Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

here is a few notes and ramblings…

msn messenger client
been trying to get the msn messenger client chat anywhere working, but apart from fetching my contact list it bombs out, then resets the treo when I try to log back in. There’;s a couple of others out there which I might try (forgotten the names), but both use a proxy service and both cost money and i’m skint.

Blogging from the Treo
The Blogworks XML (that currently runs this blog) web user interface is just about useable with the blazer web browser that comes with the Treo. My first post seemed to be truncated, but worked when I resent it. I briefly looked at HBlogger as a gui blog client, but this doesn’t currently support Blogworks XML - i’m sure it could, but I intend to move all my stuff to a Plone based blogger in the future so not worth persuing.In the meantime, it might be worth creating a stripped down version of the blogworks web interface though, just strip out everything except the bare essentials to make it download faster and fit the screen better.

I think the best approach is to use memos to write blog content (as i’m doing now) and cut and paste it into the form when ready, to avoid losing data in the event of timeouts etc.This also means that with hotsync you can edit stuff within palm desktop

FTP clients
I’ve been trying FTP clients, mainly so I can upload images captured by the treo to my blog. So far i’ve tried LsFtp, EZFtp and VSFTP. LsFTP is a command line ftp client, and I couldn’t work out how to map to images, either on the sd card or in the image database so I abandoned it.

EzFtp looked promising but seemed to truncate the folder listing on my site, so I couldn’t change into the images directory and Iit didn’t want to let me map straight to it. It also bombed out on me when I tried to either upload or download stuff.

finally I stumbled on VSFTP - i’m running a demo version and it runs a treat.

using the thumb qwerty keyboard
getting used to thumb keyboard. it is very useable when you get used to it, but it is still fiddly enough to make me keep text short and concise where I might digress if I had a full size keyboard at my disposal (maybe a good thing!). You may also notice that because of the fiddliness I havent bothered to hyperllink to various products mentioned above (you’ll have to google for them)

synchronising with hotysync
Palm desktop has so far worked flawlessly. I’ve never had much sucess with sychronisation software before but this just works, even when installed on home and work PC’s.

removing applications from the treo
Another major/minor breakthrough is that I worked out how to remove applications from a Treo 600/ palm device - basically go to the apps launcher, hit the menu button and select delete - this will take you to a list of apps which you can delete to your hearts content. It’s funny how I found this out in an obscure place (buried in Treo updater page on orange website), even though I had spent ages googling and searching forums for advice on how to do it (people were advising to do a hard reset, which would remove all user added programs and data amongst other things!). It’s probably in the manaul somewhere….

I found the answer here:-

http://tomster.org/geek/plonezope/simpleblog-cmfcalendar

haven’t tried it yet.

UPDATE: I tried it yesterday (2004-11-08) and it turns out that the two methods were already in my Archetypes Blog type, so all I needed to do was go into the ZMI, portal_calendar -> configure and select "blog" as one of the types to display.

despite my best attempt it turns out that I am still unable to resist the chemical allure of salt and vinegar flavour “discos”. I was doing pretty well but made the mistake of turning up for the train early last night at paddington and had time to kill and everywhere I looked I was being enticed by the blue shiny foil.

the magic of technology eh. just found that the huge load of text I intended to cut and paste from a memo on this treo is too damn big for the clipboard so you’ll have to wait for another time to see that. don’t be upset

I have a whole load of things to tell the world in general about discoveries and experiments with my new toy (Treo 600 PDA/phone). here is not the place for it though, i’ll stick them all on the the lab page when i’ve written them tomorrow on the train. on my new PDA phone. did I mention my new gadget yet?

i’ve had this thing for about 12 hours now and i’m finding my way around. email works a treat, got an ssh client working and i’m starting to speed up on this keyboard. the first blog attempt got truncated for some reason but managed to resend it. got an mp3 player working and looking at some video players…

if this test blog from my treo 600 works, this blog could come back to life