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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Wednesday, September 11, 2002OpenZaurus
I managed to install OpenZaurus. The good news is that it was easy, and there is nearly 3MB left in Flash for applications and data. The bad news is that OZ includes very few applications and no web browser. I think that I can stuff Perl and a minimal Apache in there, but Movable Type and Konqueror/Embedded will need to go on a storage card.
And now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know if Konqueror supports XHTML. MT's editing interface is HTML 3.2, but the default site templates are XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Getting my SD card re-formatted from ext2 to FAT16 was challenging. Had a brief scare because fdisk on the Zaurus was giving me a bus error whenever I tried to display the partition table. I have one of the few Sandisk 128MB SD cards that never had a problem on the Zaurus, so I was really worried for a moment. Eventually I got it whipped into shape, thankfully.
Trying not to trip.
Today I've been thinking about blogwalking + digital photography. All of the pieces needed to do this well are now available. The Pretec 1.3MP CF Camera is the most important bit, it is the first CF camera good enough to replace a "real" digicam. If the Pretec camera, Zaurus SL-5500, and Movable Type had been around back in Y2K, I would have been "Photo Blogwalking" constantly.
The Zaurus has an edge for this scenario because it can use a local Movable Type installation and push photographs out to the web using whatever process moves the weblog entries (ftp/rsync/scp/etc). A Zaurus photo blogwalker also has the ability to instantly preview what the posted entries and pictures will look like on the web.
Blogger API clients such as Pocket Blog are at a disadvantage here. They can't offer a genuine preview function and the only reasonable way to move pictures around would be via FTP. That's ok for Movable Type and Blogger users, less than ideal for Radio Userland.
It would be nice to see the major weblog packages offer asset management features that are usable remotely. Implementing xmlStorageSystem seems like a good place to start.
.NET, Mono, and the Zaurus
For a couple of weeks I have been wanting to post a mini-rant declaring that Trolltech and Sharp need to support Mono. It turns out that there is a Qt# project to create Qt bindings for .NET under any of the CLRs (Microsoft's, Mono, and Portable .NET). Last month they released Qt# 0.4, and it sounds pretty good.
Unfortunately, Qtopia support is still on the TODO list.
Trolltech and Sharp ought to donate some resources to this project. The Zaurus SL-5x00 is going to be a dead-end product if better developer support doesn't materialize, and Qtopia# seems like a much better solution than giving away left-over SL-5000Ds.
Probably would help to offer the Mono project some assistance in optimizing for embedded platforms, too.
I would start developing for the Zaurus in a heartbeat if it supported C#.
Jeremy Lott: Why forgetting September 11 is good for America
If recent media coverage is any indication we are still very much stuck in the moments of that sad, sad day.
I hate that terrorism still dominates the news. I want to move on, but our President and media refuse to let me. I've become very selective in my television viewing, I don't surf to general news web sites, I try to avoid reading the items that make it to my aggregator... Yet I still feel inundated.
My Zaurus crashing problem with the "Crow ROM" is actually if I dock the Zaurus at all, sync or no sync. That is a much bigger problem. Found a related thread on Zauruszone, added a "Me Too" and sent an email to Crow (update: Crow says to keep an eye on Zauruszone for updates).
Think I'll give OpenZaurus a shot while I'm waiting. It's most interesting feature is that Flash is writable, and they have kernels that make the full amount of RAM available.
