Blackmoor Vituperative

The JMRI Defense fund is a worthwhile cause. Think about sending a few dollars their way.

Net neutrality is a complex issue, but here is the main thing you need to know about it in order to support it:

The Digital Rights Mafia is against it.

This has to be the craziest case mod I have ever seen.

I have been using the Nokia n810 for a few weeks now, and I am going to soften my criticism of it a bit. What the n810 does, it does really well. I am able to check my email, chat through Pidgin, and research on the web any time I am near a wireless hotspot.

The n810 has become my lifeline to my wife, my mother (who is having serious health problems), and my colleagues across the world. Suffice to say that I have turned around completely on the n810. No, it doesn’t replace my Palm — nowhere near. But it does keep me connected to my friends and loved ones, and at this time in my life I couldn’t really live without that.

Warning: shareaza.com has been suborned by scammers. For Shareaza updates, always go to http://shareaza.sourceforge.net.

I was very excited to get my hands on a n810. I have been virtually drooling over them since I first read about them last autumn, and mine finally arrived last week.

Unfortunately, not only does it not do what I have been using my Palm for for the better part of a decade, it also does not do what I would want a Linux handheld to do.

No desktop sync, no decent PIM apps, and the Garnet VM is, shall we say, not a replacement for a real Palm (not even close). So it won’t replace my Palm T5.

Meanwhile, I can’t install or compile the vast majority of Linux applications, including Shadow Plan, OpenOffice, and a host of others. So it won’t take the place of a laptop, even for such a basic task as working on a report while riding the train to work.

What it does do very well is surf the web. If you happen to be standing near a WiFi hotspot. Whee.

I am returning mine. Maybe some day there will be a Linux handheld that can replace my Palm T5, but the Nokia n810 is not it.

What I do not understand is why this is so difficult to accomplish. PIMs are not new. Desktop sync is not new. Palm has been doing it for years. We have better hardware, faster processors, higher-resolution screens, better batteries, more memory than anyone has ever had before. So what’s the obstacle? Where is the Linux based Palm-killer? Not even “killer” — merely “replacement”. Where is it? Where?

So I am sending the Nokia n810 back, and contemplating ordering a Palm TX. The TX would have a slightly faster Internet connection than my T5 (when I am near a hotspot), and thus would be able to more than replace the Nokia n810, which costs almost twice as much as the TX.

I updated Wordpress to 2.3.1 today. In the process, a plugin I use stopped working. So I fixed it. If you would like to us it, you may download it from here:

Categorical Links Page plugin

You will need 7-zip to decompress the file.

I was browsing Amazon earlier, looking for books to recommend to a friend who may be interested in getting into Linux. I thought other people might find this handy, too, so here they are. It is a very short list. There are literally dozens of other books on specific subjects that I would also recommend (the O’Reilly Apache book, a few Perl books, and so on), but this is a start. These are more or less in order of increasing complexity.

• Learning the UNIX Operating System
• Unix in a Nutshell
• Learning the vi Editor
• Essential System Administration
• UNIX System Administration Handbook

Free Press and Public Knowledge filed a complaint with the FCC about Comcast’s squeezing of BitTorrent and other apps the cable company deemed to be too much of a strain on its network.

Comcast, you may recall, was playing a little game whereby it delayed outbound traffic by impersonating users and sending reset commands.

[…]

The groups want Comcast to pay $195,000 per affected user.

(from Comcast throttling deserves punishment, groups say, ZDNet)

I agree with these groups in principle, but $195,000 seems a little steep. Refunding the cost of my high-speed Internet service during the affected period seems a fairer punishment.