http://www.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/12/25/flights.canceled/index.html

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Even the airlines are joining in on the Christmas Cheer. I got a coupon for up to $150 yesterday. The catch is that my luggage needs to remain lost for 5 days...


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ROTFL

I just had to share this support request...  I'll withhold the name to protect the ... err ... not so innocent.

"I just want to know if I can set Pocket Tunes to vibrate mode so my tunes will vibrate to the beat instead of playing music. I want to drop it down my pants and be happy all day!  Rock on dudes!"

Pocket Tunes Update

Pocket Tunes 3.0.6 is now available with lots of nifty new features, including support for M3U playlists.

I've also updated the Pocket Tunes automation API and the Pocket Tunes skin compiler.

 

Our November newsletter

Don't use blacklists!

Today we sent out a newsletter to all of our users.  It's a perfectly legitimate email sent to existing customers with clear unsubscribe instructions, and we completely honor all subscription/unsubscription requests.  We even process all bounce requests and remove emails that bounce 3 or more times.

Several hours later, SpamCop blacklisted us, and we got a slew of complaints from customers who weren't getting their order confirmations.  This is a perfect example of why blacklists are bad.  Do not use blacklists on your server!  If you use blacklists, you are likely blocking legitimate email because most of these blacklists make ill-informed decisions based on over-zealous user reports of spam.  There is no oversight and very little recourse for valid companies to contest the blacklisting.  For all we know, it could be one of our competitors reporting the spam.

All the user has to do is click the unsubscribe link, and we'll NEVER email them again, but yet they'd rather go through the trouble of filing a bogus spam report.  Go figure.

 

Don't Install the T3 DIA Compatibility PRCs on a T5

We've had half a dozen customers angrily email us that the DIA is no longer working on their T5 after installing Pocket Tunes.  It turns out they installed the T3 DIA compatibility PRCs.  The only solution that I know of is to perform a hard reset and restore your files except for those 2 PRCs.  Two problems here:

1. Why the hell did PalmOne let the T3 compatibility PRCs screw up the T5?

2. Why do customers insist on installing files for devices that they don't have?  (In the past, we've heard from customers who installed these files on their iQues and Zodiacs, too!)

If you're a Palm developer, it's another support nightmare to worry about.  Have fun!

NormSoft Acquires HBlogger

Well, this announcement is a little old, but I've been quite busy lately.  NormSoft recently acquired a suite of software products from the PalmOS company Hexlet LLC.  Among these products is HBlogger, a very nice PalmOS app for posting messages and photos to your blog.

We've also acquired TrafficStat and DialStat, two tools to track your data and voice usage on your PalmOS smartphone.

To see all of NormSoft's products, visit http://www.normsoft.com/products.shtml

 

Here's Mark Belliveau, Director of NormSoft, getting ready to enjoy a fun week with PalmGear on their 2nd annual cruise...

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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!


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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...