Picture of a Wireless Zaurus, DSL Hell

My Zaurus SL-5000D displaying my Radio page, with an SMC 2642W WiFi card, a SanDisk 128MB SD card, and a US nickel.

My DSL is now back. I called my provider, they told me to disconnect the modem and reboot. My computer blue-screened on the disconnect. "That shouldn't happen, USB hot-plugs." "Not when the modem's drivers suck."

I never meant to upgrade to XP, it just sort of happened because I finally got DSL and the modem was making my Windows 2000 installation crash so often that it finally became corrupted and would no longer boot.

Naturally, my DSL connected immediately after the reboot, and no sooner had I hung up than it went back down again. Rinse and repeat.

5:07:46 PM | Comments: | Topics: pda_zaurus wifi wireless 

PDA Convergence

Dan Bricklin has a review of the Treo 180 in his usual style. I was just starting to read it as my DSL died...

The evolution of Palm-powered phones has been interesting. Microsoft isn't the only company that needs three release cycles to get something right. First there was the Kyocera model, pictured in Dan's review, originally designed by Qualcomm. It is literally a Palm III molded into a phone. It wasn't much good at either function. My roommate used to have one, and happily got rid of it.

Next came the Samsung. If I could get online, I'd link to it. My roommate presently uses one of these. It loses the keypad, adds color, and reduces the screen size in order to make it more pocket friendly. It comes with an extra battery, and it is necessary! The device is a significant improvement over the Kyocera, but still only the hard-core Palm geeks need apply.

The Treo 180 is the first device to get serious about integrating Phone and PDA into a solution that excels at both functions. It's got a keyboard, because Graffiti sucks and buttons are better than touch-screens for dialing. It's size appears to be a fair trade-off between what is ideal for a compact phone and a PDA. It's got Geek Appeal without appearing too geeky to use around "normal" folks.

If it had a StrongArm processor I would buy one. I've owned several Palms, and still have a Vx LE on my desk, but now I have moved on. I want powerful PDAs that can stand alone, not weak desktop adjuncts.

Yes, I totally skipped over the Handspring VisorPhone. It's not an integrated device. As a technology demonstration for the Springboard slot, it was great. As a phone, worthless.

4:35:49 PM | Comments: | Topics: pda_convergence wireless 

Thunderbolts and Lightening, Very Very Frightening

I grew up, and presently live, in South Florida. If there is anything that this area has a lot of, it's thunderstorms. Today they have been going strong from before noon until just a moment ago. Just as the thunder is starting to sound distant, and the rain is fading to a drizzle... my DSL dies.

Unbelievable.

If it weren't still raining, I'd walk outside and kick the RDSLAM.

Half an hour later: Either a power sub-station just blew, or someone went on a shooting spree. Still no DSL. I know the RDSLAM is up because I have a link, I just can't log in. I have my DSL provider on speed-dial...

3:56:10 PM | Comments: | Topics: florida_living 

More Fun With CSS and PDAs

My first goal for the day was to eliminate the table at the top of the page. At first I tried to replace it with CSS boxes for each element (the timstamp, three image fragments, and the Blog heading). Unfortunately it proved very difficult to get all of the elements lined up properly. Eventually I gave up.

In the spirit of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" I decided to try it with two boxes, one for the timestamp and one for everything else. After shaving seven pixels from the top of the upper two images, everything cam together perfectly.

From there I moved on to creating a better stylesheet for PDA displays. And by "PDA displays" I mean my Zaurus, as I don't believe that any other PDAs currently ship with CSS-capable browsers.

I borrowed some Zeldman code for dynamic stylesheet selection, built a quick-and-dirty JavaScript to load a scaled-down stylesheet for PDAs, and... It didn't work. After making many tweaks, I've reached the conclusion that either Opera on the Zaurus does not support alternate stylesheets or Zeldman's code isn't compatible. Either way, same effect.

Work-around mode: I've stripped the default stylesheet to create a minimal presentation. A JavaScript routine checks the browserversion string for "embedix" or "Windows CE", and will attempt to load my PDA stylesheet. Otherwise, it switches to the normal stylesheet.

If your browser allows it, these links will allow you to temporarily change the stylesheet:

change style to base
change style to normal
change style to pda

Today I also upgraded my VMWare NT 4 session to IE 5. The site displays pixel-perfect compared to IE 6. Maybe tomorrow I will try some Netscape 4.x installs...

Update 9/21/02: The style-changing sheets have long been broken.

3:03:58 PM | Comments: | Topics: accessibility css radio