Codejunkie

Gaming: Techradar interviews me about homebrew and commercial game development on the upcoming GP2X Wiz

Looks like a number of things were editted out (which is fine, I ramble a lot), but I had hoped one comment would slip through; I'll paste it verbatim here. (Maybe down the road I will paste the whole of the interview, but this is for them so they can have it for awhile before I post anything.)

# 5. A lot of people would suggest
# that the GP2X:Wiz will once again be a console very popular with those
# who use emulators or pirate games, and won't actually be interested in
# a dedicated software base. How would you respond to such a statement?

        I must nit on your question; I wouldn't suggest that previous GPH
machines have been popular with those who pirate games; emulation and
homebrew yes, but piracy of published GP titles has always been _Very_
frowned upon in the community; mentioning it will get you banned from the
various websites, and discussing even how to crack the DRM on GP32 cards
was a hushhush secret affair so the 'newbs' wouldn't catch wind of it. I
expect the same for Wiz games -- with such a tight community the publc is
protective of their developers, and knows they and GPH live or die on the
economy of it all.

        If you're suggesting emulation itself thrives on pirating games
then I can only say that they are not one and the same -- ask me another
day if you'd like my essay on it but suffice to say you can enjoy
emulation to a large extent very much without breaking any laws.

        Anyway, ranting aside --

Youch, looks like my fear for this came to life - the piece got picked up (which is good) on other sites and affiliates, but for some the spirit got lost; when boiling down many of the words it has gotten turned into a "Jeff thinks its a failure" piece. That isn't what I had intended at all - its a homebrew machine - its not going to take on the PSP and probably isn't meant to. they're working up for that fight, but this isn't the time. Its like saying a bicycle isn't going to take on a car... we know that. Its fine and it doesn't suggest bicycles suck. *sigh* See, I did say..

        The Wiz will be enormously popular for emulation and homebrew
fans, and I expect people will buy a title or two of commercialware if it
is priced well, and is priced to the quality. Prices have been climbing in
gaming arenas, but as we can see with Apple's iTunes App Store .. keeping
prices modest can really boost the numbers.  Now, remember there are
multiple sides to economics -- on the one, you want to make people smile,
and enjoy your title, and keeping prices low does that.. and gets the
title out to more hands for more smiles. But accountants will be quick to
point out that if you half the price and sell 2.5 the quantity, you still
are ahead.. so karma, and profits. The trick is finding the balance.

        So I do believe there is a market, but I don't expect its a huge
one.

        I've never seen statistics for sales for the previous GPH
machines, but from the forums we do see people buying the games; and if no
one bought any, Play Asia and so on wouldn't have kept stocking them
right?

Another piece that got cut out; I know its a really lame analogy, but its my lame analogy. I've used it in a dozen interviews over the years, and it always gets cut. They know it sucks, but damnit, my quest on earth is to have someone publish my lame analogies :)

        For a decade I've been telling people my theory -- if you go to
the supermarket and look in the butter aisle you'll see a dozen brands of
butter; sure, most people buy the top 3 brands, but theres room for a
dozen. Getting into the top tier is exponentially hard, but getting on the
shelf at all.. thats doable; hard, but doable. Theres no shame in being
#10 out of a hundred products, as #10 gets on the shelf. Some might call
it bottom feeding, but those of us working our tails to the bone 80 hours
a week like starving musicians - just to get onto the tiniest edge of a
shelf against the big guys.. we call it survival, fighting the good fight.

        This is how Quake mod teams suddenly end up being game developers
themselves; ten years of bottom feeding and finally getting their break.

        GPH was a nobody with the GP32, and they're getting more known
with their increased Linux support on the GP2X series; they're still a
nobody, but they're less a nobody. Slashdot posts about them now, but
thats a logn way from pretending Sony will take notice. (I don't know how
big a name they are in Korea. Perhaps I am woefully unaware!)

PSP: Why 'mod' (reflash with customer/hacked firmware) your PSP?

This comes up on occasion, so I thought I might put a reply here rather than in private; doubly so since I've always pushed for folks to consider ethical and legal implications of their actions and have probably ranted on it before. (ie: As software developers, I believe we must be careful to do the Right Thing, since the implications of our work could cause much aggravation or annoyance. This is why it should always default to 'No' to the question 'Do you wish to format your hard drive?' More, it comes up with increasing frequency in todays busy business world and sometimes we have to stand up for the user and consumer, right?)

Anyway, for purposes of this discussion, 'modding' refers to simply reflashing your PSP game consoles firmware.. something Sony will ask you to do all the time, as they publish updates. The trick is, you can reflash it with Sony's official firmwares, or the more questionable firmware 'mods' you can download online.

First.. why would you do it, knowing there is some risk you might do it wrong and 'brick' (kill) your device?

(Note that nowadays there is little risk; even if 'bricked', you can usually unbrick your device trivially.)

Principles: When you buy yourself a Ford Mustang, you can put in any seat covers you like, not just what Ford tells you; this seems obvious, but in electronics the vendors are increasingly locking you down. The public at large tends not to care since it is but a small thing, and they're getting used to it. But taken in the light of your car, it would be intolerable. The essence of it is .. if you've bought something and fully own it, you can do to it what you like pretty much. Its the Tinkerer's Right. You can take it apart, and if you break it, its your problem :) Where would our society be if we never fiddled, improved or fixed anything ourselves? There was a time when we changed our own oil in the car..
Practical: Sony artificilaly limits some aspects of the system, to be pricks. Consider -- video playback is low resolution and low quality, unless it is from officially purchased UMD videos. So while they advertise the device as a multimedia playback unit, and encourage you to play videos on it, they make them crappy. Thats pretty bad behaviour on their part, and borderline questionable to boot .. the old bait and switch. Anyway, using a modded firmware will ditch this little limit and enable full video playback from UMD or from your own video files. This is not the only little shaft that Sony has built into the system for their benefit, and not yours.
Practical things: You can run homebrew, which is to say .. people release free applicatons, be they games, utilities or whatever, all the time. With the official firmware, you cannot run these. Sony is anal. This is the main treat .. you can play peoples new little games, ported games, and so on. Some great stuff (and a whole lot of crap.) More, you can develop yourself with an open source SDK .. you can write your own little games and explore your handheld console. Heck, this could be your break into the gaming industry, right? (Try the open source gp2x console as well, since it just runs Linux and SDL; life is easier there, and no fighting with the company. Watch for the upcoming Pandora console as well, at www.openpandora.org!)
Practical: You can run 'disc images' (.iso and .cso files); this is not piracy. UMD disc games boot and load slow and eat a lot of battery power. Usually this is fine but some games take their sweet minutes to load, plus numerous load-times in-game which gets on your nerves; further, UMD games take up a lot of space so you can't generally care more than 1 with you. There are simple utilities to let you record the UMD disc into a .iso or file listing, and then you can boot them on your modded PSP. This is handy as hell. I've recorded a dozen of my UMD games and can keep a rotation of a half dozen on my Sony memory stick. All legal, and certainly ethical and useful. (If you go giving your .iso files to other people, you are then participating in piracy. I'm super small peanut, but I'm a developer who makes a living selling software. Please don't pirate it :)

There are more things as well, but that should cover why most people do it. I'm not going to go into how, as it can be easy or a right pain depending on your skill set, if you know someone who has done it, and so on. Ask me if you want some instruction and maybe I can sort it out for you but in general I worked out some methods for myself and do that. I don't really follow 'the scene' as it takes a lot of time, and 3/4 of the sceners are idiot kiddies :) (This is one thing I've commented on before.. when you get into some of these things for all the right reasons, you still have to be mindful that others are less kocher than yourself, like going to a seedier hotel.)

Anyway, all the above is just sillyness.. I really only wanted to pass a few notes to a friend, which would be:

"EBoots" are the executables in PSP land. When you build a homebrew app, you're releasing an EBOOT file which is somethign the PSP will recognize as runnable. In general you create a directory on a memstick in /PSP/GAMES/ such as /PSP/GAMES/WANKER and stick your Eboot.pbp in there. Most homebrew comes in a zip file with the needed hierarchy to make it obvious.
.iso is same as any other .iso around; a .cso is a compressed .iso, and there are stdio source files floating around for a tool to convert iso to cso and back, which can be handy; some people will 'rip' a UMD to .iso and attempt to extract the movie parts and such to reduce size, but thats work. I just rip the UMD to a .iso, and then run it through the .cso converter on my FreeBSD box, and good to go. Can reduce a file by some 10-50% depending how lucky you are. Anyway, you stick your .iso files in a top level directory .. /ISO or something I forget. Since the bay I've not had time to be ripping UMDs so have suffered carrying one around (Indiana Jones LEGO lately natch), but if you've got the time, slap your .iso's on the memstick.)
Note for PSP Fat/Slim differences; the PSP Fat (original heavier) unit had less protection in it, so applications could run in kernel or user mode, among other things. The display driver and such is also a little different and so on. In essence, in moving from Fat to Slim, Sony created a branch for people who are hitting the hardware more directly or using the open source SDK which assumed it could work a certain way. Naturally UMD official games were not impacted. Anyway, when looking for homebrew, look for more recently updated versions of an application, or ones noted as being Slim versions or Slim compatible. Some applications built before the Slim existed only work on the Fat models, but most applications of note have long since been converted to work on both, or come in two builds.
You might see references to firmware 1.50, since it was the most 'open' of the official firmware.. easily exploited. To this dat, PSP Fat owners's can have their modded firmware trick the system by keeping a copy of 1.50 on their system as _well as_ the more recent version of the firmware, and then booting up homebrew under the old firmware kernel, while booting new UMDs on a more recent version (essentially.) For PSP Slim, you _can_ do this, but its a little tricky and generally not needed since everything is updated to the newer kernel versions anyway, as mentioned above. But I thought I would clarify.

So all this verbiage above serves merely to confuse anyone reading. But there you go.

Retro: EAMON, one of the earliest CRPGs

The term CRPG refers to Computer-based Role Playing Games, such as the current Oblivion, but tracing back through Eye of the Beholder and back to Temple of Apshai and so on. The earliest examples were more text based due to their mainframe origins, and later the slow transmission rates of modems. Enter EAMON .. I've not done any history lookups here but its going back to the Apple 2 days, and I experienced it on the almighty Atari ST .. so back around 1987 or so I'd guess I fiddled with the system.

As fans of "Choose Your Own Adventure" style books (Steve Jackson ftw!), my brother was an aspiring adventure author at the time, putting together little adventure novellas on pads of paper. (You number each page, and at the end of a given page you have options that give you page numbers to turn to should you take that action. The pages are randomized to make it hard to guess where a given series of actoins may lead. Ultimately there are numerous plot endings, but usually more than a few times your character gets killed along the way, forcing you to re-start. Fun stuff.) I remember going through the Public Domain archives of local groups, and through BBS file listings all over the province (racking up huge bills all the time through long distnace charges), trying to find (well, to be honest, pirated games) some adventure authoring tools for him. There were a few systems, including EAMON, but they were just too complicated for us. Still, I remember playing a few EAMON games.

Well, t'other day I stumbled across EAMON Deluxe, a port of the EAMON system to DOS a decade back. The beauty of this is that you can still run it today on your modern PC (and hopefully someday he'll release the source so that it can be brought to Mac, Linux and so forth.) You could always fire up an emulator (Atari ST, Apple 2, C64 and so on) and play the games there but this makes things pretty easy.

Further, the lad has pulled all the many EAMON adventures together into a big archive, including user supplied reviews of the adventures. Now, I should note that EAMON was not a game.. it was a system, supplied with a few simple text adventure games. But the author supplied tools to make your own adventures and many did.. so there are literally hundreds of additional goofy little text adventures. (These are of different style than the pure "IF" Interactive Fiction games I've gone on about before; those are pure adventure games with no dice rolling, no skills per se and include such classics as Zork or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. EAMON is one of the first CRPGs, in that you play a character who increases in powers and gold and gear and so on over playtime, and also is a less lofty academic pursuit; the EAMON gamelets are not novellas in adventure form, but early examples of kill-and-loot games.) Fun for short bursts, which hits a certain spot in my heart.

One facet of the system I admire is this .. you have a character and you pick an adventure to play through; the character persists between adventure gamelets.. so while you might be in a fantasy gamelet (the majority) one time, the next could be sci-fi. The EAMON system defines the system, and suggests certain damage levels.. so while a new player might have 20 hit points before dieing, a slight damage hit is 1 damage, while a heavier stroke is 2 or 3 points, say. So you take your character including gear game to game and grow him over the lifespan, regardless of the actual adventure the character is in.

That is pretty ahead of its time.

Anyway, if you want to try a quck text hack and slash game, that plays and feels like a light text adventure, and definately hardcore retro.. EAMON could be just the thing.

I may just have to look around for some source.. porting this to a handheld could rock my socks :)

Day by Day: Weeds, I has them.

Remember back to those halceon days of youth, running through the lush spring grasses of the park - your shoes off and long forgotten, the wind in your hair and a smile on your face. Sometimes you spy a dry patch in the grass and go around, and other times you stumble over an ouchy, a little flat weed that is prickly and annoying.

The yard in the new house was those prickly weeds Trifid style.. a few feat high, dense, and occupying a hundred square feet. My nemesis. Like Detroit.

Most of it is gone now, but it took me a mean weekend of digging, toiling, pulling, and making arcane gestures. Oh, for sure those prickley bastards took their vengeance on my hands, through the armor of my workgloves, but they're baking now.

Kill you filthy!

Midpoint Void. A MUD.


>

An old man leaves east.

> n
The Prancing Pony Inn
The room is dimly lit, the only light coming from the blazing fireplace, and a
few lamps hanging from the rafters. The bar is just to the right of the
entrance, and a sign has been posted on a pillar beside it. On a good day, this
room is filled with all sorts of travellers and residents of Bree, and many
races can be picked out of the crowds. At times, it can be hard to see in this
room through all the smoke and poor lighting conditions.
A barman watches you calmly, while skilfully mixing a drink.
The storyteller is sitting here, drinking beer and telling tales.
Exits: south, west, up.

> rent
Sorry, but you cannot do that here!

> up
The Inn's Rooms
You have entered a medium-sized room with solid wooden floors. You see a
large cheerful fireplace on your right, and a large desk at the far end of
the room. Behind the desk stands a man who cautiously acknowledges you.
Behind him lies a corridor of rooms for people who can afford them, and
whom the Innkeeper should trust.
A heavy iron key with a large handle has been left here.
A large bulletin board, entitled "News of Arda", is mounted here.
Barliman Butterbur, the innkeeper, offers you a room in his inn.
A brown donkey watches the surroundings, perhaps looking for a chance to graze.
Exits: down.

> rent
Barliman tells you 'It will cost you 5 copper pennies per day.'
You have enough money for three days.
Barliman stores your stuff in the safe, and helps you into your chamber.

Connection closed by foreign host.

Books: _The Bank Shot_ by Donald Westlake

No doubt I've gone on about Mr. Westlake in the past (or should have) -- truly his works form an astounding body of fiction that really everyone should have a taste of. I can only say that, fortunately for the humble reader, he has written and continues to write so many works that you will never truly run out - and for the completionists among us, much of his work is now out of print and can be great fun to track down. How many times in the past have you caught up to an authors latest work and waited half a decade for the sequal, and then found another one in the wait? With Mr. Westlake and his sydonyms you could start with books done many decades ago, only to find out he pops out a book a year .. go forward or back, you'll never keep up to the man.

Of the several dozen books I've read from the man, they are generally even.. highly consistent pacing (always a fast read since of course you can barely stand to put them down), always crackling and witty dialog, always very human characters -- likable heroes, bad guys you cannot wait to get their upcomings and always some absolutely perfect caper scenes.. be they amusing or action packed.) Choose Donald Westlake for his capers-gone-wrong or other works, or the Richard Stark alias for more serious crime noir fiction.. capers going right.

Just go read some. I'll wait. Go.

Anyway, I just wrapped up Bank Shot, a caper in the Dortmunder series (which is under Westlake, not Stark) from awhile back. Another great caper with familiar characters doing their jobs and hanging about at the O.J. Bar .. and some truly amazing scenes. Few 'comedy' books have ever evoked an actual real world laugh from me before, but this one had it.. action, dialog and a couple so well crafted scenes I had to tell my wife about them. I'm going to tell non-reader folks around my office about them. I'm going to look in a mirror and tell yself about them for Crom's sake.

Oh, I suppose I should summarize a little.. in Bank Shot, the gang comes across a bank that is being rebuilt, so for a short time the bank operation is being run from a heavy mobile home across the road while the main building is under construction. Suffice to say the mobile bank is locked down.. security guards, no wheels under the home, cement walls to hold up the unit and so on. But the gang is going to steal it. The whole bank.

As readers, we are in a lucky position.

Writing: Some advice for writers

A friend of mine was describing a trap that some-or-many authors get in.. the middling author trap: Whereby you are moderately successful in the past, but not likely to produce the next Harry Potter and sell-through millions of books. As such, the publishers are more interested in new blood (rolling the dice to possibly find the next Harry Potter emitter) or known blockbuster blood.. thosre souls in the middle, cannot get published. Fascinating little shaft from an industry I know little about. Anyway during the discussion he noted a message board where some writers were discussing.... authory things.

I'm sure there are many very good threads but in particular I have this one - a very good short read with some thoughts on the writing processw, how to get published and so on. Clicky!

Absolute Write

Linux: Ubuntu - wtf with the compiler?! (Or, apt-get install build-essential doesn't work)

Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) are very popular Linux distributions, regarded as being both flexible and easy to use for newbies, and still usable by those of us old in the tooth with Unix-and-friends systems.

But get this -- the current Kubuntu distribution DVD includes the gcc compiler (good!), but does not include the required files to actually make use of it (for C coders, things like stdio.h are missing.) I mean, the inclusion of the C compiler is questionable .. either include it and dependancies, or none of them and require a developer package to be installed. But actually including the compiler in a broken state? _Wow_.

Anyway, being someone who has been through this with older Ubuntu's, and Debian and others, I just figured I'd do the old "apt-get install build-essential" and be done with it. Again I was shocked to see "build-essential not found".. Wait, what? Seriously?

Turns out the installer sets up the apt-get repository list to a dozen sundry places, none of which are carrying the developer stuff? Or perhaps I just needed to run an 'apt-get update' first.. only now just occurred to me (but if so.. why wouldn't the distribution have included it, if its including things in the repository list?)

Fine, whatever says I, but then wondered.. why wasn't it pulling it from the DVD image? Oh, the installer by default doesn't mount the DVD image which I suppose makes sense, given people might well have yanked it out. After poking around, it would seem the suggested incantation is..

Pull from the DVD image

sudo apt-cdrom add
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Seriously, before you can build Hello World, on a Unix-like machine, you have to jump through a few hoops. That first apt-get should just work. And don't include gcc-broken to begin with. It just seems so odd to have such obvious and trivially repairable things screwed up in a major Linux distribution in this day and age. Wow.

Gaming: Age of Conan MMORPG

Updated end of month; see below

(Aside, I'm working on a new, extra crappy simple blogging system. Fun stuff for a couple hours.)

World of Warcraft pretty much took over the "MMORPG" (multiplayer life-destroying role playing games) market, with millions of players (literally.) Thankfully other companies have attempted to get into the market as well, with most being destroyed in the process.. but competition is good. Funcom's Age of Conan is the new darling on the block, the one that will possibly dent WoW a trifle (not likely can anything dethrone WoW besides apathy which will come in time, but if any game is to get on the radar it will be AoC, or perhaps the upcoming Warhammer Online.)

AoC does a number of things right, and a whole lot of things wrong.. but in this particular market that is more the norm; the UI needs work, there are lots of bugs, etc and so on but it will evolve over time, if the players give it that much rope.. and with the voume of units sold (already a million IIRC) then it should have the momentum to carry on for awhile. Good.. competition is good, and they at least are innovating in a few ways (not many, but a few.. enough to keep things fun. Good job Funcom!)

Parenting: Rules to parent by

A friend of mine pointed me to this instructional article for new fathers; read with the utmost of concentration!

Hit up Skepchick

Day by Day: Seriously, wtf squiddy

Swiped from here

FamilyTech: Review: Wee Ride bicycle seat for kids

(Aside; I just described something to someone and liked the analogy, so thought I would repeat it here. Maybe its wanking but here goes -- I was describing one of the reasons I like to code so much, and so many free games and tools and so on; I compared myself to a 'chef' - as someone who likes to code "for other people", as a chef likes to cook for other people. There is a pleasure in the act itself, to seeing life come from nothing, to achieving the desired goal and all that.. but there is a joy also in making something from nothing and giving it to other people to also enjoy. So there you have it, at heart I'm an entertainer of the geek sort. A techsihibitionist?)

I'd like write up a full and lengthy review of the Wee Ride bicycle seat but let me be a little brief; essentially though it is a 'front mount' seat, which is to say it sits in your lap as you bicycle, so that a small child (40 pounds and less it suggests) can go biking with you, relatively safely. For this sort of device there are a few main options -- the common rear mount seat, the bicycle trailer/chariot, and the front mount seat.

At first I wanted to narrow down and the front mount appeals to me much more than the others -- the rear seat is traditional around North America but means the poor child is stuck looking at your back or side to side the whole trip (which seems dangerous to me with the child wanting to tip themselves over to see!), and of course you cannot much see the child should they cry out. (They are on the other hand protected from anything you might bike into such as tree branches or bugs in the air and so on.); the trailer can be cute (certainly everyone loves to wave at them as you go by right?) but shares similar issues as the rear mount seat.. it worries me that you cannot directly see the child, that something might run into the trailer behind you, or that you drag it into something :) Still, those are low chances, so trailers are a good option I believe.. and further, the better ones can double as pushcarts with an extendible handle at the back. Still, for my goal of just hopping on the bike and getting around, heading to the park or even to do small chores, the front mount seems ideal.

As to which brand, there seem to be a half dozen various seats that can be found; in my immediate area there are only a couple available, mostly at expensive bike shops. So while I did various reviews online and decided I liked the Wee Ride, it turned out to be readily available at Toys-R-Us and Canadian Tire, so that made the brand decision easier.

The price on Wee Ride is very good, certainly a very good value IMHO -- for a little plastic seat and mounting bar they're making some $$$ -- but for all the enjoyment we get out of it, $69.95 CDN seems a very good price. (Factor in you must buy a toddler friendly helment for about $25 CDN.. a helmet that is slightly different than a small child helmet.) (The seat was $69.95 at TrUs while being $89.95 at CanTire, fwiw.)

Installation really was quite simple -- theres a bar that you bolt on under your handle bars on the post, and onto your seat post. The bar extends as needed to fit various bike sizes (male or female styled), and bolts on using O-clamps so should fit on pretty much any bike; the construction of the bar is very good. The seat itself just has a single thumbscrew to attach it to the bar, which seems a little weaksauce to me .. but the advantage is the seat can be removed in one minute, should you wish to bike without the child carrier in place, which seems a good feature.

My only real complaint then is the buckles on the seat .. I need to adjust them tighter perhaps, but while looking around or fidgeting my 15 month old daughter can wriggle out of half the harness, though the waste belt stays good and tight on her. Furthermore, while in motion the drivers arms are cuddling around the seat, so theres minimal chance she could possible slip out.

As to seat positioning -- you might worry having an extra 25 pound child monted on the bar would raise the center of gravity and unbalance the cycle, but it seems not a problem; they suggest carrying a bag of flour around for a minute to get used to the weight, but in pratice it took me all of 5 seconds to be peddling around, no problem, turning and braking on hills and such. No problem whatsoever with balance (and I've not biked in years!) Furthermore the seat is not uncomfortable -- your arms go arond the sides to the handle bars no problem (though it might be weird on a 'road bike' with curled horn handlebars, but on my T-bar mountain bike, no problem. You do peddle a little wide, so your knees aren't near the seat.. so you lose a little power. Better exercise, and practice for when you want to waddle..... All told, fine!

Summary - the Wee Ride might not be absolutely perfect, but it is a Very Good value for the money, and is extremely fun to have. Did 10km or more last night to the park and back, and tootled around the area to explore. With my daughter. How awesome is that? And everyone you pass waves and giggles since it is so adorable.

VM: using VMWare's vmware-player for free virtual machines, installing from Live CDs or isntall CDs, and so on. And Parallels, too. Kubuntu.

This short posting might be way over the top for some people; thats okay.. if you don't want to know about virtual machines, you're probably better off :) I just wanted to be able to run Kubuntu (a Linux distribution) under Windows.

A virtual machine is a software application that within itself pretends to be a machine of some sort; an arcade game emulator is an application you run that within itself looks like an arcade machine so those games can run within it. VMWare is a company who writes a virtual machine engine that allows you to run a Windows or Linux or whatever 'real computer' within itself.. on your computer. While at first you might just think this an asinine experiment, to us IT nerds it can be quite beneficial.. instead of having 5 actual PCs on your desk, you can use one good one running a half dozen virtual machines within itself.. handy for software testing during development, or for running many servers within one (and when one virtual server dies, you can just restart the virtual machine application for it.. much easier than rebuilding a new physical machine.)

Anyway, in the past I was a big fan of VMWare -- rock solid. Of late a competitor has come out - Parallels - originally for Mac and now also for the PC. (There are others, and various open source options as well. But for my purposes I'm talking about the big boys here.) I tried Parallels on my Mac a couple years ago and it seemed okay, but I never much got into it as I was trying to operate it via a remote desktop connection, and Parallels could never get the mouse to work right. (They claim its due to acceleration on the machine at my fingertips, factored against the mouse acceleration on the machine I was logged into, against the mouse acceleration of the machine being emulated. I think they're jut lazy.)

Parallels is very inexpensive (say $60CDN?), so when I had need of something recently I thought to jump on their Windows build. Tried to install a Kubuntu 8 into it, and failed. Tried Kubuntu and Ubuntu 7.. failed. Saw a pile of posts online about CD emulation problems and fiddled with many options but in the end.. many hours spent, and no results. Sucks. So probably a good tool when it works, but if it cannot handle installing one of the most popular Linux distributions... it has issues still. Fine.

So what to do, after having already popped a few dollars for Parallels? VMWare Workstation is more expensive ($180 give or take CDN), and I was already in for Parallels. Now, don't get me wrong.. I really like VMWare, so I am seriously considering popping for VMWare Workstation. Again (I've bought it 10 years ago, too.) But we just moved, and I'm very much broke right now.. but fortunately, VMWare has a free offering -- the VMWare Player.

VMWare Player lets you run a virtual machine that someone else has created. I started to get myself confused though -- what is the difference between created or not, for installation of an OS on a blank machine? Are they really just talking about paying $180 for the version which knows how to create the virtual machine description/configuration? If you're bandying about a full install, then it makes sense.. given the disk image, just run it in VMWare Player. But for installing a fresh OS ... what is 'created' versus not 'created'? A fully created blank machine cannot be much work, right? (One can aqssume Workstation also includes administration tools and so on and so forth.)

Turns out I am right.. I cast my eyes around for details on what makes up a VMWare descriptor, to see if I could just create one by hand (that is null and empty), and see what VMWare Player does with it. Empty disk image files can be found in various places online or created using freeware tools. You can specify a Ubuntu (say) Live CD as the virtual CDROM. All you need now is the virtual machine description file .. it would seem the commercial VMWare product really just creates this file, and the empty disk images (and administratoin and so forth).

In a few web forums I found references to this snippet.. create 'foo.vmx' and paste in the following. I've noted some customizatoins you might wish to make.

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.filename = "Ubuntu.vmdk"		# name of disk image to use
memsize = "256"				# pretty small, maybe need to increase it
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"

#ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"	# use this pair of lines for actual CD drive
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso" # use this (fixing filename) for an ISO
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "Ubuntu"
guestOS = "Ubuntu"
nvram = "Ubuntu.nvram"
MemTrimRate = "-1"

ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:7e:06:58"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"

uuid.action = "create"

checkpoint.vmState = ""

Simple store that file alongside the disk image, and point to the right .iso .. and boom, your free VMWare player can now create a VM for Ubuntu or whatever you should like to install there. Kudos to John Bokma, the apparent head vampire for this VM description file.

Armed with this setup, I installed Kubuntu 8 into the VM; VMWare Player is clever enough so that networking works from the virtual network card, so running web browsers and so on within the VM works fine.

UPDATE: Rickard informs me of a website that builds vmx files for you -- how interesting is that? Check the site out here: http://www.easyvmx.com/

Moving: Sentimental Old Fool. SOF. Thats me.

So today is it -- the last day I own my old house. Thats cool, I'm with that now, and the new folks are pretty decent people. A couple last things to pick up there so I guess my wife and I can do a pop bye to say goodbye to the bushes and whatnot.. that might be hard in a way to admit to myself I'll never see it again, cept as I peek around the corner when picking up my old misaddressed mail. Maybe we'll have a house warming here and have the new residents and the old neighbours over .. everyone was pretty cool and could be nice to keep up with them.

I had to go meet the new folks at my old place, and it made me realize something though --

Its not that I'm selling my house, abandoning it to the vultures; oh no, it is still my house and always will be. Its just the house has adopted a new family, new pets for it to take care of and raise. Right? I'm proud of our old house.. it grew up pretty responsible didn't it?

Moving: Inching closer..

The process is being dragged out a bit, but we inch closer. I'm feeling better about things.. turning back to my normal self; the world is sunny and bright and I'm happy with my life. I will always miss the old place, but thats okay now. Growing up a little, I guess. (Always figured you did your growing up as a kid, but I guess once in awhile you grow up again, much later :P)

When I look at the empty old place (I keep being made to go back for various sundry reasons :/), it reminds me of good times -- when we moved in. We took possession just before we got married .. we were young, the world was open in front of us, we got our first house .. very good, very exciting times. I suppose thats why I've been melancholy, right there -- it is hard for times now to compete with such powerful moments as those. But then, birthday party for my daughter will be cool in a year too, right? :)

Moving: Almost the end..

(The end of the move, the end of the old place, the begin of the new one.. not really sure how to title this one.)

OKay, so I'm feeling a little better about it today, hopefully be my old self again soon. Today is Monday and we spent the weekend doing some important things.. Saturday my wife cleaned the old place, which was a cleansing experience for her .. to remove the 'us' from the old place and make it fresh for the new people. Yesterday I had some simple wiring to do there (swap a light fixture we wanted to keep and so on) and we ended up there as a family and watched my daughter wander around the old place a bit. That choked me up of course, since really she is a big part of my attachment/fixation I think .. she seemed confused a little at first, but then crawled up the stairs and stood up and wandered straight into her old room, then into the old office beside it, and then into our room and the bathroom .. very purposeful it seemed to me. Like she was noticing the differences.. it being familiar, but all the furniture missing. Or perhaps she wondered if it was just a similar place to the one in her memories. But she did remember, a week past .. but I wonder how long until she just forgets the place entirely? We videotaped her wandering, which was nice .. yet another short video for me to pine over in my mind, and have to look at some day down the road.

And yet today, here I feel better; perhaps it helped to see her happy in the new place, and not crying or anything at the old.

Or that in my head I'm rolling around the idea that yes, I really do think it was a wise move.. that this is a better area to raise a little girl in. (It was the right thing to do, wasn't it? *Sigh*) I still cling to a few things ... I'm waiting for the video tour guys to get me a DVD of the old place, and I did asked my agent to put a watch on MLS for the old place, so that if it ever goes up for sale again we might actually find out.. twould be nice to buy and then rent the place out... (Or is that creepy of me?) Anyway, all part of the minutia my brain comes up with to torture itself.

Anyway, the big night of handing over the key to the lawyer is Wednesday, which I'm sure will freak me out a bit; the new folks actually take over on Friday, so I'm sure Thursday will be annoying, and Friday will piss me off knowing they will be in my house. But then the weekend will be over.. I think all these times I've had to revisit the old place to move this or that, or perform some duty or another, has kept it a fresh wound.

Anyway, last week a friend of mine mentioned something which was well observed .. that when you buy bigger properties and homes there is a simple truth that there is always more to do; more land and space is more chores .. more yard work, more cleaning. Perhaps some of my melancholy from last week was due to the worry of all that maintenenace when we are already strapped for time. Perhaps we need minions.. a maid or yardbuoy to take care of things once in awhile. (Myself, I would just slash and burn .. remove most of the bushes and plants and trees, and just have simple grass with a nice tree in it the middle .. keep it low maintenance. Our neighbours all have amazing yards.. let them do the work, and we can sit and admire from our step. Perfect!)

I also had the thought.. that since I am generally always happy, laid back, and good at managing anything that arises (few things tend to really excite me) .. perhaps these times where there is an overwhelming assault of things going on (not to mention the sleep dep etc), perhaps I'm not so good at dealing with things (or suppressing things if thats what I normally do?) .. ie: If I'm so good at always being together, maybe I get a little screwy when things finally break over the wall? At least this week of melancholy seems to be receeding.. I will love my old place, but pining over it sure doesn't get me anywhere and I'm sort of angry with myself over my bout of weakness.

Perhaps we bought too big .. we'll find out down the road; perhaps we needed something bigger than we had, but not _this_ big... but then if we have another little one someday, we will need the space? (Then again, my brother and I were raised in a house smaller than the one we just sold... hmm.)

I told my wife (who is very excited about the new place, and bummed out by my melancholy.. but its not "just a house" I insist!) that perhaps .. althought I did the gab all the time of 'we can't do this or that, since we plan to move someday', perhaps in my heart I really never did think we would ever move. Perhaps we just stayed too long and I got too attached. Who knows?

Anyway, my parents sold their first places. My in-laws sold theirs. Pretty much everyone sells their first place, right?

And we're in a better area for my daughter to grow up in.

This week, if things get weird in my heart, I will tell myself those things. But for now ..

They're nice people moving in, but it will always be my house, bitches.

Moving: You are in a maze of twisty little boxes, all alike.

This post has no editing and is a total mess, and is some inner thoughts, paranoia, conceits about the simple act of moving. From one house to another you insensitive clods ;) I'm nearly 100% sure it will not come out right and no one will be able to pick up on what I'm trying to say, and I'll sound like a total immature dork for saying it. But I'm noting it down anyway, for posterity and maybe someday I'll read it again, and maybe _I_ will glean from it whatever it was I intended to be... gleant.

In essence, I miss my old place, these few days after moving. Its not to say I dislike my new place -- it is gorgeous and I'm sure we'll be 'at home' in the new home soon enough. Its just I feel like I'm in a mourning period for the old place.. it was biult, shiny new, just for us. My family started there, the house and us grew up together. Leaving it behind somehow feals like we're abandoning something.. that period of time. That mode of life. With a home and life being so intertwined, it feels like a small piece of myself, is left behind. Hopefully my baby girl won't notice or care.. naturally she won't, as we've all moved before and we know.. but hopefully it doesn't impact her in some subtle way. Anyway, just like dumping or being dumped, I feel entitled to a few days or a week or transition where I mull things over, roll it around in my head, and have occasional guilty or sad impulses. I know, I'm weird.

Anyway, a few days have already passed now, so some of these thoughts are stale from a few days back, and thus cannot be expressed. Heisenberg and all that, too. I'm writing them down anyway, and in a few days they will be forgotten. (And yet my first house, my baby house.. will never be forgotten, though the details in memories always fade..

It was a lot of work and planning and so forth, but we've made it - to our new house! Maybe its my reminiscent personality, but I find it a bit of a melancholy surreal experience -- exciting, but also weird. We went from a warm cozy little house (with an annoying kitchen, and that we resisted upgrading knowing we planned to move 'someday'), through a period of packing and crazyness and teething with the baby, to renovations after we took possession of the new place, and finally the move out of the old place. To come yet is actually handing over the keys of the old place, and that will hurt.

Our old place is not actually 'gone' just yet .. that will be in a week, but today I'm intending to write up a 'Welcome to your new home..' letter for the folks who'll be moving in - a nice little gesture and to document a few things they might want to know about the place - and writing such a thing is just a little strange to me. I made a quick video of the place after the main move (wish I'd done it during the pre-sale week so I could have it recorded with all its furniture!) and opened that 5 minute video with a statement that keeps penetrating my mind -- "This is the house where I carried my new wife over the threshold, and later my newborn baby girl." This old place was my first real move, my first real home (after my parents of course), and a vital one. It'll take time for the new house to replace it and there will always be a place in my heart for the place my family started. I will miss it. It held the very best of times I've ever had. That one sentence packs a lot of emotion for me, and hence this whole posting. If I hadn't thought of the house in that context maybe it would not have bothered me so much.. but this home was important for some 30% of my life, and the best 90% of it. I will never forget that drive home from the hospital with my wife and newborn in the car, but we came 'here', to the old house.

In my mind, the house will always remember that. It will remember us as its one true owners and family. Right? For some reasonm the day after the move, I felt some guilt there, leaving that poor house behind. If only we could afford to keep it and rent it out.

Anyway, permit me to meander and whine like a little kid ;) A little while back I looked over the virtual tour the agent made to help promote the sale, and its cool to see what the house looked like 'staged' -- nice and clean and minimal, but still very distinctly 'us' with our paintings and pictures and furniture and so forth. This is that scene I would have liked to videotape, but at least we have the virtual tour (I've since recorded it to avi files so could maybe burn a DVD video of it, if onyl a few minutes long. Likewise, the virtual tour company suggests they can make me a short DVD too, so thats nice.) Anyway, viewing the virtual tour seems a little surreal but 'homey', as we spent the last month or two living in a mass of boxes as we packed for the big move. I'd almost forgotten what it really looked like.. never really thought about it I mean.. the boxes were some common they became part of the reality that it was. That itself was fine, but it did really make me look forward to the move and 'getting it all done'.. living with boxes around is pretty silly. The old place was small and carpetted (thought that was a bad thing at the time) and had a few annoying features (a terrible kitchen, and being a semi had an attached neighbour), but was really a good place. That made it hard to shop for a new place (we spent some 3 or 4 years doing that I think, on and off) since it was hard to find a good place that was clearly superior and yet did not cost an enormous fortune. When you really liked your place and got it for a good price (before the boom as it were), it is hard to replace.

My daughter (shes just a baby now) loved to run around on that carpet (she slides like on ice in the new place with its hardwood floors.. something for us to adjust to.) I joked often how she spent the last few weeks climing over boxes, trying to push them around, or pulling things out of them.. but she also played in her normal way. She seems happy in the new place (kids adapt so quickly!), but her playing habits immediately changed, which sort of makes me sad. She doesn't care I'm sure, but now she spends her time looking around the new exotic locale rather than carrying over her alphabet toy to read off. Shes happy, but flexed so quickly. We had our routines.. she/we would play on the floor (soft and carpetted), chase around the pole at the kitchen, and she would carry things over to the couch. At the new place she has new routines, pushing a glass door closed or open over and over, and she hasn't really carried anything around. She's far too interested in the new stuff. So thats all fine of course, but I will miss that older way too, and the instant transition.

I'm way too much a creature of habit, I have observed. I think I am flexible in other ways, adjusting to new coding techniques and so forth.. but I do miss the way I drove home, the superior pressure in the old shower (I will fix the new one eventually!), the location of the gas bar and the various stores around. Without knowing the new area, it puts on the front how I don't know the new area, and so it creates that temporary "the old place was better in this or that way" mentality, when these are trivial things. Anyway, in a subtle and stupid way for some reason I will miss (for a short while) the old neighbours I didn't talk to, the places I used to stop at to buy computer games, and so on.

But only with the house of course; Its not like I've not bought and re-sold hundreds of things in the past. Why is it the house makes it so tramautic?

Well, it was my home. But I suppose it could also be that life has been so hectic the last year or so with the baby around, and super hectic with the move tasks and busy workplace and home work that I overburden myself with. Maybe I'm just so pumped up on go-go-go that coming to an end means I'm coming 'down' from the busyness, and that adjustment is screwing with my system? So many things I could and have come up with, but whatever. It'll all pass soon enough... but I still love that old little house.

Another thought was that.. well, with having a wife, a nice big house that we cna stay in forever if we like, and a baby .. am I 'done'? That sort of scares me.. always plugged forward, working toward svarious goals ( not forcefully, but always wanted to move forward and rather aimed that general way.) But with the big things 'done', now its just.. upgrades, and helping my daughter grow up. Thats super important to but I mean.. it just seems like so much is 'done' now. I wondered if that was part of my weird 'down' of the last few days.. worry of not knowing what is next on the radar.

Like other men I will have to make up new goals. Big damned TV. Motorcycle. Yeah, maybe. Never cared before, but maybe someone like me needs concrete goals to function normally?

My daughter will never remember it, and she will not care to be told about it of course, but I will fondly look at those baby pictures so many years from now...

Anyway I will adjust, just not quite so quick as her (or my wife who just takes everything in stride; she'll feel it the day we hand our keys over, but she's just so happy about the new place. I admire her for that.) Our new place is beautiful (and I have a little guilt over that too... who are we to have such a nice big place? Did we over-do it? All told we just wanted detached, and a nice place for the little one to run around and be safe in, and a place as-good-or-better than our current place. Weird how growing up and being successful seems to give me some guilt. Lets not analyze that. Always thought I was a simple and pragmatic man, but here I ambeing a sop once in awhile :P) but I find myself still muscle reflex driving towards the old place (heck, it's only been a few days after all), or reaching to drop the keys in the old place. Change is weird and scary in a way, since it seems I've managed to be so... sedentiary I suppose in this context. I think that in other contexts I've been pretty flexible and creative, but I guess I've only really lived in a couple of places so use them as a foundation, and altering it creeps me out. I'm fine of course, and life in the new place is fine. Just I have these 5 minutes each day of .. something feeling like regret. But I don't regret the choice, and we needed to move on really (we'd have been happy there, of course, but we shoudl be happy here too.) And then there are those whove had a dozen apartments, who just don't get this :) And my poor wife who thought it was sweet when I was sad at first, and now a few days later shes sick of it.

Hell, I'm sick of it. I hate being a softy once in awhile. It was so much easier when I was always a robot inside.. damn my wife for making me a family man with fealings ;)

It is nice not to have so many tasks left; the move was extremely busy with tracking down contractors for any number of a myriad things and managing each step of the process (lawyers, banking, renovations, etc etc), along with having the little baby around and the common sleep deprivation as she teeths and such. Finally we're nearing the end of the current assault of tasks and I'm running out of minutia that must be managed.. about time, as it has been so busy the last year, and so extremely busy the last two months, that I worry a piece of my Calm has been damaged. Need to get my cool back. I've always been pretty laid back .. in control but rarely 'excited' but I've been so utterly wound up lately.. terrible. Its not me. I'm still trying to micromanage things when I should be able to let them slide around a bit now.. I find myself looking for new things to attack, too quickly.. we've not even unpacked yet. (Wife.. check! New big house.. check! Baby... check! Whats left for the big changes in life? Crap, nothing big to plan for.. damn! Find something else to attack..)

In the night I woke up, wondering to myself.. when you change your home, does it change you? Having a baby certainly did.. so many things that were vitally important to me almost instantly became uninteresting (which did have a certain adjustment stress for a couple weeks). With changing location, do you also change? I think I really liked where I 'was' (time/space/social etc context), so this change in location and changes in me to match seem a little weird. The new place is a grown ups house with new challenges .. somehow, over the space of one day, it seems in a way a new me. A new rut, a new me, grown up a little more. Weird. The old routines seem surreal and different now .. the bed in the old place faced one way, and its a different direction now, so even the old routines seem somewhat surreal and new now. So it feels like we've brought some subtle change to our day, which changes how we are, which changes us. I dunno how to say that right in this stream of consiousness posting, but there you go.

Ah well, in a couple days we'll all be normal (maybe a slightly new form of normal), and will be having fun buying new knobs for the cabinetry, new faucets for the bathrooms, new rugs, and new appliances and furniture.. this will take years I'm sure. Oh, maybe thats part of the stress of it all.. I like new things (and intensely dislike other peoples used appliances and things.. yucky, grosse!), but I really dislike the whole buying process. Maybe I will enjoy it this round (hope so!), but maybe that stress wore on me this last few days. *shrug*

Still, though I liked my 'old life' and self and family, there is so much to look forward to.. the new place is not far from the old (so I can be a weird voyeur and drive by the old place once in awhile to see if the plants _we_ planted are still there .. some had just now started to take purchase, so a shame we won't get to enjoy the climbing roswe bush.. but I hope the new people do and not kill it!), but is a better and safe neighbourhood, and nearer to some large parks and bike trails. Hell the neighbours might even be _too_ friendly if such a thing can be .. weird eh? Time to get a baby seat for the bike so I can drive around with the little one in tow or on the handle bars maybe? Find new places to see and not cling to seeing the same old ones. Get past those subtle mental shocks and stresses you can barely perceive but effect you.

I hope I didn't just 'grow up', since I like how I am/was. But its time to _explore_, not just _find_. The cup should be half full. I've always been super positive, always happy, always motivated, always self assurred, always on the go and doing, attacking, winning.

Where the hell did this melancholia come from? I hope it goes away. I don't need this hanging over me.

I am the new me. I need to be the old me.

iPhone: How to migrate from Palm to iPhone/iPodTouch/Anything, or from Palm to Outlook, or vCalendar/vCal to Outlook,

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:

Hotsync; treo 650 crashes and hotsync would never complete. Perfect. The OS 'data mangler' bug strikes again! (I've lost months of work against the OS bugs..)
Do hotsync or SD card tricks (like using Filez) to copy the actual databases from Palm OS device RAM to desktop (via SD card or visiting the Hotsync pdb Backup directory or other approaches.) Load up the PDB files into PalmSim or POSE and hotsync from there -- crash again. *sigh*
Use VersaMail on the real Treo (or the Sim) and 'Send Category' in the built-in Calendar and Contacts applications to send various groups of data to an email account; this works, but the attached data in the email is general corrupt. (ie: Send Category, for 'All' category, always provides a bad email. Send an individual contact works, but who wants to send a thousand emails from their Treo, one at a time...). *Sigh*
One brainfart was to use Bluetooth to transmit from Treo to iPhone .. but of course, Apple sucks, and iPhones BT stack only does headsets.

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 );
}

Apple: iPhone first impressions

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.

Non-standard headphones. The iPhone is also an iPod, and a very expensive one, so playing games with the headphone connector just so you can sell your own headphones .. thats just lame. You can play games with the razer blade market because you're going for cheap volume, but when a customer lays down $500 or more for a device, it better work. Wait, isn't Apple's catch phrase "It just works"? *busted*
iTunes and Syncing; iTunes is the new and hotness supposedly, and as with Apple's "just works" mantra, its supposed to be easy and just do its job. Now, I could flame the living hell out of iTunes (the application) itself but thats an entire book right there (it is badly designed in so many ways, which is very un-Apple). But aside from all of that, you would think they have syncing down. (ie: You flag a bunch of music, videos, your calendar and so forth to go to your iPhone, and it goes over there.) For one computer. I set up the phone at work, synced over some contacts, thought Great! Went home and later tried to send over some video files from my PSP.. no go. How curious.. oh wait -- iTunes requires you to 'erase' your iPhone to sync to another computer. (Apple diehards will suggest iTunes can be set to let you manually manage your files and work around this.. but no so with the iPhone.. other iPods, sure. Extra lame!) So here we have a feature that Palm has been doing for more than a decade (if not well), and iTunes just says 'Nope!' .. lame!
Workflow -- the iPhone UI is fracking awesome, for sure. But once you start using it, a few of the nits show up -- Palm and Microsoft have done minimal (and ugly) UIs for years, but they have learned something -- making things work with one hand, and minimizing the tap-counts. The actual day to day workflow on the older devices is just smoother. (Not to mention the actual physical keyboards most of the smartphoens have and the iPhone does not.) Granted, Apple is new to the game, but when looking at converting from a Treo to an iPhone, this will stand out. *busted*
On the other hand, Palm still sucks. I figured I would export vcards and vcals of my Palm information and import it into Windows Addressbook and so forth and sync it into the iPhone. Not so, since Hotsync Manager and/or the handheld will crash when I try to sync the Treo. Fine, I moved the data over to my Palm T|X.. and same. The only success I'm having is to do some evil developer tricks and extract the data through a Palm Simulator. Just peachy.
Ringtones; as usual, ringtones are the whipping boy -- Apple wants you to pay an extra buck for a ringtone (which is by definition not a whole song even, so shouldn't it cost _less?_). ie: If you already own a song via iTunesMusicStore and want to ringtoneify it, its a buck as I underdstand it. Or $2 if you don't own the song. (God firbid you own the song on a CD or from another service of course.) But you need a custom ringtone, since the built in ones are very quiet, and are basicly generic. *lame*
Video codecs; the iPhone and iPodTouch are studly video players.. but alas, like most devices, do not play divx. WHY? Again, when people are laying down $500 or more for a device, put the few days of effort it and bring the divx. It annoys the living hell out of me that PSP and iPods and most other devices simply cannot play divx, probably the most common format of downloadable video. Palm and Windows Mobile can do it through free open source players. I mean, OPEN SOURCE. C'mon Apple, Sony etc.. get with the programme and port it. Tip for the wise -- its not a hard port, and probably a licensing issue if anything. Get on it. Frankly, I don't know why one of us devs doesn't jump on it (I would, but I'm busy moving and have a little baby around, so thats my excuse.) *LAME*
More Apple control issues. As all I know, I hate DRM with a passion - humanity is a species of tinkerers so don't lock us out. Anyway, it appears the iPhone doesn't support the standard bluetooth profile for stereo headphones... unless they're Apple headphones. So non-Apple bluetooth headsets will be in mono. *screw you guys, becuse you screw us*
Edit: Drive-mode too .. most iPods can plug into USB and work as an external drive/thumbdrive. Not so with the iPhone.. wtf were Apple thinking?
Edit: So many, it was hard to remember them all -- no 'text hilight'. The virtual keyboard is difficult to get right (maybe with practice?) due to the lack of tactile response from the display and lack of hardkeys to 'feel out.' As such you make lots of mistakes .. and if you're a few letters down it is hard to place a cursor, hard to move the cursor (no left/right cursor motion?) and hard to select a region to keep or ditch. No copy/paste either - wow!
Edit: No ToDo application (!!) Firs th ing I installed after 'jailbreaking' was a ToDo app (terrible, but then I suppose I am biased in that arena) and some password stores.
Edit another day: iPhone bluetooth doesn't support anything but headsets; trying to find _SOME_ way to move data from my Treo to my iPhone.. but alas a bluetooth calendar and contact transfer won't be the way. BLOODY HELL they make this hard...... ie: why are we trying? :)

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.)

Day by Day: A question for transvestites

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.

Day by Day: Do we really need anti-virus applications?

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