Blogotron 4000+ demo

I think this is the ice cream truck from hell. It was gargantuan.

I think the kitten did it…

Least appealing product name ever.

Remains of the great Geologics flood of 2005. The water was actually an inch deep or so in the hallway before it receeded. Who knew that building a big, tall new concrete slab in front of your existing building would result in the water flowing toward and into the building. Morons.

I got my iPAQ Micro keyboard today. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but it’s pretty awful. For starters, the little keys are way too small for my pudgy, inaccurate digits. Also, if you like typing things like punctuation, you have to mash a “Fn” key to throw the thing into a different mode. Each button has at least 2 and as many as three things printed on it (there are actually two Fn keys; orange and blue). I think I understand why people that use text messaging have such awful punctuation and spelling; it’s a side effect of bad human factors design. There’s also no visual indication of what mode you’re in. Also, when the keyboard is plugged in, it occupies the docking port, preventing me from plugging in my battery extender. This here post took a good 15 minutes to type out. Grumble.

Got my PDA wireless card. It’s slick! Posting with it now, through PPCDJ.

Today I got a new toy for my Ipaq PDA. It’s a doohickey from the scary depths of the Taiwanese third-party hardware industry (by way of Semsons) that lets you read Memory Sticks in a CompactFlash card slot. It’s part of a system I’m putting together to bring with me to Dragoncon. Assuming there’s available WiFi access, I’m planning on blogging the event to this very site in real time! The system consists of my iPAQ 2215 PDA, a Sandisk 802.11b CompactFlash card, the aforementioned memory stick reader, a thumb keyboard, and a custom battery box I’m building to increase the system’s endurance between charges. I’m looking at PPCDJ as a LiveJournal client for the PDA.

With this rig, I’ll be able to upload pictures and make blog posts right from the show floor, without hauling around my laptop. Ought to be neat! nerdness++

Writin’ code, writin’ code…

I’m starting to really dislike doing development on OS X…too many wierd errors and workarounds. Like this one, for example:

2005-08-14 23:26:40.836 java[737] CFLog (0): CFMessagePort: bootstrap_register(): failed 1103 (0x44f), port = 0×11403, name = ‘java.ServiceProvider’
See /usr/include/servers/bootstrap_defs.h for the error codes.
2005-08-14 23:26:40.873 java[737] CFLog (99): CFMessagePortCreateLocal(): failed to name Mach port (java.ServiceProvider)

What? It still seems to run (a minimal little Swing app), but that can’t be good.