[Tfug] Followup: DNS hosting

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 11:51:36PM -0700, johngalt1 wrote:
>Here are several questions if you don't mind. .
>
>1. Will this app work on Handspring devices?

It should work fine.  Most of the recent work has gone into making it work
better on newer devices (hi-res, memory cards, etc.).  If I recall, Handspring
devices run Palm OS 3.5.  It should work okay on them.

>2. (rhetorically) Is the Palm platform dying?

Unrhetorically, yes...  *sigh*
While Palm did (is?) face stiff competition from Microsoft, they have pretty
much managed to destroy their own company all on their own.  In the beginning
they had even better market share than MS does on the desktop.

After OS 5.x was released, development became a lot more difficult for
non-Windows developers like me.  POSE, the Palm OS Emulator, was a wonder for
development.  It could emulate just about any device and do it nearly
perfectly.  That's why I never needed to own more than my own personal PDA.
And since POSE was under the GPL, it ran on many platforms.

Then OS 5 came.  No more emulator, but instead the Palm OS Simulator.  It was
exceptionally buggy and ran only under Windows.  Even worse, it only
"simulated" a device.  If your program had any ARM-native code in it (for
speed reasons) the Simulator would just choke on it unless you compiled those
bits to run natively under Windows (i.e. an x86 DLL file).  I could never get
it to work under Wine.  It works okay under VMWare, but I can't plug GDB into
that.

>3. (rhetorically) John Gruenenfelder is not in the UofA 
>phonebook. So, how does he have a arizona.edu email address

Because John still remotely maintains a couple of machines at Steward for his
boss.  :)

>P.S. I love BSD, so I don't want it to die..., just like I 
>don't want my Handspring OS to die.

I feel your pain.  I've really enjoyed working on the program.  Only ever
met one or two actual users in person, though there are tens of thousands
around the world.  At least, during Palm's heyday there were.  Lots of
patches, bug reports, and feature requests.  And it even won me a Free
Software award and trip to Europe, and that's not bad for a free book reader.

With Palm's demise eminent, I'm not sure where the next open platform will
be.  Access bought Palm OS and is making a new Linux based mobile OS that will
also run Palm OS apps.  But they've been working on it for a long time and
it's still not out yet.  I'm hoping good things come from Google's Android
platform.  I've looked at it and it seems really nice and developer friendly.
But it's just a pie in the sky dream until an actual device shows up.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
Try Weasel Reader for PalmOS  --  http://gutenpalm.sf.net
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
of my enemies!"
        --Sam of Sam & Max