palm

Ooh! I think I might want a copy of Doomling when it comes out.

Expedition ES turns your Palm into a portable surveying instrument. Having tried to figure out how high the tree we'd just climbed by getting someone to bring up a rock and time how long it took to hit the ground, and then someone trying the "stick of known length" method to cross-check, I can readily understand just how handy this thing would be if I spent more time climbing trees and wandering around the bush.

Expedition ES was written in Quartus Forth, which I'm still devoting whole minutes per day to learning.

Mocha W32 PPP is a simple PPP daemon that binds to your serial port (ideal for your hotsync cradle) or IR port to provide network connectivity to your Palm. I guess you could then use Network HotSync over the top of it. Interesting thought! My gut feel is that I'd set it up on my FreeBSD "router" rather than fork out USD$20 to do it from a Windoze box, though.

I've removed Blogger's remote editing JavaScript, so things should be more stable now. I've also set things up so that new pages open in this window, so if you like the old behaviour you'll need to shift-click or whatever. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Darren lists his phone number on his web site, so I just called him to talk about the latest CityTime version. He's already had "a lot of feedback" on the import feature and the speed consequences after over-using it. At the very least, he'll make the don't import everything, please notice a bit more visible.

Heh. The projection of night and day on the map always looks wierd during the equinox. Just two straight lines. Funnily enough, Darren gets support calls every six months from people complaining that the plot is square. I suggested a box in the middle of the pacific somewhere that said "equinox!" and pointed to the plot during those two weeks a year. Tapping would explain why the plot was square and give the option to remove the box. Sure, all this is in the FAQ and ReadMe, but who ever reads those?

I keep muttering that there should be more C64 games ported to PalmOS. Nobody has produced a convincing version of Elite yet, which annoys me, but EmperoR Studios just released Arena, which apparently behaves a lot like Archon.

I say "apparently" because the sceen's resolution is so tight I can barely see what I'm doing. It's not the instant playability wonder my favourite Palm games are, and it hasn't yet convinced me that what looks like a big time investment to master it will pay off any.

Zoe isn't hugely enthusiastic about me playing Dope Wars. She'll ask "Are you selling drugs again?" if she hears my Palm beep. Maybe it's the way I leave pieces of paper scattered all over the house which detail how much I paid for LSD and cocaine last time I bought it. So, it's nice -- in a way -- to see that someone has downloaded the code and changed all of the labels to produce Solar Wars. It's exactly the same game, but won't get you into trouble with the kind of people who have no sense of humour whatsoever about the original game.

Disclaimer: Zoe has a wonderful sense of humour. I think I'd prefer to play Solar Wars than Dope Wars on my next trip to Malaysia, though.

I didn't think CityTime could get any better, but Code City have upgraded the time calculator (essential for figuring out international teleconference times) and made it easier to add new cities -- just grab one of the pre-cooked memo book entries from Code City's import page, copy and paste to your memo application on your PC, and after your next HotSync you can import the cities into CityTime itself.

The only way they could improve on this process would be to import from Doc files instead, in which case they could offer one great honking big Doc PRC and you could import the whole world in just a few clicks. At the moment, it's just a few times nineteen memos, which gets kinda repetitive, especially when you figure out that the list of eligible memos to import can't be scrolled with the hard up and down keys. This kind of usability problem is surprising from Code City -- I regularly use the rest of CityTime as an example of how usable software should be.

Yoik! Speaking of usability, once you've loaded CityTime down by importing all nineteen optional city databases, clicking on the map is noticeably slower to figure out the closest city. That's not so good. Having loaded the options, I've also discovered some duplicates -- the American cities in the original database only had their name, whereas the new versions have their state initials appended. Now I have both San Jose and San Jose, CA. That's just careless...