NuclearDonkey.net

Previously, I had posted an entry on my love/hate outlook on Apple's iPhone. Well, this week I took the plunge and committed myself to both stick by Verizon's superior network and re-enter the world of Windows Mobile.

My last PDA ran Pocket PC 2003, and it doesn't look like much has changed. The Windows Mobile interface is as unwieldy as ever and, looking at it versus Apple's new interface, it's easy to put a finger on why I've never been a fan of Microsoft's mobile OS: it's practically impossible to control with finger input!

What Apple did was get rid of the need for a stylus, the old standby input device that is essentially required to have any level of accuracy when navigating around Windows Mobile. Of course, there are thousands of third-party apps out there to customize the ever-uncool Windows Mobile experience. After spending way too much time playing with my new phone last weekend, I've finally got it to the point where I can do most tasks without the need for unsheathing that little plastic annoyance.

I started with a clean hard reset of a Verizon XV6700, aka the HTC Apache. It's not nearly as svelte as the sleek and slim iPhone, but with the extra girth comes a slide-out keyboard that's substantially easier to type on than any other mobile layout I've tried. It's a bit of a downer that storage is a bare minimum, but a little Googling turned up 4GB micro SD cards for under $100. Admittedly, the more expensive model iPhone comes with 8GB of internal storage, but lack of expansion slots could quickly leave a bad taste in the mouth of anyone with a music/video collection of any reasonable size. After paying $240 for the XV6700 (with several accessories) on Ebay, I can buy 12GB of additional storage and still come in under the $600 base price of the 8GB iPhone.

Let it also be noted that I did try a number of the iPhone skins available out there for Windows Mobile, but they all just respond too dang slowly and hog too much memory. So, here's what I ended up with.

First to go was the atrocious Windows Mobile Today screen. At Korey's recommendation, I installed SPB Mobile Shell and SPB Pocket Plus. Both programs go a long way toward making Windows Mobile finger-friendly, with the option for larger Today screen icons.

I especially like the overlays they give you at the tabbed top of the screen. If you need to check the weather forecast, just select the sun tab with your finger and it wil expand.

The new phone/text/email icons came with another SPB package -- SPB Phone Suite. And all the icons in each sub-menu are fully configurable, so swapping out any of the program shortcuts is a breeze.

Next to bite the dust was the Windows Mobile contact manager. A bit of digging turned up a program called, simply enough, ContactManager. This program replaces your default contacts program with an iPhone-esque list that scrolls with the flick of a finger. Additionally, you can jump to any letter in the alphabet by selecting it from the list on the left. While the letters themselves are small, the developers of this app made the areas in which they register screen taps large enough that stylus input is not required.

The only complaint I have is that the program is a bit twitchy when it comes to selecting a contact versus scrolling the screen. It's rather sensitive to small movements on the screen, so a firm and steady tap is required to select a contact.

One other super-cool app I've fallen in love with is Google Maps Mobile. As long as I've got a Verizon signal, I won't ever be lost again. It's a shame the phone doesn't have an integrated GPS, but you can still get turn-by-turn directions from Google. You just need to press the screen after each step in the directions, and it will proceed to the next. I'd like to own a GPS one day, but this isn't too shabby for a free program.

All-in-all, I'm pretty pleased so far now that most of the interface usability issues are taken care of. I still need to find a way to get text message reminders, though. As it is, a new text message will only alert me once and then disappear, and there is no vibrate option. If anybody know of a way around this or any other cool Windows Mobile apps, let me know.

The quarter ended a couple weeks ago, so let's see how I did this time around:

1. Learn thirteen new VI commands/shortcuts, an average of one per week.

2. Post thirteen email-related or work-related blog entries, an average of one per week.

3. Work an average of at least three hours per day on weekends.

4. Read all of Learning Perl.

Dang! Missed on this one.

5. Finish and upload the current batch of RT interface enhancements.

Personal Goals

6. Be out of bed by 7:15 at least four days of each week.

Not even close, but I had a good streak going up until the flu of death I had at the beginning of June.

7. Read one book for personal enjoyment -- God's Debris.

8. Work out five days out of every week, barring injury or illness.

9. Add .1 miles to daily workout at the end of each month.

10. Take Dexter to the dog park at least three times.

Shooting-For-The-Moon-If-There's-Time Goals

11. Begin work on integrating our accounts database with RT.

RT has since been largely taken off my plate.

12. Beef up the U2-Drive and get it running Xen/VMWare with multiple OSes.

Sebastian got there ahead of me and set up his own VMWare box for Customer Care.

13. Complete at least one of three phases of the reseller provisioning project.

I did get a good bit of PHP under my belt last quarter, but not from working on this project.

It seems the quarterly goal system is going to be a bit different this time around. I've already got a long list of tasks I want to get done.

Pursuant to that previous post, it seems the solution for text message alerts was staring right at me the whole time!

SPB Phone Suite, nestled within its settings menu, has an option to enable reminder notifications for unread text messages (or missed calls or unread emails if that's more to your liking). What's even neater is that it operates outside of the regular Windows Mobile notifications, so your initial "new message" notification can be one thing while the reminder can be something completely different (probably something a lot louder than the first notification, in my case).

After a lot of pondering and cursing cron's lack of error logs, I discovered today that apparently cron does not support using the modulus operator in a job. As an example, here's a snippet of what I've been trying to run nightly:

HOSTVAR="0$((`hostname -i | cut -d '.' -f 4` % 8))"; TIMEVAR="`date +%H`"

Simple enough, right? We create a $HOSTVAR and a $TIMEVAR based, respectively, on the last octet of the current host's IP address and the current hour of the day. This works fine from within a shell script outside of cron, but when copied directly into the cron job, we get this in the logs:

CMD (HOSTVAR="0$((`hostname -i | cut -d '.' -f 4` )

I've never run into a command that just wouldn't run from within cron, but no amount of fiddling with escapes or quotes seems to help. Maybe I'm just nuts for wanting to run everything from within my cron file instead of from its own script that cron calls. But I was hoping to keep things more condensed so I don't have more files floating around than I need, especially since the entire script is only 8 lines.

I'll have to play with this some more later, but at least the job is working now.

http://www.pdagold.com/themes/detail.asp?t=14490

The forecasts that SPB Weather generates are pretty flaky compared to what the weather in Blacksburg actually is. Luckily, you can add custom templates for any weather data source you want to pull from. The template at the above URL will give you Weather Channel data within SPB Weather. Woo!

I felt it worth noting that Spaced is one of the greatest shows ever. If you're a fan of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, or any great British comedies or comedies in general, you owe it to yourself to watch Spaced.

I can say that it was indeed well worth ordering an import of the UK DVD (it has not been released in the US due to copyright issues with the songs used in the soundtrack, as I understand it).

If you are a restaurant and are going to let people order curbside takeout online, it may be a good idea to only allow orders that will be filled while your restaurant is still open.

It may NOT be a good idea to allow someone to order dinner, confirm the order, tell them to pick it up at a specific time, and then be closed with nobody there at that time.

Outback, I'm glaring in your general direction.