Spam on my phone

Okay, this is great.  I just got a spam by SMS on my phone.  Might have to turn that feature off... *sigh*

 

Something New For Me...

So this is something I haven't done before.  I've been talking to a few independent artists to try to find ways to use Pocket Tunes's success to promote their music.  I met with Lori McKenna this weekend, and I spoke with Geoff Byrd last night.  Both amazing artists, and I'm trying to think of things I can do to get them more fans.

As a business person, I obviously want to be successful by selling Pocket Tunes.  But as a music lover, I feel I should take the opportunity to give something back and promote great music like this.

Blogger API changed

Apparently the blogger API changed, so I had to update Newsgator to point to the new URL: http://www.blogger.com/api  Hope that doesn't happen too often...

 

Music I'm listening to: Yiriyaro (Percussion Storm) by Baaba Maal. Cool stuff :)

Can't do that

Apparently there are quite a few things you can't do from within a sampled sound callback on PalmOS 5, I mean Garnet. As you may be aware, the callback runs in a separate thread of execution from the rest of the application. Therefore one of the things you need to be careful of is synchronization with your main thread. There are no synchronization constructs available to 68k apps or PNOlets, so you've got to implement your own. (Open up your favorite operating system book and look up spin locks. With audio callbacks, you can modify spin locks in such a way as to avoid pegging the CPU. I'll leave this as an exercise.) The other option is to avoid doing things that require synchronization between the threads, which is probably a good idea anyway.

Besides the threading problems, there are also problems with certain OS functions that appear not to be thread safe. We've run into the following functions that seem to have problems:

• DmDeleteDatabase - calling this from the audio callback on some devices causes resource-management functions (e.g. DmGetResource) to later fail in catastrophic ways.
  
• PrefGetPreference - calling this from the audio callback at precisely the wrong time (i.e. when another thread is accessing the system preferences DB) causes a Fatal alert because the system preferences DB can't be opened.
  
• FileClose - just found this today. Calling this from the audio callback corrupts something and leads to hard-to-track-down crashes sometime later (possibly after leaving your app and coming back, which is kind of scary!)
  

Powered Up Award Winners

I've been remiss in posting here due, in part, to going to the PalmSource 2004 developer conference last week.

Pocket Tunes was given a "Powered Up" award from PalmSource! I got to give a quick 2-minute demo in front of about 1,000 people at the keynote address.

It was my first time at a PalmSource conference. It was quite a lot of fun; I highly recommend it for all developer types. I made quite a few contacts and friends and received a boost of energy for Palm development. :)

Tapwave DRM

Tapwave has an interesting DRM scheme for licensing software on their devices.  It looks like they thought it out pretty well so that applications can be reasonably sure they haven't been tampered with and are registered to the current device.  Too bad our software has to run on other devices as well; otherwise we could take full advantage of it.

I wonder how long until someone cracks it...

 

I Smell Spring

Well, maybe I'm just being overly optimistic, but it was a balmy 40 degrees F today.  So I went for a bike ride.  Yes, I was bundled up and it was chilly, but it was still fun to get out there!  I got a few strange looks, but that made it more interesting.

Next week I'll be out in California for PalmSource.  I'm planning to do a bit of mountain biking with some friends while I'm there.  I'm looking forward to the warm weather...

Excellent article on starting your own software company

Eric Sink has a great article in the MSDN about starting your own software company.

They key points that I strongly agree with here are, "Ideas are worthless" and "Choose your Competition".  These are two of the most important concepts I've always kept in mind while working on NormSoft.

I'm also happy to say that NormSoft is the exception to the rule with regards to seed capital.  We started with $0.  My initial legal expenses of $500 were paid for within a month or two.  NormSoft has paid for everything since then and has always been profitable (albeit not very profitable for the first 3-4 years!).

 

Indian Outsourcing

Oh yeah, an article on Slashdot just reminded me of this...  Yesterday I got a call from some guy in India asking me if I wanted to outsource to India.  So apparently they are getting pretty pushy about this kind of stuff.  I couldn't understand him (his accent was much worse than any of my Indian friends in the US), so I pretty much hung up on him.

Well I'm just catching up on this, but it's directly relevant to my email woes this past week:

Microsoft's Penny Black Project

I like the ticket approach, and it makes good sense for businesses who want to operate a legitimate announcement list.  If a customer doesn't refund your ticket, then you take them off the list and don't mail them next time.  That way you can send notifications only to users who appreciate them.

 

Just added an Atom feed for my blog.

Attachment Save

I'll give a quick review for some software I just purchased: Attachment Save

There's a free trial, but it's hidden so well on their web site that I just gave up and bought it ($30) since they have a money-back guarantee anyway.

So it does exactly what I want (well, almost; see below).  Whenever an email is moved to a certain folder in Outlook, it saves the attachment to a specified directory.  This will save me hours of saving those stupid CSV files that all of my resellers send me.  (PalmGear has wisened up and has a nice little tool for downloading a CSV that includes all the orders within a certain date range, but Handango and PDAssi still send you the individual ones.)  Now I don't want to hear from Unix weenies about how easy that is to do in Perl/TCL/etc.  I didn't want to mess with my Linux mail server until I fully understand how that control panel my ISP uses interacts with the configuration files.

The only problem I have with it is that it doesn't have enough options for renaming files due to name collision.  So, for example, if you have two attachments called "sales.csv", it will create "sales.csv" and "sales-2.csv".  Not great.  I'd rather have it append a date on the file so I have some idea of what the file is for.  No big deal, though; it was easy enough to write a Perl script to rename them the way I really want. :)

The developer is very responsive; he responded within a few hours of my email asking for that feature.  He said it's planned in a future release a few months away.

So it's good; it saves me lots of time, and I don't have to muck with my mail server (yet).

 

Geek Leisure

After a rather stressful week of dealing with the Pocket Tunes 2.2 release, subsequent 2.2.1 patch release, and numerous email worms and difficulties, I decided to take it easy this afternoon and indulge in some "geek leisure".  So I'm learning PHP and MySQL.  My first goal is to write a customer database tool for our web site so that customers can look up their past orders and registration codes and change their email preferences.  I've already automated the links on the pTunes homepage to add yourself to the mailing list, etc.  PHP looks pretty cool, but I'm sure everyone knows that already.

Next I'm going to delete my unused cookies.  And you though Palm developers were the coolest guys around...

And tomorrow I'll indulge in some non-geek leisure and watch the game on my widescreen HDTV *silly grin*  Go Pats!

 

It seems I just can't win with email this week.  After sending out a perfectly legitimate email announcement to my customers about new versions of Pocket Tunes and Athletix, I have seemingly been blacklisted from Hotmail.com.  What's strange is that, if I send an email to Hotmail.com or MSN.com, it doesn't bounce back with an NDR (non-delivery report).  It simply disappears into the ether, and the recipient never gets it.

Some folks on the Palm Entrepeneur's Forum suggested that I just wait; Hotmail's list is updated fairly frequently.  We'll see...

 

I just noticed that most of the viruses I'm receiving are addressed to email addresses in the .txt files shipped with Pocket Tunes.  Duh!  So taking out those addresses in the next release should save me quite a bit of this junk...

 

I will make the predication that 2004 will see the demise of email as we know it.  My email has become nearly useless, between the thousands of viruses I'm getting, misfiled spam (see previous post), and lost emails.  I had to resort to the telephone (gasp!) to call my French translator because neither of us could receive the other's emails.  And then I spent two hours on the phone with MSN, trying to figure out why I can't send email to any hotmail or MSN users (they were no help at all, of course).

I don't know what the solution is, but I think that some kind of authenticated email scheme or micropayment system for sending email will solve many of these problems.  I'm sure others have thought about this more than I have, so I won't make any off-the-cuff suggestions.

As a last ditch effort attempt to stem the flow of spam, I'm obfuscating all my email links (google for "obfuscating email" for some good tips) on my web pages.  What a waste of time...

 

I've been using SpamNet (www.cloudmark.com) for some time now, and it's been working fairly well.  However, I just checked my spam folder, and I found all kinds of things in there that aren't spam.  Regular mailing list entries, bug reports from customers, and more.  Looks like I might have to start scanning the Spam folder every day.  Sigh...  Email is becoming virtually unusable with this virus and spam.

 

I wake up to 200 copies of the W32.Novarg.A virus  http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.novarg.a@mm.html

And this is after I blocked all the bill@ joe@ john@ etc. email addresses that it seems to spam.

While working on the German translation of Pocket Tunes 2.2, it occurred to me that German speakers must be used to having their language abbreviated!  All the words are so long that a good proportion need to be abbreviated to fit on the Palm's small screen...