Re: Adventures in TeXas

On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 2:56 PM, dmccunney <[email protected]> wrote:
> While the group has been quiet for a while, I suspect at least some
> folks still have it in their email configuration, and people here are
> likely to appreciate the story.  (Warning: long post follows.)

And update or two, under the heading (mis)Adventures in TeXas...

> (EDIT: It hasn't.  Now Hotsync
> crashes when run, and I have no idea what's going on.  I simply get a
> Windows message that Hotsync has encountered an error and needs to
> close.  This has persisted through a remove and reinstall of Palm
> Desktop. This is not critical, as I can Hotsync to another Windows
> machine running Win2K, but it's like having an itch I can't scratch
> when I don't understand what's going on. )

It gets more curious.  After a couple of removals/reinstalls of Palm
Desktop with Hotsync still dieing horribly when run, I decided to try
it from a different userid.  There are several configured users on the
system where this occurred, so I logged off my normal account and
logged on as a different user.  Hotsync worked just fine. The problem
wasn't on the Pam Desktop and Hotsync end - it was something specific
to my configuration.  Since it used to work on my ID, the challenge is
figuring out what change I made that broke it.

> LX works fine on the TX; other things didn't.

There's a quirk with LX, too.  I got bitten years back by an LX bug:
if the LX database that held the config info grew beyond 64KB, LX
choked. I believe I was the first to report the issue, because I had a
complex enough LX config with everything *including* the kitchen sink
installed that LX *hit* that limit.  Bozidar apparently thought he
knew what was going on, but felt it would take some work to fix.  He
implemented a partial fix that made LX less likely to hit the 64K
limit in practice, but died before getting to a real fix.

The odd bit was that it appeared to be version dependent.  After Jeff
Gibson of GoTreo software bought LX and started the beta cycle for a
new version, I had at least one beta where the bug didn't bite.  I
created an LX config where I pushed the database size to something
like 220K with no ill effects.  A subsequent beta broke it again, and
the 64K limit bit.  Jeff couldn't figure out what was going on, but
needed to get a release out the door.  *His* work-around was to cap
the LX DB size at 64K, and if it grew over that, updates would
silently fail. I forgot Jeff had done that till I added some things
when my LX DB was one the edge of the limit, and said "Why aren't the
icons appearing in the first LX tab as they should?"  Oh.  Right.  I
forgot Jeff's "fix".

I could find some stuff to remove to give me headroom, but this is a
problem with no real solution beyond "Don't add more stuff unless you
can make some existing stuff go away".

> The pick of the litter is probably Apt, an open source application
> that is a sort of control panel on steroids for Palm devices.

I'm still finding things to do with Apt, and it's a "Why did I not
know about this years ago?" item.

The other major change was getting NetFront working.  I had it on my
Zodiac, but attempts to install it on the TX produced hard resets.  It
turns out Dmitry Grinberg had packaged it as a PRC installer, with
NetFront and the other stuff it needed.  Hotsync the installer to the
TX, run it, let it reset, and Poof!  A working NetFront installation.

I'm still trying to get wifi to work.  The TX supposedly does WPA-PSK
security, but it refuses to connect to my router which uses that, and
I'm not about to lower my security for the TX.

On the Zodiac,  I had a SanDisk Wifi SD card with 256MB of storage.
It worked, but the SanDisk drivers only did WEP..  To get around that,
I added a second router.  That was configured as an access point,
connecting via a CAT5 cable to the Linksys primary.  The Zodiac
connected to the second router using WEP, and I had MAC address
filtering turned on as well.  Since the second router was an access
point, DHCP and connection to the outside world were handled by the
Linksys, which saw the secondary router as a trusted client, so the
Zodiac could authenticate through it.

The primary router now is a Belkin, and I found an old Linksys  801B
router I'm attempting to set up as a secondary to the Belkin to do the
same thing with the TX I used to do with the Zodiac.  I just haven't
found the right magic spell for this configuration.

This is actually fun for the most part.  I *like* technical challenges.
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519


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