I believe I am one of the last few die-hard nutjobs on the face of this earth who still use (and “use” here is a highly subjective word meaning that I have a bunch of Palm devices lying around, am currently the only semi-active (and “semi-active” means that I get probably a good 2 hours of KPilot hacking in per year =:( ) KPilot developer, and occasionally even turn some of them on) Palm PDA devices. I have successfully resisted the siren call of the iPhone for the last 2+(?) years–partly because there is no functional synchronization solution between my Linux desktop and it, partly because it’s pretty bloody expensive, partly because Cingular has atrociously high data plans compared to Sprint, partly because I’ve endured the lunacy of FLOSS developers trying to keep re-figuring out Apple’s iPod/iTouch/iPhone database structures that would otherwise allow me to synchronize my music and movies with said Apple devices and have an extremely bad taste in my mouth from said frustrations, and partly because I’m one of the cheapest geeks you’ll ever meet (also, being the sole income-provider for a family of 5 only solidifies my inborn cheap nature). All that being said, however, I hereby declare the good old Palm OS officially dead and uninteresting to me anymore. Okay, truth be told, that was an obvious statement to make 2 years ago, but I’ve been in denial since then and am only now trying to face reality and get help. =;P

I am a gadget geek–I always have been–and I have wasted more money on Palm gadgets than I care to remember. I clearly remember agonizing over spending $400 or so for the Palm IIIc when it came out (but OOH, it had a nice color screen!). And the $400 or so I spent on the Clie NX70v was a week-long ordeal that involved me hemming and hawing and spending many an angst-filled evening at the local Circuit City. And the $400 or so I spent on my Treo 650 (which magically turned into a Treo 700p in a couple of years after the 650 became deathly ill) was also quite the emotional ordeal. And yes, I realize that these series of purchases contradict my statement that I’m a cheap geek, so I’ll defend my previous statement by saying that I’m apparently a selectively cheap geek.

Palm was a GREAT gadget and a good OS that allowed me to sync my data with my Linux desktop and enjoy being cool and geeky. In fact, it was (and still is) the only PDA solution that I have found that synchronizes (for the most part) very smoothly with my  Linux desktop. It was never as flashy as the Windows-based devices, but it sure was more stable. And there were a huge number of applications for the Palm OS. But seeing the spartan Palm OS 5 interface nowadays, especially when compared with the iPhone bling, or even the Maemo interface… it’s like looking at the old OLWM Window Manager compared with the current KDE4 sexiness. There’s just no comparison. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 2 years (or have been cheap and/or in denial like me and/or just so in love with the old Palm OS), it’s painfully obvious that very few care about the old Palm OS anymore. Everybody and their pet turtle has an iPhone now (or so it surely seems). And being a FLOSS advocate/hacker/supporter/proponent/religious nutjob, that concerns me and I’d like to again put my money where my mouth and soapbox are.

So what’s my point with all of this? Well, it’s time for me to get a new phone/geek toy, I think. I want to be as FLOSS-supportive and interopable as possible, and I’m really curious what other people who are FLOSS-conscious are thinking about this and have done about it. While none of the options that I see are 100% FLOSS-perfect (being that we’re still dealing with proprietary bits/pieces/networks/hardware with cell phone companies), Android seems the closest, while the Palm Pre (assuming it runs on Linux and allows itself to be open enough to be hackable/customizable/extensible) seems a strong second, whilst the “what do you mean you don’t have an iPhone yet” seems a distant third, being that you’re totally under Apple’s friendly-dictatorship-and-heavily-taxed thumb.

Here’s my short list so far, with my take on positives/negatives. I’m very curious to see what people (especially Planet KDE people who are actively working on providing/improving/supporting FLOSS) have done and are thinking with regards to their cell phones.

• The Apple iPhone. The current definition of sexiness–just ask the entire planet. Unfortunately, from my understanding, it’s very tightly controlled by Apple, and while you can jailbreak it, you’re still under Apple’s thumb as far as transferring music/videos (at the very least) to it from a Linux desktop. Want to back it up? You’d better have either a physical Windows or Mac machine or a very good virtual machine provider like VMware Workstation or Player and cross your fingers a lot. The other major downside in my book is that you can only get an iPhone if you use AT&T/Cingular as your cell phone provider, and their data plans are the highest in the industry ($30 per phone–and that’s if you don’t want to be able to connect to it via Bluetooth for laptop internet accesss???). Also, it doesn’t look like they have a shareable family data plan, so I’d be looking at $90 per month, at least, for just data access?? And then there’s the fact that it’s the absolutely least FLOSS-friendly geek toy of the bunch, from my understanding. There are a lot of positives, of course, and there seems to be no shortage of 3rd party application developers and applications. Of course, if you want to develop for the iPhone, don’t you have to pay the Apple tax and buy a physical Apple computer as well??
• Android phones. Really slick and awesome looking! I would LOVE to just have the PIM applications from it be able to run on my Nokia N810 and be able to sync flawlessly with my Google calendar/contacts data! The biggest downside for the Android for me is that only T-Mobile has an Android phone–and I can’t get T-Mobile service in my neck of the woods (literally). I’d really like to leave myself as open as possible to being able to get an Android phone as quickly as possible, so I’m thinking that I’d like to sign up with whichever cell phone service provider will give me the best shot at that. I think that because Google is backing this platform, it has the second-best chance of attracting application developers/hackers and should mean that it’s pretty future-proof from the standpoint of being able to look forward to years ahead of good, solid applications for the Android platform. Is it reasonable to think that even if cell phone companies don’t sell Android phones themselves, that one would be able to pick up an HTC Touch or Diamond or similar and slap the Android OS on it and have a fully functional Android phone?
• And finally, the soon-to-be-released Palm Pre (and here we tie in nicely with the title… the Palm is dead! Long live the Palm!) I cannot find a whole lot of information about the Palm Pre right now, but what little I see looks good. Based on Linux(?), supports a bunch of audio/video codecs out of the box, sports a slick new interface that looks very much like the iPhone/Android UIs, has a built-in GPS, and is being aimed squarely at the iPhone/Blackberry camps. The things that concern me: it has a custom web browser (why didn’t they use one of the existing FLOSS browsers???), lack of information regarding add-on external storage (does it use microSD?), will it support Bluetooth tethering/DUN(?), and the fact that this is yet another new platform that requires a healthy influx of 3rd-party app developers/hackers. Can Palm pull in a huge number of app developers to breathe life into the Pre and its new WebOS? To me, that’s the biggest question, since if they cannot, I don’t think they can stem the tide of iPhone-exclusive applications and developers. On the positive side, my current cell phone provider (Sprint) will be offering the Pre in another week or so, and they have pretty attractive data plans.

So I’d love to get comment feedback from folks about this. What are you currently using if you’re using one of these solutions? What are you planning on doing going forward?

It started to hit me yesterday as I spent 3.5 hours in this year’s KDE Google Summer of Code mentor’s meeting (thanks again sebr!!). KDE4 just plain rocks, and it feels good to start getting excited about it again. And I don’t just mean KDE 4.0. Don’t get me wrong, KDE4.0 is a nice little release. It’s not perfect and there are some things that are irritating about it and keep me from using it as my main DE. But like Aaron has been saying over and over and over again, KDE4.0 is not KDE4. KDE4.0 is more of a preview of things to come, and what I see coming just plain kicks butt.

I am finally getting excited about our PIM space again, and that feels really, really good. KMail, KOrganizer, KPilot, and the rest of our PIM suite was what drew me to KDE in the 3.x series. (Well, that and quite honestly I find the intentional dumbing-down and lack of configurability of the other large, free DE irritating to the point of exhaustion.) But lately our PIM apps have suffered from lack of care and have started to look seriously unsexy compared with Thunderbird, Sunbird, and even *gasp* Evolution. But KDE4 gives us a chance to remedy that, in my mind, and looking at this year’s Summer of Code projects, I’m hoping we get some really nice improvements done. There’s a few really sweet ones that I’d love to see get accomplished: the Google Contacts/Calendar integration into Akonadi and thusly KDE PIM, the enhanced KMail view, and (nearest and dearest to my heart) getting KPilot fully functional, and rock solid for KDE4.

And going through the SOC-sorting meeting made me realize all over again how fantastic a community it is that we have in KDE. There’s a lot of respect and comaradarie and friendliness that I just don’t see in some other communities. Not to mention the quality of talented people that we have. PIM might have drawn me to KDE, but it’s the people and our awesome community that we have that has kept me. =:)

Anyway, I just had to say that it feels really, really good to be excited about KDE4 again. In my mind, it’s a really unique opportunity to do something fresh and new and fun and exciting again. It’s a chance to learn from past mistakes and do better. It’s a chance to take the fantastic functionality that we have and rethink how our users can best interact with it. It’s a chance to not be bound to the past and to not have to be stuck with the same old presentation layer we have just because we don’t want to make drastic changes to our applications.

As the pretty graphic says, KDE4 is truly a chance to be free. =:)

Being out of the “being able to spend mad money on Geek toys” for a while (having a family will do that to ya), I was ill-prepared for this new-fangled UPnP thing. As I was setting up my (DANGED AWESOME!!!) PS3, I breezed by the UPnP settings (I don’t need no steenking directions!) with nary a second glance. However, after reading up on the PS3′s media streaming abilities a bit, I downloaded MediaTomb, installed it and configured it (took an hour, max, maybe), and before you know it, Bob’s your uncle and my PS3 was able to stream all of the movies, photos, and music that I’ve been keeping on my ancient Linux file server in the basement. SWEET MAMA!

To make things even just that little extra bit cooler, Sony’s Remote Play allows my and my wife’s PSPs to connect to the PS3 and stream movies, photos, and music anywhere in the house through the PS3.  Now that just plain rocks! I mean, 4GB memory stick modules can hold a decent amount of stuff, but to be able to have 250GB of movies, photos, and music accessible from the PSP in your pocket is just darned cool!

Now all we hafta do is get UPnP client-ness into VideoLAN so I can finally be free of supporting iTunes on my darling bride’s Powerbook….

Does this make any sense to anyone? Is it possible to be predisposed to dizziness and room-spinning-ness? Are in-ear, noise-isolating headphones known for making you feel dizzy, causing the room to spin on you, and not take effect until the next morning? I felt fine while I was listening to them. But after I took them off, went to bed, and got up the next morning, the room just spun ferociously.

Blef.

“This piece enters your bloodstream and then changes who you are. The entire blueprint of everything… of society, of how things should be, of how things are… all the way from subatomic particles to galactic clusters… it’s all here.”
George Mathew: Conductor, Beethoven’s Ninth For South Asia
Carnegie Hall 1/23/2006

Kerry, I sincerely wish you the best of good fortune in your endeavor and I hope your film gets the attention that it deserves!

I have always been deeply fascinated with the genius that is Ludwig van Beethoven. I grew up listening to my mom playing his pieces on our piano, and have enjoyed the complexity and overwhelming emotion found both in the observation and participation of his immense talent. In particular, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has something that resonates in my soul like nothing else ever has.

The second movement (Molto vivace – Presto) has such passion and raw power and ferocity and strength and beauty and peace!!! It is everything that life should have in it, and I am amazed at Beethoven’s ability to make it all fit together and make sense in one place. Every time I hear it, it just overwhelms me with emotion. Watching Ed Harris’s spectacular portrayal of Beethoven as he was conducting the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, I was just absolutely overjoyed beyond words to hear the second movement kick in and finally get some visual confirmation of the pure joy and power and energy that I’ve always felt deep in my soul when listening to it. I was smiling and laughing and air-violining… just such power… amazing. And seeing the expression on Beethoven’s face as he was pouring his very soul into the playing of his music… pure, intense joy.

And then the fourth movement… which is what most people (who are even aware of such things) think of when the Ninth Symphony is mentioned… WOW. I’ve always preferred the second movement over the fourth movement, and quite honestly, I never really grasped what Beethoven was doing with it. Of course, it helps not that the fourth movement played such a prominent role in the deeply disturbing Clockwork Orange. But what I didn’t realize was what ground-breaking stuff Beethoven was doing at the time! A chorale and two tenors in a Symphony–it was unheard of until Beethoven dared to do it. And then to have them do absolutely nothing but stand on-stage for the entirety of the performance preceding their parts in the fourth movement–it must have seemed absolute insanity! But. But… when the chorale joins in in the fourth movement… the incredible power and beauty of it absolutely brought me to tears. It was as if the countless multitudes of angels of heaven had joined in at that very moment and the eye and ear could scarcely take it in. And the effect that it had on those in the crowd on screen was exactly what I felt: pure emotion and power and beauty.

The funny thing is that just a few hours earlier today, I sat through another Ed Harris movie (okay, it was a Nicolas Cage movie), National Treasure: Book of Secrets. As far as movies go, it was a pretty good ride. Laughs and suspense and danger and all the right ingredients. A nice, clean family movie, and I applaud it for being that. And Ed Harris did a very nice job in it.

But Ed Harris’s performance in Copying Beethoven is something extremely special. It was obvious that he gave his whole heart and soul to the part. I don’t think I would have known that the actor playing Beethoven was Ed Harris, quite honestly–and in my book, that’s exactly how it should be. Tremendously done, Mr. Harris. I have complete respect for your abilities after seeing this movie.

In the special features section of the DVD, Agnieszka Holland said something to the effect that seeing people who have never listened to classical music crying from seeing and hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony made all the work worthwhile. Well, ma’am, I have loved classical music all my life and your film brought joy, tears, and some of the biggest smiles to my face that you could imagine. I’d say you did a darned good job.

As far as notoriety and high visibility go, I rather doubt that you’ll
be seeing a lot of raving reviews of Copying Beethoven. As a matter of fact, I kind of doubt you’ll find it mentioned much. Its style and
pace and camera work and subject matter and such are very much not the taste of today’s
huddled masses. It lacks too many of the normally-prescribed Hollywood
ingredients to make it palatable for our darling MTV generation.

But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t see it. =;)

Some bits that I totally identify with:

So how would you say life is different from five years ago?

Max: As a 40-year-old, I think it’s a time for me to mellow. The kids keep me on my toes, but I’m really more of a family guy as opposed to a guy who’s always wanting to go out on the town and trying to see what the [newest thing] might be. I enjoy being home now.

…

Your publicist said Michael W. Smith calls you the “most misunderstood man in Christian music.” Is that a compliment?

Max: Probably, if you put me up against the wall with the other contemporary Christian singers. I would say that Michael W. Smith can be quite a misunderstood guy, too. I’m known as the guy that’s kind of on the fringe or the outside—not because I think it’s cool, but because I really believe in creativity and pushing the envelope and progressing in the arts. I don’t like to sit still and put out exactly what people expect me to. I like to push myself to change.

…

Is this a one-off project? Or do you think you might continue in this vein of music for albums to come?

Max: As I’ve tried to explain to so many people that are trying to figure out this little enigmatic head of mine—which is quite small at times—I always like to change. Change is probably my one vice. It kind of confuses and pisses off some people, but I need change. It’s not that I think it’s cool to do that. I just like doing it. The next project is probably going to be another 360-degree turn.

Here’s to change, Kevin. I’m in the middle of a big one, myself, and loving every bit of it. =:)

I was totally blown away, 4 years ago, at BorCon when I got to see Sun’s Project Looking Glass demo. Jonathon Schwartz did a fantastic job of demoing it, and he did so following an especially obnoxious and irritating Microsoft presentation. I still remember walking out of the room with my friend, both of us in awe of what we just saw that Sun was doing. And what a stark contrast we saw between the heavy FUD machinery of Microsoft compared to the truly innovative work that Sun was doing.

Incidentally… yes, I’ll admit it, I (currently…  =;) ) program in Java during the day for a living, and I actually enjoy the language.  I know there’s been distrust of Java from the FOSS community for a long time now, and I very much wish Sun had Open Sourced Java a LONG time ago so it could have had a bigger role in the FOSS desktop.  And having had experience with early Swing apps years and years ago, there used to be good reason to be wary of using Java–it was slow and painful, especially on the crappy hardware that I could afford back then.  But I do not see any of those road blocks in the successful Java apps of today.

So anyway, tonight, in all of my geekiness, as I watched Paul Lamere’s presentation titled “Search Inside the Music: Using Signal Processing, Machine Learning, and 3-D Visualizations to Discover New Music“, I once again enjoyed seeing true innovation happening in a place like Sun. Compare that with Microsoft’s arrogance and Borg mentality, and it’s all the more refreshing. Anyway, you might have to sign up for Sun’s developer network to see the multimedia presentation I mentioned above, but it’s totally worth it.

Blockbuster has sweetened their deal by allowing in-store trade-ins of online-rented movies. This, to me, blows NetFlix out of the water, since NetFlix does not yet have a brick-and-mortar presence anywhere (?). And, because we signed up with Blockbuster a while ago, we still get to keep our 2 free movie-or-game rental coupons per month too. Pretty cool! As a result, we’ve been watching tons of movies as of late, including the Indiana Jones trilogy (forgot how good they were!!).

I’ve been a busy little beaver over the last few weeks, OSS-code-wise, anyway. Adriaan and I have whipped kpilot into shape proper-like, it seems. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time twice now and merged our codeyard.net svn repository into kde’s svn (it’s in kdepim-3.5.5+ branch now, but will be merged into branches/KDE/3.5/kdepim before 3.5.6 is release, iirc) using this spiffy little shell fu that I created for the purpose of merging code from one svn repository into another. Also, Sune from the debian packaging team has been a tremendous help in motivating us to get the critical data loss bugs fixed and backported (that’s my pain) into kde’s svn. It’s been really refreshing and fun hacking on kpilot again. I’m reaching a point, though, where we either need to architect kpilot to be more like opensync or I bite the bullet and start helping kdepim use opensync working towards kde4. That’s assuming my current time-to-spend-on-OSS holds up, which is a big assumption. Ohh–also, bbroeksema has helped bring cmake into kpilot, and I must say that I REALLY like it. Adriaan and I have pitched in and we now have a fully-functional build system (bye bye AAP) that I can fully grok. I’ve even written a custom configure script that helps bridge the gap. Sweet! Oh, and if you’re a kpilot user who cares about malconduit (syncing with Avantgo) or docconduit (creating palm docs), your help is required. Since none of the current kpilot maintainers/developers use these conduits, and there’s a decent amount of bit-rot in them, they are going to be disabled for the next release of kpilot/kde, unless you step up and help us with them. Help, please?

Thanksgiving was really, really fun. I need to put up some of our latest pics, but we had a wonderful time just staying home with our little family. I cannot tell you how stress-free our holidays are, not having to pack up and hobble off to a not-short list of relatives’ homes every holiday. Although it was a completely unintentional side-effect of moving cross-country, I really think that this is how it should be. For the first time ever, we have been able to establish our own traditions and have some really neat bonding time as a family that you just miss out on rushing to various relatives’ houses. Plus, my wifey is a really great cook and I get to cut turkey, so it’s enjoyable all around. =:)

Work goeth on. It’s looking to be a stressful year ahead of me with my current employer, and I’m not so sure how I feel about it at this point, other than to hang on for the ride and see what God provides

My darling bride allowed me to play The Matrix – Path of Neo for a few days (and I really appreciate it hon! =:)). I can honestly say that it’s a dissapointing game. First, the graphics are very poor and at least on my “last-year’s-model” Xbox, the characters and artwork are choppy, blocky, and bad. Second, the combat system is horrible. For the most part, you get through the game pressing “Y” repeatedly. Call me an old-school fogey, but coming from a Street Fighter and Killer Instinct background where you have learnable, predictable, more-than-one-button-mashing combos, the fights in this game are really sad. And the camera system is absolutely atrocious. I’ve noticed that there are several games that follow this model–where you are allowed to change your camera perspective, but you don’t have complete control since as soon as you start to move, the game takes over your camera again. Yuck! Make me puke on my jammies! Learn from Splinter Cell, folks, please.

Music-wise, I’ve been really taken by Skillet’s new CD (Comatose), Orbital’s Blue Album, Everything But The Girl, Aaron Shust (Anything Worth Saying is excellent!!), and most recently (don’t laugh) Dean Martin’s Baby It’s Cold Outside duet that played a really cute scene in Will Farrell’s Elf movie.

We’ve had our good friends The Wallers come up and visit us recently, and our family had a wonderful time with them. Sarah was gracious enough to stay with us for almost 2 weeks and we had an absolute ball. I was able to be “one of the girls” a little bit, which I really, really miss from our Bible Quiz days. *sniffle* I also was reminded of how cool my son is, and how much he is like me, with all of his Lego Star Wars 2 kung fu. =:)

And my beautiful daughter, A (name withheld to protect the innocent), is really into her NeoPets thing. What impresses me the most, though, is that she’s walking herself through some basic HTML tutorials and writing some content for her NeoPets pages. Cool!! The hacker spirit lives on in my children, vahoo!! =:) She is an amazingly talented, artistic hacker, though, and I need to start working with her on web designs so she can get exposed to that early on as a modern art form.

Laptop wise, I’ve bounced from Kubuntu Dapper to SUSE 10.1 to Fedora Core 6 to Kubuntu Edgy and back to Fedora Core 6 again for my powerbook. I’m settling on FC6 for the time being. Unfortunately, NONE of these distros work acceptably with my powerbook and NetworkManager. My goal was to be able to use NetworkManager solely as I do on my x86 SUSE 10.1 laptop at work, which is why I kept bouncing between distros. But since none of them do, and I really like what the Fedora boys have done with Core 6, and my powerbook runs pretty darned stable with it, I’ll keep using it. Oh–one thing I still need to figure out is how to get the keyboard backlighting working with FC6. I had it working with SUSE 10.1-ppc, iirc, and it does not work out of the box with FC6.

Lastly, I’ve been using vortexhost.com as my web hosting solution for the last 2 years. They have been really, really stable and been a good home for a good price (250 megs for $55/year). However, my little family has outgrown 250 megs and now I need to figure out what to do in the next 2 weeks. I’ve been looking around at some of the bigger-space-for-slightly-more-money players and some of the hosts I’m looking at are:

I’ve researched them at webhostingjury.com and webhostingtalk.com, and from what it looks like, hostgator would be the best in terms of decent price, decent disk space, good customer service, and good reputation. However, I’m really hesitant to fork over $83.40 for 1 year of web hosting. Yeah, I know, it’s only $30 more than I was spending before, but still… $83.40 is a decent chunk of change for a personal/family web site. So I’ve been looking at Google’s accounts for domains stuff and I might poke into it a little more, but still, I need to so something because we’re out of space right now and my contract with vortexhost.com is up in 2 weeks.

One thing I’d like to look at as part of this adventure is using Google as a spam filter. I use spamassassin with some custom training fu right now, but it still lets spam through every once in a while. And I really want to be able to provide my kiddos with some web space so they can have some room to play and learn. So, all in all, I still don’t know what I’m going to do. One side of my brain is saying that I could host our domain on a PC at the house, but I’ve already been down that road and it’s just painful (especially considering that my always-on box at home is a PII-200 laptop with zero disk space) and I’d like to not have to deal with that headache again. And I want something rock-solid and reliable for our e-mail solution, which is why GMail would be nice. The downside to GMail, though, and this is probably the ONLY reason I’m not going to use them yet is that they don’t support IMAP. *sigh* Any helpful suggestions, solutions, watch-out-fors, etc., would be greatly appreciated.

Okay, well, I think that touches every category I have defined, so with that (and the fact that it’s midnight, *grrr*), I guess I’ll hit the “publish” button and call it a night. G’night, Gracie…

the w’s – fourth from the last, originally uploaded by vanRijn.

If for no other reason than the amazingly cool, self-deprecating, ska/punk album cover, you have GOT to love this one!! =;)