I’m paying for part of my recent tablet PC purchase by selling my Zaurus SL-c760 PDA. It’s a nice unit with a 640×480 screen (I even had a Debian chroot on it!), but I think the tablet PC is more what I need these days.
So, in shameless plug mode, here are links to the eBay pages for the unit and accessories: Zaurus, Wifi CF card, CF modem, 512MB SD card.
Free Software Magazine has just posted my article Haskell: A Very Different Language.
The folks at Free Software Magazine are doing a great job on a shoestring. I hope they can continue to do good things out there.
Many students need calculators, and I’m no exception, with my physics class this semester.
I got my HP 48GX calculator 10 or more years ago. For those of you not familiar with HP calculators, let me give you a bit of a background.
HP is a company that, for many years, had a dedicated calculator division. They produced many of the world’s most advanced calculators for science, engineering, and business. Their top-of-the-line series, the HP48 and HP49, contained some features that you’d normally have to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get in PC applications. In many ways, the HP48/49 series were far more advanced than any other calculator, even most on the market today. Their ability to use both algebraic and stack-based (RPN) modes simultaneously is nice, too.
HP has pretty much killed off its calculator division, though. I don’t know why; I think they were profitable. Perhaps one of Carly’s many “strange” ideas.
Anyway, back to the story…
I recently pulled out my HP48GX, having not used it heavily for about 6 years. I found that I didn’t remember some things about it and went searching for the manuals. The manual that comes with the calculator is 600 pages, and the optional “advanced” guide is another 600 pages. I found that hpcalc.org has scans of the manuals — very nice. And when I say the 600-page book came with the calculator, I mean there was an actual book in the box. Not some 3-page booklet and a CD-ROM with a PDF.
After (literally) dusting off the HP48GX, I pressed the power button. Two surprises: 1) it turned on, and 2) it still had all my data and files from six years ago in memory. Sweet. I had written a few useful programs for the calculator (yes, it can be programmed in its own language, or C or assembler) and was glad to see them intact.
I also discovered a saved Chess game (of COURSE you can play chess on the HP48GX) on the unit.
So I thought — I better back this thing up. First task: find the serial link cable. Took awhile of rummaging through boxes, but there it was. Second task: find a Kermit or XModem program for Linux. (When’s the last time you’ve needed *that*? I’m betting it’s been awhile.) Third task: read the manual, because I forgot *how* to back up the calculator. So after a little while (9600bps, after all), I have a nice dump of the memory.
There are some people, myself included, that believe that the HP48G series was the best calculator HP ever made, and still one of the best available. By the time the HP49 arrived, HP had decided it needed to be “cheaper” to compete with TI. So it was built with lower-quality components. Also, HP wanted to compete with TI in the high school market, so it removed some of the more advanced (and useful) features, and added some geared for that market. Sigh.
Back in 1999, due to changing employment situations, I moved to Dallas, and then to Indiana. I’m back in Kansas now, and figure it’s about time I finish my computer science degree. I’ve got a full-time job now, though, so this means evening classes. Not all that much fun, but hey, it works.
One thing I’ve noticed is that there is far less available for part-time students as far as financial aid and scholarships are concerned. It’s almost as if we don’t exist.
Along with that, I’ve also been toying with the idea of purchasing a tablet PC that runs Debian. But I don’t really know where to go to learn about the different models. I found a comparison from last year, but I’d really like something more current. Acer seems to have a nice model, but it’s almost impossible to find it for sale in the USA anymore.
Any suggestions for a lightweight (around 3 pounds), decent tablet PC that doesn’t cost a huge amount of money? I’d like one that’s convertible (has a keyboard that can optionally be used).
I’ve been a long-time user of JFS, but have grown unhappy with it for various reasons. So, I decided to try out XFS. It proved no better than JFS or ReiserFS 3 with data integrity during a crash.
Next step: Reiser4. I’ve been using Reiser4 for the past month or so on three different machines. I must say that I’m quite impressed with it. It is a stellar performer and it also recovers well from crashes. I mount all my filesystems with the nopseudo option, which essentially makes Reiser4 have standard Unix filesystem semantics in every way. I’m very pleased with it so far.
Here’s a use case for Darcs.
All the blogs hosted here run Drupal. I have a whole slew of add-on modules, themese, and a few patches. It’s a pain to manage them all, so after moving to Drupal 4.6.0, I decided to store my Drupal tree in Darcs.
Drupal 4.6.1 just came out. I used darcs_load_dirs to load it into my upstream repository, then darcs pull to pull it into my main tree.
It worked perfectly, first time. Very, very nice.
Now maybe in this particular case, Arch could have done as well, but I sure was impressed at how easy darcs made it all.
Someone sent me a link to this interesting article. It does a good job of explaining some of the reasons that Haskell is such an interesting language.
Suramya Tomar has written a very nice tutorial on installing Debian from my Debian From Scratch images (or from DFS images you build yourself). Nice and thorough work.
I clicked on a headline for an article titled Firefox news readers run the gamut. Sounded interesting; I’m not particularly happy with slrn, but I use it because there’s nothing better.
I thought it would be odd that there would be more than one newsreader, and one integrated into Firefox no less. So I was curious and clicked the link.
Surprise — it wasn’t talking about news readers at all, but rather RSS aggregators.
GRRR.
A news reader should be for *Usenet*.
Speaking of which, RSS is superflous. One could use NNTP to publish headlines and summaries anyway, and not require the development of a whole slew of software for yet another annoying protocol.