http://jerryknight.com/wp This Internet thing is just a fad. Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:04:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://jerryknight.com/wp/2007/01/09/triumphant-return-of-multi-touch/ http://jerryknight.com/wp/2007/01/09/triumphant-return-of-multi-touch/#comments Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:33:28 +0000 Jerry http://jerryknight.com/wp/2007/01/09/triumphant-return-of-multi-touch/ someone. Nobody knew exactly who bought them, but it smelled like Apple, the Fortress of Secrecy. (I had a few specific clues.) Everyone (who cared) was worried that Apple bought them to absorb them and keep them from competing, like some other west coast company.. I knew that if anyone was going to bring the multi-touch technology to the mainstream, it would be Apple. Apple just announced their iPhone (lawsuits possible from the holder of that copyrighted name, Cisco). The input for this phone is entirely multi-touch (with the exception of the one button on the front). They didn’t even change the name of the technology. I heard that Steve said that they own the patent to it, and they do, since they have obviously bought the company that started it and did a pretty good job developing it before being bought. Now if they would just come out with an input device similar to my keyboard, my mourning for the fate of Fingerworks would be completely healed.]]> http://jerryknight.com/wp/2007/01/09/triumphant-return-of-multi-touch/feed/ 1 http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/18/new-depths-of-laziness/ http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/18/new-depths-of-laziness/#comments Mon, 18 Sep 2006 05:45:01 +0000 Jerry http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/18/new-depths-of-laziness/ read this to get a better idea of what sudo does). In the process of letting the webserver run commands as me, I corrupted the sudo config. No problem – I’ll just log in directly to root (admin account) and fix it. This was when I realized the admin password wasn’t working right. I had just been using sudo to do all the admin stuff for a while, and now I had neither that nor the admin password. Techno-babble Warning. Normally, fixing this would be a long scary process of booting from a recovery linux CD and manually mounting the root partition and fixing the problem directly. This probably would have required admin access to create the recovery CD, and besides, I was tired of restarting my computer, especially since earlier this weekend I had to do a panic-restart after mounting an NFS share directly on top of the home partition. But, since I’ve had problems with my 64-bit processor and some programs, I had a separate 32-bit system (dchroot) running, and sudo still worked in that setup. The only problem was that the main config files weren’t accessible from inside the 32-bit system. In a flash of brilliance, I remounted the root partition from within the 32-bit subsystem, fixed the sudo config file, and unmounted the partition (not sure if double-mounting a partition can cause problems). Saved from a huge headache! Although I may have just inflicted one upon my non-geek friends reading this! Sorry, but I did put a big warning up there…]]> http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/18/new-depths-of-laziness/feed/ 0 http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/12/new-phone-gremlins/ http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/12/new-phone-gremlins/#comments Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:25:01 +0000 Jerry http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/12/new-phone-gremlins/

While Minimo (portable Firefox) works, it’s sometimes slow – and if you push it too hard, the whole thing locks up. That’s always fun. Think I might have to cough up the $30 for Opera Mobile, at least until Minimo is more mature.

The touch screen likes to get out of whack (technical term). I haven’t figured out why, but I have noticed that the handwriting recognition sometimes goes berserk and the stylus draws lines all over the screen. I think it happens when too much is running in the background. It’s annoying to have it think you tapped in one place when you really tapped in another. Recalibrating helps, but it’s still annoying.

My phone can officially make nearby speakers buzz. I thought it was a bad input line in my computer, or a loose connection, but when it happened on the Bose Wave radio at work, I’m convinced the phone is spitting out tons of electromagnetic stuff. Makes me feel great that I’m absorbing some of that.

Calendar reminders happen without any indication at all – vibration, sound, etc. Every other kind of reminder tells me something somehow, but not for calendar events. Weird. Haven’t yet invested much time figuring that one out.

None of those are deal-breakers. I still like my phone. I can learn to minimize my dependence on the touch screen, especially with a smarter web browser. I can keep it away from speakers, and I’m sure calendar events can buzz or ring, but the option is probably in a stupid place. Sorta like the Outlook/Exchange settings. You’d think that email settings for an Exchange server would be accessible from the mail program, along with the other types of mail connections, but noooo.. It’s in ActiveSync, a separate syncing program. Makes sense to me now, but to not be able to enter Exchange information in the Email Accounts page is perplexing. I can’t call it a gremlin, but I can call it bad design. Oh well. I can live with it. Update: The wonky-touch-screen problem was in fact caused by the Write-Right screen protector I put on it.  Guess those things are Write-Wrong on this type of screen.  That’s disappointing, but I guess I’ll just clean the screen often and minimize the non-stylus touching.]]> http://jerryknight.com/wp/2006/09/12/new-phone-gremlins/feed/ 0