Category Archives: Rant - Page 2

Palm to Pocket

Posted by on December 9, 2005 No comments

I’ve been working on this old school ASP website for work now for about a month. So far everything is going well and I’m about ready for a beta release. Or so I thought. I was asked to develop the site with the assumption that all users would be accessing the site via a Treo 650 or like model. If you’ve ever done any coding; stand alone or web, you know that developing for one specific type of device/user can be bad. However, since this website is designed to compete with a Palm app and I just started the job I didn’t dwell on the matter too much. So after about four weeks of working around all the shortcomings of Palm and limitations of the Blazer browser my boss comes up to me and tells me that we’ll be changing end user devices to Pocket PC. This is a mixed blessing. The good thing is that Pocket PC, or Windows Mobile, has a fairly decent browser and can actually render thing correctly. The bad thing is that my boss wants me to add all the JavaScript features that I had to exclude because Blazer couldn’t hack it back into the website for the beta release. We’ll be discussing the website again on Monday and I’m 99% sure I’ll get him to say that the JavaScript features can be included in the beta 2 release.

One thing that I should point out is a vast difference in emulators. Palm had a couple of version of the Treo 650 emulator, one for each of the cell phone carriers, and they worked OK. I had too many crashes to count when using Blazer. Go to any site with a multiple select drop down list and it would work 75% of the time as opposed to the Pocket PC emulator that hasn’t crashed on me yet. There was also a big difference in size of the emulators. The Treo was 12 Megs zipped and used 150 Megs of memory when I upped the amount of memory to 128 Megs. 20 Megs of overhead give or take. The Pocket PC emulator was a 3 Meg exe, and 130 Megs if you wanted a skin. 80 Megs for the SKD which had to be installed to install the 50 Meg Windows CE Emulator images and skin. The Pocket PC emulator is actually a Virtual PC application though there is no virtual harddrive to save your prefences to. The Treo would at lease save some of your settings that you made while running the emulator in an ini file. Pros and Cons to both but I think I’ll like working with the Pocket PC a little more than the Palm.

Palm Emulators

Posted by on December 1, 2005 No comments

Part of my job is developing a website that will be ran on a Treo 650. The Treo is a cool palm pilot/cell phone that runs for about $600 if you’re interested. What makes devloping this website so much fun is that the Treo uses a browser called Blazer. Blazer is actually a decent browser for a palm. It has HTML 4.0, XHTML, XML, CSS 1.0/2.0, and Javascript 1.5 support. The Javascript support is debateable in my opinion considering some simple scripts don’t work while others do but it does have some support. One of the most anoying things about Blazer is the way that it handles tables. You can create a table, specify the width, border, cell padding/spacing, etc all you want. Won’t actually do you any good but you can specify it. Table borders are the only thing that seems to work correctly! Another annoyance, however needed, is the way that selects, drop down lists and lists, are displayed. Sure it has to render the selects but why can I not specify the width?! Something like

<select name="name" size="2" style="width: 20px">

<option>1</option>

<option>2</option>

<option>some really long text goes here!!!!</option>

</select>

would work fine on just about any browser. However when it’s rendered it still takes the full required length! There are other things that are annoying but are just small quirks that I won’t go into full detail right now. Check out the simulator if you’re interested.

Mongol Tired…

Posted by on September 7, 2005 No comments

Ok, it’s 2:30 AM EST and I’m just now leaving work. That’s not bad you say? I was up at 4:00 AM CST this morning, to catch a 6:00 AM flight! So now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to crash….

IAH

Posted by on August 25, 2005 No comments

You may or may not have heard about two ladies running through security at IAH, Houston International. Just incase here you go. Two ladies ran through an un-manned security station at IAH. 15 minutes later security monitoring the cameras noticed it. They then shutdown the entire airport. No plans were allowed to leave and those planes that were landing were not allowed to de-plane. I was one of the many who were stuck on a plane that wasn’t allowed to de-plane. Finally after an hour we were allowed to get off the plane. Those that didn’t have any connecting flights were allowed to leave however everyone else was stuck. Security re-screened around 300 people in the C-B Terminal link and God knows how many in the other terminals. After it was all said and done, they never found the ladies and determined that they were confused. TSA later said that they are no longer looking for the ladies as it seemed to have been an accident and there is no reason to believe that they did anything dangerous. Nice….

Late Night

Posted by on June 27, 2005 No comments

I travel for work, part of the job. But man did last night suck. I had a 5:10pm flight out of San Antonio to Houston to make a 7:10pm flight to Charlotte. Not too bad. I get to the airport with plenty of time to spare, too much actually, and grabbed a bite to eat. Wouldn’t you know that at the time my flight was supposed to be boarding, the previous flight was boarding. Turns out that my flight would be 40 minutes late arriving and thus forced me to find other means to get to Charlotte. The counter attendant set me up with another airline and everything was good. Or so I thought. My flight in DFW, another airline, was delayed by an hour and a half! I finally landed in Charlotte around 12:30am only to stand in line for 30 minutes to get my rental car. Finally at 1:30am I got to the hotel room. Gotta love the late late nights….

Laptop, I'm Sorry.

Posted by on April 16, 2005 No comments

Well it seems that after I bashed my laptop the other day that I discovered some interesting information. It seems that Win Server 2003 has some of the worst driver support around. So it’s not entirely my laptop’s fault that the BroadCom drivers won’t work under anything but Win2KP/XP. So, Laptop. I’m sorry.

Bad laptop. Bad!

Posted by on April 14, 2005 No comments

A little over a year ago my parents bought me a laptop for graduation. No not high school graduation, college graduation. While I could have used the laptop in college for obvious reasons, I was excited that I had a new computer. My folks bought me a Dell Inspiron 5100. It’s a nice little laptop with 20gig hard drive, DVD/CD-RW combo, 256Mb of DDR ram, ATI 7500 Mobile graphics card, and a 2.66 P4 processor. Like I said, it’s a nice little computer, designed for basic use, some programming, and/or a small server. So what’s the problem you ask? I’ll tell you. The Inspiron 5100 model laptops (and a few others) use the Broad COM 440x drivers that are only supported under Win2K and WinXP. This sucks big-time since I installed WinServer2003. Now I’m stuck with a server that can’t serve! In the past I had Gentoo Linux installed on it and it gave me some trouble. Looks like I’ll be installing it again. Hopefully the new Gentoo 2005.0 install process works just as well as my last install.

Withdrawals

Posted by on January 12, 2005 No comments

We moved into our house about a month ago and we still have no internet, phone, or cable TV! Ok, phone is a little bit of a stretch. SBC services out to where we live but its $30 a month for a basic no long distance land line. Steph and I are waiting for Time Warner to come out to where we live because we can get unlimited call anywhere we like for just $40 a month. Likewise we know that we could do satellite but once again we’re waiting for Time Warner. As for internet, we’ve shopped around only to find that dial-up is $60!!! I’m not paying $60 for dial-up. So the long and the short of it is that we’re waiting for Time Warner. They have a package that includes cable TV with some extra channels, broadband, and the phone service for $130 a month. Not bad considering it cost more separately. We’ve been told that we should be getting service first thing in February. I count the days.

A Little Odd

Posted by on December 1, 2004 No comments

Just thought this was a little odd.

  1. Blogger is not updating my blog count. Been at 63 for the past 2 months now?!
  2. Blogger’s spell check marks “Google” as a misspelled word?!
  3. Blogger doesn’t have a built Google search or just a search utility for a specific account?!

Switching Back And Forth

Posted by on December 1, 2004 No comments

It seems that we are making the switch again. First it was ASP.Net, then JSP, and now we’re doing PHP. I come from a PHP background so its a welcome change but I was actually wanting to go with JSP. I just purchased the Struts book and was ready to start “going to town”. Now I’ll be “going to town” with PHP. In all honesty though, I’m anticipating another switch back to one or the other by this time next week.