Ever try to install a Palm Pilot on a computer on a corporate network? Its a PITA. For some reason Palm assumes that all people on a corporate network are running as a local administrator and aren’t being restricted in anyway. This is a very DUMB for them to assume. It also makes life difficult for those of use that have to install and maintain palm software.

After fighting with it for years, i’ve found the following to work best on Windows XP SP2 with any version of a Palm Pilot:

• Install the software that comes with the Palm m130. NOT the software you can download off of Palm’s website, but the stuff from the CD. The current version of Palm Desktop will Freeze at the splash screen on startup as a restricted user. If you contact Palm this is a known issue, with the solution of ‘give the user local administration privileges.’ The m130 software, however, runs just fine with one small drawback that i’ll mention later.

• Follow the installation as normal, entering the username on the palm and skipping the registration. Exit the install application.

• Sync the palm as Administrator. You may receive an error at this step with the newer palms, see below.

• Run Palm Desktop as Administrator

• Give “Domain Users” (or “Everyone” if you’re that sorta person) full permissions to c:\Palm, propagate the permissions through the directory.

• Move “c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\Palm Desktop” to “c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\All Users\Desktop” (or delete it). Give the users permissions to use it.

• Export “HK_CURRENT_USER\Software\USRobotics” from the registry and drop it somewhere the normal user can find it. Make sure they have permissions to it.

• Logout Administrator and in as the User (You will have to perform the follow steps of each user that will be using the Palm Pilot).

• Exit Hotsync, by right clicking it in the task bar.

• Double click the exported registry file to merge it with the users.

• Restart Hotsync from the Start Menu.

• Sync the palm as the User.

• Open up Palm Desktop, and you should be good to go.

So .. now that its installed and running, what is this one small drawback? On the newer Palm Pilots notes will not sync properly. The sync log mentions a database incompatibility, but this doesn’t seem to be an issue for any of my users.

Problems with newer Palm Pilots:

When you sync as administrator for the first time it finds the Palm and installs the drivers for it. If you have a newer palm (say a Tungsten E/2) it will not install properly because the disk that came with the m130 doesn’t have the right driver. Go through the install and point the New Hardware Wizard to the disc that comes with the newer Palm, you should be able to navigate to the drivers on there. Once those are installed, just sync the palm again and it should work.

Went to the bank last night to sign some papers.

me: “My name is Michael Bond. I was told there were papers left for me to sign”

Teller: “Okay hold on.”

Teller: “What’s your name?”

me: “Michael Bond. B-O-N-D” (This is through the drive through, so i thought spelling it would help, in case of static)

Teller: “Ok. Michael Myers, right?”

… Laughter errupts from everyone in my truck.

me: “No. Bond. as in James”

Teller: “Oh …. Sorry … “

I’m used to the obvious jokes but this is the first time I’ve ever been confused with Michael Myers

I enjoy Pod Casts, for the same reason that I’ve always enjoyed radio shows. I enjoy music as background noise while I’m working on something, but i prefer content when I am not doing anything else (falling asleep, on the PRT, Driving, etc … ).

The problem i’ve found though is that Pod Casts tend to suck. My current line up is this:

• Buzz Out Loud : A pod cast that reads tid-bits of news they find via RSS, then talk about it. Problem is that 75% of the time they really have NO idea what they are talking about. Imagine Jeffrey Zeldman analyzing Tiger Woods golf swing on a daily basis. Its about that painful.
• TWiT : a pod cast by Leo Laporte. enough said. I listen to this pod cast when I run out of anything else. Sometimes they have interesting guests on the show that actually have something worth listening too. Sometimes.
• Escape Pod : This is the only Pod Cast I listen too that I would classify as ‘good’ or ‘worth listening too’. I discovered it about a week or two ago, and it is ALMOST exactly what I’ve been complaining doesn’t exist. Each week they take a piece of short science fiction and read it out loud. Each piece is about 20 to 40 minutes in length and is at least entertaining.

I’ve been craving stories in pod casts. Radio shows like the Long Ranger, or War of the Worlds from the early and mid 1900’s. I think well done productions like that could do wonderfully in the pod-cast arena. I would be more than willing to pay a monthly subscription for good, original, shows. Hell, right now I’d be willing to pay money for good, unoriginal radio-style shows in the form of a pod-cast. Where they get voice actors, do sound effects, etc …

In fact, I would probably be more willing to pay a monthly fee for this than I am for TV which looses my interest more and more each month.

I picked up a Nintendo DS Lite the weekend that it had come out. My main reason was for the New Super Mario Brothers game (Which, BTW is very worth it if you are a fan of the original Super Mario Brothers on the NES), but picked up the DS version of Tetris as well. Anyway, about a week and a half ago I started a single player marathon Tetris game. 2 days later I hit 999 lines, and found myself disappointed that it no longer counted lines. But the levels kept going up, so i had a rough idea how many lines I had.

A week later I hit 999 levels (thats 9,990 lines), and then stopped counting levels (at 10,000 lines). Great … but the score kept going up. So i kept playing thinking about whether its worth the effort to see if there is a max score or not. Last night (July 5th) I hit 40,000,000 points in the game, paused it, turned the power off, and popped Mario back in (Seriously, NSMB is a GREAT game, I highly recommend it.)

This morning curiosity got the best of me, so i started googling what the max Tetris score is on the DS. Apparently 99,999,999 … wow, that seems kinda of low to me. Over all, I have decided that I am disappointed in the DS Tetris. The online play is the only thing that keeps me from saying ‘worse game-boy Tetris ever.’ I think I will put it down for a while before picking up the online addiction again. Go through mario a couple times, maybe pick up Mario64 or Castlevania and play those for a bit too.

At this point the best version of Tetris ever is the Gameboy Color version. It holds true to the original playability of the game (none of this sliding blocks around after they land that started with the n64 Tetris), a max level of 30 but infinite lines (at least, I never hit the max number of lines).

I’ve been wanting to learn ruby for a while now, and I finally had a project at work that seemed like it would be great to learn the basics on. I could have coded and debugged it in Perl in a couple of hours, but it was the last step in a larger project and I had the week to work on it.

Pulled out the fresh Programming Ruby book (Which, btw, I would not recommend) that the library had purchased. Read over some of the example programs to get a feel for the syntax and went to town. 15 minutes later I had a scrip that read in the XML data (a 17mb file, with ~3500 items), spit out some results.

Things that i noticed right away:

• ReXML, the default XML parser for RUBY is horribly slow. By ‘horribly slow’ I mean, you may as well go get lunch while its reading in your data. In Perl that same file loads in less than 1 minute using XML::Simple. In Ruby using ReXML, 8 to 10 minutes depending on machine load. Then, you have to go through the data which involved a couple calls to the ReXML library. Another 8 to 10 minutes.

• ReXML expects all XML transformations to come from XSLT. This is all well and good, i guess. But what happens if you don’t want to, or can’t, use XSL? The DTD for this particular spec does not allow for a style sheet. In fact, if you assign one in the XML the program that reads in the XML file will fail because it does not expect it … so XSL isn’t an option for me.

What do you do if you need to do something as simple as sorting the XML data? Throw it into a Ruby Hash, then sort it.

Ugh.

I plan on using Ruby a bit more, with the exception of XML it seems pretty nice. But if you have any XML projects, you might be better off programming it in BrainFuck than ruby. It would be faster.