Palm's refusal to admit errors

I have been using PalmOS and now WebOs for ten years. A handspring visor for 5 years, totally stock, then a T|X when I got back to the USA in 2005. I watched the Treo descend into irrelevancy compared to Blackberry. I watched them buy BeOS (my favorite dead OS) then split off the OS department as PalmSource; it was then sold to Access. Palm then refused to use the pda/phone OS that the BeOs guys developed. PalmOs 6 it was. Ready in 2004 but never used by anyone.

When WebOs and the Pre were unveiled at CES in 2009 I, along with lots of other folks was totally stoked. Palm had tons of mind share in 2009. Remember Roger Macafee famously saying that everyone who bought the first iPhone in 2007 would be buying a Pre? It did seem not unreasonable to me. Then the Pre came out a few days before the iPhone 3GS and all those folks who were to get the Pre got the newest and Kulest iPhone instead.

I got a Pre that first week. It was not ready for prime time. The iPhone wasn't ready at first either, but by 2009 had completely changed people's expectations. A not ready new device would not cut it. Hardware reliability problems, software needing to be rebooted, etc. People buying a telephone do not expect to have to reboot it.

I still use that Pre (actually, my first was replaced under warranty) and love it, but many of those early adopters moved to Android or iPhone. I still see more Palm Centro's (I had one) than Pixi's. Sprint invested a lot in the Pre/Webos rollout as the next hot thing. Now they won't carry the new Pre +, probably due to bitterness.

Android was just coming out at the same time as WebOs. There was one Android phone with a troublesome OS. A year later Android was ruling and Palm was leaping into the arms of HP to avoid slow death.

Jon Rubenstein was brought out of retirement to shepherd the new OS into a device to put palm back into relevance. They designed this Kul device to go with the OS. I like the Pre form factor. The keyboard is a bit small, but all the designers seem to have thought this was a killer design. The market has ruled against it. Everyone wants bigger phones. Bricks. Rubenstein here refuses to admit that anything was wrong with the Pre/WebOs rollout at all.

Hey, go ahead and say that our design did not meet with favor and we are working on it! The "portrait slider" form that the Pre introduced is now being used by Blackberry and a Dell android phone. They have bigger keyboards and bigger screens.

People complained about the introductory advertising campaign. I liked it, but most people didn't. He says here "we changed it". Nothing about trying a different type of campaign to create buzz, but it didn't work out right.

Hey, people do not like it when a leader needs to admit errors and refuses to do so.

D-Link dsl modem on AT&T dsl

Last year I was working on getting my Cousine Carolyn Sue's home network up. AT&T dsl. There were phone line quality issues; I strung some new wire, the company put in a new box on the side of the house. We got reliable service with the Motorola Netopia 2210 modem.

Hooking up the Tivo to the network required stringing ethernet cable and taping it to the floor. This is not an optimal solution but we settled for it.

Wi-fi with DSL: I had installed a wi-fi access point in my house to work with a Netopia modem but for some reason we chose to get a D-Link dsl modem with router and wi-fi built in. The model we bought in 2009 was the 2640B. Attaching it to the phone line resulted in a web browser returning a strange detour page from ATT.net requiring downloading of software to reset the password. This looks a lot like a hijacking attempt but it is the way they do it.

Couldn't get it to work and I didn't want to spend the time on the phone with AT&T tech support. That D-Link sat on the floor for more than a year.

Last week Cousine Sue got an iPad and needed a home wi-fi signal. I resolved to return to the problem of getting the D-Link 2640b to link up with the AT&T signal. It is difficult and little help is available.

I went thru the same procedure as last year, disconnecting the Netopia and hooking up the D-link and getting a redirect page from the AT&T network. This time I invested the time in calling tech support.

I actually got a helpful tech support guy. He spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with me; he was knowledgeable about the different models of Netopia modems (the newest ones are crippled to make NAT and routing very difficult).

The problems with getting the D-Link to sync were thus: the wizard scans and searches for usable signals but reports that all of them are busy. Skipping the wizard reveals multiple VPI and VCI assignments available but in use.

(I think those were the names of the ports, I am writing this at home and do not have perfect recollection; I'd never worked inside a DSL modem before. The D-Link allows access to vastly more settings than the Motorola Netopia.)

Searching help forums didn't give a lot of information. D-Link knowledge base had nothing helpful. I finally found one post (somewhere) that referred to leaving the old modem turned off for a day before hooking up the new modem. Hmm. From this hint I started to glean that the busy ports were still thinking that they had to talk to the netopia.

SOLUTION:
I synced up the Netopia then held down the reset button on the back of the unit. Just as it began to wake up I disconnected it and hooked up the D-LInk. Booted it up, logged into the D-link and set the ports to 8 and 35. Save and reset. After booting up the D-Link it came up with the I light on!

Perhaps someone else will find this useful.

more on the ssd/dual drive ProBook

I've had a bit of trouble with the system since installing the SSD. It would freeze on boot up from cold. I booted with the Snow Leopard install disk and went to disk utility and found the original, 120 gig HD was corrupt. Fix it. Then I found that the new boot SSD had bad permissions. Fix it. I don't know all the majik shell commands to move files in and out of a boot disk.

Eventually I decided to move the assigned ~/HOME directory back to boot/users/myname and keep photos and itunes libraries on the external. Documents and Downloads and Movies too. I cannot discover how to make the ~/Documents folder redirect to the second disk. So, I made an alias for the Documents folder on the second disk and moved that into boot/users/me. So, I see a Documents and 'Documents alias' folder. Sloppy.

I don't quite know why having $HOME on the second disk makes problems, or if it really was that. For now, I'm keeping $HOME on the boot.

It boots up screamingly fast from the SSD.

I was afraid of opening up this thing, what with my experience trying to solder inside my Amiga 3000 all of 20 years ago. It was no problem; Modern laptops are incredible.

ssd in macbook pro

I've been thinking of cleaning up my Macbook Pro. I got it in 2008 when Emile-Alexandre broke my previous laptop, an iBook. The DVD/CD drive stopped working a long time ago; same with the drive in the Mac Mini. I got an external Samsung DVD writer for $50. Much better idea. How often do I use an optical drive these days? Couple times a year.

I'd heard about replacing the DVD drive with a second hard drive, and I'd thought about using an SSD (Solid State Drive). So I got a 40gig Intel SSD for a hunnerd bux.

I followed instructions here and at ifixit.com. I got an adapter at newmodeus.com. It is a little confusing figuring out which adapter to use. This probook has an ATA bus for the DVD. ATA is now called PATA. Parallel ATA, which is for some reason slower than the new Serial ATA. So, the hard drive is SATA and the tray to replace the DVD has an ATA buss on the outside and SATA on the inside.

It fit perfectly. I moved the old drive into the DVD bay and put the SSD in the boot drive location. Then I assigned ~/home to the old drive in the new location. You do this in advanced options of the login preference. A right click is necessary to find this hidden advanced option. Non obvious.

So after installing OSX snow leopard onto the SSD and re-assigning ~/home and rebooting I have a fast system and a big user area for all files. Applications are installed on the SSD boot drive. I deleted all the old system files from the original 120gig (now the second drive, remember?)

Kul

Mac Mini hard drives

Yahoo search found me this article about putting a new hard drive into an Intel Mac Mini. My early Minintel has a small drive and is getting noisy. Not as noisy as that external Lacie, but still noisy. I was thinking of putting a silent solid state drive in but they are a bit expensive.

Win 7 on Virtual Box on a mac

I just found the Apple Insider story linked above. I did this very installation last week; Win7 beta installed in Virtual Box. Virtual Box is from Sun, a virtual machine to run (whatever) intel operating systems on a Mac. I own Parallels, the first Mac virtual machine for running windoze on yr Mac. I bought Parallels 2, then upgraded to 3. They are trying to sell me the upgrade to 4 for another $50 but I think I'll pass.

VM Ware has a competing product, Fusion, which gets better reviews than Parallels, altho Parallels supposedly will run from a Boot Camp installation. I cannot get Boot Camp to finish an install.

Virtual Box is free and runs quite well, but does not support my ProBook graphics nearly as well as Parallels. VirtualBox cannot detect the native resolution on this GeForce 8600m.

So, Win 7 is actually pretty nice. I like it. Much cleaner and faster than XP.

futre nine

I canceled my land line and got a voip thingie from Future Nine. After buying the box for $45 the service is virtually free. I got a local number from them today, 504.799.0801. They didn't charge me for the number! Must be something wrong there.

I am trying to figure out configuring the SPA2002 box. Caller ID information is going out, I called my cell phone to check. They must do that at sip.future-nine.com. There is a web interface to the SPA2002 but no way that I can discover to edit the sip.conf file. Is there one in there? Dunno.

Onyx multi-touch phone

The link is to a blog website for the Onyx cell phone. It was a proof of concept for the new touch screen interface like that used by the iPhone. This is interesting as the Palm Pre will be using this screen, from the same manufacturer that Apple uses.
Palm is apparently being threatened by Apple over intellectual property. Apple was just granted a very broad patent for touch screen cell phones.

Synaptics has a growing business supplying touch sensors for cell phones. It uses a particular type of touch sensor known as "projected capacitive." Before the iPhone came along, Synaptics was struggling to convince manufacturers that the technology was better than the cheaper "resistive" screens. From an SFgate story about this issue. Interesting battle coming up. I lust after the Palm Pre and bought in to Palm stock again. Too late, but it is making a little.

win on mac with VirtualBox

I've been using Parallels Desktop on my Intel Macs for a while to run Windoze XP. I hardly ever run win, but I check sites with InternetExploder on it. I installed Chrome as well. Since Parallels came out VMWare released a desktop product for the Mac and it has gotten good reviews.

The noise about Win 7 made me want to look at it. Downloads of the beta are free! My Parallels version 3 doesn't install the Win7 properly. An upgrade to version 4 would be $50. So, I looked at VMWare Fusion, which offers a cross grade rebate; prove you own Parallels and they pay you $30. A digital download purchase of VMWare Fusion is $80, same as a new Parallels. A boxed edition from Amazon is $57. Strange days when a boxed version is cheaper than a download.

Then I discovered VirtualBox from Sun. It is free, open source and has gotten some good mentions. Installed Virtual Box and Win7 is one of the choices for automatic installation. How is Sun going to get me to buy a Sparc server by giving away a virtual machine program?

More: The free VirtualBox does not run the graphics card in the MacB Pro. ProBook it should be. Anyway, VB does 'generic vga' but it is a lot more than 'generic vga' used to be; 1280xwhatever, 32 bit graphics. But, it does not do a widescreen Macbook resolution. Runs this Win7 pretty darn good tho, for free.

laptop insurance

Safeware offers insurance for laptops which has much better coverage than, Apple Care, for instance. My Treo 755 and Centro can be insured much cheaper than what Sprint charges as well.