCVS redirection:

  my $redirect = substr $path, 5; # drop "/cvs/";
  my $cvs_info;
  my $loop = 5; # nuke the redirect loop

do {
 local $ENV{SCRIPT_NAME} = "$script/cvs"; 
 local $ENV{PATH_INFO} = $redirect || '/';
 $cvs_info = $CVS_PATH 2>/dev/null;
 ($redirect) = $cvs_info =~ m{  
    ^Status:s+301s+Moved

    Location:s+Q$ENV{SCRIPT_NAME}E/(.*)
    }x;
 } while (defined $redirect and $loop--);

  for ($cvs_info) {
 if (m#^Content-Type: text/plain#) {
    $_ = (split / /, $_, 2)[1];
    s/&/&/g;
    s/</</g;
    s/>/>/g;


 $_ = "<pre>$_</pre>";
 } else {
    s#.*<body[^>]*>##is;
    s#</body>.*##is;
    s#"$script/cvs/~checkout~/#"$CVS_URL/~checkout~/#g;
 } 
 }
 print $cvs_info;

Airlines

Looks like these are my plans for January:

  • 1-13-2001 to 1-22-2001: Fly from SF to Colorado for vacation with Erika
  • 1-22-2001 to 1-29-2001: Fly from Colorado back to SF for training at Linuxcare SF facility
  • 1-29-2001 to 2-3-2001: Fly from SF to New York for Linuxworld Expo

“How Do You Eat An Elephant?”

Somewhere in here, I have to find time to get the BBC cvs up and working for public development, prepare my slides for LWE, release pilot-link 0.9.5, get my Sony Clie kernel module finished, complete two lingering HOWTOs (perhaps I can do these on the airplanes?), shim in JogDial and MemoryStick support into Plucker, and lots more.

And that work thing. Lots of projects there too. Have to get the final report out for $PROJECT[1], the $PROJECT[2] serial alarm daemon, and $PROJECT[3] for the Wine stuff. Can’t say any more at this point.

Dysfunctional Family Life

I managed to find my dad on the net.

That’s oddly surreal. He left me when I was 3 years old. I wonder if he even knows I exist. Or does he even care. I was talking to a guy in #perl on irc, and he said my last name seemed familiar, and that his stepfather’s last name was the same as mine. After some digging, I realized that this guy’s stepfather was my father’s brother. Weeeeeird.

I have a brother and a mother somewhere too. I wonder where they are.

Pilot Goo

If anyone has any ideas for conduits for pilot-link or gnome-pilot, let me know. I’ve posted my wish list here. Consider it an ad-hoc TODO list.

Toys, toys toys!

Toys!

    I managed to get to the local CompUSA here in town, and picked up a new Sony CLIE handheld. This one has a jogdial, and Memory Stick external upgradable storage. It comes with an additional 8-meg stick of memory, but I opted to get an additional 64 megs for use with Plucker and some other apps I’ll be testing on it. Right now you can’t run applications from it, but you can use it for DOC and db storage.

    After tearing open the box, and sticking in a new 64-meg Memory Stick, I charged it up and tried some hacking. It comes with a USB cradle (arg!). I managed to rape the usbserial.c code and hack together a clie.o module. It “almost” worked. Just a few more tweaks, and I think I’ll get it.

    I think supporting the Jogdial in Plucker is going to be next, with the jogdial-in function (pressing the jogdial button in) setting a “chevron” for bookmarks in the page.

    That was day one with the unit. Wait until the weekend comes! I’ll work with kroah on it and see what we can come up with. I want to “own” this one. My First Kernel Module.

Palm again…

    Looks like even though I’ve signed and delivered several NDA agreements to Palm® over 12 months ago, they still refuse to give me full developer access to their Pavilion. I can only get to the OS 3.5 stuff, and their phone system is atroscious. It tells me to hold for an operator, then hangs up on me. Every time. One of my coworkers signed up, faxed in some NDAs, and had his full OS4 access within an hour. Apparently I have to sign, and snail mail two copies of three separate NDA agreements in order to gain access. WTF?!

Plucker

    Here’s a screenshot of the new layout I’m working on. Looks mighty sweet.

Work

    Pushing 22GB of data across a potentially flawed NIC driver over rsync is not fun, not when you fill up the drive by accident. D’OH!

Planes

    Travel sucks. Going to Colorado in January, then New York, then back to SF. I hate flying.

Post Christmas Blues

grog: I’m sorry about your recent loss. Heartfelt apologies go out to you and Yvonne.

Christmas is over

    It’s funny to see how fast people get Christmas over with. Christmas starts sometime in July (if the department store displays are to be believed), and yet the day after Christmas, trees are on the curbs, husbands are winding up coils of lights from the bushes, and it seems to be over.

    …except when you return to the workplace. Monday morning was barren. I think there were 12 people total in the office, and I was 1 of them.

Hacquer

    Looks like I have a nice, organized, full plate of tasks to bite into for the next quarter. I’ll not list them here, but quite a bit of Palm® hacking will be in order. If I get some time, I might look into prc-tools, and try to help johnm out with
    that at some point. Anyone else who wants to jump in, by all means…

Technowar

    boris: I feel for you with the telco madness.

    Pacific Bell certainly has a bug up their ass about me having phone service with them. I had similar problems back in CT with SNET.

    I started phone service with Pacific Bell back when I moved here, had it for a week, then house-sat for dsifry for a full month. When I returned, my phone bill at home had grown to $237.00, and was terminated. None of the numbers I called were my own (largely because I was not even at home that entire month). After arguing with them to waive this deposit to restore service, I just got service again (different number,
    different options) 3 weeks ago. Promptly on Monday morning at 7:00am, they once again terminated my service, before I even got my first statement on that number, and wanted me to pay another $90.00 deposit to restore service.

    I really don’t want to resort to some knowledge I’ve “obtained” in my past (for educational purposes only) to continue to make phone calls. I still have some “equipment” at the house.. Really guys, get a clue please.

NIC

    Lately my time has been spent investigating the difference between the Intel
    eepro/100 driver
    and the Becker driver. Have to do some pseudocode workarounds here for a client. Can’t say more at this point.

XHTML

    I’ve been tinkering with some really complex HTML pages lately, trying to get them to validate against the spec at w3.org. Fun, and not.

Lots to do, not enough time, you know the rest…

Sleep is for Mortals

3:23 am, PST (or “Sleep is for Mortals”)

  • I had this book awhile back called Wide Awake At 3 AM” by Richard Coleman, and it was about using a revolving wake period (add an hour each day, go to sleep an hour later) to increase the amount of time you stay awake. Supposed to be a behavior mod to enhance productivity. Most people aren’t wealthy enough to be able to do that, and maintain a job.

    But what if you don’t sleep AT ALL? I hate what that car accident in 1992 has done to me, and at the same time, it’s the best thing it could have ever done to me.

    Since I only put in less than 5 full hours of rest per week (I’m completely unable to achieve REM at all, lilo believes this is the result of my TBI in 1992, and resulted in what he believes is an undiagnosed overactive reticulum), as long as I stay away from boredom, and keep myself fed, I’m doing good. Very particular splits of mental and physical rest are all I need.

    Found some interesting information here on this whole sleep disorder thing related to TBI.

    “Boredom is the hardest task to concentrate on”

Internet 6.0

  • I was working on a new site design today, which actually came out REALLY well. I’m pretty impressed with the result. More on this later, but I found a neat tool while asking the guys in #perl too many convoluted perl questions. In the middle of this madness, I found Bluefish, vi, GyrosCoPe (yes, it’s really spelled that way), and an assortment of browsers, and you can pretty much do anything. Table wizards are a great help.

    “AOL now ships the Internet on CDROM. It’s called Internet version 6.0”

In the PalmĀ® of my…

  • pilot-link.0.9.5 errata went out on Sunday. I hope to get enough feedback to get this rolled out within the next week or two. I would have loved to have cut a release by Christmas, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Christmas Passed

  • Another Christmas has come and gone. I hope everyone that celebrated some sort of holiday this season got what they wanted. Joy or toys. I should hit the mall one of these days and go shopping for some new toys to outfit myself with.

    I spent the long weekend coding. And coding. And coding. And… ah, enough of that.

8am-8pm

  • Work is going to be fun these next two months. Whee. Much to do with the BBC, some non-public internal projects, OLS, Linuxworld in New York, and lots more writing and coding.

RSI

  • schoen, I think I can sympathize with you now. My arms have been cramping up a lot lately. No pain associated, but my fingers seem to hit the wrong keys now as I type. It’s that same feeling you get when you’ve been out in the snow without gloves for too long. Stiff. I hope I don’t go into some sort of RSI injury session. Without use of these hands, I am pretty much rendered useless.

Thinner

  • I’m done with this severe diet modification. I looked in the mirror the other day, and saw a skeleton looking back. I must have lost 20lbs, and I’m only 175lbs. on a good day.

    On the plus side, I’ve never been mentally sharper, or looked as healthy. I look 10 years younger (and I probably weigh as much as I did 10 years ago). Time to do some real in-depth nutrient research and approach this much more methodically. As hectic as this was, I am convinced.

    I wonder if Erika can help me along this path of self-discovery. Her background is perfect in this area.

    I had a huge bowl of my “Nuclear Spaghetti” today (Dave’s Insanity in the boiling water, 1/2 tbsp of mayonnaise (for a cremier
    sauce), chunky sauce of choice, some other ingredients, boil, eat, burn).

    I definitely miss the taste of good food.

Christmas was productive, work is going to be speedily accelerating, things are looking up with Erika, I’m cutting away at my growing list of projects and overdue tasks… things are looking good. Now I’ll have to get in an accident or get pulled over, or my truck will blow up or something. It’ll balance all this chewy wholesome goodness with some catastrophic act in my life.

Karma is never on my side.

Trucksportation, holidays and hacking

Tags:

“I just love that gasoline smell!”

Wait, no I don’t.

Evolution

I finally got it working, but there’s still that annoying font bug. It sync’s with my Palms. I don’t really like the fact that it requires I use gnome-pilot to get my data. I don’t like running that daemon. I have to get a conduit in pilot-link for this.

Starting the daemon, sync’ing my data, and killing the daemon is not a model I want to continue to use. Still needs proper category support in the Contact records and a few other tweaks. Not quite production ready yet.

Also, what are we doing about group calendaring or rfc2447 compliance. Let’s start coming up with a good solution here.

Her

Things appear to be stabilizing. I just wish I was.

That Work Thing

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Work continues to be interesting. Unfortunately, there’s some internal projects I can’t elaborate on here. It’s rapidly become a great test of my mental strength and tolerance.

“The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.”

Palm

I’m unmotivated.

I found a bug in pilot-addresses, and some other redesign problems. The good news is that it appears that there are still several people successfully running 0.9.5 under OS/2. Small problems, but it works. Another “When I Get Time™” fix.

ianmacd, we should get you started on some small development tasks on the Palm©. As you know, there’s a ton of work out here in that space. I have a certain
project
I think you could help us with.

It seems that my internal Linuxcare email diary from PalmSource 2000 made it’s way into the hands of PalmPower Magazine, unaltered. How it got there, I don’t know, but now they’re asking me to print it in their magazine.

Let me be clear: “If you print that material without my permission, you put your entire company in a very ugly legal liability situation.”

AvantGo is still at it on my server. This time they’re trying to subvert my $HTTP_REFERER tricks. They don’t realize what I’ve got running on that box. I just love seeing this stuff. A small reminder guys, I stay on top of my logs, and now so do they.

Stuff

  • Have to work on my CVS For Secure Development talk.
  • BBC Slides for LinuxWorld in New York.
  • OLS Paper
  • pilot-link fix, OS/2 builds, Autoconfiscation
  • Capture all of my tweaks in the IBM Thinkpad HOWTO
  • Finish the Secure Wavelan HOWTO
  • Complete work on the Palm PPP HOWTO
  • Begin the Palm, Linux HOWTO. The old one needs a serious update. Makes sense to do a complete rewrite from the ground up.

logic: well put:

“Christmas: Was there a class I missed out on in grade school that failed to prepare me for the efficient and thoughtful acquisition of gifts for significant others during holiday seasons?”

Take a breath, step back, relax.

I need to get back into writing. I’ve got so much work I need to capture on paper (electronically) and distribute to the community.

Holy Hackery

Random Hackery

  • Talked to lewing about it. Seems there’s some issues with test11 kernels. I upgraded to test13-pre3-ac3 and all seems well. Even my previous VMWare problems were solved. I managed to get the latest gnome-pilot up and running. It heavily depends on my releases of pilot-link.

  • The conduits seem to work, now to deal with the USB code, and work on getting Category support inherited into Contact records. jpr and I have to figure out how to do appointments which span beyond midnight in the Datebook conduit (multi-day appointments). Palm© itself doesn’t even support this behavior (yet?).

pilot-Nuke!

  • I talked to several high-level application designers about the code in pilot-link, and we all agree. Much of it has to go south. Nuking globals. Nuking redundant replicated functions, cleaning up argument parsing. Generally rewriting it from the inside out. I can’t abruptly break binary or source compatibility, but things have to change to “move forward”. Lots of good changes going into this one. Tracking towards a 1.0 release. That TODO list continues to grow.

Work

  • Work is… well… work. Lots to do, not enough time to do it, and with insufficient resources. Have to keep my head above water.

These things are not my fault.

OLS

  • I may end up getting my butt over to the Ottowa Linux Symposium. Have to find some people to talk to, and get my paper in, and get it approved by “The Company(tm)”. It would be worthwhile to present some information there about what I do in the community.

LWE

  • Looks like I’ll be speaking at Linux World Expo this year in New York on the Bootable Business Card (otherwise known as the BBC). I have to figure out some slides and bits to chatter about.

The Past

” Don’t just dream dreams, live them.”

  • I’ve been spending a large percent of my free thinking time dealing with my past (what little I remember of it, thanks to that nice accident incident in 1992). Choices I made have made me who I am. Introspection. What if I chose differently? Would I be alive? It’s finally time for me to concede that I’m done being transitory. I have to be stable, because she needs me. I need her. Life is about change. Sometimes we agree with the change, sometimes it’s inevitable.

“All things must change to something new, to something strange.” -Longfellow

The Truck

  • The saga continues. Now I have a very strong gasoline smell in the cabin of the truck and around it when I park. Could be a carbeurator thing. The windshield now has a crack from bottom to top, right in the center of the glass. Loud rapping noises from the engine. I wish I lived closer to work or BART, so I didn’t have to drive. It’s going to die soon, leaving me stranded.

Sleep is for mortals

  • It seems my sleep schedule has now flipped, due to exhaustion and diet changes. I’m now fully awake from about 8:00pm one night through midnight until 5:00pm the next day. Lay down for 3 hours, lather, rinse, repeat. I am much more productive from the hours of midnight until 5-6:00am it seems. Have to tinker with this a bit more.

Goals (unordered)

  • Workity, workity, work.
  • Get Lisp under my hat-o-skills
  • Replace/nuke/bury the truck.
  • Health (MRI, headaches, bloody noses)
  • Logistics of moving Erika here.
  • Remaining taxes from CT.
  • Relocation closer to SF. Loft living?
  • Plucker Perl Spider
  • pilot-link 0.9.5 release
  • and anything else I forgot.

bonk!

Can’t get my head out of the mud

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Weekends

  • Well, another weekend gone and passed. This one was rife with boredom projects. I have pretty much given up on driving now. I hate my truck. It hates me. Normally driving is great “thinking time”, but not with the fear of the local LEO‘s and my CT plates still on my truck.

Diversions

  • Been hooked on bzflag lately. If you haven’t played it, go. Use the server at themis.eng.buffalo.edu. #bzflag at openprojects

No, I’m not hungry…

  • I’ve been doing an experiment on my body over the past 7 days or so. I’ve been starving myself, to try to verify what I think is true. Basically under extreme hunger (and I mean hours upon hours of stomach growling), my mind becomes more… focused.

    It’s hard to explain, but it’s very apparent. I seem to have much more motivation to get things done and answers seem to come faster to more complex problems. It’s very hard on me mentally, to fight the biological urge to eat, and the mental need not to.

    Definitely need to find out more on this. I guess it’s called Caloric Restriction, and there’s a lot of studies on it’s affects on aging and memory retention.

    “I wish I could dream a life that was real”

Jiggle the Cable

  • My 21″ Hitachi monitor died last week. That was a $1400.00 investment. Not good. It was only a year old. I have to get the warantee information out of storage in Fremont, 31 miles away. I wonder if there’s a local Hitachi repair center.

Palm Programming

  • I started hacking on a quick program to do advogato diaries from the Palm©. Tentatively called palmvogato. Initial cut of the code will just allow you to compose the diary with the html shorcuts being buttonized. I suppose the second build should include a sync of the diaries back down, so you could read them, but you can already do that with Plucker. The desktop conduit will execute the POST.

    Gotta kick myself in the butt and get pilot-link.0.9.5 out. At least I managed to fix the SourceForge mess and clean up the pilot-link page there.

    Spent some time this weekend working on POSE around the NetLibSend and NetLibRecv guts in Platform_NetLib_Sck.cpp.

    Managed to get a patch out of it, but now there’s a weird NetLibClose() problem I can’t seem to nail down. I was working with the author of PalmIRC on irc #palmchat (openprojects).

    We managed to patch it through (30a7 and 30a8), but there’s lingering bugs.

    At least I got a fully registered copy of his application for helping him. I’m going to use it for screenshots in my PPP + Palm HOWTO. We managed to get some more feature ideas added into his code.

    Collaboration like this makes me happy. Complete somehow.

    Have to remember to diff POSE 30a8 into my cvs with the previous releases.

    I wonder how hard it would be to write an app for the Palm© to do the equivalent of Pocket Mapblast. Perhaps PalmBlast? I use it enough, I should approach them with the idea.

Holidays

  • I have no idea what I’m doing for Christmas or New Years this year. All of my friends are back in CT, and I know nobody here. For the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve spent New Years in NYC, never missing a year, but it looks like I’m not doing that this year. I’m not sure how I feel about that yet. Erika wants to do something. Now we try to figure out who flies to see whom. I really wish we could just solve this distance problem.

The Prison I Call Home

  • This penitentiary I call my apartment has reached it’s last bit of usefulness. I’m dying here in this place. I have to get out. I can’t grow here. Need to get a bigger, cheaper place closer to the city. Maybe a place that allows cats. I miss my cat.

Projects

  • Lots of projects on my plate. Began the conversion of the Plucker site into phpNUKE format. I have to tighten up MySQL on the box first. Can’t open a hole that wasn’t there before. Sek-yoor-a-tee.

gnu-designs

Painted Man

  • I sit every day looking at this arm. Before Mike kills himself on his bike, I want us to get this thing colored, and finished up. Probably another 20-30 hours of work. Flying back and forth from CA to CT for it is going to suck.

Us

  • Are we drifting apart? Did I do something wrong? I’m so wrapped up in survival, I don’t see sometimes how other people are spiraling down in my vortex. I’m sorry.

    Building this diary, and reading those of others somehow motivates me further to continue to top previous days events. That’ll die off soon, I’m sure.

All in all, a pretty laid-back weekend. Lots to do when I get back to work tomorrow. I hope I can focus, without interruptions.

Palm, Palmsource, and cross-country relocations

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robk, you may want to take a look at OpenFlock and gctp. We’ve been working on it as much as we can “Find Time(tm)”, and I’m going to be responsible for the Palm-resident port of the OpenFlock code. You can see a screenshot here and my attempt at a group meeting icon here.

rasmus, I’ve tamed the J-Pilot exploit. Pretty easy fix. We’re talking about applying an interesting model to network and group sync’s now in the linux space. Much more to come. You know how I feel about security anyway…

johnm put on a good talk about GCC on the final day of PalmSource 2000. My only wish was that tools like par and the interoperability between the m68k gdb and gcc were touched on. Good stuff though.

On the last day of PalmSource 2000, I was able to meet some more interesting people. I met Dan Royea who is helping bring out the third edition of PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide from O’Reilly. I met Keith Rollin, author and present maintainer of POSE at his incredibly informative talk on the Emulator. I managed to meet Steve S., who makes Datastick.

I passed him some of my references at Perkin Elmer to help him productize this device. I may want to talk to him about some residuals on it for those valuable references. He’s had some trouble with getting to the right person, and thanks to my previous employer, I’ve actually sat down with the “Top 5” at that company for dinner. If it works out for Steve, I might want some “credit”. Looks like a great use of the Palm© device in any case. I was able to rant some more about AvantGo and some issues. Apparently he’s worked for them over the summer. Great. Maybe they’ll get
the word.

The weirdest thing is that we’d be talking in a circle in the hall or something, and people would walk by and see your name badge, then walk over and say “Hey, it’s glad to finally meet you!”, and I have no idea who these people introducing themselves to me were. Oddly surreal. I guess when you bury yourself into so many mailing lists over the years, people learn to remember your name.

What is with these women. It started Friday AM at PalmSource 2000 with one of the “door checkers” talking tattoos and piercings with me, then about college, then… Friday PM it’s the Pizzaria Uno waitress. AAHHH! I hope this isn’t going to be a point of conflict in the near future.

So now I’m working on cleaning up the Plucker homepage. I tried to get a shorter url going, since

plucker.com and friends was already registered. I may end up doing it in static html to prepare for a heavy test of the Slashdot Effect as we announce it on Freshmeat and PalmGear. I’ve been toying around the idea of a banner too, and doing some t-shirt sales from the website, so we can finally get some compensation to these developers who’ve worked so hard on this over the years. Once that onslaught is over, and we get some more bandwidth, the page will be converted over to phpNUKE. I like the ability to theme and layout the content separate from presentation. Nice.

More to do…

Plucker

  • Plucker Web Engine
  • Plucker Desktop Buddy
  • The email gateway is 90% complete. That’s going to be the coolest thing.
  • The perl spider has to be finished. I really wish others could jump on and help me with this. My perl is quite limited where it concerns parsing web content and dealing with pack() with binary data formats.
  • Once these things are done, I can get back to actually putting code back into the application space itself. Too long away from it.

pilot-link

  • 0.9.5 release
  • Redocumentation, man pages, autoconfiscate it
  • Work on the 1.0 roadmap
  • Merge that ugly code base, and decrease the number of required binaries.
  • Lay out a conduit SDK for pilot-link development
  • Anyone that can help me bite into the TODO list, please do.

Home Life

  • Move her over here. No more wondering.
  • Relocate closer to the city. This apartment is killing me.
  • Legal matters resolved re: relocation from CT to CA.

Work

  • Enthusiasm. Have to… stay… focused… I can’t keep taking it personally when people quit and leave. This is not my fault, and I will not pick up their lingering work. I can’t kill myself for this.

Enough for now. I have to get back to hackery.

Bad Behavior has blocked 746 access attempts in the last 7 days.