I got one of the "Computer Lap Desk" versions of these last year for X-mas. Wasn't expecting much, but it's actually quite nice. I use it with my MacBook. I've tried it with a large ThinkPad, and that basically worked as well. Not perfect, but not bad. I think I've seen these for $15 in B+N stores.
The pad on the desk bubbled up because of the heat of the boxen; I ended up slicing it with a knife, gluing it back down; no problem since then. In fact, you can't even see the slices.
I have an older 'desk' that I still use on occaison, that I 'built' myself; a poly cutting board wrapped it in some soft, stretchy, grippy cabinet liner.
Last month or so, yahoo started bouncing email from earthlink. 100% of the time. Calls to support eventually indicated it was a known problem (didn't admit it until pressed), and then indicated multi-day wait for it to be fixed. It was easier to fix on my wife's side; reroute her mail through my hosting server. Though the advice from our 13 year old son was probably the best: "why aren't you using gmail?"
Ironically, I bought my MacBook because I was tired of dealing with crappy WinTel hardware, with the most recent problem being... it randomly turned off. Sigh.
So are you saying that there are some secrets of J2ME technology that you need to know before you can write J2ME apps effectively? What are the secrets, and, more importantly, why are they secret?
One problem with Apache's FOP is that it doesn't support keep, orphan, widow type stuff, so it's difficult to get nice looking paginated stuff, broken at natural places. FOP supports it in the 'spec', Apache FOP doesn't support it in the implementation.
I was using FOP to create 'slides', and it did an ok job. Nice that it supports links in the PDF file.
I also looked at ReportLab for Python, which seemed slightly better to me than FOP, with one exception. I think the link support was not as nice as Apache's, and at the time I was too reliant on it to be able to move to ReportLab.
Oh yeah. kedit is still my editor of choice for win32. It's easily the longest-lived piece of software I've ever owned. It has held up to time incredibly well.
I've been using it since my first computer, a PCjr! W00t! a 720K drive! There was nothing I couldn't do between kedit, personal rexx, turbo pascal, smalltalk/v, and my 'voice' sidecar
The problem, is, Slashdot will lose revenue when folks start to strip out the ads (I guess this is how they 'profit'). So, what they should do is arrange to charge folks who want XML to do all kinds of 'cool' things.
I'd pay, because I'm a scraper, and it'd be worth it to me to be able to not have to keep my scraper up-to-date (need to change it every couple of months), plus do a better job scraping.
I scrape to HTML for input to iSilo to read/. on my Palm. Download about 500K of compressed/. a night!
On a much smaller scale, the Envy repository used in Envy/Smalltalk, then VisualAge Smalltalk, then VisualAge Java, used to essentially commit with every save. Seems insane, but of course Smalltalk methods are small <grin/>, and it was fantastic to be able to see every change you had ever made, at the 'save' level.
A while back, the wife and I inadvertantly fast forwarded (via our Philip's Tivo at fastest FFW speed) through a show, watching like an hour in about a minute or so. For whatever reason, we weren't super hooked on watching it, but we had it, so we just let the FFW go.
The amazing thing was, we got the gist of the entire show. In like a minute. No audio.
Goes to show ya how much content really is on TV shows.
But the Sprint version is running OS 4.1 and makes no mention of SDIO slot. And doesn't say what the resolution of the display is. I can't go back to 160x160...
What really irks me with the Treo 300 device, and maybe the 600 has fixed this with it's 5-way toggle, is that you need to use the keypad AND a fingernail/stylus to run many apps that require some kind of tactile feedback. I get to the point where I keep the stylus between two fingers and shift my finger position so I can quickly use the stylus while texting. You have to text, because there is no grafitti. I would actually be quite happy with the graffiti area back and no keypad. Who needs a freaking keypad on a Palm? (Well, actually the Sony Clie's that fold out, with the keypads, are perfectly acceptable, since they have both keypad AND graffiti area).
I didn't spend 6 years using graffiti to just throw it all away now!
Sure PocketPC has the lead in interesting peripheral support, but Palm wins on software available. Bonus; Palm devices don't suck the juice like PocketPC. For anyone who really uses a PDA, and doesn't want to have the device in the cradle every day, there's no competition; Palm wins. The power usage of PocketPC is the ultimate killer for me, for that platform.
Like other people suggested, I use a Palm. I've been using iSilo since it's been out; this is great for all kinds of stuff, including gutenbooks. I do a little work on 'em before hand to actually convert them to HTML (I don't understand why Gutenberg doesn't do this, but... whatever).
I used to use a Palm Vx (160x160 4-bit grayscale), but have since moved on a 320x320 Sony Clie. When you get into a beat on the reading, turn on the autoscroll, and you don't even have to touch the PDA. The new Clie-with-a-keyboard's have 320x480 displays, and it sounds like from the description at iSilo that they support that mode. It's really a nice, inexpensive, well-supported program.
Be careful in looking at PDAs for displays that smear or bleed display contents when scrolling. For some reason, a lot of b&w Palms do this, and the color ones don't (at least the Sony Clie's don't seem to). I'd go nuts if I had to put up with a crappy display while reading.
Bonus for reading off a PDA, if you can stand it, is that you don't need a light source. In fact, I have read my kids gutenbooks at night, and we turn off all the lights: my book becomes the light source.
I was also briefly thinking about getting a Rocketbook. I think this would probably be another good way to go if the screen is nice and big, doesn't have tracers when scrolling, and I can put anything I want on it.
Acid Music, the cheap $50 one, is a pretty fun program, and can get kids to learn how to put a song together, and learn a little about keys. You can burn your resulting songs onto CDs. My kids love it. For the under-7 crowd, there is a greatly simplified version called Super Dooper Music Looper.
Besides the loops they give you, you can find lots of free ones on the web as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I got one of the "Computer Lap Desk" versions of these last year for X-mas. Wasn't expecting much, but it's actually quite nice. I use it with my MacBook. I've tried it with a large ThinkPad, and that basically worked as well. Not perfect, but not bad. I think I've seen these for $15 in B+N stores.
The pad on the desk bubbled up because of the heat of the boxen; I ended up slicing it with a knife, gluing it back down; no problem since then. In fact, you can't even see the slices.
I have an older 'desk' that I still use on occaison, that I 'built' myself; a poly cutting board wrapped it in some soft, stretchy, grippy cabinet liner.
Last month or so, yahoo started bouncing email from earthlink. 100% of the time. Calls to support eventually indicated it was a known problem (didn't admit it until pressed), and then indicated multi-day wait for it to be fixed. It was easier to fix on my wife's side; reroute her mail through my hosting server. Though the advice from our 13 year old son was probably the best: "why aren't you using gmail?"
http://www.json.org/license.html
Relevant sentence: "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."
Ironically, I bought my MacBook because I was tired of dealing with crappy WinTel hardware, with the most recent problem being ... it randomly turned off. Sigh.
So are you saying that there are some secrets of J2ME technology that you need to know before you can write J2ME apps effectively? What are the secrets, and, more importantly, why are they secret?
'nuff said
I was using FOP to create 'slides', and it did an ok job. Nice that it supports links in the PDF file.
I also looked at ReportLab for Python, which seemed slightly better to me than FOP, with one exception. I think the link support was not as nice as Apache's, and at the time I was too reliant on it to be able to move to ReportLab.
xmlresume uses FOP, it appears, to generate PDF
FOSE was in April. Old quote.
me: What's the problem, maybe I can help.
support: There's a glitch running around the system.
me: What's the glitch, maybe I can help.
support: It's some kind of glitch running around the system.
me: I see ...
Oh yeah. kedit is still my editor of choice for win32. It's easily the longest-lived piece of software I've ever owned. It has held up to time incredibly well.
I've been using it since my first computer, a PCjr! W00t! a 720K drive! There was nothing I couldn't do between kedit, personal rexx, turbo pascal, smalltalk/v, and my 'voice' sidecar
JCP specs are not free to read. There is a click-through license you have to agree to. Try reading it sometime. They are also not free to implement.
Common misperceptions, that Sun has not felt the need to correct.
What are you talking about? What does Write Once Run Anywhere have to do with Open Source? Answer: nothing.
What "community process"? Are you talking about the Java Cartel Process?
The problem, is, Slashdot will lose revenue when folks start to strip out the ads (I guess this is how they 'profit'). So, what they should do is arrange to charge folks who want XML to do all kinds of 'cool' things.
/. on my Palm. Download about 500K of compressed /. a night!
I'd pay, because I'm a scraper, and it'd be worth it to me to be able to not have to keep my scraper up-to-date (need to change it every couple of months), plus do a better job scraping.
I scrape to HTML for input to iSilo to read
On a much smaller scale, the Envy repository used in Envy/Smalltalk, then VisualAge Smalltalk, then VisualAge Java, used to essentially commit with every save. Seems insane, but of course Smalltalk methods are small <grin/>, and it was fantastic to be able to see every change you had ever made, at the 'save' level.
Now, we're using Eclipse, and thus CVS. sigh
A while back, the wife and I inadvertantly fast forwarded (via our Philip's Tivo at fastest FFW speed) through a show, watching like an hour in about a minute or so. For whatever reason, we weren't super hooked on watching it, but we had it, so we just let the FFW go.
The amazing thing was, we got the gist of the entire show. In like a minute. No audio.
Goes to show ya how much content really is on TV shows.
But the Sprint version is running OS 4.1 and makes no mention of SDIO slot. And doesn't say what the resolution of the display is. I can't go back to 160x160 ...
That is just so untrue. My parent's don't have a basement.
What really irks me with the Treo 300 device, and maybe the 600 has fixed this with it's 5-way toggle, is that you need to use the keypad AND a fingernail/stylus to run many apps that require some kind of tactile feedback. I get to the point where I keep the stylus between two fingers and shift my finger position so I can quickly use the stylus while texting. You have to text, because there is no grafitti. I would actually be quite happy with the graffiti area back and no keypad. Who needs a freaking keypad on a Palm? (Well, actually the Sony Clie's that fold out, with the keypads, are perfectly acceptable, since they have both keypad AND graffiti area).
I didn't spend 6 years using graffiti to just throw it all away now!
Sure PocketPC has the lead in interesting peripheral support, but Palm wins on software available. Bonus; Palm devices don't suck the juice like PocketPC. For anyone who really uses a PDA, and doesn't want to have the device in the cradle every day, there's no competition; Palm wins. The power usage of PocketPC is the ultimate killer for me, for that platform.
Like other people suggested, I use a Palm. I've been using iSilo since it's been out; this is great for all kinds of stuff, including gutenbooks. I do a little work on 'em before hand to actually convert them to HTML (I don't understand why Gutenberg doesn't do this, but ... whatever).
I used to use a Palm Vx (160x160 4-bit grayscale), but have since moved on a 320x320 Sony Clie. When you get into a beat on the reading, turn on the autoscroll, and you don't even have to touch the PDA. The new Clie-with-a-keyboard's have 320x480 displays, and it sounds like from the description at iSilo that they support that mode. It's really a nice, inexpensive, well-supported program.
Be careful in looking at PDAs for displays that smear or bleed display contents when scrolling. For some reason, a lot of b&w Palms do this, and the color ones don't (at least the Sony Clie's don't seem to). I'd go nuts if I had to put up with a crappy display while reading. Bonus for reading off a PDA, if you can stand it, is that you don't need a light source. In fact, I have read my kids gutenbooks at night, and we turn off all the lights: my book becomes the light source.
I was also briefly thinking about getting a Rocketbook. I think this would probably be another good way to go if the screen is nice and big, doesn't have tracers when scrolling, and I can put anything I want on it.
Besides the loops they give you, you can find lots of free ones on the web as well.