Category: Geekery

Not much going on

I haven’t been doing much updating of this blog, mostly because I’ve been busy fixing up Maddy’s blog. Good thing she never got around to changing her password after I set it up for her. I had been putting updates on her blog because she’s been incommunicado – as people reach her on the phone or go visit her, they email me some status information and I put it on the blog for the benefit of all her friends. But because she’s been in the hospital and extremely fatigued, my posts were basically overwhelming what is, after all, her story. So thanks to the wonderful extensibility of MT, I’ve made a separate category for my posts, made the main page only show her category, and put a side bar entry showing my most recent posts.

It was remarkably easy. The only hard part was that because my blog and her blog are on the same site, if I wanted to look at my “Main Index” template while editing hers, I had to use two browsers, because two windows on the same browser couldn’t be logged in as different users. Fortunately I was working on my Mac, so I had both Mozilla and Safari, two excellent and standards compliant browsers at my disposal.

Who’d have thought it?

We’ve had daylight savings time for how many years now? All of my life, I’m sure. So why the hell did I think that I could march my date-time classes from one day to the next just by adding 24 hours (or rather 24*60*60*1000 milliseconds)? Damn, that was a stupid bug. And I’d done it in about 15 different places in the code as well. It’s going to be hard to test it completely until April when the time goes back.

I hope it works.

Wish me luck

Generally, when my computers have failed in the past, it’s either been 3 or 4 days after a major configuration change (such as adding a hard drive) or it’s been while I was away for the weekend. It’s now 4 days since I added the new hard drive, and I’m going away for the weekend. With that combination, I figure with my luck it will probably explode and burn the house down.

Second and Third

Reader’s Choice Awards–PDA Software Winner

So CoPilot came second in the poll, which is a real vindication of this wonderful unpretentious and understated free software. Coming second to the flashy, expensive and hugely processor intensive Anywhere WX (which only runs on PocketPC because of the processor requirements) is no shame. If I had a PocketPC I’d probably want AnywhereWX or WXWorks.

But I’m surprised to see that number three is another piece of software that I’m slightly involved with – GPSPilot.com’s Fly 5.1. GPSPilot.com are the nice people who bought me my lovely Sony Clié as thanks for doing my waypoint generator for them. It appears that they’re paying more attention to the connection to AeroPlanner than to my generator now, so I probably won’t be able to convince them to replace the Clié now that it’s getting kind of battered looking. Oh well.

If I can just convince Vicki to replace her clunky old Handspring Visor with a Palm Tungsten E, I might be able to get away with buying a new PDA next year. I’m so crafty it hurts – too bad I’m letting the cat out of the bag here.