Comments to lily

• Got the G1 for 14 days.
• I'm liking it. Easy to download apps.
• The keyboard isn't bad. Typing all of this from this a ssh client I grabbed.
• The screen is pretty nice. Not quite as high res as the HTC Touch Pro.
• The scrollball is nice. Works well for most things.
• The coverage seems decent. Haven't seen 3G yet though.
• It's nice the port works with a regular mini usb cable for charging.
• The chin is a little in the way for typing, but it's not bad.
• The only thing I've found so far that is really bad is the camera app. It takes too long for the shutter to go off.
• No flash on the G1 that I can see.
• The barcode scanner app is fun.

Comments to twitter

• Going to check out the G1. Maybe try it out for a week before deciding on my next phone.
• At dinner for my father's birthday. Playing with the G1.
• Wow. The camera app on the G1 is really bad. Very slow to register shutter presses.
• $0.20/min to forward calls from my Sprint Treo to the G1 while I test it.
• How weird. Looks like Tmo is the only service that gets any decent coverage in this building. No 3G tho.
• G1 verdict after 1.5 days: Tmo coverage is ok - 3G coverage not good. Battery life kinda meh. Keyboard ok. Can live with Android.
• I don't mind the look of the G1. It's not flashy, but even with the iPhone, I'd wrap it in a case to make it grippier/less bling.
• Android is a bit rough. Definitely see lots of potential but it's not to iPhone's level yet. Hope this gets Apple to open up more.
• Flipping back and forth between 3G and Edge is painful.
• The G1's battery life still sucks (charging it now off my work desktop), but it's nice that I can just use a mini-USB cable to charge it.
• I'm definitely finding some interesting/helpful apps for Android. Will need to see if there are equivs for the iPhone.
• I really want to like the G1. Android is pretty nice, but the G1's battery life is making it hard to be my main phone.

There hasn't been any real updates to PalmOS in over 5 years. The promised "PalmOS 6" (aka Cobalt) never materialized. The technology was sold off and turned into Access Linux Platform. Who has seen a ALP-based phone? Exactly. Then Palm said they'd have a Linux-based platform as the future of PalmOS, available in the middle of 2009. I hate to say it, but I'll believe it when I see it. But then again, I'd imagine the future Linux-based PalmOS be much like Android - it'd run a PalmOS-compatible GUI layer on top of a Linux platform. Still, too little, too late, with the competition out there.

The traditional alternative to PalmOS is Windows CE (aka PocketPC aka Windows Mobile). WinMo seems ok, but it feels really clunky to me. I currently have one in the form of a work-provided Motorola Q9c, running on Verizon Wireless. Again, it's ok, but I can't get really excited by it. It's kinda slow, and the quality of 3rd-party software doesn't seem that great - at least what I've found and tried.

So, I have come to the conclusion that my only choices moving forward are either the T-Mobile G1 running Android or the Apple iPhone 3G on AT&T's network. With the iPhone being a fairly well known quantity, based on the amount of coverage it's gotten over the past 2 years, I will be giving the G1 a test-drive, to see how well the hardware works out and how good the OS is. I hope to write up my experience shortly.

After reading lifehacker.com's post about how to prepare for the downturn in the economy, Gina suggests setting up a nameplate website.

This seems like the purpose I've been looking for, for my blog. Most of the day-to-day tech chatter, I have other outlets that I can use, but I think I need to use my blog to concentrate on tech/career related things/tasks/hurdles that I encounter every day.

I think I'll use this to talk about the things I'm working on, and also use it as a reference for myself, so when I need to do work on something again, I'll have someplace where I've already tossed some notes, and some links, so I don't need "recreate the wheel". I've been doing similar with notes in text files, in delicious bookmarks, and in Evernote. I will try to spend some time each week taking what I've learned, and try to put something in here. Something that someone can also Google search for and maybe get the answer they need.

About the only thing that I miss is being able to add new categories with a new post. I'll need to add categories via the main WP inteface. But then again, I would need to do the same with weblogger.el. When I tried to add a new category with weblogger.el, I ended up blowing up my blog, until I fixed it.

One thing I need to figure out how to do with Vim is replicate "fill-region" from Emacs.

edit:

Very weird. I had installed the UTW plugin to try out tagging, because Vimpress said it supported tagging with UTW installed. Apparently I did not install UTW correctly, or did not set up enough of it - it was generating error messages when I'd try to save the post in Vimpress.

edit2:

Ah ha! Looking through the example .vimrc that comes with vim, I see a key mapping of the "Q" command to "gq". This seems to serve a similar function to "fill-region" in Emacs. I found this Vim tips & tricks page that offers some good tips for users new to Vim. I wouldn't call myself a newbie with Vim, but I'm new to customizing Vim.

edit: seeing if the vimpress plugin for Vim will allow me to edit an existing post.

edit2: let's see if this will bork my blog, if I add a new tag to this post.

edit3: ok, didn't bork my blog, like weblogger did, but the tag doesn't show up either.

edit4: can I save this?

With the customizations I did to TripleK2, and the old version of WP, I think it's time to start anew again. I think I found a decent theme as a starting point. And it's time to upgrade to the current version of WP. I hope to work on some of this during week. We'll see how far I get.

Of course, this post is not supposed to be a rant about how to use Twitter, but more about the recent "maintenance" from this past weekend. By Saturday afternoon, I noticed something a bit "off" with my Twitter webpage. I was not seeing as many tweets from others as I wousd have expected. I was trying to catch up on events overnight, and noticed some tweets showing up on gTalk that didn't show up on the webpage. I didn't think too much about it, until Sunday morning, when I noticed more "missing" tweets.

And it looks like Twitter is aware of the problem.

So, my gf offhandedly mentioned that she can tweet and follow with Google talk. I realized that was the easiest solution to my "problem". So, now I have a Twitter account.

I had been considering setting up one of the CLI-based Twitter clients on my linux box from home, but I couldn't decide if I wanted to go with one of the various scripts to tweet and follow from the shell prompt, or if I wanted to try out an Emacs module to do this, like I did for posting to this blog. As an aside, I still can't say I'm totally happy with the Emacs webblogger module. (See the previous post about the wonky timestamp.)

Of course, I just noticed that the Twitter page for tweeting is an https page. Oh well. I would not be surprised if Twitter is something that gets blocked by the work webproxy.

I've changed it so that it's more obvious that the "Subject" field would be the title, instead of using the first several words of the first line, or using <title></title> markup in the entry.

I also exposed the "Keywords" field so that it's easy to add categories to the entry.

I still have a couple to-dos. When editing previous entries, the dateCreate param gets screwed up. It's either a problem with the version of WP I'm running, or I need to figure out how to determine the timezone of the dateCreate param, and pass the same timezone back to the server.

I also want to change the fields that are displayed by the weblogger-entry-edit function. I'd rather the fields reflect the "blog" fields, rather than "email-like" fields.

Edit:

Interesting. I originally added this post at 12:42am, and the post is currently showing a time of 01:42am. I wonder if the time should be in GMT/UTC as opposed to "local" time.

I wonder if the timestamp will stai the same when I say this entry. Time to add some stuff and see what happens.

Edit 2:

Ah ha! WP really wants the timestamps in GMT/UTC and not local time. At the time of this edit, the time is 9:42pm. Let's what happens when I set it to 5:42am.

1. One
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The past few days, I've found myself looking for different ways post entries that do not require a browser, or anything particularly GUI-based. I found a few different ideas to use perl to talk to WordPress via XML-RPC. I think the easiest way to use this would be to read in a marked up text file and post based on the mark up - much like how Blosxom works. But instead of saving the text file a certain directory, I would read in the file and then toss it. I could probably write something smarter, but I think this would be a good starting point for me.

Another idea that I'm tossing around my head is to try to get the weblogger mode to work on the box that is hosting this blog. That way I'll have a secure way to post by connecting to the box with ssh then running emacs to do my writing. Call me weird, but I like writing text in a text console.

The film starts by defining copyright, and then goes onto describing what can and cannot be copyrighted. Next, it describes the original duration of a copyright, what that duration is as of today, and what the public domain is. Then, it talks about fair use, and finally the creators motivations for using Disney clips and characters in this short film.

As I said above, it's a short film, about 10 minutes long. It's quite educational on the subjects of copyright and fair use. Everyone should watch it and let their friends and family know about it.

I guess, I just don't get it. I don't understand why a show as funny and well written as Studio 60, why it failed, why it did not succeed. Aaron Sorkin's previous show, [The West Wing], was a big hit. But then again, his first show, Sports Night, only lasted 2 seasons.

I don't want a full graphical WYSIWYG editor. I don't even want "non-visual" textarea interface that WP currently provides - it does annoying things with keybindings. When I hit "ctrl-a" in the textarea, I'm not trying to add a link - I just want to go to the beginning of the line. At least, that is how Firefox2 in OSX acts when I try to edit an entry.

With the Markdown plugin installed, I don't need all those buttons and keybindings that give a BBCode-like markup for WP anymore. From the Google searching that I've done, I haven't had much luck in finding a simple textarea interface that I can just type my plain-text and be happy.

Yeah, I know. I'm in the extreme minority here for wanting something dead-simple. I would assume that most use the web interface because it's convenient. Or if they don't like that, they end up going with one of the multitude of stand-alone blogging apps. If you look through my archives, you can see that I don't post nearly enough to merit paying for one of these apps. And even if I were to use a stand-alone app, it would have to be OS-agnostic, since I jump between OSX, linux and Windows on a daily basis. Of course, that said, I have a work-around, of sorts.

Since Firefox2 is my browser of choice on all 3 OSes, on the iMac at home, I have installed the It's All Text Firefox plugin, which allows me to start up an external editor to edit textareas. After some work, I've been able to get IAT to startup Emacs.app and I'm currently editing this post from Emacs.app. It's not ideal. I'd much rather have a simple textarea field that I can type in from any browser on any OS, but it works for now.

After getting the theme installed, I started playing with the K2 sidebar modules and other WordPress plugins. I got a lot of suggestions from my better half as to what plugins to try; she's even installed a few for me from getting WP working for me. She installed for me 404 Notifier, Akismet, Comment Timeout, and Permalink Redirect. So far, I have found 404 Notifier to be extremely useful in figuring out what WP thinks are 404s (they don't seem to show up in the Apache logs). Akismet seemed like a good idea, considering all the problems with comment spam that I've had in the past; and the same reasoning can be used for Comment Timeout. Permalink Redirect is used to make sure all my posts are still accessible.

A few other plugins that I've found to be rather useful are Extended Live Archive, Markdown, Scrobbler, and Unfancy Quote. I would put these plugins under the "better quality of life" category. They don't necessarily make this blog better from the outside, but they sure make my interaction with this blog better. Extended Live Archive gives a pretty interface to my archives; it's the suggested plugin for TripleK2. Markdown was suggested by my lovely gf as a better way to add markup language posts; coincidentally, it's also used and approved by the great Merlin Mann. I admit, I only have the Scrobbler plugin installed so that I can show off what I've been listening to. But I have found Unfancy Quote to be essential - I hate so-called "smart" or "curly" quotes; I blame the old-school 7-bit ASCII in me for that.

After playing around with around with TripleK2 and various WP plugins, I felt the need to make some changes with how the posts themselves are displayed. This led me to attempt to dive through the theloop.php file. Man, PHP seems like it's all over the place. I've been able to figure out enough of the syntax to make a few minor changes, but I still need to figure out how to set up "date-based" headings. This is so I can just have the time in each post, but have one date header for one or more posts. But I guess that'll have to wait til I have a bit more time to delve into PHP more.

It's still pretty plain and default looking. I'm trying to figure out what plugins I should add to WP, and I want to find a theme that I like. As usual, this will be a work in progress.

For the past 2 months, I've been dealing with the DST updates at work for our MA sites. It has been a pain in my ass, dealing with all the meetings, dealing with all the boxes, dealing with all the people who are affected by the downtime to patch the boxes.

Even though DST switch over is this weekend, I fully expect to need to deal with the fallout for the next week. I am sure there are a couple boxes I missed, or some random application I forgot about. I am sure that I will get calls and emails from users about how their oh-so-important app is not working correctly.

I took today off and have been ignoring work emails about it. I'll get to them later tonight or tomorrow sometime.

The sad thing was this change was supposed save money with power savings. As others have postulated: how much money have corporations spent on updating all their boxes and apps?

I hate Congress. I hate DST. I wish they would get rid of the switch altogether - keep it at one time or the other.