random neuron misfires

I have over 10 years of email on my machine, which I refer to from time to time for various projects and historical reasons. Many of these emails are from very active mailing lists I’m still subscribed to. The total space consumed by all of these messages is currently 2.3 gigabytes, and it is stored in Maildir format.

I’ve been spending the last 2-3 years pushing myself to become more and more productive using a collection of various systems mostly based around David Allen’s GTD system. The whole premise behind David’s system is to “dump your head” into a trusted system, always filter every input through that system. There’s quite a lot more to it, but once you get the methodology down, it really, REALLY does improve how much you can do. Not only can you do more with less time, but you can do what you’re already doing now, and get a LOT more free time back in your day. No, seriously.

Click the image below for a full-size version:

My own “hybrid” system encompasses analogue and digital formats, because of my specific and unique needs for the kind of work I do. At the core of the hybrid system is my PDA; a Treo 680 smartphone. If you want to see why I use a Treo instead of an iPhone, read my previous post on the matter.

Still with me so far?

I love gadgets. I have lots of them.

My role as pilot-link maintainer has me thinking about devices, data, synchronization and plenty of other things on a daily basis. Not a day goes by when I’m not trying to mentally redesign some portion of the datapath between devices.

That being said, the iPhone has created a lot of buzz in the industry. It’s a neat looking device, and has plenty of eye-candy to please the masses, for a short while. I’m sure it’ll do great as a device in the industry.

But the iPhone is absolutely useless to me and to anyone but the ENTRY LEVEL Apple customer and userbase. Before you reach for that tomato to throw at me, hear me out…

1. It has less storage for music than an iPod, and is twice as large.
2. It does not sync to anything BUT an Apple OS X machine and onboard applications. Can I sync this with Linux? No. Windows? No. FreeBSD? No.
3. It doesn’t upgrade any existing device (i.e. getting data into it is manual re-entry, which is prone to lots of errors and mistakes
4. It has a VERY fragile face. Can you stick this in your pocket with your bluetooth headset and keys? Not likely. Can you put it in your bag and not have it scratched/crushed/cracked? No.
5. Can I share data on it with a non-iPhone user by “beaming” business cards or other datafiles back and forth? No.
6. Can it run another operating system, other than OS X? Can I run Linux on it? No. (at least not yet, but that doesn’t erase the issues in 1,4 and 5 above.)

While its a neat looking device, so are plenty of gadgets that went exactly nowhere. My Treo680 has more storage, more features, more functions, more stability and more flexibility with support for at least 5 separate operating systems out of the box than the iPhone.

My colleagues who know I love gadgets are asking me when I’ll be getting an iPhone (probably so they can play with it). The answer is a resounding never, until all of the above issues are addressed. This isn’t a Linux statement, this isn’t an anti-Apple statement, this is a usability statement.

My wife has a 20″ iMac that I bought her last Christmas, and she loves it. She also has a 4-gig Nano I bought her the previous Christmas. The two work great together. She also has a flip phone I bought her for Mother’s Day a few years ago.

She admits that her phone has more features than she’ll ever use, and the iPhone isn’t even interesting to her… and she has the optimum environment to use it within.

I’m not sure who they’re targeting, and without any clear, open path to development on the device, I can’t see developers being their target audience.

I think the only people who will covet and buy an iPhone are those who “Just Gotta Have One™”, without really looking at how it misses the target on almost every issue.

UPDATE:

• No replaceable battery. This IS 2007, right? (there are plenty of links describing how to replace it yourself though, but you void the warrantee by doing so.)
• It has a camera, but can’t record video (my Treos have all done both)
• Custom headphone jack; can’t use your normal headphones with it.
• Stereo bluetooth ONLY with the Apple-branded headset(s)
• AT&T’s “unlimited” plan is not unlimited (read the fine print; you’re limited to 5 gigabytes per-month)
• Requires switching to an alternate keyboard to get things like commas and other meta keys. By contrast, my Treo has a series of ‘shift’ keys that do the same thing, depending on whether you want numbers, letters, punctuation and so on. MUCH faster with the meta keys than popping up an alternate keyboard.
• No Flash support (but there is a way around that)
• No support for non-iPhone headphones (those expensive studio earphones you have? Forget it.)
• No support for memory expansion cards (SD/MicroSD/CF), when it takes nearly no space to implement it
• No non-Safari SDK available
• Capacitive touchscreen, not resistive; no using it with gloves on in colder climates. (Treo wins again here)

And the list goes on. While I think lots of “Must Have It” gadget people will love the device, for real productive or business users, its a lemon.

A member of one of the pilot-link mailing lists was having trouble getting his shiny new Samsung SPH-i500 PDA/Phone working with Linux, specifically SuSE 9.1 Professional.

After trying to diagnose the problem remotely over ssh, going through several dozen tests of kernel changes, userland software changes, and other configuration changes, it was decided that the best course of action was to ship me the phone, and have me work on it directly on my own hardware. Debugging things remotely can be tedious and frustrating at times.

After I received the phone, I unpacked it and charged it up for a few hours. My normal production Debian system is configured to talk to dozens of Palm devices, so I plugged it into that first, and tried to sync.

It worked first try!

So now I had to figure out why this phone wouldn’t work on SuSE 9.1 Professional. After a long and tedious installation on a test drive in my laptop, I was up and running with SuSE, replicating the exact same environment that the owner of this phone was running.

Another quick test with my standard tools on SuSE, and it worked straight away too. Odd. So now I had to figure out what was broken at the upper levels..

More testing revealed that the culpret in at least one large piece of the puzzle, was a broken version of gnome-pilot, the “glue” behind the PIM Evolution. Upgrading the gnome-pilot package to the latest version (from source, compiled on SuSE), fixed the issue, and I was able to sync.

Lets hope that when the owner gets his phone back, we can make it work on HIS end as well.. I took dozens of pictures of the phone, and lots of screenshots. I’ll put those up in a gallery of some sort later on.

RoUS, VMware is something I know a great deal about, inside and out. I can probably help you.

I’ve gotten many unsupported USB devices working, regularly sync my Palms over USB, Ir, and serial into and out of vmware guest images, and have no problems with NAT or DVD playback.

Hit me up in email and I can help you out. I have some tweaks as well, that you may want to implement, which will speed up the performance of that NT image for you inside the vm.

I have about 12 images I use in vmware on nearly a daily basis (and as I type this, FreeBSD 4.3 is happily compiling gnome inside VMware right now on another window).

I rely on it quite heavily for my cross-platform work, where I need a “soft” box to test in.

opie, some of us here are quite familiar with Palms, PDAs, and other handheld PIM devices. I only own about 22 units, so not that many, ranging from almost every Palm made, my Helio, two iPAQs, my Agenda, two Cybiko units, and handfuls of others.

As you know, I’m the maintainer of one of the packages you can use to connect your PDA to your desktop and sync data. You may want to look here for a matrix comparison of every Palm made. It may give you some ideas, depending on your needs.

…anyway, in other news progress continues on many fronts.

Bug Tracking

ishamael, the bug tracking package you seek is called Mantis. I use it quite extensively now on my server, and it works very well. I had to change some of the UI a bit and move some things around, but generally, it’s rock-solid. You can see it in action on one of my bug sites. Another you can look at is called RoundUp, and is really good. I tested 11 separate packages before narrowing down on these two. I chose Mantis in the end because it was PHP, and I didn’t want to have to burden my box with Python code, runtime, in the browser. You may also want to go here and see the other dozens of alternatives.

I can’t post much, in the middle of too much hardware hackery, but I’ve been reading all the diaries today and yesterday regarding the whole certification and trust metric issue and have to make some points.

deven

deven, you realize of course that by removing your certification of others when you were certified as Apprentice, that you have lowered their ranking, just as I removed your Apprentice status altogether by removing my certification of you. This is how the trust metric works, and it works well. Your point regarding the “Good ‘ol Boys Network” is completely unjustified, since you clearly don’t understand why Advogato exists. Nobody here is refusing people access to Advogato. Anybody can join. Anybody can post their diary entry. Anybody can contribute.

Your comment of:

“..Since most of Raph’s writings here seem to focus on effectiveness in keeping out the bad people, it’s not clear whether he ever paid close attention to the flip side of the coin, letting in the good people…”

If this were nothing other than a web-based forum without a hint of any certification metrics, created solely to discuss open source projects, like Blogger, would you have the same complaints? I would guess not.

To quote George Carlin:

“…a radio has at least two knobs; one changes the channel, and the other… turns it off!“

The value of certs here is not linear. If 10 people certify you as Apprentice, and they themselves are not even holding an Apprentice certification, you do not get an Apprentice certification. However, if raph or lilo or alan or myself certifies you as Apprentice, at the next sync, you will now be holding an Apprentice cert, even if nobody else certifies you. There is a very logical reason for that (and I wish it was applied to Slashdot and other projects as well).

You are measured here by your peers for your contributions to the free software community (and sometimes, non-free contributions, as some people here have talked about before). You are not “given” certifications. You earn them.

Again though, my desire to post my diary here has absolutely no bearing on the color that my name appears in. I didn’t start coming here because I wanted to gain some sort of status. I wanted to have a place to share my contributions, let people know what I’m doing (and if you read my diaries, they can be quite personal, ugly, and graphic at times, I have nothing to hide).

There’s a lot of cool things I do, as well as other people. I like to see what’s going on in the community I’ve been a part of for over a decade, and I like to watch it grow.

In your July 31, 2000 diary entry, you decided to certify yourself as Master, and I’m still trying to see what “important” free software project you are the author of, or what groups you mentor. Can you help me find it?

Your comments regarding the certification of God, Satan and Jesus are important, because they point out the lack of clarity in the people who are certifying these accounts. Look at rms for a perfect example. People don’t take the time to really understand the accounts before they go and waste certifications on them (hint: That’s not really Richard Stallman’s account).

As raph points out, there is a bit of weirdness going on in the certifications right now, and you have seen the trend also, but it fits exactly into the model which works here. The more people who join, the more uncertified users will exist, who are then going to be certifying already-certified users (sometimes wrongly, in the case of rms and others as above). This must be how you determined the system to be a “Good ‘ol Boys Network”, since the new users are the ones creating the dilution as you call it.

Here’s a tip: Ignore the certification altogether. Simply post your diary as you would have for any other site, and talk about what you’re doing in the community, free software space, open source space, or whatever. Relax. Have fun. If people respect you, and feel you’re doing “the right kinds of things” (subjective), then you may find yourself with a certification… or maybe not, but who cares. This is not gaining you PayPal bucks, or being used towards grading your GPA.

I respect the fact that you are doing development, and that you have taken the time to report some Mozilla bugs, but at the same time, you blather on about certifications. The two don’t jive. Free Software advocates and contributors give of themselves selflessly, often sacrificing deep into their personal lives to do it, and many times, unrecognized and uncompensated. Keep up the work, push hard, advance the status of free software where you can, and ignore what people think of you. There’s a famous quote I live by:

“There’s no defense for the truth”

If this isn’t working for you, there’s always Badvogato and Blogger.

{very}Hard{ware}

I am having nothing but trouble with my hardware here, and right when I need it the most, it fails me in exactly the ways I require of it to be working.

I have a single bootable RedHat cdrom I found in the back of a book here (Out of all of my linux cdroms, the only one I found to be bootable was in this RedHat Bible book, pft! No, bootable floppies were not possible, since I had no floppy drive, and even if I could install one in this machine, there was no way to get the images onto the disks, ugly all the way to the bank on this one).

After having to gut a production machine to get a the build onto the drive, it neglected to install perl (apparently Perl is not part of a ‘Development Workstation’ according to their installer, gar!). I decided to mount the cdrom in another drive, and map it over nfs.

But wait, my 3c905 Vortex NIC decides to start spouting packet errors and ghosted frames. I rummaged through my storage and spare parts and found one lone 3c509 ISA card, and put it into the box. Try again, no video. Wiggle some cards, move some slots, now I get video, but the cdrom in the other system fails on one lone file… guess which file I can’t read from the cdrom: perl_5.005.*.rpm. ARG! I can’t get a break!

dyork, you’re not off of the XML/XSLT hook with me yet… I have quite a handful of questions to toss your way. I’ll try to keep them en anglais for you.

Enough for me for today. I’m just not going anywhere near hardware right now. Maybe a good movie will get me distracted enough to concentrate on this when I get back tonight.

Sun Jun 17 19:04:32 PDT 2001

The Wonderful World of Javascript

I started thinking about a way to take a visible page in a browser, and configure some Plucker parameters on that page, and then have it gathered for you, or have the values build a home.html file for you, so you can Pluck that page at your next frequency.

I’ve never done Javascript programming before (can I really call it that?), but here’s what I have so far after about 2 hours of tinkering (it’s a Javascript “popup” wizard walkthrough sort of thing), which will prompt for the URL (it snarfs it from the current page), an expiration time on the cookie (defaults to 1 day), and then the maxdepth of that URL, and sets two local cookies for those values. When it’s all working (or I hit the string length limit on bookmark Location fields), it will walk the user through the full
gamut of settings for that URL.

javascript:q7Hm8=prompt('This webpage has ' + document.links.length + ' links. 
Below is the URL of the current webpage. We can now store this value in a 
 local cookie on your machine. Once your selected Plucker parameters are set, 
we can then create a home.html file for you with these parameters. ',location.href); 

if(q7Hm8!=null) {
        // Prompt for two separate vals
        // which will be stored in two
        // cookies on the local machine
        pVj5D=86400000*prompt('Expires in...(days)','1');
        m3xD=prompt('How deep would you like to gather' +
             location.href,'1');

        // Prompt for the maxdepth value here
        1m4g3s=prompt('How deep would you like to gather' +
               location.href,'1');
        dT9v=new Date;dT9v.setTime(dT9v.getTime()+pVj5D);

        // Store the first cookie (URL)
        void(document.cookie='PluckerURL='+escape(q7Hm8)+';
        expires='+dT9v.toGMTString());

        // Store the second cookie (maxdepth)
        void(document.cookie='PluckerMaxdepth=
            '+escape(m3xD)+';
        expires='+dT9v.toGMTString());}else{void(null)
}

So far, this works, and properly sets the cookies. Why do I want to do this in a Javascript fashion? because my goal
here is to make a Plucker “bookmarklet” that most users can use to ease their pain of Plucker configuration
and sync’ing.

An example of how it can be used (for this current page) is here

Reading the cookies back is a bit simpler. I won’t bore you with the code, but it allows me to do some interesting things with it. The problem with Javascript is that I can’t launch a local client application (plucker-build in this example, which is used to actually gather the content itself), nor can I write to a local configuration file. I can, however, put the data in a popup browser window, and have the user do a SaveAs from the menu on that window. It’s not the best solution, but short of having to write several different plugins for each architecture, it will work for the moment.

I’m still trying to find out if Javascript has checkbox and <option select…> type of elements so I can make a real application out of this, in a client-side popup dialog “wizard” thingy.

Why am I not doing this fully in a webpage-style application? Because then you lose focus of the webpage you’re on that you want to Pluck, and this must run client-side. I suppose I could make a webpage that contained similar code, and then submitted the URL to my server for final parsing and gathering, but my server doesn’t have the bandwidth for that right now.

This all started from my original search
google bookmarklet. You can click on it and it will pop up an entry dialog, or you can highlight words on the webpage, and click on it (go ahead, try it) and it will send that highlighted text to google as the search criteria.

I started playing a bit, and came up with another weird one to translate
the current webpage into German (or any other language)

Mantis

The bugtracker is up. Currently supports Plucker, pilot-link, pilot-mailsync, POSE, and a few other projects. I made some cosmetic changes to the layout, and cleaned up some of the PHP code. I’m trying to learn the language, but it’s slow going. Worked for a year with rasmus, and didn’t even use the language once for anything production. EEP!

As the Task List Turns… (unordered)

• Embedded Linux Course, tightening deadlines, scope creep.
• Plucker Bookmark Assistant needs a version update and will begin handling IE as well as Netscape and Mozilla bookmarks. I don’t know what format Konqueror uses, or some of the other browsers, but I can support them too, in time. I found URI::Bookmark which may help a bit.
• The Plucker Perl Spider needs a revisit, and an update. Hasn’t been touched in 11 months. EEP! I have all new ideas for it.
• pilot-link 0.9.5 needs to be released. I wish we could get the final parts of that Ralf’s USB sync fixes pushed in.
• Update the main gnu-designs webpage. I have a new design idea here that I’m tinkering with.
• Chest x-ray.
• …buncha other things…

It’s been a busy Sunday. This week promises to be incredibly productive for me. I still have to be cranking basically 26 pages a day out of this Embedded Linux Course.

My hands hurt.

The Saga Continues…

After the debacle with Sony and the GPL, I’ve been barraged with emails and many queries from reporters and other people who are apparently questioning Sony’s actions in other areas. I won’t reveal any names here, but it’s clear POSE is not the only place where this is happening. Apparently a commercial product developer on their PS2 Linux team (separate very well-known IDE development company) has patches he’s made to the gdb and gcc sources and was not allowed to put them back into their respective trees, back to the community from whence they came.

Let’s be clear though. I am not attacking Sony or their partners. I’ve already tried to clear that up over here.

I decided to seek out another hardware vendor to support the JogDial functionality and memory expansion slots. I find Handera and of course, Handspring.

So I’ve been trying to find the sources for the Handera modifications to POSE, as well as those from Handspring, and come up with some interesting results. I managed to find the Handera Windows binary of the emulator over here, and upon extraction, I see a ‘Handera Readme.txt’ (spaces in filenames, gar!) that states:

“..This is based on the Palm OS Emulator 3.1 sources and is also compatible with all ROMS the 3.1 Emulator from Palm is compatible with. The changes will be sent to Palm to be merged into their sources in a week or two…”

The original announcement of this Handera POSE release is here (May 2, 2001).

I asked for the sources over here (follow the thread from there, May 8, 2001).

Interesting points from Keith over here (May 8, 2001). Most important of which is:

“..So I couldn’t say when Palm will post a version of Poser with HandEra support. But it will be in the range of several months from now…”

I then tried a different approach since we can’t wait months to begin testing these applications, by emailing Handera from their Comments form on their website:

“..Comments: I’m looking for the sources to the Handera port of the PalmOS Emulator. I did not find a link on your website to download the sources. As I don’t run Windows, I need to build this under linux. Can you please let me know where I can download this, so I can build a version under linux? Thanks a lot…”

And received:

Thu, 10 May 2001 16:18:33 -0500

“..We will be making them available to Palm for inclusion in future versions of the source tree. The modifications will be included in all versions of POSE (and source) at that time…”

To which I replied:

Thu, 10 May 2001 14:27:44 -0700 (PDT)

“..Are these sources available now? I’d like to include them in my local version of POSE, so I can begin testing applications against it. I
do not run Windows, so I cannot use the Windows version of POSE. Thanks again for your time and a rapid response…”

And received as a reply to this:

Thu, 10 May 2001 16:50:51 -0500

“..They are not available at this time. If you have any other questions please let me know…”

Ok, so they’ve taken the sources for POSE, a known GPL project (who’s owner of copyright is
still unknown) and modified them for use in their own product (the Handera 330 and the POSE Emulator to assist developers in developing applications against it), compiled a version of this for Windows using these sources and modifications, but continue to keep those modified sources “in-house”. That would be ok, if you also kept the Windows binary-only version in house, and did not distribute it, however, you can’t have one foot in both kiddie pools.

Guys, I simply want the sources so I can support your hardware in the open source projects I help develop which may some day USE this hardware. This abuse of the community effort to help you develop your projects will not continue much longer. You don’t support the linux or unix community. We do. We do this in our spare time because we love this work. We don’t get paid to do this (however you reap the revenue rewards from our hard work, you’re welcome).

So I get frustrated and decide to go to Handspring‘s site and look for their POSE modifications to support writing to the Springboard slot(s) in their new devices from pilot-link directly. Simple task. I see that they have a link to the Handspring POSE sources here on this page.

The sources are for a VC++ 6.0 build environment. Ugh. I did receive this reply from them though in my query:

Tue, 8 May 2001 09:41:19 -0700

“..We don’t build POSE under Linux internally, so the Makefile might not be part of that package. The version from Palm’s 3.1 version should do it (we only added a few source files related to the Visor Edge)…”

I’m not really sure how this translates, I mean… these ARE sources (which fits into section 3(c)p2 of the GPL), even if they’re not sources which will build on a GNU/Linux platform from which their parent project was derived from, so I can’t get completely pissed, but I don’t have or know VC++, so I’m not about to port these over (back over) to linux.

So we have a few “issues” here. I’ve also had a conversation with a Palm employee who said that “..the GPL means nothing unless it’s tested in court…”. That may be true, fundamentally, but that doesn’t mean that this type of behavior can continue (Handspring is definately on the right side of this one, kudos!)

“Encryption via Obfuscation”

I was trying to sync my newly-flashed OS4-aware Palm Vx with the latest pilot-link before I release it out the door, and I noticed that with a password set on the device, it will no longer sync. The Palm complains that the desktop software doesn’t support the password on the handheld device, and to upgrade the desktop software.

So I sent an email to the list hoping to find an answer.

The answer I got wasn’t exactly reassuring, but it gives me something to work with for now (thanks Dave Fedor, another fast response). One disconcerting thing though:

“..So if you’re on a 4.0 device with a password, you need a 4.0 desktop if you want to perform a HotSync operation…”

There are some “encryption” issues which exist in this new OS version. Just be careful and aware.

I simply want to support these devices and the users who use them. I’m not trying to cut holes in your profit streams or in your business plans. We shouldn’t HAVE TO resort to reverse-engineering protocols on the port and sniffing syncs just to write a compatible driver to support these devices under non-Windows platforms.

We’ve helped you, now how about helping us for a change.

johnm, you know I don’t want to bicker about things like this, especially here. I don’t have the time, patience, or resolve to argue with you about the issues regarding pilot-link. In short, the reason I said it’s a mandatory upgrade is that the sync code that was in 0.9.3 is “questionable” and was removed because of potential GPL concerns.

It was completely rewritten from the ground up by jpr, and those concerns have been alleviated. We’ve talked about this on the list already.

Also, 0.9.3 will not work with most of the supporting applications that might continue to use it, such as Evolution,
gnome-pilot, and possibly others such as PilotManager, JPilot, etc. If people want to continue to use 0.9.3, and ignore some of the licensing issues, and an occasional corrupted record here or there, that’s fine. I’m not forcing anyone to upgrade, just that compatibility will break if they choose to use 0.9.3 with some of the newer GUI-based apps.

Maybe “mandatory” was bad phrasing. Let’s call it “necessary”, or “critical” or something else then.

As for the layout at tool launch time, that silly splash, reminder: It does say -pre5 on it, no? Any code can be added removed for a final release. It’s my intention to move all of the argument parsing out (probably using popt or getopt() in a proper lib), and make it uniform between binaries. Until I do, some will act different than others.

Speaking of patches… the only message I’ve received from you directly or on the list regarding pilot-link referencing patches (not general webpage or SourceForge banter) was on Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:31:55 -0700 (PDT), referencing the PILOT_LINK_PATCH stuff. I’ve already fixed that (and screwed up the branch, which jpr had to resurrect).

If there are other patches I haven’t received, if you could email them to me, I will include them. Other than that, I haven’t seen anything, and you already know that I’ve been / including / patches, so you’re not being ignored.

I await your patches and suggestions to improve the package.

2:14:53AM PST

Distracting Hacking

Tonight I managed to get a quick and dirty hack out to get the JPilot Backup Plugin working with the latest JPilot version. I’ll work on a much cleaner version later on this week if I get some spare cycles. There’s still some minor GUI tweaks I’d like to do to it. I’m not sure I like the little status window at the bottom. I’ll monkey with a status bar hack or some progress bar stuff later.

You can find the small hacky patch here.

I managed to get my external serial modem working over the Keyspan Serial->USB adapter, so now I can use my Palm on the serial port. Just some more testing. I need to figure out why the kernel module for it is locked at 9600. Perhaps some mods to modprobe a new speed into it would be in order. hugh, any ideas?

So far, I’ve been able to get three consecutive mouses working under X (at the *SAME* time, USB, PS/2, Trackstick), my modem or any other device on the Keyspan adapter reliably, sound, IrDA, USB, and some other small goodies consectutively on this laptop. Now it’s time to get some of this Thinkpad Hackery documented, so others can take advantage of it and play with devfs, reiser, and some of the kernel level crypto stuff.

ianmacd has this all down pat now, apparently, so I’ll trade him some CVS knowledge for his FreeS/WAN tricks.

Pain Comes In Many Forms
..and I hope this is the end of mine…

BBC Development

I’ve now taken a stand and stepped up to the plate to lead the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card project. Now that Duncan Mackinnon can no longer help us from the inside, I hope he will continue to help us in the community. It will continue onward, no matter what we are called, or who we are maintained by. Between schoen, ianmacd and myself, we will ensure the success of this.

Believe in that.

Seminar’ige (CVS, Group Calendaring, Windows Migration)

Well, it seems that I’m going to have to persue some SGML expertise to get my presentation done up for people to follow on my CVS talk internally. Once again, a wrench in the works, since Ancilla was one of the unfortunate ones to go on Friday. She was the one who tirelessly set up these internal talks, gathered the respondees, and tended to the projector, keys, and all of the organization. I’m trying to find someone to help me with this before my talk. I’m going to have to split the talk into two separate days, four hours each, instead of one grueling day on a weekend of 8 hours. Maybe I’ll have some ‘homework’ for the people who attend on Day One.

Two more seminars have come to mind recently, which I’ll have to begin working on soon:

1. Migrating From Windows (replete with full conversion examples, multiple options for Word docs, Excel, mail, etc like the migration from Word to Abiword or StarOffice/OpenOffice, Excel to Gnumeric, yadda yadda.)
2. How To Use Your Equipment (hardware hackery, centering on our “Standard Builds” and Thinkpads for the moment)
3. I’ve scheduled a BOF this week which I’ll be chairing on “The State of Group Calendaring”. I’d like to get some other outside people to dial in to help us with this. Maybe I can do a LUG on it at FourSeas.

Advogato Wishlist #247

1. Why is there no search option on Advogato?
2. Why do we not have <project>foo</project> tags?
3. Why does the Login page not give me a ‘Post Diary’ option on the success page? I have to strike the success portion of the URI and reload. Ugly.
4. No <code> #include <foo.h> </code> tags? <pre> </pre> isn’t good enough.
5. Can someone say <a name=#foo> tags to reference a specific day’s entry?
6. Why does this happen?

Palm Stuff

Lots of goodies coming around the horizon. Anyone who can lend some cycles, either in coding expertise, documentation, or anything (even pointers to some HOWTO documents) would be greatly appreciated. Here’s what I’ve got planned:

1. pilot-link 0.9.5 release
2. Various other conduits
3. XML outputs for pilot-link, pxd (pilot-xfer daemon)
4. New conduit to sync your Palm to a cvs server (local or networked)
5. Malsync updates (should help fix the Vindigo problems).
6. gnome-pilot updates for Calendar, Categories, and some other goodies. jpr and ettore are working on this one. Teaming up on this is crucial to it’s success.
7. Plucker Portal…
8. Work on the perl spider for Plucker
9. Plucker Desktop Buddy
10. Palmvogato. Yes, a way for you to enter your daily diary in your Palm, sync, and have it posted to the server. Makes sense if you’re on the road and want to still keep a record of your daily activities.
11. gnutrition conduit for the Palm. merge with on-Palm shopping lists.
12. Finish my Palm PPP HOWTO.
13. Strip gnome-pilot conduit fixed. It exists, just in a broken state.
14. Finish my Sony Clie USB kernel module.

The Writing Was On The….Web?

I’ve decided to begin putting my writings online for people to enjoy. Maybe I’ll do some sort of “page-a-day” story site or something, and let people jump onboard and read what I have. I’ll be fun, I promise. I still have lots of ideas in this space.. Celiac Times, some sort of Linux/Palm column, maybe some short fiction stories, and of course, the much-sought-for autobiography. I’ve got so much crazy things that have happened in my life, more than a dozen people have asked me to put them to paper, they’re so insanely unbelievable. Anyone who has spent more than a day with me knows that they’re all valid. Time to start penning my memoirs.

EEK! I’m turning 30 in less than 5 months!!

Miscellaneous

Lots more new stuff on the horizon. I hope I can devote some spare cycles to getting it all done in time. At some point, I have to deal with moving my whole life again to another location closer to San Francisco, moving Erika here with me (yes?), and putting myself through school, fixing my health and my teeth, blah blah… it’s all boring and I’ll spare you this time. This year is going to be a huge, productive year of reinvention, and churning out so much code it’ll be coming out of my ears.

If I have time…