It's been a very successful PalmSource EuroDevCon. NormSoft announced a partnership with GlooLabs to provide a service for listening to your home music collection anywhere from your wireless Palm. Go to NormSoft's press page for details.

Mark and I are now headed over to downtown Munich for Oktoberfest. We'll have a few beers for Pocket Tunes!


[Posted with hblogger 2.0]

Well, according to Symantec, SideStep is now considered spyware... Apparently it spies on your web browsing and sends your URLs to their main server to determine whether to open up SideStep...

It looks like you might be able to turn this 'feature' off, but I decided not to take the chance...

I found an interesting meta-search engine for travel called SideStep.  I just booked a flight to France for the Orange Code Camp and I decided to give them a try.  I have mixed feelings so far.

Their flight search engine found a great deal on American Airlines for 50% of the cost of what Expedia or Travelocity could find.  It's offered from airfare.com, which seems to be a low-budget travel site with strict cancellation policies.  So far so good.

I also found a hotel in Paris for the last night of my trip.  It was a decent hotel within my price range, so I picked it.  It was offered by PlacesToStay.com, apparently powered by WorldRes.  Less than 24 hours later, I received an email from the hotel saying that they are cancelling my reservation because WorldRes has not been paying them on time, but if I'd like to book the hotel directly, I should contact them.  That's not a good sign.  Granted, it could be that the hotel is trying to side step (pun intended) the commission from WorldRes, but it seems like they could only do this for so long before they were delisted.  So my bet is that the hotel is telling the truth and WorldRes is delinquent.

I contacted SideStep and told them about my incident.  It's not in their interest to partner with financially irresponsible companies, so I hope that this will improve over time.  At present though, I'd say to be cautious whom you book through.

Oppose Discrimination

Help oppose this ridiculous constitutional amendment.  Besides the fact that it's discriminatory, it's giving the federal government power to legislate things that should remain the domain of individual states.  I don't understand why people want their lives to be more regulated.  Even if you happen to agree with what this amendment says, consider that you may not agree with the next amendment that comes along.  Ask yourself if you want your rights to be dwindled away by overzealous politicians eager to be re-elected.

Spammy

I just took a look at the number of viruses that my script caught today.  It was over 10,500!  Holy crap!  There's 826MB of viruses in the blocked folder since May 1.

Pocket Tunes 3.0

Pocket Tunes 3 is finally out.  We're now dealing with the usual flood of emails, questions, comments, etc. that follows a new release.  We'll be busy all weekend, it looks!

New Spam/Virus

Apparently there's a new virus going around in Germany that will make people reconsider their catchall email accounts.  It makes up a bunch of email addresses, presumably by random or by looking at the local name of addresses in your address book, and then it sends them all to each mail domain in your address book.  So a few times an hour, I've been getting batches of 20-50 emails from the same zombie computer.  Looks like I may have to start filtering out dynamic IP addresses with our mail server. :(

 

FntDefineFont gotcha

Beware if you use FntDefineFont on the Tungsten T3.  You should be prepared for other applications popping up and redefining your fonts!  In particular, the clock application (which pops up when pressing the select button on the 5-way nav while the device is turned off) redefines the font fntAppFontCustomBase.  When your app gets control back, if you try to use that font, you will get garbage on the screen or your T3 will crash.

The fix that we've implemented is to re-call FntDefineFont whenever we get a winEnter event.  This seems sufficient for this particular case, but theoretically, there could be another background app that redefines the font without even opening another window. (ack!)  In that case, you should call FntDefineFont before using any custom font.  But I'm not going to go that far.

(Even that, if you want to be absolutely safe, is not adequate.  There could be another thread (e.g. an audio callback thread) that calls FntDefineFont, causing a race condition on your code.  This is so unbelievably rare that I think it's ridiculous to worry about.)

The conclusion is that FntDefineFont is broken at the OS level because it allows other applications to mess with your resources.  Custom font IDs should be dynamically allocated.  This has probably been addressed in OS6, but I haven't been paying as much attention to OS6 as I should.

 

Stock Price Manipulation in action

I've been getting spams all weekend for the OTC stock TTTP.OB.  They've been trading at around $0.08.  This morning they've spiked to $0.12.  Someone's making a killing on that spam...

How many bugs did you fix before breakfast?

We're in full-fledged beta mode now.  It's quite gratifying to churn through a list of bugs and knock each one off the list...  But maybe that's just me.

Pyrotechnics

Cool, I was building a PC out of spare parts, and it blew up.  It was sitting there at the Windows 2003 Server setup screen (some people might argue that was my problem) and all of a sudden there was a loud bang and crackling noise.  The circuit breaker tripped, and the room filled up with smoke.

I still haven't plugged anything back in yet, so I don't know if it was the monitor or the power supply on the PC.  My guess is the monitor; I haven't used it in a few years, and it's been sitting on the floor of a damp basement...

Fundraising Ride

I signed up for the Mass Reb Ribbon Ride in August.  I have been a supporter of Community Servings in the past, and this seemed like a good way to support them again.  We'll be riding 225 miles across Massachusetts in 3 days, which will be my longest ride yet.  Help support me!

Pocket Tunes 3.0 Beta

The Pocket Tunes 3.0 beta program is finally underway.  We've got a good number of users signed up, and we're getting some great feedback so far.  Everyone's been excited about the new features, particularly the tag-based song browser and the Windows Media Player interface.  There have been some good bug reports, but we'll get those ironed out.  Hope I can keep up with the beta emails!!  I'm a bit worn out, now.

The things people will do...

to get support.  I just got an email from a customer who claims that he invested $100,000 in our company to get it founded.  (As I believe I've mentioned previously in my blog, NormSoft is completely self-funded.)  What will they think of next?

Another Time Trial

I raced another time trial (my third so far) last night.  I did pretty well; I shaved 18 seconds off my time, bringing me just about to an average 23mph for the 9.75 miles.  As I crossed the finish line, I passed my 30-second man, who was using aerobars, so I felt pretty good about that. :)  The ride was tough; I was really struggling to keep going, particularly on the flat sections, where I couldn't get aero enough.  I took one hill too quickly, and my lungs were burning for a few minutes afterwards.  On the last hill, I gave it everything and easily caught my 30-second man.  He caught me on the downhill, and then I passed him again right on the finish line, as I sprinted up the small incline.  Overall, I felt good.  Today I'm off to the bike shop to get a set of aerobars!

Stupid me, I forgot my helmet at the race.  Doh!  I went back later, and it was gone.  I emailed the race organizers, but no word yet.  Might be time to get a new helmet today...

My first Time Trial

Okay, I'll post something that should be a little more interesting...

A few weeks ago, I did my first bicycle race - a time trial in Dover, MA.  A time trial is a race against the clock; each rider sets out at 30 second intervals and tries to finish the course as fast as possible.  You're not allowed to draft (ride close behind) other riders because that gives you an advantage in a race that's supposed to be all about your own effort.

I started off at a little under my maximum effort; I needed to save some energy for the upcoming hills. The race starts going up a few stair-step hills, and I was feeling like I was having a little trouble. Just ahead of me was a girl on a bike. When I started to pass her, she suddenly swerved to the left, struggling up the hill. I yelled, "Look out!" and gave her plenty of room. That got my adrenaline going, and I picked up the pace.

I reached the top of the hill, surprised thinking that it was not as tall as I'd remembered. There's a nice steep downhill section afterwards, and I got down as aerodynamic as I could and got close to 40mph; it felt great! At the bottom of the hill is a hairpin turn; I looked around and there was no traffic, so I took the whole lane to get a good line around the corner to keep up my speed, just tapping my brakes a little.

After that is a less-steep climb. I started grinding away, and I heard the whir of wheels to my left. The guy who started 30 seconds behind me was passing. You can't draft in a time trial, but the mental advantage of having someone to chase (your "carrot") is big. I picked up the pace again and tried to keep him in sight.

After that hill is a short descent with a blind 30 degree right-hand turn. It always makes me nervous. I saw the rider in front of me speed around the corner and briefly thought about slowing down for the turn. But I looked around - no traffic - so I moved left and took the turn wide. Still no traffic, so I was still making good speed.

I saw the rider in front of me hit the last big hill. I used to commute on these roads, so I know this hill quite well. I knew that I could climb it quickly because it's short, and it's the last hill. So I gave it everything I've got and sailed past the guy who just passed me. I looked down at my speedometer: 19.5mph UP HILL. I was smoking. :)

At the top of the hill is a flat section. I was feeling pretty beat at this point, but still going strong. Then I heard the whir of wheels again. Another rider zoomed by me with his special time trial bike with disc wheels and aerobars. He was out of sight while I was thinking, "That's not right". :)

On the last downhill section, I was fighting the wind a bit. The rider whom I'd just passed had aerobars (I don't) and was able to catch me again and got about 5-10 seconds ahead. There's one last short, but steep, hill before the finishing line, and I made up a few seconds there, using up the last bit of energy, then I yelled my rider number as I crossed the finish line and sat up and tried to catch my breath.

22.48mph was my average speed. My previous maximum speed for any ride was 21.2mph. All the riding on the trainer this winter (and down in Florida) is paying off. :)

That's it. It was exciting. Can't wait for the next one!

Here are the results.  Scroll to the bottom for the most recent.

 

Message from TJIC

Tim,

Remember back when you used to have a blog, and you'd post things in it?

Those were great days!

TJIC

Bike Racing

Well, I was going to try to enter a few bike races this year, so I went to go watch a criterium this morning.  It's supposed to be one of the safest criteriums around, so I figured that I should be okay to race in it.  (Don't want to get hurt and miss my trip to France!)  Well, there was a nasty crash midway through the race; someone flew into a telephone pole.  No one was hurt too bad, but I think that's too much excitement for me! :)  The race director told me they should call it a crashterium.  I'll probably do some time trials, though.

Back in Business

Well I just wasted the past 2 days re-installing all the software on my laptop.  For some reason, it was just rotting away.  My sound output was really low through the built-in speaker, and the hard disk access was painfully slow.  Perhaps there was some driver I installed that caused these problems, but they're all fixed now.

On the plus side, I got to update all my applications with the new MSDN subscripiton we just got.  Outlook 2003 is quite nice; I think I could get used to it. :)

Back to work!

CLIE TH-55

So if you can't get your TH55 to connect to your WiFi access point, check the access point's channel.  Apparently the TH55 doesn't work with channels of 7 or higher.  Nice...