Category: The slush pile

eBay item 3030701253 (Ends Jun-21-03 14:40:39 PDT ) – 1 and a half Newton MessagePad 2x00s, loaded

What does 1 and a half MessagePads mean?

I have a complete Newton MessagePad 2000, with keyboard, serial dongle, faux leather case, power supply, and the serial cables to sync it up with your choice of desktop hardware.

I am the original owner so I know it all works.

I also have a MessagePad 2100 for parts: it does work, but the digitizer cable is broken, so you can’t input anything. But it is a 2100, so if you’re handy or know someone who is, you could swap the motherboards and have a 2100 with the 2000 motherboard as your spare. I also have a spare keyboard.
I also have a 2 Mb memory card and a 3 Com ethernet card, both fully operational (I used them just this morning to back everything up).

I am only selling this stuff to get it into someone’s hands who can use it. I’m not able to integrate it into my daily life and it seems a shame to have it collecting dust when someone could be getting some use out of it.

It’s still the best, perhaps the only true, PDA ever made, and it deserves better than to sit on a shelf.

It’s getting down to the wire when I need to decide if I’m going to commit to this challenge. 36 miles of training yesterday in 90+ degree heat (don’t sneer, you East Coast dwellers, you have air conditioned homes to go to) and it was hard going at the end. Speeds between 17 and 21 mph, but I’m learning it really helps to ride with someone. I seem to have little trouble keeping up with all but the fastest riders, but my own drive keeps me at 17-18 mph.

I started to get a pounding headache that reminded me of my youth in sunny south Florida. I have since learned that can be a symptom of heatstroke. I don’t think hydration was an issue, as I drank the full capacity of a 70 oz camelback-style water tank, but perhaps it was. I sweat in flourescent lighting, so I’ll need to add capacity or fill up more frequently. 100 miles on consecutive days might require a tanker truck to ride alongside me . . . .

I just scored a Trailabike from eBay this evening so I can make these outings a family affair. Took my son and heir out this afternoon, but his range is only about 3-5 miles and the pace is a not-so-brisk 4 mph (training wheels don’t make for much speed). I figure him sitting behind gives me 60 pounds of additional training weight (groan) but should help him transition to 2 wheels. He’ll get used to the motion and posture of being upright. And I’ll burn some calories.

Charlie’s Diary

The US pursuit of Saddam is sending a very explicit message to Kim Jong-Il, and that message is “use it or lose it”. If SARS is a North Korean strategic bioweapon, it almost certainly isn’t the only one. In fact, the nightmare scenario is that it may be the attenuated form of something like the ebola-equivalent mousepox strain that Australian scientists unwittingly stumbled across last year, and this release is a test run in case they feel the need to bring the house down by releasing the real thing. Dr Strangelove, eat your heart out …

Conflicting reports on whether or not this new bug is man-made or not. There’s a discussion forum linked from this piece that presents both/all sides of the question.

CNN.com – McCartney ‘puts record straight’ – Apr. 5, 2003

But McCartney, who has long complained that Lennon, for instance, had no input in the hit “Yesterday,” wants the songs fairly labelled.

I had always heard that Lennon named the song and gave it it’s hook (Paul had been singing “scrambled eggs” for lack of a more appropriate choice).

Seems that was apocryphal, after all.

But why does he care, after all these years? It seems ungracious to care about billing after 40 years, especially when your partner has been dead 20+ years.

So things have been moving along reasonably well in my new Windows world. Cygwin helps me get things done that the all-singing all-dancing interface doesn’t manage. I installed gkrellm to keep an eye on what it’s doing (since the command line is useless and the task manager’s performance metering is too limited).

Today I hit an obstacle.

I wanted to rename a folder/directory. I clicked to select it, used the right mouse button to select the ‘Rename’ option ant typed the new name. I am informed that there might be “a sharing violation.” Not that there was, or how it migth be resolved, just the possibility of one. Hmm. Permissions problems? On my local disk? Wha?! I tried a couple of variations. Nothing doing.

So I drop into the command line and do a simple ‘mv oldfolder newfolder’ and watch the CPU utilization spike to 100% on gkrellm. It stayed there a couple of hours, or as long as I watched it. Could be pegged still.

This is an 800 MHz machine — faster than anything else I’ve ever used — and it feels boggy slow periodically, but this was beyond anything else I had seen. So gummed up, it couldn’t send email. It could print, but slowly.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (NPS) – News and Events

Sometime between April 22 and 26, a John Deere riding lawn mower was stolen from `Ainahou Ranch in Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park. The diesel mower, Model #455, is predominantly green with a bright yellow seat and wheel wells. It has a 54″ blade and weighs 1,320 pounds.

There shouldn’t be too many of these, so perhaps they’ll catch the bum.

bbum’s rants, code & references : bbum’s rants, code & references

Do not ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, store prefs in the app folder. It is a bad, bad idea no matter what way you look at it. It is just lazy. There are places to store writable stuff that are well documented and well convered in this thread. In the app wrapper is NOT ONE OF THEM.

Almost as annoying applications that insist on traveling in an enclosing folder (Mozilla, Archipelago). And I note that Archipelago stores its user prefs in whatever folder it’s in. If you take it out of its folder and put it in Applications, you get a prefs file at the same level. On a multiuser system, whose prefs are they? And there’s account information in there: how secure is that?

OpenOffice.org I haven’t had any luck building this from source, even through the ports collection, but these packages are supposed to work. So far, all I get are crashes, so I am going to try the Linux packages and run them in the emulation ABI. Of course, I can’t install the Linux version until the I get the FreeBSD one uninstalled: some remnants survived my attempts at removing it all, so I have to now download it again and see if I can uninstall it properly. They’re managing that much MSFT emulation quite well: make it difficult to uninstall or reinstall.

Serious Internet Explorer Defect

A simple way to exploit an unfixed defect in Internet Explorer has been discovered that allows malicious web sites, and possibly malicious email messages read with Outlook or Outlook Express, to take control of a computer. All you would need to do is click a web link and the owner of the web site could take almost any action they desired on your computer.

Simple, working exploit software was recently published to a public mailing list.

There is no patch to fix the problem. Anti-virus and personal firewall software will not prevent an exploit. It is hoped that Microsoft will provide a patch to fix this defect in the near future.

So anyone wth access to content on public webserver could integrate this code into some other page and reformat hard drives, conduct a DDOS attack, whathaveyou.

And will this affect MSFT’s stock valuation, sales, or public image outside the Usual Suspects who never have anything good to say about them?

The automobile, triumphant

Let me offer a revised marker. "For eons a primordial forest stood here, intersected by nearby Native American trails. With the arrival of European settlers, it first became farmland, then was incorporated into an inconsequential small city upon which a small shop was built. In that shop, Henry Ford, a man of checkered genius, began a career that would change the world with his method of producing cars. His ideas so prospered the city that his historic shop was eventually cleared away to make way for a large and elegant cinema. Ultimately the consequences of his inventions would doom the cinema and building housing it to obsolescence, such that it became necessary to turn the cinema into a parking lot to try to save the building.".