Palm 755p Error Log

Dial #*#377# to see the Palm 755p Error Log. Helps with troubleshooting spontaneous restarting of the palm device. My palm started rebooting when I accessed a certain item in the Memos. Then this problem got worse, and it started rebooting when I accessed ANY Memos. I see on teh intarwebs that people experience this sort of problem with restarting from corrupted txt messages, corrupt downloads like ringtones, or email attachments.

I am trying to update the vzw software using the desktop updater that verizon provides for the Treo 755p.

Update: the updater, and restore via hotsync worked. Now I just need to get the phone reprogrammed or see if I can get *228 to work.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset verdict: 1.92 million?!?

Heh heh, like they will ever see that money. It's ridiculous. If I were in her position I would just laugh. What are they going to do? They can't take her car, they can't keep her from renting a house. They can garnish 25% of her wages. They will never see more than a few thousand dollars of this award and the obvious overkill in the award just makes them look horrible in the public eye. I wish the entire music industry would fail, big bank style, and publish zero new albums next year. This would be of great benefit to our society, as then people would go listen to live music, or, land sakes, make their own music at home.

Problems with Vista 64bit

Problem number 1: there is no 64 bit version of Adobe Flash to use in 64bit IE. Solution? Use Firefox. Why the heck are you using IE anyhow? Problem number 2: Verizon and Palm do not make drivers for 64 bit windows for the 755p Treo. So you can not hotsync via USB cord, nor can you use VZ access manager to connect to the internet. Solution? Use USBmodem. Problem number 3: Not sure if this is a 64bit problem, but, I used Microsoft Update to get a selection of security updates, and after I was done, Windows had changed my update settings to 'update automatically'. I noticed this because the tray icon for windows update was there this morning. "Downloading updates," it said. "No, you are not," I said. I never use automatic updates, because Microsoft patches are not known for their stability, and MS often tries to slip in a new program or two when you update, like WGA or IE 8. Solution? Turn off updates. Change update settings to 'Never Check for Updates.' This means that you have to keep track of which updates are reliable on your own. I use AskWoody to get the scoop on which updates to skip for awhile. I also have a good antivirus program and I use Firefox instead of IE. Always get the updates for Windows Defender, Malicious Software Removal Tool, and Junk Mail Filters for Outlook (if you use Outlook). Problem number 4: My Razer Diamondback 3G mouse doesn't do center-click. It doesn't show up in the mouse control panel applet. There is no way to adjust it's settings except with the 3G driver applet, and it doesn't list center-click as an option. This is a problem for me, as I center-click links all the time to open them in a new tab. Solution? I discovered by trial and error, that 'Universal scroll' in the 3G applet works as center-click, instead of providing a scroll.

My chat session with Dell sales

Horrible salesmanship. Neither agent greeted me. Neither tried to see what they needed to do to close the sale, or offered to take my order. Neither had a sense of humor. They both missed questions in my text and didn't answer them. Neither said goodbye-have a nice day when our session ended. I am literally sitting here with my credit card in hand and their doofus agents couldn't close the sale. Their sole effort to sell me was to paste a system in front of me. They didn't even extol the virtues of these systems or explain why they thought these systems suited my needs.

Eternal Silence is a Kick Ass HL2 Mod

Eternal Silence is a kick ass mod.

It's a space and shipboard combat game.

Each match starts out with both teams boarding ships to go bomb the other side's defensive corvettes, and defending their own corvettes. When one team succeeds in blowing up all three of the other team's corvettes, then the game mode changes, and the successful attackers invade the enemy capship and attempt to capture all the subsystems on the enemy's capship. This phase is timed, and when the timer runs out, new corvettes spawn in and the capship attack phase is over until all the corvettes are gone again. The timer can be stopped, though, if the attackers capture one of the capships subsystems. As long as the invaders hold one of the subsystems, the timer is stopped, and they can spawn there in that subsystem room on the enemy capship. They can also fly a multiseat gunship into the enemy capship hangar and spawn in the gunship, then jump out into the enemy capship's hangar area.

There are several different classes of ships and classes of soldiers, as you would expect.

I had some problems with frame rate, and locked up movement with echoing sound when I first started playing, but I cranked my video settings down a notch and I haven't had any freezing, echoing or lagging since. The game has crashed out to windows (Vista) a couple of times on me. (but it was way past my bedtime anyhow...)

I have had a lot of fun playing this game, and in the few days that I have played it, I have been on teams that used communication and teamwork about 50% of the time, which I think is an awesome ratio for a pub game.

It would be a great game if it had resource gathering, an upgrade system and a commander mode. But it's still fun with the simple gameplay it has now. It still offers a lot of possible tactical gambits, and strategies. Games can go back and forth for awhile, generating considerable drama and impassioned combat, although the continual bombardment of the capships does bring the match to an inexorable end. It is more than fun enough to keep me up late, flying the unfriendly skies.

Chinese Character Problems in Zen Cart

I needed to put some links with Chinese, Thai and Japanese characters in a header on a Zen Cart home page. I had a hard time finding the place in the templates and php files where I needed to specify the utf-8 character encoding.

Eventually I stumbled on the /includes/languages/your-template/english.php file which is where the magic happens.

// charset for web pages and emails
define('CHARSET', 'utf-8');

is the way you need to make it. If you don't, then your character set will be wrong, since Zen Cart installs with iso-8859-1 by default, and you'll get nonsense characters instead of Chinese.

I don't know why I couldn't find this file...it's the obvious place to look. I guess I had the wrong english.php file open...

I also ran into a great forum post on the Zen Cart forums. A user named Incouto provides a good explanation of character sets, collation in mysql and in the php query controller.

Phone eats my photos

And Blogger eats blog postings...

Let me see if I can reconstitute this post.

My Razor v3m ate some of my cell phone pics tonight. I was transferring pics to my microSD card when the phone decided to erase all but two of the pictures on the card. And no, I did not accidentally choose to erase the card. Otherwise it would have gotten the two that it left behind, eh?

So I went looking for some free file recovery apps to see what I could get back.

Softperfect File Recovery is a tiny download and doesn't require an install. It quickly recovered 36 images and three .3g2 files. It didn't recover all the images and some of the images it did recover were corrupted. The .3g2 files wouldn't play.

PC Inspector File Recovery requires install. It had the same results. 36 files recovered, same corrupted files, .3g2 files won't play.

So I guess the missing/corrupted images are not gonna come back.

The PC Inspector app also has a find lost files option where it scans the media cluster by cluster, and that found a long ago deleted xls file. So you may be able to get some extra stuff back using that method.

This is the second time I have lost the contents of a microSD card. The first time, the card sprang out of it's socket and just happened to land right under the wheel of my chair. So when I turned to look for it....'crunch'.

That one: my fault. This time: yer pissin me off Motorola.

Google vs Facebook? I don't think so.

Just finished reading this article on the internal economy of Facebook. Mostly it is about Facebook's growth struggles and how recent changes in layout have hurt the businesses of lots of Facebook App Developers. But one small part was about Facebook's place in the larger web ecosystem.

The Article maintained that Facebook aims to be the OS of the Web, "making the web fundamentally social across all sites and applications." In this, it competes with Google.

"Google says the modern day operating system, or at least the starting off point on the Web, starts with search. Facebook believes it starts with people connected via social networking." ~Developers Struggle Amid Fragile Facebook Economy

This reminds me of my thinking about the web ca. 1995. There is a basic truism about the internet. People get on the net to get stuff done or to mess around. Save time or waste time. I think maybe 'search' is weighted towards saving time, and web 2.0/social apps are weighted toward the waste time end. So, Google and Facebook aren't even in the same market. Folks aren't going to get on Google to check in with their friends and they aren't going to use Facebook to find a grant for their non-profit or to search for a part number.

Easy polaroid image generator

While looking for a way to create a polaroid image effect for a website, I ran across this easy polaroid image generator. It even has fancy shaped drop shadows. Beats all the photoshop tutorials about polaroid frames all to heck. Need to do some Fireworks work on it to give it a transparent background, though.