Recently in Review Category

Back in February, my Treo took a fall and more or less stopped working. Not completely, but almost nothing worked.

Eventually, I figured out that it was due to the right shift key being jammed in the depressed position, keeping most keystrokes from working, along with a lot of taps. A little surgery to insert a small piece of paper between the contacts of that key, and the phone was up and running again, minus that one key. Since the shift key is the one redundant key on the Treo, it could’ve been worse.

At the time, I was only two months away from Verizon’s “new every two [years]” promotion, so I figured I’d just wait until then and upgrade to another phone. So, in April, I decided to take the plunge and switch from Palm OS to Windows Mobile.

After some research and brief contemplations about getting a smartphone instead of a PDA, I decided on the Verizon XV-6700, a.k.a. HTC Apache, a.k.a. UTStarcom PPC-6700 (this is a phone with an identity crisis).

XV-6700 First Impressions

The XV-6700 is roughly the same size as the Treo 650, though a lot boxier. Style apparently wasn’t ranking very high on the designers’ list when they put this device together — it looks like a rectangular hockey puck crossed with an Oreo.

Ignoring the fashion statement, the major selling point of this phone over its Windows Mobile competition is the keyboard. The front of the PDA only has a few buttons and a five-way knob, but the whole side of the device slides out, revealing a rather large keyboard. It’s actually large enough that you can do four-finger typing without too much trouble. The Treo, by contrast, is pretty much limited to two thumbs.

The XV-6700 also has built in WiFi. Major points for that.

Other nice features are the large rectangular screen, which can be run in either portrait or landscape mode, and the 1.3MP camera. I especially liked the built-in LED, which, while probably not all that useful as a flash, made for a very nice flashlight.

When I started using the phone, one of my first observations was that it lived up to the Windows stereotype — it crashed a lot. Over half a dozen times in the first day. I can see why the reset button is easily accessible, and not hidden in the battery compartment.

I was expecting this, though, especially on my first day or two of using it, while I was pounding the device to smithereens to find its limits. It would seem that Windows Mobile is more ambitious than the device is able to handle. After figuring out some boundaries, I was able to basically eliminate crashes.

XV-6700 Software

On the Treo, MyBible is a killer app for me. It’s ridiculously fast, and does most of what I want in a Bible program. Because of that, I immediately downloaded their equivalent program for Windows Mobile, PocketBible.

That didn’t go so well. Whereas MyBible is perfectly integrated with the Palm OS, PocketBible is, at best, clunky. It breaks the UI guidelines in a number of places, it’s slow, it crashes a lot, it doesn’t remember where you left off last time (usually because it crashed in the meantime), and it isn’t nearly as intuitive as its counterpart.

I really tried to acclimate to its quirks, but just couldn’t do it. I was finding myself bringing a paper Bible around to church and Bible studies instead, because the program just couldn’t keep up, and it would frequently crash and need to be reloaded, which is not conducive to a good Bible study.

In desperation, I downloaded OliveTree’s BibleReader for Windows Mobile. My experience with their program from several years ago hadn’t been very good, but it was better than this.

To my surprise, OliveTree has dramatically improved their product since the last time I’d looked at it, and it’s now positively pleasant to use. It used to take at least 15 seconds to pull up a verse in my old version, but it’s now more or less instantaneous, even when the Bible is on a memory card. Reference books work just as quickly, and OliveTree has really expanded their library to include all sorts of books. Such as Wayne Grudem’s excellent Systematic Theology, which is packaged with the ESV Bible translation. Perfect!

So, Bible software is taken care of with BibleReader. Internet Explorer works well — much better than Opera, Minimo, and another browser whose name is escaping me. Pocket Outlook does a good job with E-Mail, as long as you’re not using a UW-IMAP server (which I am, but POP3 works as an alternative). Contact management, tasks, and calendar both work fine out of the box. MP3-playback wasn’t a problem.

I definitely give Microsoft credit for including a very good package of applications with the out-of-box installation of their handheld OS. Would that they’d do the same thing with their desktop OS!

SSH took a long time to get straightened out, but I eventually found a program that worked and was cheaper than $80 (one SSH program for Windows Mobile would’ve cost more than my phone did!).

That’s nearly all that my PDA gets used for. Oh, and games. There’s no shortage of games for Windows Mobile. Some of them are even free. I tried several demos of the non-free ones, and they looked pretty impressive. In the realm of free games, there were a number of ports of old BBS games, and I enjoyed a much-too-long game of Space Trader on a flight to Orlando (and subsequent hotel stay, at least until I finished the game at the end of the first evening there).

The memo program was nearly the only disappointment out of the built-in software. Each memo is a separate file in the filesystem, and they’re a royal pain to work with. For one thing, there’s no apparent way to categorize them. I have a lot of memos, and this was a problem.

There was a third phone on that list…

I might have been able to find a workaround for the memo problem, but there were a few things that became showstoppers in the meantime:

• Phone quality. The XV-6700’s speaker isn’t loud enough for use in any but the quietest environments. In addition, the microphone is much too sensitive and omnidirectional.

• Too much stylus. The Treo has a keyboard that’s always accessible. It’s smaller, true, but it means there are 31 more hotkeys available before you need to pull out the stylus. This is huge, and it became increasingly frustrating not to have that capability, especially since most of the hotspots on the screen were too small and too close together for a fingernail-press to work reliably. Pulling out the keyboard to execute a command is more cumbersome than I’d like.

• Battery life. This is really what killed the deal. In Boston and Orlando, it worked fine, but in West Lebanon, which is not a pinnacle of cell phone reception, the XV-6700 would barely make 10 hours on one charge, and that was with no use at all. My 2-year-old Treo easily lasts several days, even with moderate use.

Enter the LG vx8600

After about a month of using the XV-6700, I’d had enough of poor phone quality and not being able to make it through the day on one charge, and decided to add another line. This served a few purposes:

• Since we don’t have a land-line, this would give us a back-up line and phone in case one went dead for some reason. It could also become a separate business line, if need be.

• I could turn the phone off on the XV-6700, just use the WiFi most of the time, and have the battery last for several days. The LG phone would be my phone, and the XV-6700 would be my PDA. Bye-bye convergence, but it could be worse — the LG phone is extremely thin, and easily fits in a pocket, so I could still carry both of them.

• It gave me a web-capable cell phone, in case I ever get around to programming some mobile web stuff.

The LG phone is pretty nice. As a phone, it does very well. Sound quality is excellent, and it’s easy to use. It has a good feature set, plus nice bonuses like a 1.3MP camera, MP3 player, and alarms. The vibrate and ringing settings are rather flexible, and you can set it to “sound on alarm only”, which is a great little touch (usually sound is either all on or all off).

The Get It Now and VCast features are much-touted, but I’m not at all interested in them, so I can’t offer an opinion as to whether or how well they work.

The web support is, in a word, terrible. I think the phone’s web support is probably decent, but Verizon has crippled it beyond redemption. They’ve locked out the ability to set a home page, and force you to go through their advertising-laden, useless menus. Even going to a manually-entered URL has to be done through a proxy web page, which means it takes well over a minute before you can get to the site you want. It’s usable, but you’d have to be pretty desperate. Especially when compared to the XV-6700’s web support, which is stellar for a handheld.

The phone’s reviewers talked about getting good battery life, but again, it seems like they live in areas where reception is better. This phone will usually give me 18 hours per charge, though, which will get me through most days.

I tried wearing both the LG and XV-6700 phones, which lasted for approximately 15 seconds. I was very quickly reminded of why I didn’t get a cell phone until I could get one that combined a cell phone and PDA — wearing more than one thing on my belt just feels ridiculous.

After that, I tried wearing the XV-6700 and keeping the LG in my pocket, and alternated that with just wearing the LG, to see which one I would prefer.

So, which phone is on Deef’s belt now?

After alternating that setup for a couple of weeks, I finally settled on… the Treo 650.

Yep, right back where I started.

With a clean install, upgraded firmware, and a better memory card (snitched from the XV-6700), the Treo is now positively zippy. I kept the upgraded (unlimited) data plan and decided to try a new set of software, and I’m very pleased with how well it’s working.

I’m hoping that my 650 will last until Verizon starts offering something equivalent to the 755p, at which time I’ll replace it with that, so as to have more RAM, faster wireless data, and bigger memory card support.

The LG has gone to Christine. I’m not sure if she’s going to keep it yet, or if the battery life is going to be a problem for her — she seems to be getting less life out of a single charge than I did. The XV-6700 is on the other line, and serves as a handy WiFi device, along with a good test environment for mobile web development.

I was going to give reviews of some of the new programs I’m using on the Treo, but this is already more than long enough, so I’ll do that some other time. I’ve definitely come back into the Palm OS fold, though, after experiencing Windows Mobile for a month and a half.

Warning: Don’t click on this link unless you have a lot of time on your hands. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Really, I mean it.

I’m not kidding — there’s ten years of archives.

Christine just told me to take the computer away from her, so that she wouldn’t read any more. You know it’s serious when that happens!

Enough disclaimers? Here it is:

Ubersoft

It’s a web comic about a certain software company known for its operating system monopoly, and the various things that have happened to that company over the years. It reminds me of Dilbert, but without being depressing — I never worked at a company led by Mr. Bunny, the Hoppy Computer Guy and Dark Lord of Ubersoft.

If you’ve ignored all of my disclaimers, I’d suggest donating at least the cost of getting those comics in book form to the author.

I’ve been happily running Windows 2000 more or less since it’s been released. It’s probably the most stable desktop operating system I’ve ever come across, but Microsoft is shooting it dead, and Adobe wants whatever’s left. So, I need to upgrade in order to be able to continue opening files that my customers send me.

One Vista installation attempt later, and I can’t say I’m terribly impressed. Strangely enough, I was able to install my wacky sound card, but it failed to install my mouse (!), keyboard (!!), and both video cards (one by ATI, the other by Nvidia). Plus, it wasn’t happy about how I installed the upgrade, so I’m going to have to reinstall the whole thing anyway.

I eventually got the mouse working by unplugging it, plugging it back in, and rebooting (I really thought we’d be past those days by now!). And that for a PS/2 optical mouse.

My Microsoft keyboard required me to download special software to get access to the hotkeys.

The ATI video card (main display) defaulted to a 800x600 SVGA display. There’s no driver for my exact model (RADEON 7000), but the 7200 driver seemed to work.

There is an exact driver match for my Nvidia GeForce FX5500 video card (two secondary displays), but it apparently doesn’t work. The reason? Error 43. I kid you not. Numeric error codes are apparently still in vogue.

I can’t wait until I try to actually install software on Vista…

So, this post is being written on Windows 2000, and I’ll try again some time this weekend, I guess.

At least for the time being, I would not recommend that you upgrade to Firefox 2.0, which came out a week or two ago. It has some nice improvements, but they’ve removed some of the flexibility, which has resulted in me needing to change hidden settings and (just now) code in order to get behavior that used to be default. In my opinion, the improvements don’t outweigh the drawbacks.

For instance: in FF1, clicking on a link to a PDF would either open it in an Acrobat applet or prompt you to either open the file in the Acrobat program, or save it to disk. Which of the two it offered depended on what MIME type was used (application/pdf or application/octet-stream). This was reasonable.

In FF2, it either opens the PDF in an applet (depending on how you have it configured) or prompts you to save it to disk. The “open” option is gone, because of a decision that all application/octet-streams are potentially dangerous, not just .exe files, and that the user can’t be trusted to decide for himself. From my point of view, that’s not reasonable. I can accept the .exe case, even if I don’t like it (and I hear there are extensions that let you get around that problem), but not for .pdfs.

It’s compounded by the fact that this is a task that I do literally dozens of times per day for work, and I’m certainly not about to save each of those files to disk just so I can go hunting for them, open them once, and then delete them. That would be going from one keystroke (“Enter”) to “Enter-Win-E-mouse-click-[figure out what the file was called]-scroll-mouse-click-click-Alt-Tab-Alt-F4” or “Enter-Alt-Tab-Tab-Tab-Alt-F-O-[figure out what the file was called]-[type first few letters of filename]-down-down-down-down-Enter-Enter” (and it doesn’t help that most of the files will be named something like “November letter.pdf”).

What’s worse, though, is that, unlike the other gripes I’ve had with FF2, this one isn’t configurable, even from a hidden configuration option in about:config. You just need to put up with it. Or change the code (which is the classical example of why open source is better than proprietary software, and it’s what I did, but I’m still annoyed).

I’ve yet to see what else is going to slow me down (I’ve been running FF2 for about two hours of light usage so far), but based on that find and the default minimum tab width (described in one of the recent links), I don’t think you should install FF2 at this time if you’re more than a novice user (and less than a code hacker) — wait for 2.0.1 or 2.1 and see if there are enough complaints that the developers open things back up and set the defaults to be a little more friendly to power users. Or, at least, keep a copy of 1.5.0.x handy, so that you can go back if you find that the changes aren’t to your liking.

“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
— Orual, in Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis

“No, Reepicheep,” said the King very firmly, “you are not to attempt a single combat with the dragon.”
— Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I think that’s my favorite line in all the Chronicles of Narnia.

Odd book. Appropriately subtitled “A Nightmare,” you don’t know who’s on your side, and before the end of the book you have hoards of people chasing the heroes, foes showing themselves to be friends, and allies being absorbed into the oncoming mob. This story, written in the early 20th century, also gives you a duel, a car chase — perhaps one of the first ever recorded — and (I kid you not) a high speed elephant chase through the streets of London, with the heroes pursuing in cabs (the horse-drawn kind).

If you want a book that has the tables turning again and again (sorry — once you’ve read the second chapter, you can yell at me for that), read this one about a police detective posing as a poet who accidentally infiltrates a Supreme Anarchy Council in his attempt to eliminate anarchy, only to find out that the Supreme Anarchist is someone very different than ever he would have imagined.

Have you read it? What did you think?

I decided that it might be a novel idea to actually finish a book that I’ve started reading (having run out of bookmarks and miscellaneous other flat things serving to keep my place in various books, and also having run out of space on my bedside table). Since Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss was a borrowed book, and since I was almost done anyway, that’s the first one on my list.

Fun book. A definite must-read for people who get aggravated when they see two spaces between mid-sentence words instead of just one. Or even people who aren’t quite that lost to all reason. It has prompted some changes in how I proofread missionary letters.

From the introduction:

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station [I should mention that this is a British author] near to where I live. “Come inside,” it says, “for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.”

If this […] causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. […] For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.

The hardcover version is roughly 200 pages, in large print, small pages, with large margins, and it’s an easy read, so it won’t take much time. I read it over a series of (solo) meals, parts of a plane ride, and on a bus. It could probably be read in an evening or two, depending on how many times you break out in laughter and have to try to explain to your spouse why a comma can be so funny.

I used to be a big fan of WordPerfect. Back in the early 90s. Sometime around when I started at Dartmouth, I started using Word, presumably because I got a copy at an academic rate and needed it to send files to professors. Some grumbling undoubtedly ensued, but the programs were close enough that it didn’t last long.

A couple of months ago, I bought WordPerfect Office 12 so that I could open and print files from the occasional customer who still uses it. It’s amazing how much better Word 2000 is over WordPerfect 12 (released last year).

The first couple of files I’ve received have looked okay (ignoring that everything needed to be realigned), but I’ve been working with a customer for the past two weeks trying to get a two-page letter with pictures sent from his computer to mine, and it’s been nightmarish. My best guess is that WordPerfect is saving each picture as a bitmap file — each time he tries to upload it, it dies after about 60MB.

On my end, WordPerfect is slightly worse about dealing with corrupted files than Word. In Word, when a file is corrupt, it complains about the filename not being correct, which is deceptive, but quick. In WordPerfect, it displays a window saying that it’s converting from one printer format to another, then goes into a 100% CPU loop until I force-quit it (I left it overnight the first time, to see if it was actually doing something and just taking a long time to do it — it wasn’t).

We eventually got around the problem by removing all of the images from the document and sending them separately. The result: a 9kB WordPerfect file, three 200kB JPGs, and three 1MB JPGs. I rebuilt the document in Publisher (so as to not have to deal with the exploding images problem in WordPerfect, or the “I know where the picture should go, and don’t you go telling me otherwise” issue in Word), and we were all set.

Just finished reading it. If you program for a living, or as a serious hobby, and are reasonably good at it, read this book. I’ll accept no excuses if you take programming seriously. Part of its appeal is how easy a read it is, and it’s written in short sections, so you don’t need to allot a large chunk of time for it. You don’t even have to read it from cover to cover.

The authors give a lot of advice on how to improve your programming, and how to be an asset to your organization. They don’t advocate any one methodology or programming language, and they even avoid taking a side in the Emacs vs. vi argument, but rather focus on issues that will be applicable everywhere.

My next book was going to be Peopleware, but, looking through the table of contents and a couple of sections, it’s not holding much appeal to me, now that I’m a programming team of one. I’ll keep it on my list for later, though.

So, instead, I’ve picked out The Design of Everyday Things as my next technical book. It has been on my wish list for quite some time, and I finally found it at the local bookstore.