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To the other three guys (or gals)....

... who own a HP Jor­na­da 720 and are us­ing Opie on it and they have the span­ish/lat­in-amer­i­can key­board­... here is your keymap.

I will write some­thing about how to get Lin­ux go­ing right on it soon, but here's the sta­tus re­port, 48 hours in.

This ba­by (un­named yet) has:

  • 32MB of RAM

  • 1 GB of Flash

  • Wifi (802.11b pcm­­ci­a) + IR­­DA + Eth­er­net (pcm­­ci­a) + Any­thing once I find a 16-bit pcm­­ci­a-USB card (any­one has a spare and wants to re­­cy­­cle it? ;-)

  • De­­cent bat­tery life (6 hours use with wifi, 9 with­­out)

  • A key­board

  • A de­­cent screen (640x240)

  • A de­­cent Lin­ux-based GUI (Opie)

  • A some­what er­rat­ic touch­screen

So, what can I do with it:

  • Email

  • Web brows­ing ( With Kon­­queror good­­ness )

  • Pro­­gram­ming (Python, even PyQt2!). They key­board and screen are sur­pris­ing­­ly de­­cen­t.

  • eBook read­­ing. This is the most im­­por­­tant one. In my work, I spend a lot of time wait­­ing. Wait­­ing for the train to ar­rive, for the trip to end, for some­one to come to a meet­ing, for the wait­­er to bring my meal, for stuff to com­pile, for stuff to down­load­­... maybe I wait 3 hours a day. So I read. And this screen (long and some­what thin) is quite spec­­tac­u­lar for read­­ing. Opie-read­­er is pret­­ty good.

  • MP3 and Video play­er (haven't used it yet). I have stream­ing TV at home, cour­tesy of Cher­ryTV (check the links at the left­­). This should work great when Rosario wants to see Mon­te­cristo and I'd rather see Penn & Teller's show.

  • Gen­er­al PIM stuff. Al­though I tend to keep that stuff in my head and my phone.

The bad side:

  • The bizarre screen as­pect ra­­tio con­­fus­es many con­­fig­u­ra­­tion di­alogs.

  • Al­­most no game works un­­less you ro­­tate the screen.

  • The key­board con­­fig­u­ra­­tion took a while, and is not per­­fect yet ( I can't make dead­­_a­­cute work for some rea­­son)

  • The ex­­tra but­­tons don't work (ex­ter­­nal au­­dio recorder, and alarm light-but­­ton)

  • I can't find a way to bind the func­­tion keys to apps in Opie

  • The re­set but­­ton does­n't work (it's now a hang but­­ton)

  • Sus­pend is not re­al­­ly sus­pend on Lin­ux (for un­avoid­able hard­ware rea­­son­s), so it spends bat­tery when sus­pend­ed (may last 12 hours or so, I think).

  • The on­­ly way to re­al­­ly turn it off is to take out the bat­tery (not as bad as it sound­s).

  • If you do that, it takes about one minute to boot.

So, I am us­ing it more as a lap­top (although a re­al­ly, re­al­ly small one, with very, very good bat­tery life :-) than as a PDA.

The small mem­o­ry and CPU means I can't run very de­mand­ing stuff, but I nev­er seem to do that, any­way.

And of course, the re­al­ly bad thing: it's so much fun to hack with, I have trou­ble work­ing!

All in al­l, a great toy, lots of fun, and rather use­ful.

I'm getting one of these

One of these I mean.

Slight­ly old, but it can get a nice Qtopia set­up on the CF card. And, with a PC­Card->USB gad­get, I ex­pect it to be use­ful (wifi/ex­ter­nal disk/what­ev­er).

Used. Cheap. Should re­place my faith­ful Clie for ebook read­ing, and my heavy note­book for meet­ings. More if I can get a NX client in it :-)

ra-plugins 0.2.9 is coming closer

Ver­sion 0.2.9 of ra-­plu­g­in­s, my qmail-spp plug­in col­lec­tion is com­ing soon.

In­clud­ing lots and lots of new plu­g­in­s, a re­al build sys­tem, and even two patch­es by some­one else :-)

So, now is a good time to let me know if you are us­ing ra-­plu­g­in­s, if you have any prob­lems with it, and if you have any ideas for cool plug­ins. I can write them.

rst2rst gets tables!

My Re­struc­tured Text to Re­struc­tured Text con­vert­er can now han­dle ta­bles!

If you don't un­der­stand a word of what I just wrote... well, skip this. It's re­al­ly quite es­o­ter­ic.

I man­aged with­out lin­ear pro­gram­ming by the usu­al route: make it ug­ly but func­tion­al. Ba­si­cal­ly, I overdi­men­sion things bad­ly.

Here's the source table:

+-------+---------------------------+
| f2,c1 | f2,c2 longer longer still |
|       +---------------------------+
| f3,c1 | 1. a                      |
| f3,c1 |                           |
| f3,c1 | 2. b                      |
+-------+---------------------------+

Here's what rst2rst gen­er­ates:

+-------+---------------------------+
|       |                           |
| f2,c1 | f2,c2 longer longer still |
|       |                           |
| f3,c1 |                           |
| f3,c1 |                           |
| f3,c1 |                           |
|       |                           |
|       +---------------------------+
|       |                           |
|       | 1. a                      |
|       |                           |
|       | 2. b                      |
|       |                           |
+-------+---------------------------+

Se­ri­ous­ly non-op­ti­mal, but it is func­tion­al, un­til a braver soul im­proves the al­go­rith­m.

It can't han­dle ta­ble head­ers cor­rect­ly, but oth­er than that, it works just fine.

Up­date: It now sup­ports all the RST ta­ble syn­tax, AFAIK.

Veanme en CafeConf 2006! / See me at CafeConf 2006!

Co­mo to­dos los años, voy a dar una char­la en Cafe­Conf 2006, el tema de este año es "Boote­an­do más rápi­do y mejor us­an­do runit".

Si bus­can runit en este blog se van a en­ter­ar mas o menos de las mis­mas cosas, pero la char­la de­bería ser más pro­li­ja :-)

La primera per­sona que men­cione el nom­bre de este blog en la parte de pre­gun­tas y re­spues­tas se gana un re­ga­lo sor­pre­sa!


Like ev­ery year, I will be speak­ing at Cafe­Con­f, Sat. Nov 11. This year's top­ic is "Bot­ting faster and bet­ter us­ing runit".

If you look for runit in this blog, you will find out more or less the same things, but this should be more or­ga­nized.

The first guy to men­tion the blog in the Q&A ses­sion gets a sur­prise gift.


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