The following is a copy of what I just posted on the Palm Prē forums: I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw: Signed Out You are no longer signed in to your Palm […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
What Characters Are Allowed in Twitter Usernames
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 – 2:12 pm
A while back, when I was writing Hummingbird, I needed to look for Twitter usernames in various strings. More recently, I’m doing some work that involves Twitter at my new job. Once again, I need to find and match on Twitter usernames. Luckily, this time, Twitter seems to have updated its signup page with some […]
So Why Isn’t Perl My Favorite Programming Language?
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 – 10:50 am
A good long while ago, I tried doing an exercise that I was considering making into a standard job interview question: “For each of your ‘languages of choice’, tell me 5 things you like about the language, and 5 things you dislike about it.” My languages of choice at the time were Perl, PHP, and […]
Hummingbird Updated to Version 0.60
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 – 7:49 pm
I’ve always questioned the wisdom of building a startup company based around someone else’s platform, like Facebook games or Gmail inbox add-ons. You’re totally at the mercy of the other company. (Many people have found out how silly it was to go up against Microsoft or Apple in just the same way.) And yet, here […]
Palm Is Lying, Not Just Spying
Friday, August 14th, 2009 – 12:48 pm
So, Palm was recently caught spying on its users. Major kudos, by the way, to Joey Hess, who initially broke this story. For those who haven’t kept up, various other news outlets and blogs have also been reporting on it. Palm’s response to this problem is a single paragraph of corporate PR-speak: Palm takes privacy […]
An Installation Shell-Script for Palm Prē Developers
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 – 3:28 pm
Last week, I wrote that I’d been working on a script to easily install homebrew apps on the Palm Prē. It now looks like there are much better ways to handle such things — I’ve become quite a fan of fileCoaster, myself, and of course webOSQuickInstall is a wonderful piece of work, as well. But just […]
A World Where People Regularly Discard Knowledge After 9 Years
Monday, July 27th, 2009 – 7:55 pm
In his latest entry on Coding Horror, “Windows 7: The Best Vista Service Pack Ever”, Jeff Atwood says: I want the world to get the hell off Windows XP. A world where people regularly use 9 year old operating systems is not a healthy computing ecosystem. I find this terribly, painfully wrong. The unintended consequence […]
Productivity on Various Fronts
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 – 5:56 pm
I’ve actually made some progress on coding projects this weekend. My Palm Prē “Magic 8 Ball” application now responds to the Prē’s accelerometer: if you rotate the Prē, the app stays right-side up (including readjusting the position of the backdrop image). Even cooler, you no longer have to tap a button to trigger the fortune; […]
Announcement: Hummingbird Upgraded to Version 0.51
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 – 3:11 pm
I’ve just upgraded Hummingbird from version 0.5 to its new version: 0.51. Since I recently starting using the #PalmPrē hashtag in my tweets, I suddenly noticed that Hummingbird didn’t make hashtags clickable. Well, now it does. The change is pretty minimal, but it also incurred some overhead in my web site: the Hummingbird web page […]
Palm Prē, Day Three: The Good and the Bad
Thursday, July 9th, 2009 – 11:47 pm
So, I’ve already posted my anguished wail over the completely unusable state of the Prē’s memo pad app. Considering that Palm started off as a company that sold PDAs, whose main apps were contacts, date book, and note pad, the collapse of one of those three items seems pretty embarrassing. But aside from that, how […]