Categories: Top :: Arts :: Day By Day :: Entertainment :: Living :: Personal :: Technology

iPhone: How to migrate from Palm to iPhone/iPodTouch/Anything, or from Palm to Outlook, or vCalendar/vCal to Outlook,
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 or Palm to Palm Desktop, or ...

I'm working on setting up an iPhone/iPodTouch development environment, and theres no better way to get your head around a beast than to just switch to the device as your 'main.' In my case this means moving away from my trusty several year old Treo 650 and attempting to use the iPhone exclusively.. for a little while. The iPhone as I've gone on about before has some revolutionary ideas - and a slew of seriously boneheaded ones.. but actually trying to use it day in and day out will certainly reveal many of the holes and nits in the platform which is the bread and butter of the 3rd party developer. Without a doubt it is slick, but it takes more 'taps' (and thus time) to do many common operations and certainly lacks the general flexibility.. but should be fine. And let me drop my media player .. freeing up a pocket in summer is a win!

The Treo line is a very good line of smartphones, truth be told; some models (such as the 650..) are buggy in the OS and prone to fits of crashing, but more or less have the most features (when counting 3rd party applications) of any smartphone. Basicly, as a looong time Palm OS developer I'd be a huge fan of the Treo line except for my general love-hate relationship.. the device invariable crashes and loses important recent calendar events when I most rely on them, but generally serves as a very good workhorse I've been abusing for years. Palm used to lead the mobile pack but has spent the last few years shooting themselves, the developers and losing the race... letting folks like Apple get back into the mobile ring after a decade being out of it. Anyway, thats another rant..

What to migrate

Anyway, to switch main smartphones, we invariably have to consider a few things -- moving contacts/addressbooks over, moving calendars over, and everything else. (Stored bookmarks in the browser, SMS history, ebooks you might be working on, music and video files, and so on and so forth.) For me, I cannot move to a new phone without bringing over contacts, calendar, and encrypted text (password database etc.)

First step - handheld to desktop

This should be an easy step. For a Palm OS handheld it should be as easy as a single hotsync button press and you watch in amazement as your data moves from handheld to Palm Desktop and/or MS Outlook. A Pocket PC should work the same way, but entirely to Outlook. But of course, we all know its not so easy and you sit in amazement as your data is systematically destroyed :)

In my case, I tried a number of options before getting really dirty:

The winning method took another day to come to mind -- using bluetooth to transmit to my laptop directly. Calendar -> Send Category -> All and poof, my laptop received the request. It didn't work really well, so I made sure to set my laptop to just store the file rather than trying to process directly .. and voila, I received a "vcs" (vCalendar) file with all my calendar in it, and another file for all my contacts. Awesome. Painful as hell to get, but awesome.

How to get Contacts into Outlook / iTunes

Naturally, most application don't want to take the vCard files correctly, but I imagine you could just hit File -> Import in Outlook to suck these in. In this case I am targetting the iPhone so I did it a little differently -- Run the Windows Address Book that no one even knows about: Start -> Accessories -> Address Book and import the vCard file(s) into it. Then just pull up iTunes and plug your iPhone/iPodTouch in and hit the Info page for it... checking off the option to Sync Contacts, and setting the source to Address Book. Done! Sucked, but at least not so bad once you know that trick.

Calendar.. the hard one.

I had to repeat a few times to get things halfway right, so I learned a neat trick up front -- should you wish to wipe out your calendar in Outlook (or a subset of it), a handy way is to just hit View -> Current, and pick All Events (or whatever it is), rather than the traditional Day/Week/Month view. This just shows a list of events, and you can (say) hit Ctrl-A to select All, Del to wipe them, and then Tools -> Empty the Deleted Items to clear them forever. With this, you can screw up and re-import over and over, and not end up with 35 copies of each event in your handheld.

Given the vCard files you can just hit File -> Import in Outlook to suck them in. (Be sure to pick vCalendar as your import source type, then change the file selector to vcs files, and away you go.) The hard part was getting the vcal file in the first place, so importing it 'more or less' works, sort of. At first I actually imported to Palm Desktop, figuring Palm would have tested that, but alas.. no really useful: the events show up, but without titles. All the titles show up as Notes, meaning you end up with 5 blank entries in Palm Desktop, when you have 5 useful entries in your Treo. Peachy. I'm not interested in hand fixing several thousand events up, either. Palm has a KnowledgeBase entry where they snidely remark that 'some applications might do this' (paraphrased), but it actually means.. Palm Desktop (and Outlook and everyone else.)

If you can work like that, fine, you're good to go. Me, I want something a little better..

vCard and vCal files are just textfiles with various fields detailing begin and end of record and so on, so I hit up Google and Wikipedia to find out the field meanings, and surprisingly the Treo 650 doesn't even include title text in the events.. just notes. So it never worked.. thanks Palm! One would expect the smarter systems would at least use the note as the title if the title is not provided, but neither Palm nor MS are that swift.

I also noticed the 'times' were always wrong; in my case, off by 4 hours. Could be a timezone thing, or a number of issues.. I reimported a half dozen times using the trick above while fiddling with time and timezone on the Treo and the laptop but no go.. always off by 4 hours. I tried hacking a timezone into the vCalendar files but Outlook and Palm Desktop ignore it. (Thanks again guys!)

Also, and most sadly, some meta-data is not in the files and not imported correctly -- repeats, alarms and such. I can deal with this mostly, but it does mean birthdays are a problem for us leaky minded people. (To fix this.. after you've done the whole import up to the point you can handle or care about, just do a search in Outlook for 'birthday' or whatever in list mode for the All category and you'll get a list of all matching events. step down them and set recurrence and alarms if you need. Sucks, but what can you do, and I didn't write a tool to do this for me yet..)

An evil hack

OKay, knowing that vCalendar files are just text, I thought I'd make a short little code hack to fix them up just enough that I can stomach the results. 10 mins work to make everythingthat uch better is worth it every time. The hack below is in Perl which pretty much every Unix and Unix-like OS comes shipped with these days.. be it Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX, Solaris, whatever. You can also get it with cygwin for Windows, or get a native Perl port for Windows.. look around. This hack takes a command line argument of a vCalendar file (a .vcs file) and spits out on the screen a 'fixed' version.. so I just run it like "./fixme-script.pl myfile.vcs > fixed.vcs" essentially.

The script does two main things -- it looks for the note field (DESCRIPTION) and repeats it out as the title field (SUMMARY); it doesn't cut it down in length, as most of my event titles are short and it didn't seem a problem for me. The job also adds 4 hours to the time (so a 5pm event will show up at 9pm in the file), since Outlook seems ot take 4 hours back off again. Theres probably a better way, but whatever.. this worked in less than 10 minutes.

Over-technical and lame, but it sure saved my bacon.. so heres to hoping it helps someone else too. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

$filename = shift;

if ( ! $filename ) {
    print "$0: Supply filename to vcs vcalendar file to insert SUMMARY lines into.\n";
    exit ( 0 );
}

if ( ! open ( FOO, $filename ) ) {
    print "$!: Couldn't open $filename\n";
    exit ( 0 );
}

while ( $inline =  ) {
    # note, not dropping newlines here
    # chomp ( $inline );

    # just keep emitting lines as we get them; should we see a DESCRIPTION field
    # we can summarize it and spit out a SUMMARY line immediately following, and
    # proceed. No need to keep any state.

    # do we see DESCRIPTION field tag at beginning of a line? Crom knows how they
    # are escaped..
    if ( $inline =~ /^DESCRIPTION:(.*)$/ ) {
        # found a description; parse it down into a usable summary and spit that
        # out; the regular line-emitter will then spit out the description as normal.

        # Do we actually need to trim the desc down, or just copy it verboten?
        print "SUMMARY:$1\n";

    } elsif ( $inline =~ /^DTSTART:(.*)$/ ) {
        # print "DTSTART;TZID=US-Eastern:$1\n"; # should've worked, stoopid Outlook

        # looks like Outlook is ignoring timezone or otherwise corrupting time, so
        # events are always 4h too early (9pm becomes 5pm); I guess I can just deduct
        # 4h from each event (caution for events before 4am.. but there shouldn't
        # be any, so I'll ignore it for this hack.) (caution for items after 8pm..)
        print "DTSTART:" . fixdatetime ( $1 ) . "\n";
        next; # don't emit DTSTART line again, so skip back to top of loop
    } elsif ( $inline =~ /^DTEND:(.*)$/ ) {
        #print "DTEND;TZID=US-Eastern:$1\n";
        print "DTEND:" . fixdatetime ( $1 ) . "\n";
        next; # don't emit DTSTART line again, so skip back to top of loop
    }

    # emit the line in as normal
    print $inline;

} # while

close ( FOO );

# done!
exit ( 0 );

# support functions
sub fixdatetime {
    my ( $dt ) = @_;

    my ( $tdate, $ttime ) = split ( 'T', $dt );
    my $thh = substr ( $ttime, 0, 2 );
    my $tmmss = substr ( $ttime, 2, 4 );

    if ( $thh < 5 ) {
        print "ERROR .. do something.\n"; # just so I can see if it occurs
    } elsif ( $thh > 19 ) {
        # for this case, just let Outlook bump them down.. so what if 9pm becomes 4pm
        # for now
    } else {
        # normal case, we bump them up 4h so Outloko can decrement them 4h agin..
        $thh = sprintf ( "%02d", $thh + 4 );
    }

    # reconstruct the date-time
    return ( $tdate . "T" . $thh . $tmmss );
}

[ Category: / technology / apple / iphone ] [link] [Comments]

Apple: iPhone first impressions
Wed, 09 Apr 2008

A quick post here to bitch up some nagging thoughts. (Life continues to be busy with the packing and so on, but I'll try to post a few things :)

The Apple iPhone does feature an impressive interface, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a hateboi, but that UI really is just the appetizer - when it comes down to it, the main course has to stand on its own. As a long time handheld developer and user I can safely say .. this is typical Apple. Its minimalist and slick, hot and sexy, and when you get right into the gears.. its not as impressive as it looks.

Anyway, so here I sit considering using the iPhone as my mains so I can get a bearing on it for developing applications for Codejedi with it. But right at the onset -- it doesn't work with my headphones, doesn't accept my video files, doesn't sync in multiple locations and so screws up my calendar and address book options. Certainly, trying to migrate from any device to another is hard, but this is extra tedious.

As I've said for a year -- my 3 year old Treo does all these things. Sure its ugly in the UI, but it works. And crashes a lot, but fine, I have a backup tool. (Crom knows what happens when an iPhone crashes hard.)

[ Category: / technology / apple / iphone ] [link] [Comments]

Day by Day: A question for transvestites
Fri, 28 Mar 2008

So I was standing at the line in a shop at 7am this morning, and a few people up the queue I noticed a gentleman wearing a pretty nice, if effeminate fur coat. He stood out since of course fur coats are on the out, he had a kindly face sporting an enormous hillbilly beard, and had naked legs sticking out the bottom of the coat despite the -6 degree weather. I suppose its much like the Muscle Mary communities -- you could be gay and casually dressed, or you could be leather studded hardcore right ouf of D&D. You could be a transvestite dressed for the weather, or one with (hopefully) a skirt on under that dead bear.

But its the beard -- if you're trying so hard to dress like a woman, lose* the beard dude :)

* Not that I have anything against beards (or our dear tranny friends, in case you think I'm a bore). Just unibomber ones.

[ Category: / day_by_day ] [link] [Comments]

Day by Day: Do we really need anti-virus applications?
Mon, 17 Mar 2008

Certainly, it has been a crazy month. We've been setting up to sell our house, meaning week after week of packing and moving to storage, repainting this or thats, posing like Stallone while using a caulking gun, and so on. All of these things take precisely 6.348 times longer with a toddler around. We set a date to receive offers on (obviously in the hopes of getting more than one and inducing fisticuffs in the front yard), so hopefully tonight we actually do get an offer and can stop living in a museum..

Oh, our little girl is more than one year old now, and her birthday party (out at a restaurant since our house is trying to be preserved) was awesome :)

Anyway, things will continue to be busy here for a few weeks I'm sure.

A question comes to mind as McAfee notifies me that it is time to renew. (And with them one must be very careful to check if it really is time .. they are highly predatory and nearly evil in their customer relation practices in my opinion. But thats another topic..) The question is -- do we really need to run an A-V application all the time? Obviously, kiddies (or parents of) heading to their favourite .ru pr0n site need many kinds of protection. Computer newbies.. yep. Corporate machines.. check and check. But I'm talking about myself -- I'm not eyeballing bukkake sites, and don't use a GUI mail reader that auto-explodes virii, and know enough about which files to open or not open.. and usually do that sort of thing on a unix box anyway. A-V applications tend to kick up and burn cpu/network at the most annoying times, and certainly blow away a lot of RAM all the time. I don't recall seeing McAfee pop up in the last 2-3 years and report that its intercepted anything bad on its way to my disks.

But of course with security its always advisable to post your guards, since the enemy only needs to attempt to get in once.. you need guards all the time. But.. really, in this environment of Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt that the retailers emit we should use our brains to evaluate our needs, rather than our gutt instincts. I'm naturally a little cautious and paranoid especially with all my source code and so on.. but still. I hate these extortionist A-V companies.

And its a Monday and I can't type for crap.

Oh, and for a great read about the origin of the Atari ST, hit this up

[ Category: / day_by_day / questions ] [link] [Comments]

Day by Day: Just a question..
Wed, 13 Feb 2008

How much paper is in a tree, anyway? And can we modify a Windows print driver so that it can thus calculate and display the tree 'body count' of a print job?

[ Category: / day_by_day ] [link] [Comments]

Dayphil: Alright, so should it be law if no one understands it?
Thu, 31 Jan 2008

I'm sure we've all had the same thought -- people generally want to be honest and hard working, and part of that is doing the right and ethical thing within a society; but a society has laws (which may or may not be ethical in foundation). And laws are there partly to codify what the averageman believes in, partly to promote the party line for the future, and other trickery. But as we've all heard.. sometimes you do not know if you are breaking the law or not, until an action is tested.. in court. But that is a high stakes game since in losing, you could be fined or go to prison.

So how can a society have a legal system so convoluted and impenetrable, that specialists are needed to attempt to comprehend it and yet still not know the outcome of a series of actions? How can people live their lives in a system where they do not know the laws, nor how to interpret them. We just live, and as good and decent people assume the law is on our side.

But isn't that odd? Dieing to defend a society with laws and ethics we don't understand the implications of?

How the heck did that happen anyway?

I suppose back in the day, farmer logic was law and it surely didn't make a lot of sense. But at least it was the 'common sense' (or rule by might, which is well understood too.)

hmrf.

[ Category: / day_by_day / philosophy ] [link] [Comments]

Absurb: A site for cops to bitch when they get ticketed by another cop?
Mon, 28 Jan 2008

Its a strange insight into how some cops think when you can see how they gitch about their fellow officers. Its cool to see a little bit of how they operate in a classy way, and its bizarre to see some who act like children when some mere mortal tries to pull over their holier than thou asses. These seem like the guys who give cops a bad name, but it is an interesting read.

A sample I found amusing..

I really didn't mind the ticket once I knew I was getting one. I've written thousands and is it really that bad?? The thing that bothers me is 1) she showed no respect for me. All the years I have worked, the different units I've been on, the shitheads that I have arrested didn't mean squat to her. I've given breaks before for people doing 19 miles over the limit. I have even let one go for doing 150+ on LSD. She didn't know this and that's the whole idea! She should have given me the break knowing that I go out there everyday and risk my life. I wouldn't have given her a ticket!

See http://www.copswritingcops.com/home.html

[ Category: / entertainment / absurd ] [link] [Comments]

Quote: This one stands on its own
Fri, 25 Jan 2008

The best thing to do when you're already in a deep hole is to stop digging.

[ Category: / day_by_day / quotes ] [link] [Comments]

Life: Must.Chill.
Thu, 24 Jan 2008

I'm a pretty laid back fella. It takes a lot to get a rise out of me.

I should make a New Years Resolution though -- it would be prudent to avoid writing emails or making decisions in the morning after a sleepless night. Those all-too frequent crazy nights damage ones calm.

I mean .. I think of late I have been snappy, and probably complain about sleep dep too much. Ah well. Shit happens :)

[ Category: / day_by_day / anxieties ] [link] [Comments]

Gaming: When given a moment.. what to do?
Mon, 21 Jan 2008

I must admit that I've always been a gamer wannabe. I mean, as a kid growing up I was heavy into tabletop wargames: board games like Risk, Axis and Allies and Supremacy and so on, or wargames such as Battletech. Even throw in some AD&D and Rolemaster for good measure, to help establish my geek cred. Later as I got more into coding the real game began.. well, to be creating games, and far too many BBSes, and games for BBSes.

I pretty much skipped the Super Nintendo and Genesis years and didn't really game much except for a few classics on the Atari ST and early PC... Phantasie, Sim City, Civilization, and Wizardry.. but really, as Tuxedo was heard to say so many moons ago.. "the only real game you need is gcc." (Nerd in-joke of the year.) I'd extend that to be any compiler I could buy or steal, since I was basicly hooked like a junkie on honey. And any SSI or Westwood Associates game. Anyway, I'll stop ubergeeking any second now.

The last few years I've definately indulged here and there, but as always basicly spent most of my time coding.. business applications, backends, middleware, and of course handhelds and games. I've always said I'm a great fan of gaming in the same way a football fan is a fan of that sport. Read the news, follow whats going on, and eat a lot of popcorn, occasionally playing the real thing and getting creamed by the pros.

So I buy lots of games, play them for a night or two, and move onto the next thing.. more coding, or something. Anyway. I like to want to play games but never did actually played them much.. just perpetually had a long list of 'if I only had a few more minutes I'd fire that up and relax.'

Nowadays, I desparately need to relax a little :) But when I do get a few minutes, or even an hour or two (expecting to be interupted a few times therein).. a bit of panic happens. What to do now? A year ago I had my evenings planned.. but now.. uh, what? I'm not used to this 'free time' thing I've heard about..

Other beings are human and chose this moment to watch pay per view movies with their spouse; I try, but sometimes I've just got the itch.. the need to hunt my prey on the battlefield. I should've watched Spiderman 3 with my wife the other night, but I just had to kill some elves. *shrug* Sometimes I'm only half human.

Anyway, that all said .. I still don't have very much time, but the baby does sleep a little bit now (only till 11 or 12, so as to keep us up all night but mercifully she's decided we're allowed to catch a bit of TV before we pretend to retire for the night.) So I've been spending some late night time (theres a lot of that) trying to sort out .. if I was to game, for an hour or two, or maybe just 10 minutes, what should I play?

As a huge retro fan, thats a tough question since its across the breadth of gaming, and not just the last year like most normal schmucks. But at least for this discussion we can narrow to halfway recent titles as I've already installed some retro on my devices.. Dungeon Master 1 and 2, Eye of the Beholder series, Phantasie 2 and 3, Wizardry 7 and 8. I'm good on that count.

For very short matches I can pull out a handheld (as a handheld dev, I have a bunch) so I can fire up Field Commander or Jeanne d'Arc on the PSP, or maybe Ratchet and Clank or something. I'd like to copy over some Battlestar Galactica, or Dr. Who, or My Name is Earl (despite the scientology ties) or this new Terminator TV series. So handhelds and short bursts are covered. This then leaves thoughts for if I have more than a few minutes..

Strategy games; going back to my wargaming youth, I've been a LONG term fan of the Civilization series (such as Civ IV) and other similar games.. Galactic Civilization II (not related to just-Civ) is very good. Going back a few years, the Panzer General or Master of Magic games all good too. Lots of good strategy games out there. (I don't count RTS' like Starcraft strategy at all, but they're good in their own way.. just too fast for these bones nowadays :) I really want to keep my Civ IV love going, but I think I cannot stomach the long games .. when each match takes 10 or 20 hours, thats just more than I can afford.. it'd take me months for each match.

Action; Over the year I did manage to squeeze in a couple must-plays such as Portal and Halflife 2's expansion packs. At 5-6 hours each they only took me a couple months to handle each one (*sigh*), but great times. As such maybe I should keep going into Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty 4.. fantastic looking and playing, and lots of action. Pretty tempting there, but definately need a good block of time (by which I mean an hour or two) for these. Definately on the table still. Maybe Thief III .. stealth games usually let you hide your character and screw off in real life for awhile so thats pretty handy nowadays, and really.. stealth games are not about the action, but about the puzzling -- action is just one of the tools where the player manipulates the world to a useful state. Good times.

I've got a UMPC now through one of my dev channels .. a small PC. Not a PDA per se, since it doesn't run a custom OS like PDAs do.. it runs honest to god full OSes, so can run old games. Not modern ones, but games up through a few years ago might run on it, and still be portable and quiet.. so much so as to be playable while holding a sleeping baby. Win! So this brings in the 3+ year old games... not retro per se, but getting there. Perhaps I need to look into Icewind Dale, try to finish Baldurs Gate, or fire up Neverwinter Nights. Or maybe MAX, Mechanized Assault and Explore. Hmm... so many options.

I'll figure something out. But as you can see.. its more about the choices than the playing. Thats my curse. Why play when you can code, or think about playing?

Course, even just installing a game onto a UMPC (with no optical drive), and running it without its protection freaking out, is a chore. Thats a game, too.

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / life ] [link] [Comments]

Gaming: Console sales up through end of December 2007.. whose winning?
Mon, 21 Jan 2008

It can sometimes be hard to find the information, so I thought I'd copy it here, from my ruthless needs. Swiped from Kotaku.

2007 Total Hardware Sales

Lifetime-To-Date Total Hardware Sales

I think the PSP Slim has that line a lot, but it always sounded like the platform was a fail; in reality, if the DS is flying off the shelves like hotcakes, and the PSP is more than half of DS sales, its by definition doing 'okay.' But with Wii sales as they seem to be doing, watch out XBox 360!

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / statistics ] [link] [Comments]

Resolutions: New Years 2008
Fri, 11 Jan 2008

I overheard someone talking about their resolutions and it reminded me that I'd forgotten to set some new ones this year. I rather liked what I overheard though.. things like: Gain more weight, watch more movies, make fun of the man. Awesome!

My goal for the year is really just one thing -- gain some balance. This last year was of course wonderous but challenging. I'd like to get more sleep even if sleeping in is gone for the next decade (you listening Little G?), catch some TV and movies and relax. More gaming (woot!). Less reading -- I've been surviving the long nights by reading ebooks.. at least 1-2 a week. I'd really like to lose a bit of weight but not through silly diets .. just shaving off a little here or there, and eating better. Eating different. I've already - yes, truth be told I'm shocked too -- managed to give up cola (and I miss it so!)

Ultimately I want to amuse my young daughter, be a big part of her life and raise and educate her as best as I can. But you can't do it 100% of the time can you?

[ Category: / day_by_day ] [link] [Comments]

Tech: Cellphone data plans and how they totally suck in Canada
Fri, 11 Jan 2008

I've often ranted about how incredibly terrible our data plans are in the Great White. I mean, not just bad, but actively terrible .. to the point it probably harms the market as a whole. We're often told that in the US one can score unlimited data for their PDA or smartphone for $30 or $50 a month, where in Toronto you cannot even get unlimited anymore .. and each MB is doled out pennies at a time. In my heart, I know it is simply because even geeks aren't aware how much data they consume in an average normal browsing day, and non-geeks have no idea how to even measure the information. ie: Data plans here are measured in how many Megabytes (MB) you get for $x -- a really big expensive plan might get you 25MB for the month .. and if you're browsing someones photos, you might be pulling down a single megabyte every few photos worth. So an hours browsing, or maybe just a couple youtube videos, and you're down a hundred bucks. _brutal_

Pretty much every Canadian whose looked into it is miffed. This one lad has written a pretty fine article about it, so take a peek:

Angry Oshawa Pilot

BTW, I just have to add -- why is it that writers so love the phrase "high seas" -- where are the "low seas?"

[ Category: / technology / mobile ] [link] [Comments]

EBooks: The future of mobipocket/Amazon?
Wed, 19 Dec 2007

I've always been a critic of ebooks -- not the concept, just the implementations we have so far. And by that, I mean the DRM (and to a lesser extent, the stores since there is a much more limited supply of ebooks than real books, and they tend to cost a lot!)

I can live with the requirement for batteries (if not for page turning with e-ink, but at least for backlighting, say) and so on and so forth, and one cannot argue with carrying a hundred books in your pocket. But as in most forms, DRM is just plain evil. Buying a locked down file means that someday it might be incompatible with some version of the application you need, or perhaps becomes unsupported as the source company goes out of business.. or maybe the book just times out or other silliness. As such, I've been stuck with DRM-free ebooks which are much harder to come by -- a very few stores and titles, or using the Gutenburg project, or converting from one DRM type to a non-DRM type if software is available. Painful.

Anyway, with that out of the way (I should just make a standard template used as a prelude to ebook posts) the question remains -- is any of this dire stuff really going to happen?

Well, maybe, and big too. Consider..

Mobipocket Reader has been around for probably nearly a decade now, supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile (CE, Pocket PC, etc and so on), Symbian and others I'm sure. Amazon bought them a few years back and started moving more content over, so a lot of people took this as a sign of confidence in the platform. I mean, it was hard to get a good catalog of ebooks, and here comes Amazon getting in, so obviously Mobipocket could be a good readewr system to go with.

Fast forward to this month, when Amazon released the Kindle product, a new ebook reader using e-ink. Well, as an ebook consumer I thought I'd take a look at the specs and lo and behold, something as silly as Microsofts PlaysForNotSure is potentially going on -- the Kindle uses a new proprietary format (AZW files or somesuch) downloaded over the air, but also supports _unDRM_ed Mobipocket files. So wait, the latest and newest Amazon product doesn't support their own ebook store, Mobipocket. (ie: You buy a new book, its got DRM on it, and thus isn't usable on the Kindle. By which I mean.. any ebook you've bought from Amazon is only good on the existing devices (PDAs and Windows, say).. but not the new device.

So, is Mobipocket to be phased out? All those customers screwed? Or is the Kindle firmware going to get updated to support the format later?

Who knows, but suffice to say -- this is why DRM sucks.

*sigh* Another year where I'd like to buy some ebooks, but can't.

[ Category: / technology / ebooks ] [link] [Comments]

Ent-Politics: U.S. Priorities demystified
Tue, 11 Dec 2007

After a recent brief trip across the border, I would like to offer up the following:

  1. Firearms (hunting rifles, say) can be found on the shelf (Walmart.)
  2. Alcohol is found on the shelf (every other store.)
  3. Prophylactics are within locked glass enclosures (K-Mart.)

Neo-con agenda explained!

Now, one thing I should add -- crossing into the US via the Peace Bridge and back out via the Rainbow Bridge, there was no line-up whatsoever (great timing eh?) On the way in they looked at our birth certificates and waved us in, taking all of 30 seconds. On the way back into Canada the friendly border agent didn't even take our ID at all. With all the horror stories of security nightmares, it makes you wonder ..

[ Category: / entertainment / politics ] [link] [Comments]

Quotes: One from Blade Runner (the film)
Mon, 10 Dec 2007

Apparently another edition is coming out, this time the Real Final Directors Actual Cut, or something. Blade Runner: Final Cut. Of course, so many good lines but near the end one that cannot be missed:

"I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die."

[ Category: / day_by_day / quotes ] [link] [Comments]

Baby: Raise one for the daddies
Thu, 06 Dec 2007

The time to say this has passed now, by a week, but I did write some of this during The Bleak Days so I thought I'd pollish it a bit and let it out, Chris Tolkien-like.

Now, before I get started, let me just get this out of the way -- we all know women are the heroes of the day - the very stones upon which society is built. Any woman, sick as a dog and with one arm can still get a family ready for school and work and out the door while doing laundry and preparing a dinner for later while paying bills. The man will prick his thumb will be out of commision for a week. Furthermore, my child is also the most beautiful and crafty little baby in the world, bar none. With that, I may continue.

As I mentioned once before, men don't really get recognized over-much for what they're up to in this whole Papa thing. And thats fine, since we're usually the kind of lugs who don't care to be recognized since all we're doing is nothing special.. it is expected, it is the norm, it is merely what we do. Life and all that. Still, I I thought I would spill a little image of life out here, for fun.

The baby was sick for awhile, and teething at the same time. Which is to say she couldn't stay asleep because her nose wus plugged and so couldn't breath unless being held upright (or sitting in a bouncy chair but thats hard to set up and a trifle risky). The poor girl was moaning or crying a lot due to the pain, and it upset her eating and sleep habits terribly. Thats fine for awhile, but this dragged on for weeks, which was something. Sometimes these teeth just give us all a wallop.

So for a few weeks, my day went something like this ... get up (usually a little late I might add), head to work. Work my tail off (near year end it is always like this) and rush home soon as could be to relieve the wife.. a day with a moaning unhappy squirmy baby is a challenge to be sure. Get home, take care of sed child intently (you just have to play with this little bundle, she loves it so much!) until she gets extra cranky and head up to get her to sleep. With luck maybe a cold dinner, but that was merely optional. During this period of time the poor little girl was in such discomfort that it literally took anywhere from two to four hours to get her to sleep.. oh, for sure she might fall asleep for a few minutes, but she'd be back awake, so I'm counting when she'd actually sleep for any length of time. Also for sure is my wife helped out a bit .. it takes more than 2 hands to get sprays into a squirming baby's nose, or to get cough medicine into her mouth and so forth. But all told it was a good through-to-midnight or more to get her to sleep, and almost certainly she'd be up a half dozen times at night. Not too bad all told since we did manage to catch a few hours of sleep (interupted, but still) each night. But the thing that really got to me was the days whizzing by with not an instant to myself. Babies train you to lose the 'selfishness', thats for sure.

Due to a loooong history of being a night person who awakes and sleeps instantly, I'm night warden by choice. Love it :) Still, it was a trying couple of weeks when I'd stumble off to bed at midnight or one, and be up for work at 8am after helping the baby back to sleep two-four times in the night, or having to hold her for another hour or two during the night.

Wow! Now, many nights weren't that bad during this period, but many were.

You might recall my intense dislike of ebooks, mostly for reasons of DRM and interface. Still, if you can get a good book an rtf, txt, html or other actually open format, the DRM argument can be dropped. It is a rare book that you can obtain in sed formats of course, but there are tools for converting forcibly between some formats... so I made the plunge and fired up a very fine book reader on my PDA. (PDA because it is backlit, so I can read at night time or in the dark.) I've always ignored ebooks (I think I blogged about them in the past but if not, I can rant easily enough), but for this purpose they work well -- a baby on your shoulder half asleep or sleeping and you can still read.

I mention this only because, sick as it might be, I've been reading two books a week for awhile, almost entirely at night time. Not short books, either. (OKay, they're not Cryptonomicon either.) The days literally breezed by.. no TV, no chilling time for anything .. just work and sitting in the dark. Crazy times.

At least I've been catching up on some reading .. its been too long. About 9 months :)

Fortunately (for all of us), the baby is only a little sick now and seems to be finishing the current bout of teething -- good for her the little trooper, she doesn't deserve that punishment any more. So the last couple nights we've actually gotten a touch of rest.

Anyway, so there you go, thats the life of a daddy. Women do the hard tasks.. teaching the baby in her early months and all that, not to mention the entire birthing process. But lets not understate what daddies go through, too :) One thing I suppose worth mentioning is now that the baby is better and I have gotten a bit of time to myself, I have forgotten what it is I used to spend my time doing. I mean really..

.. isn't it all about the family now?

Funny how life teaches you the real shit.

[ Category: / personal / baby ] [link] [Comments]

Baby: Testing the limits
Sat, 24 Nov 2007

I think I will write a couple blog entries over the next little while to talk about the hardships of mommying and the usually unmentioned and swept away difficulties of daddying. Crazy stuff really, but perhaps I either need to get it off my chest or its enlightening.. probably more of the former than latter :) Oh and for the neeks out there, I'll post a short how-to on porting code from PSP-Fat to PSP-Slim.

Yes, I know, I should be focusing on Razor (a flashback 'movie' in the new Battlestar Galactica series; I'd not watch it at all except I'm a year behind and well, this fits right into that timeline, so why not?) but alas my time has been so hard pressed and fragmented of late that I cannot focus; I am watching, but will have to take it in again later. Ensign Ro is still an evil wench :) And IKEA still sells BSG merchandise. Oh, I sort of enjoy, but not being hit so heavy wih it, the imagery that on Pegasus they hold the 'phone' upside down, since they only talk into it.. while on Galactica they hold it like a phone, so they can talk and listen too. A not so sublte message. Well done.

The last few days the poor baby has been teething and sick; her nose has been plugged with phlegm and so she cannot sleep very well and thus we spend some large time getting her to sleep, so that she can wake a couple minutes later. Very trying and takes me back to about 8 months ago when she was just a peanut in our hands .. pacing up and down the halls all night long while wishing for her sake she could settle, and for my sake since I .. guilty as it may be, just wanted to sleep for more than a few minutes. Anyway, I noticed something over the last day or two - the poor child has learnt to be afraid of the dark. Our nightlight wasn't sufficient, so with the addition of another one.. my god, she sleeps a little bit more and a little bit easier. The poor girl has suffered so much the last week and a half, it breaks the heart. But this in its own way is cute, and something we can roll with to make her feel better. The other day I spent some 4-5 hours over the night just getting her to sleep. Man.

[ Category: / personal / baby ] [link] [Comments]

Mobile: 2008 will be an interesting year..
Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Its really been a known thing for a few days or a week now, but the official announcement is out -- Goggle has launched Android, its Linux based mobile phone OS platform. This is the foundation with no house on top, but if it proves to be a robust foundation (solid, flexible enough to be ported to many devices, easy to lock down for telcos and easy to develop applications for), it could be a good thing. It'll be fun to watch the next few days as people inevitably compare it to established stacks like Apple's iPhone has (ie: an OS with a relatively complete application suite and a year head start) and the traditional smartphones OSes (Symbian, Palm/ACCESS and Windows offerings.)

As usual, Michael Mace has a very good article on things here -- I really love the closing lines:

It's going to use open source and alliances to suck the profitability out of anybody who creates a proprietary island that it can't target.
It'll be interesting to see if and how Google applies this principle to the upcoming frequency auction in the US.
Or to anyone else who gets in its way.

[ Category: / technology / mobile ] [link] [Comments]

Literature: Pale Gray For Guilt
Tue, 06 Nov 2007

So many topics have come to mind the last few weeks, but just as easily drifted away. On the rough nughts when the baby is gnashing through her growth spurts and clawing her way through the rising waves of inputs, time goes quickly as we cheer her. On the easy nights when she plays away and giggles with fascination at her new found skills, what stone-hearted scoundrel could avoid playing with hose tiny probing fingers? So either way the days tumble by, rocks in a slide. (Last night was a funky night, so I will cop out on the rest of this posting :)

A very good friend of mine who had comforting thoughts a year ago when they were welcomed, resent an excerpt from a novel that was timely then. It is excellent stuff, clear and precise and binding. So I rcord it here for when it might be needed again, and as a mini review .. I've not read the novel but I think I must based on these few paragraphs. Perhaps they will entice you as well. (And if not, go read some Neal Stephenson. He'll mess you up.)

...too many others were gone, and I sought chill comfort in an analogy of death that has been with me for years. It doesn't explain or justify. It just seems to remind me how things are.

Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.

-- John D. MacDonald, _Pale Gray For Guilt_

[ Category: / arts / literature ] [link] [Comments]