The Goldfish Chronicles

So I’m trying to get one of the Java games that fails to work on the c760 to work.

First problem, the previously mentioned bug in the evm script. This means that most Java apps won’t work for me.
Second problem, -Xprogress and -Xlinenum don’t appear to be available on the version of Jeode(?) on the c760. I need to put the old Sharp ROM on the 5000D [currently playing with thekompany.rom] and see how its Jeode looked.

Still, I have got the game to run happily with only a failure to find a translation file. It isn’t great though.

So, the main aim now is to rebuild an ipkg with the -X stuff removed, and the evm switched to evm2. Currently my attempts at an ipkg fail to be installable, but from memory ipkg’s can be quite a tricky business. I need to find the docs on making them again.

I’m sure that I’m missing something here, but:

Zaurus compiling can be done with Kopi. Kopi appears to be a simple script that wraps around evm, a script that comes with the ROM.

The problem is that the script on the ROM doesn’t seem to work with the version of bash on the ROM. It gives errors. The solution I have found is to perform:

cp `which evm` /usr/local/bin/evm2
then edit evm2 with vi and change the ‘||’ to be a ‘-o’.
then edit `which kjc` with vi and change it to point to evm2.

The backtick is function-@ [the - key]. Escape is the cancel key.

We monitor power plants at work. We record data in the field, feed it into our servers and fire alerts based on whether plants and reactors are going down etc.

So today was a very very interesting time. The first time that I’ve been sat there hearing the news happen, then watching the news channels react.

I’ve put a kind of article, kind of jottings, up to detail what I learn about my Zaurus:

http://www.generationjava.com/article/zaurus/zaurus.shtml

The manual for the Zaurus C760 is in japanese. However, a PDF manual for the web browser in English is available at:

http://www.access-netfront.com/netfront3_manual.pdf

Most other software from my 5000D failed to install and run. ZTailGunner being one of them. But it is all stuff I grabbed online, and it’s Java, so very tempted to hack away to make it work [someday somewhen], but first I should look for a new version of each.

Wireless….wonderful. Netgear CF card inserted, configured and it works. Just like that. Much better than the 5000D, which took some fair effort. So immediately online with no problems.

New web browser on the latest Z OS. NetFront rather than Opera. Feels bad to leave Opera after using it as a pda browser for so long, but NetFront seems okay so far….

I’m drooling in happiness.

This thing rocks. The new Sharp PDA, ordered from dynamism.com from the proceeds of my company’s sale [okay, maybe just my personal proceeds and not the entire sale… shock news…company sold for 800 dollars…gives money all to immigrant developer].

Took me under an hour to hang it by installing missile command [great game on zaurus] which hung and needed me to remove the expanded battery to get it to work.

Atomic [another game] pretty much works with some minor GUI issues. Iceblox fails. An mpeg on my SD that used to be playable is no longer playable. I think it must be because it is mpeg 2 and not 4? Or something. Will have to learn more on that. Video player is mostly still in japanese, so a bit confusing.

Old Java entries get installed into the Jeode menu, which isn’t shown. So you have to edit the tabs-menu [which is easy] and push them into Java or Games.

All in all… very sexy hardware 10/10. It has a scrolly-wheel in the perfect place, ok/cancel buttons there too, lovely keys, a beautiful screen. Only downside on hardware is that I thought it was silver and not half white. Silver would match my powerbook, instead my wife is comparing it to her iBook.

Software wise… nothing stunning on top of the c5000d. There’s a pipe symbol on the keyboard, but no escape key. A shame they don’t throw more of the open source stuff on to make the machine look more impressive. 7/10 on the software I think. It was the part of the c5000d that I liked.

Always happy to push out new code. Version 0.6 of simple-jndi and version 2.2 of genjava-core now released.

www.osjava.org

Simple-JNDI is my rather basic implementation of a JNDI server, without a server. Looking at the Tomcat JNDI implementation, there’s a lot of complexity which it doesn’t go near, but that I can hopefully learn from. Currently I transfer Names to Strings. I need to reverse that and make Name the default key. I also need to get more into the converting concepts, and look into the javax.naming.spi package to see what it offers.

GenJava-Core is my personal utility library. A lot of the code has gone into various parts of Jakarta Commons, and more is deprecated to be removed later on. However, this leaves some of the more unique pieces behind. I also spent the weekend pushing out unit tests. Not a lot so far [though I swear the Clover report is not as good as it should be, by a percent or two].

I’m a user of JBoss. I’m also an Apache committer.

I don’t usually read the server-side, as it’s often very slashdot-like in the signal to noise ratio, but thought I’d see what ‘TSS’ were saying about the Geronimo annuncement. Very amusing reading.

The thing that really stands out for me, is that for people sitting on the fence the JBoss Group [the ‘caretakers’ of the JBoss project] are committing a series of wonderful PR gaffs and damaging the ‘innocence’ of their brand entirely.

Accusations fly that Apache is dominated by Sun [I think it’s about 25% Sun, 25% IBM, 50% others from memory] and yet JBoss is not only dominated by the JBoss Group corporation, but its own laws allow them to be the ‘caretakers’, whatever that means.

Maybe I’ve been apachi-fied [though I held these beliefs long before Apache], but an open-source dictator is ony useful while they’re benevolent. The JBoss Group are now a liability.

With the new Zaurus coming in [need an animal name for it….old one was Amoeba, netBook is Warthog…] the old Zaurus is now surplus. So I will be offering it to the first person to comment… So I have installed OpenZaurus on it

In other news, at Defcon I picked up a copy of FreeBSD [5.1] from the BSDMall. The old home file server [Marsupial/SuSE Linux 7.1] is now being replaced with the FreeBSD install.