it's getting better

Friday, November 07, 2003

second half of the OTA

Got the radio update part of the hiptop OTA over lunch. Seemed to improve reception immediately, but as soon as I left the restaurant, the unit turned off and wouldn't turn back on. I tried the power button, a soft reset (1-@-0), and a hard reset, to no avail. I walked to the local T-Mobile shop, handed it to them, and told them what I had tried.

I also mentioned that once before, the sidekick seemed to put itself into the mode that it's in when it ships to you. It's a deep hibernate mode, and you get out of it by plugging it into the charger. So, this happened to me last week, and as soon as I plugged it in, it woke up, and told me it had a full battery.

I figured that it had happened again. Why? I don't know. But I told the T-Mobile guy, and he plugged it into a charger, and sure enough, the sidekick woke back up and acted as if nothing was wrong.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love this device, and the new software update is cool. But what's up with this random hibernation stuff?

Oh, and for all of the people that end up on this page trying to find out what you use Terminal Monkey for, here's the answer. It's a Telnet/SSH client, and if you don't know what those are you probably will have no use at all for this program.

In short, it allows you to make a connection to another machine on the internet, and communicate to it via typed commands. If this makes you excited, then by all means get Terminal Monkey and play with it. If you are still confused, then you might as well either skip getting it, or delete it if you've already got it, because it's just using space on your device.

2:15:13 PM comments () trackback []

MailEdit thoughts

I've been thinking about features for MailEdit. For the most part, it does exactly what I need. There are a couple of things I wanted to add -- one is a feature that would allow me to force Radio to republish my weblog, because there have been situations where Radio seems to have had problems upstreaming new articles, and the only way I've gotten it to get back in sync is to force a republish.

The other feature is a little more involved, and deals with making MailEdit useful for more than just posting to Radio weblogs. And that is I'd like to make MailEdit use the MetaWeblog API as a posting option. In fact, the thought is that I should be able to provide a list of weblogs that MailEdit can post to, with the posting API assigned to each one. Also, why limit myself to the MetaWeblog API? I should support any Weblog posting API that is out there.

I saw someone suggest that MailEdit should accept ANY subject line, and merely keep track of the ones that don't have the right subject. I have a problem with that -- if, somehow the email address you use for posting became know to spammers, MailEdit would quickly get overwhelmed. I prefer that any message that comes in with the wrong subject be merely discarded.

So there are my thoughts. What do you think?

9:08:58 AM comments () trackback []

ota

I got the OTA for the Sidekick/Hiptop finally. Checked the phone this morning while getting ready for work, and there it was. So I told it to install, and then, like every other good geek, downloaded all of the apps in the catalog.

Of course I then SSH'd into my home linux box, and played around on the command line. It's a little surreal, typing away on this phone, knowing that you are logged in to your home machine.

Still haven't received the radio update software, though.

8:54:01 AM comments () trackback []