Very good day everybody!
Today's text was generated in Germany, 18,600 km (or ca 10,000
miles) away from New Zealand, so the title of the column really
doesn't make a lot of sense, but hey, what does in my
editorials?
Anyway, as I and my significant other don't see each other a
lot, I thought it would be nice to actually devote two months of my
time to her, stay at her place, and do all the things a good man
does for his working girlfriend: clean the place, cook, do the
laundry, and have the place sparkling and a bottle of wine opened
when the weary woman comes home at night from work.
As her place is not Buckingham Palace, the household chores can
be sorted pretty quickly, leaving me with my technology park (which
poor Air New Zealand and I had to carry all the way from New
Zealand to Germany), a rather slow modem connection, and plenty of
time to improve my Java and Unix skills (as they are nonexistent).
So far this arrangement is working out fine, and the S.O. is so far
rather pleased having me around for some time.
As I couldn't take my car as well as my iBook and associated gadgets with me
from NZ, this leaves me dependent on Germany's excellent public
transport system, in effect giving me plenty of opportunity to read
while I am being taken from A to B at 300 km per hour (German
trains +++).
As I like my Slashdot,
Low End Mac, and the Independent with me,
and there are unfortunately no print versions yet globally
available (that would kill too many trees anyway), I thought it was
finally time to utilize my Palm m500, so I checked out the market
leader in Web-to-palm communication, AvantGo - but alas, they do not
support Max OS X. Well, to be correct, they don't support the
new Palm Desktop for OS X, so my dreams of reading Low End Mac
on the train were quickly shattered.
I was actually quite surprised, as this really was the first
major inconvenience I had encountered since running OS X, so I
was obviously not very pleased about AvantGo's decision not to
support us. Fortunately I found a little reference to Plucker, a little
freeware program (free as in beer - AvantGo would have taken plenty
of money for the channels I wanted) that was available for most
POSIX compatible OS's, including OS X. They even have a little
installer script for the command line-challenged that places the
documentation, a Java library, and an executable on your hard
drive.
After placing all files in the appropriate directories,
installing the Plucker-reader onto your Palm, and studying the help
files, it is quite straightforward to get the content you want onto
your Palm, and as this is Unix (well, Free BSD, I know) you can
easily setup a script that cron can execute before you get up in
the morning, sucking all the content off the Net so all you have to
do is hotsync your Palm before you go, and then it's Low End Mac or
The Pilum all the way to work.
As I fortunately don't have these constraints at the moment
(2-1/2 months holidays anyone? Unpaid, though. That's the beauty
[and curse] of being self employed), I just set up a little shell
script that I can start from the Finder, and fump! - all the nerdy
stuff I so dearly crave travels with me in one of my jacket
pockets.
I would be interested what kind of functionality you, my dear
readers, achieve with OS X and your Palms and invite you over
to the Pilum to share it
with the rest of us.
This is Dirk Pilat in Germany, signing out.
