TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

After a year long stint trying to configure Debian Sid to work stably on my laptop — and for the most part failing miserably; maybe that’s why sid is ‘unstable’ — I decided it was time to stop pretending I could configure Debian, so I installed Ubuntu, which happens to exist specifically for people who can’t handle configuring debian.

Jokes aside (please don’t comment on my horrid sense of humor, I’m probably legally insane right now.) I installed fedora 10 on my Gateway MT3423 laptop. Here’s what I have to say about the newly released distro: Very sound, very stable, very reliable, even running KDE4.1.3, I have had little to no issues with it; only positives.

Let me start by saying this: RedHat did a superb job on the Anaconda installer. It is by far one of the easiest installer system that I have ever used. It’s fast, it’s clean, it’s concise. It let me deploy an entire system based on the packages I wanted, which, based on my prior experiences is not the norm… at least with debian, you are hardwired to set up either a desktop (GNOME, no other option) webserver, sql server (only postgresql) etc… With Anaconda, you can choose individual packages, or just choose a desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, etc)

So, after a nice install, I got to see the shiny new KDE4.1 desktop. Fedora 10 ships with a very nice blue and black theme called Solar, which is primarily an image of the sun, or some other star, filtered through a blue filter, imo. It looks really snazzy; everything matches, from bootscreen (which I could, for the life of me, not get working on Debian) to the desktop background. The only thing I had to do out of the box was change KWin to use a different color scheme, to match the desktop — I used Zion (reversed), a nice high contrast black theme.

KDE4 introduced the concept of plasmoids, little widgets that can be stuck anywhere on the desktop, little widgets for, say, taskmanagement, calculating, even twitter. The choices were a little paltry, but then again most users have yet to upgrade their desktop, leaving the core of developers still at kde3.

Fedora 10 also ships with integration with SELinux, a kernel level tool used to verify that security is at it should be and to prevent root use as much as possible. While this is kind of a pain the behind for me, a regular laptop user running virtuall no services, and not minding an occaisional typing of his root password, I can definitely see the cool-factor and reasons behind it. It was just a bit of a pain to get NetworkManager to work when SELinux blocks it from doing a dhcp reservation. I fixed that though with a minor bit of hacking in the policy files, which, by the way, is managed by the Fedora system configuration tools, another stellar part of Fedora 10.

Fedora — and I assume RHEL — use system-config-* tools to bind up all of their configuration tools into one quick little interface, which keeps one from dredging around in /etc and keeps the system nice and easy to administrate; I haven’t had to vim a single /etc file except once to change the desktop manager to KDM.

While KDE4 is still a little rough around the edges (no way to hide unused tray icons? what?) it shows great promise and great, erm, entertainment for little technophiles like me. And that hiding unused tray icons will be in KDE4.2

Recent analyst downgrades of Palm stock have led to rumors claiming that Elevation partners would plan to sell its stock in the near future.

This is untrue according to an Elevation Partners spokesperson, who claimed the following:

“Elevation Partners is very pleased with the progress Ed Colligan, Jon Rubinstein and the entire Palm team are making. The Company’s product pipeline, including a next generation operating system due out soon and a new device targeted for the first half of 2009, excite us enormously. Elevation supports Palm in taking the difficult but necessary steps required to migrate from legacy products. We have a very long-term investment horizon and have no plans to exit our investment in Palm.”

While their enthusiasm is honored, I think that their definition of legacy product is not exactly right. Bigger devices (think Treo 680) and handhelds (think ipaq 210) still sell pretty well (and will continue doing so for the infinite/near future). Exiting these markets IMHO does little good…

Via palminfocenter

After the recent events, nobody should be surprised to hear that Palm has just EOL’d the unlocked GSM version of the Palm Treo 680 according to various industry sources.

The Palm Treo 680 can be considered the last business Treo for GSM – its successor, the Treo Pro, shares the Centro’s barely usable screen and form factor.

Our long-term friend Jan Slodicka from Resco states the following:

I use a Treo 680 every day and like it very much - the Centro is not at all a replacement. The Treo 680 still sells quite a bit of software and is very popular with our users…I can not understand this decision.

What do you think?

Sony abandoned its Clie line quite a few years ago: nevertheless, the veterans from 1src keep up the fight for their beloved Palm OS PDA’s. Here are their latest accomplishments:

Documents To Go 11 - works somewhat
Users report varying success with DocumentsToGo - while SheetToGo works well, WordToGo is said to act up when the DIA is collapsed (saw sth similar on my GSPDA M70 some time ago).

Nevertheless, Documents To Go 11 works well on Clies.

Opera Mini 4.2 - works well
Later releases of Palm’s Java VM were limited to recent Palm devices - Clie users were left standing in the rain. Nevertheless, some innovative folks managed to find a way to get Opera Mini running: hit the link above for further info!

Dear Readers,
it’s finally time to say farewell to inaccurate Centro/Treo clocks. Don’t ask me why Palm decided to save a few cents by omitting the reset button from its latest smartphones…we can be sure that they saved a few cents on your expense.

Tamoggemon TimeDrift fixes the problem and allows you to reset your handheld without that highly annoying time drift of up to a full hour:

A free 30-day evaluation version can be downloaded from Tamoggemon.com - the full version currently costs 7.95$ (usually 9.95$) and can be purchased in the TamsShop!

A big thank you goes out to the beta team!

Palm has been at work advertising on their hardly little PalmOS device, the Centro. Their newest ads, centerred around the holidays focus on “Claüse,” the reinvented Santa, whose life was turned around after he received a Centro.

While the man is definitely creepy looking, this seems to be a very interesting advertisement campaign, and has the hopes of capturing some sort of press coverage

This is just the next step in a long line of palm’s dealing with Facebook; perhaps Palm is looking to attract a wider range of users, branching from their usual corporate appeal. Perhaps some new, exciting devices are in the tubes?

Anyways, the ad campaign is here (palm.com) and here (facebook.com)

What do you think Palm is up to?

PS: Cheers to Nicoya over at #palm on irc.freenode.net for the tip!

Japanese have traditionally loved gaming - this seems to have changed this Autumn due to the global recession. Times Business reports that sales have surprisingly plummeted, leaving Japanese console makers wondering about how recession-proof their business actually is.

According to unnamed Japanese analysts, Christmas sales will be ok. But: things will get worse quickly after that. Publishers have to take part of the blame, as they are accused of not producing enougnh games which appeal to the Japanese market.

Furthermore, the global growth of casual gaming seems to stop slowly but surely. A KBC Securities analysts states that:

“Nintendo will never say it, but casual gamers, almost by definition, are happy with just a few games and will easily cut gaming out of their discretionary spending as the downturn hits their wallets. The market seems to be expecting casual gamers to act like hardcore gamers and they just won’t.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Masato OHTA

Hospital wards all over the world fill up as more and more snake oil salesmen get cerebral stroked and heart attacks. Austria’s hospital system is breaking down, parent mortality rate exceeds 50%.

The horror scenario outlined above could very well become truth if Keith Bakker, head of Europe’s only clinic for gaming addicted people, gets more media attention. His bold claim:

“These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies,” he says.

“But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers - this is a social problem.”

Paddy Maguire (BBC News) visited him in Amsterdam, and interviewed him on a variety of gaming-related topics. Another popular myth was debunked in the process:

This kind of aggression is not uncommon in young gamers who feel frustrated with their real lives. Besides addiction, aggression and violence form part of the ongoing debate about the influence of gaming on impressionable minds.

When two students killed twelve pupils and a teacher in the Columbine High School shooting in the US in 1999, many believed that their common interest in playing violent games had helped to trigger the massacre.

Research at Smith & Jones seems to imply that feelings of anger and powerlessness often pre-exist a compulsion to play violent games. In some cases these people find each other in the gaming world and form a bond based on those feelings of alienation and anger.

Do your editor a favour and be a good net citizen: pass this story on to your friends and colleagues. Millions of gamers will love for you…it’s a karma thing. Deal? Thank you!

So far, image quality was determined by reviewers looking at the image and describing what they think. While this method has worked well in the past, it unfortunately is about as scientific as a Rorschach test interpreted by a drunk wearing sunglasses and sitting in the dark.

The boys at DX0 have decided to perform the ultimate test of sensor fitness, and set up a methematical test which analyzes RAW images and determines how good they actually are. As the output is a bunch of numbers, comparisons are easier than ever before…

Get more here:
http://www.dxomark.com/

Opera Mini 4.2 has just been released - as we covered Opera Mini to death in the past, this review looks only at the new things I noticed.

At start-up, the program displays its usual change log and asks you to confirm your agreement to the licensing contract:

The synchronization option can be enabled from the main menu. It requires you to have a so-called Opera Link account, and then let’s you keep bookmarks in sync:

Opera added a rudimentary feed reader for reasons I will never ever understand. Nevertheless: if you visit an RSS-enabled web site, a sidebar pops up in a fashion similar to FireFox:

Clicking the bar allows you to preview the feed and/or subscribe to it:

I managed to get the program work somewhat stable on my Treo 680 with the following settings - the stability of this version of the program was a lot better than on previous versions. This is quite a feat, as Palm’s JVM is now over three years old:

Overall, Opera Mini is a good thing to have (if you manage to get your hands onto a Java VM) on your device. It manages to render a surprising amount of web sites: even though a native version of Opera would definitely be better, this manages to beat Blazer in most aspects except stability. Highly recommended…

CNET’s News team got their hands onto a recent Symantec report on the state of cyber-crime. The boys listened to “underground IRC channels”, and then analyzed the data.

Computer criminals have become more professional in the last year, creating underground economies where malware, bank accounts and services are bought and sold “freely”. If everything offered would be sold (a highly unlikely scenario), sellers would net 270 million dollars in a single year.

The most scary part of the report is the following quote:

“The big picture is this system is highly self-sustaining. You can buy the attack tool kit, use it to steal information and sell that information to others in the economy,” Zulfikar Ramzan, technical director of Symantec Test and Response, said in an interview. “You don’t need to have expertise in every area of cybercrime. You can have expertise in just one area and with others, form a supply chain to make money.”

Of course, it’s always possible that Symantec is peddling fear here in a fashion similar to what F-Secure did with S60 virii - so take these results with a grain of salt.

TamsPalm has always been on the forefront of all things GMail - we were among the first news services who performed GMail invite giveaways after receiving our account from Sir Baetzgen.

Anyways, a new and possibly highly dangerous exploit has been discovered. Essentially, it involves the theft of a cookie which then allows the attacker to set up random filter rules in your account.

Further information can be found at ZDNet’s:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1188

So far, mobile phones received a new IP address whenever they connected to the internet - essentially, mobile phone networks worked in a similar fashion to a home network with DHCP turned on.

According to rcrwireless, this will now change - Verizon Wireless offers a service which guarantees that an individual handset will always get the same IP.

Unfortunately, the technology is prohibitively expensive as of this writing:

The cost to set up mobile devices with the technology is a one-time fee of $500. Along with the one-time fee, a $60 monthly data plan is also needed for each device and companies need an AAA server to implement the technology, Weldon said. Such a server could cost a company between $30,000 and $40,000.

We had ITW pictures of Sprint’s Olive Green Centro for quite some time - the boys at MobilityToday now bring us the first ITW shot of the new pink version:

Hardware-wise, this Sprint-exclusive device is very similar to all other Centros-. However, it has 2x the RAM and drops with a variety of extra programs in ROM.

P.S. More on these new devices can be found here!