Contrary to popular belief and idiot marketing droids, Mark Shuttleworth is technically not the first African in space. This of course is dependent on your definition of “African”, but if that definition is “person born in Africa”, the title of First African in Space should go to Colonel Patrick Baudry, a French dude who was born in Douala, Cameroon on March 6, 1946. Colonel Baudry was part of the 1985 space shuttle Discovery crew.
Urgh… the Toshiba MK3018GAS 2.5″ hard drive in my laptop keeps on spinning down every so often in spite of Windows XP being configured only to spin it down after 30 minutes of idle time. This is extremely frustrating.
Under linux, hdparm -S with a suitable time-out did the trick just marvellously. After having investigated this issue with several different diagnostic utilities, it turns out the disc has its own power management as well. However, Toshiba doesn’t offer any utilities to configure this, nor does my BIOS have the right stuff.
What a lovely holiday… I got time to party with many of the friends, spend quality time with the family, drink many Windhoek Lagers and eat too much red meat. Unfortunately, I missed Goof’s bachelors’ party. Next time! ;)
On a totally unrelated note, it seems my Tungsten E is working with Evolution 1.2.4, gnome-pilot DEBs from <http: debian="" www.madhack.com=""> and some spit. The whole volatile combination seems to be dancing drunkily on the edge of a very sharp Minora blade though…
There are a few things you have to remember when trying to keep your pilot synchronised with your Linux workstation. Most of these caveats are due to general Gnome 2.2 shittiness. My opinion that many open source programmers should rather go back to school has just been enforced by this opinion. :)
Testing kernel setup with pilot-xfer
Make sure your kernel has full support for usb and that you’ve built usbserial and visor modules as well. Make sure the visor module is installed. Connect your visor with the supplied mini-usb cable, switch it on and tap the sync thingy (that little star in the corner). Now type the following:
At least judging by my experience with the Tungsten E so far, Palm has really done it again. The durn thing Just Works(tm) and will do just wonderfully as PDA, just like my trusty old Palm IIIx.
It’s still a real CHORE to get it working with Debian Woody (well, with Debian stable everything always has to be a chore), but Mandrake cooker (soon to be 9.2) handles it just fine. I’m beginning to like Mandrake more and more; this probably has to do with the fact that I’m getting lazier and lazier and prefer to have my Linux machines just work. One problem of synching with Linux is of course that things like Kinoma Movie Producer (you need this to pre-process film clips before being able to view them on the palm), DataViz DocumentsToGo and the Acrobat Reader for Palm pre-processor don’t work…
Yesterday at 15:55 I placed my order for a Palm Tungsten E at The PDA Shop. This morning at about 10:00 the friendly TPG postman delivered it at my door. :)
Specs in short: 320×320 transreflective colour screen, 32MB memory, SDIO slot (for extra flash and peripherals), TI OMAP (ARM) 126MHz processor, a solid collection of software and oodles of prettiness.
This is already in stock it seems. Tungsten E (approx. EUR200) or T3, what would you choose?
Addendum:
Thanks to Dirk Postma, we can now also keep track of the Tungsten E prices, live:
Anna Wiersbicka is a Polish-Australian researcher in language semantics who is proposing that all concepts in all languages can be defined in terms of 61 basic concepts, called “primitives”. In a very interesting article in the NRC Handelsblad of Saturday, September 20, 2003, she elaborates on this theory.
In short, these 61 primitives can be represented by 61 words (or word groups) in all languages. By stringing these 61 words together with a suitable mini-grammar, any concept can be explained. Strangely enough, the definitions themselves read like poems. For example: