Slashdot | Nokia’s Linux Handheld

This device shows a lot of promise.

I carry a mobile phone nearly everywhere. it’s nice, small, makes phone calls, receives phone calls, has a rudimentary (and, of course, rather broken) calendar and todo. it’s phone book is mostly pretty good and the ‘mobile internet’ that we were told was going to change the world, didn’t.

I have a laptop. it’s great, i spend *heaps* of time on it. in fact, it’s a primary workhorse for a lot of things. But, it can be a bit big, and i don’t take it everywhere.

I have a Newton (that I don’t use anymore, it’s only a 120, and getting it to sync with evolution would be, well, interesting). I love the newton UI, handwriting recognition and *size*.

Yes, the Newton was large, bigger than a palm, but tihs made it useful. you could see a fair bit at once, and it was easy to read.

I do not want a big mobile phone with a big screen and all the bells and whistles (decent cpu, free software, full net access, bluetooth, 802.11 etc). I wouldn’t carry it everywhere (which is the point of a mobile) – it would be too bulky.

having two complementary devices (as this seems to be) would be great for me. I wouldn’t take it when i went out on the town, but would when i jumped in the car going somewhere i hadn’t been before.

now, if only evolution didn’t leak memory like, well, something that leaks a lot – and it’d run on this baby.. then we’d be in business.

great promise though. all the right technologies – linux, X, gtk.

one thing it is missing though is a hard drive. i reckon this would be an ipod-killer if it had a nice HD in there and some sweet looking software to play tunes (ogg, of course).

they’ve also got the dev stuff up already. with a ‘howto port your app’ featuring gaim. very cool.

so, here’s to another possibly great ARM based handheld. Now, if only it was available in australia now, and there was a phone running free software to go with it.

revenge/therapy � rant: web standards

she’s full-on joined thoes of us who are enlightened.

well, to web standards anyway – and is now spreading the love (or becoming dominating standards overlord who kills at the sight of invalid XHTML*) around the office.

Yes, it also surprises me how little of the importance of standards compliance is taught to graduates. Same with coding. I think it would be a great reqirement for CS courses that you code something (that is then accepted into the main source tree) of an open source project (preferably a generally well known one with decent standards about what goes into the tree) How you would mark something like this i have no idea… maybe some form of peer-review/marking thing.

* Yes, I have been watching too much Alias since I got back

Piano may be the key to mystery man from the sea – World – theage.com.au

Yes, that’s right folks – I’m conducting a poll. Post your comments in comments (duh).

If this man, found wandering, distressed, without a passport and unable (or unwilling) to speak was found in Australia, and was an Australian citizen – where do you think he would be deported to?

If you aren’t too good at geography, I offer the following canned responses:
a) Asia, somewhere small, possibly with a bunch of islands. He could be one of them
b) Middle east. It’s safe there now, we killed the evil doers.
c) Europe somewhere, those leftist weirdos.
d) a british boyband.

copyrighteous : ip/20050512-00.html

I enjoyed this tale – it has all these elements of truth, and even an element of absurdity!

Alas, that absurdity is truth as well.

%u039Blgorithm.com.au: CSV to Address Book Importer

Surely my OSX Address book VCF to Evo VCF perl script is more free software friendly.

i think tihs may even be fixed now. i seem to recall a bugzilla mail recently. so maybe it’s redundant! yay!

move from the proprietry world of OSX to the free world of Linux.

http://www.flamingspork.com/junkcode/vcf.pl

Rusty’s Bleeding Edge Page

Rusty talking about the spam that banks give him.

personally, i’m nearly convinced one of my banks is trying to kill me. they keep pestering me to take out “accitdental death” life insurance.

Without fail, every few months – for years.

fuckers.

stillhq.com – Stat on the command line

So Michael pointed out there is one…. in recent versions of coreutils at least.

(umm… yeah… that’s a good excuse. no really)

I should retitle previous entry to something like:
ever wanted /usr/bin/stat on an older system?

The copyright for /usr/bin/stat is 2004 – so i guess my perl is still good for pre 2004 distros (*cough* a debian release *cough*)

Totally not the topic of the blog entry, but anyway: Over at stillhq.com – Blogging methods there is a mention of Theraputic Beer. I totally agree. Where the oath is mine? It’s in the fridge. Why isn’t it here? wait…it’s now in the freezer. WHEN OH WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO MAKE INSTANT-COOL BEER?

Some magic substance that means when you open the beer, it’s nice and cool. even if it was sitting *next* to the fridge because someone thought that ‘food’ was more important than BEER.

argh.

maybe i’ll get lots of therapy then.