Finding my way to Briones

I determined that this morning, I'd find out how to get to Briones on the Briones Mt Diablo Trail. I did manage to find it, but it was a bit farther than I thought, and I had to turn around once I found the trailhead. On the way, I did manage to get better pictures of the cows and calves than before. And of course I took a picture at the trailhead into Briones Park.

An Open Letter to Palm

Dear Palm,

I like your phones. I like the Pixi's form factor, I like the screen, I even like the keyboard. And the touchstone is the coolest charger ever.

I also like your OS. WebOS has a lot of nice design touches and the UI is well thought out and polished. Developing for WebOS is also very nice and easy, and I love how open everything is: I can browse the source for all of the apps. That's neat.

It's these things that let me work with the slowness and the memory leaks and hope that WebOS 2.0 will bring fixes for these things. These are things I can believe in. I can even deal with AT&T's complete failure to provision WebOS updates in a timely fashion.

However, today, my phone decided to hard reset itself in my pocket for the 3rd time in the 3 months I've had it. To make things even better, the 2nd spontaneous reset was yesterday. This is an issue that I can't excuse. Randomly deleting everything on my phone just isn't nice. The only reason this is even remotely bearable is because of your backup service. However, the lack of the ability to back up system preferences, pictures, music, and web pages added to the launcher makes the backup service not quite good enough.

After the first occurrence, tech support claimed that the hard reset is something that could happen in your pocket because it involves holding down two keys on the keyboard and the power button at the same time. While that's possible, when I attempted a hard reset myself after the first occurrence, it didn't have the same behavior as the spontaneous reset: the spontaneous reset makes the phone unusable for like 10 minutes at a black screen with a circle in the center. At the bottom of the screen is text saying not to remove the battery. The grey circle in the center has a while progress bar that goes around it and the phone reboots when it completes the progress bar. When I did a manual hard reset, it immediately rebooted and was reset.

I guess I need to call support again, however, I don't know how far I'll get or if I even trust the Pixi not to do this in the future. I'd really like to trust that my phone won't randomly delete my data, but I don't know how to regain that trust.

So Palm, we'll see what you do about this. As an HP employee (and Palm fan) I do have a bit of a vested interest in seeing you succeed, but this episode isn't making me feel positive about those prospects.

Your rather disappointed customer,

Bem

Pictures from this morning's run up the hill

It was a beautiful morning, the full moon was out in force and the weather was perfect. I tried to get the moon over the hill in the first picture, but my camera just wasn't quite up to it. By the time I got to the top of the ridge, the moon had escaped completely, so I didn't get a second chance. I did see two calves, but I didn't think about a picture until I had passed them, so the pictures are kinda far away. But the run was great, and I totally understand now why trail runners love minimal shoes... They're absolutely perfect for trail running.

BTW, the relevant dailymile post is here.

Intersting post on Perl 6 type subsets and multiple dispatch

I recently read a blog post by Alex Miller about Clojure multi-methods.

It described and answered a question his friend had asked him, as well as discussing some related problems. I'm going to showcase the different options Perl 6 provides for solving these same problems. Here's the initial question:

Is it possible to write a multimethod that has defmethods which handle ranges of values? For example, say that a person has an age. Can I write a multimethod that accepts a person as a parameter and returns "child" if age < 16, "adult" if 16 <= age < 66 and "senior" if age >= 66?

As in Clojure, the answer is "Sure." In keeping with TIMTOWDI, Perl 6 provides several ways to do this.

This post does a rather good job of covering some of the new features in Perl 6 in a very readable way.

Interesting blog post on the Oracle Google thing by Charles Nutter

As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this big obviously requires at least a couple thousand words.

It's long, but he has some interesting thoughts and a decent amount of background that I wasn't necessarily aware of. It's nice that he lists all of the patents, too.

Asics Hyper Speed 4 rock my little world

I figured I owe a follow up here on my previous shoe post. I went running in the shoes on Wednesday, and I concluded that while they were awesome, the size 12 were about half a size too small. Happily, I am not stuck with them, because Running Warehouse is awesome and let me return them anyways. So now I have size 12.5 and they fit great. I went for a run in them tonight, with good results. I really don't think I'll ever go back to more conventional shoes, these feel so much better. But I also don't think I'll be running anything more than a 10k any time soon, as I'm definitely feeling that my body needs some time to fully get used to having less support.

Anyone have recommendations for a good book on HTML/JS/CSS?

I've been deep in the bowels of the backend of web applications for years, but I haven't done anything on the frontend side in years. Since I acquired a webOS based phone, I'm finding that my biggest problem is not having a deep enough understanding of modern web development and how to get the layout I want. I also have ideas that I think might be fun to implement as web applications, but my lack of knowledge about the frontend technology is a problem. Does anyone know of a good book on the topic? Not a nutshell reference, but more in the vein of things like "The C Programming Language" or "Programming Perl".