Little Spikey Land - psion

Well now with the release of the latest version of JPL I have finally got restoring from backups implemented. People have been asking me to do it for a while, but it's only recently that I have had the time and a spare Psion to backup, then wipe, then restore.

In principle this was the only thing that MacConnect could do that JPL could not, so although it's not quite equivalent to PsiWin yet JPL is definitely on the way!

posted at 8:04 PM John

Well I finally took the plunge and upgraded to MacOS X. I know that Panther (OS X.3) is out in about 2 weeks, but I went for Jaguar (OS X.2) as I didn't want to wait. When it comes down to it Jaguar runs Java 1.4 and that's what I really want.

So far I am impressed with OS X. It's really nice being able to force quit programs that freeze and not take the system with down too. It's also pretty looking ;^). Oh and my favourite little feature is that when you drag an item off of the Dock (to remove it) it then disappears with a little cloud of smoke and an accompanying sound! I think it's the little touches that will make OS X fun.

My only niggle is that Safari (Apples custom built browser) won't do google queries from the main page, but it will from it's built in google search box thing. It's a bit bizarre, as Internet Explorer handles this fine. I suspect it's partly my setup, i.e. connecting through a Windows 98 box. I do also get similar problems with my Linux box, so I am not too worried.

Beyond that my scanner, cd burner and graphics tablet all work fine. The graphics tablet lets me use Inkwell, which is quite good fun, but I'm not sure how useful it will be in "real life". I did have to get a new USB serial adapter, but that was only £20 from Expansys so not bad.

I also got JPL running and it seems to work pretty well. Considering I have been developing it on entirely different operating systems it runs well. At least now I can fix some of those little problems (mainly with GUI elements). Anyway here is a screen shot of it running.

Edited on: Friday, October 10, 2003 7:59 PM
posted at 7:56 PM John

Well the netBook Pro has materialised. As pointed out on Slashdot there is a Forbes article about it. Annoyingly it runs Windows CE.net, but apparently it does have a JVM and is basically the exact size and shape of the original netBook.

My original netBook is still carrying on and has recently had a new lease of life now that I've got a Wireless PCMCIA card for it. Even more so now that I can use it to connect to the wireless network at uni. Not bad considering it went travelling with me to Oz.

posted at 12:32 AM John

Well today I got some wireless kit. Got the cheapest Access Point I could from Dabs.com (Quicklink code 2MBDWS) and the Buffalo slimline pcmcia wifi card which is listed at Silvester.org.uk as working with the psion netBook. The Buffalo card is basically the same as the Lucent cards (in terms of chipsets), but is slimmer and therefore does not block the stylus.

Got it working very quickly (too quickly some might say). Just plugged in the access point, connected to it with a web browser to change it's ip address and so on and then setup the netBook. I tried a manual configuration first, but that didn't want to work (I suspect because I need to specify routing information). Then I tried dhcp and it worked like a charm. The netBook is now living up to its name, even when in the garden!

The only problem at the moment is that it's all very insecure. Anyone could walk up and hop onto the network. Given where I currently live that's unlikely to happen, but it needs sorting out. I'll probably enable WEP (wireless's builtin security), which should keep most hackers at bay for an hour or two and should keep out most people, unless they really want in. I do want to make it completely secure at some point tho. This will involve using ssh and probably a proxy server, but I haven't figured it out yet. Either way I'll need to keep my eye out for any suspicious goings on and strangers with laptops ;^)

posted at 8:01 PM John

Only recently got around to trying out the PostScript printer driver. Will be very handy, as should make printing in your typical unix/linux environment a lot easier. Seeing as I'll soon have access to such an environment this will be a good thing^TM;.

posted at 7:03 PM John

I looked at the PsiLinux page again recently and toyed with the idea of installing Linux on my netBook. Unfortunately at the moment it's not too easy and I'd need to do a lot of fiddling to get it work right (and even then I would not have access to CF cards or PCMCIA cards). Plus I'd lose all my data (although obviously I can back that up).

Anyway whilst looking around the site I did come across a couple of interesting things:

• EpocEMX
• GNUpoc

The first is a port/series of ports of GNU software to EPOC ER5. This even includes a bash-like shell and gcc!

I've just installed the bare minimum for now, but it definitely beats eshell. I think my next job will be to try and get it setup to compile java easily. Currently it's a bit of a fiddle.

The second are a set of dev tools for writing Epoc/Symbian programs under Linux. Which is very cool as otherwise you need Windows to do the job.

Edited on: Monday, August 25, 2003 5:11 PM
posted at 2:43 PM John