Tag Archives: diary

A webOS 1.2 Upgrade Experience That Couldn’t Be Much Worse

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 Profile on this [...]

Productivity on Various Fronts

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; [...]

Musing on Mac Keyboards

I’m at a one-week contract this week, and the client uses only Macs. So I’m using an unfamiliar Mac keyboard — the kind with the transparent plastic casing, and the really stiff keys (by my standards, anyway).
I am starting to get used to the propeller key already, and getting sort of used to using Meta-K instead [...]

Would Shlemiel the Painter Optimize Prematurely?

I don’t want to optimize this code prematurely. And “while you’re still writing it” is probably premature. On the other hand, totally ignoring algorithmic complexity is a sure route to a Shlemiel the Painter’s algorithm.
Do I really want to just write the whole thing, and then start profiling it to see where the hot spots [...]

Eyeball-Deep in Legalese

I used to not have a problem when I wanted to release software. I’d just release it under the GPL (what we’d now call the GPLv2), and be pretty happy with that decision.
Now there’s GPLv3, and I’m really uncertain whether I like it at all. I understand that Tivoization is a serious problem, but I [...]