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mdlbearYesterday, as our group was planning for the annual research review, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mr_kurt (our manager) decided that, since I've written this nice little multiplatform, web server in Java, we ought to show it running on a small, mobile platform, like a Palm Tungsten C which has 802-11b networking built in, a keyboard so that old Unix geeks like me don't have to learn Graffiti, and an available JVM (from IBM). Easy, right?
Wrong.
This morning I went to Fry's (chaoswolf in tow, since I was driving her to school) and bought a T-C (to be expensed once I got to work -- it's not the PDA I would have chosen!). Easy setup. Nice, bright display. Web browser. Slightly confusing menus (took me a while to find preferences), but I can deal with that.
Then the fun begins. First of all, IBM's Java for the T-C costs ~$6.00; it's free for the Palms that have Bluetooth. Weird. By signing up as a PalmOS developer I was able to find a free version, but it requires an installer that only runs on Windows (and I'm running on a Mac laptop, because I have one and I'm too lazy to chase down the necessary Linux software). Go figure. By this time I've been on four websites: Palm's main site, their developer site, IBM's, and Handango's. Add Sun's. None are particularly well-designed, but they're all bad in different ways. What fun.
Did I mention that the documentation is wretched? I thought not. And the Adobe Acrobat reader for the Palm comes as an executable that has to be tweaked so it runs properly on MacOS-X (it's in the README).
And after it's all done, anyone would think that all I'd have to do is upload a jar file and run it. But no, it has to be specially packaged as something called a "midlet". So it's back to IBM to download some moronic IDE (at least it's available for Linux). And when I finally get that installed, sometime tomorrow afternoon, I'm almost certainly going to find out that such trivial web-serverish things as listening on sockets, writing a log to STDOUT, and opening files on the SD card don't work. Feh!
mr_kurt (our manager) decided that, since I've written this nice little multiplatform, web server in Java, we ought to show it running on a small, mobile platform, like a Palm Tungsten C which has 802-11b networking built in, a keyboard so that old Unix geeks like me don't have to learn Graffiti, and an available JVM (from IBM). Easy, right?Wrong.
This morning I went to Fry's (
chaoswolf in tow, since I was driving her to school) and bought a T-C (to be expensed once I got to work -- it's not the PDA I would have chosen!). Easy setup. Nice, bright display. Web browser. Slightly confusing menus (took me a while to find preferences), but I can deal with that.Then the fun begins. First of all, IBM's Java for the T-C costs ~$6.00; it's free for the Palms that have Bluetooth. Weird. By signing up as a PalmOS developer I was able to find a free version, but it requires an installer that only runs on Windows (and I'm running on a Mac laptop, because I have one and I'm too lazy to chase down the necessary Linux software). Go figure. By this time I've been on four websites: Palm's main site, their developer site, IBM's, and Handango's. Add Sun's. None are particularly well-designed, but they're all bad in different ways. What fun.
Did I mention that the documentation is wretched? I thought not. And the Adobe Acrobat reader for the Palm comes as an executable that has to be tweaked so it runs properly on MacOS-X (it's in the README).
And after it's all done, anyone would think that all I'd have to do is upload a jar file and run it. But no, it has to be specially packaged as something called a "midlet". So it's back to IBM to download some moronic IDE (at least it's available for Linux). And when I finally get that installed, sometime tomorrow afternoon, I'm almost certainly going to find out that such trivial web-serverish things as listening on sockets, writing a log to STDOUT, and opening files on the SD card don't work. Feh!
