Palmsource 2000 is
winding down. One more day left. There's a lot of good
talent here, and a lot of clueless developers spinning
themselves in spirals. One person got up and asked when
Palm© was going to get hotsync working under unix and
linux. They said they had no plans to do that at all. I
stood up and told them that we'd been doing that for almost
4 years now. Some people meandered over to me, and lined up
to talk to me. Apparently they didn't even know about things
like
pilot-link
or
gnome-pilot,
or
ColdSync,
among the two dozen or more tools that use these to get at
your data. Made a bunch of contacts, ran out of business
cards. Could end up bringing in some business for these
projects.
One of the sessions I attended was on Bluetooth and their
position in the Palm© space. At the post-session
Q&A, I was asking them some pretty heavy questions about
their position on linux and unix support with Bluetooth.
They were hesitantly evasive. It's clear they don't quite
understand Free Software and
Open Source and how it
relates to their business model. I asked them about the use
of their APIs
under linux, specifically with regard to creating a linux
port of the libs and sync code. Some of their plans are here.
They apparently didn't even consider that anything other
than Windows
was a possible target platform.
One of the other sessions was on the Future
of the PalmOS©. They introduced some new
information about PalmOS 4.0, and the new APIs around the
use of storage cards in the devices. Supporting their new OS
with pilot-link
is going to require that we at least understand their code.
In order to do this, I either need their SDK (with their
nice license),
or leverage some of the code out of POSE.
Again, somewhat evasive. I'll have to talk to Keith Rollin who maintains
it. It is under the GPL.
Definately need to investigate if we're bypassing their
license by using code which is in POSE.
The speaker seemed impressed that we were continuing to
support it, even though they had no plans to support it. I
told him I was 100% committed to getting it working, with or
without them.
Ugh. They're so blind sometimes.
I hooked up with jpr
(maintainer of gnome-pilot)
at the show and talked about some new ideas for pilot-link.
Lots of new things going in. Have to start biting into the
growing TODO
list soon. I'm only one person. I wish some people on the pilot-unix
list would give me a hand with some of the extras we're
dealing with. jpr and I are
going to begin some deconstruction on pilot-link
to autoconfiscate
it, and add support for iconv_
unicode definitions.
On the Pavillion floor, I managed to make some
really
good contacts for future projects. PalmGear was there, and I
talked to them about a very lucrative project I could
leverage their service against. More on that later...
I also managed to find the right people at Vindigo to field my
questions about the problems with malsync. Seems there
may be some problems with resources in the prc file. Have to
manually diff these records with pilot-file at some point to
figure this one out. Everything else seems to work, just no
updates to movie data. Tom and I have moved it to my
cvs for better maintainership.
Among the dozens of contacts I was making at the
show,
full badge and tattoos in tow, I was able to meet Calvin, Mike Waldron, Kenny from PalmGear, Alan Weiner and a
few other people I've grown to know and work with (and
irritate) on #palmchat on OpenProjects
and years of email back and forth in the mailing lists.
Oh, one more rant, AvantGo can kiss my ass.
I wish Kodak
would be more forgiving with their image format, so we could
support it in pilot-link.
Looks like someone
else is just as frustrated as I am with this. I talked
to them on the showfloor, and they basically said that
unless I was under NDA, and purchased their
SDK, I was not
allowed to reverse engineer this format. The word "lawsuit"
slipped from his mouth a few times. Doesn't bode well for
them as a company. I presented them with a very good verbal
business plan describing how we (open source vs. Big Kodak
Business) could make this work in a non-threatening way for
each party. They wanted to hear nothing of the matter.
I also managed to finally get my Minstrel PalmV case
review (my
copy) out
for Julie at The
Gadgeteer (her copy). When I was at the show, one of the
reporters
there wanted to talk to me, and had been following me around
for nearly the whole day. Apparently I made an impression,
since I was the only one who audibly was asking very
specific questions about linux support and open source vs.
Palm© in general. He
seemed interested in how I got started in this field, how I
could survive "not making any money" since I was doing this
"for free", in a world where Palm© could make so much
on it.
Ugh.. need to reeducate these people. I managed
to
explain it all to him as he took notes on everything, and
took pictures of my
various PDAs and other stuff. (Need to update that pic
to include my Helio,
my two iPAQs,
my girlfriend's Palm IIIc,
and a few more accessories). No pictures of me, that's the
rule.
Some new things in Plucker this week.
Version
1.0 has been released. We are adding color support, and
working on getting 16bpp
support rolled in for a smooth transition to PalmOS 4.0.
I was making some screenshots
of it. It's
tedious work with the GIMP.
At least I'm intimately familiar these tools.
I had some sort of stomach virus on Tuesday, and
stayed
home sick. I managed to craft a
page on Connecting
Your Palm to the Internet while bedridden. It's not
done yet, and I plan to include sections for PalmOS4, VMWare (with NAT, masq, and
ip_forward), and Windows.
I'm going to be crafting and updating a similar page on
Connecting Your Palm to Linux (focusing on sync and sync
tools).
Tomorow I have locked-in plans to attend the Emulator
session. I want to get into the Bluetooth
Lab session and the round table on the PalmOS
SDK and talk to some of the engineers about some
problems I've had with it.
Immediate Goals (unordered):
-
Get myself officially set up in California
(truck,
license, taxes)
-
Learn Lisp
-
Get my girlfriend relocated here from CT
-
Release 0.9.5 of pilot-link
- Finish Plucker Desktop
Buddy
- Add some more work to Perl
Plucker
- Find a new place to live, closer to the city.
- Back to school
- ...and about 3 dozen other miscellaneous things...
This was my first ever diary entry, so I hope it
wasn't
too boring. That's just 3 days in the life of a day hacker.
Until the next one...
