Jeremy Hermans experienced an emergancy landing and lived to blog about it. But it looks like Alaska Airlines employees should do less dogging on company time and maybe spend more time on its planes.
Archive for December, 2005
I wrote this in November 2004. It remains just as applicable to this day.
I wanted to make a few comments on the state of Palm OS tools and such, and I didn’t want to post them publicly because they’re not exactly positive. If there’s a better place to send them, please let me know. Don’t worry, there’s no questions here… and I don’t mean any of this to be insulting, either, if I’ve phrased some of it that way I apologize…
PalmSource seems to be focusing mostly on “Cobalt.” This is important for the future, I definitely agree with that. But in the near term, there are no Cobalt devices actually shipping and will not be for months yet. How long until the majority of shipping handhelds are Cobalt? I’ll be a bit optimistic — I figure it’s at least two years. Developers in the business of making a profit over the next few years need to focus on Garnet. I have not even looked at the Cobalt tools yet, and have no intention of doing so for many months yet.
The current state of affairs for Palm OS Garnet development is rather poor. PalmSource seems to be putting the majority of their efforts into the Palm OS Developer Suite. I am starting a new Palm OS product, and am no longer actively involved in maintaining the first one (which is on the market and being maintained by someone else; if you’re curious, see www.principalm.com). So it was the perfect time to switch to the new tools. I downloaded PODS and gave it a try, but I ran into a few problems.
The first is that the IDE is pretty unfamiliar. And this is from someone who has used a dozen or more IDEs over the years. I couldn’t even find a way to “quick open” SDK header files within the IDE. Making a makefile was easy (and, to be honest, I prefer this approach to an IDE) but getting the files recognized by the workspace was a pain. I’m not exactly sure how anyone uses a SCM with it; just the limitation of storing everything in Program Files is huge, and I never found a way around that one.
But finally I had everything in the workspace and compiling. Here’s where the real problems began — I had to segment. Segmentation is a fact of life under Garnet, and the documentation for segmentation is very weak — did I say weak? Between myself and a co-worker (working on yet a third product, with no code in common with either of the first one or mine), we couldn’t find anything on it as part of the install. I had some ideas how to do it for C, but none at all for C++. He figured out how to segment eventually and emailed me on it…
Now, which segments were too big? The error messages were next to useless for figuring it out. Still, through trial and error I reduced the size of my segments. That’s when I started running into data segment size issues. What was wrong? Well, I still have no clue at all.
So one night after about a week of fighting it, I threw threw in the towel and moved back to Codewarrior Palm (the latest Mac version). I sent an email to my coworker: “I gave up on PODS. It struck me last night that even if I got everything compiling in PODS, there was no real advantage over Codewarrior that was likely to matter to me for a while. [With Codewarrior, I] had my project compiling within ten minutes. No segmentation issues at all. Hopefully by the time I start to run up against the limitations in Codewarrior Palm’s tools will be ready, because they’re not right now…”
I expected him to tell me to keep fighting PODS, but apparently he’d done the same thing the vary same day, only he moved to the latest Windows version: “I came to same conclusion late last night and am now doing my demo work in CodeWarrior.”
So I just put in an order for the latest version of Metrowerks’ Windows-hosted tools. Will they save me? I don’t know. I’m worried — the new version of Codewarrior is based on the PRC tools,. So am I probably going to be fighting it for data segment size. (I know the standard RTTI/exceptions off trick. I need exceptions. I’m trying to write 21st century C++ here, not 1988-era ANSI C….)
As an aside, this is wrong — Codewarrior Palm 8’s linker is not based on PRC-Tools. This is why I ended up settling on Codewarrior as my development tool.
My conclusions:
1. There has to be a greater focus on Garnet development. Cobalt is the future (maybe.. if it’s late enough, the future is probably going to be the dreaded PocketPC), but it isn’t going to keep me or anyone else in business now.
2. There has to be a lot more work done on both documentation and tools for Garnet. The current (PRC-based?) toolchain — in particular, the linker — needs a lot of work and is under-documented.
3. All of these segmentation issues I’m dealing with are “artificial,” in that segments don’t actually hold any meaning other than legacy to the current Palm OS. If there was a way to write an application for Palm OS 5 that wasn’t PACE/68k, this whole series of problems wouldn’t exist. But still, there’s a couple years to wait until I can stop worrying about this mess.Anyway, I hope none of this insulted you. Not my intent at all. And I could very well be wrong, I just call it like I see it.
We’re almost in 2006. What’s changed since then? NOTHING. Cobalt still doesn’t exist in any tangible way, and there’s still been no significant efforts put into the Garnet toolchain.
(Also, I want to add: For the one guy out there who recognizes this email, I do not blame the lack of progress on you. I dug up this particular email only because I felt it was the best one I’d written on the subject.)
Got this in response to a spam report. Yes, I said spam — I’ve never subscribed to any PC World mailings, and have years of archives to prove it.
Unfortunately, since you chose to have SpamCop conceal your actual e-mail address, we have no way to respond by opting you out of PC World e-mail.
If you will reply to me with your actual e-mail address, I shall be happy to comply with your request immediately.
Michael England
PCWorld.com Customer Service
This image was forwarded to me by a reliable source in Apple. It seems that in addition to compiling Mac OS X for x86, Apple has a backup plan for the Intel backup plan: AMD.
See, geeks all along have been arguing that Apple should have gone to AMD instead of to Intel. AMD offers higher performance, you seee. But, of course, we know the main reason for the switch to the x86 architecture is that IBM can’t produce a portable version of the G5. AMD doesn’t have much in the way of lower power, high performance chips yet, either.
But Apple’s ready anyway.
Here we have an actual photograph of a prototype Opteron-based PowerBook. Get it quick before Apple legal forces me to take it down! Remember, this is a prototype only — the final version will have a color screen. The black and white screen is actually touch sensitive.
More discussion on wikipedia’s accuracy over on slashdot, where accuracy between Britannica and Wikipedia was compared:
I wonder if the newspaper people then fixed the inaccuracies in the wikipedia articles, making it 0 to 3, which would be a clear win for wikipedia?
I checked one article to see if that might be the case. In the article for “quark” the only recent edits are one that changed all occurrences of “hadron” to “hardon”, and then one that changed “hardon” back to “hadron”.
Of course if the Encyclopedia Britannica had an article on quarks that mentioned “hardons” it would take years before a correction would make its way into print. So score this as a clear win for wikipedia.
I’m usually no fan of Dvorak, but it’s time for people to start getting active about this. Ubiquitous Porn: Alive on the Net:
It’s a warning label, not a platform! It’s isolation. It’s zoning. Would you allow locating adult bookstores next to churches? It seems that Concerned Women for America would demand doing so.
[Wikipedia is] predicated on the belief that an infinite number of trolls will eventually produce an objective authoritative reference work.
– Arandir (Source)
It’s widely accepted in the Internet world that Firefox is the end-all, be-all of web browsers. Now that Microsoft’s long forsaken Internet Explorer is starting to show its age to more and more of the general internet using public, people are touting it as such in record numbers. Come with me; wont you, as I describe in detail the intricacies that make the best browser for Windows, one of the worst browsers for the Mac.
See full article.
This is a good introduction to Firefox on Macintosh’s deficiencies, but it barely scratches the surface.
For instance, try hitting command-enter instead of enter after editing the URL on Mac Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, Camino and Safari. Now try on Firefox. Why would it do that? But it wasn’t accepted as a defect. The developers care more about cross-platform consistency than about platform consistency.
Mozilla Suite already showed that path leads only to irrelevance. Have they forgotten that lesson so easily?