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Weather: First Snow of Winter 2005
Wed, 30 Nov 2005

The first snowfall for winter 2005 (as opposed to first snow of 2005 which was doubtless last January) was about a week ago; I walked outside looking for something pretty take a photo of, but using a camera in a cellphone is guartanteed to make the worst of it .. but it did strike me as cute how my footprints in the new light snow looked so much like a certain famous moon landing bootprint. At any rate, here you go..

For reference, the first footprint on the moon's photo is shows as well :)

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Time: Getting Jobs Done
Mon, 28 Nov 2005

Time is a tough issue all around I'm sure - theres never enough of it, and when you do get a spare moment you'd really rather spend it on the couch with your significant other - a person perhaps, or maybe a PlayStation - than getting to work and clearing out the daytimer. Let me be the first to admit that I'm organized enough to see tasks for what they are, and realize that the number of tasks coming in exceeds the number put to sleep. But, as you likely know, I've built a time management system for myself and.. it bloody well works. I thought I'd share.

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Quotes: Words from C. S. Lewis
Sat, 26 Nov 2005

Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

- preface to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

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Larfs: Chuck Norris Facts
Fri, 25 Nov 2005

I hope I'm not seriously late to the game on this one but I just now stumbled across this article. From all those early kung-fu shorts, the Walker show, Delta Force.. the Octagon - so many greatbad films from the past, you have to like ol' Chuck. Well, at least if you're a Gen-Exxoner. My favourite Facts About Chuck Norris could be:

My silly invention of the day (and being silly, likely has been done) is air-conditioned and/or heated headphones.

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Tech: Why Buildings Do Not Have Gargoyles
Sun, 20 Nov 2005

This posting could just as easily be called 'Why do all websites have to be black on white?' but its easier for people to wonder 'Why do all buildings have the same sized door?' In software, there is a transition going on.. a battle in the trenches between the software artist and the software engineer - a battle thats been going on as long as the industry has existed and that has been waged in probably every other industry since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Stated simply - the artist, the cowboy, the path-finder must be replaced by the machine, a process, standards - the quality controlled English-style boiled down variation of itself. While there are pros and cons to both sides of the war, you can be sure of one thing - no one likes to lose a battle.

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Comics: Serenity (aka Firefly)
Thu, 17 Nov 2005

I've been quiet a couple of days (terrible loss I know ;) as I was in training for a certification; I'll talk^H^H^H^Hbitch about that later. For now, I'll just say - perogies are amazing, but perogies are more amazing with meaty-spaghetti sauce. Speaking of tasty segues, it's very delicious watching Sony getting beaten-up in the public media for it's evil Windows and privacy-invading rootkit. For instance, while driving into the office today 680 News-radio featured a brief story about the state of things - though they got all the facts incorrect of course. Wonderful - A tech blog has kicked Sony right in the shins. Lawyers will make their move and perhaps Evil Corporate Bastards will regain just a little of their humanity (we can dream, right?) - and maybe 50 years from now we can look back and say "when we were young and free, at least we got some skin."

I'm still trying to work through the 10 or so episodes of the short-lived Firefly television show - time being what it is - but of the 4 or 5 episodes I've seen so far, I'm loving it. Apparently it ends abrubtly (as the show was cancelled) and the silver-screen movie picks up several years later (in both real world and virtual chronologies), so the three-issue comic set attempts to bridge that.. interregnum. I'll read through them once I finish up with the TV show set and let you know how they go.

Really, I just want a Firefly (the ship) figurine to perch atop my monitor in the office, beside my SDF-1.

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PSP: A Brief Review of GTA: Liberty City Stories
Fri, 11 Nov 2005

I never really played the previous GTA titles (though I did get in some multiplayer GTA1 and GTA2 top-down racing in the past) - Vice City seemed impenetrable to me as I just walked around not knowing what to do (and beating up cops and pimps didn't really scream "fun!" to me.) People have been raving about the series for so long that I thought I'd best take a peek with its most recent incarnation (on the PSP.) - yes, I know, the PSP is Sony and I'm boycotting them, but I did recently get the device so I might as well make some use of it.

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PSP: Armistice Day, and, PSP Specification Confusion
Fri, 11 Nov 2005

Most importantly, this is Remembrance Day and I'm trying to locate someone to give me a poppy; they seem hard to come by today for some reason (which makes me a little ashamed as I didn't go find one yesterday or earlier.) Of course, I'll find one over lunch (yes, I write this at work today which is unusual since I reserve blogging for a home activity... but this topic is important.)

Who observes Remembrance Day? Obviously the Commonwealth nations do, but what of these war-torn countries in the middle-east? I'm sure they've got plenty of days of mourning and the like. Do immigrants to Commonwealth countries pick it up, as they do Christmas? At any rate, I have always sworn that when we finally have children I will impress the importance of this day upon them.. that they will remember their forebears who fought in the Great Wars and other endeavers, and that they will know What Not To Do -- that they will put heavy thoughts into embarking into such terrible activities as war. With things like the Iraq invasion going on, there is no better time to remember what was given for our freedom, and to think on what is being done now with heavy heart.

Read on for some PSP specifications.

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Mobile: How to Bring Developers to Your Shiny New ESD-Portal
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

A little goddess I know asked me what I thought about a new ESD portal that will soon be opening up and I replied with a little diatribe. Perhaps a few of you guys would like to know my thoughts? (An ESD is a online store.)

I can summarize easily: 1) Developers like a big ecosystem; the more stores the merrier (to a point), so that any one store will not wield too much hammer with which to hit people with. 2) Developers have been burnt in the past and are thus mistrusting of new stores until they've established themselves; 3) These two points contradict each other, so life is hard.

If you'd like more details, read on Spider-friend!

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GP2X: A Brief Interview for GP2x.letters zine
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

I've done a tonne of interviews over the years - mostly for my Palm OS software of course, but a fair amount for little gaming magazines or the like. Release an emulator or homebrew game and be popular for a day or two. (Fame, riches.. not here!) Sadly, it only occurred to me late to actually keep copies of interviews around so I don't have most of them on file, but one of these days I'll try and dig up the ones I do have and hoist them up. After all, is not a blog for organizing bits of text? :)

Below is the email-interview (can you call it that?) for a little to-be-zine about the very soon to be released GP2x mobile gaming console. I spewed it out quick before heading into the office, so I'm sure its full of typos.. what can you do :)

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Tech: A simplistic comparison of the GP2x and [X]
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

A lot of people are planning to move over to the GP2x handheld console - be they former or current GP32 (the companies prior device) owners or people coming completely in from the green. As a GP32 owner and fan this is great news -- GamePark (now GamePark Holdings) are fairly clueless in a lot of ways, but (like Commodore!) they know to keep prices low to the ground and encourage third parties to get into the mix. (Yes, you read right, a company who actually encourages you to rip open their devices knowing you'll enjoy it, tell all your friends, and need to buy another when you kill your SMC slot.. right Squidge?)

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Tech: Pocket PC email and ssh (or lack there of) and general woes
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

Alright, so its been one of those weekends. This will be one of those rant postings, so feel free to just ignore it entirely - but let me summarize and say that Pocket PC should be good as a temporary replacement for a laptop, but it isn't so far..

Updated July 25th 2005 - see bottom.
Updated July 26th 2005 - see bottom.

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Pocket PC: When a little is too much...
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

(And not just with brustle sprouts.) Without a doubt, Microsoft's Pocket PC platform is a solid workhorse sporting many components that developers can build upon to create powerful applications. A robust kernel with true multitasking... check. Gorgeous font rendering and high resolution displays... check. Wifi 802.11 and bluetooth both... check. Yadda yadda. The operating system rests upon inspired hardware such as the Dell Axim X50v... and yet I must wonder why there just seems to be so many fewer applications in each genre than in the Palm OS camp. (I am not saying the applications are any less functional -- merely less in population.)

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Pocket PC: Compilers of Rage
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

A busy week means a slow news week so I better get to it! The main topic of the post will be some brief commentary about the state of development tools for PDAs, specifically Pocket PC, in porting Beats of Rage to the platform. But first some quickies (queue in the deedee-deet-deedee-deet news anchor background music): Ditching the 'Geekery' categories and merging those posts into the 'Technology' categories, Coca-cola with lime is delicious, Zot Bandits is still on my mind, and I trimmed the office grass down to half its height and pruned away many of the broken guys in hopes of restoring it to its short lived glory... so far, Prognosis: Negative!)

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Palm: Manage your Palm device's battery - live long and prosper via under and over-clocking.
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

(This quick posting is inspired by a post I made to the shadow-discuss mailing list; just posted a how-to for making Shadow Desktop export templates, too.)

I know, I agree - when you hear the phrase 'over-clock', the mental image conjured is of a desktop PC video card smoking away or sparks flying from the CDROM tray as the CPU melts down. But chip-clocking is a great way to extend the life of both your desktop PC and your handheld devices - so let me explain :) And remember - clocking (be it under or over-clocking) is safe to perform, especially with modern devices that let you do it right from the operating system!

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Palm: Unlocked GSM Treo 650 finally gets an update
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

I'm sure all the Palm OS sites are mentioning this, but I'm pretty happy about it despite some installation pains. The Treo 650's really needed this! Oh, and Darren -- if you're reading -- this definately makes the speaker more audible!

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Palm: A cheap but useful implementation of the standard 'C' stdio library
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

If you're porting a game or application from some OS to Palm OS, you'll almost certainly need a 'fopen' and 'fread' function, or face altering piles of code to match Palm OS's very different conventions. For games and emulators I've found you almost always need fopen and fread, but rarely file descriptor level open or nasties like fprintf and vsprintf. Still, I've implemented most of those crazies as well, though I keep them in other source files than the stdfile.c below.

I've implemented most of these twice -- a private over-complex and full featured version for licensed stuff, and a cheap quickie non-buffered hack version that I use for most everything -- its just so braindead and simple that I am hooked.

Since so many people need it and hate to search through all my projects to find it.. here you go, ready to use. Note: This doesn't include fgets or other fancier (stdarg) functions, or things like scanf or printf.. since emus and games didn't need them. Implementing those is fully doable and I've sent code around to lots of people -- let me know if you need it and I can try and dig it up to post here.

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Palm: Mobile Data Divergence
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

With the release of the PalmOne LifeDrive, we will now have a widely released mass storage PDA-like device. How the public will react, and how they will use the device is yet to be scene, but at least a few things are for sure -- 4GB of data is a hell of a lot to hotsync and back-up. This will alter behaviours as I'm sure people will not want to sit through enormous sync sessions as long lists of Word docs get scanned for changes. As such, sync will either be performed less often or it will be more selective. Folks will opt to sync the PIM apps and maybe a few other crucial apps, but for mp3s and Word DOC's and other fat media, they'll just copy it over in drive mode or using a card-writer with SD cards or the like (much like we do now for mp3s, since Hotsync is too slow for raw data.) The question that pops to mind is this -- if we're all carrying enormous amounts of data (as 2GB SD cards come into sensible pricing ranges for instance), then will people use card writers and drive-mode more often? And if so -- should applications read and edit raw data from local media cards ("VFS") instead of relying on hotsync?

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Palm: Noodling with PalmSource Installer (PSI)
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

Over the last week or so we've had the PalmOne announcement of their new line of Mobile Managers (presumably beginning with the very soon to be announced LifeDrive device), and also the Microsoft announcement of their Windows Mobile 2005 operating system (to be offered in new devices as well as upgrades for some existing WM2003 and WM2003SE devices.) These sorts of announcements always bring out those who will suggest these are the greatest or worst things ever and invariably the competitive side of human nature shows itself via the comparisons of these announcements. (God forbid they wait until the real devices hit the streets.) Also, I have grass!

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Rant: The Payback Blog (re: Sony Being Irresponsible and Probably Criminal)
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

(From the title you might suspect this to be about a Donald Westlake novel - it should be but alas it is not.)

Instead I continue my trend of posting far too many technology rants, but this time its joyous news - the lawsuits against Sony are mounting. God only knows how Sony decided it was a good idea to install rootkit spyware into a consumers PC when they buy music (even aside from ethics, of which Sony evidently has none), but they'll finally get hit in the wallet which might actually get their attention. Cutting to the chase, Sony has been making bizarro-world decisions for awhile now -- after having huge hits with the Playstation and Playstation 2 they apparently decided to use those victories for evil - like the proposed Blu-Ray DVD technology which requires a DVD player to phone home to Sony across the 'net before allowing the DVD to play. Or their newly announced one-player-only technology which prevents a DVD from being played on any player which wasn't the first one it was played on -- take that Blockbuster movie and game rentals! Take that, loaning your purchased media to a friend!

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Rant: Rogers - Payback's a Bitch; Sony.. You're Next; Firefly is good.
Wed, 02 Nov 2005

Obviously, I'd like to actually make a difference to Rogers but being an individual, I cannot; as a consumer, we can only speak with our hard earned cash and so I have.. while Rogers sees fit to charge a pile of cash each month for long distance (and surprise us all with it, no less), Bell was entirely happy to waive all monthly fees in order to make Rogers less happy. (I do not delude myself that Bell did it to make me any happier.) Switching long distance is easy, so why not? Its not like its a bank account.. thank god I keep my money in in buried toilets.

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Daily: Life, Being Frazzled, and, Yes - I Really Did Make an Inukshuk from Jam
Tue, 01 Nov 2005

(Awhile back I mentioned the idea of making an Inukshuk out of jam packets. It had occurred to me one morning while sitting in a a breakfast-jernt, that the jam and peanut-butter packets looked like excellent building blocks. As every geek knows, anything that can be built with must be built with, so I began trying to construct various things, but it turns out the packets are badly weighted and too slippery to produce useful things. Still...)

From the too-stressed-and-fealing-tightness-in-the-chest department. Er, wait, thats.. from the whining department :)

I've not posted much in the last week or two .. its just been too nuts. I realize now that one of the great dangers of being too busy (or being burnt-out again?) is that the more wiped out you are, the less tasks you can handle concurrently. Normally we can all handle all manner of simultaneous jobs - having to book appointments, working insanely, preparing dinner, washing laundry and dishes, and still designing some complex new code in our head - but toss in day after long day of such things with high intensity and not enough sleep - Boom! - Instead of being able to juggle dozens of things at once you're frazzled with just a couple of things. Worst of all, the little things that'd never phase you before - the grit in the oil - are suddenly stressing you out and leading you to annoy everyone around you.

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