Category: Tech

Just like clockwork, another great Eclipse release is out. You can get it at the Europa home page.

I can’t say enough about how hard the teams have worked this year. I greatly appreciate their effort and I can say, without reservation, that Europa is the best Eclipse ever.

As long as I’ve been tracking the Palm world, their motto has seemed to me to be “Do something that’s (just) good enough.”. I can remember thinking “Who would buy this Palm Pilot thing; it’s so much less than a Newton?”, but people did buy them, and in retrospect it was obvious why: Palm had identified a real need (i.e. find a way to get peoples’ increasingly computer based personal data into something that replaced their filofax) and built it cheaply enough that they could hit a price point that made sense to people.

Since then however, they really haven’t come up with anything as ground breaking.

• Higher-res, color screens? Nice for increased readability, but that’s about all. Displaying photos on your Palm makes about as much sense as doing it with your iPod. [Does anyone actually do this?]
• Increased storage capability? Sure. If the screens were just a bit bigger they’d make excellent e-book readers. Nothing else you can do with the space is interesting — I will never edit a Word document on my Treo.
• Adding a cell phone? Ah, well that was actually a good idea, but the phone integration has always seemed like it was frankensteined on to the side of the OS (e.g. take a look at the phone app in the 680). And lets not forget that somebody had to build a separate company (i.e. Handspring) to make it happen. There is nothing that would have prevented Palm from building something to rival the iPhone.
• Adding an HD to the LifeDrive? Bah. They should have fired the person who came up with that one. They put a slow, non-solid state, 4Gig(!) drive (with a duty cycle that needed to be off most of the time or it would die [pdf link — see section “Hard Drive”]) into something that used to be almost instantly responsive and was supposed to live in your pocket.

Now let’s be clear about this: Palms don’t suck. I have had some form of Palm device since the Pilot came out, and I’m still using a Treo 680. It’s just that it seems like they’ve been following that “just good enough” mantra too long.

So here we are, with the announcement of the new Palm Foleo, and I just can’t seem to shake the feeling that this is more of the same. As far as I can tell, it’s a low spec laptop, that runs some flavour of Linux. It can browse the web and read email, and has some MS Office editing capabilities (but not using OpenOffice [not enough horsepower?]). They’ve got bluetooth sync capability, but it’s not targetted specifically at Palm phones, so we’ll have to see how good that can be. The $500 pricepoint is believable, I guess, but it’s too much for an impulse buy, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why I wouldn’t just get a $500 real laptop computer instead.

Ah well, as Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity says:

I think Foleo will eventually live or die based on whether it attracts a lot of third party applications that do interesting things you can’t do with a notebook PC.

We’ll just have to see.

The 1.8 patch for the PS3 has enabled new uPnP AV capabilities, which theoretically should allow me to play content from the G5 server on the TV in my living room. This would be great, since I lost the minimal capabilities I had (i.e. Airtunes) when I hooked the PS3 up to the wire in the living room instead of my Airport Express.

The problem is, the formats that the PS3 can currently understand appear to be severely limited, so ideally you would want a uPnP server that supported transcoding. Apparently, Nero 7 Ultra supports this, but it is a PC only product. In the Mac world, I found two uPnP servers that sort of work with the PS3: Elgato’s EyeConnect and TwonkyVision’s TwonkyMedia.

Based on what I have read on the net, TwonkyMedia seems to currently be slightly ahead on features, and is a more solid host for the PS3. But it does not integrate as well with the Mac (the GUI is a webserver running on a random port), is more difficult to configure (than EyeConnect) and can be difficult to uninstall.

On the other hand EyeConnect installs as a System Preference Panel, is easy to uninstall and is built by the company that makes EyeTV, which I am currently running to record live TV. It also supports a plug-in architecture that has transcoders for “Audio to WAV/LPCM” and “Picture to JPEG/BMP”. I’m hoping this means that they will extend this set over time. [Note: TwonkyMedia probably has these too.]

As you can probably guess, I went with EyeConnect, since I know it will provide the best integration with EyeTV. The company also seems to get the Mac design ethic, and I appreciate that enough to want to support them… and to be honest, I really had trouble taking a company called “Twonky” seriously.

Unfortunately, the current version of EyeConnect (1.1) isn’t a great experience when talking to the PS3. The single most significant problem appears to be that it has trouble maintaining the network connection. Almost every time you access content you get some kind of error displayed on the TV screen — variations on “Connection lost” or “Access denied. Oddly, the PS3 seems to still be able to play the content. I also noticed that folders that contained a lot of data (e.g. the entire iTunes Library) were truncated.

Another problem is in the way iTunes music is served: It doesn’t appear to currently be able to give you anything except playlists and the entire library. For this to be useful, it desperately needs “by artist” and “by album” categorizations.

However, despite these limitations, I was able to successfully view some of my photos, music and movies on the PS3, so I know we’re on the right track. The limited formats supported by the PS3 meant that I could only play music in MP3 format and Movies in MPEG-2 format. Some of my old music was ripped as MP3s, but I didn’t have any MP-2 movies lying around. VisualHub solved that problem for me. On the recommendation of a forum comment I read, I used the “MPEG” tab with the TIVO profile, which worked well, displaying a 1.1Meg movie surprisingly clearly at 42″ resolution.

I wrote to Elgato about the problems I was having and received this reply:

Thank you for contacting Elgato Systems.

The new PlayStation 3 firmware does offer the opportunity for software like EyeConnect to send data to it.

However, EyeConnect is not yet optimized for the PS3. This would explain the problems a few users have seen.

So, we will test EyeConnect with the PS3, and adjust EyeConnect software as needed.

Hopefully we can have our tests done soon, but we have no specific data to share about when this additional functionality might be ready.

Now, I’m a bit suspicious of the “problems a few users have seen” comment, since I couldn’t find anyone on the net who claimed that they had no problems, but it looks like they are aware of the issues and hopefully things will improve.

The other thing we need is for the PS3 to get a more reasonable list of supported formats. Supporting only a handful is just about unforgivable, given the absolute wealth of available codecs they could be using. (Hint: It’s been years since I found something VLC couldn’t play.)

Anyway, somewhere between new versions of EyeConnect and new revisions of the PS3 firmware, I expect this is all going to work out and I may finally have found a good reason for buying a PS3. 😉

So, I finally got Deb to give me her old T30 to play with [Thanks, Love], and the first thing I did was to wipe Windows XP off of it, and replace it with Ubuntu.

I have to say, as desktop OSes go, Ubuntu is pretty nice. I honestly don’t know why the average user would need anything else — web, mail, IM, office suite, you name it. And it performs well on the T30, unlike XP. I could even turn on XGL and get the amazing wobbly windows! 🙂

Of course, with any linux install the issue is whether or not it will find/configure all of your hardware properly. In this case, because of the ubiquitousness of ThinkPads I would guess, the support for Ubuntu on them has been well tuned, and I had no problems getting everything installed… or so I thought.

It turns out there were two issues, one a minor annoyance, and one quite serious:

1. If you put it to sleep, when it wakes up the sound is disabled
2. As far as I can tell, attempting to connect to a wireless network, “hangs” the machine. That is, if I try to connect to my home network, it silently does nothing, and leaves me in a state where I can no longer start any gui processes.

According to Google, the solution to the former problem is to upgrade your BIOS, and given that the BIOS on this machine is still the original 1.0 version, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that upgrading would fix the wireless problem too.

The link to download the bios (and many other T30 updates) is here:

Lenovo Support & downloads – Drivers and software – ThinkPad T30

According to that page, I actually need to upgrade two different things: the BIOS and the “Embedded Controller Program”. This is where things start to get scary. Apparently, if you need to update both, then you have to update the BIOS first, but if you read the description of the BIOS, it claims that it won’t run without the updated ECP. Um…

What I hope is true, is that you can update the BIOS and it will still run well enough to let you update the ECP, even though it’s running on the wrong version. Of course, it seems like the best way to do that would be to use the minimal set of hardware/software capabilities to do the updates [can you imagine attempting this from within Ubuntu?], so time to build some boot floppies.

Erk! No floppy drive.

So now what do I do? Has anyone gone through this process? Anybody in Ottawa with a spare TP floppy drive? Anybody want to hold my hand while I do the lobotomy?

…but I wouldn’t want to write a novel with it.

How do people type with two fingers on these things? When I try it, the thing flops around in my hands to the point where I can actually go faster by holding it with one hand and typing with the index finger of the other hand.

I have added a new page that describes the apps I use on my Treo 680:

What’s on my phone.