Decisions, decisions

Shopping around for a new PDA for my wife to replace the Visor Edge she stepped on. So the past week or so we’ve made visits and repeat visits to BestBuy and Circuit City. The local BestBuy has pretty much emptied their selection of PDAs, and only carrry a couple of models now, neither of which I would have recommended to my wife. So scratch them. The local Circuit City has a slightly better selection. And they all work too, not the cheesy dummy display models.

She wants:

  • Camera
  • WiFi
  • Colour
  • PalmOS

First I recommended the Tungsten C. Fortunately Circuit City happened to have one on display. She didn’t like it much. Wasn’t too fond of the keyboard.

My next recommendation was the Sony TH55. She likes the style, but the stuff on the screen is too small for her.

The Sony TJ37 was my next recommendation. At first she didn’t like it too much, but after a second visit to Circuit City, she says it’s starting to grow on her.

PalmOne has just released the Zire 72, which I was telling her about also. Showed her the specs, and we checked out the Zire71 at Circuit City yesterday. She thought it was cute, and put it on her list of possibilites. It doesn’t have WiFi though. But that might not be a terribly big deal though.

There are a couple of reviews on the new Zire 72 and TJ37 so I’ll have to show them to her and see what she thinks. Personally I’m leaning more toward the Zire72 since it’s got the better camera and processor, even though it lacks WiFi. It does have BT though, so maybe my T3 will finally have something to talk to.

Holy Bandwidth Batman!

Wow, talk about bandwidth. 6.25 Gb/s (gigabits/second) over a 11 000 km link.
10 minutes to transfer almost 500 GB of data. Talk about some serious bandwidth. Details are here
From Physics News Update

A LAND SPEED RECORD FOR DATA FLOW, 6.25 gigabits per second (average rate) moving over an 11,000-km course, has been set a consortium of scientists form the CERN lab in Geneva and Caltech in Pasadena.
This new result was announced at the Spring 2004 Internet2 Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia (http://lsr.internet2.edu). The World Wide Web got its start at CERN, where particle physicists had to find ways of sending huge loads of data to collaborators. CERN will again need huge flow rates, perhaps at the 10-gigabit-per-second level, when they begin physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now under construction.
(http://ultralight.caltech.edu/lsr/)

I’m a dial-up luddite

The other day I was reading this New York Times article (sign-up required to read) via AvantGo about how lots of people are still using dial-up to get online and are happy about it.

I’m one of them. I’m a pokey slow dial-up user and very content to remain that way.

All my friends with broadband say I should switch, and don’t know why I haven’t yet considering I’m such a computer geek. I tell them it’s because I’m just cheap. No technical reasons at all. I’m just too cheap to pay for broadband.


Currently, I have dial-up through Earthlink, although not exactly by choice. First I was a Netcom subscriber, but they got bought out by Mindspring. Then Earthlink bought Mindspring/Netcom. So I’m a part of the Earthlink horde.

Cable broadband here comes from Comcast. Last time I checked, with Comcast, cable broadband was $40/month, but you have to subscribe to the premium cable package to get it, which would add an extra $10 (not including the extra “fees”) to my cable bill on top of my current cable package, plus broadband costs. Otherwise it’s $50/month.

DSL broadband here comes from BellSouth. Last time I checked, DSL was about $30/month, but you have to get the BellSouth CompleteChoice package which includes a bunch of services that I don’t need, like call forwarding, call display and the like. That adds about another $10 to the phone bill on top of what I already pay, plus broadband costs. Without the CompleteChoice package, DSL is $40/month or something like that. I barely use my land line phone anyway and we’ve all but stopped answering it because the only calls we get are usually from telemarketers.

Either way, my cable bill ends up going up about $50/month plus “fees” or my phone bill goes up about $40/month plus “fees”. Take out the $22/month I currently pay for dialup and the net increase is $28 and $18 for cable and DSL respectively plus “fees”.

Is it worth it? Maybe. Do I need it? I don’t think so, at least not yet. If I need to download something big, I’ll do it at work and sneakernet it back home. Plus tying up the phone line keeps me from being annoyed by telemarketers. And on the rare occasions it actually is someone looking for me or my wife, they can just leave a message on the voice mail. I always check for messages after I get online anyway, so they usually never have to wait very long.

I suppose the other thing that keeps me from switching is inertia. I like my email address. I’ve had it for a while now and I don’t want to change it. Changing it would only be a minor inconvenience, but still.

So go ahead, call me a luddite, or whatever. I’m quite happy with my pokey dial-up and have no desire to change at the moment.

I think I need version control

I’ve been looking at some of my PHP/web database projects lately, and deciding some of them are in need of updating. I also think I probably ought to use some sort of version control system to help me keep track of all the files and what I’ve changed, particularly since I’m looking at rewriting several projects and PEAR DB’ifying them. I’ve dabbled a bit with using CVS/RCS and Emacs a while ago, which worked reasonably well but not perfectly. I must admit that it probably wasn’t perfect because I didn’t really bother to learn how to effectively use CVS/RCS. Maybe I need to get this book.

Now I’m using Dreamweaver, which is supposed to have some checkin/checkout features, but it doesn’t appear to do any versioning or keep track of comments and changes. Looks like all it does is keep two people from trying to edit a file at the same time.

In my current devlopment model, I create web pages locally using Dreamweaver MX, upload them to my test server to play and test. When I’m happy with the result, it either gets uploaded to the main server or goes into production on my test server depending on what project I’m working on. Sometimes I’ll take stuff home to work on (where I develop and test using DWMX, Apache/PHP/MySQL on WinXP), then bring them back to work for uploading to the server. So I’ll either need a VC system that fits into that development model, or I need to change my model.

I think I’ll check out Subversion and accompanying TortoiseSVN GUI.

Website CMS’

So today I ended up spending pretty much the entire day taking our department website and stuffing it into a web CMS (Content Management System), specifically phpWebSite.

The existing site is a series of individual webpages I created using DreamWeaver MX (6.1) and a custom template. I think it looks pretty good. DW templates make maintainng the look and feel of a website much easier. Using a CMS makes it even easier.

The whole process went pretty smoothly. Looks reasonably good too. Now I just have to figure out how to create custom themes for phpWebSite. I already have our intradepartment website running on phpWebSite, and I figured using it for the public site would make it easier on me to update and maintain.

The downside of it is that my dynamically generated pages won’t work inside the CMS. I’ll have to find a workaround for that.

Haven’t released it yet since I’m still playing, testing and tweaking. I hope to have it all ready soon.