Advogato blog for shermozle

25 Apr 2000

Tue, 25 Apr 2000 14:29:28 GMT

I doubt many people will read this but you never know... I have a simple Palm application need. I want to have a button on a web page for people to download a bunch of calendar entries to go onto users' Palm Pilots.

You'd think it'd be easy but it actually requires a "conduit" program which works on the desktop of the user's machine and does all the sync reconciling -- does the event exist etc. Of course this means your users must download and install this piece of software on their machines, and I need to get someone to write one for every platform I plan to support. Blah!

So what I want is something much simpler. A tiny Palm application that only adds the events (included in the same file) to the date database on the Palm and then removes itself. That way it won't matter so much that users download it every time.

Any ideas? If you're a Palm coder and want to write such an app for a fee (and release under the GPL), get in touch.

19 Apr 2000

Wed, 19 Apr 2000 13:46:40 GMT

After my trials and tribulations getting sound to work, I figured it'd be nice to write a search engine indexable page about it. Hopefully the next person with the same hardware will do some searches and find my page.

18 Apr 2000

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 01:38:14 GMT

Ahh of course, fscking BIOS had the stupid virus protection thing on. Grrr!

Well now my workstation's back and I even got sound working. Had a bit of a gruntle about this on my site. Getting hardware to work shouldn't be this hard!

Course now my printer, which worked beautifully on the day I got it, doesn't print any more. It's not hardware--I can print direct--but something in lprng. Course it doesn't do any logging of WHY it's deleting things from the queue without printing them. Just a lovely: Status: job 'simonr@dogbolter+344' removed at 02:24:31.072

Of course the biggest problem I had getting sound going was finding out what I was doing wrong and getting an example pnpdump file. Now that I have it working boodifully, I'll document it on my site so that the next hapless traveller might have more luck.

3 Apr 2000

Mon, 3 Apr 2000 03:44:25 GMT

Well the cable modem is fine and dandy, my Debian workstation however isn't. For some reason my lilo is locking up the system before getting to the lilo prompt or anything. I don't have DOS anywhere so I can't run fdisk /MBR

Anyone got any ideas?

2 Apr 2000

Sun, 2 Apr 2000 12:25:55 GMT

Got my cable modem today. Telstra, Australia's partially government-owned telco, recently started flat rate pricing. Prior to that is was $0.35/megabyte which is ludicrous.

The speed is amazing! I'm never going to be able to work for a company with pissy ISDN again!