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 phone.

If you plan to use this phone again, you can leave the files on your USB drive intact.

If you’re done using this phone, you can erase all your data on the phone and return to its factory default.

[Just Restart]
[Erase All Data]

The [things in brackets] represent buttons.

And I hit "Just Restart", and I wait about 8 minutes while the phone reboots, and then I see the same screen again. I’m effectively locked out of my phone.

Is there any way out of this that doesn’t involve blowing away all my data, files, apps, bookmarks, and other customizations? Hell, I had photos on there that I hadn’t offloaded! I had calendar reminders for upcoming events, and I can’t recall what they were – if I could remember all that, I wouldn’t need a calendar app!

How do I get out of this without losing all my data?

Obviously, this is a less-than-optimal user experience. Just as obviously, not everyone is experiencing this. But my satisfaction with the Palm Prē has been dropping steadily for the past few weeks, as I wrestle with the near-impossible text-selection and cursor-control problems and snarl at the interminable waits to open applications. This has just sent me into raging, livid territory.

If I have to nuke all my data, I doubt I’ll bother putting much of it back. I may actually migrate back to a Trēo, even though its web browser is nearly unusable for most of my purposes. Since I’m on a shared Sprint plan with my girlfriend, jumping over to the Android isn’t really an option, so I might just drop my smartphone altogether and use a netbook for my mobile computing platform. At least then I can run the OS of my choice, and set up the backup system of my choice to insure against data loss.

Right now, my phone is a brick until I either learn of a way to break out of this loop without losing data, or give up and decide to accept the loss.

Please, if you want a smartphone and you value your sanity, happiness, and data: Don’t get a Prē. That’s my heartfelt personal advice. You have been warned.

(And I so wanted Palm to succeed. Just a few months ago, I was so happy and hopeful. But the other big news today is the insanity of their app store approval process. Palm is screwing this up about as hard as they possibly could.)

I’ve also got a reasonably good script for installing, updating, and uninstalling homebrew apps for the Prē. Instead of the annoying, six-step process for installing homebrew apps on a rooted Prē, I just shell in and type ./homebrew.sh my 8ball, and the homebrew.sh script does it all for me. I need to publish that thing, now that I’ve got it working fairly well.

Additionally, my Japanese sentence generator, called “J-Babble”, now does proper plain past tenses (the -ta and -nakatta forms), which will make it more useful for me as a tool to keep me from backsliding when I’m busy. I’d link to that, but it’s not really a general-use tool yet. It’s more just for me. Maybe some day, I’ll give it the option for people to customize what vocabulary and grammatical forms they know, so it can just generate stuff they have a chance of understanding. For now, though, its use is just for me: when my life gets too busy for me to read my Japanese textbook and try to make new progress, I can at least bring up J-Babble once a day and get 25 randomly-generated, but grammatically correct and semantically sensible, sentences in Japanese. It’s just enough to keep the neural pathways from atrophying; it allows me to hold my place instead of losing ground.

(I’ve gotten some housework done, too, but this isn’t the place to talk about that.)

I am starting to get used to the propeller key already, and getting sort of used to using Meta-K instead of my usual Meta-E to access the search bar/field in Firefox. But one nice thing…

Because of the weird keyboard, I’m hoping that I can avoid transferring these habits back to my normal, PC-keyboard typing. Maybe I’ll be able to turn this drawback into a minor advantage. (Which would be nice, because reaching for the propeller key on my home computer would be seriously annoying to me.)

Do I really want to just write the whole thing, and then start profiling it to see where the hot spots are, and then possibly have to re-design the whole thing? That seems like the complete opposite of “work smarter, not harder”. Then again, it doesn’t matter if you write an O(n²) or even O(n!) algorithm if n is always going to be small… and in this application, I expect low-to-middling n values.

Of course, even if n will always be small, and increasing CPU power is my friend… even if it performs fast enough to make users happy, I’ll still know there’s a problem down there in the details. That may be the deciding factor.

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 don’t quite understand the special non-consumer exemption for the anti-Tivoization clause. There are some other new and weird clauses the FSF has added, dealing with patents, and the WIPO Copyright treaty of 1996, and so on.

The GPL used to be pretty simple and elegant. Now? I recognize that the FSF is trying to make the best of a pretty bad situation. But their license has become something bizarre and awkward.

Theoretically, I could still use the old version. But that feels kind of odd, too, now that version 3 is out.

So now I have to look at things like the CPL, the Apache License, and so on. I’m already fairly sure I don’t want to use the MIT or modified BSD licenses; one of the things I liked about the GPL is that it keeps other people from dragging my open-source work into a proprietary package. I’m releasing it as open source for a reason, after all.

All of this is merely by of saying: I’m getting ready to release another software package. I’m not so sure the Creative Commons license I used on Hummingbird is quite as appropriate for this package, so I’m having to do some annoying research.

I started off by getting my /etc, /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin, and /var/named directories under version control. That’s good. Plus I think I’ve got things set up to where I can upgrade WordPress plugins on my local setup, then reliably push the changes through version control to my live site.

Oh, and my Twitter feed importer is a little prettier, in terms of how it displays how long ago a tweet was posted.

But then there’s the Live+Press plugin… I have high hopes that I’ll be able to use that to automatically crosspost from here to my new Dreamwidth account, but for now, it only seems to communicate with Livejournal. Since there’s a feature request open in the project’s wish list to make it work with other LJ-codebase sites, I figure I may as well pick that up and run with it.

Of course, that just slows me down on LJ Content Sieve… *sigh*

Because I don’t have everything done, I feel like I didn’t accomplish much today. That’s silly, but knowing that it’s silly doesn’t chance my feelings much.

Possibly most important — certainly more important than I would have expected just a few years ago — is the fact that now I have my SVN repository back. I’ve recently checked in two months’ worth of code changes. I wound up describing the extreme discontinuity as “the Spring 2009 Downtime”, because the first few ideas that drifted through my head just sounded a little too grandiose and overblown.

Still, I’m reminded of a scene in Joe Haldeman’s early novel Mindbridge. A team of interstellar explorers get sent off to an unknown planet via teleportation technology, wearing fully self-contained environment suits that keep them alive for two weeks. When they’re teleported back to Earth and a safe enviroment, Haldeman writes: “they scrambled out [of their suits] to an orgy of backscratching”.

I know the feeling.

I’m disturbed, and I don’t like this.

I’m aware that some people take things like religion and politics so seriously that they’ll fight, kill or die over them. But Kathy Sierra wrote about making software as pleasing to users as possible. Michael Arrington? Okay, I didn’t used to read his blog, but I get the idea his topic was “what’s going on in Silicon Valley”.

And people feel that they need to spit on and threaten to rape or kill over this?

Did such things never used to happen? Or did we simply never hear about them? Why were there no cases of, for example, newspaper columnists in the ’50s getting death threats over their thoughts about fashion or architecture? (Or were there such cases?)

Are people getting more insane? And if so, why? And how do we stop it?

I also can’t help but wonder if, now that it’s happened to Arrington too, people will take it more seriously. And how much of that is that twice is more significant, and how much of that is because Arrington is male, and so we can’t write it off as “feminine hysteria”? (On the other hand, kudos to those who took it seriously back when it was just Sierra — and even pointed out that “this culture of attacking women… has especially got to stop“.)

The yak-shaving odyssey that this necessitated involved upgrading my local copy of PHP (which originally came with InstantRails) from 4.whatever to 5.2.8, so that I could develop PHP5 code at all, then installing PEAR so that I could use it to get PHPUnit, and also resolving the weird extension-loading bugs on PHP for Windows (for example, you have to load php_mbstring.dll before php_exif.dll, or else both of them will fail and complain. Ditto with php_pdo.dll and php_sqlite.dll. None of this is documented in the manual; you have to Google on it and get links to the bug database. Joy.)

But I can now run PHPUnit test on the stuff that I’m working on, locally rather than remotely. So… now can I get some code written?