Saturday, 16 September 2006 by marstinson.

Moved into the Big Leagues, sort of, with my recent graduation from a Palm Zire 31 to an iPaq Pocket PC. Just as an aside, the PPC seems to prove the corollaries to Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law says that processor power doubles about every 18 months. Moore actually said that the number of transistors on a processor seems to be doubling about every 18 months (and it was only an observation, not a rule), but it has essentially the same effect. That  being the case and all other things remaining equal, the corollaries to Moore’s Law say that you should be able to buy the same product at half the price in eighteen months, the same product at half the size in eighteen months, or twice the product at the same price in eighteen months. So after unpacking it and checking out what was there, it seems that it packs about the same punch (with multiple times the memory) as the 386 machine that I had sitting on my desk about 10 or 12 years ago.

I purchased it as a factory refurbished unit on eBay and ended up with the same product and a 3-year warranty at $100 less (including shipping) than I would have paid at my local CompUSA. So, all in all, I’m thinking that I got a decent deal on it.

After unboxing it and doing and requisite amount of drooling and “wooooooo!” on my new purchase, I sat down to set it up. A couple of things immediately jumped out at me. First off, much to my dismay, it will only sync through its cradle, unlike my Zire, which sync’d through a standard USB. I got a little attachment that let me recharge it without the cradle, but nothing else as far as sync’ing. I found that to be a bit disheartening because it means carrying around more cables and junk, which is definitely not something that I need. The other thing that hit me was the almost complete lack of documentation. I’m not saying that I didn’t get manuals with it, because I did. But the manuals only dealt with the initial setup and hardware end of things; nothing on Windows Mobile or the applications that came preinstalled. If anyone else finds themselves in the same boat, Microsoft was kind enough to make their documentation available online.

To give HP and Microsoft credit where it’s due, the initial setup was a snap. I installed the battery and hooked it up to the charger (it came about 98% charged). After a little while, the charging light stopped flashing, so I dropped in the CD and installed the drivers and ActiveSync (I didn’t need any of the other bundled software), rebooted and plugged the cradle into a USB port. DIY-ers TAKE HEED: as a general rule for any HP product, install the drivers before you hook anything else up. Plug-n-Play detected the new device, installed the appropriate drivers and began to sync up immediately. No fuss, no muss, no bother. And on an even brighter note, unlike my Palm device, the iPaq will sync with multiple PCs. The only restriction is that you can only sync your Outlook email on one machine. No biggie (I’ll probably change my tune on that in a few weeks, but it’s no biggie today).

 The acid test (and the reason I went with an iPaq rather than with a fancier Palm) was sync’ing Windows Media Player. After all of the hassle that I’ve gone through over the past few weeks to whip my jams into some semblance of order, I decided that not listening to them would be a crime. So the prime requirements were that whatever device I ended up with had to be able to deal with Office files in their native formats, had to be able to sync with Windows Media Player and had to use SD cards for storage expansion. Just about everything else was negotiable. As it turned out, the iPaq met the requirements at a price that didn’t make me do much more than wince a bit.

The first order of business was going to be to set the thing up to use my home wireless network. This is where I first noticed the almost complete lack of decent documentation. Had I not known a bit about configuring wireless devices, I’d have been in a world of hurt as far as setting it up. And to make matters worse, finding my handheld’s MAC address was a good two-hour task. Most laptops have a nice little bar-coded sticker somewhere in or near the battery compartment that has the MAC address of the wireless card for that unit (PC cards have a sticker on the back of the card itself). But not the iPaq. No stickers and nothing in the documentation. And since I’m pretty clueless on Windows Mobile (this is my first device with that OS), I spent the better part of two hours tapping this, that and the other, hoping to kind of blindly stumble onto the information that I needed.

See, my home wireless network uses MAC address filtering as one of its security meausures. Not only to you have to know the SSID of the network (which is not broadcast) and have the proper key, the device’s MAC address also has to be on the “approved” list or it’s not connecting. Period.

Anyway, I decided that I wasn’t getting anywhere and hopped online to HP’s technical support site, hoping to get a little joy from that end. Boy, was I sadly mistaken. After being told that someone would be with me in about 5 minutes (automatically generated chat message), I sat down to wait… and wait… and wait… and wait. After close to 30 minutes, I gave it up as a lost cause and went back to my “tap and hope” scheme. It eventually paid off and I found the MAC address, which just goes to show that even a blind hog finds the occasional acorn. With that in hand, I set up my access point and everything was off and running.

Web access was decently speedy, and all of the web pages that I went to loaded and worked relatively well. Except for Microsoft, the web designers didn’t take handheld displays into account, so everything was a bit cramped, but otherwise functional. I was not able to get into my Hotmail account initially, but was able to get in a day or so later. Maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe there was a problem with rendering. Who knows? But it worked eventually, which was all I wanted in the first place.

Anyway, as I said earlier, the acid test was Windows Media Player. One of the first things that I tried to do was to sync my SD card with my laptop. It was pretty much a situation of drag the song that I wanted to the sync list (or right-click and tell it ”add to the sync list”) and then click “Start Sync”. Worked just fine except for one itty-bitty problem: it took two to three minutes to synchronize each song and wouldn’t do more than 15 or 20 songs at a time before generating errors. On a song-at-a-time basis this is probably not that big of a deal. But when you’re trying to fill a 1GB flash card, that’s a couple of days of waiting for the sync to finish. And that was also unacceptable.

So, my next idea was to try to use the SD card as a simple storage device. It sync’d up just fine with WMP and only took a second or two per song. But anything that was DRM-protected (which is most of my library on the laptop) refused to play on the hand-held. Anything that was non-DRM-protected (like my ripped CDs) played just fine. Hmmmm. There has to be a better way of doing things.

HP’s technical support was about useless on this issue. And while an answer to my questions about the time it takes to sync might eventually appear on the Microsoft Newsgroups, I’ve seen nothing in 24 hours. So it appears that if I want to synchronize my music on the iPaq, my only viable options are to make sure that everything gets converted into non-DRM-protected .mp3 files and then transfer those to the SD card by treating it as an extrnal storage device. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Beyond that issue, though, the iPaq is a neat little device. Again, I’m rather disappointed to find that it cannot be sync’d except through its cradle. But as another bright issue, battery power seems to be lasting a lot longer than my Palm. I went to do some shopping this morning, jamming the whole way. It took a couple of hours and had drained less than 10% of my battery. In comparison, a couple of hours of jams would have knocked about 50% of the battery off of my Palm.

Posted in Computers | No Comments »

Saturday, 9 September 2006 by marstinson.

On their “Free Speech” segment, the CBS Evening News ran an item on the  Congress being out on vacation again and how everyone should get to take as many days of vacation time as they do. More power to ‘em, I say. Think about it - if they aren’t sitting there holding useless hearing, making speeches, and generally making nuiscances out of themselves, they’re raising your taxes, eroding your civil liberties and generally making your life miserable.

Bah! Let ‘em stay on vacation. Think we could maybe pay them to NOT work? It would probably be cheaper in the long run.

Posted in News and Politics | No Comments »

Monday, 4 September 2006 by marstinson.

Many years ago, my parents gave me some old books that had been laying around the house and no one had read in years. For the most part, they were books containing important pieces by various philosophers from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century and were not the sort of thing that a young buck would find terribly interesting. But I’d dig into them from time to time just to give the synapses a workout. Among these philosophical writings was “The Manual” by Epictetus, sometimes called the “spokesman” of the Stoic philosophers. At the beginning of “The Manual,” Epictetus first introduced me to the concept of binary thinking.

For the non-geeks out there, binary only contains two states: 1 and 0. Something is either on or off, true or false, black or white, greater than or not greater than, etc. There isn’t any middle ground because the number system doesn’t permit anything other than one thing or its opposite. Here, then, is the introduction to “The Manual”:

Of all existing things some are in our power, and other are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everyhing which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, eveyrhing whcih is not our own doing. Thing in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammelled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hinderance, dependent on others. Remember then that if you imatching that what is naturally slavis is free, and what is naturally another’s is your own, you will be hampered, you will mourn, you will be put to confusion, you will blame gods and men; but if you thing that only your own belongs to you, and that what is another’s is indeed another’s, no one will ever put compulsion or hinderance on you, you will blame none, you will accuse none, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, you will have no enemy, for no harm can touch you.

Essentially, everything that happens falls into one of two categories: it’s either something you can control or it’s something that you can’t control. In many ways, it’s the serenity prayer: “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

To put it in modern terms, Epictetus is essentially saying that everything comes down to what you choose it to be. Think about it — if there’s a meteor hurtling toward your home at this very red-hot moment, there isn’t anything you can do to change that. The meteor will do what it will do and all you can control is whether you and your stuff are going to be there when it hits. If the company is looking at downsizing, you can’t control the decision on whether you’ll have a job tomorrow or not. All you can do is influence the choices of the person making that decision: is keeping you on the payroll more beneficial than not keeping you on the payroll? But in the final analysis, that decision is completely out of your control. “Mandatory” meetings? Same thing. You don’t have to go. But is the bit of extra free time you gain worth the job you may lose? “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?” (Personally, I think you’re hosed either way.)

This is something that my students have a hard time getting their heads around: “Mister, do we have to do the assignment?” Answer: “No, of course not. The only thing you have to do is be born and die; everything else is optional and comes down to choosing the consequence that you prefer.”

So, all of this begs the question. If we are what we choose to be, where does this leave non-protected speech? If I choose to phrase something in a particular way and you choose to take offense, is that my problem or is it yours? Granted, if my words are calculated to get a rise out of you and I get a punch in the nose for my efforts, then I suppose that I got what I wanted. But if I tell a joke that you find offensive, is it not your choice to be offended rather than to see the humor that was intended? Why am I, then, responsible for your choice?

 So rather than, “You have insulted me,” should you not be saying, “I choose to give you power over how I feel”? Or, perhaps more precisely, “I choose to be insulted/offended because in this way I do not have to expend any effort to control myself or understand why I feel as I do.” It is a heady feeling to know that I, a simple techno-geek, can have such power over others. But it must also be true that I have that power because someone gave it to me.

Posted in News and Politics, Whatever | No Comments »